by John Prados
It is fair to speculate that Nishimura did not learn of Admiral Kurita’s turnaround notice, but the battleship division leader did receive Combined Fleet’s exhortatory order in which Toyoda invoked the deity to demand advance. Fleet headquarters had been in an uproar and had sent this message without knowing Kurita had already returned to his base course, but the sense of Toyoda’s message, in a demanding and even insulting tone, was that the Kurita fleet had abandoned the Sho mission. Anthony Tully notes that this news had crucial implications for the Nishimura unit, a minor force whose purpose was instrumental to helping Kurita reach his goal. If Kurita had given up, what value remained in Nishimura’s mission? Historian Tully concludes that Nishimura made the correct decision, to press ahead. The admiral even chided Kurita somewhat in a dispatch reporting when he expected to break into Leyte.
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BATTLE NOW LOOMED. Nishimura’s information message suggests he expected to fight soon and closer to the mouth of Surigao Strait than he had before. It remains puzzling what Nishimura expected to happen before that—he spoke of “charging” into Leyte Gulf, but he worried about PT boat and destroyer attacks, so it is clear that Nishimura did not think he could simply waltz into Leyte. Moreover, the Japanese admiral knew he had been discovered. The Allies were aware of his approach. And Nishimura had aerial scout reports of Allied battleships and other vessels in Leyte Gulf.
The Imperial Navy chieftain could not have expected to get past the enemy merely on the strength of Japanese mastery of night battle tactics. Above all, Japanese combat experience in the Solomons showed that Allied technology—radar—had trumped night action. Nishimura himself had been in the thick of some of those fights. Commander Nishino of the Shigure recalled that fighting off New Guinea earlier in 1944 had convinced him, at least, that night was the worst time to engage an Allied fleet. Nishimura’s staff chief, Ando Norihide, a gunner, had been gunnery officer of cruiser Chikuma and had taught the subject at the naval gunnery school in Tateyama. Rear Admiral Ando had to know that the advantages of “crossing the T” were guaranteed if the Allies took position within the narrows of Surigao, but would have to be won by maneuver if they permitted the battle to occur inside Leyte Gulf. Nishimura must have known that too. Kinkaid’s warships had had ample time to position themselves. The Japanese had every reason to expect heavy ships inside the strait.
It would have been out of character for Admiral Nishimura to cancel the mission, and he did not. That choice was the correct one, for his unit had already been committed and would not have gotten away without substantial losses. But he also did not speed up his advance, which would have been his best chance at getting into the strait before Kinkaid’s fleet had completed preparations. You can call this foolish or purposeful. The latter supports the notion that Admiral Nishimura had determined to sail to his doom. He did so in the expectation that his sacrifice would open a way to overall victory.
The Nishimura unit continued plowing ahead—the battleships, accompanied by destroyer Shigure, at a stately pace; cruiser Mogami with the scout force, at speed. At 9:45 p.m., Kurita sent a message reporting his fleet on track to pass through San Bernardino Strait after midnight and to be in a position on the Pacific side by 6:00 a.m. It was too far away to cooperate with Nishimura, who expected to fight two hours earlier, and even though Nishimura might now have slowed his advance to compensate for Kurita’s delay, all continued as before.
PT boats, radio call sign “Martini,” were grouped in three-boat sections to defend the approaches. The sections were given specific waters to patrol. As the Japanese neared, PT leader Commander Robert A. Leeson concentrated them. The biggest grouping—five sections with nearly half of Leeson’s boats—idled along the shore just where one entered the Surigao Strait. PT tactics were to keep the boats throttled down to minimize noise, ships darkened to minimize their visibility, and keep a sharp watch until they detected the enemy. Then the PTs would head for attack position, going to battle speed only for the final torpedo run. Each boat carried four torpedoes. Japanese sailors dreaded the PTs and called them “devil boats.” And as Lieutenant Commander Tanaka Tomo of the Michishio told interrogators later, the PT boats had been like mosquitoes.
First up would be PT Section 1, off the end of Bohol Island just before eleven o’clock. A lookout aboard destroyer Shigure reported torpedo boats to starboard. Ensign Peter R. Gadd in PT-131 actually picked up the Japanese flotilla on radar and began stalking them together with PT-130 and PT-152. They were still several miles away when Shigure and Rear Admiral Shinoda’s Yamashiro fired star shells to illuminate the PTs. The latter battleship then followed with real ammunition. Shinoda’s first salvo straddled the fragile, wooden-hulled PTs. Gadd’s devil boats went to twenty-four knots and bored in. Admiral Nishimura ordered a turn to comb the tracks of any torpedoes in the water. The PT-152 would be badly damaged, while Nishimura emerged unscathed. At 11:30 p.m., Nishimura reported to Kurita and Combined Fleet that he had engaged torpedo boats but continued his advance.
