Leyte Gulf and the Philippines: The First Special Attacks, October 1944 – January 1945

USS St. Lo (CVE-63) erupts after a kamikaze of Lt. Seki Yukio’s Shikishima unit crashed through her flight deck off Samar on 25 October 1944. Fires set off bombs and torpedoes in the hangar and she sank within about half an hour, the first warship sunk by an organized kamikaze attack. Photo: U.S. Navy, NARA 80-G-270516, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Kamikaze · Chapter 2 of 9

Leyte Gulf and the Philippines

For three months, from the escort carriers off Samar to the invasion fleet in Lingayen Gulf, a few hundred Japanese aircraft flown to their destruction did more damage to the U.S. Navy than the whole Japanese battle fleet had done at Leyte Gulf.

21 October 1944 – 13 January 1945Samar · Leyte Gulf · Ormoc Bay · Mindoro · Lingayen Gulf~25 min read

On the morning of 25 October 1944, off the island of Samar in the eastern Philippines, the escort carriers of the U.S. Seventh Fleet survived one of the most unequal fights in naval history. Japanese battleships and cruisers had surprised them at dawn; destroyers and destroyer escorts had charged the Japanese line, and the carriers’ aircraft had attacked with whatever weapons they had, until the Japanese commander broke off. A little before eleven, as the exhausted ships re-formed, a handful of Zero fighters came in low, climbed, and dived into them. One struck USS St. Lo (CVE-63). Within about half an hour she was gone.

That was the first success of the organized special attacks described in Chapter 1, and it opened a three-month campaign that the U.S. Navy had not anticipated and at first could hardly believe. The Naval History and Heritage Command’s summary is blunt: more American ships were hit, sunk and damaged “during the two months it took to secure Leyte than during the Battle of Leyte Gulf itself”. The attacks followed the American advance through the archipelago, against the fast carriers of Task Force 38, the shipping off the Leyte beachhead, the convoys to Ormoc Bay and Mindoro, and the invasion force bound for Lingayen Gulf on Luzon, until by mid-January 1945 Japanese air power in the Philippines was spent.

This chapter follows those three months in order, with a day-by-day chart built from the Naval History and Heritage Command’s H-Grams and a reconstruction of the morning of 25 October from documented times. Casualty figures come mainly from those NHHC summaries and from the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships (DANFS), both based on the ships’ action reports; where sources differ, the chapter says so. Ship names carry hull numbers on first mention. Japanese pilots are named where their identity is known; for most of the attacks of these months it is not.

The Battle and the Beachhead

The American landings on Leyte on 20 October 1944 brought the largest fleet yet assembled in the Pacific into the central Philippines. The Seventh Fleet under Vice Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid carried and protected the landing force; its air cover came from sixteen escort carriers, the small “jeep carriers” built on merchant hulls, organized in three task units known by their radio calls as Taffy 1, Taffy 2 and Taffy 3. Admiral William F. Halsey’s Third Fleet, with the fast carriers of Task Force 38, covered the operation from the east. Against this the Japanese launched Shō-1: four forces converging on Leyte Gulf to destroy the transports, with land-based aircraft from Luzon and the central islands meant to hold off the American carriers.

The Battle of Leyte Gulf, fought from 23 to 26 October, was the largest naval battle of the war, and the special attacks were born in its margins. On 24 October American carrier aircraft sank the battleship Musashi in the Sibuyan Sea. That night the southern Japanese force was destroyed in Surigao Strait. Halsey took his carriers north after Ozawa’s decoy carriers, and at dawn on 25 October Vice Admiral Kurita Takeo’s Center Force, with the battleship Yamato, came through San Bernardino Strait and found Taffy 3 off Samar, with nothing but escort carriers, destroyers and destroyer escorts between it and the gulf. The submarine war that preceded the battle is told in the site’s Submarines in the great naval battles of 1944.

21 October: HMAS Australia and the Question of the “First”

Four days before the escort carriers were struck, and before the first special attack sortie had left Mabalacat, a Japanese aircraft crashed into the foremast of the Royal Australian Navy’s heavy cruiser HMAS Australia off Leyte at about 06:05 on 21 October 1944. Burning fuel and wreckage swept the bridge. Her commanding officer, Capt. Emile Dechaineux, was mortally wounded; in all 30 men were killed or died of wounds and 64 were wounded, according to the Australian War Memorial. The Australian official history, by G. Hermon Gill, called Australia the first Allied ship hit by a suicide plane, and the claim is still repeated.

