With the beachheads relatively unprotected, it would fall to Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita’s First Striking Force (which the Americans called the Center Force), sailing east from Singapore to Brunei Bay, off Borneo, to slip through the central Philippines via the Sibuyan Sea and San Bernardino Strait and pounce on the transports, supply ships, and accompanying escorts off the Leyte beachheads. Relying on surface firepower, Kurita had five battleships, including the 64,000-ton Yamato, with its eighteen-inch guns, eleven heavy cruisers, and a bevy of light cruisers and destroyers.

To complete the pincer action against Leyte, two smaller forces—Vice Admiral Kiyohide Shima’s Second Striking Force of cruisers and destroyers and Vice Admiral Shoji Nishimura’s detachment from Kurita’s Center Force of two battleships, a heavy cruiser, and assorted destroyers—would pass north of Mindanao and transit Surigao Strait in time to attack any American ships fleeing Leyte in the face of Kurita’s advance or reinforcements steaming to their aid. Together, though they were not closely coordinated on the Japanese side, the Americans would call these two forces the Southern Force.29

Hostilities began during the night of October 22–23, when Darter and Dace worked themselves into firing positions and sank the heavy cruisers Maya and Atago, the latter being Admiral Kurita’s flagship. Kurita then transferred his flag to the battleship Yamato. On the morning of October 24, Halsey unleashed air attacks from the carriers of three of his four task groups against Kurita’s fleet as it steamed eastward through the Sibuyan Sea. Halsey’s fourth task group, under the command of Vice Admiral John S. “Slew” McCain (the senator’s grandfather), had been retiring toward Ulithi to rearm and provision, but Halsey ordered McCain to come about, refuel at sea, and return to Philippine waters.

Meanwhile, MacArthur had been going back and forth daily from the Nashville to beachhead sectors and Tacloban. On the twenty-fourth, Kinkaid asked him to move his headquarters ashore and free up the Nashville for combat operations—operations that seemed increasingly likely. MacArthur professed a desire to stay on board and see the action, but the next day Kinkaid insisted, and MacArthur transferred to Barbey’s flagship, the amphibious force command ship Wasatch, for a night before moving ashore on October 26. Before that occurred, however, there were plenty of fireworks.

Halsey’s carrier planes wreaked havoc on Kurita’s Center Force in the Sibuyan Sea throughout the day on October 24. Aircraft from Task Group 38.4 also located Shima and Nishimura’s converging Southern Force headed toward Surigao Strait. Kinkaid summoned his Seventh Fleet task group commanders on board Wasatch around noon on the twenty-fourth and gave Oldendorf and Task Group 77.2 the job of plugging Surigao Strait.

Shima and Nishimura’s combined forces were expected to transit the strait around 2:00 a.m. on October 25, and Oldendorf deployed six aging battleships (five of them Pearl Harbor survivors), three heavy cruisers, five light cruisers, twenty-six destroyers, and a bevy of PT boats to stop them. Rear Admiral Thomas Sprague’s sixteen escort carriers (CVEs) and destroyer escorts were left to protect the beachheads and Oldendorf’s ships from air attack. Kinkaid advised Halsey that his Seventh Fleet would stop the Southern Force but that he expected Halsey’s Third Fleet to handle Kurita’s Center Force. By late afternoon on the twenty-fourth, Halsey was convinced that he already had done so.

Pilots returning to their carriers reported major losses to Kurita’s fleet, including sinking the Yamato-class battleship Musashi. It appeared to Halsey and the Task Force 38 commander, Marc Mitscher, that they had largely destroyed Kurita’s force. A reconnaissance plane from the carrier Intrepid seemed to confirm this with the report that Kurita’s remaining ships had turned around and were sailing westward. Within an hour, however, Kurita reversed course and was once again bearing down on San Bernardino Strait.30

Not knowing this, Halsey turned his ships northward and steamed to engage the third Japanese group, the carriers of Ozawa’s Northern Force, which were lurking somewhere off Cape Engaño, on northern Luzon. Before knowing the results of the air attacks in the Sibuyan Sea, Halsey had issued a battle plan for four battleships, including his own New Jersey, two heavy cruisers, and assorted light cruisers and destroyers to form Task Force 34 and block the exit from San Bernardino Strait in a manner similar to what Kinkaid had ordered Oldendorf to do at Surigao. Unlike Kinkaid, however, Halsey never gave the order to execute this plan, and the ships that would have been assigned to Task Force 34 steamed northward instead.31

That night, with MacArthur still on board the Nashville, anchored near the amphibious force command ships in Leyte Gulf, Oldendorf’s battle line conducted textbook battleship maneuvers, including crossing the enemy’s T, and handily defeated the Southern Force in Surigao Strait. Dawn on October 25 should have brought contented sighs of victory, but instead it brought an urgent summons from Kinkaid: Kurita’s Center Force had passed through San Bernardino Strait and was approaching the northern group of escort carriers off Samar, far too close for comfort to the ship-filled waters of Leyte Gulf.

