Japan Sent 18 Carriers to the Philippine Sea — Lost 5 Ships + 630 Pilots in 48 Hours!

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]June 19th, 1944.

[00:00:02]700 hours, Philippine Sea. A Grumman Hellcat drops out of the sun at 400 mph.

[00:00:10]The Japanese Zero pilot never sees it coming. One burst, 650 caliber rounds.

[00:00:16]The Zero explodes into a fireball and spirals into the ocean. The Hellcat pulls up, finds another target. 3 seconds later, another Zero is burning.

[00:00:25]Then another, then another. In 8 minutes, 8 minutes. Lieutenant Alexander Vrau shoots down six Japanese aircraft.

[00:00:35]Six men dead before they even understood what was killing them. But Vrau is just one pilot across 200 m of sky above the Philippine Sea. The same scene is playing out hundreds of times simultaneously.

[00:00:49]Japanese aircraft falling like rain, burning, exploding, spinning into the waves. pilots screaming into radios that nobody is listening to. By the time the sun sets on June 19th and 20th, 1944, the Imperial Japanese Navy will have lost three fleet carriers, two light carriers, nearly 630 pilots, and over 3,000 sailors. Not over weeks, not over months, in 48 hours.

[00:01:19]Nine carriers went in. The most powerful naval strike force Japan had ever assembled. every pilot they had left, every plane they could find, every last desperate hope of stopping the American advance across the Pacific. And America destroyed it so completely, so efficiently, so brutally that American pilots started calling it something that was not a battle. They called it a turkey shoot. Don't forget to hit like, subscribe, and turn on notifications so you never miss our next videos.

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[00:02:02]This is the story of how Japan sent everything it had into the Philippine Sea in June 1944 and came back with nothing. This is the story of the pilots who flew knowing they would die. the admirals who lied about their chances.

[00:02:18]The submarines that fired from the dark and one catastrophic chain of decisions that doomed an empire before a single fighter ever left the deck, but to understand why this disaster happened, why Japan walked into the most lopsided defeat in the history of naval aviation.

[00:02:35]We have to go back not to June 1944.

[00:02:39]Further, we have to understand what Japan was before this battle. What Japan believed about itself and how that belief became the deadliest trap in the Pacific War. June 1942, 2 years earlier, Japan is riding the greatest wave of military conquest in modern history. In 6 months, Japanese forces have seized an empire stretching from Burma to the Gilbert Islands. They have sunk two British battleships.

[00:03:08]They have captured Singapore, the impregnable fortress in a week. They have driven American forces from the Philippines. They have bombed Darwin, Australia. They have raided Salon and threatened India. The Imperial Japanese Navy enters 1942 believing it is invincible and it has reason to. Japan's carrier pilots are the finest in the world. Men with thousands of hours of flight time. veterans of the China campaign who have been flying in combat since before most American pilots finished high school. At Pearl Harbor, these men sank five battleships in 90 minutes. At the Coral Sea at Darwin in the Indian Ocean, Japanese naval aviation dominates everything it touches. But then comes midway, June 4th, 1942.

[00:03:57]Four Japanese fleet carriers, akagi Kaga Soryuhiru, are caught with their aircraft on deck loaded with bombs and fuel. American dive bombers arrive from above. In 5 minutes, three carriers are turned into infernos. By the end of the day, all four are gone. Four fleet carriers, hundreds of aircraft, and most critically, hundreds of Japan's best, most experienced, most irreplaceable combat pilots dead in the Pacific. Japan loses at Midway, not just ships. Japan loses something that cannot be rebuilt on an assembly line. It loses the human expertise that took years to develop.

[00:04:37]The veteran pilots who knew instinctively how to survive in air combat. The formation leaders who could navigate 300 m over open ocean in darkness and still find their target.

[00:04:48]These men are dead. They are at the bottom of the Pacific and they are not coming back. What follows midway is the grinding horror of Guadal Canal. 6 months of brutal air combat above the Solomon Islands. August 1942 through February 1943.

[00:05:06]Every week, Japan sends aircraft and pilots into the meat grinder above Henderson Field. Every week, more veterans die. The Americans are losing pilots, too. But American training programs are already producing replacements by the thousands. Japan's training program was built to create perfection. It takes two years to make a Japanese naval aviator. Two full years of grueling instruction gunnery practice carrier landings, navigation formation flying. Japan does not have 2 years anymore. Japan does not even have 2 months. By late 1943, the men entering Japanese cockpits have sometimes as little as 90 days of flight training.

[00:05:48]90 days.

[00:05:50]They can take off. They can land sometimes. They have fired their guns perhaps twice. They have never flown in combat. They have never been shot at.

[00:06:00]They have never seen a Hellcat coming at them out of the sun. They are not pilots. They are young men in pilot uniforms sent to die because Japan has no choice. In Tokyo, the high command understands the crisis but refuses to admit its full depth. The official line is that Japanese fighting spirit Bushidto will overcome any material disadvantage.

[00:06:23]Admirals brief one another using charts that show theoretical aircraft numbers and theoretical pilot counts. On paper, Japan still has hundreds of naval aviators. On paper, the numbers look workable numbers. But Lieutenant Zenji Abbe, one of the few surviving veteran pilots stationed aboard the carrier Zuaku, watches the new men arrive and feels something close to despair. He writes in his diary, "These boys cannot land on the carrier in calm seas. How will they survive when Americans are shooting at them?" He cannot say this openly. To speak honestly about Japan's weakness is to commit a kind of treason.

[00:07:04]The culture demands confidence. The culture demands the appearance of strength even when strength is gone. So the lie continues and the plan continues and the young men with 90 days of training continue climbing into cockpits.

[00:07:21]Meanwhile, on the other side of the Pacific, Commander Joseph Roshfort sits in a basement room in Pearl Harbor, surrounded by papers, working 20our days cracking Japanese naval codes. His unit station HYPO has been reading Japanese radio traffic for months.