The evidence does not support calling it an organized kamikaze attack. Samuel Eliot Morison, in the American official-commissioned history, described it as “not an organised attack”. The researcher Richard Dunn, comparing American and Japanese records, concluded that the aircraft was most likely an Army Type 99 assault bomber (Ki-51, Allied code name “Sonia”) of the 6th Flying Brigade, often mistaken for a Navy “Val”, whose unit records mention no suicide attacks; he suggests the crash was either accidental or a jibaku, the spontaneous crash of a damaged aircraft or wounded pilot. The Navy’s first special attack sortie that day, from Cebu, in which Lt. (jg) Kuno Yoshiyasu of the Yamato unit failed to return, took off more than twelve hours after Australia was hit. Australia would be hit again, repeatedly, in January (below); she survived them all.

The Shikishima Unit’s Four Days

At Mabalacat, Seki Yukio’s Shikishima unit sortied on 21 October with five bomb-carrying Zeros and their escorts and found nothing. It tried again on each of the next three days, and each time weather or a lack of reliable reconnaissance turned it back. The repeated farewells and returns were a strain the units would come to know well: Japanese accounts describe pilots apologizing to their commanders for coming back alive. Meanwhile the Battle of Leyte Gulf began without them. On 24 October conventional Japanese air attacks from Luzon sank the light carrier USS Princeton (CVL-23), but at a heavy cost in aircraft, and the American fast carriers were untouched.

Morning, 25 October: Taffy 1 off Mindanao

The first organized special attacks to hit their targets came not from Mabalacat but from Davao on Mindanao, where the Asahi, Yamazakura and other newly formed units had been sent. Early on 25 October they found Taffy 1, the southernmost group of escort carriers, operating east of Mindanao in support of the Surigao Strait fighting and of Taffy 3 to the north. At 07:40, according to DANFS, a kamikaze crashed through the flight deck of USS Santee (CVE-29) and exploded on the hangar deck. Sixteen minutes later, while her crew fought the fires, a torpedo from a Japanese submarine struck her as well. She stayed afloat, and emergency repairs were completed by 09:35.

USS Suwannee (CVE-27) shot down a plane diving on her neighbour Petrof Bay (CVE-80) and a second attacker, and was then hit at 08:04 by a third, which dived into her flight deck forward of the after elevator; its bomb tore a large hole in the hangar deck. Her crew had the flight deck repaired within about two hours. On 26 October she was hit again, at about 12:40, by a Zero that crashed into a torpedo bomber just landed on her deck; both planes and nine more on the flight deck burned. DANFS gives Suwannee’s losses for the two days as 107 dead and 160 wounded.

10:50, Taffy 3: The Loss of St. Lo

To the north, Taffy 3 had fought Kurita’s fleet for more than two hours. The escort carrier Gambier Bay (CVE-73), the destroyers Hoel and Johnston and the destroyer escort Samuel B. Roberts had been sunk by gunfire, and the other ships were damaged and exhausted when Kurita turned away. The Shikishima unit, five Zeros with 250-kg bombs and their escorts, had left Mabalacat at 07:25. According to DANFS the unit came under a concentrated air attack at 10:50. In Morison’s reconstruction the attackers came in low under the radar, then climbed and dived: one Zero struck the port catwalk of USS Kitkun Bay (CVE-71), others dived on Fanshaw Bay and White Plains and were shot down or missed, and USS Kalinin Bay (CVE-68) was struck and damaged.

At 10:51 a Zero crashed through St. Lo’s flight deck. Its bomb exploded in the hangar, where aircraft were being refuelled and rearmed after the morning’s strikes, and set off a series of explosions that, in the words of DANFS, “exploded her torpedo and bomb magazine”. Survivors described a first blast, a second within seconds that rolled back part of the flight deck, and a later explosion that blew an elevator out of its well. She was abandoned, rolled over and sank about half an hour after she was hit, leaving, in a phrase the Naval Aviation Museum quotes from the official history, “a cloud of dense black smoke to mark her watery grave”. The destroyers and destroyer escorts of the screen, themselves battered from the morning, picked up the survivors.

The Toll of 25–26 October

How many of St. Lo’s crew died is given differently by different sources. The St. Lo veterans’ association counts 114 crewmen lost; the National WWII Museum, in its account of the sinking, gives 889 men aboard and 746 survivors, which would imply a larger figure if all the missing are counted with men who later died of wounds. Neither DANFS nor the Naval Aviation Museum gives a number. Another count, used on this site’s St. Lo page, gives 113 killed or missing and about 30 more who died of wounds. This chapter therefore says “more than 100” and gives the figures as they stand. The wreck was found on 14 May 2019 by the research vessel Petrel, operated by the estate of Paul G. Allen, lying upright at a depth of about 4,376 m off Samar.

