Battle of the Visayan Sea, October 26, 1944.

[sergey]

Hello Laurent.
I have done a detailed analysis of all the documents. It turns out that the figures in the general reports do not correspond to the figures in the reports of individual ships and air groups. Therefore, I have written down the number of aircraft participating in the attacks from each aircraft carrier/each naval air group.
TG 77.4.2 took off with 20 FM-2s (including 8 from NATOMA BAY, 4 from KADASHAN BAY and 8 from MARCUS ISLAND) and 16 TBMs armed with bombs and rockets, including 8 from KADASHAN BAY, 1 from NATOMA BAY (another one crashed on takeoff), 3 from MANILA BAY (including 2 that had landed there the day before from NATOMA BAY's air group) and 4 from MARCUS BEY. TG 77.4.1 sent 7 FM-2s - 6 from SANGAMON with 500-pound bombs and 1 from SUWANNEE and 5 TBMs - 2 from PETROF BAY (including 1 from FENSHAW BAY) with 500-pound bombs and 8 rockets and 3 from SUWANNEE - 2 with bombs and rockets and one with a torpedo; en route to the target, off the northern end of Leyte, the latter was joined by 4 TBMs from SAVO ISLAND that had flown out earlier to search.
The aircraft from TG 77.4.1 and TG 77.4.2 took off simultaneously, at 08:25 - 08:35, but it was not possible to determine exactly which of them attacked first. The attacks on the Japanese ships began at 10:20 and lasted for about 1.5 hours.