'Different Kinds of Courage'

Shortly after dawn on the morning of 25 October 1944, the crew of the USS Johnston (DD-557), a Fletcher-class destroyer convoying Task Unit 77.4.3 (Taffy Three)-six small escort carriers, popularly known as jeep carriers-supporting the American invasion of the Philippines at Leyte Gulf, went to general quarters. The officers and sailors of the Johnston could see, just peeking over the horizon, the distinctive pagoda-shape superstructures of Imperial Japanese Navy ships.

To say this was an unusual sight is an understatement: during the Pacific War, fought mostly at night or by long-range aircraft, the warships of Japan and the United States rarely sighted each other in daylight.

Next came the noise: the roar and rumble of 14- and 18-inch shells flying overhead-"like a freight train," recalled one crew member. Manning the 40-mm gun just below the bridge, an 18-year-old Sailor named Bill Emerson heard the Johnston's captain, Commander Ernest Evans, order the engines to flank speed.

Thank God, Emerson thought, we're getting out of here. Then he heard Evans give the command for left full rudder, and he watched in horror as the bow of the destroyer swung around to face the Japanese fleet-four battleships, eight cruisers, and ten destroyers. Emerson reached down and put on his life jacket, wondering how his mother would react to the news of his death.

Leyte Gulf in Perspective

Emerson survived. Commander Evans and half the 330 officers and men of the Johnston did not. The Johnston had blown the bow off a Japanese cruiser with a torpedo and stayed afloat for more than two hours of intense action, but when the destroyer sank, her survivors were left to drift for two more days. The sharks came on the first night. Evans went down with the ship and was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.

The bravery of Evans and his men is the kind that should serve as an inspiration to all the men and women who go down to the sea in ships. The greatest traditions of the U.S. Navy were served on that October day 65 years ago-the Sailors who manned the small vessels of Taffy Three facing the vastly more powerful capital ships of the Imperial Japanese Navy, the aviators who flew against battleships even when their planes had no bombs to drop (one pilot fired his pistol). But the Battle of Leyte Gulf should be remembered for another reason as well-for showing that there are different kinds of courage, and that the bravest act can be to choose not to fight.

The Battle of Leyte Gulf is relatively little-known today, which is curious, because it was one of the largest naval battles-in terms of ships and men, over an expansive area-and it was also the last major ship-against-ship battle to date. It is hard to imagine a fleet action on that scale being fought any time in the immediate future.

The battle, waged over four days in October 1944, effectively put the Japanese navy out of action. Japan was forced to fight on largely with kamikaze suicide aircraft. But Leyte Gulf does not evoke the same sort of reverence we hold for the Battle of Midway or the poignant memory of Pearl Harbor. The reason, I think, is that Leyte Gulf was a muddle.

The great American naval hero, Admiral William F. "Bull" Halsey, fell for a Japanese fake and allowed the main Japanese battle force to slip behind his fast carriers. The Japanese might have inflicted tremendous damage on the American landing ships at Leyte Gulf had not the Japanese fleet commander, Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita, abruptly broken off the attack and steamed home.

'The World Wonders'

I feel great sympathy for Halsey. He had to endure the humiliation of receiving that famous telegram from his boss, Admiral Chester Nimitz, inquiring "Where Is Task Force 34? The World Wonders." The last bit, evoking Tennyson's poem about the charge of the Light Brigade, was inserted for encryption purposes by the ensign coding the message, not by Nimitz. But the pain to Halsey, who thought he was on the verge of a great victory, was life-long.

In truth, he had been faced with a difficult decision. Halsey believed his true objective was to sink the Japanese carrier fleet. When American planes spotted the enemy carriers to the north on 24 October, Halsey probably should have left behind some battleships to cover the San Bernardino Strait. But he believed pilot reports that the Japanese battle force under Admiral Kurita had been badly damaged on the other side of the strait, and that remaining Japanese ships would not pose much of a threat to the American invasion force to the south.

Halsey was wrong-but it was a close call. He worried that he could not spare the aircraft required for a separate battle line to cover the strait. He wanted to muster all his power for a knock-out blow to the Japanese carriers. He might have guessed that the Japanese were engaged in a giant deception, but he didn't. Halsey was an aggressive, all-out commander. He had become a legitimate hero early in the war because he stood out against the defeatism that threatened the Navy after Pearl Harbor.

Halsey's decision to plunge north after the decoy carriers left a golden opportunity for the Japanese commander. Though he had lost the massive battleship Musashi to American bombers the day before, Kurita still had plenty of firepower to wreak havoc on the American landing fleet at Leyte and the various support vessels-like the jeep carriers and destroyers of Taffy Three. But he broke off the engagement just as he was on the verge of crushing Taffy Three, and then reversed course and headed back through the San Bernardino Strait. Kurita had been given an order by the high command in Tokyo to die gloriously-to sacrifice his entire fleet if necessary. But he did not carry out his order.

'The Mysterious Retreat'

Much speculation surfaced about Kurita's motives. In Japan, the withdrawal of his striking force from Leyte Gulf is still referred to as "the Mysterious Retreat." Kurita himself gave various face-saving explanations at the time and in the years after the war. At first he said that he had turned north not to retreat but in hopes of encountering Halsey; that he had not slept in three days and was disoriented; that he was running out of fuel.

But the most honest explanation, I think, was the one he gave an old schoolmate just before dying in the late 1970s. Kurita had known that if his fleet plunged deeper into Leyte Gulf, it would surely have been surrounded and trapped by superior American firepower. The Japanese deception trick had worked-but the Americans had time to recover. Kurita said that he could see no point in getting all of his men killed. He knew that Japan had already lost the war. He would just be wasting tens of thousands of lives for no purpose other than to justify the vainglory of his superior officers.

I believe Kurita made a difficult moral choice-in Western terms, the harder right over the easier wrong. For a Japanese commander in the fall of 1944, choosing to commit mass suicide was actually the easy choice-individual ground commanders were doing it with suicide charges, and the navy's first kamikaze attacks began that same day, 25 October.

In my book on the Battle of Leyte Gulf, Sea of Thunder, I also wrote about Kurita's battleship commander, Admiral Matome Ugaki. A self-styled samurai warrior, Ugaki was indignant when the Japanese fleet turned around and withdrew that day. He later became the commander of all of Japan's kamikaze forces. On the day the Japanese surrendered in August 1945, Ugaki took 22 men in 11 planes on a last suicide run against the American fleet at Okinawa. Six of the aircraft turned back with "engine trouble," but Ugaki plunged to his death in his planefutilely, without hitting an American ship.

That act took a kind of mad courage. But sometimes real courage is in knowing when not to get swept up in the emotions stirred by the desire for glorious sacrifice. Duty calls in many ways; the bravest are not always the wisest, and the wisest must sometimes know when to sheath their swords.