Four days of battle end: Japan's navy leaves Leyte Gulf broken
For four days the waters around the Philippines held the largest naval battle ever fought. On October 26, 1944, the fighting at Leyte Gulf finally stopped, and Admiral Soemu Toyoda's Combined Fleet limped away having lost much of what remained of its carrier and battleship strength. More than 200,000 naval personnel had taken part across four main engagements and several lesser actions. Japan's navy never again sailed in comparable force for the rest of the war.
Leyte Gulf secured the Philippine campaign General Douglas MacArthur had promised two years earlier, and it ended Japan's ability to contest the sea around the islands. The battle also introduced America's military to organized kamikaze attacks, a tactic the Navy had to account for in the amphibious assaults that followed.
QWhat happened to Vice Admiral Kurita when his flagship went down before the battle even reached its climax?
Kurita had to swim for his life. On October 23, before his Center Force had even engaged the American surface fleet, the submarines Darter and Dace caught his ships in the Palawan Passage and sank his flagship, the heavy cruiser Atago. Kurita was pulled from the water and transferred to the battleship Yamato to continue commanding the force. He went on to lead that same Center Force through San Bernardino Strait two days later, arriving off Samar still in command despite having lost his ship, his staff's equipment, and nearly his life before a single large-caliber shell had been fired at him by a surface ship.
QWhy did the light carrier USS Princeton become more dangerous to American ships than to the enemy that hit her?
A single bomb hit during the Sibuyan Sea fighting turned the Princeton into a floating hazard for her own fleet. The strike set off stored torpedoes and bombers on board, and the resulting explosions tore into the nearby cruiser USS Birmingham, which had pulled alongside to help fight the fires. The secondary blasts caused heavier casualties on Birmingham's deck than the original bomb had caused aboard Princeton itself. The carrier eventually had to be scuttled by her own task force rather than saved, proof that a single hit on a ship loaded with ordnance could wound two vessels at once.
QWhat fuel problem had Japanese strategists already warned about before the battle began?
Japanese naval planners had flagged the danger in their own strategic assessments: losing the Philippines would sever the shipping lanes connecting the home islands to the oil fields their fleet depended on. One internal assessment warned that even if ships survived the fighting, a fleet pushed back to Japanese waters afterward could not obtain its fuel supply. The fuel shortage happened just as predicted. Surviving warships sat idle in port for the rest of the war not because they lacked crews or ammunition, but because there was no fuel left to send them anywhere, a strategic bottleneck Japanese commanders had identified as a risk before the first shot at Leyte was fired.
