Battle of Surigao Strait

Epilogue “A thing repeated will happen a third time.”

Epilogue “A thing repeated will happen a third time.” With the sinking of Nachi, the sad and futile saga of Third Section and 2YB essentially reaches its end. The dénouement is swiftly told. The depressingly small number of Nachi survivors joined those of Mogami and Akebono ashore in Manila. Here they soon had an opportunity to sate their interest in the past days’ events by questioning Lieutenant Commander Shigeru Nishino when his Shigure arrived in Manila November 9 from Brunei, en route to Japan with Junyo and Tone. During this brief time, Shima, Mori, and other survivors of Nachi, as well as various Mogami men such as Fukushi, eagerly compared notes with Shigure’s skipper. They satisfied some lingering questions they had about the battle and fighting of Nishimura’s Third Section. These discussions had considerable impact on the Japanese interpretation of events, and influenced the final form of 2YB’s report drawn up later. Naturally, they had no access at all to the survivors of Yamashiro, Fuso, Asagumo, Michishio, and Yamagumo whom the Americans captured; indeed, even postwar accounts—Japanese and American both— would remain largely unaware of them.1 Between the violence of the sinkings, exposure in the water, strafing by U.S. forces, and finally murderous Filipinos, captured survivors were tragically few: ten each from Yamashiro and Fuso, four from Michishio, two from Yamagumo, and thirty-nine from Asagumo. For Shima, his involvement in the Philippines finally ended November 13; after another big, devastating raid on the port, he departed for Singapore via Brunei aboard Hatsushimo. By this time he had lost another of his command, DD Akebono, blasted and left canted on its port side against capsized Akishimo on the bottom at Cavite dockyard. Upon reaching Brunei, Shima transferred subsequently to his old teammate, Ashigara. When the aftermath is remembered , the entwined fates of Shoji Nishimura’s Third Section and Kiyohide 271 272 · BattleofSurigaoStrait Shima’s 2YB becomes one of the most tragic and star-crossed in naval history since the deadly voyage of Czarist Russian Admiral Rojdestvensky’s doomed Baltic Fleet.2 The Japanese have a saying, “A thing repeated will happen a third time.” So it proved with lucky Shigure. On December 17, 1944, it departed Kure with Hinoki and Momi of Desdiv 52, escorting the new carrier Unryu to Manila. Unryu was torpedoed and sunk, and after rescuing survivors, Shigure headed back toward Kure. The next day its old wound from Surigao opened, and it had a steering valve failure for a time. Its two Desdiv 52 comrades fared worse: they proceeded to Manila, and were both sunk there with few survivors two days apart. Once again, Shigure alone survived of the force it put to sea with.3 Of the two Surigao battle forces, only four units—Ashigara, Kasumi, Ushio, and Shigure—lived to see 1945. Shigure’s fabled luck ran out less than a month after New Year’s; on January 24, 1945, while escorting a tanker from Hong Kong to Singapore, Shigure was torpedoed in the port quarter by Bluefin. Its after magazine exploded, and it sank within fifteen minutes. Even now, its fortune did not quite desert it: only 37 men were lost, and its captain and 270 men were rescued.4 Kasumi would venture forth on the fabled Last Sortie of the Imperial Navy, joining super-battleship Yamato in its suicide run to Okinawa—a mission even more hopeless and “special” than Surigao Strait. Crippled by bomb hits that left seventeen dead, Kasumi was scuttled. Ashigara lingered for a while, but in June fell to five torpedoes from HMS Trenchant in Bangka Strait. Its losses were kinder than its sister ship’s—853, including Captain Hayao Miura, survived. By a singular irony, it perished in the performance of 2YB’s original assigned task: a troop movement. Ushio alone survived the war, moldering in Yokosuka, port engine disabled.5 At a press conference with secretary of the navy Forrestal on December 6, 1944, ComDesRon 54 McManes “made some significant observations on Japanese weaknesses” at the battle. “For one thing,” he said, the Japanese “entered the strait in column, thus permitting American warships to pick them off by the classic maneuver of ‘crossing the T.’ Their naval marksmanship is ‘sporadic’, as probably because of the inferiority of their technical equipment, they do not seem to be able to coordinate range and deflection.”6 McManes also had some interesting remarks on the “question of considerable and somewhat controversial interest in...