"The title of this article "shell-game" is apt for more than one reason. Not only did the sister battleships YAMASHIRO and FUSO die under a deluge of shells and torpedoes, but their identities have been continually transposed -- as in the proverbial game of shells on a table -- by historians ever since. Indeed, since both were members of BatDiv 2, both battleships shared most of their careers together, and by an interesting quirk, died on the same night within miles of each other, victims of the same enemy, during the Battle of Surigao Strait (October 24-25, 1944). Thus stated in this bare form, it is obvious that such circumstances, particularly during a night battle, could easily produce confusion. Such indeed has been the case, aggravated by the fact that FUSO seems to have had no survivors post-war and YAMASHIRO only ten.
Predictably, these factors have led to confusion, even among the Japanese who were present during the action. As a result, down through the decades since World War II's end some authors have said that it was YAMASHIRO that fell to gunfire and FUSO to destroyer torpedoes, and others the opposite of this. When Samuel Eliot Morison and the U.S. Naval War College published their distinguished histories of the naval conflict, they came down decisively in favor of the view that FUSO was torpedoed first, fell out of line and blew up at approximately 0338, while flagship YAMASHIRO continued into the storm of gunfire and sank later, at 0419. This reversed a number of the contemporary accounts of the battle that had been based on the interrogation of SHIGURE's skipper. The Morison view was again affirmed in 1979 in Adrian Stewart's respected book on Leyte Gulf. Recently, however, this widely accepted interpretation of the events surrounding the battle has been inexplicably challenged and reversed yet again by the most current writers on the subject.
In 1994 a new book, The Battle of Leyte Gulf, by Thomas Cutler appeared, and opted for the YAMASHIRO being hit first and left behind to explode, while FUSO faced the gunfire of the U.S. Battle Line. Although presenting no clear justification for the reversal, nor citing new IJN material, Cutler's book was the first new work on Leyte Gulf in some time, and presumably carried weight. The revision gained momentum early in 1999, when an important authority on Japanese warships repeated the transposition of the BB's fates. The Polish author Janusz Skulski published his latest contribution to his acclaimed "Anatomy of the Ship" series--a comprehensive study of the battleship FUSO. In it, Skulski is aware of and explicitly discusses the fact that two versions of the fate of the twin battleships exist, the first being the version put forth by Morison and the Naval War College. Skulski then continues by stating that there has always been a competing "Japanese" version of the tale that states essentially the reverse of the Morison version. Skulski comes down in favor of the second interpretation, asserting that it was YAMASHIRO that was the early victim, and FUSO that sank later at 0419, thus directly contradicting Morison…"
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