Imagine a hallway, a long, narrow, dark hallway filled with seaater.
At one end of this hallway, a giant is entering.
A massive steelclad warrior carrying the heaviest guns ever built.
This is the Japanese southern force led by battleships that are essentially floating mountains of armor.
They are coming to smash the American fleet, and they are expecting a glorious, violent duel.
But at the other end of the hallway, there is silence.
The Americans have not just set up a defense.
They have built an execution chamber.
On the night of October 25th, 1944, the Surigal Strait is the deadliest place on Earth.
The US Navy has stacked the deck so thoroughly that historians later called it the last of the giants.
They have battleships, they have cruisers, they have destroyers.
But before the Japanese fleet can even reach those heavy hitters, they have to pass through something else, something much smaller and much scarier.
Floating in the pitch black water, bobbing in the swells, a dozens of tiny boats.
They are not made of armorplated steel.
They are made of mahogany plywood.
They are fueled by high octane aviation gasoline.
If you look at them the wrong way, they catch fire.
These are the PT boats.
The Mosquito Fleet.
To a Japanese admiral standing on the bridge of a cruiser, these boats are a joke.
They are pests.
They are insects to be swatted away with a single shell.
But on this night, one of those insects is going to land a sting that cripples a giant.
This is the story of how a wooden boat commanded by a reserve officer fired a shot into the dark that defied the laws of probability.
It is the story of the moment a perfect trap snapped shut and a 5,500 ton cruiser was brought to its knees by a weapon that wasn’t even aiming at it.
Welcome to the night of the mosquitoes.
To understand the madness of this engagement, you have to look at the players.
On one side, steaming into the throat of the strait is Vice Admiral Shoji Nishimura.
He is a warrior of the old school, stern, experienced, and on this night he is a man walking to his own funeral.
He commands the southern force.
It sounds impressive, but Nishimura knows the truth.
His fleet is a collection of leftovers.
He has two battleships, the Fusso and the Yamashiro, but they are old.
They were built before World War I.
They have been modernized, sure, but they are slow.
Leading his destroyer screen is the light cruiser Abukuma.
The Abukuma is a veteran.
She has been fighting since Pearl Harbor.
She is the flagship of destroyer squadron 1.
Her job is to be the eyes and ears of the fleet to spot the enemy and unleash her long lance torpedoes.
She is 5,500 tons of steel and discipline.
But Nishimura knows his orders.
He is the diversion.
His job is to draw the American fleet south so the main Japanese force can sneak in from the north.
He is the bait in the trap.
He expects to die.
There is a samurai quality to his advance.
Stoic, inevitable, doomed.
Now look at who is waiting for him.
Hiding in the shadows of the islands are 39 American PT boats.
If the Abacuma is a samurai sword, forged, sharp, and traditional, the PT boat is a baseball bat wrapped in barb wire.
These boats should not be fighting warships.
They are 80 ft long.
They are built out of mahogany plywood.
Yes, wood.
In an era of armor-piercing shells, the Americans are sending sailors out in boats you could punch a hole through with a screwdriver.
They are powered by three massive Packard aircraft engines.
They are fast, screaming across the water at 40 knots.
But they are fueled by 3 to,000 gallons of high octane aviation gasoline.
Think about that.
High octane gas in a wooden hull.
The crews call them the mosquito fleet or sometimes the expendables.
If a Japanese destroyer hits one of these boats with even a small caliber shell, it doesn’t just sink, it disintegrates in a fireball.
Commanding one of these floating tinder boxes, PT137, is Lieutenant Junior Grade Mike Kovar.
Kovar is not a career admiral like Nishimura.
He is a citizen soldier.
He is commanding a crew of young men who are soaking wet, seasick, and staring into the darkness, listening for the rumble of enemy engines.
Their weapon is the Mark13 torpedo.
It is heavy, it is slow, and compared to the Japanese long lance, it is primitive, but the Americans have numbers, and they have the element of surprise.
The contrast could not be sharper.
Nishimura is bringing heavy steel and a philosophy of honorable death.
Kova is bringing plywood, gasoline, and a philosophy of chaotic survival.
The Abukuma is designed to fight other ships in a clean daylight battle.
She is not designed to fight ghosts in the dark.
And that is exactly what the Americans have prepared.
They are not going to fight fair.
They are not going to meet Nishimura in a duel.
They are going to swarm him.
As the Japanese fleet passes the headland, entering the narrowest part of the straight, the trap is already primed.
The plywood boats rev their engines.
The steel giants sail on, blind to the fact that the water around them is already teeming with predators.