[00:07:38]When Japanese Admiral Koga's plane crashes in the Philippines in March 1944, Filipino gerillas pull a briefcase from the wreckage. Inside the complete Japanese battle plan, the Z plan. Every detail of how Japan intends to fight its decisive battle. Within weeks, Admiral Chester Nimitz reads it over breakfast.

[00:08:00]America knows exactly what Japan is planning. America knows where Japan intends to fight. America knows Japan's tactical approach. the shuttle bombing scheme where Japanese aircraft would hit American carriers land at Guam to refuel then hit the Americans again. America knows the Japanese fleet composition, its route, its timeline. And America has been preparing something Japan does not know exists. The Grumman F6F Hellcat designed specifically specifically to kill the Zero. Where the Zero is light and maneuverable, but fragile, the Hellcat is heavy, fast, and nearly impossible to destroy. 650 caliber machine guns, self-sealing fuel tanks, armor behind the pilot's head, a powerful engine that lets it climb faster, dive faster, and in level flight simply outrun anything Japan is flying.

[00:08:52]A zero pilot who gets behind a Hellcat and puts 50 bullets into it may watch in horror as it keeps flying. A Hellcat pilot who gets behind a zero needs perhaps 3 seconds. American pilots entering combat in 1944 have completed two full years of training. They have practiced the thack weave, a mutual protection tactic where pairs of fighters cover each other's tails, making it nearly impossible for an enemy to attack without being attacked himself. They have extensive gunnery hours, night flying experience. Many have already seen combat in earlier campaigns and come out the other side with hard one knowledge of what it takes to survive. And America has radar, not just any radar. Radar so advanced that American carriers can detect incoming Japanese aircraft at over 100 miles.

[00:09:43]Radar so precise that controllers on ships can talk fighter pilots onto intercept courses in real time, positioning them at the perfect altitude, the perfect angle with the sun at their backs and the enemy below before a single Japanese pilot knows Americans are anywhere near him. Japan does not have this. Japan's radar is primitive by comparison. Japan's radio communications are unreliable. Japan is flying into the Philippine Sea essentially blind. One more American advantage so secret that the Japanese have no idea it exists. The VT proximity fuse. A tiny radar device inside each anti-aircraft shell that detects when an aircraft passes nearby and detonates automatically. No direct hit required.

[00:10:28]Japanese pilots who survived the American fighter screen and somehow reached the ships would fly into a wall of exploding steel that simply did not behave like anti-aircraft fire was supposed to behave. Shells that seemed to explode out of nowhere. Planes dropping from the sky as if swatted by an invisible hand. Japan is bringing a sword to a battlefield that has been mined electrified and covered by snipers who can see in the dark.

[00:10:56]June 13th, 1944.

[00:10:59]Admiral Jizaburo Ozawa leads the mobile fleet out of Tawi Tawi in the southern Philippines and turns northeast toward the Philippine Sea. Nine carriers, five battleships, 11 cruisers, 28 destroyers, 430 carrier aircraft, and an additional 500 plus land-based planes supposedly waiting at Guam and the Maranas ready to join the decisive strike. Ozava is not a fool. He is an experienced officer, intelligent, methodical, but he is planning his battle based on information that is dangerously wrong. He believes his shuttle bombing technique attacking American carriers, landing at Guam, rearming attacking again, will give him an overwhelming advantage. He believes he can strike from beyond American range, keep his carriers safe, and destroy the American fleet in waves.

[00:11:52]What Ozawa does not know, American carriers have been attacking those Guam airfields since June 11th. American Hellcats have been sweeping Japanese aircraft out of the Marana sky for days.

[00:12:04]By the time Ozawa's fleet enters the Philippine Sea, most of the land-based air support he is counting on is already burning on the ground. What Ozawa does not know, American submarines spotted his fleet the moment it left Tawitawi.

[00:12:19]USS Flying Fish, USS Seahorse, shadowing his force through the Philippine Sea, reporting its exact position, course, and speed to Admiral Spruent every few hours. Spruce knows where Ozawa is at every moment. Ozawa has almost no idea where the Americans are. Aboard the carriers, the young pilots prepare for what they have been told will be the battle that saves the Empire. They write final letters home.

[00:12:47]They tuck photographs into their flight suits. They attend briefings where officers explain the shuttle bombing plan with confidence and authority, making it sound like a guaranteed victory. Petty Officer Koshi Sato, a dive bomber pilot aboard Shukaku, sits down and writes to his parents. I go to strike the Americans with all my strength, he writes. Then almost in a whisper, the paper can barely hold. I fear we are not prepared for what awaits us. He tucks the letter away. He will never send it. He will never have the chance. In the ready rooms of 15 American carriers steaming west of Saipan, Lieutenant Alexander Vrau and hundreds of pilots like him attend their own briefings. The intelligence officers describe the Japanese formations in precise detail because they know precisely what those formations will look like. Fighter directors explain the radar interception procedures that will place American Hellcats above the Japanese strike aircraft before the Japanese even see American ships. Vatu listens quietly. He is already an ace.

[00:13:52]He knows his aircraft. He knows the tactics. He sleeps well that night. 300 m to the west. Ozawa's pilots sleep fitfully, praying for courage, carrying photographs of people they love, preparing to fly aircraft that are already obsolete against pilots they have never faced with skills they have never fully learned. The Philippine Sea sits dark and warm between them. In 36 hours, it will be a graveyard.

[00:14:23]At 400 hours on June 19th, 1944, Admiral Ozawa launches seven search float planes to locate the American fleet.

[00:14:33]Seven. America is launching over 30 search aircraft in systematic sweeping patterns. Ozawa's seven planes fan out over hundreds of square miles of open ocean, looking for a fleet that is not where Ozawa thinks it is. It is his first mistake. It will not be his last.

