The 40mm gun crew on PT-152 fired on the Shigure, hoping to take out her searchlight, but to no avail. The Shigure and several other ships in the Japanese column turned toward the attackers, reducing their target profiles and preparing to “comb” torpedoes. The boats launched their fish and turned away to flee. All torpedoes missed—probably widely, because the Japanese lookouts saw no tracks.
While speeding away in retreat, zigzagging and laying smoke, PT-152 took a direct hit astern. The boat’s 37mm gun was destroyed, the gunner killed instantly, and fires flared up in her aft compartments below. PT-130 was also struck, probably by a six-inch projectile fired from one of the Yamashiro’s secondary batteries, but the armor-piercing shell punched “through and through” the boat’s plywood and mahogany without detonating. For an anxious moment it appeared that the damaged PT-152 would be overtaken by the Shigure and blown out of the water, but the destroyer turned back into column, giving up the chase. The Japanese had bigger fish to fry.
By a stroke of bad luck, all three of the boats in Gadd’s section discovered that their radios were disabled. PTs 130 and 131 turned southeast and raced toward Camiguin, where they fell in with another section. Boarding PT-127, Gadd radioed his contact and action report to Admiral Oldendorf at the head of the strait. Now Oldendorf knew that Nishimura was just south of Bohol, about 90 miles southwest of his position, and he would continue to receive position updates throughout the evening. The Allied battleships and cruisers continued to pace the strait at 5 knots, guns trained south, and waited for the enemy to come into range.
Passing Limasawa Island, the Japanese force re-formed into a double column with destroyers on the flanks. They were observed closely, first on radar and then visually, by the three boats of PT-Squadron 12, commanded by Lieutenant Dwight H. Owen. As Nishimura reached the southern tip of Panaon Island, Owen’s boats swarmed out of the inshore darkness and attacked. PTs 151 and 146 advanced into the searchlights, water spouts leaping up around them, and launched torpedoes from a range of 1,800 yards. Both missed widely. The boats turned away and fled, zigzagging for their lives. In the melee’s confusion, the battleship Fuso mistook the cruiser Mogami for an enemy and briefly fired on her, but did not inflict serious damage.
As it rounded Panaon Island and turned north into Surigao Strait, the Japanese force was suddenly beset by a swarm of attackers on all sides. Lieutenant Commander Robert Leeson’s three PT-boats (134, 132, and 137) charged the center of the Japanese column and found themselves in the blinding searchlight of a battleship, probably the Yamashiro. Closing to 1,500 yards, they launched seven torpedoes, then veered sharply away to escape. Zigzagging erratically, they were chased by the Yamashiro’s big guns and a storm of machine-gun fire. “Her 40-millimeter batteries and her 14-inch main batteries turned night into day,” said a PT sailor who felt lucky to have survived the encounter. “There was considerable 5-inch gunfire as well. The destroyers must have opened up too, and tracers, smoke, exploding shells and fire were everywhere.”5
As the Japanese guns reached out for Leeson’s three retreating boats, another trio charged in from the darkness in the southeast. PTs 523, 524, and 526 found their targets perfectly silhouetted by their own muzzle flashes and starshells. They launched torpedoes, then sheared away to run for the cover of Sumilon Island. It is not clear that the Japanese even saw these three starboard attackers, however, because at nearly the same moment PTs 490, 491, and 493 sped in from the north in a virtual head-on attack. This section broke out of a covering squall to find itself just 700 yards from the nearest enemy destroyer. The enemy ships were engaged with PTs on the other side, therefore momentarily inattentive. This trio of boats made the boldest torpedo run of the night, closing to within 400 yards before being illuminated by searchlights; they launched fish and veered away, chased by whitewater eruptions. All three were hit by enemy fire while zigzagging away to the north. PT-493 took the worst beating of any boat that night: one 5-inch shell struck the stern, a second punctured the hull below the waterline, and a third hit just aft of the chart house, killing two men instantly and wounding seven more. With no one left at the helm, PT-493 turned randomly and threatened to head back toward the enemy, until one of the survivors got to the wheel and straightened her out. She escaped into a passing squall, but she was a wreck, in sinking condition, with most of her crew immobilized by injury. The survivors ran her aground on Panaon Island and carried the wounded men ashore, where they were rescued the next morning.
