Battle of Leyte Gulf: Largest Naval Battle and the First Kamikaze Attacks

On 25 October 1944, 82 years ago today, three things happened off the Philippines within a few hours: a small American group of escort carriers and destroyers suddenly faced four Japanese battleships. The battleships fought their last battle against battleships. And shortly before 11 a.m., a Japanese aircraft deliberately hit an American ship, the first organized kamikaze attack of the war that sank ships.

In short: the Battle of Leyte Gulf lasted from 23 to 26 October 1944 and is regarded, depending on the measure, as the largest naval battle in history. It destroyed the striking power of the Japanese fleet, and it brought forth a weapon that shaped the Pacific war until the end. Today, 25 October 2026, the World War II season starts in HistoryBytes, and this day in history is a good way in.

The "battle" of Leyte Gulf was strictly speaking a campaign of four interrelated battles: in the Sibuyan Sea, at Surigao Strait, off Cape Engaño, and off Samar. On 23 October 1944, the Japanese navy launched a massive counterattack on the Allied landing in the Philippines. According to one account, 282 ships and almost 200,000 people were involved, over an area of more than 100,000 square miles.

On the first day, American submarines sank two cruisers, among them the flagship of Admiral Takeo Kurita, who led the Japanese Center Force. On 24 October, carrier aircraft sank the battleship Musashi, one of the largest in the world, which took about three dozen hits. Kurita withdrew temporarily and then turned around again. The point of the Japanese plan was a lure: the Northern Force drew the American Third Fleet under Admiral Halsey north. When Kurita passed through the unguarded San Bernardino Strait at 12:35 a.m. on 25 October, no American ship was there anymore.

At the same time, a second Japanese group passed through Surigao Strait in the south, where the Americans were waiting. The engagement from 10:52 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. is considered a classic example of "crossing the T," a maneuver in which a fleet trains its broadsides on the head of the enemy column, which can answer only with its forward guns. Admiral Nishimura's ships ran into a deadly trap.

It was the last battle in history in which battleships fought each other in a battle line. The Japanese battleship Yamashiro was the last battleship to engage another and one of very few sunk by another battleship in World War II.

On the morning of 25 October, Kurita's Center Force, 23 ships, appeared off the island of Samar. There lay a small American group with the call sign "Taffy 3" under Rear Admiral Clifton Sprague: six escort carriers, three destroyers, and four destroyer escorts, built for air support and not for fighting battleships. Facing them were four battleships, among them Yamato with her 18-inch guns, six heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, and eleven destroyers. Yamato alone displaced as much as the whole of Taffy 3 combined.

Sprague sent the carriers at full speed into a rain squall and the destroyers into the attack. USS Johnston under Commander Ernest Evans attacked first and alone, straight at a wall of cruisers, and her torpedo blew the bow off the cruiser Kumano. Hoel, Heermann, and the small destroyer escort Samuel B. Roberts followed, the latter earning the nickname "the destroyer escort that fought like a battleship." After about an hour, torpedoes forced even Yamato to turn away, and the Japanese formation fell into disarray.

The price was high: the escort carrier Gambier Bay, the only American carrier ever sunk by enemy surface gunfire, as well as the destroyers Johnston and Hoel and the destroyer escort Samuel B. Roberts were lost. Of Johnston's crew 145 survived, of Hoel's 58, of the 224 men of Samuel B. Roberts 120. According to one account, the survivors waited three days and two nights for rescue. Commander Evans was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. The wreck of Samuel B. Roberts was found on 22 June 2022.

The Japanese lost the heavy cruisers Chokai, Chikuma, and Suzuya. At 9:20 a.m., Kurita signaled withdrawal through San Bernardino Strait. He took the small ships of Taffy 3 for large fleet carriers and feared the Third Fleet would arrive at any moment. That was a mistake, and it saved the landing beaches. Admiral Nimitz later wrote that the success of Taffy 3 was "nothing short of special dispensation from the Lord Almighty." Historians count the fight among the greatest last stands in naval history.

Later that morning, after Kurita had turned away, at 10:47 a.m. the Shikishima Unit of the Japanese navy's 201st Air Group found the ships of Taffy 3. As early as 21 October, a kamikaze had hit the Australian heavy cruiser Australia, and a first official attack under Yoshiyasu Kunō failed. The organized attacks of the "Special Attack Forces" began on 25 October, with the unit of Lieutenant Yukio Seki, 23 years old.

At 10:53 a.m. (by other accounts 10:51), a Zero deliberately hit the escort carrier USS St. Lo, which sank within half an hour. It was the first major ship sunk by a kamikaze, other escort carriers were damaged. Seki himself died that day. The kamikaze attack was an answer to a strategically hopeless situation: after Leyte, the Japanese fleet could no longer interdict sea lines, and the navy used its remaining aircraft as suicide weapons.

Leyte ended the Japanese fleet's ability to conduct large-scale naval operations. The carrier Zuikaku, the last survivor of the six aircraft carriers that had attacked Pearl Harbor, sank on 25 October off Cape Engaño. After Leyte, Okinawa and the Japanese home islands stood without protection of the fleet.

The kamikaze remained. At Okinawa in 1945, Japan launched massed attacks, Operation Kikusui, in which the American radar picket destroyers bore the brunt. The tactic could not be reversed and couldn't prevent Japan's defeat. What remained of Leyte is both: the largest naval battle in history and the beginning of a form of combat that lasted until the end of the war.

The wrecks of the battle stayed lost for almost 80 years. In 2021, the American explorer Victor Vescovo reached with his submersible the wreck of USS Johnston, whose deepest part lies at 6,468.6 meters, then the deepest shipwreck ever found. On 22 June 2022, he found together with the sonar specialist Jeremie Morizet the Samuel B. Roberts, broken in two pieces lying about ten meters apart. She lies at about 6,900 meters, the sources give values between 6,865 and 6,895 meters, almost 3,000 meters deeper than the Titanic. It is the deepest wreck ever found and surveyed.

The find was preceded by careful historical research, led among others by the retired naval officer Parks Stephenson, because the old position records were inaccurate. The team also searched for Gambier Bay but did not find her, and for lack of reliable data did not search for Hoel at all. According to the discoverers, live ammunition apparently still lies aboard Samuel B. Roberts.

To wrap up, the short version, so fact and story don't blur.

Leyte Gulf shows how much can be packed into a single day. That's why every season in HistoryBytes is split into five categories, and this story touches all five: Commander Ernest Evans as a person, the island of Samar as a place, the battle off Samar on 25 October 1944 as an event, crossing the T as an idea, the destroyer Johnston as an object. That's how the WW2 season builds the whole picture of a war that people on all sides lived through. The season starts today with 250 episodes, split into 50 each of people, places, events, ideas, and objects, more than twelve hours of play time, and the first week is free for everyone.

That the same day saw the courage of a handful of small ships, the last battleship duel, and the start of a new, cruel form of combat makes it one of the densest days of the Second World War. On all sides stood people who followed their orders, most of them young. Whoever thinks of this day today thinks of the crews who stayed there, and of those who were rescued after three days in the water.