Geography is destiny in warfare.
And on this night, geography is the enemy of the Japanese Navy.
The Surigal Strait is not a wide open ocean where you can maneuver, turn, and bring your guns to bear.
It is a funnel.
It is 12 mi wide at its mouth, but it narrows down.
It forces you to drive in a straight line.
Admiral Nishimura knows this.
He has no choice.
To get to the American transports at Lee Gulf, he has to punch through this bottleneck.
So he organizes his fleet into a formation known as line ahead.
Imagine a parade.
Ship follows ship in a single rigid column.
The destroyers are in the lead acting as scouts.
Then the light cruiser Abukuma.
Then the massive battleships Yamashiro and Fuzo.
Then the heavy cruiser Moami bringing up the rear.
It is an orderly disciplined formation.
It is perfect for navigation.
It is also the worst possible formation for fighting a swarm.
Waiting for them is American Rear Admiral Jesse Oldenorf.
Oldenorf has not just set a trap.
He has built a machine designed to process the Japanese fleet into scrap metal.
He uses a strategy called defense in depth.
Think of it as a series of filters.
Layer one, the PT boats.
They are stationed at the very entrance of the strait hidden in the coes of Boho and Laty.
Their job is not necessarily to kill the battleships but to act as a trip wire to report the enemy position and if possible cause chaos.
Layer two, the destroyers.
Miles up the straight lurking against the dark shorelines are squadrons of American tin cans loaded with torpedoes.
Layer three, the executioners.
At the far end of the straight, capping the tea, are six American battleships and eight cruisers.
They are waiting to cross the Japanese tea and unleash a wall of steel.
Nishimura is sailing his parade column directly into a meat grinder.
At 22 36 hours, the first tumblers of the lock click into place.
A PT boat radar operator sees a blip, then another, then a mass of them.
Skunks, they call them.
Unidentified surface contacts moving north at 20 knots.
The weather decides to pick a side.
A heavy tropical rain squall sweeps over the straight.
Thunder rolls across the water mixing with the sound of the wind.
For the PT boats, this is a gift from God.
The rain blinds the Japanese lookouts.
The waves hide the low profiles of the wooden boats.
Up on the bridge of the Abukuma, the tension is breaking point.
Their radar is primitive compared to the Americans.
They are squinting into the rain, looking for shapes in the gloom.
Suddenly, star shells burst overhead.
Flares.
The Americans are lighting up the night.
The PT boats break cover.
They don’t attack as a unified fleet.
That would be suicide.
They attack in sections of three, darting out from the shadows like wolves nipping at the heels of a buffalo herd.
The Japanese reaction is violent.
The Abukuma and the destroyers light up the darkness with search lights.
Their secondary guns, 5-in and 25 mm, start hammering the water.
Great geysers of spray erupt around the tiny wooden boats.
It is a chaotic, confused melee.
The PT boats launch torpedoes, turn hard, and pump smoke to hide their escape.
Most of the torpedoes miss.
They run erratic or they detonate prematurely on the wake of the destroyers.
To Nishimura, it seems annoying but manageable.
He orders his ships to maintain course, speed up, push through the insects.
He thinks he is brushing them aside.
But amidst the spray and the smoke, one boat, PT137, commanded by Mike Kovar, finds itself in a unique position.
Kovar is not looking at the battleships.
He sees a shape emerging from the squall.
It is a Japanese destroyer.
It is moving fast, screening the main body.
Kavar yells the order.
He lines up the shot.
This is not a calculated firing solution from a computer.
This is Seaman’s eye.
It is a gut check in the middle of a hurricane.
He releases his torpedo.
The weapon splashes into the black water.
The engine kicks over.
It begins its run.
Kovar spins the wheel and runs for his life.
Tracers chasing his stern.
He thinks he has missed.
He thinks the shot was wasted, but the torpedo is running true and it is running long.
If you have never been in a naval battle at night, it is hard to describe the confusion.
We tend to think of battles as these organized chess games.
Admiral A moves here.
Admiral B counters there.
But down on the water, inside the cockpit of a PT boat, it is not chess.
It is a knife fight in a closet with the lights off.
The Surigal Strait explodes into a kaleidoscope of violence.
For the crew of PT 137, the world shrinks down to the few feet of mahogany deck around them.
The sound is deafening.
Three Packard engines are screaming at full throttle, vibrating the fillings in their teeth.
The ocean is chopping up, tossing the 80 ft boat around like a cork.
And then there are the lights.
Japanese search lights cut through the rain.
These are carbon arc lamps, incredibly powerful.
When one of them hits you, you feel naked.