Thus far, the PT attacks had been nothing more than a nuisance to the Japanese. More than two dozen torpedoes had been launched, but none had scored. The PT crews, it was later agreed, needed more training in torpedo tactics. Undoubtedly they had made many wild launches while under fire, or had declined to court their own annihilation by advancing into point-blank range. Some of their weapons had probably malfunctioned; some might have actually hit their targets but failed to explode. Still, the PTs had executed their prime assignment, to provide an early warning of the enemy’s approach. As the Japanese ships fought off successive swarms of “devil boats,” they lit up the night with gunfire and illumination rounds that could be seen a very long way away. At 2:06 a.m., noted the log of the West Virginia: “Saw starshells to southeast far distant.” Two minutes later: “Gunfire sighted bearing 180° true.”6 Nishimura had blown his cover with this traveling fireworks show.
That did not stop him, however, or even slow his progress. Turning into the center of the strait, Nishimura’s ships sped on toward the waiting American fleet on a course of zero degrees, dead north. The moon had set at 11:00 p.m., and the night was very dark. The sea remained calm, but frequent squalls of rain swept through the area, obscuring visibility. Japanese lookouts could barely make out the looming masses of the islands of Panaon to port and Dinagat to starboard. They could not see their soaring, heavily forested ridgelines at all, except in sporadic flashes of distant sheet lightning. The familiar shape of Ursa Major, the Big Dipper, was low in the northern sky.
Captain Jesse Coward’s Destroyer Squadron 54 was closing quickly from the north. Coward had arrayed his destroyers in two parallel sections, intending to envelop the Japanese column on two flanks. Closing the range at a combined speed of 40 knots—with Coward’s destroyers roaring south at 20 knots and Nishimura’s charging north at the same speed—the two adversaries made visual contact simultaneously when separated by about 5 miles. Coward’s eastern column was closing almost head-on, just 10 degrees off the starboard bows of the leading Japanese ships. They laid smoke on their approach, obscuring visibility further—but the owl-eyed Japanese lookouts could make out the distinctive shape of their funnels moving against the formless backdrop of Dinagat.
The Japanese opened fire at long range, but their first shots were wild, the splashes falling about 2,000 yards short of their targets.7 By hugging the shorelines of Surigao Strait, Coward’s ships kept within the “radar shadow” cast by the hilly island terrain. According to Commander Shigeru Nishino, skipper of the destroyer Shigure, this tactic served its purpose. The frustrated Japanese gunners, peering at their radar scopes, “could not differentiate between the ships and the land. We just got one merged reaction on the screen. We fired regardless but I think it was very ineffective.”8
The American ships did not return fire, lest their muzzle flashes serve as aiming points for the enemy. Coward had instructed his squadron to attack only with torpedoes. At 3:00 a.m., the three destroyers in his eastern section launched twenty-seven torpedoes, then turned sharply away to port, chased by naval shells of many calibers. Lookouts on the Japanese ships spotted incoming torpedo tracks and the green phosphorescence they churned up—and the Japanese column steered to evade. The Fuso’s 14-inch guns opened fire on three retreating destroyers, straddling the McGowan but scoring no hits. At nearly the same moment, however, the Fuso caught two torpedoes, possibly three, on her starboard side amidships. Her boiler room flooded, she listed heavily to starboard, and abruptly lost power. She fell
out of formation. The cruiser Mogami, following in her wake, had to execute an emergency turn to avoid colliding.
The second half of Coward’s destroyer force—the western group, comprising the Monssen and McDermott—launched a spread of twenty torpedoes at ranges between 8,000 and 9,000 yards. These arrived just as Nishimura’s force was turning back onto its base course, dead north. The results were devastating. Three of four Japanese destroyers in the column were struck in three minutes. The Yamagumo was struck amidships by two torpedoes simultaneously. The blasts detonated two of the ship’s own torpedoes, primed into their tubes. The combined explosions virtually blew her apart, and she sank in about two minutes. Commander Nishino recalled that she went down with a hissing sound, “like a huge red-hot iron plunged into water.”9 The Michishio was crippled by a hit that struck her port engine room. She began foundering, dead in the water, and only by heroic efforts of her surviving crew was she kept afloat. The third, the Asagumo, was struck forward. Her entire bow was torn away, but her crew managed to seal off the damage.10 The ship turned around and limped south.
