The Japanese claimed they were unsinkable. In secret, between 1937 and 1942, the Imperial
Navy constructed two 72,000-ton super-battleships: the Yamato and the Musashi. They were the heaviest
battleships ever constructed and they carried the largest naval guns ever affixed to a warship.
Among many other weapons, each ship carried nine 18-inch guns, each capable of firing a
3,200-pound shell over 25 miles. The Japanese expected Yamato and
Musashi to take part in the ultimate naval showdown, a battleship versus battleship
match against the Americans. In the mind of the Japanese admirals, Yamato and Musashi were the
epitome of invincible naval architecture, and for years, they vied with each other to take
command of these behemoths, then believed to be the world’s only unsinkable warships.
On October 24, 1944, Yamato and Musashi were heading for San Bernardino Strait, accompanied
by a massive task force under the command of VADM Takeo Kurita. With him, Kurita had three other
battleships, 9 cruisers, and 13 destroyers. He intended to complete Operation Shō-Gō 1,
the annihilation of the U.S. 6th Army along the shores of Leyte Gulf. But as events unfolded,
one of those super-battleships—the Musashi—did not arrive. As Kurita’s task force entered the
Sibuyan Sea, U.S. Navy pilots attacked from the skies above, dashing the myth of Musashi’s
invincibility. By the end of the day, one of Japan’s two beloved super-battleships was at
the bottom of the Sibuyan Sea. This is how it happened.
That same morning, the U.S. Navy’s 3rd Fleet commenced its aerial scouting operations.
Admiral William Halsey already knew that Musashi, Yamato, and their escorts were on their way. The
previous day, two Gato-class submarines—USS Darter and USS Dace—had intercepted Kurita’s
task force in Palawan Passage, sinking two heavy cruisers. Before making his attack,
Darter’s skipper radioed a contact report, giving Halsey a firm idea of what was coming.
Immediately, Halsey deployed his fleet to meet the threat. He spread his task groups out along
the eastern shores of the Philippines, ordering them to conduct search missions at first light.
RADM Gerald Bogan’s Task Group 38.2—a force of three carriers, two battleships,
three cruisers, and 16 destroyers—guarded San Bernardino Strait. This group stood the
best chance of finding Kurita’s fleet. At 6 A.M., one of Bogan’s carriers,
USS Intrepid, launched 18 scout planes—twelve F6F Hellcats and six SB2C Helldivers.
Each scouting unit operated in a three-plane team: two fighters and one bomber to each sector.
At 7:30, after nearly 90 minutes in the air, the Sector Three search team—consisting of pilots
LT Donald Watts, LTJG Charles Amerman, and LTJG Max Adams —caught sight of Kurita’s task force.
After investigating the scene below them, Adams’s rear-seat gunner, Cornelius Clark,
sent out a terse message via Morse code, relaying the sighting report to a fighter
pilot, LTJG Bill Millar , who was halfway between Bogan’s task group and the scouts.
Millar sent the finished contact report: “13 destroyers, 4 battleships, 8 heavy cruisers off
the south tip of Mindoro, course 050, speed 10 to 12 knots. No train or transports.”
At 8:25, Millar’s message made it onto the bridge of Admiral Halsey’s flagship, USS New Jersey.
Halsey was elated. His carriers were within striking range and the Japanese would be passing
through the placid waters of the Sibuyan Sea, with little room to maneuver. The weather was perfect.
Now was the time to attack. Promptly, Halsey sent a terse message over TBS radio, repeating
a phrase he had used two years earlier at the Battle of Santa Cruz: “Strike! Repeat: Strike!”
Immediately, forty-four planes from USS Intrepid and USS Cabot scrambled into the air, a mix of
F6F Hellcats, SB2C Helldivers, and TBM Avengers. Intrepid’s group commander, CDR William Ellis,
directed the mission. Wafting at 16,000 feet, taking advantage of the unspoiled visibility,
Ellis’s planes flew northwest, skirting Cebu Island. They passed over the Bicol Peninsula,
and at 10:26, they caught sight of Kurita’s fleet as it headed northeast through the Tablas Strait.
When the American planes appeared, the Japanese ships sent up a hail
of antiaircraft fire. Yamato and Musashi mounted 150 AA guns apiece.