[00:14:51]At 0530, before his search planes have reported anything useful, Ozaba makes a decision that will haunt him for the rest of his life. He orders the launch of the first raid. 69 aircraft climbing off the decks of his three fleet carriers and turning east. 45 fighters, 16 Judy dive bombers, eight Jill torpedo bombers. Young men in cockpits believing they are flying toward victory. At zero 559 radar aboard USS Lexington picks them up.

[00:15:26]150 mi away. 22 minutes of flying time from the American fleet. The alarm goes out. Across 15 carriers, Hellcats roar down flight decks. 220 fighters clawing for altitude radar controllers, talking them onto perfect intercept positions.

[00:15:44]The sun still low behind them. The Japanese formation below and ahead completely unaware. At 700, the Hellcats arrive. What happens next is not a battle. A battle implies two sides with roughly equal chances.

[00:15:59]What happens at 700 on June 19th, 1944 is something else entirely. It is an execution. And in part two, we will be there in the cockpit in the radio room on the burning flight deck as Japan's last great gamble dies in the sky above the Philippine Sea. Because what Ozawa does next, even after losing two carriers to submarines, he never detected, even after watching raid after raid disappear into American fighters and never come back. What he does next is almost impossible to believe. He keeps sending them. June 19th, 1944.

[00:16:37]700 hours at 7220 American Hellcats dropped out of the sky above the Philippine Sea. 69 Japanese aircraft were flying in loose formation below them. Green pilots, minimal training, no idea what was coming. In 23 minutes, 42 of those 69 aircraft were gone. That was raid one. Japan's opening move in the battle. Admiral Toyota called the fate of the empire. And it failed so completely so fast that the men who survived it could barely transmit a coherent report back to Ozawa's flagship before their radios went silent. But here is what makes the next 8 hours almost impossible to comprehend. Ozawa received those fragmentaryary reports, confused transmissions about explosions and fire and aircraft going down, and he interpreted them as success. He heard the chaos and decided his pilots were winning. So he did the only thing a commander who has misread the situation completely would do. He sent more. 128 aircraft, RAID 2, launched at 0856, flying east into the same sky that had just swallowed RAID one hole. And waiting for them, already climbing, already positioned, already guided by radar onto perfect intercept courses were 400 American Hellcats.

[00:18:01]Lieutenant Alexander Vrau is at 8,000 ft when his radio crackles. The fighter director's voice is calm, almost conversational.

[00:18:10]Vector 065 bandits 110 mi low. Vrau banks his Hellcat east and pushes the throttle forward. Below him, the Philippine Sea stretches flat and blue to the horizon.

[00:18:25]Somewhere out there, 128 Japanese aircraft are flying toward him and do not know it yet. He finds them at 0952.

[00:18:34]A mass of aircraft spread across several miles of Sky Zeros flying top cover.

[00:18:39]Judy dive bombers in the middle. Jill torpedo bombers low and slow beneath everything. Exactly where the radar said they would be. Exactly the formation the intelligence briefings described. Vatzu picks his first target, a Judy loaded with bombs. Slow, the pilot has not seen him. Vrau comes in from above and behind cuts his throttle slightly to avoid overshooting and squeezes the trigger for less than 2 seconds. The Judy's right wing tears off. The aircraft rolls inverted and falls. He is already looking for the next one. The Judy pilots are trying to dive for the American fleet. It is the only tactic they have. Push the nose down. Build speed. Release the bomb. Pull out. They practiced this in training. What they did not practice, what they had no way to practice is doing it while a Hellcat is behind them and closing. Vatu shoots the second Judy before it completes its roll into the dive. The third tries to evade, turning hard left. The Hellcat turns harder. Another burst. Another fireball. 4 5 6 8 minutes six aircraft six pilots dead in the Philippine Sea before Vrau's guns overheat and he has to break off. He radios his count to the ship. There is a pause on the other end then say again. He says it again. Six.

[00:20:10]The radio operator sounds like he cannot quite believe it. Neither in some part of himself can vouch you. Not because it was difficult, because it was not.

[00:20:20]Because those pilots, for all their courage, for all the determination written on their faces in those final letters home, simply did not have the skills to survive what the Hellcat pilots had trained two years to do.

[00:20:32]Vashu is not the exception that day. He is the average.

[00:20:37]Of Raid 2's 128 aircraft, 97 are destroyed. 97. In roughly an hour of combat, the few that break through the fighter screen fly directly into the proximityfused anti-aircraft wall surrounding the American fleet. Shells exploding in mid-air steel fragments, shredding aircraft that never take a direct hit. The battleship South Dakota takes one bomb. Minor damage, one ship, one bomb. That is the sum total of what 128 Japanese aircraft achieve. The pilots that somehow survived the Hellcats and the Flack turn west toward Guam, toward the airfields where they were told they could land, refuel, and attack again. Ozawa's shuttle bombing plan. The great tactical innovation that was supposed to win the battle. They find American fighters circling the runway. Hellcats from Task Force 58 have been hitting those airfields for 8 days.

[00:21:35]The runways are cratered. The parked aircraft are burned out wrecks.

[00:21:40]As the survivors of raid 2 approach to land, fuel warning lights on some trailing smoke pilots, wounded American fighters drop on them from above. More Japanese aircraft burning on final approach. More pilots dying inside of the ground they were trying to reach.

[00:21:56]Perhaps six aircraft from Raid 2 make it back to Ozawa's fleet. Six out of 128.

[00:22:05]But the worst moment of June 19th does not come from the sky.

[00:22:09]At 080940 minutes before raid two even launches, American submarine USS Albaore is running at periscope depth beneath the mobile fleet. Commander James Blanchard watches through his scope as an enormous carrier turns into the wind.

[00:22:26]He can see aircraft on the flight deck.

[00:22:28]He can see the rising sun enen. He recognizes the silhouette immediately.

