"The fire-eating and impetuous Admiral William "Bull" Halsey – Commander of the hard-htting fast carrier Task Force 38 – reportedly once remarked that "if there was a Japanese ship he could feel sorry for at all, it would be the KUMANO". There was a good reason. Despite his well-documented loathing of his Japanese enemies, the heavy cruiser KUMANO had sought to cheat death with a tenacity that was truly admirable, indeed almost miraculous. That it was ultimately in vain – as it would be for virtually all IJN heavy ships – was more a testimony of United States logistical might and persistence than any failure of design or effort.
The KUMANO was one of the four MOGAMI-class cruisers, and like her two remaining sisters MOGAMI and SUZUYA, perished in the fierce air and surface actions during the Leyte campaign. By an eerie quirk, KUMANO's last epic battle to survive the crushing power of her adversaries would span exactly a month, from 25 October to 25 November. In this time frame she would be subjected to a veritable rain of torpedoes and bombs and attacked by almost every conceivable means, air, surface gunfire, and submarine torpedo attack. In absorbing each of these and remaining somehow afloat she built a reputation for being seemingly more indestructible than a battleship. This article tells the story as revealed on the Japanese side, and shows that the actual number of hits and damage was far-less than claimed. However, it takes nothing away from KUMANO's Captain Hitomi and his brave crew's fight to save her -- even the actual confirmed hits are a daunting number.
The vessel's epic begins within the larger epic known as the Battle off Samar the morning of 25 October 1944 during the Battle of Leyte Gulf . KUMANO was part of Vice-Admiral Kurita Takeo's First Diversion Striking Force, a powerful unit of battleships and cruisers with destroyer squadrons dispatched to destroy the beachhead of General of the Army Douglas MacArthur near Tacloban on Leyte. Five days prior, MacArthur had made his triumphant "return" to the Philippines; but seven days prior, on 18 October, Combined Fleet had mobilized nearly all its remaining strength to converge on Leyte Gulf to destroy the enemy or die trying…"
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