The Japanese did not even bother to change course as the PT boats came hurtling out of the darkness to loose torpedoes and open fire with .50-caliber machine guns. Vice Admiral Nishimura thought so little of the attack he did not bother to break radio silence and notify his fleet headquarters that his ships had been sighted and were under attack.
The Japanese attack plan for smashing the American invasion force at Tacloban depended on almost split-second timing. The two forces, Nishimura’s Southern Force and Vice Admiral Kurita’s Northern Force were to achieve rendezvous and proceed in line of battle up the Gulf of Leyte to the attack. Hours before the time of the rendezvous Vice Admiral Nishimura suspected that Admiral Kurita might not be able to make the rendezvous at the appointed time. Kurita had broken radio silence to report that he had come under heavy air attack while approaching San Bernardino Strait and might be delayed as much as seven hours. Vice Admiral Nishimura, a stubborn and skilled fighter who relished night battles, decided to carry on with the original plan, confident that his two battleships, the heavy cruiser, and his four large destroyers were more than sufficient to do the job.
The moon set at 0106 on the morning of October 25. The sea was glassy smooth, the night hot, airless, and humid. Occasional flashes of lightning from a storm over the mountains of Leyte Island illuminated the blue-black water.
Undeterred by the PT boat attacks, Vice Admiral Nishimura swept into Surigao Strait and turned to make the run up the Gulf of Leyte to his targets, the invasion fleet. He formed up his fleet into line of battle, the four destroyers in the van followed by the battleship Yamashiro, the battleship Fuso, and the heavy cruiser Mogami bringing up the rear.
To the north of him, completely undetected by Japanese intelligence, was one of the mightiest naval forces ever assembled for a sea battle: 27 U.S. destroyers and one Australian destroyer; four heavy cruisers, one of them an Australian ship; four light cruisers; and six battleships.
At 0300 on October 25 a lynx-eyed lookout on the Shigure, the Japanese destroyer leading the way, reported seeing the outlines of enemy destroyers. Nishimura ordered the big searchlights on the bridge of his flagship turned on to sweep the ocean ahead, but the American destroyers were too far away to be seen in the searchlight beams. The Japanese battle fleet swept onward through the quiet night.
Then, from both sides of the Japanese battle line, the destroyers roared in to the attack, each ship pouring a dense cloud of smoke from its funnels, each ship’s multiple torpedo tubes trained toward the Japanese battle line.
It was, as naval historians were later to write, the classic, time-honored attack by the hornets of the sea, the destroyers. The small ships, vulnerable to a hit from a gun of almost any caliber, roared in to the attack, loosing their torpedoes, their small deck guns barking at the huge battleships and the enemy’s larger destroyers.
The first salvo of torpedoes slammed into the battleship Fuso, cruising a kilometer behind the Yamashiro. The Fuso turned out of the battle line as its crew fought raging fires below decks. No one told Vice Admiral Nishimura that the Fuso had been hit and was no longer in the battle line. Nishimura plowed forward, not even bothering to order evasive tactics for his ships.
The first wave of attacking destroyers peeled off and made room for the main destroyer attack. The destroyers, their thin hulls vibrating heavily as their engines drove the ships through the seas at thirty knots or more, charged in at the Japanese ships. As the attack developed, as destroyer after destroyer, funnels belching black smoke, torpedoes lancing into the air from the deck tubes to drop in the water and race toward the Japanese ships, guns blazing, raced in, Nishimura knew he had erred. A torpedo hit his flagship and slowed it for a few moments. The Japanese destroyer Yamashiro was hit and blown apart by the American torpedoes. A torpedo hit the Asagumo’s bow and blew the entire bow away, but that ship’s captain, a doughty seaman, reversed his engines and began to steam backward to keep the sea from caving in the thin bulkheads back of the missing bow. He managed to reverse course 180 degrees and steamed toward the attacking American destroyers stern first, his deck guns firing.
At 0330 Nishimura broke radio silence to say that he was under heavy attack by American destroyers, that he had lost two of his destroyers but would continue to press home his attack. At this point in the developing battle Vice Admiral Nishimura still did not know that his other battleship had been hit, was, in fact, exploding internally with such massive force that the Fuso was broken into two huge pieces, each of which floated, burning brightly. Nishimura steamed straight ahead, preceded by two destroyers and followed by the heavy cruiser Mogami.
There is a classic naval strategy for war on the high seas that is known as “Crossing the T.” The concept calls for catching the enemy battle fleet steaming in a straight line. The objective at that point is to cross the top of that straight line with one’s own battle fleet, to cross the “T.” The advantage, an enormous advantage, lies with the ships that cross the T; those ships can bring their entire broadsides to bear on the line of ships advancing toward them. The ships that make up the vertical bar of the letter T can fire only their forward guns.
The last time this maneuver had been successfully carried out was in 1905 when Admiral Togo succeeded in crossing the T against a Russian battle fleet in the Battle of Tshushima Strait, just north of Japan. Now, 39 years later, Vice Admiral Nishimura was unwittingly advancing into trouble.
Lying in wait halfway up Leyte Gulf was the greatest concentration of naval fire power ever assembled in one body of water. The four heavy and four light cruisers were the lightweights of the force. Just north of the cruisers there were six battleships, leisurely steaming from west to east across the Gulf of Leyte. Two of those battleships, the U.S.S. California and the U.S.S. West Virginia, had been torpedoed and sunk on December 7, 1941, at Pearl Harbor. Three of the others, the Maryland, the Tennessee, and the Pennsylvania had also been hit and damaged in the attack on Pearl Harbor. Now, in company with the U.S.S. Mississippi, the five battleships, their officers and crews thirsting for revenge, waited, cruising slowly, the cross bar of the classic T as Nishimura steamed toward them.
As the destroyers finished their attacks and hauled off to the sides, the heavy and light cruisers began to bark at the Japanese fleet. Nishimura answered with his auxiliary batteries and one or two salvos from his forward turrets.
At 0351 on the morning of October 25, 1944, the radar screens in the American battleships showed the enemy line of ships to be 21,000 yards distant — 11.9 miles.
The order was given to open fire. In a matter of eighteen minutes the six battleships fired over 3,200 rounds of fourteen-and sixteen-inch shells toward the Japanese ships.
Vice Admiral Nishimura, his flagship Yamashiro still afloat despite the terrible volume of heavy shells that had been poured into the ship, ordered the ship’s captain to turn so he could bring his main battery to bear against the American ships. The Yamashiro made the turn and capsized. Almost all of the crew, including Vice Admiral Nishimura, drowned in the dark water.