Original subtitles

On the night of October 24th, 1944,

a Japanese admiral named Shoji Nishimura

steered his last two battleships into a

narrow channel in the Southern

Philippines called Surigao Strait. He

had one heavy cruiser alongside him,

four destroyers, and orders that even

his own superiors privately doubted he

could carry out. What waited for him in

the dark ahead wasn't a scattering of

patrol craft or a handful of coastal

guns.

>> [music]

>> It was six battleships, eight cruisers,

28 destroyers, and 39 motor torpedo

boats arranged in a formation that naval

officers trained their entire careers to

use and almost never get the chance to.

In roughly 90 minutes, one of the last

real battle fleets Japan had left would

stop existing and naval warfare itself

would close a chapter that stretched all

the way back to the age of sail. So, how

did the Imperial Japanese Navy sail an

entire battle line into a strait where

the enemy was already waiting on three

sides, guns loaded, range found, outcome

basically decided before a single shot

was fired?

>> [music]

>> By the autumn of 1944, the war in the

Pacific had turned hard against Japan.

The carrier battles at Midway and

[music] the Philippine Sea had already

gutted its naval air power, and on

October 20th, General Douglas MacArthur

waded ashore on the island of Leyte and

made good on the promise he'd made when

he fled the Philippines two years

earlier.

"I have returned," he told the crowds on

the beach. Japan's high command

understood exactly what an American

foothold on Leyte would mean. If the

beachhead held, the Philippines would

fall, and if the Philippines fell, Japan

would be cut off from the oil fields it

needed to keep fighting at all.

So, the Imperial Navy staked almost

everything it had left on a single

desperate gamble code named Shogo, a

coordinated pincer attack meant to smash

the invasion fleet crowding Leyte Gulf

before it could land another soldier. A

decoy carrier force under Admiral Ozawa

would sail south and dangle itself in

front of the Americans hoping to drag

the powerful US Third Fleet away on a

wild chase.

While the Americans chased ghosts, two

more Japanese forces would converge on

the Gulf from opposite directions. A

powerful center force under Vice Admiral

Takeo Kurita, built around the giant

battleship Yamato, would come through

San Bernardino Strait from the north. A

smaller southern force would come up

through Surigao Strait to hit the

landings from the south. If both pincers

closed at once, that fleet and the

transports behind it would be caught in

the open and slaughtered. It was, by

most measures, about to become the

largest naval battle in history. It was

also a plan that depended on

split-second coordination between three

fleets operating hundreds of miles apart

under strict radio silence, and it

started coming apart almost immediately.

Vice Admiral Shoji Nishimura was no

stranger to hopeless odds. Back in 1942,

off Guadalcanal, he had commanded a

cruiser squadron through some of the

ugliest night actions of the entire

Pacific War, and his own officers had

come to know him as a driving, sometimes

reckless fighter who never backed away

from a night action. In September of

1944, barely 5 weeks before Leyte, he'd

been handed command of Battleship

Division 2, two aging dreadnoughts named

Fuso and Yamashiro, both laid down

before the First World War and rebuilt

more than once since, but still, by 1944

standards, relics.

His orders were to take that division,

along with the heavy cruiser Mogami and

four destroyers, and push his way up

Surigao Strait to strike the Leyte

beachhead from the south, while Kurita's

far more powerful fleet came at it from

the north.

A second Japanese group trailed behind

him, too, Vice Admiral Kiyohide Shima's

second striking force of cruisers and

destroyers, but Shima was operating tens

of miles back under a separate chain of

command, and the same radio silence

meant to protect the whole operation

left the two admirals barely aware of

what the other was doing.

Nishimura would be going in first, and

largely alone.

By most accounts, he knew exactly what

that meant. His ships had no realistic

chance of breaking into Leyte Gulf

unmolested. What they could do was pull

American attention and firepower toward

the southern approach, and buy Kurita's

battleships room to do the real damage

from the other direction. Nishimura

never wrote down his state of mind, and

he did not live long enough for anyone

to ask him, but everything about how he

fought that night suggests a commander

who had made his peace with the odds,

and decided to go forward anyway.