Further, both super-battleships fired a new weapon, the sanshikidan, Type-3, “beehive” shell,
an antiaircraft round fired from the 18-inch guns. When they exploded, the sanshikidan shells
burst with incredible fury, scattering over 2,800 shrapnel fragments in all directions.
In the opening salvo, one Hellcat was blown out of the sky, and soon,
two TBM Avengers were also hit, causing the pilots to make emergency landings in the water.
But Intrepid’s Helldivers pressed on through the vortex of AA. They reached Musashi and
made their dives. In quick succession, four 1,000-pound bombs splashed around the bow,
throwing jagged splinters in all directions. The fifth bomb struck Musashi’s number one turret,
bounced into the air, and then exploded. At first, it seemed as if Musashi had
repelled this attack, but then, a few minutes later, two divisions of TBM torpedo bombers
dropped their torpedoes. Another TBM was blown out the sky, killing its entire crew,
but ENS Willard Fletcher’s torpedo struck Musashi amidships, causing a boiler room
to flood. The mighty ship took on 3,000 tons of water and listed five degrees to starboard.
The remaining Helldivers—three of them—scored near misses on the battleship Nagato. Two TBMs took aim
at Yamato and missed. But one torpedo detonated against the stern of the heavy-cruiser Myōkō,
causing it to fall out of line and head for a safe anchorage under destroyer escort.
But the Americans weren’t done. At noon, a second wave of planes arrived, another group from USS
Intrepid. Once again, the Helldivers and Avengers concentrated on Musashi. Two more Helldivers
were shot down by AA, but Intrepid’s Helldiver pilots scored two direct hits with their bombs.
Six minutes later, nine Avengers closed in and attacked from both sides of the bow—a
so-called “anvil attack.” Three torpedoes exploded against the battleship’s portside,
causing Musashi to list five degrees in the other direction. By the time damage control parties
finally leveled the ship with counter-flooding, Musashi was down six feet by the bow.
From his position aboard Yamato, Kurita ordered his fleet to press on, instructing other ships
to slow down so that Musashi could keep up. Thus, the two attacks from Intrepid’s air group
slowed Kurita’s advance, keeping his task force within the Sibuyan Sea much longer than expected.
This was exactly what the Americans wanted. As the afternoon droned on, more and more
American airstrikes arrived. Halsey’s fleet had finally repulsed all the land-based air attacks,
which freed up more American carriers. At 1:30 P.M., a third wave of American planes arrived,
about thirty planes from USS Essex and USS Lexington. Once again,
the American pilots concentrated on Musashi. Two more near misses from Helldivers caused
superficial damage and another torpedo detonated against Musashi’s portside. With power flickering,
dozens of Japanese sailors below decks became entombed in the behemoth’s submerged compartments.
At 2:20 P.M., thirty-five more planes arrived—Hellcats and Helldivers from Essex,
Franklin, and Cabot. Twenty-three-year-old dive bomber pilot LTJG Irvin Fellner,
Jr. of Bombing Squadron 13 accompanied this fourth wave. Coming in at 12,000 feet,
he saw the disorganized Japanese fleet below. "It’s hard to convey to anybody what it felt
like to be a pilot, knowing that we were going after the Japanese fleet. Understand that all our
missions previous to this had been against land targets—and maybe a few barges or transports—but
nothing like the warships we were seeing. So we were on a high. We were flying maybe twelve
thousand feet and all of a sudden we began to see the little white puffs appear around the clouds.
We knew that we had been spotted by the Japanese which then gave us the option to break radio
silence. Pretty soon we heard the signal, ‘tally ho’ and we knew that the fighters and
torpedo bombers were going in. I was leading a division of seven planes. I put them into
right echelon formation. Then I peeled opened my cockpit canopy, armed my bomb, armed my guns,
and nosed down through the clouds. I’m not sure what altitude I came through the clouds,
but the first thing I saw was this tremendous panoply of ships below going in corkscrews.
They just looked like a bunch of scattering ants all over the place."
Although Musashi still presented a target, Fellner’s contingent veered toward Yamato.
