The Battle of Samar (October 25, 1944) demonstrates how tactical courage and aggressive defense can compensate for overwhelming numerical and firepower disadvantages. When Rear Admiral Clifton Sprague's Taffy 3 force—consisting of six small escort carriers and seven destroyers—faced Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita's massive Japanese fleet of four battleships (including the Yamato), eight cruisers, and 11 destroyers, the American captains chose to attack rather than flee. This desperate stand, led by officers like Commander Ernest Evans aboard the USS Johnston and Lieutenant Commander Robert Copeland aboard the USS Samuel B. Roberts, forced Kurita to withdraw, saving the Leyte invasion. The battle proved that even the smallest warships, when commanded by officers willing to fight rather than run, can alter the course of history.
In 1944, A Japanese WarShip Attacked A Tiny US Destroyer. It Was A HUGE MistakeAdded:
It was just after sunrise on October 25th, 1944, off the coast of a Philippine island called Samar.
A small group of American sailors were drinking coffee on the decks of their thin-skinned escort carriers, expecting another quiet morning of ferrying supplies and flying anti-submarine patrols.
Then a lookout spotted something on the northern horizon.
Pagoda masts.
The unmistakable silhouette of Japanese battleships closing fast.
What was bearing down on them was the largest surface striking force [music] the Imperial Japanese Navy had left in the war.
Four battleships, including the largest [music] battleship ever built.
Eight cruisers, 11 destroyers.
All steaming straight at a force of slow escort carriers protected by just three destroyers and four destroyer escorts.
The Americans were outgunned, outweighed, and out of options.
By every reasonable measure, they should have been wiped out within the [music] hour. However, in the next two and a half hours, a handful of American captains would do something so reckless, >> [music] >> so improbable, that even the Japanese admiral who fought them couldn't believe what he was seeing.
>> [music] >> And one tiny destroyer would write itself into naval legend forever.
>> [music] [music] >> To understand how it came to this, >> [music] >> you have to go back five days.
On October 20th, 1944, General Douglas MacArthur waded ashore at Leyte, returning to the Philippines [music] after more than two years of Japanese occupation.
The landings were enormous.
>> [music] >> Tens of thousands of troops, hundreds of transport ships, and three full task forces of the US Navy ringed the beaches to protect them.
>> [music] >> For Imperial Japan, this was the moment of truth.
If the Americans took Leyte, the Philippines would be cut in half, and Japan's oil supply from the Dutch [music] East Indies would be strangled.
The Imperial Navy decided to throw almost everything it had left at the beachhead in a single coordinated strike.
The plan was [music] called Shō-Go 1, and it was as audacious as it was desperate. Japan split its remaining fleet into three [music] forces.
A northern force of nearly empty aircraft carriers would sail south as bait, trying to lure the entire US Third [music] Fleet away from the beachhead.
A southern force would approach Leyte Gulf [music] from the south, and a center force, the strongest of the three, would slip through the San Bernardino Strait [music] and fall on the American transports from the north.
The center force was commanded by Vice Admiral [music] Takeo Kurita, and his flagship was the legendary battleship Yamato, the largest warship ever built, mounting nine 18.1-in guns [music] that could throw a shell the weight of a small car 26 mi.
>> [music] >> The trap worked almost perfectly.
Admiral William "Bull" Halsey >> [music] >> took the bait.
He pulled his entire Third Fleet north to chase the Japanese [music] carriers, San Bernardino Strait completely unguarded.
At about 3:00 in the morning on October 25th, [music] Kurita's center force slipped through that open door and turned south, racing along the coast of Samar [music] toward the defenseless transports at Leyte.
The only thing standing between Kurita's battleships and the American invasion fleet was a small unit of escort carriers nobody expected to see combat that day.
>> [music] >> They were called Taffy 3.
Taffy 3, officially task unit 77.4.3, >> [music] >> was commanded by Rear Admiral Clifton Sprague, nicknamed Ziggy.
His unit had six escort carriers, basically merchant hulls fitted with a flight deck, capable of around 18 knots flat out.
They were nicknamed [music] Jeep carriers by the men who sailed them.
And a few sailors had a darker nickname, combustible, vulnerable, expendable, [music] after their hull designation CVE.
Screening these carriers were three Fletcher class [music] destroyers, the Hull, the Heermann, and the Johnston, along with four smaller destroyer escorts, Dennis, [music] John C. Butler, Raymond, and Samuel B. Roberts.
>> [music] >> The destroyers carried 5-in guns and torpedoes.
The destroyer escorts were even lighter, [music] built primarily for hunting submarines.
Combined, their entire arsenal of guns and torpedoes could not equal the broadside of a single Japanese battleship.
>> [music] >> That morning, the men of Taffy 3 had no idea Kurita's fleet existed in the area.
Halsey hadn't told them he was gone.
>> [music] >> And the night's report suggested the Japanese had been beaten back the day before.
