October twenty-fifth, nineteen forty-four. The Philippine Sea, sixty miles east of the island of Samar. At six fifty-nine in the morning, the battleship Yamato, the largest warship ever built, fired her first shots at an enemy ship. Her target was USS White Plains, an escort carrier eleven months out of the builder's yard. The range was about thirty-four thousand five hundred yards, roughly seventeen nautical miles. Each of Yamato's eighteen point one inch shells weighed thirty-two hundred and nineteen pounds.

White Plains had been built by Henry Kaiser's shipyard in Vancouver, Washington, on a hull laid out to merchant marine standards. She carried one five inch gun, mounted on her stern. Her armor was splinter plating. Her top speed was nineteen knots. The sailors who served in ships like her said the letters C V E stood for Combustible, Vulnerable, Expendable.

There were six of them in Task Unit seventy-seven point four point three, radio call sign Taffy Three, screened by three destroyers and four destroyer escorts. Bearing down on them came four battleships, six heavy cruisers, two light cruisers and eleven destroyers. The heaviest gun in the entire American unit was the five inch, firing a fifty-four pound shell. Yamato alone displaced more than all thirteen American ships combined.

Two and a half hours later, the Japanese fleet turned north and left. Three of its heavy cruisers were sinking or about to be scuttled. A fourth had lost her bow. The invasion shipping in Leyte Gulf, the target the whole Japanese plan had been built around, was never touched.

The escort carrier was the ship the Navy had not wanted. Naval authorities had refused to approve it until the builder went around them to the President's advisers. So how did a class of mass-produced, unarmored, nineteen knot carriers stop the most powerful surface fleet Japan had sent to sea since Midway? The answer starts two years earlier, with an argument about how fast a carrier could be built.

By the autumn of nineteen forty-four, the American return to the Philippines was under way. On October twentieth, the Sixth Army went ashore on Leyte. Behind the beaches, Leyte Gulf filled with transports, supply ships and landing craft. Japan could not afford to lose the Philippines. The islands sat across the sea route between the home islands and the oil of the East Indies. Admiral Soemu Toyoda answered with Sho-Go One, a plan that committed nearly everything the Imperial Navy had left.

The plan had three parts. Vice Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa would bring the surviving Japanese carriers down from the north, with few aircraft aboard, as bait. If Admiral William Halsey's Third Fleet took the bait, the way to Leyte Gulf would open. A southern force would come up through Surigao Strait. And Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita's Center Force, the battleships, would come through San Bernardino Strait and fall on the invasion shipping from the north.

The plan cost the Japanese heavily before it worked. On October twenty-third, the submarines Darter and Dace sank two of Kurita's heavy cruisers in the Palawan Passage, one of them his flagship Atago, and Kurita shifted his flag to Yamato. On the twenty-fourth, Halsey's carrier aircraft sank Yamato's sister Musashi in the Sibuyan Sea. That night, Vice Admiral Shoji Nishimura's southern force was destroyed in Surigao Strait.

But the decoy worked. Ozawa's carriers were sighted in the north on the afternoon of the twenty-fourth. Halsey took all of his fast carriers and all six of his fast battleships north to destroy them. He believed Center Force had been so badly damaged that it was no longer a serious threat. San Bernardino Strait was left unguarded. Kurita's force passed through it at three in the morning on October twenty-fifth and turned south along the coast of Samar.

The only American ships between Kurita and Leyte Gulf were three escort carrier groups of the Seventh Fleet, Taffy One, Taffy Two and Taffy Three. Their job was to fly close air support for the troops ashore and anti-submarine patrols over the fleet. Taffy Three, under Rear Admiral Clifton Sprague, was the northernmost. It was the one in Kurita's path.

On paper, the contest was over before it started. The Japanese battleships carried guns of fourteen inches and more, reaching beyond twenty miles. The heavy cruisers had eight inch guns and could make thirty-five knots. The escort carriers could not outrun them, could not outgun them and could not absorb their shells. The Japanese destroyers alone outnumbered Sprague's destroyers eleven to three.