[00:22:33]Taihaho brand new 33,000 tons armored flight deck Admiral Ozawa's flagship the single most powerful carrier in the Imperial Japanese Navy on her first combat deployment. Blanchard fires six torpedoes. Five miss. One finds the hull. The explosion tears a hole in Taihaho's starboard side forward. Fuel lines rupture. Aviation gasoline begins seeping into the voids and compartments below decks. On the bridge, Ozawa's staff barely reacts. One torpedo hit on an armored carrier. The flooding is contained. Flight operations continue.

[00:23:11]Damage control parties report the situation manageable. What they do not report, what they do not yet understand is that Taiho is now breathing gasoline vapor. Every compartment the ventilation system touches is filling with invisible explosive fuel fumes. and Taihaho's damage control officer makes the decision that will kill 1500 men.

[00:23:32]Believing the fumes can be cleared internally, he orders the ventilation fans to maximum power. The fans do not push the fumes out of the ship. They distribute them evenly throughout it.

[00:23:43]Taihaho becomes a bomb and for the next 7 hours she keeps flying aircraft conducting operations while her crew moves through corridors saturated with fuel vapor completely unaware.

[00:23:56]65 miles to the southeast. At 1220, USS Kavala finds Shukaku. Commander Herman Costler watches the veteran carrier through his periscope.

[00:24:06]Shukaku, present at Pearl Harbor, present at Coral Sea. One of the oldest and most battleh hardened carriers in the Japanese fleet. She is actively recovering aircraft completely absorbed in flight operations. No awareness of the submarine 2,000 yards off her starboard beam. Kostler fires six torpedoes, three hit. The explosions are nothing like the single contained hit on Taihaho. Shukaku's hall opens in three places simultaneously.

[00:24:38]Fuel lines rupture and ignite immediately. The hangar deck crowded with fueled aircraft armed with bombs and torpedoes becomes an inferno in seconds. The fires move faster than the damage control teams. Bombs begin cooking off in the heat. Then torpedoes.

[00:24:56]The secondary explosions tear through bulkheads designed to stop flooding, not blast. Shukaku's experienced crew fights desperately. These are not frightened recruits. These are sailors who have survived Pearl Harbor Coral Sea, the Eastern Solomon's Santa Cruz. They know damage control. They know how to fight for a ship, but the damage is beyond fighting. The list increases. The fires spread downward. At 1401, the captain gives the order. Abandon ship. 10 minutes later, Shokaku's magazines detonate. The explosion is visible for 30 m. She takes 1263 men with her to the bottom of the Philippine Sea, including her captain, who chooses not to leave.

[00:25:42]At 1532, 7 hours after the torpedo hit an elevator operator in Taiho's hangar deck, presses a button. The electric motor sparks. The spark meets the gasoline vapor. The entire hanger deck detonates at once. The blast blows out Taihaho's sides. The armored flight deck built to withstand bomb hits from above buckles upward from the pressure beneath it. Secondary explosions cascade through the ship as fuel tanks and ordinance cook off in rapid succession. In seconds, the newest and most powerful carrier in the Japanese Navy is a burning, sinking wreck. Ozawa transfers his flag to the destroyer Wakatsuki. He stands on the destroyer's deck and watches Taihaho burn. At 1748, she capsizes. She takes 1650 men with her.

[00:26:32]In one afternoon, without a single American aircraft reaching them, Ozawa has lost his two best fleet carriers and his flagship. 3,000 sailors dead. The mobile fleet core gone.

[00:26:47]Ozawa still does not fully understand what has happened. His communications are damaged. His picture of the battle is fragmentaryary. He launches raid three at 1,000 hours 47 aircraft and it is destroyed as completely as the first two waves. Seven return. He launches raid 4 at 1182 aircraft told to rendevu with land-based planes over Guam. The land-based planes do not exist anymore.

[00:27:15]Raid four wanders across empty sky, is harassed by hellcats, and finally lands at Guam, where most are destroyed on the ground. By the end of June 19th, Japan has lost over 300 carrier aircraft. The American fleet has suffered damage to one battleship. No carriers hit, no carriers sunk. American pilots returning to their ships in the late afternoon are already calling it the Turkey Shoot. The name spreads across Task Force 58 by evening. It is accurate and they know it. But beneath the dark humor is something more complicated. Lieutenant Vachu asked to describe shooting down six aircraft in 8 minutes says it was like practice. They didn't have a chance. I felt sorry for them. He means it. The Japanese pilots were not cowards. They were not weak. They were undertrained young men sent into a fight that their leaders had already lost before a single wheel left the deck.

[00:28:13]Ozaba retreats west. His surviving carriers aircraft gone pilots dead turn away from the Philippine Sea. He has six carriers left that can still float.

[00:28:24]Between them, they have perhaps a 100 operational aircraft and crews depleted beyond replacement. But the battle is not over because 400 m to the east, Admiral Mitcher is staring at a chart.

[00:28:36]his finger tracing the line of the retreating Japanese fleet, calculating distance and fuel and the angle of the afternoon sun. His staff is telling him the same thing. Every calculation confirms any strike launched now will return after dark. Night carrier landings, exhausted pilots, marginal fuel, aircraft ditching in black water.

[00:29:00]Mitcher takes off his cap, runs a hand over his face, looks at the chart one more time. Launch him, he says. 216 American aircraft turn west into the setting sun. And what happens next in the darkness over the Philippine Sea with fuel gauges dropping toward zero and no lights visible on the ocean below will define the final chapter of Japanese carrier aviation. In part three, we follow those aircraft into the dark and we find out what Ozawa does when he realizes the Americans are still coming. June 19th, 1944, 1740 hours. 216 American aircraft are climbing off flight decks and turning west into a sun that is already touching the horizon.

[00:29:48]Mitcher has launched everything.