Waiting for him was Rear Admiral Jesse

Oldendorf, an Annapolis man his officers

nicknamed Oley.

Before the war, he had commanded the

heavy cruiser USS Houston on a peacetime

cruise that once carried President

Franklin Roosevelt, then spent much of

the early war years hunting U-boats in

the Caribbean, a long way from the

glamour postings, before finally taking

command of the older battleships

assigned to support MacArthur's

landings. And here is the detail that

turns this battle from a straightforward

ambush into something closer to poetic

justice.

Five of Oldendorf's six battleships,

West Virginia, California, Tennessee,

Maryland, and Pennsylvania, had all been

sunk or crippled by Japanese bombs and

torpedoes at Pearl Harbor on December

7th, 1941.

Every one of them had been raised out of

the mud of that harbor, patched,

rebuilt, and sent back to war. Only the

sixth, Mississippi, had missed Pearl

Harbor entirely. Nearly 3 years after

that Sunday morning, the survivors of

Pearl Harbor were steaming into their

battle positions in Surigao Strait,

ready for a straight shot at the

Imperial Japanese Navy's battle line.

Oldendorf's plan for the night was a

trap built inside another trap. 39 PT

boats, organized into three-boat

sections, were posted at the southern

mouth of the strait to spot Nishimura's

force the moment it appeared and radio a

warning north. Behind them, two full

squadrons of destroyers waited on the

eastern and western shores, ready to

dash in from both flanks and fire

torpedo spreads before the Japanese

ships ever reached the main event. And

behind all of that, stretched clear

across the strait's northern exit, where

it opened into Leyte Gulf, sat six

battleships and a line of cruisers, the

Australian heavy cruiser HMAS Shropshire

among them, arranged in a single

unbroken wall. Any naval officer alive

would have recognized instantly what

Oldendorf had built. It's called

crossing the T. Picture two fleets at

sea, one steaming in a column, bow to

stern, straight up a channel. The other

lined up broadside, stretched across the

top of that channel like the crossbar of

a letter T.

The column can only fire the guns

mounted at its bow. The line across the

top can fire every gun on every ship all

at once down the full length of the

enemy's formation. It is the single most

lopsided advantage in naval gunnery, and

it is also almost impossible to pull off

in open water, where a competent

opposing admiral has thousands of square

miles to maneuver away from it. Surigao

Strait gave Nishimura nowhere to run.

It's a narrow, current-choked channel

squeezed between Leyte, Mindanao, and

Dinagat. And by the time his lookouts

could actually see the American line

ahead, there would be no room left to

turn his column and answer with anything

but his forward guns.

Oldendorf explained his own thinking

afterward in blunter terms than most

admirals allow themselves. "Never give a

sucker a chance," he said. If the

Japanese wanted to attack with an

inferior force, he wasn't about to offer

them an even fight. Just before 10:00 on

the night of October 24th, Nishimura's

force reached the southern entrance of

the strait, exactly on schedule, and

exactly where Oldendorf expected. The PT

boats found him first. Small, fast,

built more for hit-and-run harassment

than for sinking battleships, they

surged out of the dark in three-boat

teams and tried to slow the column down.

It did not go especially well for them.

Nishimura's destroyer Shigure spotted

the nearest boats and opened fire, and

Japanese searchlights and shellfire

chased the little wooden craft across

the water for the next several hours.

10 of the 30 PT boats that made contact

that night took hits, and one, PT-493,

was sunk outright. Three American

sailors were killed and 20 wounded

before the sun came up. In terms of

damage to the Japanese, the PT boats

accomplished almost nothing. Not one of

their torpedoes found a mark on

Nishimura's main force.

But that was never really the point.

Every contact report they radioed back

up the strait told Oldendorf exactly

where the Japanese were, how fast they

were moving, and what course they were

holding.

Nishimura shrugged the attacks off and

kept his ships moving north at 20 knots,

confident he'd cleared the worst of it.

He had no idea he'd only cleared the

outer edge of the trap.