The American aircraft were no better suited to the fight. Taffy Three's six carriers held about one hundred sixty-five planes, F M two Wildcat fighters and T B M Avenger torpedo bombers. That morning they were loaded for ground support and submarine hunting. Some carried small bombs, some depth charges, some rockets, some nothing but machine gun ammunition. Very few carried the torpedoes or armor-piercing bombs needed to sink an armored warship.

Escort carriers were auxiliaries. They escorted convoys, ferried aircraft and supported landings. They were never meant to stand in front of a battle line. Why these ships survived that morning goes back to the argument over whether they should exist at all.

In the first six months of nineteen forty-two, German submarines sank more than two million tons of shipping off the American East Coast. The Navy's escort carrier program already called for twenty-four conversions of existing merchant and tanker hulls. President Franklin Roosevelt believed that was not enough.

Henry J. Kaiser was not a naval shipbuilder. He was the industrialist whose yards had cut the building time of a Liberty ship from more than a year to less than ninety days. With help from Roosevelt's adviser Thomas Corcoran, Kaiser brought the President a design by the naval architects Gibbs and Cox: a small carrier of about twenty knots, to be built in quantity at his yards. He promised fifty of them in under two years.

The Navy said no. Prewar carriers had taken an average of thirty-eight months to build, and naval authorities refused to approve the Kaiser ships. Kaiser went directly to the President's advisers. On June eighth, nineteen forty-two, Roosevelt declared his support for the Kaiser design. The Maritime Commission would oversee the program, and the hulls would be built to merchant marine practice. The Navy ordered fifty.

What Kaiser built was a warship designed like a production line. The Casablanca class was the first American escort carrier designed from the keel up for the job rather than converted from a merchant hull. Its hull was a lengthened attack transport design, drawn to be assembled from welded, prefabricated sections. The Vancouver yard on the Columbia River had been built in nineteen forty-two for Liberty ships.

The first keel, for USS Casablanca, went down on November third, nineteen forty-two. The fiftieth ship was commissioned on July eighth, nineteen forty-four. USS Munda, the last of them, was delivered one hundred one days after her keel was laid. The Casablancas remain the most numerous class of aircraft carrier ever built.

Gambier Bay shows the pace. Her keel was laid on July tenth, nineteen forty-three. She was launched on November twenty-second and commissioned on December twenty-eighth, one hundred seventy-one days from keel to commission. The yard workers called her the Bonus Ship. The yard had projected sixteen carriers for nineteen forty-three. The Navy asked for at least two more. Gambier Bay was the nineteenth.

The price of that speed was written into every specification. Each ship was five hundred twelve feet three inches long, with a four hundred seventy-four foot flight deck and a two hundred fifty-seven foot hangar. She displaced eighty-one hundred and eighty-eight tons standard and ten thousand nine hundred and two at full load. Four Babcock and Wilcox boilers fed two Skinner Unaflow reciprocating steam engines. Nearly every large warship since the Dreadnought had used turbines. The Casablancas used reciprocating engines because the American gear-cutting industry could not supply reduction gears fast enough. The engines produced nine thousand shaft horsepower, enough for nineteen knots.

She had one five inch, thirty-eight caliber gun, eight forty millimeter Bofors and twelve twenty millimeter Oerlikons. Her protection was splinter plating. She needed a crew of eight hundred sixty men and carried about twenty-seven aircraft.

Every one of those numbers looked like a weakness. Several of them became advantages on October twenty-fifth.

The first was the five inch gun's position. It was mounted on the stern. A carrier running away from an enemy points her stern at him. Every Casablanca in Taffy Three could bring its only heavy gun to bear for the entire chase, while the Japanese ships closing from astern could use only their forward turrets.

The second was the thin hull. Japanese armor-piercing shells were built to punch through heavy steel belts before their fuzes fired. Against splinter plating and merchant-grade hull steel, there was often nothing hard enough to set them off. Many passed straight through the ship and burst in the sea beyond, or did not burst at all.

The third was numbers. A single escort carrier had a small air group, but a Taffy was six carriers operating together. Taffy Three's one hundred sixty-five aircraft were the equivalent of two fleet carrier air groups. Taffy Two, to the south, could add almost as many again. The Kaiser program had made the individual ship expendable because it made the ships plentiful.

