10.5°N 125.5°E Pacific Battle of Leyte Gulf
Briefing
Fought between 23 and 26 October 1944 across four separate engagements, Leyte Gulf was the largest naval battle in history and saw the first organised kamikaze attacks. The Imperial Japanese Navy committed nearly its entire remaining strength and was finished as a fighting force.
Books Covering This Event (9)
Popular History
The classic single-volume history of the American war against Japan.
The sinking of the USS Indianapolis and the five days her crew spent in shark-infested waters.
The story of a small American escort carrier group that took on the main Japanese fleet at the Battle off Samar.
The brutal final year of the Pacific War, from the Philippines to the atomic bombings.
The second volume of Toll's Pacific War Trilogy, covering the brutal middle years from Guadalcanal to the Marianas.
America's war of annihilation in the Pacific, 1944-45 — Saipan, the Marianas Turkey Shoot, and the road to the bomb.
The final volume of the Pacific War Trilogy: Leyte Gulf, the kamikazes, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and the bomb.
Historical Fiction
Officers of a Pacific minesweeper relieve their unstable captain during a typhoon — and face court-martial for it.
The sequel to The Winds of War carries the Henry family from Pearl Harbor through Midway, Leyte Gulf, and Auschwitz.
The War in Books: Leyte Gulf
By some measures the largest sea battle ever fought, and one morning that stands apart.
Leyte Gulf is a difficult battle to grasp because it was really four, spread over days and across hundreds of miles of the Philippines. The Japanese plan was a desperate one, designed to lure the main American carrier force away while other fleets struck at the landings. It nearly worked. James Hornfischer’s The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors tells the story of what happened when it did, in the waters off Samar, where a small force of escort carriers, destroyers and destroyer escorts found itself facing Japanese battleships. It is one of the most gripping naval histories in print.
For the wider picture, Ian Toll’s Twilight of the Gods gives the fullest account of the battle in its place in the last phase of the war, including the first organised kamikaze attacks. Hornfischer’s The Fleet at Flood Tide centres on the Marianas campaign that came before it, and The Conquering Tide, Toll’s previous volume, brings the story up to the summer of 1944. Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny and War and Remembrance show life aboard the American fleet of those years in fiction. Read Toll for the shape of it and Hornfischer for the morning off Samar.