The crippled Fuso could barely make way. She was fighting for her life, “entirely enveloped in flames from her waterline to her masthead.”11 For the ensuing hour, she drifted helplessly on the current. The captain ordered abandon ship, and her crew began leaping into the warm water of Surigao Strait. At about 4:00 a.m., she rolled onto her starboard beam ends, her huge superstructure striking the sea with a great splash. Her bow went under; her stern stood out of the sea to a height of 150 feet, her screws still turning, and she slid under. Oil spread across the sea and the fire spread around her to a distance of several hundred feet, engulfing many men attempting to swim to safety. It is not known how many survived her sinking, but very few survived the hours that they would spend as castaways at sea. Only about ten of the Fuso’s crew returned to Japan after the battle.
Now there was a tremendous amount of confusion on the Japanese ships. Some thought that the column was surrounded by PT-boats. Commander Nishino was under the impression that the flagship Yamashiro had been hit, rather than the Fuso. The Yamashiro continued pressing north at 25 knots, but Admiral Nishimura and his officers did not know that the Fuso and three destroyers had been hit, and that more than half of the column’s combined tonnage was disabled or destroyed. Only the Mogami remained in company with the flagship. Shigure, the only remaining seaworthy Japanese destroyer, raised speed to get clear of the torpedoes, but then lost contact with the rest of the force. For a time, Nishino was unable to raise any friendly ship on the radio. He turned south “to find out what had happened to Yamashiro and to get orders if possible; then made a second turn and proceeded north again.”12
At the northern end of the strait, meanwhile, Oldendorf’s battleships and cruisers tracked the approaching Japanese ships on radar. They intercepted oddments of Japanese chatter on low-power radio frequencies. The lookouts spied distant starshells and gunfire and heard the rumble of far-off explosions. Admiral Oldendorf saw the beam of an enemy searchlight sweep across the horizon, which he compared to a “walking stick of a blind man being waved through the night, though what it touched we could not see.”13 When the Yamagumo blew up, the explosion could be seen clearly from the top of the strait—and a few seconds later, a corresponding “pip” vanished from the radar scopes.
The gunners were locked on target and ready to open fire, but they held back in obedience to Oldendorf’s prior instructions. First the northernmost destroyer group—Destroyer Squadron 56—must have its turn to strike the enemy. At 3:34 a.m., Oldendorf ordered them forward, to “get the big boys.”14
This final destroyer attack was led by Captain Roland Smoot in the Newcomb. His Destroyer Squadron 56 destroyers were arrayed in three sections, with three Fletcher-class ships in each column—one to attack Nishimura’s left flank, one his right, and one head-on. They tore down the strait at 25 knots. Mindful that Oldendorf’s big guns were about to open fire, and that he had better have his destroyers out of the line of fire when they did, the commander of the middle column radioed: “This has to be quick. Stand by your torpedoes.”15 When the range had closed to 6,000 yards, each column turned their broadsides toward the enemy and launched torpedoes—five from each ship, forty-five altogether. Then they continued at peak speed toward the edges of the strait, blowing copious amounts of funnel smoke and racing to clear the field of fire.
The big guns around the northern horizon erupted just as the last of Smoot’s torpedoes shot from their tubes and slapped down into the sea. The 6- and 8-inch guns of the right-flank cruisers were first, followed quickly by the 14- and 16-inch main battery salvos of the battleships. Red tracers soared overhead in long, lazy arcs. The big projectiles seemed to hang patiently in the air during their 12-mile journey toward their targets. Captain Smoot called it “the most beautiful sight I have ever witnessed. The arched line of tracers in the darkness looked like a continual stream of lighted railroad cars going over a hill.”16
At 3:53 a.m., the West Virginia’s first salvo struck home. The gunnery officer chuckled over the intercom and announced “hit first salvo.” Captain Herbert V. Wiley, studying the target through binoculars, saw the target flare up as the second salvo landed.17 Although he did not yet know it, the target was the Yamashiro, Nishimura’s flagship, which soon absorbed the concentrated shellfire of at least a dozen American cruisers and battleships. The Denver’s action report remarked: “Almost from the time of commence firing at 0350 the enemy ships appeared to observers in this ship to be a continual mass of flame and explosions.”18
The Yamashiro advanced stubbornly into this maelstrom. For the next seven minutes, all of the naval gunfire of the entire Allied fleet was concentrated upon this one ship. Vertical whitewater columns leapt up close aboard to starboard and port. Her heavily armored deck shuddered under a rain of armor-piercing shells. Wounded men were carried down to the wardroom and laid out on tables, but a direct hit obliterated the compartment and killed everyone in it, including the medical staff. Even after all internal communications were lost, and the turret gunners were cut off from the bridge, they kept pumping salvos from her main and secondary batteries, and splashes leapt up around the U.S. destroyers and cruisers on the right flank.19 Without fire control radar, the Yamashiro’s shooting was wilder than that of her adversaries, but several shells fell uncomfortably close to the Allied cruisers. One salvo landed wide of the Australian cruiser Shropshire, a second landed closer, and a third went over and sent up big splashes on the far side. Columns of water shot up around the Phoenix and the Louisville, Oldendorf’s flagship. The admiral ordered the line of cruisers to raise speed for evasive maneuvering.
