Battle of Surigao Strait

Appendices

275 Appendix 1 The Riddles/Enigmas of Surigao Strait In this new account of the battle of Surigao Strait, particular attention has been paid to unraveling key lingering mysteries or more simply interesting discrepancies. An effort has been made at solving or attempting to solve these. A secondary objective has to been to provide a possibly more accurate indicator of where future dives or research might look to shed more light on the battle. With Surigao three such significant riddles were propagated by the accepted account of the battle. These were . . . The Mysterious Fate of Battleship Fuso and Its Extraordinary Explosion As any readers familiar with the battle of Surigao Strait and Leyte Gulf know, it is invariably alleged that at about 0309 battleship Fuso was hit by one or more torpedoes to starboard and fell out of line. Possibly it was then in flames, for not long afterward, at 0338 or 0345 depending on the source, Fuso violently exploded and split in two. Even more spectacular, it was unreservedly asserted that both halves remained afloat for an hour or more, burning furiously. Despite the scarcely credible nature of this event, it has been uncritically accepted. That a 35,000-ton battleship, with its sturdy construction and great weight, could suffer a magazine explosion strong enough to break it in two, and yet the surviving sections retain balance and buoyancy enough to remain afloat, confounded common sense and probability. Yet with no Fuso crew testimony or closely adjacent observing ships, historians have been at the mercy of this claim. It was naturally assumed that the evidence must have been strong to lead to such conclusions , after all. Then painstaking examination of the primary evidence starting in the late 1990s began to suggest a different scenario. We have seen how overlooked and never previously published survivor reports from U.S. interrogations had revealed the greatest prize of all: a survivor of Fuso. Hideo Ogawa’s 1945 testimony states that around 0300 Fuso was hit by two or three torpedoes in the starboard side, and while some power remained, it began to list steadily to starboard . Forty minutes after being hit, that is, shortly before 0400, battleship Fuso capsized to starboard and Ogawa and others were washed away. Though POW evidence can be uneven, Ogawa’s testimony so precisely fits the facts and more likely probabilities that it seems pedantic to question it. Further, Hideo Ogawa returned to Japan, and in 1984 he co-authored, with Yasuo Kato, an article on Fuso’s last voyage. It strongly 276 · Appendix1 agreed with the outline of the interrogation report, while filling in some remaining gaps in vivid detail.1 In short, while it is likely that Fuso did not explode at all, once it was believed to have done so that prejudiced and colored interpretation of subsequent reports and observations on that point after 0345 by historians on both sides. What then of the supposed sightings of two “blazing sections” by both sides in the pre-dawn hours?? Not only U.S. reports, but the testimony of Shima’s torpedo officer Tokichi Mori, spoke of two burning pyres presumed to be ships. It is possible to get mired in a myriad of speculations, but in essence, the scenarios to explain these sightings boil down to these: 1. Fuso exploded after upending and broke in two, and the stern half retained enough buoyancy to remain afloat for a time, surrounded by burning oil. 2. There was floating wreckage and burning oil, but it belonged to the exploded Yamagumo or possibly Michishio. 3. The big ships burning assumed to be Fuso were mistaken sightings of fires on Mogami and Yamashiro. 4. The “sections” were actually simply a very large burning pool of oil, which was certainly present and was photographed. 5. Any combination of the above. When the actual primary USN accounts are consulted, they reveal surprising ambiguity that encourages acceptance of possibility 4. First to be considered is the official report of Oldendorf, speaking of the 0529 gunfire target that the War College analysis would go on to associate with “the bow of Fuso.” Italics are mine. Estimates: at one time after daylight, eight separate columns of smoke, photo shows four, but these are believed to be fires rising to surface because of downed planes, for various reasons—two or three fires had been seen in the darkness. 0716 plane is launched and pilot saw one pool of burning oil (photo) and five patches of...