[00:29:50]Hellcats, hell divers, Avengers, every aircraft that can fly. The Japanese fleet is 275 mi away. The math is brutal and everyone on every flight deck knows it. At combat speeds, the strike will reach the target around 1840. That means returning in complete darkness fuel gauges near zero over black water with no landmarks. Raid one destroyed 42 Japanese aircraft in 23 minutes. Raid two killed 97 more. Three carriers are already on the bottom of the Philippine Sea. But Ozawa still has six carriers, still has battleships, still has cruisers and destroyers. While any of that survives, Japan can rebuild. While Japan can rebuild, the war continues.

[00:30:38]American boys keep dying on Saipan's beaches. B29s cannot reach Tokyo. The Philippines stay occupied. The war stretches on by months, by years.

[00:30:49]Mitcher looks at his staff. Nobody argues with him.

[00:30:53]216 aircraft turn west and the real final act of the Battle of the Philippine Sea begins. On the retreating Japanese ships, the mood is something between exhaustion and disbelief.

[00:31:06]Ozawa has finally received clearer reports. He now understands that his carrier air groupoups have been effectively destroyed. He knows Taiho is gone. He knows Shukaku is gone. He knows Hio took bomb damage and is struggling.

[00:31:22]He transmits to Admiral Toyota in Tokyo.

[00:31:24]The situation is grave. Toyota's response is immediate. Continue the operation.

[00:31:30]Ozawa stares at the message. He has perhaps 100 aircraft left across six carriers. The Americans have lost fewer than 30 planes in 2 days of combat.

[00:31:41]Continue the operation means sending what remains of Japanese naval aviation into another engagement against a fleet that has demonstrated it can destroy aircraft at a ratio of 20 to1. Ozava is a professional. He does not refuse a direct order. But he turns to his operations officer and says something that becomes one of the quiet epitaps of the battle. We cannot win this. We can only choose how we lose it. His ships are running on Terracon crude. the same volatile, unrefined oil that turned Taiho into a bomb. His damage control teams are exhausted. His surviving pilots have been flying since before dawn. His radar is intermittent. His communications are damaged. And somewhere to the east, he knows the Americans are coming. He is right. At 1620, Japanese lookouts on the battleship Yamo report aircraft on the horizon. American search planes circling, reporting. Within 20 minutes, every ship in Ozawa's fleet knows what is coming. The Japanese anti-aircraft crews load their guns. What remains of the combat air patrol, perhaps 30 zeros, climbs to intercept altitude. The destroyers tighten the protective screen around the carriers. Every man in the mobile fleet understands that the next hour may be his last.

[00:33:02]1840 hours, 275 mi west of Task Force 58. The American pilots see the Japanese fleet at the same moment the sun finally touches the ocean. Perfect silhouette light. Ships dark against a copper sea.

[00:33:18]The strike commander, Commander William Dean, surveys the formation below from 12,000 ft. Six carriers, battleships, cruisers, dozens of destroyers, more ships than any American strike has ever attacked at once. Dean keys his radio.

[00:33:36]All aircraft attack. They go down.

[00:33:39]Anti-aircraft fire erupts from every ship simultaneously. The Japanese gunners are experienced, disciplined, and completely aware of what is at stake. Colored tracer rounds fill the sky, red, green, white, creating intersecting walls of fire that the American pilots have to fly through to reach their targets. Zeros slash into the Hellcat escort from above. The sky becomes a three-dimensional brawl across 20 mi of airspace. Lieutenant Commander James Bucky Snowden leads his Hell Diver squadron toward the carrier Zuaku Ozawa's new flagship since Taihaho's sinking. Zuakukaku Cloud Crane is the last surviving carrier from the Pearl Harbor attack. She has been in more major naval battles than any other ship in the Japanese fleet. She is fast, well crewed, and her gunners are some of the best in the mobile fleet. Snowden begins his dive from 12,000 ft, 80° nose down.

[00:34:37]The altimeter unwinds, 10,000 ft, 8,000.

[00:34:42]Anti-aircraft shells are detonating around him close enough that he can feel the concussion through the aircraft frame. His wingman, Lieutenant Peterson, takes a hit and pulls away trailing smoke. Snowden stays in the dive. 6,000 ft. The carrier fills his windscreen. He can see men running on the flight deck.

[00:35:01]4,000 ft. Release. The bomb falls for what feels like a very long time.

[00:35:07]Snowden pulls out blood draining from his head as the G-forces build and does not see the impact. His rear gunner sees it. Direct hit. Center of the flight deck. She's burning. Zuaku takes two bomb hits in the next 4 minutes. Her flight deck is wrecked. She cannot recover aircraft. She cannot launch aircraft. She is still floating, but as a fighting ship, she is finished for the battle and for months afterward. 30 mi north, Avenger torpedo bombers from USS Bunker Hill find the carrier Ho. Already damaged from earlier in the day, Hio is making 21 knots and maneuvering hard to comb the torpedo tracks. The Avenger pilots spread their attack, coming from multiple angles simultaneously. The tactic designed specifically to defeat this kind of evasion. Two torpedoes hit HYO on the port side within 4 seconds of each other. The explosions are massive.

[00:36:05]Hi heals sharply to port. Power fails throughout the ship. The lights go out.

[00:36:11]In the darkness below decks, men try to find their way to hatches while the ship continues to roll. The engineering crew fights to restore power and buys 40 minutes. At 2005, Hio capsizes. 647 men go with her. The carrier Juno takes three bomb hits and survives burning but a float. The light carrier Chiota takes one bomb hit. The battleship Haruna absorbs two near misses that buckle hull plates and slow her to 18 knots. Two fleet oilers, slow and unarmored, are caught by Avengers and sunk within minutes of each other. The entire engagement lasts 43 minutes. American losses 20 aircraft shot down over the fleet. 20 more that stagger away from the battle zone and never make it back to their carriers. The remaining 176 aircraft turn east into darkness.