The dawn [music] patrol launched normally, the galleys served breakfast, and then at 6:45 in the morning, an American pilot on routine patrol [music] spotted four battleships, eight cruisers, and a flock of destroyers steaming straight for [music] them at 28 knots.
At first, no one on the carriers believed it.
The radio operators [music] thought the pilot had mistaken friendly ships.
But within minutes, lookouts [music] on the escort carriers themselves could see the pagoda masts on the horizon.
Then came the splashes.
Brightly [music] colored splashes because the Japanese dyed their shells different colors to track their fire.
Aboard the flagship Fanshaw Bay, [music] Admiral Sprague stared north and saw something he was never trained for.
The heaviest [music] surface fleet in the Pacific bearing down on his unarmored, slow-moving carriers >> [music] >> with nothing but seven small ships in the way.
He had two options.
Run and watch his carriers be sunk one by one or fight [music] and probably die.
He chose to do both at the same time.
Sprague turned [music] his carriers east into the wind so they could launch every aircraft they had.
He ordered the carriers to lay smoke [music] screens and run toward a rain squall on the horizon.
Then he gave the order that would define the morning.
He told his three destroyers and four destroyer escorts to attack.
The first ship to break formation was the USS Johnston, a Fletcher-class destroyer [music] commanded by a 36-year-old officer named Ernest E.
Evans.
Evans was part Cherokee and part Creek, born in Pawnee, Oklahoma. [music] When he took command of Johnston a year earlier, he told his crew, and I'm paraphrasing here, >> [music] >> that this ship would never run from a fight.
On the morning of October 25th, he made good on that [music] promise.
Without waiting for orders, Evans turned Johnston straight at the Japanese fleet.
His ship was 2,100 tons.
The cruiser [music] he was charging, Kumano, was over 12,000 tons and carried 10 8-in guns.
Johnston closed to about 10,000 yd under heavy fire, launched all 10 of her torpedoes, and turned away into her own smoke screen.
Behind her, [music] two enormous explosions rocked the Kumano.
One of Evans' torpedoes had ripped off the cruiser's bow.
Then a shell [music] from a Japanese battleship hit Johnston.
Three 14-in shells from Kongo and three smaller hits, all within [music] seconds.
Evans lost the use of his bridge, his after engine room, his after gun mount, and several fingers on his left hand.
>> [music] >> He kept fighting.
He moved control of the ship to the after steering position and continued maneuvering by shouting orders down a hatch.
As Johnston pulled [music] back into the smoke, Sprague ordered the rest of his destroyers in.
USS Hull, under Commander Leon Kienberger, charged the Japanese [music] battle line and launched a torpedo attack at the battleship Kongo.
>> [music] >> Hull was hit more than 40 times. Her radio was destroyed, her engines were failing, and she [music] was visibly burning.
But her remaining torpedoes forced Kongo to turn away, buying the carriers minutes they desperately [music] needed.
Then came the smallest ship in the line, the USS Samuel [music] B. Roberts, a John C. Butler class destroyer escort under Lieutenant Commander Robert W.
Copeland.
Sammy B. was 1,350 [music] tons, less than a tenth the weight of a heavy cruiser.
Copeland brought his [music] crew on the intercom that morning and told them they were about to enter, in his words, a fight against overwhelming odds from which survival could not be expected.
>> [music] >> Then he charged the heavy cruiser Chokai.
The Samuel B. Roberts closed to 4,000 [music] yd, fired her three torpedoes, and then did something almost unbelievable.
She kept fighting with her two 5-in guns.
For the next 35 minutes, from as close as 5,000 yd, her crew fired over 600 rounds at Japanese cruisers designed to shrug off that exact caliber.
>> [music] >> Sammy B. earned the nickname the destroyer escort that fought like a battleship, because in those minutes, she really did.
Her guns helped [ __ ] the heavy cruiser Chikuma, which would later [music] sink.
While the small boys were attacking, Sprague's carriers were doing something extraordinary of their own.
Their FM-2 Wildcats and TBF [music] Avengers, many armed with depth charges, fragmentation bombs, or nothing at all because there had been no time to [music] load proper anti-ship ordnance, were making dry runs on Japanese cruisers and battleships.
>> [music] >> Pilots flew through walls of anti-aircraft fire to drop whatever they had.
When they ran out of ammunition, they made strafing [music] passes anyway, just to draw Japanese fire away from the ships.
It worked.
The Japanese formation was breaking [music] apart.
Kurita's ships were dodging torpedoes, swerving to [music] avoid air attacks, and losing the tight formation that gave them their gunnery advantage. [music] From the bridge of Yamato, Kurita couldn't even tell what he was fighting anymore.
The American smoke screens, rain squalls, and the sheer aggression of [music] the attacks led him to believe he was tangling with fleet carriers and full destroyers, not jeep carriers [music] and escorts.
