Nitpick. Straits 
No, the US strategic objective was the invasion of the Philippines, liberating them and cutting off the Japanese from resources vital to their war effort. The US fast battleships were used to escort the carier groups, Halsey was very reluctant to detach them when he received reports of Kurita’s attack. From the wiki article:
Because his most powerful assets, his carrier groups, were busy attacking Ozawa’s carriers. Sinking the carriers was Halsey’s priority. Halsey was severly criticised for failing to prevent Kurita from attacking.
You are simply making stuff up.
This is silly, Halsey did not lose 200 planes attacking Kurita. They could be refuelled and rearmed to attack the next day. Most of the attacks were made on Musashi, but two other battleships were also hit and a cruiser was sunk. Kurita would have run out of ships long before Halsey ran out of aircraft.
Of the 259 sorties against Kurita’s centre group on the 24th October, many were made by escorting fighters, not attack aircraft. Halsey was not able to commit his entire strength against Kurita, as the largest of his four carrier groups had detached to resupply, and was not recalled in time to play much part. Another group was busy striking Japanses airfields. For comparison, 527 sorties were flown against Ozawa’s carrier group the next day.
I can’t make any sense of this point.
Yes, the battleship has higher fuel consumption than a smaller carrier, but not a supercarrier of the same displacement.
Aircraft carrier were the pre-emiment weapon of the Pacific campaign, which made the island-hopping strategy possible. Please, try reading a book on the subject sometime.
As long as everyone is playing nitpick, I’ll go back and get this one:
CVL- Light Carrier
CVE- Escort Carrier
CV- Fleet Carrier
[/nitpick]
You’re welcome.
I can’t find anything to nitpick in your nitpick of a nitpick of a nitpick, so I’ll simply observe that you smell. 
That’s harsh, man.
Ozawa’s carriers were a ruse to lure assets into chasing them. Those ships were barely combat capable.
It worked, Halsey chased them and, famously, Admiral Nimitz sent the following to Halsey:
“Where is repeat where is Task Force 34? The world wonders.”
Carriers were indeed important but attacking islands without battleships at your back was usually a bad thing. Without the battleships the island hopping campaign would have been substantially more difficult. I cannot find a cite right now but I seem to recall some islands were attacked without battleship support and things did not go well for the invaders.
Interestingly, the bolded words here were not the snark they look like. It was routine at the time, when encrypting messages, to throw a few meaningless words on the end to pad out the message, making it harder to crack the encryption. (That is still routine, BTW.) Those words are randomly generated by whatever convenient means. The cryptotech (whateverthehell they were called then) saw words that could plausibly be part of the message, given its nature, so included them on the copy that was delivered to Halsey, rather than properly stripping them. Halsey took it as a rebuke, broke off his action against Ozawa’s task force, and went racing back to Leyte, rather than finishing off Ozawa. Thus some of Ozawa’s CVs survived to fight (futilely) another day.
Just an interesting side note… Carry on.
All correct except all the Japanese carries were sunk.
Whatever. Some of Ozawa’s ships survived Halsey’s ministrations, that otherwise wouldn’t have. Do I need to list them? If so, find the list yourself. My only point was that Halsey turned around and left a few alive, because he falsely thought Nimitz was reaming him. Entirely due to a misunderstanding. I was pointing out the source of the misunderstanding.
I appreciate your classy response.
all these unnecessary posts and cites from you just prove:
- halsey wanted to destroy the japanese main battleship force using his own battleships. lee’s battleships were just 42 miles away from ozawa’s units when the “turkey trots to water” message was received.
- the southern japanese force was effectively bottled up using night destroyer torpedo runs and in-line battleship gunnery during the day.
- the central main force got through because there was no similar battleship screen like in surigao strait.
which means only one thing: leyte gulf was undeniably a battleship action.
incomplete quote. he made the northward dash away from the 7th nevertheless. his strategy of using BB’s was his main weakness. he would have to move away from the 7th if he spotted the main japanese force.
incorrect. halsey thought ozawa’s force WAS the main battleship group. the japanese carriers had camo paint of their decks to make them look like batlleships when viewed from the air. that’s how well the japanese knew halsey.
i don’t think so. i’m not so limited as to rely on (dubious) wiki quotes.
this shows how little you understood the battle. in a mid-ocean fight like midway, sure, currier planes could just shuttle back and forth to their carriers and keep searching/attacking enemy units. but this was archipelagic fighting. your enemy could pop out from a number of points. look back to my post. the reason the central force slipped through was because there was no surface screen. the fact that halsey thought his air strike had crippled kurita sufficiently to leave him behind aggravated his error. even if he followed up his first attack one or two japanese BBs would have slipped through. it’s easy to lose track of even big ships if they’re weaving around islands.
academic, he was focused on ozawa. note also that ozawa’s one air attack (that sank one escort carrier of the 7th) was largely dismissed. halsey through they were land-based planes. that’s how confused things got.
you can’t imagine who has to travel farther to hit a target from common starting point: a carrier or a battleship??? :rolleyes:
academic.
oh i don’t doubt that. but battleships were right there all the time. they were crucial up to the end of the war (my main point.) the iowa class ships were on active duty and deployment up to 1957. in fact, in the last 40 years, the US navy still appeared to prefer iowa-class ships when coming within 20 miles of a hostile shore.