[00:37:06]What happens next is not combat. It is something harder. The pilots fly east in radio silence conserving everything.

[00:37:14]Fuel gauges dropping. Some aircraft trailing damage. Engines running rough.

[00:37:19]The ocean below is completely black. No moon overcast sky. No landmarks.

[00:37:24]Navigation is dead reckoning and prayer.

[00:37:28]Pilots who flew west in the late afternoon light are now flying back by instrument by compass, heading by the simple mathematics of time and airspeed.

[00:37:36]The fuel begins running out 80 miles from the fleet. One by one, engines sputter and quit. Pilots transmit their position if they can and ditch into black water. Hellcats, hell divers, Avengers, all going in. The life rafts deploy automatically.

[00:37:56]The pilots climb out, inflate their May West life vests, and float in the Philippine Sea, waiting for rescue they cannot be certain will come aboard USS Lexington.

[00:38:08]Mitcher is watching the clock. Aircraft fuel endurance expired at 2100. It is now 2115.

[00:38:16]His radar shows aircraft circling the fleet unable to find the ships in the dark fuel exhausted, beginning to fall out of the sky. He makes the decision that every officer in his fleet will remember for the rest of their lives.

[00:38:30]Turn on the lights. Every ship in Task Force 58 illuminates simultaneously.

[00:38:35]Carriers turn on their flight deck lights. Destroyers fire star shells.

[00:38:40]Search lights sweep upward, visible for 50 mi. Submarines that might be watching. There are always submarines will see Task Force 58 glowing on the black water like a city. Mitcher knows this. He lights the fleet anyway. The effect on the pilots is immediate.

[00:38:56]Aircraft that were circling in darkness suddenly have a reference point, a direction, a destination.

[00:39:03]They turn toward the lights. They come in on whatever carrier is closest. Wrong ship, wrong squadron. It does not matter and land. Some run out of fuel on final approach and ditch alongside the ship close enough that destroyers recover the crew in minutes. Of the 216 aircraft that launched at 1636, 116 land safely, 100 aircraft are lost, the majority to fuel exhaustion, not combat, but the crews are a different accounting. Mitch sends every available destroyer and float plane into the recovery operation the following morning. They search through June 21st and into June 22nd. Of the 185 air crew who went into the water, 160 are recovered alive. 25 are lost. The Japanese, by contrast, rescue almost nobody. Their pilots who ditch are left to the ocean. The difference in how two navies treat their airmen is not a footnote. It is a statement about what each side understands about the value of trained human beings in modern warfare.

[00:40:11]By June 21st, Ozawa has received his orders from Tokyo. Withdraw. The mobile fleet turns northwest toward Okinawa.

[00:40:20]Three carriers gone. Three more heavily damaged. Hio sunk the previous evening.

[00:40:26]The carrier air groupoups that Japan spent years building and months desperately trying to reconstitute have ceased to exist as a fighting force.

[00:40:35]Ozawa composes his battle report aboard the destroyer that became his flagship when Taiho sank beneath him. He writes with the precision of a professional officer and the exhaustion of a man who has watched everything he commanded destroyed in 2 days. His final count, 476 carrier aircraft lost, 445 air crews dead or missing. Three fleet carriers sunk. The mobile fleet reduced to a formation of ships that can sail but cannot fight. He recommends in clinical language that Japan reassess the viability of carrier aviation as a strategic instrument. It is the most honest document submitted to Japanese Naval High Command since the war began.

[00:41:17]Tokyo receives the report, files it, and begins planning the next operation.

[00:41:25]Encipan Marines who have been fighting in the jungle and on the beaches for 6 days emerge from their foxholes on June 20th to find that the air raids have stopped. The Japanese aircraft that had been harassing the invasion beaches since the landings are simply gone. The sky for the first time since they came ashore belongs entirely to American aircraft. The Marines do not know about the turkey shoot. They do not know about Taiho and Shokaku burning. They do not know about Mitch's night strike or the 100 aircraft that ditched in the dark.

[00:41:59]What they know is that the planes have stopped coming and that means something significant has happened out there on the water Siphon Falls on July 9th after 25 days of brutal ground combat. 10,000 Americans are killed or wounded taking the island. The number is staggering, but without the Battle of the Philippine Sea, without Task Force 58 destroying Ozawa's fleet, the Marines would have fought under sustained air attack the entire time. The casualty projections for that scenario are not something American planners want to calculate. In Tokyo, the government understands what the loss of Saipan means before the public does. The inner defensive perimeter is broken. B-29 bombers will now be able to reach the home islands.

[00:42:45]The Philippines are exposed. The road to Japan itself is open. On July 18th, 1944, 9 days after Saipan falls, Prime Minister Hideki Tojo resigns. The government that promised victory that sent those undertrained pilots into the Philippine Sea collapses under the weight of what it has done. Japan's surviving carriers will sail again in October 1944 at Le Gulf. But they will sail as decoys, not as strike forces, because they have no trained pilots left to fly from them. The most powerful expression of Japanese naval power, the carrier striking force that attacked Pearl Harbor that dominated the Pacific in 1941 and early 1942 will never fly in combat again after June 20th, 1944.

[00:43:34]The battle that Ozawa called the fate of the empire has ended and the verdict is clear. But the story is not finished because what happens to the men who survived this battle on both sides is a chapter that the official histories tend to skip. What happens to Ozawa who will sail again at Lee? What happens to Vrau who will be shot down over the Philippines and spend months with guerrillas?

[00:43:58]What happens to the Japanese pilots who lived who carried the memory of the turkey shoot for the rest of their lives? And what this battle teaches us about war preparation and the cost of institutional dishonesty. That is the final chapter and it is one that almost nobody knows in full. In part four, we close the book on the Philippine Sea and what we find at the end may surprise you. June 20th, 1944.

