Talk:Winter 2018 Event/@comment-32781876-20180221172547/@comment-32647310-20180221190202

@ 32.208.100.248

Umm... sorry, but no.

The IJN was already well aware of the situation even before going to Leyte; they knew, for a fact, that holding the Philippines was impossible in the long-term.

If Kurita left the area (as you suggest), the region would be just as vulnerable to a future attack, which would either come from Hasley or from some future operation...which would mean that the entire effort to defend the region would have been for nothing.

Kurita would have had little choice but to leave some sort of defense force in the region, if not to maintain a direct hold on the area, then to definitely protect the supply-lines...which is exactly why the region was so important in the first place!

The fact of the matter is that by this point in the war, the IJN was pretty much done. They had no functional carrier force; the functional carriers that the IJN had were either shuttling aircraft around or were used as bait by Ozawa...either way, they had few carrier-based aircraft and even fewer pilots. And even though the IJN still had very powerful surface ships, they were still not in sufficent numbers to really compete with the USN (for every Yamato/Musashi, the USN had 3 Iowas, for every Nagato/Mutsu, the USN had 4 equivlents (3 Colorado, 2 North Carolina and 4 South Dakota)...not that it mattered because by this point in the war, it was pretty much a given that these types of warships were easily outclassed by carriers.

Winning at Leyte would have bought the IJN (and by extention, Japan), a little more time, but that's it.