In two days, suicide aircraft had sunk one escort carrier and damaged five others, Santee, Suwannee, Kalinin Bay, Kitkun Bay and White Plains. The Japanese claims were inflated, as claims of air attacks in every navy were. Inoguchi and Nakajima’s 1953 account has Seki ramming one carrier and a second pilot crashing into the same ship, and other units damaging three more escort carriers; Japanese newspapers reported fleet carriers sunk. The real results were nonetheless the first significant success Japanese aircraft had achieved against the American fleet in months, and they were achieved by a handful of aircraft. On 26 October, as Chapter 1 describes, the Navy made special attack its standing method in the Philippines.

The Fast Carriers: Intrepid, Franklin, Belleau Wood, Lexington

The next targets were the big carriers. Task Force 38 stayed off the Philippines after the battle to support the Leyte campaign, because the Army’s airfields ashore were not yet ready for land-based fighters, and its carriers became the special attack units’ main objective. On 29 October USS Intrepid (CV-11) was hit, with 10 killed. On 30 October two carriers were hit within minutes: USS Franklin (CV-13), with 56 killed, and the light carrier USS Belleau Wood (CVL-24), with 92 killed, according to NHHC. On 5 November USS Lexington (CV-16) was struck near her island, with 50 killed and 132 wounded.

None of these ships was sunk. American fleet carriers were big, well compartmented and manned by damage-control parties trained by three years of war; the 250-kg bombs carried by the Zeros could wreck a flight deck and start terrible fires among fuelled and armed aircraft, but could not break a large ship’s back. What they could do was kill men in great numbers, especially aircrew and the deck crews working around the planes, and put carriers out of action for weeks or months of repair. Franklin and Belleau Wood both had to return to the United States. A pattern was set that would hold for the rest of the war: heavy loss of life and long repairs, but no fleet carrier sunk.

The destroyers suffered more. On 1 November, in Leyte Gulf, a Val dived on USS Abner Read (DD-526) at 13:30; its bomb went down one of her stacks and exploded in an engine room. At 13:52 a massive internal explosion caused the destroyer to list heavily, and by 14:15 she had sunk, with 22 of her crew, according to NHHC; Claxton (DD-571) alone rescued 187 survivors. Claxton and Ammen (DD-527) were damaged the same day.

25 November: Four Carriers in a Day

After a pause while both sides reinforced, the special attack units struck Task Force 38 again on 25 November 1944, off Luzon. In a single afternoon four fleet and light carriers were hit. USS Intrepid was struck by two kamikazes, with 66 killed and 35 wounded by NHHC’s figures; USS Cabot (CVL-28) lost 36 killed; USS Essex (CV-9) was hit on the port edge of her flight deck by a Yokosuka D4Y “Judy”, with 15 killed and 44 wounded; and USS Hancock (CV-19) was set afire by burning wreckage when a kamikaze broke up over her deck. American photographers on neighbouring ships captured several of the attacks from beginning to end, and the photographs of Essex are among the best known of the war.

Admiral Halsey withdrew the fast carriers from the Philippines to refit and to work out a defence. Two days later, on 27 November, the attacks fell on the battleships and cruisers in Leyte Gulf: the battleships USS Colorado (BB-45), with 19 killed, and USS Maryland (BB-46), with 31 killed, the light cruiser USS St. Louis (CL-49), with 16 killed, and the destroyer USS Aulick (DD-569), with 32 killed. The Army’s special attack units, the Banda and Fugaku units and the Hakkō units that followed them, were now flying against Leyte Gulf alongside the Navy’s, and the Japanese were sending reinforcements of aircraft and pilots into the Philippines from Formosa and Japan almost as fast as they were expended.

Ormoc Bay, 7 December 1944

In December the Americans moved around Leyte’s coast to land a division at Ormoc Bay on the west side of the island, behind the Japanese defenders, and the convoys that carried and supplied the landing became the next targets. On 5 December the medium landing ship LSM-20 was sunk and the destroyers Drayton and Mugford damaged. On 7 December 1944, exactly three years after Pearl Harbor, special attack aircraft struck the Ormoc landing force. The destroyer USS Mahan (DD-364) was hit repeatedly and had to be scuttled. So did the high-speed transport USS Ward (APD-16), which as the destroyer Ward had fired the first American shot of the Pacific War, at a Japanese midget submarine off Pearl Harbor on the morning of 7 December 1941. The destroyer that sank her with gunfire after she was abandoned, USS O’Brien, was commanded by William Outerbridge, who had commanded Ward on that morning in 1941. The transport Liddle (APD-60), with 36 killed, and the destroyer Lamson (DD-367), with 21 killed, were also hit that day.

