"Greatest of All Sea Battles" Topic
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Tango01 | 25 Nov 2017 12:07 p.m. PST |
"The Battle of Leyte Gulf was the biggest and most multifaceted naval battle in history. It involved hundreds of ships, nearly 200,000 participants, and spanned more than 100,000 square miles. Some of the largest and most powerful ships ever built were sunk, and thousands of men went to the bottom of the sea with them. Every facet of naval warfare—air, surface, subsurface, and amphibious—was involved in this great struggle, and the weapons used included bombs of every type, guns of every caliber, torpedoes, mines, rockets, and even a forerunner of the modern guided missile. But more than mere size made this battle significant. The cast of characters included such names as Halsey, Nimitz, MacArthur, even Roosevelt. It introduced the largest guns ever used in a naval battle and a new Japanese tactic that would eventually kill more U.S. sailors and sink more U.S. ships than any other used in the war. It was the last clash of the dreadnoughts and the first and only time that gunfire sank a U.S. aircraft carrier. It was replete with awe-inspiring heroism, failed intelligence, sapient tactical planning and execution, flawed strategy, brilliant deception, incredible ironies, great controversies, and a plethora of lessons about strategy, tactics, and operations. If all this is true, why is Leyte Gulf not a household word—like Pearl Harbor? Why have fewer Americans heard of it than the Battle of Midway or the Normandy invasion of Europe? The answer lies in timing. Leyte Gulf occurred late in the war, after several years of conflict, when great battles had become commonplace. Tales from such places as Midway, Stalingrad, Guadalcanal, and Normandy were by then frequent fare. More significant, however, was that the Battle of Leyte Gulf happened when most of the United States had accepted ultimate victory as merely a matter of time rather than as a debatable question. Midway was accepted widely as the turning point of the war in the Pacific, a dramatic reversal of what had been a losing trend. The D-Day invasion at Normandy was seen as the true beginning of the end of war in Europe. But many saw Leyte Gulf as the continuation of a normal and inevitable trend. Lacking the drama of earlier battles, Leyte Gulf was then eclipsed by later events—a near-reversal at the Battle of the Bulge, ferocious fighting at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and the cataclysmic dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki…" Main page link Which is the best book you recomended about the Gulf of Leyte Naval Battle?
Thanks in adavance for your guidance.
Amicalement Armand
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Shagnasty | 25 Nov 2017 3:04 p.m. PST |
"Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors" by James D. Hornfischer is highly recommended for he Battle of Samar island. |
KniazSuvorov | 25 Nov 2017 7:59 p.m. PST |
Samar is usually portrayed as a David-and-Goliath struggle, with the puny American DDEs facing off against massively-superior Japanese battleships. Proponents of this mythos --and Hornfischer has been one of the leading voices -- tend to compare ship tonnages and gun calibres to emphasise the mismatch. In reality Samar was a David-and-Goliath struggle… but the U.S. Navy was Goliath, and Goliath won. Gun calibres and tonnage meant relatively little by then; the Americans' vastly-superior fire-control technology at that point in the war meant that a 2,000-ton American destroyer was actually a more effective warship than a 65,000-ton Japanese battleship… And the hundreds of American warplanes available for the battle were far more effective still. By 1944 the warplane was uncontestably superior to the big gun as a naval weapon, and Leyte Gulf was a battle where the relative balance of air power was so lopsided as to make the ultimate result of the battle all but inevitable. The Japanese plan was a clever attempt to eke out a win using obsolescent technology, but it had no hope of reversing the momentum of the war. Nothing the surface fleet did could make up for the loss of the carrier air wings earlier in the war. Yes, there was drama and heroism in plenty at Leyte… But ultimately it was a battle of no great consequence. All those more famous battles are justly more famous. |
Mark 1 | 25 Nov 2017 9:25 p.m. PST |
I think of Leyte Gulf as the Pacific War's equivalent of Bagration on the Eastern Front. It was an operation … a series of connected battles, too big and too multi-faceted to be called just a battle … that was fought after the tide had turned, after the momentum had been established, after the handwriting was on the wall. It was a lop-sided victory because one side was a lop-sided over-match, in terms of forces and the logistics behind them. Leyte (or Bagration) was one out of an unbroken string of victories stretching back to the two turning-point campaigns of Coral Sea / Midway, and Guadalcanal (or Stalingrad and Kursk). But it was the biggest one. And it both demonstrated, and furthered, the gap between the rising victors and the falling losers. -Mark (aka: Mk 1) |
EJNashIII | 26 Nov 2017 2:25 p.m. PST |
The battle was much like the 3rd grade bully getting beat up by five 6th graders. He might have completely deserved it and maybe even got a few licks in, but overall it was just painful to watch. |
Tango01 | 26 Nov 2017 3:34 p.m. PST |
Thanks!. Amicalement Armand
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ScottWashburn | 01 Dec 2017 11:12 a.m. PST |
"the Americans' vastly-superior fire-control technology at that point in the war meant that a 2,000-ton American destroyer was actually a more effective warship than a 65,000-ton Japanese battleship…" Maybe in theory, but if you were a sailor on one of those 2,000 ton destroyers, the hard fact was that you could hit that 65,000 ton battleship with your main guns dozens of times without doing any significant damage, whereas the battleship only needed to hit you with its main armament ONCE. I really don't think the men on those tin cans would be the least bit comforted to be told: "Hey, don't worry about it. Our technology is better and we have overwhelming forces-they're just not here at the moment." |
Charlie 12 | 04 Dec 2017 8:16 p.m. PST |
The best book on the battle has to be H.P. Wilmott's "The Battle of Leyte Gulf: The Last Fleet Action". Covers the entire battle (and the neverending debates it spawned) very well. |
Tango01 | 04 Dec 2017 9:11 p.m. PST |
Thanks also!. Amicalement Armand |
Blutarski | 05 Dec 2017 6:37 p.m. PST |
KniazSuvurov wrote – "Gun calibres and tonnage meant relatively little by then; the Americans' vastly-superior fire-control technology at that point in the war meant that a 2,000-ton American destroyer was actually a more effective warship than a 65,000-ton Japanese battleship…" I would respectfully but intensely disagree with this assessment. B |
Captain Gideon | 06 Dec 2017 10:12 p.m. PST |
Leyte Gulf was a very big Battle with 367 ships and 200,000 men,but it wasn't the largest Naval Battle in History. In 256 BC at the Battle of Ecnomus the Romans and Carthaginians fought with a combined 680 ships and 290,000 men. Just thought I'd let you know. |
ScottWashburn | 07 Dec 2017 12:37 p.m. PST |
That's very interesting Captain G! Even allowing for the fact that numbers given for ancient battles are notoriously suspect, that's still a lot of ships and a lot of men. However, since most of those ancient ships would have displaced only a couple hundred tons or less, I think Leyte wins the prize for tonnage of warships. :) |
Captain Gideon | 07 Dec 2017 4:01 p.m. PST |
ScottWashburn tonnage wasn't the question and I didn't mention tonnage. I mentioned the number of ships and men that took part. Also who said that Leyte Gulf was the Greatest of all sea battles? Also Leyte Gulf was a series of Battles as part of a Campaign,and not a single battle/engagement. It was a foregone conclusion that the Americans were going to win. That's all I'm saying. |
Blutarski | 07 Dec 2017 7:10 p.m. PST |
Savo Island is generally considered to have been the greatest naval defeat ever suffered by the USN. FWIW. B |
Captain Gideon | 07 Dec 2017 11:43 p.m. PST |
And let's not forget Midway the great Carrier Battle as it was the turning point of the war. |
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