![]() And finally, there were MacArthur's special ties to the Philippines. Japanese forces virtually controlled the air and sea approaches such that only a bold and clandestine move had any hope of success. Then came the realization that escape from the Philippines was more easily ordered than carried out. First, there was the natural reluctance of the general to abandon his command. Roosevelt had ordered the general to leave. To allow him to fall into the hands of an enemy whose propagandists predicted that they would see him hanged publicly in the Imperial Plaza in Tokyo was simply unthinkable. MacArthur had been elevated to heroic proportions not equaled since Admiral George Dewey had defeated the Spanish Fleet in these same Philippine waters at the close of the last century. In the gathering darkness of those early days of the war, when defeat had followed defeat, the brave but futile stand that MacArthur's forces had made on the fortified peninsula of Bataan had been a welcome ray of light. General Douglas MacArthur, 25 pounds lighter than he had been three months earlier, removed his gold-encrusted khaki cap and raised it in a final salute to Corregidor, the island-fortress he had been ordered to abandon. Buildings that had housed a proud garrison lay in ruin. Trees had been reduced to mere jagged stumps. Where lush vegetation and vibrantly colored tropical flowers had flourished, all that remained was the shattered remnants of an army on the verge of capitulation. Army general stood at the water's edge and surveyed his wilting domain. ![]() victory in the battle may have been viewed as somewhat mundane by that stage of the war, a defeat would have been disastrous. It was vastly important to millions of Filipinos and thousands of Allied prisoners of war whose liberation from Japanese oppression depended upon it. It represented the last hope of the Japanese Empire and the last significant sortie of the Imperial Japanese Navy. 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.īut the Battle of Leyte Gulf was indeed pivotal. But many saw Leyte Gulf as the continuation of a normal and inevitable trend. The D-Day invasion at Normandy was seen as the true beginning of the end of war in Europe. Midway was accepted widely as the turning point of the war in the Pacific, a dramatic reversal of what had been a losing trend. 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. Tales from such places as Midway, Stalingrad, Guadalcanal, and Normandy were by then frequent fare. Leyte Gulf occurred late in the war, after several years of conflict, when great battles had become commonplace. 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. ![]() 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. It was the last clash of the dreadnoughts and the first and only time that gunfire sank a U.S. It introduced the largest guns ever used in a naval battle and a new Japanese tactic that would eventually kill more U.S. The cast of characters included such names as Halsey, Nimitz, MacArthur, even Roosevelt. 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.īut more than mere size made this battle significant. 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. It involved hundreds of ships, nearly 200,000 participants, and spanned more than 100,000 square miles. The Battle of Leyte Gulf was the biggest and most multifaceted naval battle in history.
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