Earlier that morning Kinkaid’s operations officer had gotten nervous about San Bernardino Strait. “We’ve never asked Halsey directly,” he told Kinkaid, “if Task Force 34 is guarding San Bernardino Strait.” Kinkaid agreed, and he directed that Halsey be queried, “Is TF 34 guarding San Bernardino Strait?” By the time this question worked its way from the Seventh to the Third Fleet and Halsey received it, it was 6:48 a.m., some two and a half hours later. “Negative,” Halsey responded. “Task Force Thirty Four is with carrier groups now engaging enemy carrier force.”³²

Nimitz and King, routinely monitoring radio traffic, had also gotten nervous. Nimitz’s similar query to Halsey became the source of increased friction when miscellaneous padding at the end of the message seemed to mock Halsey’s tactical deployments. The bottom line is that with Halsey’s ships about to engage Ozawa’s carriers, Kurita’s battleship force was inbound to Leyte Gulf opposed only by escort carriers and destroyers. If they continued into Leyte Gulf, the Nashville, with MacArthur still on board, was the only large ship available to oppose them.

Kinkaid sent urgent appeals to Halsey for assistance from his fast battleships and carriers. Within reach of Ozawa’s decoy carriers, Halsey agonized over his next move even as he radioed McCain’s task group and told it to expedite its return toward Leyte and launch air strikes when within range of Kurita’s forces. Finally, at 11:15 a.m. on October 25, Halsey reluctantly ordered his fast battleships to form Task Force 34 and race south to engage Kurita, closely followed by one of his three carrier task groups. Mitscher and the remaining two carrier groups would continue north and finish off Ozawa’s force.

Iowa and New Jersey, the latter with Halsey on board, charged toward Leyte and arrived shortly after midnight on October 26, but by then the central battle of Leyte Gulf was over. In the face of gritty resistance and selfless sacrifice by Kinkaid’s escort carriers and their destroyer escorts, Kurita had hesitated and then turned tail when he was within an hour or so of the Leyte beachheads. Before Halsey arrived, Kurita’s fleet slipped back through San Bernardino Strait.

Nonetheless, when the smoke cleared, the combined battles of Leyte Gulf may have been the greatest victory ever won by the United States Navy. As a result of the torpedo attacks by Darter and Dace, and in the wake of Mitscher’s assaults against Ozawa’s carriers, Japanese losses totaled twenty-six combatant ships: three battleships, one large carrier, three light carriers, six heavy cruisers, four light cruisers, and nine destroyers—a total of 305,710 tons. American losses included the light carrier Princeton and the two escort carriers, two destroyers, and one destroyer escort lost in the last-ditch effort to oppose Kurita; these totaled 36,600 tons.33

By any measure, it was a stunning achievement of American naval might—thanks at least in part to Kurita’s unexpected early withdrawal, something he never fully explained. After the war Kurita said his decision was predicated on “lack of expected land-based air support and air reconnaissance, fear of further losses from air attack, and worry as to his fuel reserves.”³⁴ Yet the very fact of Kurita’s surprising withdrawal despite the closeness he had come to the Leyte beachheads summoned a host of critics.

During the critical hours of October 25, MacArthur appears to have been largely disengaged—not from any sense of personal paralysis, as may have been the case on the morning of December 8, 1941, but rather from a lack of information. This may have resulted from Admiral Kinkaid having his headquarters on the Wasatch and a number of MacArthur’s key staff being ashore at Tacloban setting up the headquarters he would occupy by the evening of October 26. MacArthur himself was still on the Nashville or perhaps in transit to the Wasatch.

During the day on October 25, Sutherland dispatched Spencer Akin, MacArthur’s signal chief, from Tacloban to the Wasatch to request information from Kinkaid on MacArthur’s behalf regarding the results of the CVE operations off Samar. Akin reported back that Kinkaid expressed regret at the lack of information MacArthur was receiving and said he would take immediate steps to correct it. Akin duly reported to Sutherland and confirmed the victory in Surigao Strait but optimistically predicted that crippled elements of Kurita’s Center Force would “undoubtedly… be sunk by Admiral Halsey tonight” before they could escape through San Bernardino Strait.35

As for Halsey, with Kinkaid’s emphatic radio pleas for assistance still burning in his brain, he immediately understood that he would face some second-guessing. Even as he sped back toward Leyte on the evening of October 25, he sent Nimitz, MacArthur, Kinkaid, and King a top-secret message attempting to clarify his actions, so that there would be “no misunderstanding concerning recent operations of the Third Fleet.”