You are suddenly the brightest thing in the universe.
You know that every gunner on every Japanese ship is looking right at you, dialing in the range.
Lieutenant Mike Kovar is standing in the cockpit, soaked to the bone.
He is trying to make sense of the shadows.
To his left, PT-138 is taking fire.
Shells are splashing the water, sending up geysers that swamp the deck.
To his right, the massive shapes of the Japanese Southern Force are thundering north.
They look like moving buildings.
The muzzle flashes from their guns are so bright they leave after images in your eyes.
Kovar sees his target.
It is a destroyer, a fast, sleek Japanese warship.
Probably part of the screen protecting the battleships.
It is cutting through the waves, a bone in its teeth, throwing up a massive bow wave.
This is the moment of truth.
A PT boat is not a sniper rifle.
It is a shotgun.
To hit a moving destroyer at night in high seas with a slowmoving torpedo requires a mix of trigonometry and prayer.
You have to lead the target.
You have to guess its speed.
You have to guess its course.
And you have to do it while people are shooting machine guns at you.
Kavar yells the command.
The torpedo hits the percussion cap.
There is a whoosh of compressed air.
The Mark1 13 torpedo slides off the rack and splashes into the dark water.
Now the physics take over.
The torpedo weighs 2,000 lb.
It has a warhead packed with 600 lb of torpex explosive.
It dives deep initially.
Then its hydrostatic valves kick in, bringing it up to running depth.
Its propellers spin up.
Kovar does not stick around to watch.
The moment the fish is away, he slams the throttles forward.
He cranks the wheel hard over.
PT137 heels over carving a tight turn to get out of the zone of death.
Behind him, the torpedo is chugging along at 45 knots.
It is heading straight for the Japanese destroyer.
But here is where the fog of war intervenes.
Maybe Kovar miscalculated the speed.
Maybe the Japanese destroyer captain spotted the wake and ordered a slight turn.
Or maybe the torpedo ran just a few feet too deep.
It misses.
The destroyer sails on unharmed.
The crew of PT137 probably curses in the chaos of the retreat, dodging shells and laying smoke.
They assume they have failed.
Another wasted shot.
Another miss in the dark.
But a torpedo does not stop just because it misses its intended target.
It keeps going.
It has a range of several thousand yard.
It is a dumb machine.
It does not know it missed.
It just follows its gyro setting, churning through the black water of the Suriga Strait.
And directly behind that destroyer, following in the blind spot, is the light cruiser Abukuma.
The Abukuma is moving at 28 knots.
Her lookouts are focused on the PT boats to the sides.
They are focused on the muzzle flashes.
They are not looking at the water directly ahead of them where the wake of their own destroyer is churning.
They do not see the trail of bubbles.
The torpedo threads the needle.
It bypasses the escort.
It enters the heart of the Japanese formation.
It is a blind bullet fired into a crowded room and it is about to find a victim.
It is one of the darkest jokes in military history.
You spend millions of dollars building a warship.
You train the crew for years.
You install the finest optics and the heaviest guns, and then your fate is decided by a blind, unguided machine swimming through the dark, fired by a guy who was aiming at something else entirely.
At roughly 0325 hours, the Mark13 torpedo slams into the port side of the Abukuma.
It hits directly amid ships right at the number one boiler room.
The explosion is instantaneous and catastrophic.
600 lb of torpex detonates against the steel plating.
It doesn’t just punch a hole, it caves in the side of the ship.
Inside the boiler room, the world ends in a fraction of a second.
The blast wave shreds the steam pipes.
Superheated steam under immense pressure explodes into the compartment.
The men inside are killed instantly, not by shrapnel, but by the sheer thermal violence of the event.
On the bridge, the impact feels like the ship has run ground.
The 5,500 ton vessel shutters violently.
Officers are thrown off their feet.
The lights flicker and die, plunging the command center into red emergency lighting.
Then comes the report that every captain dreads.
Speed is dropping.
The Abukuma was slicing through the water at 28 knots, keeping pace with the destroyers.
Within minutes, she is limping at 10 knots.
Then seven, in naval warfare, speed is life.
If you cannot move, you cannot fight.
And more importantly, you cannot stay in formation.
And this is where the lucky shot changes the entire geometry of the battle.
Up until this moment, Admiral Nishimura had a cohesive fleet.
He had his eyes, the Abukuma, and her destroyers out in front.
They were his screen.
They were supposed to spot the enemy destroyers.
and the battleships waiting up the straight.
But now the Abukuma is falling out of line.
She is veering off, trailing oil and smoke, struggling to stay afloat.