PT-130 lost her radio to a shell that passed through the boat without exploding. She made her best speed to another PT section, where PT-127 copied her report and passed it up the line. Oldendorf got the message at 12:26 a.m. It was his first definite news the Japanese were coming.
Mogami and the scout destroyers saw the pyrotechnics of Nishimura’s fight with the Martinis, and they soon became involved. The ships passed through squalls, then encountered Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Dwight H. Owen’s Section 3. In PT-151, Owen identified Captain Toma’s cruiser and several destroyers and thought he saw a battleship. He got off one torpedo before 151, caught in searchlight beams, had to retreat under a smoke screen. PT-146 also managed to launch a torpedo. Both PT-190 and the 146 boat thought they had scored many 40mm gun hits on the Japanese. On the other hand, due to Japanese radio jamming and bad atmospheric conditions, it would be several hours until Ensign Edward S. Haugen of PT-190 could get off his report on the enemy. And by that time, the battle had intensified.
The two Japanese units joined up, with Mogami coming into line behind the battleships and the three destroyers taking station ahead. This was not accomplished easily. The ships had just been assigned to the Nishimura unit and had never worked together. Toma on the cruiser kept furnishing imprecise position data, leaving his recognition lights dark, while the Imperial Navy’s radars were too primitive to eliminate the ambiguities. Thinking the Mogami an enemy, Fuso opened fire and hit the cruiser with a 6-inch shell. Fortunately it did not detonate.
A trio of American PTs guarded the western side of the strait’s entrance. This was Commander Leeson’s section. The PT boats had been filling the airwaves as sections reported the approach, then passage, of Nishimura’s fleet. Leeson’s unit, Section 6, had not gotten any action until now. Suddenly he had radar targets and crept up on what he thought were two battleships with several destroyers. In PT-134, Commander Leeson reached a distance of about 3,000 yards when enemy searchlight shutters opened up and his boat came under fire. The 134 replied with what she had—just light cannon of 20mm, 37mm, and 40mm calibers, which was not much against a major warship. Leeson launched three torpedoes and thought he obtained hits, but the Japanese steamed on unconcerned.
Commander Leeson’s Martinis engaged after Captain Toma had reunited his scout force with Nishimura’s battlewagons. In a confusing melee in the dark, further muddled by gunsmoke, shell flashes, squalls, and smoke screens, Leeson’s PTs launched most of their torpedoes but were unable to see any results. About an hour later, when the Japanese 2nd Diversion Attack Force sped up in Nishimura’s wake, PT-134 had no torpedoes left. The Japanese passed sections of torpedo boats and managed to avoid any damage. It was impressive that Nishimura managed to transit the narrow waters at the entrance to the Surigao at all in the face of the devil boats. The PTs fought determinedly and ten of them were hit, but just one (PT-490) was damaged seriously enough that she had to be beached and ab
andoned.
Next up to fight were the Allied destroyers. Jesse Oldendorf had essentially lined the strait on both sides with squadrons of tin cans ready to pounce. The moon set just after midnight. The sea remained calm, the sky partly cloudy, and a light breeze blew from the northeast. Visibility was at two miles, though that mattered less to the Allies with their radars.
In addition to his own vessels, Oldendorf had the benefit of the ships of Destroyer Squadron 54, which had been on ASW duty and had asked to participate. Captain Jesse B. Coward divided his squadron by divisions and put some ships on each side.
Destroyer McGowan made first contact on her SG radar at 2:38 a.m. The enemy were 39,700 yards away and almost due south. Commander W. R. Cox got on the TBS to radio the news. The contact faded but returned. More ships picked up the Japanese, tracking them, filling the ether with notices. Captain Coward recorded firing his eastern group’s torpedoes at exactly thirty seconds past 3:00 a.m. Ships in the western group put their torpedoes in the water ten minutes later. Nishimura’s warships also detected the Americans and opened fire at 3:01, straddling Coward’s destroyers, which began to retreat.
