Episode 19 - “Battle of Leyte Gulf “

Summary

At the Philippines’ Leyte Gulf, a 23–26 October 1944 sea battle followed the nearby American landings which had occurred several days earlier. Admiral Halsey led the Navy's Third Fleet, with Admiral Kinkaid in command of the Seventh Fleet, bolstered by forces from the Royal Australian Navy. Samuel Eliot Morison wrote:

As the amphibious vessels completed unloading on the shores of Leyte Gulf and the Sixth Army extended its beachhead, Japanese naval forces were sal-lying forth to give battle. The quadripartite Battle for Leyte Gulf which re-sulted comprised every type of naval warfare invented up to that time—gun-fire of heavy and light ships, bombing, suicide crashing, strafing, rocketing and torpedoing by land-based and carrier-based planes; torpedo attacks by submarines, destroyers and motor boats. Every naval and air weapon but the mine was employed by both sides.

Opposing Japanese Navy vessels were divided into what HUSNO and other western WWII historians refer to as “Northern,” “Central,” and “Southern” Forces, intent on crushing this first invasion of the Philippines by the Allies. The action at Leyte Gulf constituted the war's biggest sea battle and remains by some measures history's largest-ever naval conflict.

Morison's HUSNO devotes his entire Vol. XII to Leyte, June 1944– January 1945, and its various sea battles can't be easily summarized here. In broad terms, EP19's three parts describe: I (1:00–9:20) Convergence of American and Japanese Forces in the Philippines, and then the “Battle of the Sibuyan Sea,” the initial US engagement with Japan's Central Force; II (9:21–18:48) the “Battle of Surigao Strait” with the Southern Force and then the “Battle off Samar” with a re-emerging Central Force; III (18:49– 26:25) the “Battle of Cape Engaño,” with Halsey taking on Japan's sacrificial-decoy Northern Force.

EP19's plentiful day and night battle scenes demanded lots of vigorous “ugly music” to be written, and its 1,594-word narration leaves more than fifteen minutes to music alone. A further indication of Salomon's reliance on the orchestra to set the scene is that despite all torpedoes, artillery, and more, only one explosion is enhanced by SFX—the 8:20 strike on one of Japan's ships.

As mentioned in my discussion of EP4, Rodgers's VIC-HYMN for EP19 was his last theme for Victory, submitted in December 1952. For Bennett, the interval between EP19's completion and its airing had shrunk to roughly two months, 13 January 1953 to 15 March.