"I Know This Book. Your Conclusions Were Wrong, Ryan. Halsey Acted Foolishly."

U.S.S. Princeton under attack October 24, 1944. Image found here.

October 23-26 marks the sixty-second anniversary of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the largest naval battle ever fought, in which a three-pronged Japanese attack on the U.S. beach head in the Philippines was beaten off by a combination of luck, bravery and what I can only suppose to be the Grace of God.

I borrow my favorite Marco Ramius quote for the title of this post because what he says to Jack Ryan in The Hunt For Red October about Ryan's biography of Admiral William "Bull" Halsey is absolutely true. Halsey commanded the American Third Fleet - which contained not only the vast bulk of our heavy carriers, but also the six fastest battleships in the Fleet. He was supposed to protect the American invasion force in combination with Admiral Kinkaid's Seventh Fleet. However, Halsey was so obsessed with knocking out the Japanese carrier strength once and for all that when the Japanese deliberately stationed Admiral Ozawa to the north with four large aircraft carriers as bait, Halsey went for them with everything he had, leaving Kinkaid to fend off the main Japanese attacks from the west and south with a scratch group primarily composed of escort carriers, cruisers, destroyers and PT boats. (Kinkaid didn't even know Halsey had left station until Kinkaid's people intercepted a radio transmission about it.) By all rights, the Japanese ought to have strolled through and crushed Kinkaid. However, the combination of factors I mention above - maifesting themselves in the ferocity of the American defense, garbled communications and loss of nerve, pursuaded the Japanese to instead turn about and run for it.