Two US submarines catch Kurita's fleet at midnight; three heavy cruisers torpedoed by dawn
Before dawn on October 23, 1944, the Japanese Navy's Center Force slipped past Palawan Island on its way to Leyte Gulf, where it aimed to smash the American invasion fleet supporting MacArthur's return to the Philippines. The American submarines Darter and Dace picked up the formation on radar at 1:16 a.m. and struck at first light, torpedoing the heavy cruisers Atago, Takao, and Maya. Atago and Maya sank quickly, and Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita, the Japanese commander, had to swim away from his own sinking flagship. Two American submarines had struck the first blow of the largest naval battle of the war.
Two diesel submarines, acting on their own initiative in a passage no one expected them to be patrolling, opened the decisive naval battle of the Pacific war before the main fleets ever met. The strike crippled Kurita's command structure at the outset and forced him to shift his flag mid-battle, a disruption that American commanders would exploit for the next three days.
QWhat finally destroyed the grounded submarine Darter after scuttling attempts failed?
Torpedoes from the submarines Dace and Rock missed Darter entirely and hit the reef instead, so the job fell to deck guns. The submarine Nautilus arrived and pounded Darter with repeated hits from her 6-inch deck guns, and on 31 October her commander concluded the wreck was only fit for scrap and sailed off. The Japanese never bothered salvaging it either, leaving Darter's wreck on Bombay Shoal, which the Japanese also left untouched. Darter sat there, unsalvaged and unfinished, until the war ended.
QHow did Darter's contact report reach the Japanese without them acting on it?
A radio operator aboard the battleship Yamato actually intercepted at least one of Darter's three contact reports as she radioed Kurita's position into the night. Despite that warning sitting in Japanese hands hours before the attack, Kurita failed to order any additional antisubmarine precautions for his formation. The Center Force kept steaming through Palawan Passage at a steady pace, giving Darter and Dace time to race ahead on the surface and set up a submerged ambush at first light. Kurita simply never acted on the warning sitting in his own fleet's hands.
QWhat became of the crippled cruisers Takao and Myōkō after they survived the submarine attack?
Takao limped back to Brunei under escort, but by January 1945 she had moved on to Singapore, where she was joined by the heavy cruiser Myōkō, damaged separately during the Sibuyan Sea fighting. Japanese commanders judged both ships beyond repair and never returned them to active duty. Instead the two cruisers sat moored in Singapore harbor for the remainder of the war, stripped of their offensive role and used only as floating anti-aircraft batteries to defend the port from air raids. Takao and Myōkō spent the rest of the war moored in Singapore harbor as anti-aircraft batteries.
