The United States Navy won such overwhelming victories in 1944 that, had it faced a different enemy, the war would have been over at the conclusion of the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Instead, the desperate Japanese forces began a wave of kamikaze attacks—something Americans were totally unprepared for—a violation of every belief about the conduct of warfare held in the West. Based on first-person accounts, this is the story of the naval campaigns in the Pacific from the triumph at Leyte Gulf to the end of the war, a new and more brutal phase in which the US Navy would fight harder for survival than ever before.