At that great range, the long barrels of the Yamato’s mammoth main guns were trained forward and elevated to 23 degrees. Propelled by six great jets of flame and smoke, six armor-piercing projectiles spun out of the muzzles and began climbing toward the distant target. Each shell weighed 3,200 pounds. After twenty-five seconds of flight, midway to impact, the shells reached the apex of their trajectories, about 20,000 feet above sea level. Then they began descending at a terminal velocity of about 1,500 feet per second—significantly less than initial muzzle velocity, but still much faster than the speed of sound. From the American point of view, therefore, no whining or whistling announced the incoming salvo. They did not learn that they were under fire until six whitewater towers suddenly erupted off the starboard beam of the carrier White Plains. Each matched the height of a twenty-story building. The towers dissolved only gradually, as cataracts of spray fell away to leeward; half a minute after impact, six ghost-columns of vapor still hovered over the spots where the monstrous shells had struck.
No ship in Taffy 3 was armed with weapons greater than 5-inch caliber, so the Americans could not return fire at this range: they could only run for their lives. But they could not run especially fast. Even with all boilers on the line, some of the CVEs in the group could barely make 17 knots. Sprague later admitted, “I didn’t think we’d last fifteen minutes.”40
The Yamato’s second salvo, fired less than a minute after the first, bracketed the White Plains with a close straddle. The baby flattop vanished momentarily behind a wall of spray. She surged ahead, seemingly intact, but the Yamato’s near-misses sent destructive shock waves through the lightly constructed ship. Rivets tore loose, welds ripped open, electric power cut out, interior lighting was doused, radio transmitters and receivers were disabled, radar screens flickered out, and a table on the bridge fell over when one of its legs buckled.
As sheets of spray fell across the White Plains’s flight deck, the Yamato’s third salvo arrived. The six-shell pattern fell “microscopically close,” according to Captain Dennis J. Sullivan, who added: “The vessel was shaken and twisted violently, throwing personnel in some parts of the ship from their feet and much gear to the deck from normal horizontal storage.”41 One of the shells burrowed into the sea and detonated beneath the ship, on the port side near the keel. According to the after-action report, “The ship twisted and lifted, crushing and tearing expansion joints at frame 101 and 146 port and starboard.”42 The shock of the blast tore hull plates asunder beneath the waterline, cut the steering control leads, warped interior decks and bulkheads, and sprung oil and aviation gasoline leaks throughout the ship. On the flight deck, a Wildcat preparing to launch jumped its wheel chalks and lurched forward, where its propeller took a bite out of the wing of the next aircraft ahead. Two of the ships’ four boilers suffered a sudden reduction in steam pressure. If the submerged projectile had exploded a few feet aft, it might have flooded the engineering spaces and left the White Plains dead in the water, in which case the ship would have been left to the mercy of the fast-approaching enemy.
The Type 1 armor-piercing projectile fired by the Yamato had been purposely designed to dive under a ship, if it landed in the sea short of the target. This round had functioned as intended, maintaining a linear underwater trajectory and detonating 0.4 seconds after surface impact. Though it did not make physical contact with the ship, its blast force was directed upward into the vulnerable part of the hull. In this respect, the Type 1 projectile had behaved like a mine or an American torpedo fused with a magnetic detonator, designed to trigger the warhead when the weapon was directly beneath the ship. In his meticulous analysis of the Battle off Samar, The World Wonder’d (2014), Robert Lundgren proposes that the Yamato’s third salvo should be credited as a hit on the White Plains.43 If the claim is accepted, the Yamato holds the singular honor of scoring the longest-ranged naval gunfire hit in history—34,587 yards, or nearly 20 miles.