[00:44:24]2300 hours. 160 American pilots are floating in the Philippine Sea. Some are in rafts. Some are clinging to life vests in black water. All of them are listening for the sound of a destroyer's engines. Most will be found. Most will fly again. Across two days of combat, Task Force 58 has destroyed three Japanese fleet carriers, sunk one light carrier, damaged three more obliterated nearly 500 aircraft, and killed over 400 pilots, the last trained naval aviators Japan possessed.

[00:44:59]American losses, 130 aircraft, the majority to fuel exhaustion on the night return flight.

[00:45:05]No carriers, no major ships, 76 air crewmen dead. The ratio is so lopsided it barely sounds real. And yet the numbers are accurate, documented, confirmed by both sides in postwar records. But the question that Fonba left open is the one that matters most.

[00:45:24]What happens next? What happens to the men who fought this battle? What happens to the admirals, the pilots, the young Japanese airmen who survived something their commanders told them would be a victory? And what does the most one-sided carrier battle in history mean? Not just for 1944, but for every naval war that came after. That is what this final chapter answers. Admiral Jizaburo Ozawa does not resign. He does not retreat into silence. He files his battle report with brutal honesty, a rarity, in an institution that preferred comfortable fiction. And then he waits for his next orders.

[00:46:04]Tokyo sends them in October 1944.

[00:46:07]His surviving carriers stripped of aircraft and trained pilots will sail into the battle of Ley Gulf as decoys.

[00:46:14]Their mission draw American attention north away from the main Japanese surface fleet attempting to destroy the American invasion force at Lee. Ozava understands the assignment perfectly. He is being asked to sacrifice his ships deliberately to use them not as weapons but as bait.

[00:46:33]He accepts this without visible protest because he is a professional and because he understands that Japan has already lost the war and the only question remaining is how much blood it costs to end it. At Lady Gulf on October 25th, 1944, Ozawa's decoy force succeeds tactically.

[00:46:52]American carriers under Admiral Hollyy chase him north, leaving the Laty landing force briefly exposed, but the sacrifice is complete. Zuikaku Cloud Crane, the last Pearl Harbor carrier, takes seven torpedo hits and four bomb hits and sinks at 1414 hours as she goes under her crew lines the deck and salutes. Someone plays the national anthem over the ship's intercom. It is the end of something that began on December 7th, 1941, and the men aboard her know it. Ozava survives the war. He gives extensive testimony to American intelligence officers in 1945 testimony that is remarkably candid about Japanese failures, the pilot training collapse, the intelligence blindness, the institutional dishonesty that sent undertrained young men into battles they could not survive. He retires, lives quietly in Japan and dies in 1966.

[00:47:51]He never publicly blamed his pilots. He understood exactly whose failure the Philippine Sea represented, and it was not theirs. Lieutenant Alexander Vashu, the Hellcat pilot, who shot down six aircraft in 8 minutes on June 19th, is shot down himself over the Philippines in December 1944.

[00:48:10]He survives, evades capture, and spends weeks with Filipino guerrillas before being extracted. He ends the war as the Navy's leading ace with 19 confirmed kills. He lives to 2015, dying at age 97, the last of the great Hellcat aces.

[00:48:28]In his final interviews, he returns repeatedly to the same theme. The Japanese pilots were brave. They were simply never given a chance. Petty Officer Koshi Sato, the dive bomber pilot aboard Shikaku, who wrote that final letter to his parents, the one confessing his fear. The one he never sent dies when Shukaku's magazines detonate at 1410 on June 19th. He is 22 years old. The letter is found among his personal effects returned to his family after the war. His parents read it for the first time in 1946.

[00:49:03]His mother keeps it until her death in 1978.

[00:49:07]The letter is now in a naval museum in Tokyo behind glass still folded the way he folded it. Enen Saky Kamasu, one of the few Raid One pilots to survive lives, to give testimony that becomes one of the most quoted accounts of the battle. He says plainly what Japanese military culture during the war made it impossible to say aloud. We were sent to die in a battle we could not win. He is right. He knows it. And the fact that he says it clearly on the record in the years after the war is its own small act of courage.

[00:49:43]The technologies that made the Turkey shoot possible do not disappear when the war ends. They evolve. The VT proximity fuse, the secret device that caused anti-aircraft shells to detonate near aircraft rather than requiring a direct hit, is declassified after the war and immediately recognized as one of the most significant weapons developments of the 20th century.

[00:50:06]The principle of using reflected radio waves to trigger detonation becomes foundational in missile design in smart munitions in the guided weapons that define modern warfare. Every radar guided missile in use today carries the conceptual DNA of the fuse that Japanese pilots encountered above the Philippine Sea in June 1944. American radar controlled fighter direction. The system that allowed controllers on ships to vector Hellcats onto perfect intercept positions while Japanese pilots flew blind becomes the template for every subsequent air defense network. The NATO integrated air defense systems of the Cold War. The Awax aircraft that coordinate fighter interceptions in modern conflicts. The carrier battle group air defense doctrine used today by the United States Navy. All of them trace directly to the procedures developed and refined by Task Force 58's fighter directors in 1943 and 1944. The Grumman Hellcat's design philosophy, prioritizing survivability, firepower, and pilot protection over pure maneuverability shapes every subsequent American fighter aircraft. The F86 Saber that dominates the Korean War. The F4 Phantom used extensively in Vietnam. the F-14 Tomcat that replaces the Hellcat's role as the carrier's primary interceptor.

[00:51:30]All built on the understanding that a pilot who survives has more value than a lighter aircraft that trades protection for agility. The pilot training differential. Two years of comprehensive American instruction versus Japan's compressed 90-day program establishes a principle that every subsequent air force internalizes quality of pilot training is not a variable to be adjusted based on wartime necessity. It is a fixed requirement. Compromise it and you do not produce cheaper pilots.