Around 8:40, the USS Gambier Bay, one of Taffy 3's escort [music] carriers, was finally caught by Japanese gunfire.
She took repeated hits from cruisers and from Yamato herself. [music] Within an hour, she rolled over and sank, the only American aircraft [music] carrier ever sunk by enemy surface gunfire.
And still, Johnston somehow was back in the fight.
With half her crew [music] dead or wounded, and Evans bleeding from his wounds, Johnston [music] single-handedly engaged a column of Japanese destroyers trying to torpedo [music] the carriers.
She forced them to turn away.
Then she was caught between two cruisers and pounded for nearly an hour.
The Japanese destroyers that finally [music] finished her circled the burning ship and one of them, according to survivors, saluted as Johnston went down.
Commander Evans went with her.
>> [music] >> He would receive the Medal of Honor, the first Native American in the Navy to be given that decoration.
By 9:00 in the morning, three American small [music] boys were sinking or already on the bottom.
Hoel had gone down at 8:55. Samuel B.
Roberts, with her engines [music] knocked out by a final salvo from Kongo, sank around 10:00.
Johnston followed soon after. [music] The path to the helpless transports at Leyte Gulf was now completely open.
Kurita had lost some ships and some time, [music] but his battleships still floated, his guns still worked, and the prize was 20 [music] miles away.
And then, in one of the most disputed decisions of the entire Pacific War, Vice Admiral [music] Kurita turned his fleet north.
He broke off the attack.
Historians have [music] argued about this for 80 years.
Kurita later said he believed he was fighting fleet carriers, not escort carriers, and that the relentless air attacks meant Halsey's main fleet must be near.
He had received fragmentary radio [music] traffic suggesting American reinforcements were on the way.
His ships were low on fuel after days of running [music] through hostile waters, and he had already lost three heavy cruisers, the Chokai, the Chikuma, and the Suzuya, to the relentless air strikes and torpedo runs of Taffy 3.
>> [music] >> Whatever the reason, Kurita pulled away.
He turned back through San Bernardino Strait, and the largest [music] surface threat to MacArthur's invasion simply evaporated.
The transports at [music] Leyte never even knew how close they had come, but the day wasn't over for Taffy [music] 3.
As Sprague's surviving ships limped south, a new horror appeared in the sky.
Japanese special attack aircraft dropping out of low clouds.
These were the first organized Kamikaze [music] attacks of the war.
One of them struck the escort carrier USS Saint Lo, igniting her bomb [music] magazine.
She exploded and sank within 30 minutes.
She became the first major Allied warship [music] sunk by a Kamikaze.
In total, Taffy 3 lost [music] two escort carriers, two destroyers, and a destroyer escort.
Over 1,500 [music] American sailors were dead or missing.
The survivors floated in the warm Pacific for days.
>> [music] >> Some were attacked by sharks. Others were spotted by friendly aircraft, but due to a series of communication [music] failures, weren't rescued until almost 2 days later.
When the smoke cleared, the math of what Taffy [music] 3 had done was almost impossible to accept.
A force of seven small American escorts and six Jeep carriers [music] had stopped a Japanese fleet with four battleships, eight cruisers, and 11 destroyers.
They had sunk three heavy cruisers and damaged a fourth beyond repair.
They had absorbed the firepower of the largest battleship on Earth.
And they had saved the entire Leyte landing. Commander Ernest E. Evans received the Medal of Honor for his actions aboard Johnston.
He was the first Native American officer in the US Navy to receive the medal and [music] one of only two captains in all of World War II to be awarded it. His body was never recovered. Lieutenant Commander Robert Copeland of Samuel B.
Roberts received the Navy Cross. Admiral Sprague [music] received the Navy Cross.
The entire Taffy 3 task unit was awarded the Presidential Unit Citation, the highest honor a Navy unit can receive.
Even the wreckage itself became legend.
In 2019, the wreck of the USS Johnston was discovered 6 and 1/2 km below the surface of the Philippine Sea, making it the deepest shipwreck ever found at the time.
Two years later, in 2022, the USS Samuel B. Roberts was located even deeper at 6,895 m, taking that record from her sister.
>> [music] >> Both ships now rest with their bow numbers still visible on what is effectively the floor of the deepest tomb in naval history.
For Japan, the Battle of Samar was the final breaking point of the Imperial Navy as an offensive force.
The center force never threatened American operations again.
Within 10 months, the war would be over.
For the US Navy, the lesson was burned [music] into doctrine forever. When seven small ships, commanded by men who had every excuse to run, chose instead to attack a fleet many times their size, they didn't just save the Leyte invasion, they proved that in the right hands, even the smallest warship can change the course of history.
If you told Admiral Kurita that morning that handful of American tin cans were going to turn back the strongest battle fleet his country had left, he would have laughed. But, on the 25th of October, 1944, the men of Taffy 3 did exactly that, and we will never see anything like it again.
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