The imperial radio broadcast rolled out of Tokyo on October 16, 1944, in the calm, self-assured cadence of a nation believing the war had pivoted in its favor. It announced the destruction of 11 American aircraft carriers, two battleships, and three cruisers, all sent to the bottom of the Philippine Sea. Emperor Hirohito transmitted personal congratulations to the airmen credited with the victory.
In a country gutted by seven years of war, weary civilians wept openly in the streets, hearing at last the echo of triumph they had so desperately craved. They had no way of knowing that less than 400 miles to the east, the ghosts of their “confirmed kills” were already moving, inch by inch, dragging their wounded hulls across the black water. The entire celebration was built on air.
Vice Admiral William Halsey, the bull-necked commander of the US Third Fleet, was reading the same intercepted broadcast that evening. As the chimes of Tokyo celebrated his complete annihilation, the other ships in his command saw a grim smile spread across his face. Halsey knew with absolute clarity that the monumental lie had just handed him a weapon far more dangerous than any torpedo.
The Japanese believed they had shattered the American carrier force, leaving only crippled scraps fleeing for home. That belief was a lure, and Halsey had already cast the bait. Two of his heaviest cruisers, painfully damaged and sitting dead in the water a short flight from the enemy airfields that had wounded them, were now the centerpiece of a desperate gambit to pull the Imperial Navy’s surface fleet out into open water where his intact carriers waited to strike.
The mission had started on October 10, paving the way for General Douglas MacArthur’s upcoming invasion, which was slated for Leyte Gulf. Halsey’s Task Force 38 had stormed Okinawa, then Luzon, arriving off the coast of the island fortress of Formosa on October 12. The island was a hardened Japanese staging point, holding over 500 airfields.
The Japanese commander, Vice Admiral Shigeru Fukudome, boasted nearly 700 aircraft, a veritable wall of steel and petrol he was prepared to throw against Halsey’s three carrier groups. As the first American fighter waves came in low over the airfields on the morning of the 12th, the sound of the engines was a death knell. In four days of attack, Task Force 38 smashed the Japanese positions.
By the end of the day, the headquarters of the 2nd Air Fleet was blown apart, and Fukudome would later recall his fighters rose only to be “thrown at a stone wall.”
Amid this storm, on the 13th, a young sergeant on the heavy cruiser USS Canberra watched a deep tropical sunset on the horizon just before a formation of Japanese bombers slipped below the radar horizon. A single torpedo tore through unsupported the steel hull, ripping into the ship’s engineering spaces. Twenty – three crewmen were killed instantly.
Canberra was out — dead in the water, a 14,000-ton warship wallowing as she took on the sea. Halsey’s orders were immediate and unorthodox. “Take her under tow,” he commanded.
The heavy cruiser Wichita came close to the damaged ship, passing enough steel line to haul the hull through the sea, the cruiser’s stern settling lower and lower. They started the slow crawl east.
The next day, the light cruiser Houston had come out from the front of the formation. She also took a hit. A torpedo crashing in underneath her armor belt, detonating against her 𝓮𝔁𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓮𝓭 bottom chine.
The blast buckled her long steel “spine,” and all four of her engineering decks flooded in an instant. Capt. William Barrens, who had commanded her since she was commissioned, gave the unthinkable order to prepare to abandon.
Yet below, deep in the darkness, men with hand lanterns and steel props, unknown to them, were shoring up the hull piece by piece, refusing to give up. They stopped the flooding. Boston took Houston under tow.
In the light of day on the 15th, the Navy called the formation “Bait Division 1,” a name the sailors themselves had already given it. They knew they were worm on a hook, pushed out ahead of the fleet to be seen—two ships they knew full well the Japanese believed had already sunk them more than once.
In Tokyo, the false arithmetic multiplied. Japanese pilots, many of them green aviators, launched desperate dusk and night attacks against the slow-moving American cruisers. They saw explosions on the water and fire.
They misread not seeing the remains of the same two ships getting hit again and again, claiming 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 after 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 in their reports. Hundreds of planes were transferred from the Japanese carriers in home waters to join the fight to “finish off” the remnants. The reports flowing up the chain of command did not go through the navy qualification: the process of discounting any estimate by clearly upsetting the pilot’s claim.
Instead, they were transmitted untouched.
On the morning of October 16, the Japanese command announced the results to its people. It reported 11 American aircraft carriers sunk, two battleships, three cruisers, and four more carriers damaged. It claimed 112 enemy planes destroyed.