[00:52:01]You produce expensive casualties. The United States military's current aviation training pipeline, which takes an F/ A18 pilot, roughly 3 years from initial selection to carrier qualification, is the direct institutional descendant of the philosophy that produced the men who flew on June 19th, 1944. 42 nations now operate aircraft carriers or carrier capable aircraft. All of them study the battle of the Philippine Sea in their professional military education. Not as a curiosity, as a warning and a model. A warning about what happens when institutional culture prevents honest assessment of capability.

[00:52:44]A model for how technological superiority combined with training superiority combined with intelligence superiority creates asymmetric outcomes that no amount of courage can offset.

[00:52:55]The deepest lesson of the Philippine Sea is not about radar or aircraft design or pilot training ratios. Those are symptoms.

[00:53:05]The disease is something older and more persistent the gap between what institutions believe about themselves and what is actually true. Japan's military command in 1944 knew at some level in private in the parts of themselves they could not speak aloud that their pilots were not ready.

[00:53:22]Lieutenant Zenji Abbe knew it watching new men try to land on carriers in calm weather. Admiral Ozawa knew it when he reviewed the training records before departing Tawi Tawi. The flight commanders knew it when they watched their formations trying to maintain discipline during transit exercises.

[00:53:39]They knew and they sent them anyway because the institutional culture of the Imperial Japanese Navy made honest assessment of weakness functionally impossible. To say our pilots cannot survive this engagement was not an operational assessment. It was treason, it was defeatism, it was a failure of Bushidto spirit. So the honest assessments were suppressed. The optimistic projections were elevated.

[00:54:07]The young men with 90 days of training were loaded into aircraft and launched toward a fleet that had spent 3 years preparing specifically to destroy them.

[00:54:15]This is not unique to Japan. in 1944. It appears in every military, in every era, and in every large institution, in every field, the tendency to protect comfortable self- assessments against uncomfortable evidence. The organizations that survive long-term are the ones that build structures forcing honest internal critique that reward officers who say this will not work over officers who say our spirit will prevail that treat accurate negative assessment as the highest form of institutional loyalty rather than as disloyalty. The Americans in 1944 were not immune to this failure. They made serious errors in other campaigns at other times for exactly the same reasons. But at the Philippine Sea in June 1944, the structural advantages they had built, comprehensive radar, rigorous training, reliable intelligence, honest capability assessment expressed themselves with a clarity that the historical record makes impossible to misread. Preparation defeats courage. Not always, not inevitably.

[00:55:22]But when the gap between them is large enough and wide enough across enough dimensions simultaneously training technology intelligence logistics the outcome is determined before the first aircraft leaves the deck. Here is the detail that almost no account of the Philippine Sea includes and it is worth knowing. In 1960 the Japanese government conducted a systematic effort to locate and interview surviving participants of the Philippine Sea engagement. They found fewer than they expected. The attrition among junior pilots, the young men with 90 days of training was so complete that in many air groups, not a single pilot from the original strike compliment survived the war. Some groups lost every man. The records simply end names then nothing. But among the small number of survivors, researchers found something unexpected. Many of the Japanese pilots who lived had done so not because of superior skill or lucky tactics, but because of small specific mechanical failures that prevented them from flying on June 19th. An engine that would not start. A hydraulic problem that kept an aircraft grounded. A radio malfunction that made a pilot ineligible for the strike. These men watched their squadrons launch from the carrier deck and vanish into the sky. and they spent the next 40 years quietly understanding that a broken machine had saved their lives. One of them, Warrant Officer Hiroshi Tanaka of the carrier Zuikaku, gives a final interview at age 81 in 2001. He is asked how he feels about having survived when almost none of his fellow pilots did. He is quiet for a long time. Then he says, "I have thought about this question every day for 57 years. I do not have an answer. What I know is that they were not inferior to me. They were not less brave. They simply flew and I did not. That is the whole difference between being remembered and being forgotten. He dies 6 months after the interview. There is no record of his name in any standard English language history of the battle.

[00:57:28]From June 19th to 20th, 1944, across 48 hours of combat above the Philippine Sea, Japan lost five ships, 630 pilots and air crewmen, and the last functional carrier air force it would ever possess.

[00:57:43]The United States lost 76 men. The battle did not end the war. Wars do not end in single engagements, but it foreclosed every Japanese path to anything other than defeat. The Marianas fell. The B29s came. The home islands burned. The road to September 2nd, 1945 runs directly through the Philippine Sea. The young men who flew for Japan on June 19th deserved better than what they received. They deserved honest leaders, adequate training, and aircraft that could compete. They deserved the truth about their chances instead of propaganda about spirit overcoming steel.

[00:58:22]They received none of these things and they paid for that institutional failure with their lives while the men responsible for it filed battle reports and waited for new orders. The men who flew for America that day did not win because they were braver. They won because someone years earlier decided that 2 years of training was not a luxury but a requirement. That radar was not a toy but a weapon. That pilot rescue was not a kindness but a strategic investment.

[00:58:52]That honest assessment of capability was not defeatism but the only foundation on which real military strength can be built. The Philippine Sea teaches one lesson stated simply, "The battle is decided long before the shooting starts.

[00:59:06]It is decided in the training programs in the design bureaus in the intelligence assessments in the institutional cultures that either allow honest internal critique or suppress it.

[00:59:18]By the time the aircraft leave the deck, the outcome is already written. The courage it takes to fly matters, but it cannot rewrite what preparation has already determined. That is why this story is worth telling. Not because America won, because of what winning required and what losing cost and the distance between those two things that was built not in battle, but in the years of quiet, unglamorous preparation that came before it. Warrant Officer Tanaka was right. The difference between being remembered and being forgotten is sometimes as small as an engine that would not start. But the difference between winning and losing that is built over years in classrooms and hangers and training squadrons and honest briefing rooms long before anyone fires a