Commander Nishino in the Shigure remembers so many torpedoes churning the water, their phosphorescent wakes lit the strait like daylight. Despite the fact that the Allied warships appeared exactly like tin cans launching torpedoes, Nishimura took no countermeasures except to shoot at them. He increased speed to twenty knots, with no zigzagging. He did communicate with Vice Admiral Shima, whose Fifth Fleet, coming up fast, was now in TBS range, and who could see the flashes on the horizon as the battle intensified, and Nishimura told his own ships that they would be entering Leyte Gulf.
Suddenly a torpedo struck the Fuso amidships to starboard, extinguishing her searchlights. She fell out of formation. Rear Admiral Ban Masami and Captain Hirata Tsutomu, the executive officer, plunged into damage control. Boiler rooms flooded, and the ship listed.
At 3:20 a.m., Nishimura ordered a simultaneous turn to starboard. Ironically, analysts at the U.S. Naval War College, painstakingly reconstructing and charting all the torpedo tracks, concluded that if the Yamashiro had held to her eastern course, the battleship would have outrun the torpedoes aimed at her. Yamashiro received one hit, but her captain, Rear Admiral Shinoda, consulting executive officer Captain Ozaki Toshiharu, told Nishimura she’d not been affected. Mogami took station behind the flagship.
Admiral Nishimura ordered Captain Takahashi Kameshiro, leading his destroyer unit, to prepare for torpedo action. At that exact moment, two torpedoes blasted the destroyer Yamagumo, and she simply exploded. Captain Takahashi went down with his flagship. Then it became Asagumo’s turn. Commander Shibayama Kazuo, the destroyer’s skipper, realized she had been hit in the port bow but found the ship could still manage ten to twelve knots. Shibayama began to make his way south, back down the strait. Commander Tanaka Tomo of the Michishio ran out of luck as well. The destroyer leader, struck amidships by at least one torpedo, quickly began settling. Tanaka would be rescued and taken prisoner. The torpedoes were from the U.S. destroyers McDermott and Monssen, making theirs one of the most successful single torpedo attacks of the war.
Nishimura sent a fresh dispatch at 3:30 recording destroyers and torpedo boats, the damage to Yamashiro, and the fact that a pair of his destroyers was hit and adrift.
But the damage had been worse than that. Of the Japanese escorts, only the Shigure still fought—and she lived up to her nickname, the “Miracle Destroyer.” Commander Nishino watched from the bridge as three torpedo wakes closed in on his vessel and seemed to join on the starboard side, right below the bridge. But there was no hit, no explosion, nothing. Either the torpedoes had passed underneath the ship or they had failed to explode. This is a mystery of Surigao Strait. Captain Coward, the U.S. destroyer commander, had instructed his skippers to set their torpedo depth at six feet, which ought to have ensured damage to Shigure. If the torpedoes had been duds and bounced off, collision shocks should have occurred. Neither happened. Perhaps the Shigure had steamed through wakes of torpedoes that had already passed.
Then U.S. Destroyer Squadron 24 mounted yet another torpedo attack. Captain Kenmore M. McManes split his force of six tin cans into two attack groups that struck in sequence. Kinkaid’s fleet missed no tricks this night. McManes’s force included the Australian destroyer Arunta, whose skipper, Commander A. E. Buchanan, led the second group. Allied tin fish filled the water. One of McManes’s torpedoes hit the Yamashiro amidships. She lost way and listed to port. Admiral Nishimura indicated the battleship was in danger when he ordered the rest of his unit to attack independently. How much power the Nishimura unit could muster by this point is uncertain. The destroyer Asagumo, her bow compromised, wasn’t going to make any more attacks. Miracle destroyer Shigure headed south to check on the Fuso. Only cruiser Mogami remained in position and in fighting shape. Somehow, Captain Ozaki’s damage-control teams made progress against Yamashiro’s wounds and she made way again. Soon the battleship reached eighteen knots speed. Nishimura headed into battle. The Mogami and Shigure came to her support. (While some accounts have the destroyer Asagumo, damaged as she was, coming up too, Commander Shibayama, her skipper, told Imperial Navy researcher Chihaya Masataka that after being torpedoed, the ship went south.)
Battleship Fuso limped along down the strait. She settled in the water with a magazine flooding. Sailors in the number one powder room suddenly realized the water dripping into their compartment was coming from above. The list inclined more sharply to starboard, and now the bow submerged. Admiral Ban Masami finally ordered “abandon ship.” An ordeal began for the survivors. Seaman Kato Yasuo, perhaps the longest-serving crewman (he’d been on the Fuso since 1938), wept openly as he jumped into the water. His watch stopped at 3:25 a.m. The ship went down by the bow, with Fuso’s stern elevating as the nearly 700-foot-long battleship stood on her keel end. Kato could see the ship’s rudder against the night sky. Once she had submerged, the vessel began leaking oil, which soon caught fire from conflagrations raging internally.