The formation breaks.
The destroyers are now leaderless.
Confusion ripples through the Japanese van for Lieutenant Kova on PT 137 miles away and running for his life.
He has no idea what he has just done.
He doesn’t get a confirmation.
He doesn’t see a massive fireball.
He just sees a flash in the distance and assumes the battle goes on.
He doesn’t know that he has just blinded the enemy fleet.
Admiral Nishimura on the battleship Yamashiro now faces a nightmare.
His point man is gone.
He is steaming into the narrowest part of the trap and he has just lost his best sensor platform.
He makes a fatal decision.
He decides to press on.
He leaves the crippled Abukuma behind in the darkness.
This is the turning point.
Not because a major battleship was sunk that comes later, but because the system of the Japanese fleet was dismantled by a piece of plywood.
The Abukuma is now alone.
The rest of the fleet rushes past her, accelerating toward their doom.
She sits dead in the water, rocking in the swells.
Her crew frantically trying to shore up the bulkheads to stop the flooding.
She has gone from being a predator to being a spectator.
And as the Abukuma drifts in the dark, her crew witnesses the apocalypse unfold ahead of them.
Minutes later, the second layer of the American trap triggers.
The American destroyers unleash a wall of torpedoes.
Then the battleships open fire.
The night sky turns into daylight.
The horizon erupts in orange flame as the battleships Fuzo and Yamashiro are hammered into oblivion.
The crew of the Abukuma watches their comrades die.
They watch the decisive battle turn into a massacre and they know with a sinking feeling that they are stranded on the wrong side of the line.
They are a wounded animal left behind by the herd.
And when the sun comes up, the hunters will come back to finish the job.
The trap worked.
The giant was hamstrung by a mosquito.
So, was it just a fluke? It is easy to look at the crippling of the Abukuma and dismiss it as a freak accident.
A one ina- million shot, a blind torpedo finding a needle in a haystack.
But if you look at the systems involved, you realize that this accident was almost inevitable.
The battle of Surigaw Strait is a perfect case study in the clash between two different ways of waging war.
On the Japanese side, you have the doctrine of order.
Admiral Nishimura is sailing in a rigid, tight formation, the line ahead.
Strategically, this makes sense for navigation.
It keeps the fleet together.
It allows the admiral to control every ship like pieces on a chessboard.
But tactically, against torpedoes, it is a death sentence.
By lining up his ships one after another, Nishimura created a target density that was off the charts.
He essentially built a wall of steel moving through the water.
If you miss the first ship, you hit the second.
If you miss the second, you might hit the third.
Mike Kovar didn’t need to be a sniper.
He just needed to fire into the crowd.
The torpedo that missed the destroyer didn’t hit the Abukuma because of magic.
It hit because the Abukuma was exactly where Japanese doctrine said it should be, following directly in the wake of the leader maintaining perfect station.
Her discipline was her downfall.
Now look at the American side.
This is the doctrine of chaos.
The PT boat program is the embodiment of American industrial warfare.
These boats are cheap.
They are mass-roduced and crucially they are decentralized.
Lieutenant Kovar did not need to radio Admiral Oldenorf for permission to fire.
He did not need to wait for a fleetwide maneuver.
He saw a target and he took the shot.
The American system trusts the individual.
It gives a 20-year-old kid a boat, a torpedo, and a general order.
Go cause trouble.
This creates a level of unpredictability that a rigid system cannot handle.
Nishimura could predict the movement of battleships.
He could not predict the erratic suicidal charges of 39 plywood speedboats.
There is also a brutal economic calculus here.
The Abukuma is a high value asset.
It takes years to build and thousands of man-hour to run.
The torpedo that hit it cost a few thousand.
The Americans could afford to miss 10,000 times.
They could afford to lose PT boats.
Japan could not afford to lose a single cruiser.
When Kovar fired that torpedo, he was not just firing an explosive.
He was firing a manifestation of the American philosophy.
Volume over precision, initiative over control.
The lucky shot was the result of a system designed to create its own luck.
If you throw enough dice, eventually you roll a double six.
The Japanese brought a sword to the fight, expecting a duel.
The Americans brought a bucket of dice and tipped it onto the table.
The Abukuma wasn’t destroyed by a better ship.
It was destroyed by a system that understood that in the confusion of night, quantity has a quality all its own.
The Abukuma does not die immediately.
Like a stubborn samurai, she refuses to fall.
While the rest of Nishimura’s fleet is being vaporized in the Suriga Strait, the crippled cruiser manages to turn around.
Her engineers perform miracles.
