**The Battle of Leyte Gulf: When David Faced Goliath on the High Seas 🌊🇺🇸🇯🇵**
By Jude Obuseh
By October 1944, the odds were massively stacked in favor of the U.S. Navy 🇺🇸 and against the Imperial Japanese Navy 🇯🇵: the Americans had more planes ✈️, more ships 🚢, more firepower 💥, better logistics 📦, more and better trained veteran pilots 🛩️ and sailors ⚓. And in fact for most of the battle, the Japanese had very much the worst of it.
But at the height of the battle, U.S. Admiral William “Bull” Halsey 🎩🔥 caught wind of a Japanese carrier group 🚢 and basically went haring off after it with every ship he could grab 🚀. In so doing, he fell for an elaborate Japanese trap hook, line, and sinker 🪝, because that carrier group was really a Judas goat 🐐 on a grand scale — it no longer had any planes with which to defend itself, let alone attack. Of course, Halsey couldn’t know that. But he could still have left something to protect Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s landing force at Leyte 🏝️, instead of taking everything but the kitchen sink 🪣 in his Leeroy Jenkins charge.
As it was, only the kitchen sink 🪣 — a bunch of toy destroyers 🚢 and escort carriers 🚁 organized into tiny squads code-named “Taffy,” and one such group named “Taffy Three” in particular — was available to protect the landing troops when the Japanese trump card appeared: a massive force of cruisers 🚢 and battleships 🚀 led by the mighty Yamato and Musashi, the biggest battleships ever built (so big that just one of their main gun turrets weighed as much as one of Taffy Three’s destroyers!) 💪💥.
By rights, the Americans should have lost the battle right then and there, their landing forces pounded into hamburger 🍔 and driven off by the Japanese battlewagons — and they would have if the pipsqueak ships of Taffy Three hadn’t risen magnificently to the occasion 🌟 and somehow driven off the Japanese giants in a near-suicidal David vs. Goliath slugfest rightly regarded to this day as the U.S. Navy’s finest hour. 🏆💥🚢🪝🌟
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