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Destroyer Squadron 56 lined up for its shots next. Led by long-faced Captain Roland N. Smoot, who studied the charts and determined the exact place where each of his sections would make their attacks, the squadron sped to its positions. Commander Joshua Cooper’s Bennion numbered among Smoot’s ships. Her experience would be emblematic of this sea fight. The future head of the U.S. Navy, chief of naval operations James L. Holloway III, sailed in the Bennion as gunnery officer. He had joined the ship barely two weeks earlier at Manus. Holloway remembered streaming rain after dark. The weather was warm and humid, and the rain provided brief respite. The sea was glassy and the night obscure. Suddenly there were star shells and flashes on the horizon. Then there were ships, and Smoot’s vessels maneuvered for position.
Cooper’s destroyer had the second position in her section. He ordered Holloway into action. The young officer estimated flashes covered 20 percent of the horizon in his gun director optics. The magnification of a Mark-37 was by a factor of twelve to fourteen. “I could clearly see the bursting shells on the enemy ships,” he recalled. The first destroyer in their column launched her torpedoes at 10,000 yards. Bennion loosed five fish at 5,600. By then, the Yamashiro filled the entire viewing lens. The destroyer turned away into a smoke screen, but behind her, the Albert W. Grant came under fire and suffered damage, including 39 dead and 119 wounded.
Just then, there came a ripple of fire from several thousand yards’ distance. The CIC reported nothing on radar, but big American ships always fired simultaneously. Lieutenant Holloway instantly concluded the ship had to be Japanese and shifted target. Commander Cooper decided the enemy—she was heavy cruiser Mogami—offered a fine target for the Bennion’s five remaining tin fish. Two of them hit. Commander Cooper was awarded the Navy Cross and Lieutenant Holloway a Bronze Star.
I
n the face of such devastation, the attack no longer qualified as a naval maneuver. Nishimura’s pell-mell advance more resembled closely a handful of teammates in a sack race to their deaths—because one damaged battleship, a battered heavy cruiser, and one Japanese destroyer were up against Jesse Oldendorf’s main body of half a dozen battlewagons and eight cruisers. The Allies’ big guns were about to open fire.
It was at that moment that Admiral Nishimura learned that Shima Kiyohide’s 2nd Diversion Attack Force had entered the Surigao Strait too. Shima was barely twenty miles away.
RETIRING TO PLAN SUBSEQUENT ACTION
The Shima fleet, from which so much was expected, though it possessed so little, anchored at Coron Bay in the evening on October 23. Vice Admiral Shima Kiyohide had barely recovered from his frustration at having his fleet tossed like a baseball thrown around the infield after a strikeout. So many dispatches had flown back and forth between Manila and Combined Fleet headquarters, and at one point the admiral had gotten so irritated he’d considered going to sea so he could profess to be out of communication. But the matter had finally been settled to his satisfaction. Better yet, C-in-C Toyoda had given Shima the opportunity to choose his own course of action.
Perhaps Combined Fleet took a chance giving Shima his head. Like so many others, the admiral thought of decisive battle as a fight against another fleet, not against transports. As he explained, the Japanese fleet should not “waste itself in piecemeal action against transports.” And anyway, Shima thought, during the long approach of the main force from Lingga, the Allied transports would leave. Shima believed any competent commander would share his judgment.
Here again is evidence of the high command’s failure to sell the Imperial Navy on its selection of invasion shipping rather than battle fleets as the targets of decisive battle. But just how “competent” was Shima Kiyohide? The Navy evidently thought he was competent enough. Though Shima had had only middling class rank at Etajima, he passed both levels of study at the Naval War College before reaching lieutenant commander, had served at the NGS (twice) and on Combined Fleet staff in addition to others, and had been aide-de-camp to an imperial prince. He began as a torpedo specialist but found his true calling in radio. Not only was Shima an expert, but he had instructed in the subject, and not just at the radio school but as adjunct at the torpedo and gunnery schools, with the JNAF, and back at the communications school as chief instructor. Indeed, the admiral’s last post before taking up the reins at Fifth Fleet in February 1944 had been as its superintendent.
