written by Glenn Flickinger
Imagine yourself a high school principal leading a group of school buses on a field trip. Suddenly, without warning, out of the blue, a ferocious storm appears ahead. Swirling tornadoes engulf your buses, buffeting you with wind and debris.
Drivers and students are paralyzed with fear. As leader of the school bus convoy, you need to make snap decision. Move ahead, stop, turn back? How do you warn the buses that follow? What would you do?
This is the situation Admiral Clifton “Ziggy” Sprague faced on the morning of October 25, 1944 off the coast of Samar, just north of Leyte Gulf, while supporting the Army invasion of Leyte.
The storm was a huge Japanese fleet led by Admiral Kurita. The tornadoes were his many battleships and cruisers, including the giant Yamato. Sprague’s naval force included six escort carriers and a handful of destroyers and destroyer escorts. There had been no warning. Sprague didn’t expect the Japanese fleet emerging from the San Bernadino Straight to threaten his force. Nor was Sprague’s force remotely designed to fight such an enemy fleet.
Historian John Wukovits captures the moment and explains Sprague’s genius response in his book,
Below is an excerpt, courtesy of Wukovits and the Naval Institute Press.Amid shell splashes, nervous tension, and a communications network cluttered with excitable voices, Sprague shook off the surprise engendered by Kurita’s stunning arrival to make no less than eight major decisions in the battle’s first fourteen minutes. That he could fire off decisions so quickly was no mere fluke, but an inbred trait further refined by years in aviation.
At times of personal or professional crises, Sprague possessed the knack of immediately grasping the entire picture and knowing what to do without hesitation. He pursued Annapolis; he knew he wanted to marry Annabel after one meeting; he selected aviation; he outperformed most cohorts at Pearl Harbor; he safely veered the Wasp away from bombs. Each occurred, In part, because this inner sense – this intuition – guided him to the proper path.
A lengthy career in aviation gave Sprague quick reflexes, confidence in his talents, and the ability to trust his instincts. Though he became a pilot during aviation’s infancy, when crashes killed or maimed an alarmingly high number of fliers, Sprague emerged unharmed. To do that, a pilot had to react rapidly, since a malfunctioning airplane allowed it pilot precious few moments to visualize a remedy; he had to believe that he could safely deal with any mission or emergency; he had to know that his first thoughts were correct thoughts. Remove any one of these traits, and the pilot soared into the heavens handicapped with doubts. Buttressed by his experience at Pearl Harbor, where he orchestrated a smooth-functioning defense among chaos, Sprague peered toward Kurita from the Fanshaw Bay bridge with confidence and responded as though he had been waiting all his life for precisely this moment.
A commander cannot risk the lives of hundreds of men strictly on something so nebulous as intuition, however. Sprague reacted so quickly because his intuition rested upon a firm foundation of thought—Sprague carefully considered his options before a battle ever started. He reacted quickly because he had already formulated his actions in rough form should his force come under attack. That is why he could act with calm assurance of someone who knew what to do. Intuition is nothing more than the combination of previous experience steeled on the anvil of thought.
“Sprague was a cool customer,” emphasized Lt. (jg) Henry A. Pyzdrowski, Gambier Bay pilot. “I got the impression he role played ahead of time and played this out, like he lay on his bunk and thought things through from every vantage. He must have done a lot of mental chess.” A personal acquaintance of Sprague, historian Thomas Vaughan mentioned that “Sprague looked like he belonged in a library. He had a reflective nature and was always thinking.”
Thus when Kurita suddenly charged into view, thereby placing his battleships and cruisers against Sprague’s vastly outgunned Taffy 3 in battle for which there existed no tactics or previous rules, Sprague countered with his own moves. Lieutenant Hagen of the Johnston stated, “Sprague was an innovator and he learned quick. At Samar, he improvised and sort of grew into the battle.”
Sprague’s personal conviction that when in a tough spot one must “pull up your socks and just do it” helped him now when he and Taffy 3 most needed it. No decision existed here for Sprague – only Taffy 3 stood between Kurita’s devastating guns and MacArthur’s vulnerable Leyte Gulf beachhead. Therefore he must get in the way and do whatever he could to harass the enemy leader. Though he assumed this meant death for many men and destruction for all his ships, since duty asked him to sacrifice Taffy 3, he would do it.
These thoughts allowed Sprague to act calmly, decisively, and aggressively. Seeing this from their commander, officers on board other ships acted in similar fashion. Sprague set the tone for the entire battle in its opening minutes, inspiring his officers to bold action by his own courageous tactics.
One officer wrote that of all the heroes produced in the Pacific war, “few can compare with the courage, coolness, and tactical genius of ‘Ziggy’ Sprague. His aggressiveness bewildered the Japanese and infected all his forces, surface and air.” Their confidence originated with his confidence; their aggressiveness flowed out of his aggressiveness; their willingness to charge at Kurita started with his willingness to sacrifice.
Had he reacted less decisively or exhibited panic in his words and deeds, Taffy 3 would have picked up those vibrations and would have fought less spiritedly. He did not. Though his inner thoughts told him Taffy 3 would be doomed withing fifteen minutes, his actions let his men know they would successfully attack. He could have produced panic, indecision, and defeat with his words and deeds, for a commander either elevates his men to a higher level of action or drags them down to a tragic low, but Sprague never let doubts and fears seep through, only his confidence. This spirit spread throughout Taffy 3 and contributed to victory.