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Yes! I read “The Last Stand of The Tin Can Sailors” and that set me off on a six month stretch where I was reading and watching everything I could about The Battle of Leyte Gulf, because it was so compelling.

The scale of the battle was huge. The stakes were high. The sub-plots were astounding.

Halsey, itching for a fight, taking the bait, and through a common clerical error which threw gasoline on the fire, ends up to his dying days fighting what he viewed as slander by people who questioned his actions, all under the shadow of the words “The world wonders”.

On the other side, almost simultaneously, the Davids of the US Navy in Taffy3 against the Goliaths of the Imperial Japanese Navy and their battleships, darting in, really, the unbelievable parallel to “The Charge of the Light Brigade” by complete coincidence aligning with the erroneously un-scrubbed padding from the message to Halsey.

The destroyers of Taffy 3 with bones in their teeth sailed directly at the Japanese battlewagons, their five inch guns like the sabres of the Light Brigade being flashed in the air, they “Volley’d and thunder’d” like hooves, as the superstructures of the battleships flashed with impacts. They sailed under full steam to what many of them, like the calvary in Tennyson’s poem, assumed was going to be their certain death...”Someone had blunder’d”.

Halsey, in full pursuit to the north, gets the communication from his boss who is trying to discreetly ask what Halsey was up to without ruffling his feathers, ending with Halsey losing it on the bridge of the New Jersey and throwing his hat to the floor in white hot anger and shame as “All the world wonder’d” in Hawaii what was going on.

You could not make this up.

And then, Typhoon Cobra just a month or two later.

With the way they could use computer graphics to recreate that, with the real, unadulterated story line from history, that would be quite the production.

“The Battle of Leyte Gulf”.