I also compare Taffy 3's situation to that of Chamberlain at Gettysburg when he realized he was running out of ammunition. Can't retreat. Can't stay here and be shot to pieces. Only thing to do is charge.
Ah! This has been one of my favorite subjects for a long time, the parallel between “The Charge of The Light Brigade” and the Battle of Leyte Gulf! Here is what I wrote just the other day...
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Yes...great book, amazing battle.
I am a movie buff, and have always wished that someone had made a movie about that battle.
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”.
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”.
Wasn't like that was the only time he did that with a typhoon. December, 1944 and June, 1945.
There is a terrific book about the Leyte battles called “The Stand of the Tin Can Sailors.”.
“Halsey, itching for a fight, taking the bait,”
Leyte Gulf, went exactly as planned for the Japanese.
Had Kurita “Damned the Torpedoes” and pressed his advantage, bought at such a high price, he could have devastated the landing forces, and bought Japan another 6 months of open supply routes to the south. (Oil going north, ammo and supplies going south, raw materials from China).
Gerald Ford (noted by the MSM as a clumsy oaf) was thrown onto a slippery slope and appeared to be on the way overboard in that gale. He saved himself by an athletic feat which presaged his later renown an All-American college lineman.
After Leyte Halsey should have been removed. His job was to protect the Leyte landings and he abandoned his post in search of personal glory
Between that and sailing into two typhoons he got a lot of people killed for no good reason
As to Balaclava having stood there where the charge finished up Cardigan was an idiot
“the parallel between “The Charge of The Light Brigade” and the Battle of Leyte Gulf”
There are also parallels with Balaclava and Little Big Horn. Both units charged heavy enemy strength at the ends of valleys—well, a coulee is not strictly speaking a valley, but they are topographically similar—the problem was caused by extreme crap-headedness on the part of commander(s), and by a wild coincidence both Cardigan’s cavalry and Custer’s used the same music—”Gary Owen.”
I also compare Taffy 3's situation to that of Chamberlain at Gettysburg when he realized he was running out of ammunition. Can't retreat. Can't stay here and be shot to pieces. Only thing to do is charge.