Talk:Action off Samar

Rewriting

The most detailed CZ account was in World War II in the Pacific, not the Battle of Leyte Gulf. I'm trying to reorganize the first so it's an overview, more detail in the second, and specific details in this article. --Howard C. Berkowitz 01:34, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

Obviously, I've been doing a lot of rewriting, primary and secondary sources in hand. Some of the existing text, which I moved from Battle of Leyte Gulf, has a number of sequences wrong or is garbled, such as:

Suddenly the Japanese made a momentous mistake. Kurita mistook the small Taffy carriers for large fleet carriers and thought he faced the whole Third Fleet that was far stronger, so he did not realize he faced only a much weaker force that he could have crushed. At 09:20 Kurita, only two hours from his destination and with victory over the helpless soldiers almost in his grasp, suddenly disobeyed his orders and turned back, racing north at top speed. He later gave many reasons, none very clear. Japanese communications were so poor he did not know the decoy plan had worked; he greatly exaggerated the threat to his force. American destroyer attacks had broken the Japanese formations, shattering tactical control, and two of Kurita's heavy cruisers had been sunk, and the threat of massive attacks was on Kurita's mind, he later said. Kurita retreated through the San Bernardino Strait, where he did encounter Halsey racing south. The Japanese land based Kamikaze planes now showed up to attack Sprague, sinking one small carrier, but it was too little, too uncoordinated and too late. (It was the first use of the Kamikaze tactic.) Sprague had lost five of his thirteen ships and 105 planes, but was the hero of the victory.

Only Taffy 3--a handful of CVEs and destroyers designated TF3--blocked Kurita's fleet. They had fighter prague, resigned to his own utter destruction, seized the initiative from Kurita by making 8 key decisions in 15 minutes. Taffy fought back in desperation. Three small destroyers and four even smaller destroyer escorts made suicide runs at the giant battleships. The little carriers retreated south into the wind, launching their fighters to attack Kurita again and again, while light bombers without bombs made heroic fake attacks to force Kurita to dodge and slow down.

I'm redoing this as well. Howard C. Berkowitz 00:40, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

The great Halsey controversy -- how much here, how much in main article, how much elsewhere?

Start with the tentative sidebar. The fog of war probably became most critical at Samar, but it wasn't limited to it. Right now, I have "THE WORLD WONDERS" in both Leyte Gulf and Samar, and I'm not sure it needs to be in both places. Some of this, perhaps, should be in a linked Halsey article.

Ideas? I have no strong opinion other than there's an organizational problem -- indeed, the divided command problem goes beyond Leyte Gulf. At the very least, you have the very different decisionmaking style of Spruance at Philippine Sea, and, above that, Nimitz-MacArthur. Even Halsey writes that the operational level should never again be divided. Howard C. Berkowitz 17:23, 22 June 2010 (UTC)