On the Mogami, following about a quarter of a mile behind the Yamashiro, a crewman recalled that the shriek of incoming shells was “an awfully gruesome sound, which passed from left to right.” As the first salvo straddled the ship, “a towering wall of whitewater suddenly appeared in the darkness.”20 Six- and 8-inch shells connected topside, disabling a gun turret and flooding the engine rooms. The captain ordered a starboard turn to bring her broadside to bear on the enemy. The Mogami launched four torpedoes, aiming roughly at the muzzle flashes up the strait. They were set for a high-speed run, which would limit their range.
As she turned, the Mogami’s main guns came to bear on three retreating American destroyers, the Daly, Hutchins, and Bache. She fired a broadside. The captain of the Daly watched in dismay as the red tracers reached out for his ship: the salvo looked to be on target. “It was definitely on in deflection, for it gave the sensation of standing in center field waiting for a fly ball which will land in one’s glove,” the skipper later remarked. “Fortunately this salvo passed overhead, landing from 200–300 yards over.”21
The Yamashiro suffered two more torpedo hits on her starboard side, probably fired by the destroyers Newcomb and Bennion. That brought the total to four. She listed to port and her speed was cut to 6 knots. Fires raged along her length, and her
pagoda blazed like a torch. But Nishimura and his chief officers survived, behind the armored steel of their bridge high in the superstructure. He told his chief of staff: “Report to the commander of the Main Body. We proceed to Leyte for Gyokusai.”22
The Mogami had continued through her starboard turn until she was southbound, headed away from the enemy guns. On the bridge, an argument broke out among the officers. Some wanted to continue down the strait, considering the battle as lost; others were resolved to fight to the end. The captain, won over by the firebrands, ordered the ship back into the fray. Before the turn could be executed, however, two 8-inch shells fired by the cruiser Portland ended the argument by scoring a direct hit on the Mogami’s bridge. For a time the ship continued on course, no one at the helm and no one giving orders. Surviving members of the crew finally climbed the ladder and found the bridge a charnel house. This sudden decapitation left the ship’s gunnery officer in command. The Mogami, continually pummeled by shellfire, was in no condition to fight. The new commanding officer resolved to head south in hopes of saving the ship.
The Shigure, having long since lost contact with the Yamashiro, was straddled by 6- and 8-inch shells. The repeated near-misses took a heavy toll on the lightly built ship; Commander Nishino said that the close detonations caused the hull to lurch out of the water by at least a meter. “I was receiving a terrific bombardment,” he said. “There were so many near misses that the gyro compass was out. The ship was constantly trembling from force of near misses, and the wireless was out.”23 Without radio communications, Nishino could not know whether he was expected to press on or retreat. He turned east, hoping to get within signaling range of the Yamashiro, but saw no sign of her or the Mogami, and wondered whether they were still afloat. As on the Mogami, there was a mutinous outbreak of democracy among the ship’s officers. Some believed the Shigure to be the last survivor of the Southern Force. The gunnery officer questioned whether it was their duty to “simply die a dog’s death.” At 3:15 a.m., Nishino judged that the Yamashiro and Mogami were probably gone, and so “I decided to withdraw without receiving orders from anyone.”24
Twilight of the Gods Page 33