Four days later, on 11 December, a resupply convoy to Ormoc was attacked and the destroyer USS Reid (DD-369) was sunk, with 103 men lost and 152 rescued. On 12 December the destroyer Caldwell (DD-605) lost 33 killed. For the destroyers, which sailed close to the enemy coast and could not be covered by enough fighters, the Leyte campaign was a foretaste of the picket line off Okinawa (Chapter 6). The Pearl Harbor story is told in the site’s Pearl Harbor collection.

Mindoro: The Nashville and the LSTs

The next step was Mindoro, south of Luzon, where the Americans wanted airfields to cover the coming invasion of Luzon. The invasion force sailed from Leyte through the Sulu Sea, past Japanese airfields on Negros, Panay and Cebu. On 13 December 1944 a kamikaze struck the light cruiser USS Nashville (CL-43), flagship of the Mindoro attack force, on the port side near the flag quarters. Its bombs and the ammunition it set off killed or mortally wounded 133 men and wounded 190, according to NHHC, among them many officers of the invasion staff. The destroyer Haraden (DD-585) was hit the same day, with 14 killed.

Content note. The next photograph, a contemporary U.S. Navy colour image of the clean-up aboard USS Nashville, may show human remains. It is blurred; select it to view.

The landings on 15 December were followed by attacks on the shipping off the beaches. The tank landing ships LST-472 and LST-738 were set ablaze and sunk that day. On 21 December, on a resupply run, LST-460 and LST-749 were sunk; together they had carried 774 men, of whom 107 were lost. On 28 December the Liberty ship John Burke, loaded with ammunition, was struck and blew up with all 68 aboard; on 30 December the motor torpedo boat tender Orestes (AGP-10) lost 45 killed and the Liberty ship Porcupine was destroyed. In Gordon’s list of ships sunk by suicide aircraft, fourteen were lost in December 1944 alone, most of them landing ships and small craft supporting Ormoc and Mindoro.

Lingayen Gulf, 4–13 January 1945

The invasion of Luzon at Lingayen Gulf, on the island’s west coast, was the largest amphibious operation of the Pacific war so far, and the force that carried it had to sail more than a thousand kilometres from Leyte through the Sulu Sea and up the west coast of Luzon, within range of every remaining Japanese airfield. The special attack units met it all the way north. On 4 January 1945, in the Sulu Sea, a twin-engine Yokosuka P1Y “Frances” (Ginga) struck the escort carrier USS Ommaney Bay (CVE-79) at 17:12. Fires reached her torpedo warheads, and she had to be abandoned and was scuttled by the destroyer Burns; 93 men were killed and 65 wounded, by NHHC’s figures (some counts give 95). NHHC identified her wreck in 2023. The same night the ammunition-laden Liberty ship Lewis L. Dyche blew up with all 71 men aboard.

On 5 January the escort carrier Manila Bay (CVE-61) lost 22 killed, HMAS Australia 25, and the heavy cruiser USS Louisville (CA-28) was hit. On 6 January, as the bombardment groups entered Lingayen Gulf, the attacks reached their peak. At about noon a kamikaze struck the bridge of the battleship USS New Mexico (BB-40), killing her commanding officer, Capt. Robert W. Fleming, and 29 others, among them Lt. Gen. Herbert Lumsden of the British Army, Winston Churchill’s personal liaison officer to General MacArthur. The destroyer USS Walke (DD-723) was hit on the bridge; her commanding officer, Cmdr. George F. Davis, was mortally wounded and was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously for his conduct on the bridge. The minesweeper Long (DMS-12) was sunk. The battleship California (BB-44) lost 45 killed, the light cruiser Columbia (CL-56) 13, and Louisville 32, including Rear Admiral Theodore E. Chandler, who was mortally burned and died the next day. HMAS Australia was hit again, with 14 killed.

The attacks went on through the landings on 9 January. On 8 January the escort carrier Kitkun Bay, already hit off Samar in October, lost 16 killed; the Coast Guard-manned attack transport Callaway (APA-35) lost 29; Australia was struck again. On 9 January, landing day, Columbia was hit for the third time, with 24 killed, and the battleship Mississippi (BB-41) lost 23. The last successful special attack in Philippine waters struck the escort carrier Salamaua (CVE-96) at 08:58 on 13 January, killing 15 men and wounding 88. NHHC estimates that at Lingayen roughly one in four kamikazes hit a ship, a far higher rate than Japanese aircraft would achieve against the more experienced defences off Okinawa.