Edward J. Huxtable, air commander on the Gambier Bay, was eating breakfast in the wardroom with fellow aviators when the shattering alarm for general quarters blared from the loudspeakers. He dashed up to the flight deck, ignorant of the sudden developments. His aircraft, a TBM Avenger, had not yet been armed with either bombs or torpedoes, but the plane captain seemed eager to launch him anyway. Huxtable was perplexed as he slid into his cockpit, wondering why he would be sent aloft in a disarmed plane. Suddenly, “I heard what seemed to be a rifle shot next to my left ear. I looked and saw a salvo of heavy caliber stuff splashing alongside the White Plains. Until that instant I had no idea the enemy was so near. I was more than ready to get on that catapult!”44
Huxtable catapulted and climbed, followed by several more Avengers. They zoomed through a layer of gray overcast at 1,200 feet. Admiral Sprague came onto the circuit and told them: “Attack immediately.” Visibility from the air was very poor, and Huxtable could barely make out the enemy fleet through the lowering gloom. He noted that four Japanese cruisers were closing in on Taffy 3’s port quarter, and resolved to make strafing runs in hopes of slowing their pursuit. Huxtable flew low along the axis of their advance, passing over each ship in turn. Flak bursts rocked his plane, but he kept his finger depressed on the trigger and poured a stream of .50-caliber tracer fire onto the enemy decks. Then he banked around for another low-altitude run, this time opening his Grumman’s long, narrow bomb bay doors. He had no torpedo in the bay, but the Japanese would see the open doors; perhaps they could be tricked by a simulated torpedo attack into taking evasive maneuvers that would buy time for the fleeing carriers.45
Dozens of other airmen had similar ideas. Aircraft of many squadrons orbited the Japanese fleet and dove through the overcast to strafe, bomb, or torpedo Kurita’s fleet, or to pretend to strafe, bomb, or torpedo it with unarmed “dummy runs.” Antisubmarine and combat air patrol aircraft of the St. Lo, Fanshaw Bay, and Kitkun Bay made effective attacks in the early stage of the action, scoring topside hits or damaging near-misses on the battleship Kongo and the heavy cruisers Haguro, Chokai, and Chikuma. Antiaircraft fire was heavy, and many U.S. planes were damaged by flak bursts. Few were taken down by antiaircraft fire, however, and one Japanese skipper lamented that his gun crews would have done no worse if they had been “shooting blanks.”46 At 7:27, the heavy cruiser Suzuya came under simultaneous bombing attack by a swarm of TBMs: one bomb landed just off the port quarter, and the resulting blast wrenched the port outer propeller shaft out of alignment. The Suzuya’s top speed was cut to 20 knots; she dropped behind and gave up the chase.
A few airplanes recovered on Taffy 3 carriers early in the morning’s action, when they were steaming directly into the easterly breeze. At 7:15 a.m., however, Sprague turned south to seek cover in a passing rainsquall. That shut down air operations on the Taffy 3 flight decks. The sister carriers of Taffy 1 and 2, farther south, took up part of the load, and some airborne planes headed over to nearby Tacloban airfield on Leyte to refuel and rearm. More American aircraft converged on the Japanese fleet, often without suitable ordnance, and did their best to bluff the enemy into turning away from the escaping carriers.
Visibility was compromised by wet weather. Periodically the sun broke through the clouds and shone down on the battle, but more often the sea horizon was obscured by low-lying clouds, squalls of rain, and a copious mass of black funnel smoke and pale yellow chemical smoke laid down by the destroyers zigzagging across the sterns of the jeep carriers. The sea was a gloomy, gunmetal gray, with a mild chop flecked by whitecaps. The Japanese lookouts persistently overestimated the size of the enemy ships, mistaking the destroyers for cruisers and the CVEs for Essex-class carriers. It was a deadly game of cat and mouse, with the prey appearing momentarily and then vanishing into smoke and haze. Firing windows were fleeting, and the Japanese gunners rarely saw the fall of their shots, so they could not make targeting corrections in consecutive salvos.
American destroyers, trailing astern of the carriers and laying smoke, took heavy fire from the
Japanese battleships and cruisers. Dye-tinted splashes made a kaleidoscope of colors: yellow, red, blue, pink, and green. A sailor shouted, “They’re shooting at us in technicolor!”47 The destroyer Johnston, laying smoke across a half-mile-wide front, found herself in the precarious rearguard position. She was nearer to the enemy than any other American warship, and therefore came in for special attention from the enemy gunners. She was straddled repeatedly by 14-inch and 8-inch salvos. “The red, green, purple and yellow colors might have been pretty under different circumstances,” said Bob Hagen, the Johnston’s gunnery officer, “but at this moment I didn’t like the color scheme.”48 When a right-side formation of Japanese cruisers closed to within 18,000 yards, the Johnston returned fire with her 5-inch main batteries.