Just after 3:00 in the morning on

October 25th, the The started in

earnest. Destroyer squadrons under

Captains Coward, McManes, and Smoot came

screaming out of the night on both sides

of the strait, running dark, launching

full spreads of torpedoes from several

miles out, then wheeling away under

smoke before Japanese gun crews could

find the range. One destroyer alone, USS

McDermut, fired a spread that hit three

separate Japanese ships within seconds

of each other. One of the most

devastating single torpedo attacks any

destroyer delivered in the entire war.

The destroyer Yamagumo caught a torpedo

and simply exploded, going down almost

instantly. Michishio was struck and left

dead in the water.

Asagumo took a torpedo to the bow and

kept going, crippled. And the battleship

Fuso, Nishimura's second dreadnought,

was hit and, according to multiple

accounts of the wreck, broke apart into

two burning halves that drifted

separately down the strait, lit up like

signal fires in the darkness. Yamashiro

herself took a hit, too, but kept

moving. From her bridge, Nishimura

radioed a report to Kurita and Shima

that said everything about a man who had

already lost the thread of the battle

without fully realizing it. Two of his

destroyers were torpedoed and drifting,

he reported, but his flagship's fighting

power was not impaired.

He did not yet seem to know that Fuso,

the ship he assumed was still following

close behind him, was already broken in

half and burning. Nishimura pressed on

anyway, because pressing on was the only

plan he had left. And that decision

carried him straight into the mouth of

Oldendorf's trap. At 3:52 in the

morning, the battleship USS West

Virginia, her radar locked onto

Yamashiro from more than 20 miles out,

opened fire with her eight 16-in guns.

Her first salvo hit. Two minutes later,

California and Tennessee joined in.

One by one, the rest of Oldendorf's

battle line found their targets in total

darkness, guided by radar the Japanese

had no equivalent for. The Japanese

ships had no way to see who was hitting

them or from where. They fired blindly

into the night at muzzle flashes and

shadows, while American gunners walked

salvo after salvo directly onto

Yamashiro's deck. Within minutes, the

old battleship was ablaze along her

entire length. Fires lighting up her

silhouette against the black water. More

torpedoes found her from the American

destroyers still darting through the

smoke and she went still in the water

listing hard to port. At 4:08, the

battleship USS Mississippi, the one ship

in Oldendorf's line that had never been

at Pearl Harbor, finally got her own

fire control solution and fired a single

broadside at Yamashiro from almost

20,000 yards out. Nobody on that deck

knew it at the time,

but it was the last broadside one

battleship would ever fire at another in

the history of naval warfare. About 10

minutes later at roughly 4:19, the

shattered Yamashiro rolled onto her side

and capsized taking Nishimura, his

entire staff, her captain and nearly all

of her 1,600 man crew down with her.

Only a handful of survivors from that

ship ever made it home to Japan.

Only one ship from Nishimura's original

seven made it out of that killing ground

intact. The destroyer Shigure, a veteran

of a dozen night battles in the Solomon

Islands, took a single shell through her

stern, turned and fled south down the

strait threading through burning

wreckage and her own retreating

countrymen in the dark. Behind her, some

40 miles back, Vice Admiral Shima's

second striking force was only just

arriving. Two heavy cruisers, a light

cruiser and four destroyers with little

idea how completely the ambush ahead of

them had already worked. Shima's

lookouts spotted wreckage burning on the

water, and in the drifting smoke,

mistook the two shattered halves of Fuso

for both of Nishimura's battleships

destroyed. It was enough. Shima did the

one thing nobody else on the Japanese

side managed to do correctly that night.

He did the math, decided his own weaker

force stood no chance of reversing what

had already happened, and ordered an

immediate retreat. As his ships wheeled

around, his own flagship, the cruiser

Nachi, plowed straight into the limping,

burning Mogami, which Nachi's captain

had assumed was dead in the water. It

wasn't. The collision tore open Nachi's

stern and cut her speed to 18 knots. One

final, almost absurd humiliation on a

night that had already gone about as

wrong as a naval operation possibly

could.

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there are a lot more one-sided naval

slaughters like this one still to cover.