The fourth was the men. Every carrier in Taffy Three had been flying combat missions for a week. Kalinin Bay's squadron alone flew two hundred forty-four sorties between October eighteenth and twenty-fourth against airfields and installations on Leyte, Samar, Cebu, Negros and Panay. The pilots knew how to launch fast, attack, and find somewhere to land afterwards.

None of that appeared in a Japanese recognition manual. When Kurita's lookouts saw flight decks on the horizon, they saw carriers, and they did not know what kind.

Just after dawn, Taffy Three was steaming about sixty miles east of Samar. Its carriers had already launched the morning's combat air patrol and were preparing the day's first strikes against the Leyte beaches. At six thirty-seven, Ensign William Brooks, flying an Avenger on anti-submarine patrol from Saint Lo, sighted a large formation of ships to the northwest. He was ordered to confirm what he was seeing. He reported pagoda masts, the tall tower superstructures of Japanese battleships.

At almost the same moment, Taffy Three picked up Japanese radio traffic, saw anti-aircraft fire bursting to the north, and caught surface contacts on radar. Brooks and his crew attacked with the only weapons they carried, depth charges. They were the first Americans to strike Center Force that day.

Sprague made his first decision within minutes. At six fifty, he turned the whole formation east, to course zero nine zero. The wind was from the north-northeast, and east was the direction his carriers had to steam to launch aircraft. It also led toward a rain squall. He ordered every available plane launched with whatever it had aboard. He ordered his escorts to make smoke. Fanshaw Bay, his flagship, launched her remaining twelve aircraft at six fifty-two: one Wildcat and eleven Avengers. Ten Avengers carried a single five hundred pound semi-armor-piercing bomb. The eleventh carried two depth charges. The pilots were told to attack the Japanese force and then fly to Tacloban airstrip on Leyte to rearm and refuel.

At six fifty-nine, Yamato opened fire on White Plains. Nagato joined her. The splashes came up in color. The Japanese battleships loaded dye into their shells so that each ship could spot its own fall of shot, and the Americans watched the sea around them turn pink, green, yellow and red. Yamato's third salvo, at seven oh four, straddled White Plains. One shell exploded under the turn of her port bilge, near her after engine room. The blast lifted the ship, damaged her starboard machinery and tripped most of her circuit breakers.

Her damage control parties had power and communications back in three minutes. She held her place in the formation by overspeeding her port engine. The sudden loss of boiler air pressure had also sent a cloud of black smoke out of her stacks. The gunners on Yamato and Nagato took it for a direct hit and shifted fire to other targets.

A few minutes after seven, Fanshaw Bay and the other carriers ran into the squall. Visibility dropped to half a mile. The Japanese had nothing in their gunnery system that could see through rain and smoke, and their fire fell away.

Kurita made his first decision at the same time, and it was the opposite of Sprague's. His ships had been shifting into a circular anti-aircraft formation when the carriers were sighted. Believing he had caught a fast carrier group of the Third Fleet, he ordered a General Attack. Each division would go after the enemy on its own. There would be no coordinated battle line. Cruiser and destroyer divisions cut across each other's paths. The battleship Kongo had to turn out of formation and fought the rest of the battle alone. At seven ten, concerned about fuel in a stern chase of what he assumed were fast carriers, Kurita pulled his destroyers back behind his battleships.

And Sprague's escorts went the other way. USS Johnston, under Commander Ernest Evans, turned toward the enemy without waiting for orders. She closed to about ten thousand yards and fired all ten of her torpedoes. At seven twenty-seven, one hit the heavy cruiser Kumano and blew her bow off. Suzuya stopped to assist her, and an aircraft from Gambier Bay caught her dead in the water. A near miss damaged one of her propellers. Two heavy cruisers had dropped out of the chase within half an hour of the first shot.

