At 1,800 yards, the cruiser Mogami snapped on its searchlight and probed for the boats. PT 146 (Ensign B. M. Grosscup), and 150 (Ensign J. M. Ladd), fired one fish each, but missed. The destroyer Yumagumo caught the 151 and the 190 in a searchlight beam, but the boats raked the destroyer with 40-mm. fire and knocked out the lights. The boats zigzagged away behind smoke.
Admiral Nishimura, commanding this van force of the two-section Southern Striking Force, was delighted with himself at this point, and sent a message to Admiral Shima, congratulating himself on having sunk several torpedo boats.
At the southern entrance to Surigao Strait, Lieut. Commander Robert Leeson, on PT 134, commanded the section posted on the western shore. The boat crews saw flashes of the battle with Lieut. Owen’s boats, and half an hour later picked up radar pips ten miles away. Leeson promptly passed the radar sighting to Admiral Oldendorf, and then—the milder duty done—led a torpedo attack.
Lieut. (jg) Edmund F. Wakelin’s 134 was caught by a searchlight while still 3,000 yards from the two battleships. Shells fell close aboard on both sides, splashing water over the boat, and shrapnel from air bursts banged against the deck, but the skipper bore in another 500 yards to launch his fish. The boat escaped from the Japanese and hid in the shadow of Panaon Island, where later in the night the sailors fumed helplessly as four Japanese ships steamed, “fat, dumb, and happy,” past their empty torpedo tubes at 1,000-yard range.
All the torpedo tubes of the section were not empty, however, for Lieut. (jg) I. M. Kovar, in 137, at 3:55 A.M., picked up an enemy formation at the southern end of the strait and attacked. He had no way of knowing it, but this was Admiral Shima’s second section, coming up to the relief of Admiral Nishimura’s van that had already entered the strait, and indeed had at that very moment been shattered by a vicious American destroyer-torpedo attack.
Lieut. Kovar crept up on a Japanese destroyer, maneuvering to take station at the rear of the enemy column. He let fly at the can and had the incredible good luck to miss his target entirely and smack a light cruiser he hadn’t even seen. Aboard the cruiser Abukuma, the explosion killed thirty sailors, destroyed the radio shack and slowed the cruiser to ten knots, forcing it to fall out of formation.
The crippled Abukuma was caught and polished off by Army bombers the next day. It was the only victim of Army aviation in this battle and the only positively verified victim of PT torpedoes, though there is some evidence that a PT may have made one of the hits claimed by American destroyers.
The rest of Admiral Shima’s formation sailed majestically up the strait, fired a spread of torpedoes at two small islands it mistook for American warships, and managed somehow to collide with the fiercely burning cruiser Mogami, only survivor—except for the destroyer Shigure—of the vanguard’s slaughter by the torpedoes and guns of the Seventh Fleet.
Gathering in the two surviving ships, Admiral Shima led a retreat down the strait. At the moment Shigure joined the formation, Lieut. C. T. Gleason’s section attacked, and the Japanese destroyer, which was doing some remarkably able shooting, hit Ensign L. E. Thomas’ 321.
Most sorely hit of the torpedo boats, however, was Lieut. (jg) R. W. Brown’s 493, which had had John F. Kennedy aboard, as an instructor, for a month in Miami. The crew had named the boat the Carole Baby after the skipper’s daughter, who, incidentally, was celebrating her first birthday the night of the Battle of Surigao Strait.