They patch the steam pipes.
They shore up the flooding.
They manage to get the engines turning again, but she is limping.
She crawls away at barely 10 knots, hiding in the darkness, heading south toward the island of Negros.
But in modern warfare, there is no place to hide.
The sun comes up on October 26th and with the sun comes the realization that the Abukuma is alone.
The southern force, the mighty battleships Fusso and Yamashiro is gone.
They are scrap metal at the bottom of the straight.
Nishimura is dead.
The Abukuma is an orphan in an ocean owned by the enemy.
At dawn, the vultures arrive.
Usually a damaged ship fears Navy dive bombers.
But in a final twist of irony, it is not the Navy that claims the kill.
It is the army.
A flight of B24 Liberators heavy 4engineed bombers belonging to the US Army Air Forces spots the limping cruiser.
Now, generally speaking, high alitude level bombers are terrible at hitting moving ships.
It is hard to drop a bomb from 10,000 ft and hit a maneuvering target.
But the Abukuma cannot maneuver.
She is a sitting duck trailing a long slick of oil that points right to her.
The B24s line up.
They open their bomb bay doors.
This is not a duel.
This is an execution.
They drop sticks of heavy bombs.
The Abukuma’s anti-aircraft gunners fight back, but it is hopeless.
The bombs walk across the deck.
Explosions rip through the superructure.
The fires that were extinguished during the night roar back to life, fed by the aviation fuel and the ammunition.
At 12:42 hours, the struggle ends.
The Abukuma, the flagship, the veteran of Pearl Harbor, rolls over and sinks off the coast of Negros.
250 men go down with her.
Her destruction completes the annihilation of the southern force.
Think about the scale of this defeat.
Japan sent a fleet to force the strait.
They sent two battleships, one heavy cruiser, and four destroyers.
By the time the sun set on October 26th, almost all of them were gone.
The only survivor of note was the destroyer Shigur.
The Abukuma was the first domino to fall.
When that single lucky torpedo from Mike Kovar’s PT boat slammed into her hull, it didn’t just damage a ship.
It shattered the cohesion of the entire Japanese formation.
It blinded them right before they walked into the guns of the American battleships.
It was the beginning of the end.
The Abukuma lies there today, a forgotten wreck in a forgotten corner of the Pacific War.
She is a monument to the fact that in war, you don’t need to be the biggest to be the most dangerous.
You just need to be in the right place at the right time with a torpedo that refuses to miss.
There is a romantic idea about war that persists even today.
We like to imagine it as a clash of champions.
We want to see the knight in shining armor fight the black knight.
We want to see the battleship Yamashiro trade blows with the battleship West Virginia.
But the crippling of the Abukuma tells us a different colder truth.
It tells us that in the modern age, Goliath does not just lose to David.
Goliath gets mugged in an alley by David’s little brother.
The encounter in the Surigaw Strait marked the death of an entire philosophy of naval combat.
Admiral Nishimura sailed into that battle looking for a duel.
He brought the finest heavy ships his nation could build.
He brought honor.
He brought tradition.
And he was dismantled by plywood boats and mass-produced torpedoes.
The Abukuma was not defeated by a superior warrior.
She was defeated by a superior system.
A system that understood that a cheap expendable weapon if used in a swarm is deadlier than a single precious masterpiece.
This is the ultimate lesson of the Mosquito Fleet.
It is a lesson that echoes down to us today.
Look at modern warfare.
We see billiondoll aircraft carriers worrying about $100 drones.
We see massive tanks stopped by shoulder fired missiles.
The dynamic that played out in the dark of October 1944 is the same dynamic we see now.
The technology changes, but the math remains the same.
The giant is always vulnerable to the swarm.
Japanese doctrine failed because it was built on pride.
It assumed that quality and spirit could overcome the raw probability of chaos.
They believed a cruiser was too important to be sunk by a boat made of wood glue and sawdust.
The Americans had no such illusions.
They knew that war is not a duel.
It is an industrial accident.
And they built a machine designed to cause that accident as efficiently as possible.
Lieutenant Mike Kavar and his crew on PT 137 probably didn’t think about philosophy that night.
They were just cold, wet, and scared trying to survive.
But when Kovar pressed that firing button, he wasn’t just launching a torpedo.
He was ringing the bell for a new age of warfare.
An age where there are no safe distances.
An age where the biggest ship in the ocean can be brought to its knees by the smallest boat in the fight.
The Abukuma rests on the bottom of the sea, a rustcovered reminder to anyone who believes that size guarantees survival.
And somewhere in the history books, the mosquito is still buzzing.