Hoel, Heermann and Samuel B. Roberts followed with their own torpedo attacks through the smoke. None of the torpedoes aimed at the battleships hit. But each spread forced the Japanese to turn away. Yamato turned north to avoid one spread, and Kurita lost contact with much of his own force. The Japanese formation came apart. Kurita told American interrogators after the war that his major units were separating further all the time because of the destroyer torpedo attacks.

Now the thin hulls began to matter. At seven fifty, a fourteen inch shell from Haruna hit Kalinin Bay on the starboard side of her hangar deck. It was the first of fifteen direct hits she would take that morning. At the same moment, four eight inch shells struck Fanshaw Bay, killing four men, wrecking her catapult track and starting four fires. Both carriers kept their place in the formation.

The Japanese heavy cruisers pressed in on the carriers' port quarter. Haguro and Tone closed on Kalinin Bay and began to hit her. Most of her eight inch hits came after eight forty, when the range was down to about ten thousand yards. One shell went in below her waterline, passed completely through the ship, and exploded in the sea on the far side. It cut her fuel lines and wrecked a bulkhead, but the blast was outside her hull, not inside it. Another went through the flight deck into her communications spaces and destroyed every radar and radio set there. The fires were put out. The flooding was contained. Kalinin Bay kept steaming.

She fired back. Her single five inch gun hit Haguro twice, knocking out a radio transmitter and cutting communication cables. White Plains' gun crew claimed six hits on the heavy cruiser Chokai at eleven thousand seven hundred yards, near the limit of the five inch gun's effective range. Fanshaw Bay's gun crew claimed at least five on a leading cruiser. The single stern guns were firing on every target that came within reach.

Overhead, the planes kept coming. Taffy Two's aircraft joined those from Taffy Three. When the bombs and torpedoes ran out, the pilots went on strafing. When the ammunition ran out, they made dry runs, diving on the Japanese ships with empty guns to force them to turn and throw off their aim. Kurita later said that the Japanese ships each maneuvered on their own to avoid the air attacks, sometimes turning as much as forty-five degrees, and that this led to the gradual separation of his formation.

Gambier Bay paid for the stern chase. She was on the exposed flank nearest the enemy. Her first hit came around eight ten, a heavy shell through the aft end of her flight deck. At about eight twenty, a shell flooded her forward engine room and cut her speed to ten knots. She fell behind the formation, and every Japanese ship in range turned on her. Accounts written from American records credited the cruisers with sinking her. Japanese records examined by the historian Robert Lundgren point to Yamato's main battery. Either way, by eight forty-five she was dead in the water and burning. Captain Walter Vieweg ordered her abandoned at eight fifty. She capsized at nine oh seven and sank at nine eleven. One hundred forty-seven of her men were killed. She was the only American aircraft carrier sunk by enemy surface gunfire in the Second World War.

The escorts paid more. Hoel took more than forty hits and sank at eight fifty-five. Samuel B. Roberts ran out of high explosive shells, then fired armor-piercing rounds, then training rounds, then star shells, before a fourteen inch salvo from Kongo stopped her. Johnston fought on with one gun until nine forty-five.

The aircraft were beginning to break the cruisers. Haguro's action report records a bomb hit that immobilized Chokai at eight fifty-one. An Avenger from Manila Bay, one of Taffy Two's carriers, put a torpedo into the stern of Chikuma, the leading cruiser, and left her unable to steer. More Avengers from Kitkun Bay hit her again later in the morning.

At nine fifteen, the light cruiser Yahagi and four destroyers fired torpedoes at the carriers from ten thousand five hundred yards. At that range, the torpedoes were running out of fuel by the time they reached their targets. An Avenger from Saint Lo, flown by Lieutenant Junior Grade Tex Waldrop, strafed and exploded two of them in the wake of Kalinin Bay. Kalinin Bay's own five inch gun deflected a third from a collision course with her stern.

Then the Japanese turned away. Kurita later put the time at about ten minutes past nine. The signal read: all ships, my course north, speed twenty. By nine twenty-five, the fleet that had been closing on Taffy Three was retiring. At about nine thirty, as the last Japanese ships fired parting salvos, Kalinin Bay scored a hit amidships on a retreating destroyer.

