Let's Send the U.S. Navy's 'Stealthy' Destroyer Back in Time to Fight a World War II Battle

James Holmes

Security,

If the U.S. Navy had to refight the Battle of Leyte Gulf in contemporary times—clashing arms with a new Asian contender along Asia’s first island chain—how would it use its latest surface combatant ships to advance the cause?

If the U.S. Navy had to refight the Battle of Leyte Gulf in contemporary times—clashing arms with a new Asian contender along Asia’s first island chain—how would it use its latest surface combatant ships to advance the cause?

To send the antagonist’s surface fleet to the bottom of the sea, one hopes. Back then the U.S. Third Fleet leadership got hoodwinked into chasing Japanese aircraft carriers with mostly empty flight decks around the open ocean. In their haste commanders neglected to bar a key passage through the Philippine archipelago, the San Bernardino Strait, to Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) battleships and cruisers. They didn’t even keep watch.

And courted disaster. Amphibious forces on the island of Leyte and their naval protectors offshore would have paid a fearful price for the leadership’s neglect but for the heroics of navy aircrews and “tin-can” sailors. Destroyers and destroyer escorts stormed the mammoth superbattleship Yamato and its consorts when they hove over the horizon on the morning of October 25, 1944. Meanwhile warplanes swooped overhead, pelting Japanese ships with bombs, torpedoes, and machine-gun fire. The defenders’ ferocity induced the ultracautious IJN commander, Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita, to beat a retreat from Leyte Gulf in the face of vastly outgunned American forces. In other words, aviators and small-ship crews salvaged a predicament in which the amphibious host never should have found itself.

Lesson of Leyte: keep your eyes—and your firepower—trained on the straits. That’s where the foe will try to burst through the island chain. That’s where the foe has to be stopped to keep the chain intact.