“The world wonders” bit may have been seen as snark by Halsey but I think when your boss phones in during a battle essentially asking, “Where the fuck are you?” then you are not where you should be.
Halsey ignored calls for his help.
Halsey took the Japanese ruse hook, line and sinker.
It turned out ok for the Americans in the end but Halsey fucked up in this case.
That said armchair quaterbacking is different then being there. I am not prepared to crucify Halsey for this. The best laid plans never survive contact with the enemy.
It remains that Halsey screwed up. Understandably screwed up? I am not sure. Nimitz sure was puzzled.
To add on to that, submarines are SS, Patrol Torpedo boats are PT, and there are various others including Landing Craft, Landing Ships, etc.
You can add G to a prefix to show the ship is armed with guided missiles (such as all modern American cruisers, referred to as CGs, or modern destroyers, DDGs), and you can add N to the end to show it is nuclear powered (SSN, CVN, CGN), and you can add B to show that it is armed with ballistic missiles (SSBN).
All of this refers to American ships. Other navies may use similar or entirely different systems.
no u
Please ignore this post, pressed the wrong key on my browser and submitted by mistake.
It appears that you aren’t interested in any facts that contradict your pre-conceived notions. I’d remind you that the tag line of this forum is “fighting ignorance”.
Cite? Here is a picture of one of the Japanese carriers at the battle. Where is this camoflage?
Wikipedia shouldn’t be entirely trusted for controversial issues, but it’s articles are supported by a list of references. It’s not just the imagination of some random guy on the internet.
It’s generally far easier to keep track of an enemy fleet in a archipelago than in the open ocean. For example, if you have a confirmed contact report that is a couple hours old, the enemy must be in a circle of ocean constrained by their top speed. If much of that area is land, there is far less ocean to search. If their are only a few navigable passages, such as at Leyte, the task of reconnaissance becomes much easier.
I agree Halsey blundered by not leaving his battleships behind to guard the San Bernardino Strait.
You mangled your original sentence, I assume you meant to say battleship guns instead of carrier guns? If that is what you are saying, it’s one reason why the battleship was not a cost-effective weapon compared to a carrier.
They were certainly useful, but not crucial, and not cost-effective.
He was warned prior to the battle by Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher that Japanese carrier aviation was all but finished, based on their performance at the earlier Battle of the Philippine Sea. Halsey was perhaps prudent not to assume that, for all he knew the Japanese might still have had a reserve of trained pilots. His aggression could also be justified, sinking Japanese ships was one way to protect the invasion force. His biggest blunders were to take his battleships north with him instead of using them to guard San Bernardo stait, and poor communications and co-ordination with the 7th fleet. Based his earlier ambiguous radio messages about forming his battleships into a new task group, the other commanders assumed he had in fact done so. Other naval officers also correctly guessed that Ozawa’s attack was a diversion.
Halsey was not a complete fool, but his performance compares poorly with the much more conservative Admiral Spruance at the Battle of the Philippine Sea, who deployed his forces with protection of the invasion as his highest priority.
I chose the insult carefully for GQ, as technically we all smell.
I’ll nitpick this myself before anyone else does. I’m aware there is a camoflage pattern there, that should have read “battleship camoflage”.
Ironically, I think he’s following a common misconception from the exact pic you linked to. The dazzle-like camouflage pattern resembles two battleship turrets, which have made some believe that the Japanese carriers were made out to look like battleships.
The notion is of course absurd, as a carrier would be impossible to hide by merely drawing turrets on it. Just the stack makes it very obvious that that’s the Zuiho.
I believe the goal of the camo pattern wasn’t so much to disguise the ship but to confuse a bomber pilot just that little bit when laying in his attack. Note that the pattern painted on the deck indicates a ship on a different heading than the carrier it is painted on. Similar camo patterns painted on the side of the ships included things like fake bow waves or outlines of ships to confuse spotters as to how far away and how fast a ship was moving.
Obviously, the “Dazzle Paint” gradually disappeared once radar became a common feature on warships.
I think that’s a false bow on the deck. In poor visibility, it could conceivably confuse a bomber pilot. Yes, Zuiho’s paint scheme is an example of dazzle camouflage. The main goal is to make it difficult to estimate the ship type, size and heading on initial contact. It also breaks up the ship’s silhouette, a single uniform block is easier to pick out of a background than a mess of shapes. Here’s another picture of two Japanese carriers under attack at Leyte Gulf (Zuikaku is on the left, and that’s probably Zuiho on the right). The patterns could be mistaken for superstructure, but they certainly don’t look like battleships.
The effectiveness of dazzle camouflage compared to greys and blues is disputed, but it sure made for some funky looking ships.