Day by Day: Ships Hit, October 1944 – January 1945

The chart below lists the principal ships hit on each day for which NHHC’s H-Grams give casualty figures. It is not a complete list: dozens of smaller ships, landing craft and merchant ships were also struck, and many near-misses caused casualties. Killed figures include men who died of wounds where the source counts them.

Who Flew: The Japanese Side in the Philippines

Most of the men who flew these attacks are unnamed in American records and known in Japanese ones only from unit rolls. The Kanoya Air Base Museum’s table of Navy special attack dead by sortie base, published by Bill Gordon, gives about 400 Navy airmen killed flying from Philippine bases: 139 from Mabalacat, 86 from Cebu, 71 from Nichols Field in Manila, 29 from Clark, 20 from Angeles, 19 from Davao and smaller numbers from seven other fields. The Army’s special attack dead in the Philippines are less fully recorded; the Chiran museum’s total of 1,036 Army dead covers the Okinawa campaign only, and the Army lost several hundred more men in the Philippines.

The units were used up as fast as they could be formed. Replacement pilots ferried in from Formosa and Japan were assigned to new special attack units within days, and by December the attacks were being flown by men with little operational experience, in whatever aircraft were serviceable: Zeros, Judys, Vals, twin-engine Frances bombers and, for the Army, Ki-43 fighters, Ki-48 and Ki-51 light bombers and Ki-67 heavy bombers. The Army’s Banda unit illustrates the cost. Formed at Hokota on 21 October, it lost five men over Nichols Field on 5 November and seven more in attacks on Leyte Gulf between 12 and 20 November. One of its non-commissioned pilots, Sasaki Tomoji, came back from his first attack and from eight more; his story is told in Chapter 3.

By the second week of January 1945 there were almost no Japanese aircraft left in the Philippines. The 1st Air Fleet’s headquarters, which had been in tunnels at Bamban near Clark Field since November, was withdrawn, and Ōnishi went to Formosa, where the fleet was rebuilt with new special attack units. The remaining ground crews and air personnel on Luzon were formed into infantry units and fought in the mountains west of Clark until the end of the war. On 21 January 1945, aircraft from Formosa struck Task Force 38 off the island and hit the carriers Ticonderoga (CV-14) and Langley (CVL-27); Ticonderoga was hit twice and suffered heavy casualties.

The Navy’s First Answers

The U.S. Navy recognized within days that it faced a deliberate tactic, not a series of desperate individual acts, and its commanders began to change their methods during the campaign itself. The Commander in Chief’s staff later analysed the attacks statistically. Its Anti-Suicide Action Summary of 31 August 1945 found that from October 1944 to January 1945 about 54 percent of the suicide aircraft that got through to attack ships scored hits or damaging near-misses, against 45 percent from February to May 1945, and that “27 suicide tries were required to sink a ship in February-May as compared with 14 in October-January.” The Philippine months, in other words, were the most effective period of the special attack war, because the defences had not yet adapted.

The changes came in stages. Task Force 38 increased the number of fighters aboard its carriers at the expense of bombers and torpedo planes; posted picket destroyers well out from the carrier groups to give earlier warning; kept larger combat air patrols over the force from dawn to dusk; and, before the Mindoro and Luzon landings, flew continuous fighter sweeps over the Japanese airfields on Luzon to destroy aircraft on the ground and keep them there. The scheme, worked out by Cmdr. John S. Thach, McCain’s operations officer, became known as the “Big Blue Blanket”. Ships added light anti-aircraft guns, and gunners learned that a suicide plane had to be shot apart, not merely hit. These measures, and the larger system built for Okinawa, are the subject of Chapter 7.

27 suicide tries were required to sink a ship in February-May as compared with 14 in October-January.

— Commander in Chief, U.S. Fleet, Anti-Suicide Action Summary (CominCh P-0011), 31 August 1945 [contemporary]

What could not be changed was the logic that made the attacks attractive to the Japanese command. In the Philippines a few hundred aircraft flown to destruction had sunk two escort carriers, three destroyers and many smaller ships, damaged nearly every class of warship in the fleet, and killed more than 1,700 American and Australian sailors on the ships named in the NHHC summaries alone. The next targets were the fleets off Iwo Jima, where on 21 February 1945 Saratoga was badly damaged and the escort carrier Bismarck Sea sunk (see the site’s chapter Sea, Air and the B-29s: Kamikazes off Iwo Jima), the anchorage at Ulithi, raided on 11 March, and above all Okinawa (Chapter 5).