Battle of Surigao Strait

Fought in the largest naval battle in history, the Battle of Leyte Gulf (actually a campaign), the Battle of Surigao Strait was the last engagement in which battleships fought one another. The Japanese force, under VADM Shoji Nishimura, lost both battleships and all of its other ships except the seemingly charmed destroyer, IJN Shigure. U.S. forces, under RADM Jesse Oldendorf, suffered only slight damage and no losses.

Leyte Gulf, on the U.S. side, suffered from command and communications failures, although not remotely as severe as those on the Japanese side. VADM Thomas Kincaid, commanding the invasion forces, assumed, incorrectly, that ADM William Halsey had formed Task Force 34 (TF 34), which protected the invasion transports and support ships from an attack from the north. Kincaid sent his Seventh Fleet Support Force, under Oldendorf, south to intercept  Nishimura's force, of two battleships, one cruiser and four destroyers. It ran into Seventh Fleet Support Force, with had six battleships, four heavy cruisers, four light cruisers, 29 destroyers and 39 PT boats. To pass the strait and reach the landings, Nishimura had to run the gauntlet.

Running this gauntlet meant that Nishimura would have to withstand multiple short attacks, first from PT boats and then destroyer formations, primarily attacking with torpedoes. Using a modern paradigm, Oldendorf's light forces made multiple swarming attacks on Nishimura's force. While the PT boats were more of a nuisance than a danger, they disrupted the Japanese and also reported accurately on the Japanese formation, course and speed. Armed with this information, the destroyers then were able to make effective torpedo attacks, long before Nishimura came into range of the battleships at the end of the strait. At about 03:00 the Japanese battleship Fuso and three destroyers were hit by torpedoes and Fuso broke in two.

At 03:50 the American battleships opened fire using radar fire control that allowed them to hit targets from a much greater distance than the Japanese. The battleship Yamashiro sank under 16-inch (406 mm) shells and only one of Nishimura's seven ships survived.