At 7:16 a.m., Sprague ordered his destroyers and destroyer escorts to turn back toward the enemy and launch a torpedo counterattack in hopes of breaking up the pursuit. The Johnston’s skipper, Commander Ernest E. Evans, had begun preparations for such an attack even before receiving the order. “Stand by for a torpedo attack,” he ordered: “Left full rudder.” The 2,700-ton Fletcher-class destroyer turned back and began a lone frontal charge against the pursuing battleships and cruisers.
Born and raised in Pawnee, Oklahoma, Evans was three-quarters Native American. His mother was a full-blooded Cherokee, his father one-half Creek. He had first entered the navy in 1926 as an eighteen-year-old enlisted man, but won an appointment to the Naval Academy the following year and graduated with the class of 1931. Most of his fourteen years of service had been aboard destroyers. Evans was not the type of officer who had been marked for promotion into the navy’s upper ranks; he was considered a steady and dependable performer. Like every other man in Taffy 3, he had not begun the day expecting to wage a life-and-death struggle against an overpowering enemy fleet at cannon shot range. But here he was, and here was the Johnston. “I can see him now,” Hagen recalled, “short, barrel-chested, standing on the bridge with his hands on his hips, giving out with a running fire of orders in a bull voice.”49
The little two-funneled ship heeled radically as she turned toward the enemy, then surged ahead like a greyhound. She was making flank speed, more than 30 knots. Multicolored splashes rose around her, and Evans ordered steering adjustments to “chase salvos”—that is, to steer toward each falling shot in order to evade the gunners’ targeting corrections. The 5-inch turrets fired back, throwing out more than two hundred rounds, and began scoring hits as the range closed. At 7:20, when the Johnston was 9,000 yards from the leading Japanese cruiser, the Kumano, she let go of a ten-torpedo spread. The weapons were set to low speed to give them range, with a spread of one degree between them. They fanned out as they sped toward the enemy, all running “hot, straight, and normal.” Then Evans ordered a sharp turn to starboard, and the ship heeled far to port as she came around, vanishing into the protective cover of her own smokescreen. The crew could not see the results, being obscured in smoke; much later the survivors would learn that one of their torpedoes struck the Kumano head-on and gouged a terrific hole in her bow, forcing her to drop out of formation. The Kumano limped away to the north, licking her wounds: she would play no further part in the battle.
For the next few minutes the Johnston withdrew to the east, safely veiled behind her own smokescreen. When she emerged briefly, at 7:25, gunners on the Yamato let fly with salvos from the superbattleship’s main and secondary batteries. The range was 20,313 yards, much closer than the earlier salvo that had struck “microscopically close” to the White Plains. This time the Yamato’s gunners did not miss: three 18-inch projectiles struck the Johnston’s port main deck amidships. “It was like a puppy being smacked by a truck,” recalled Bob Hagen.* The massive blasts pushed the little ship over to starboard, penetrated down into the lower decks, and gutted the portside engine room. A boiler in the after fireroom ruptured, filling the compartment with superheated steam and scalding several men to death.
Seconds later, a salvo fired by the Yamato’s six-inch secondary guns hit the Johnston’s forward stack and the port side of her bridge, where the ship’s senior officers were lifted off their feet and hurled against bulkheads. Hagen’s helmet, telephone, and binoculars were blown off his head and neck. The stool he was sitting on broke and he was thrown to the deck, injuring his knee. The gunnery officer was fortunate, however: two other men stationed nearby were killed outright, and two more eviscerated by shrapnel. Commander Evans, knocked to the deck a few feet away from Hagen, was suddenly bare-chested—his uniform khaki shirt had been torn from his body by the shock of the blasts. The skipper’s hair was singed, his face blackened and bleeding, and he was missing two fingers on his left hand. In that condition he rose to his feet and continued bellowing orders as if nothing had happened. He wrapped a handkerchief around the stumps of his severed fingers. When the doctor approached, Evans declined medical attention, saying, “Don’t bother me now.”50
At this point it looked bad for the Johnston and for the rest of Taffy 3. But a timely rainsquall was sweeping in from the east, and it suddenly enveloped the ship. Admiral (Ziggy) Sprague had been running directly toward it, so his six baby flattops were likewise shrouded from view just as a column of fast Japanese cruisers closed on their port quarter. That provided a providential respite from the enemy’s alarmingly accurate naval gunfire. Visibility in the squall fell to a few hundred feet, but the Japanese continued firing nonetheless, and American crewmen noted the familiar tightly grouped colorful geysers erupting from the sea in their midst. The Johnston fired back at the unseen adversaries, using only modified radar control—and although the gunners could not visually confirm that they were hitting their targets, several Japanese cruisers were struck by 5-inch fire during this interval.
