RE: So Kurita doesn't lose his nerve off Samar...did he have any ammo left for the transports?
Posted: Fri May 18, 2012 9:40 am
wat iß sis tiping?
ORIGINAL: Sakai007
It is interesting to me how he entered battle with the US DD's and DE's in such an unorganized fashion.
Was his opinion of American surface fighting capability so low that he figured he could go about the battle any old way and still win the fight?
Would learning that the enemy they faced was not cruisers and fleet carriers, but destroyers and jeep carriers, and they were still having a very difficult time have hurt morale so badly that holding back that information was the best decision at the time?
In retrospect it's hard to believe that the Japanese Navy that fought at Leyte Gulf was the same institution which conceived and executed the attack on Pearl Harbor, which sank the Prince of Wales and Repulse, which crushed the ABDA force at the Java Sea, which almost aborted the first US offensive of the war at the Battle of Savo Island. At Leyte Gulf the commanders of Japan's greatest warships revealed stunning ineptitude. Their ship recognition skills were shockingly poor, their tactics primitive, their gunnery woeful, their spirit feeble. None of this diminishes the American achievement at Samar, but it does give rise to the bewilderment of naval history.
Perhaps the best example of the fatalism that gripped the Japanese is the submarine ambush of Kurita's force on October 23rd by the Darter and Dace. This first US success was made possible by a tactical carelessness on the part of Kurita amounting to apathy. Five battleships and ten heavy cruisers were steaming in three columns at sixteen knots without an anti-submarine screen. This is all more astonishing since the Japanese had intercepted US radio transmissions, and knew the subs were in their path.
Like many aspects of the battle, this Japanese behavior suggests a resignation to an inevitable crushing defeat much stronger than any will to fight. Going through the motions was the order of the day.