In October 1944, the Japanese Sho-Go plan used a decoy fleet to lure Admiral Halsey’s Third Fleet north, and a chain of assumptions left the San Bernardino Strait unguarded. What stood between Admiral Kurita’s four battleships, eight cruisers and eleven destroyers and the Leyte landing beaches was Taffy 3: six slow escort carriers, three destroyers and four destroyer escorts armed with nothing larger than five-inch guns. The Yamato alone outweighed the entire American unit. This episode reconstructs the dawn discovery, the surreal pink, green and yellow dye-marked shell splashes, and Admiral Clifton Sprague’s dash into a rain squall.

The tin cans turned and charged. USS Johnston blew the bow off the cruiser Kumano, and the Samuel B. Roberts pushed its engines to 29 knots and fired illumination flares when it ran out of shells. Armor-piercing rounds punched clean through the thin-hulled destroyers without detonating, buying precious minutes. Pilots made dry runs with no ammunition, torpedoes forced the Yamato out of the fight, and Kurita concluded he had stumbled into Halsey’s main fleet and withdrew. We also cover the first organised kamikaze attacks that sank the St. Lo, the infamous padded message reading the world wonders, two days of survivors in shark-filled water, and the World Series password used to rescue them.

• How Sho-Go 1 and a failure to communicate intent left Taffy 3 alone against the Center Force
• Why Japanese battleships used coloured dye in their shells and what it reveals about optical rangefinding
• The ballistic quirk that let armor-piercing shells pass through unarmoured destroyers without exploding
• How smoke, rain, dry runs and torpedo evasion convinced Kurita to retreat
• The Nimitz-to-Halsey padding error and the cost of the battle: over 1,000 men and multiple ships lost