Adding to the official announcement, Radio Tokyo had been propagating for days a tonnage figure close to half a million tons of American shipping sitting at the bottom of the sea. The Japanese did not realize their actual victory had been two damaged cruisers and several hundred dead sailors. Halsey exploited this manage fully.
He sent a message to Admiral Nimitz at Pearl Harbor. When it was released to the press, it swept through the citizens of the United States, and was a stark threat to Japanese commanders: “Third Fleet ships that Radio Tokyo had reported sunk have been salvaged and are retreating at high speed toward the Japanese fleet.” The fuse was lit.
The Japanese, further convinced, used this to press the advantage. The High command issued orders for a surface force to helm from the Japanese inland sea to hunt down the retreating cruisers. The 3rd Fleet steams carriers surrounding them were very real.
American search radar found the Japanese ships as they left port. The bait had worked — but if it happened, the ambush had been prematurely appeared. The force zigzag back before contact.
No salute, just a deep irony. bring The cost on the Japanese was not counted in hulls, but in pilots. A command that never paused to seize the opportunity had ordered more planes from Japan’s own carriers to Formosa, reckoning they were moaning the wreck of Halsey’s backbone.
Those aircraft, and the men who flew them, were ground up in the same four-day meat grinder. By the end, approximately 500 Japanese planes were destroyed. 325 pilots were dead.
Over more than one hundred days in the heart of the war, the number of Japanese pilots lost had been estimated. In two weeks, Imperial Japan had spent its entire last, last fleet of quality air crews. The remains of all they’d lost had not touched the American Hulls as they were towed.
A dramatic, logical consequence arrived on October 23 when the Battle of Leyte Gulf began. At first, the Imperial Navy issue was a much larger American fleet that had spread across the enormous Philippine Sea. The Emperor’s Top Command, under Ozawa, planned a haymaker: they would use the remnants of the Japanese carrier force as a decoy to pull Halsey’s main fleet north.
They sailed right up into visual range of the American carriers, with a flight deck that was intriguingly bare. The pilots who should have been there to fill them were dead over Formosa chasing York’s lie. Fueled, briefed, devotional pilots that never came.
On October 25, 1944, Halsey took the bait. The fast carriers of Task Force 38 steamed north and turned their guns and planes on the sacrificial fleet. Zuikaku, the last surviving carrier from the Pearl Harbor strike force that had launched the war three years earlier, went down in the Cape Bernardino sea alongside Zuiho, Chitos, and Chiyoda.
Crewmen who were rescued described bare hangar rooms and empty bones. The four Japanese carriers went down without launching any meaningful airstrike against a fleet that was literally sitting off their starboard. The bait was Japanese, and it had taken the bait.
The Japanese carrier force had been completely spent, solely to mouth their own illusion, more than any American carrier.
It was a victory that was total and ironic. The Imperial Navy had pulled its own ultimate deception— the belief of a false victory— and the resultant the culmination of that suffered when it had played its last card at the domain. The men of the USS Canberra, after being declared sunk, limped into Ulithi on October 27, 1944, after 13 days of running a drag race.
Houston followed, her stern open to the sky, her 194-man crew had lived through. The main generators were gone; they were lighting lanterns. Sets drunk drained the water that had sitting in the number one ballast tank, tasting of paint, sliced through with rust.
The Japanese claimed that Houston sank to the deck. Yet had 194 men been at work at every pump and shoring the bulkheads and the bulkhead and they had done it, they were already at Marine ship beside the repair ship, as Halsey’s trap was still being worked out in Tokyo.
The dirty tricks department had already nailed the lie to the wall. With a neutron bomb bay empty, what was actually left for Japan? An empire had given its citizenry a false heartbreak and sustained it.
The two ships had suffered no real warship damage. They were back in the U. S.
and would be repaired. One would serve for another 25 years. But Tokyo could not retract.
They could never tell people the war was slipping away. They had beaten their armies with their own horn, let them hum. It cost the Imperial Navy the majority of her bore and her central Air Group.
They were done.
It is best to reconsider Halsey’s delight reading that radio broadcast from his bridge on the 16th. It was the joy of a man who knows exactly how to answer a loss with a victory. His fleet never actually destroyed the.
He had the will to leverage air. The entire British public went wild in their streets for a phantom 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 in their hands. What great plans had to commit to the ocean floor was not just the cold weight that still floated to the surface.
The only thing it managed to sink was itself. The final the that any public relations department could find to believe, they had given the Japanese empire something so, so profound, they would sue for their own total defeat.