Sprague did not like his chances. The squall would pass over quickly, exposing his ships to view again. The enemy cruisers and battleships could make peak speeds over 25 knots; his CVEs could barely reach 17 knots. While hidden from the enemy’s view, Sprague altered course to the southwest. He hoped to draw his pursuers south, toward Leyte Gulf and the big guns of Oldendorf’s force. He also reasoned that if he lured the enemy fleet farther from San Bernardino Strait, it was less likely to escape a counterattack by other Allied air and naval forces. As for Taffy 3, “there appeared only one possible outcome of the encounter—complete annihilation.”51
HALSEY’S SIXTY-FIVE-SHIP ARMADA HAD CHARGED north through the night, intending to ambush Ozawa at dawn. Tactical command was passed back to Mitscher, who kept the three carrier groups on slightly different headings and speeds, so that they would arrive at optimum launch points at first light. All carriers were instructed to arm and fuel up their strike planes and spot them on deck; they would launch right after the first F6Fs of the combat air patrol, whether or not the enemy’s position had been pinpointed. Task Force 34 was formed under Ching Lee and sent to the vanguard of the three carrier groups, about 10 miles ahead. As the first faint glow of dawn rose in the east, airplanes began roaring off the decks and climbing into the sky. Heavily reinforced searches departed the fleet on diverging headings to the north and east. The attack groups, dive-bombers, and torpedo bombers with Hellcat escorts were ordered to circle about 50 miles north of the American fleet, awaiting clarity on the enemy’s exact whereabouts.
Aboard the Wasatch, 300 miles to the south, Admiral Kinkaid and his officers were celebrating Oldendorf’s knockout victory down in Surigao Strait, and debating how aggressively to pursue the retreating remnants of the Southern Force. An operations officer reminded Kinkaid that they had not yet received explicit confirmation that Halsey had left his heavy ships behind to guard San Bernardino Strait. It seemed prudent to ask for confirmation. At 4:12 a.m., therefore, Kinkaid queried Halsey directly: “Question. Is TF 34 guarding San Bernardino Strait?”52
Given the scale of operations underway throughout the region, the navy’s radio communications net was badly congested. Kinkaid’s dispatch did not reach the New Jersey
until 6:48, more than two-and-a-half hours after it was sent. It flummoxed Halsey, who called it his “first intimation that Kinkaid had intercepted and misconstrued the preparatory dispatch I had sent to my fleet the preceding day.”53 He replied in the negative, reporting that Task Force 34 was far to the north with the Third Fleet carriers off Cape Engano, hunting the Japanese carrier force.
The search planes did not take long to find Ozawa’s fleet. One division of the Essex combat air patrol was sent on an impromptu reconnaissance flight to the northeast, where they found the enemy flattops a few minutes after Halsey had received Kinkaid’s message. They were 130 miles away, on a true bearing of 15 degrees from Task Force 38. Ozawa was northbound, apparently running away. But this would be no reprise of the Marianas Turkey Shoot four months earlier: now the Americans held the high cards. The distance was manageable; visibility was clear; and a fresh breeze was blowing about 45 degrees off their starboard bows, which meant that they could launch and recover planes while closing the range on the enemy. The initial strike planes were already airborne, circling north of the American fleet, so they had only a short distance to fly.54
A pitifully small number of fighters rose to defend the Japanese fleet against the waves of incoming planes, and all were quickly massacred. For the rest of the day, Ozawa had no fighters in the air at all. The attackers took their time, circling over the enemy fleet like vultures, safely above the reach of Japanese antiaircraft guns. Designated strike coordinators remained at altitude, organizing and directing the attacks, and ensuring that they did not fall disproportionately on only the largest ships. In all, the U.S. carriers launched 527 sorties against Ozawa’s ships throughout the course of the day.
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