Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Battle of LEYTE GULF 23-26th Oct. 1944.

Plenty of information available on-line so you can easy find most of that yourselves, and reflect on such a decisive AIR and SEA battle
at this time in history.

In brief, it brought out the first organised Kamikaze attacks and was the last great battleship engagement in history.

https://www.historyonthenet.com/battle-of-leyte-gulf

My FIL was from Leyte and old enough to had experienced the Imperialist occupation. Bad guys defeated by good.

The good guys win, killed plenty of japs.

My Dad was there..said it scared hell out of him watching airplanes crashing into ships.

Had to be miserable watching that. Very tough to defend against, too.

May the valiant sailors of Taffey 3 live forever in our memories. Nowhere on this Earth have lived finer men.

I recall a vet saying that..
"every man has a breaking point, and the kamikaze tested that breaking point like nothing else"...

...he told of accounts where those manning AA guns on ships, could no longer take the pressure and just jumped over the side ,
gone, the last they ever saw of them.

The same vet said something like ."they were taught to die for their emperor, but we were not taught to die for our president,'

.. psychologically they had it over us."

My dad was on USS KIDD DD661. The only modern era US warship to fly a black flag with skull and crossbones for their battle flag. Took a hit from a kamikaze in WWII that left 38 dead and 55 wounded. The ship fought off other attempts to finish her off by Japanese pilots, steamed on under her own power while fighting fires on board and containing battle damage. Dad was a gun captain on the #1 5" gun. Dad was sure proud of the KIDD.

i lost an elderly woman client earlier this year. Some years ago she had given me her first husbands navy dog tags. Cleaning up her living quarters, i found about a two foot long picture of his boot camp graduation, immediately after which he was assigned to a destroyer.
he was in that last battle with the battleships, they were firing shells at over 12miles. The U.S. had an atvantage, having radar on some of the
ships, the japanese did not. First salvo from one of the american ships at that distance bracketed a japanest battleship.
his destroyer survived the engagement, quite a few did not. that was the battle of surigao strait.
i had another guy walk in my office one day, saw a book on my desk on the battle off salvo island. He said have you read the book? yes. He started crying. Turns out he was on the destroyer cut in half at night by a japanese ship. he floated around on a life raft off the canal for over a week, they couldn't put in for fear of the japanese, nobody would stop for fear of being shelled. Finally they just snuck in and made their way to american lines. It was some weeks before he could rejoin the fleet.
I at one time had client that during the invasion of saipan, one was a beech commander, another a navy fighter pilot, and another in the marine corp.
some interesting stories.

My father was a naval officer on the battleship Pennsylvania at Surigao Strait. We have his diary with a contemporaneous account of the battle. He ended the account with "this has been a hard day". He was recounting the aftermath of the battle with live Jap navy men everywhere in the water. Another older cousin was on the cruiser Denver in the same battle and after my father had died he told me that the American boats machine gunned the Jap swimmers. That may have explained my father's reaction when I asked if they stopped to pick them up. He sharply answered me "NO". I said "well they are people too". He said "they should have acted like it". He never told me they machine gunned swimmers, but I'm positive our Marine cousin on the Denver was telling the truth.

Allied pilots machined-gunned civilians in Germany without much hesitation (especially after already having official
permission from the top to target them] So it don't take much to believe Japanese
enemy combatant sailors would get some... in other battles (New Guinea/New Britain ) when Japs failed in their two mAjor
offensives (in a two-pronged attack -one amphibious 'operation Mo' /one land (Buna) to capture Port Moresby to the south.
. why? well Moresby became seen as important cause Japs discovered that having Lae did not ensure the security of Rabaul
from air attacks.
Now following the failed op.Mo...the subsequent Jap landing assault at Buna- with the idea to press through the Owner Stanley Ranges-
required all logistical support to be provided by sea, but so did the Allied counter-offensive to push them back, so began the fight
to also control the vital sea lanes.

...anyways,>> .some allied pilots would / some would not fire ( based on personal ethics) on a whole heap of Japs swimming ashore
from their sunk ships.

Things to look up if interested in the New Guinea campaign ...,.. battle of Buna -Gona, Milne Bay, Ioribaiwa,

In another part of WW2, there were times where U-boats would assist sailors from sunken allied ships,
even towing their life vessels, but U-boat hunting aircraft saw such exposed subs as prime easy targets,
so the germans would just dive ASAP with vessels still in tow, naturally dumping allied sailors back into the water.