So the drama played out. Kinkaid’s amphibious craft went ashore at Leyte on October 20, and four days later Third Fleet air strikes sank the monster battleship Musashi in the Sibuyan Sea.

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With the enemy’s reported withdrawal, Halsey was buoyant. On the afternoon of the twenty-fourth, scouts from Task Force 34 found Vice Adm. Jisaburo Ozawa’s four carriers off the northeast end of Luzon. Never suspecting they were a deliberate decoy, the Bull wanted to pursue immediately but needed the rest of the day to consolidate his task groups. By the next morning Halsey’s entire striking force—fast carriers and battleships—was steaming north to destroy Ozawa. Halsey went to bed that night confident of a bigger bag on the morrow. At that moment Bull Halsey committed the sin of complacency, and men not under his command would pay the penance.

Meanwhile, during the night, Avengers from the light carrier Independence’s nocturnal air group tracked Japanese fleet units in San Bernardino Strait and found that rather than retreating they had reversed course and were steaming back to threaten the amphibious beachhead at Leyte. The tailhookers made a timely report and returned to their roost. But for reasons still unknown, Halsey’s staff failed to act on this vital intelligence.

In the wee hours of the twenty-fifth, the last major surface action in naval warfare history occurred in Surigao Strait, between Leyte and Mindanao. It cost Japan two battleships, a cruiser, and three destroyers in exchange for an American PT boat. The American southern flank was secure.

Shortly past dawn, Seventh Fleet units off Samar saw pagoda masts on the horizon. It was Vice Adm. Takeo Kurita’s Center Force. Four battlewagons, eight swift cruisers, and eleven destroyers had defied the Americans’ serene confidence and completed their transit of San Bernardino in the dark.

Thus began “The Battle of the Taffies,” named for the call sign of Kinkaid’s escort carrier groups. Directly imperiled was Rear Adm. Clifton “Ziggy” Sprague’s Taffy 3 with six escort carriers and seven support ships. Sprague did the only thing he could: make smoke, turn away, launch aircraft, and holler for help.

At that point the entire American command structure had failed. MacArthur’s insistence on running naval messages through his headquarters complicated an already dire situation, but more trouble was soon apparent. In Hawaii, Nimitz tried to make sense of the confused situation and dispatched one of the most famous messages in naval history.

To confuse enemy cryptanalysts, radio messages contained nonsensical phrases or “padding.” But when New Jersey’s radio watch decoded the message, it retained the end padding: “Where repeat where is Task Force 34? The world wonders.”

Unfortunately, the second sentence appeared logical in context, and when Halsey read it, he went into shock. Chester Nimitz, a gentleman to his core, had seemingly jabbed Bill Halsey with a bitterly sarcastic rebuke.

Meanwhile, Seventh Fleet waited three hours for clarification that Halsey’s battleships were charging northward to engage Ozawa. Clifton Sprague was largely on his own. Halsey dithered for over an hour before he even replied to the dire message from the south. The delay remains inexplicable and condemns him to history. He indulged himself in what a later generation would call a hissy fit, venting his anger and frustration while American sailors died under Japanese guns two hundred miles away.

Third Fleet’s staff watched the spectacle in stunned alarm. At length Rear Adm. Robert “Mick” Carney confronted his boss: “Stop it! What the hell’s the matter with you?” The subordinate literally ordered the admiralissimo to pull himself together.

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