Japan Sent 11 Battleships to Leyte Gulf — Lost 3 + 6 Cruisers in 72 Hours

Japan Sent 11 Battleships to Leyte Gulf — Lost 3 + 6 Cruisers in 72 Hours
The morning of October twenty-fifth, nineteen forty-four. Admiral Takeo Kurita stood on the bridge of the battleship Yamato, the largest warship ever constructed by human hands. Around him stretched a force that represented the concentrated striking power of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Four battleships, six heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, eleven destroyers. And somewhere ahead, through the gray dawn mist off Samar Island, American forces that had landed on Leyte just five days earlier.
Kurita had already survived one sinking. Just forty-eight hours ago, American submarines had sent his flagship Atago to the bottom, forcing him to swim for his life in the dark waters of the Palawan Passage. Yesterday, American carrier aircraft had pounded his fleet for hours in the Sibuyan Sea, sending the mighty Musashi, Yamato's sister ship, to her grave after absorbing nineteen torpedo hits and seventeen bombs. He'd turned back twice, convinced the Americans had defeated him. But each time, Tokyo's orders had driven him forward. The fate of the Philippines. The fate of the entire Southern Resource Area. Perhaps the fate of Japan itself rested on what happened in the next few hours.
At zero-six-forty-four, lookouts spotted masts on the southeastern horizon. Kurita raised his binoculars. American carriers. His intelligence had been wrong about nearly everything else, but here, finally, was the target. The invasion fleet they'd been sent to destroy. What Admiral Kurita didn't know, what couldn't have known in that moment of grim satisfaction, was that he was looking at the wrong American fleet entirely. Those weren't the heavy fleet carriers of Task Force Thirty-eight. They were six escort carriers, tiny Kaiser-class ships built for antisubmarine work, protected by just three destroyers and four destroyer escorts. The mismatch was so absurd that within minutes, Kurita's officers would misidentify the escort carriers as fleet carriers and the destroyers as heavy cruisers, because nothing in their experience suggested the Americans would leave such pathetically weak forces exposed.