Mogami somehow survived the collision

and limped south with what was left of

Shima's retreating column, but her luck

ran out a few hours later. American

carrier aircraft caught her stopped dead

and smoking in the Mindanao Sea, and

rather than let her fall into American

hands, her own escorting destroyer put a

torpedo into her that afternoon and sent

her to the bottom. By nightfall on

October 25th, Nishimura's Southern Force

had effectively ceased to exist. Two

battleships gone, a heavy cruiser gone,

three destroyers gone, a death toll the

Navy's own post-war analysts admitted

they never precisely counted, but which

ran, by any reasonable estimate, into

the thousands.

Against all of that, Oldendorf's entire

command lost 39 sailors killed and 114

wounded, most of them aboard a single

destroyer, USS Albert W. Grant, which

took a battering not just from the

Japanese, but from confused friendly

fire in the smoke and chaos of the night

action. A small human reminder that even

the most lopsided ambush in naval

history wasn't painless for the winning

side. One PT boat was lost. That was the

entire bill.

There's a detail about Surigao Strait

that most people miss, and it's the kind

of thing that makes military historians

sit up a little straighter.

Crossing the T is one of the oldest

ambitions in naval warfare, but almost

nobody managed to pull it off cleanly

against a real enemy fleet until 1905 at

the Battle of Tsushima, when Admiral

Togo Heihachiro of the Imperial Japanese

Navy crossed the T of Russia's Baltic

Fleet and annihilated it, sinking or

capturing all but a handful of some

three dozen Russian warships for the

loss of a few small torpedo boats.

That single battle helped usher in

nearly half a century in which the big

gun battleship, arranged in a

disciplined line, was treated as the

ultimate expression of naval power on

Earth. Togo's maneuver at Tsushima

became the textbook standard every naval

academy in the world taught afterward,

Japan's own included. 39 years later, in

a narrow strait in the Philippines, that

same tactic, the same beautiful and

brutal geometry that had once made the

Imperial Japanese Navy the pride of

Asia, was used to annihilate what was

left of it.

Surigao Strait was the last time in

history that one fleet successfully

crossed the T of another, and the last

time battleships would ever trade fire

with other battleships anywhere on

Earth. The book Togo opened at Tsushima

in 1905. Oldendorf closed at Surigao

Strait in 1944, and he did it in a

strange and fitting way, with ships that

Japan itself had already tried to sink

once before at Pearl Harbor.

Oldendorf never got the chance to fully

finish off Shima's retreating force, and

the reason says a lot about how enormous

the Battle of Leyte Gulf really was.

Even as Yamashiro was capsizing in

Surigao Strait, word reached Oldendorf

that the other half of Japan's pincer,

Kurita's powerful center force built

around the battleship Yamato, had

slipped through San Bernardino Strait

far to the north and stumbled directly

into a group of lightly armed American

escort carriers off the island of Samar.

Oldendorf's battleships were needed

there, urgently, in case Kurita broke

through completely. So, the pursuit

south was called off. Shima and the

survivors of Mogami and Shigure were

allowed to slip away into the Mindanao

Sea, and Oldendorf turned his battle

line north to prepare for a fight that,

as it turned out, never fully arrived.

Shigure herself would survive Surigao

Strait only to be sunk by an American

submarine off Malaya less than a year

later. Nearly every ship in Shima's

force that limped out of the strait that

night would be sunk within weeks in the

running battles that finished off what

remained of the Imperial Japanese Navy

surface fleet for good. Surigao Strait

is quiet water today.

Ferries and fishing boats cross it every

day between Leyte, Dinagat, and

Mindanao, and most of the people on

board have no idea that resting beneath

them is the wreckage of an entire battle

fleet. Or that for about 90 minutes on

one October night in 1944,

this narrow, unremarkable channel was

the stage for the closing act of an

entire era of naval warfare. Six old

battleships, raised out of the mud of

Pearl Harbor and given one more fight,

closed the book that a Japanese admiral

had opened 39 years earlier at Tsushima.

It's a strange kind of symmetry for a

war that Japan had started with a

surprise attack on battleships at

anchor. And in even stranger kind of

ending, it finished in a very real sense

with those same battleships, or what was

left of them, waiting patiently in the

dark for their turn to fire back.

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Pacific for a story just as wild as this

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