Signaling his wingmen, Fellner rolled into his dive and plunged downward:
"Below me was the biggest ship I had ever seen, a monster ship, and within fourteen seconds I dived
from 12,000 feet down to 1,000 feet. Time passed very quickly and the danger was you’d get fixated
on the target and forget your altitude. Since this ship was doing a very tight turn, I had to almost
corkscrew to keep it in my bombsight. But all of a sudden I looked and I was at a thousand feet
and the needle was going down so rapidly. I said, ‘It’s time to release!’ So with the ship more than
filling my bombsight, I pressed the button which was the pickle for the bomb, and at the same time
I pulled the trigger on the stick which started my 20-millimeter cannon. Then I popped my dive
flaps and pulled out, swooping low over the water, as low as I could get, and right ahead of me was
another battleship—and this turned out to be the Nagato. I literally leap frogged over the Nagato.
In the meantime my gunner had taken a picture of the Yamato in the background and I’d turned
around quickly to take a look. I noticed there was no splash in the water. When
you see a splash in the water you know you’ve missed. I knew I got a hit, clean as a whistle!"
Fellner’s 1000-pound armor-piercing bomb penetrated the anchor deck and exploded
below the waterline. The next two bombs damaged one of Yamato’s turrets. Another blew a hole at
the waterline. Still another ripped apart the crew quarters. Yamato took on water,
and much like its sister ship, it developed a five-degree list.
As Yamato recovered from the attack, at 2:55 P.M., a fifth wave of American aircraft—69 planes from
USS Enterprise and USS Franklin—arrived and took over the attack on Musashi.
Armed with armor-piercing bombs, Bombing Squadron 20 scored four direct hits atop Musashi’s bow.
Then, Torpedo Squadron 20’s Avengers added three more torpedoes into the same area.
Finally, at 3:25, the Americans delivered the coup de ’grace.
Seventy-five aircraft from Intrepid, Franklin, and Cabot made the day’s last attack.
Thirty-seven planes—about half of the assaulting force—attacked Musashi.
The battleship received 13 additional bomb strikes and 11 additional torpedo strikes. Going down by
the head, listing ten degrees, Musashi could not move faster than six knots. During this attack,
six more American planes were shot down or forced to ditch, but the battleship’s fate was sealed.
The damage made it impossible for Musashi to keep up. Reluctantly, Kurita ordered it to stay
behind. The remaining ships made it another 30 miles, but Kurita became frustrated when
the Air Fleet’s land-based planes failed to show. (Kurita did not yet realize that the bulk of them
had been shot down earlier that morning trying to attack RADM Frederick Sherman’s Task Group.)
Worried that another American airstrike might come, or that U.S. submarines would
be prowling San Bernardino Strait, Kurita ordered his task force to turn around.
At 4:20 P.M., Kurita’s ships returned to Musashi’s position. The sight filled them with despair.
The bow was down by 26 feet and seawater swept the forecastle. More problematically, the list
had grown worse, and it appeared as if the ship was ready to capsize. For the next three hours,
the crew fought hard to keep the ship upright, but it did no good. VADM Toshihira Inoguchi, who
had been wounded during the attack, ordered his crew to abandon ship; however, Inoguchi himself
chose to go down with the wreck. Only 1,376 of Musashi’s 2,399-man crew managed to escape.
Hundreds had already been killed by the Americans, but hundreds more died when the ship rolled over
violently at 7:36 P.M. With the stern jutting high into the air, the ship sank to the bottom
of the Sibuyan Sea, 4,400 feet below. Back on USS Franklin, LTJG Fellner
celebrated with his shipmates. They knew they had achieved the unachievable. They
had sunk a ship that had been touted by the enemy as unsinkable. Fellner remembered:
"I flew back to the ship and we all were highly elated. There was great euphoria among all the
pilots, everybody telling tales. Most of the planes that day attacked the Musashi. It was
wounded—badly wounded—by torpedoes early on so it was going in circles like a wounded tiger.
Everybody homed in on it. It was an elephant; those were gigantic ships,
and they had seen only minor action before. This was their first major action.
That day the Musashi took seventeen bomb hits and nineteen torpedo hits. The only thing I
would add is that, in my estimation, Sibuyan Sea was a great engagement and it certainly
would have been by itself if it was not dwarfed by the achievements off Samar the very next day."
Fellner’s recollection underscored an important point. If the American carrier pilots had not
sent Musashi to the bottom of the Sibuyan Sea, Kurita would have arrived at the Battle of Samar
with two super-battleships, not just one, which might have changed the outcome of that engagement.
In persisting in their attempt to sink the unsinkable Musashi,
the American carrier pilots had, in effect, changed the outcome of the Battle of Leyte Gulf.