The Anchors Aweigh series was placed in honor of the men of the
US Navy who have served in the defense of our country. Each cache
is dedicated to one of the warships involved in battle. If you find
all the caches in the series, you’ll reveal some nice GeoArt
on your cache map. These are not difficult caches to find. If you
cannot find a cache easily, it’s probably missing. Send me a
picture (by email, not in your log) of where you think the cache
should be, and I’ll accept the find and replace the
cache.
Because of the difficulty in finding suitable locations for some
of the caches, some puzzle caches were used (not this one) so that
the find icon could be in a location separate from the cache. You
should be able to solve the puzzles with information on this cache
page. I suggest you solve the puzzles before you make your cache
run, to help optimize the route.
USS Tennessee
USS Tennessee, the lead ship of her class of battleship,
was the third ship of the United States Navy named in honor of the
16th US state. During World War II in the Pacific Theater, she was
damaged during the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 but was
repaired and modernized. She participated in shore bombardments at
the Aleutian Islands, Tarawa, the Philippine Islands, Okinawa and
several other amphibious landings later in the war, and
participated in the sinking of the Japanese battleship
Yamashiro in the Battle of Surigao Strait. After the war,
she was placed on reserve in the "mothball fleet" for several
years, before being scrapped in 1959.
Battle of Leyte Gulf
USS Tennessee
The Battle of Leyte Gulf, also called the Battles for Leyte
Gulf, and formerly known as the Second Battle of the Philippine
Sea, is generally considered to be the largest naval battle of
World War II and, by some criteria, possibly the largest naval
battle in history.
It was fought in waters near the Philippine islands of Leyte and
Samar from 23–26 October 1944, between combined US and
Australian forces and the Imperial Japanese Navy. On 20 October,
United States troops invaded the island of Leyte as part of a
strategy aimed at isolating Japan from the countries it had
occupied in South East Asia, and in particular depriving its forces
and industry of vital oil supplies. The Imperial Japanese Navy
(IJN) mobilized nearly all of its remaining major naval vessels in
an attempt to defeat the Allied invasion, but was repulsed by the
U.S. Navy's 3rd and 7th Fleets. The IJN failed to achieve its
objective, suffered very heavy losses, and never afterwards sailed
to battle in comparable force. The majority of its surviving heavy
ships, deprived of fuel, remained in their bases for the rest of
the Pacific War.
The Battle of Leyte Gulf is also notable as the first battle in
which Japanese aircraft carried out organized kamikaze attacks.
Also worth noting is the fact that Japan at this battle had fewer
aircraft than the Allied Forces had sea vessels, a clear
demonstration of the difference in power of the two sides at this
point of the war.
While Tennessee had been working in support of the Leyte
invasions by US troops, the Japanese Imperial General Headquarters
had noted the scale of the operation being mounted and had decided
to make that island the focus of a decisive naval counterstroke.
Under the Japanese plan, dictated by a combination of geography,
logistics, and the lack of adequate carrier aviation, four widely
separated forces were to converge on the area of Leyte Gulf in an
effort to destroy, at whatever cost, the American invasion force. A
relatively small force, commanded by Vice Admiral Shoji Nishimura,
turned to the south of Palawan and crossed the Sulu Sea to pass
between Mindanao and Leyte. Nishimura's force would meet a number
of assorted American ships, Tennessee among them, in the
Battle of Surigao Strait.
As they passed the cape of Panaon Island on the evening of 24
October and morning of the 25th, the Japanese forces ran into a
deadly trap set for them by the American 7th Fleet Support Force.
Rear Admiral Jesse Oldendorf had six battleships
(Mississippi, Maryland, West Virginia,
Tennessee, California, and Pennsylvania, all
but Mississippi having been resurrected from Pearl Harbor),
eight cruisers (heavy cruisers Louisville, serving as the
cruisers' (flagship), Portland, Minneapolis and HMS
Shropshire, and light cruisers Denver,
Columbia, Phoenix, and Boise), 28 destroyers
and 39 PT boats.
Onboard Tennessee, observers had seen distant flashes of
gunfire, star shells and searchlights as the torpedo boats and
destroyers engaged the Japanese. At 0302, the battleship's radar
picked up Nishimura's approach at nearly 44,000 yd and began to
track the lead ship, the flagship Yamashiro. With the
cruiser Mogami and the destroyer Shigure, she was all
that remained of the first Japanese force. At 0351, Oldendorf
ordered the flanking cruisers to open fire, and at 0356, the
battleships let fly from 20,600 yd.
Radar fire control allowed the American battleships to hit
targets from a distance at which the Japanese could not reply
because of their inferior fire control systems. Japanese ships
Yamashiro and Mogami were crippled by a combination
of 14 in and 16 in armor-piercing shells. Shigure turned and
fled, but lost steering and stopped dead. Yamashiro sank at
0419.
The Battle of Surigao Strait was, to date, the final line battle
in naval history. Yamashiro was the last battleship to
engage another in combat, and one of very few to have been sunk by
another battleship during World War II. Of Nishimura's seven ships,
only Shigure survived.
Tennessee's participation in the Battle of Surigao Strait
was one part of the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Other actions included
the Battle of the Sibuyan Sea, the Battle off Cape Engaño and the
Battle off Samar, among others. Losses to the IJN were probably the
largest in naval history. Among the losses were 1 fleet carrier, 3
light carriers, 3 battleships, 10 cruisers, 11 destroyers,
approximately 500 planes, and 10,500 battle deaths, effectively
ending the Japanese Naval presence in the Pacific for the rest of
the war..