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"A Ready Trap." As the Japanese admiral recalls it, there was tragedy, but no buffoonery. In late 1944, he explains to Student Frazer, the imperial navy was still strong, but it had been pushed back so fast that it was badly disorganized. Just before the Leyte Gulf battle, Shima's force had wild-goose-chased after a supposedly crippled U.S. force. Shima steamed for the fringes of the vast Leyte engagement after other Japanese naval forces had set out, and the necessity for radio silence, he explains, meant that he could not coordinate his strategy or tactics with theirs. Faced with bad luck, disorganized communications and the blazing evidence that another Japanese force in Surigao Strait had been shattered, all Shima could do was withdraw. The admiral's account: "At that time, things flashed in my head were thus: ... If we continued dashing further north, it was quite clear that we should only fall into a ready trap."
Bill Frazer hopes for more letters. A reply from Admiral Kurita would be particularly valuable; he has been criticized for turning back into San Bernardino Strait, north of Samar when he might have dealt a telling blow to a U.S. force inferior in speed and firepower. But Shima offers the schoolboy historian an understandable summing up of Japanese hesitancy at Leyte: "A further defeat meant to Japan no longer incidental losses but loss of life itself."
* In History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, Volume XII, Leyte, June 1944-January 1945.