To “statically guard San Bernardino Strait” and wait for the Japanese “would have been childish,” so Halsey struck north for Ozawa’s carriers, which had theretofore been “missing from the picture.” Saying that he had then been forced “to stand off from my golden opportunity and head south to support Kinkaid although I was convinced that his force was adequate,” he went to some lengths to catalog his support over the previous week for MacArthur and Kinkaid. This included the destruction of 1,200 enemy planes, the “crippling” of Kurita’s force in the Sibuyan Sea (however premature that assessment was), and the surface movements then under way “to cut off enemy retreat toward San Bernardino,” belated though that would prove to be. “The back of the Jap navy has been broken in the course of supporting our landings at Leyte,” Halsey concluded.³⁶

In response, Nimitz and King seem to have taken their cue from a comment reportedly made by Ulysses S. Grant after he demanded to know who had given the order for the charge up Missionary Ridge. Supposedly Grant grumbled, “Well, it will be all right if it turns out all right.”37

It had turned out all right, close call though it was, and the US Navy closed ranks around Halsey. MacArthur did much the same thing. He extracted a heavy toll of personal loyalty from his subordinates, but he was usually a loyal supporter in return. Certainly that was true in Bill Halsey’s case. The admiral and the general had had their moments of disagreement, but they had generally worked very well together—as, by many reports, had their respective staffs.

Despite the second-guessing that occurred at the time over Halsey’s strike against Ozawa—second-guessing that continues today—MacArthur never blamed Halsey or directly questioned his decision. Reports of MacArthur castigating Halsey for having abandoned the beachheads as Kurita bore down on the CVEs seem, in hindsight, to have emanated largely from Sutherland.³⁸ Not only was MacArthur not with Sutherland that morning, Sutherland was also recognized by no less an authority than George Marshall to be the “chief insulter of the Navy” within MacArthur’s headquarters.³⁹

The most accurate expression of MacArthur’s feelings may have occurred on the first evening MacArthur spent ashore in Tacloban. According to George Kenney, as MacArthur sat down at the dinner table, he heard Halsey’s name mentioned with “certain expressions that might be classed as highly uncomplimentary.” MacArthur pounded the table and exclaimed, “That’s enough. Leave the Bull alone. He’s still a fighting Admiral in my book.”⁴⁰

Marshall sounded a similar note of interservice cooperation in a meeting of the Joint Chiefs a few weeks later. When Admiral King made sarcastic and disparaging comments about MacArthur, Marshall banged his own table and brought King up short, exclaiming, “I will not have any meetings carried on with this hatred.”⁴¹

MacArthur sent messages of thanks and congratulations to both Nimitz and Halsey. “To you and to all elements of your fine command,” MacArthur wrote Nimitz, “[I extend my] deep appreciation of the splendid service they have rendered.” To Halsey, MacArthur laid it on especially thick. “We have cooperated with you so long,” MacArthur told him, “that we are accustomed and expect your brilliant successes and you have more than sustained our fullest anticipations. Everyone here has a feeling of complete confidence and inspiration when you go into action in our support.”42

None of this, however, could obscure or eradicate two critical lingering questions. First, why didn’t MacArthur, the big-picture strategist in his vaunted map room, either query Kinkaid to confirm that San Bernardino Strait was guarded or go directly to Halsey with the same concern? The usual answer involves some version of the difficulties of Kinkaid’s chain of command running to MacArthur while Halsey’s command authority for operations at sea ran to Nimitz and ultimately to King and the Joint Chiefs.

Indeed, MacArthur’s stock answer to this question was the continuing failure of the Joint Chiefs to give him unity of command throughout the Pacific. “I have never ascribed the unfortunate incidents of this naval battle to faulty judgment on the part of any of the commanders involved,” MacArthur wrote in his memoirs. Rather, he found that the blame for the “near disaster can be placed squarely at the door of Washington.” This meant, he said, that “two key American commanders were independent of each other, one under me, and the other under Admiral Nimitz 5,000 miles away, both operating in the same waters and in the same battle.”⁴³

But Halsey and MacArthur had been cooperating on operational matters since the campaigns at Buna and Guadalcanal. Surely MacArthur—who was never shy about dashing off a message to anyone—would not have hesitated to query Halsey on the status of his operations. He had every right and responsibility to do the same with Kinkaid.

The real answer is that MacArthur at that moment lacked a big-picture understanding of Japanese naval movements. This was, at least in part, because he had chosen to be on board the Nashville and to take part in the landings and subsequent Philippine government ceremonies in Tacloban. Consequently he was without the communications and intelligence resources more readily available at an established headquarters. Having eschewed Hollandia, he would not find such facilities available in Tacloban until after the sea battles.

But one should not criticize MacArthur too heavily for this. As CINCSWPA, he had by necessity delegated responsibility for air, land, and sea operations to Kenney, Krueger, and Kinkaid. It was up to Kinkaid to supervise Seventh Fleet naval operations, which he did admirably in the immediate waters around Leyte Gulf. Even had MacArthur been in supreme command of both Kinkaid and Halsey, it is highly unlikely that he would have questioned, or even known about, the fluid operational situation that ultimately led to San Bernardino being left unguarded.

The more vexing question is this: Regardless of what Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet was doing, why didn’t Bill Halsey leave so much as a picket destroyer guarding the eastern end of San Bernardino Strait? At the very least, why didn’t he request that Kinkaid do so? Such an action likely would have provided early warning to both Halsey and Kinkaid hours before Kurita’s battleships bore down on the CVEs off Samar. This question has never been satisfactorily answered. One thing, however, became certain: as much as the US Navy was tested at the battles of Leyte Gulf, so, too, would MacArthur and the US Army be tested ashore in the days and weeks that followed.