For a time, Kurita still meant to enter Leyte Gulf. Then he turned north for good, to hunt an American carrier force he believed was there, and withdrew back through San Bernardino Strait. He never reached the transports.

Taffy Three's ordeal was not over. At ten fifty, kamikaze aircraft from Luzon attacked the retreating carriers. A Zero flown by Lieutenant Yukio Seki crashed through the flight deck of Saint Lo. The fires reached her bomb and torpedo stowage, and a series of explosions tore her apart. She sank about half an hour later with the loss of one hundred thirteen men, the first major warship sunk by a kamikaze. Kalinin Bay and Kitkun Bay were also hit. At about the same time, a strike from Kitkun Bay caught the damaged cruiser Suzuya, and near misses set off her own torpedoes. She sank with two hundred forty-seven of her crew.

Count the results. Taffy Three lost two escort carriers, two destroyers and a destroyer escort. More than a thousand Americans were killed or missing.

But Center Force lost the heavy cruisers Chokai, Chikuma and Suzuya. Kumano was left with a false bow and a top speed of fifteen knots, and was sunk a month later. Five of Taffy Three's six carriers came through the Japanese gunfire. Kalinin Bay took fifteen direct hits and steamed home to San Diego. White Plains took an eighteen point one inch shell burst under her keel and kept her station. The only carrier lost to gunfire had been hit repeatedly by the largest guns ever mounted at sea.

Many Japanese shells hit and failed to do their work. Surviving Japanese cruiser records identified their targets as Ranger class or Independence class carriers, fleet types with real armor, and fired armor-piercing shells at them to the end. The thin hulls of the Kaiser ships let those shells through.

Kurita's interrogation after the war fills in the Japanese side. He was asked whether the American smoke had caused him serious trouble. His answer was: it was very serious trouble for us. It was exceedingly well used tactically. He was asked why his gunfire had grown worse as the battle went on. He said his ships were making a stern chase on carriers that were zigzagging, which made it difficult to get the range, and that his major units kept separating because of the torpedo attacks. He was asked what kind of carriers they were. He said he did not remember. A starboard bridge structure was all he could tell.

Sprague put it into one sentence in his action report. He wrote that the failure of the enemy to wipe out all the vessels of his task unit could be attributed to our successful smoke screen, our torpedo counterattack, continuous harassment of the enemy by bomb, torpedo and strafing air attacks, timely maneuvers, and the definite partiality of Almighty God.

The smoke came from the escorts, laid around carriers that kept their station under fire. The air attacks came from ships built in months. The timely maneuvers were possible because a flagship with shell holes in her flight deck could still launch aircraft and give orders.

Taffy Three received the Presidential Unit Citation. Commander Ernest Evans of Johnston received the Medal of Honor, posthumously, and Sprague and Captain Vieweg each received the Navy Cross.

The class went on fighting. Of the eleven American carriers of all types lost in the Second World War, five were Casablancas: Liscome Bay to a submarine at Makin in November nineteen forty-three, Gambier Bay to gunfire off Samar, Saint Lo, Ommaney Bay and Bismarck Sea to kamikazes. The other forty-five survived the war. After it, they were too slow and too small for the jet age, and their reciprocating engines limited them further. Most were laid up and scrapped between nineteen fifty-nine and nineteen sixty-one. None of the fifty survives today.

The Navy had been right about the escort carrier in every technical sense. It was slow. It had no armor. Its only heavy gun faced backward. It was built to merchant standards in a yard laid out for Liberty ships. The men who served in these ships called them combustible, vulnerable and expendable, and in a straight fight with a battle line they were all three.

But the fight off Samar was not a straight fight. The admirals who had opposed the Kaiser program were wrong about what the ships would be worth. Kurita's gunnery officers were wrong about what they were shooting at. Halsey was wrong about what had been left behind to guard the approaches to Leyte Gulf. And a fleet built around the largest battleship in the world turned north with its work undone.

October twenty-fifth, nineteen forty-four. Six carriers that Henry Kaiser built in months, and the Navy had not wanted, stood between Yamato and the beaches of Leyte for two and a half hours. One of them sank there. The Japanese never reached the beaches.