Oral History Interview with Robert Hagen, August 28, 2007 Page: 3

                                
MR. HAGEN: Ernest E. Evans came out of his cabin, had been in bed, assessed the
situation and said, "This is an emergency, all hands to General Quarters. Light off all
boilers and prepare for an attack on major portion of the Jap fleet." He increased the
speed and he finally said, "Left full rudder." What that was for was to lay a smoke
screen. This is just an automatic reaction of a fighting man to make a smoke screen to
cut down the vision between the two forces. At forty thousand yards you could just
barely see tops of them on the horizon. He was the first one. One of the outstanding
things that he did was order left full rudder and he proceeded right across the length of
our formation in such a way to lay the smoke screen where it would hide the ships and
the size of the ships we had and also gave us a brief breathing space where the Japs didn't
know what to do. Now the Japs had two choices. They had to decide whether we were
one of the fast moving task forces led under Halsey or were we one of the auxiliary CVE
groups that have a maximum speed of only 17 knots. So having this brief look allowed
by our skipper for them to see what the hell we were, Kurita guessed wrong and he said
he thought we were one of Halsey's fast moving dangerous task forces whereas we
weren't. At that point the Admiral, Kurita, had to decide how to attack us and he elected
to send his cruisers and destroyers and battleships forward and kept his destroyers in
reserve and this was a key action. It was exactly the wrong thing to do. So the first thing
Commander Evans did was to trick this admiral into fighting the wrong type of a battle.
Now, what should the admiral have done under the circumstances that were real? He
should have sent his two squadrons of destroyers out ahead similar to what the Admiral
Oldendorf, that ran the battle the night before, did. He sent his scores of destroyers ahead
of them and they did sixty percent of the damage to the Jap force in Surigao Straits,
damage to them before the battleships and cruisers even opened fire. If he had done

properly what I am saying, with the two fast destroyers coming down at 25 to 30 knots
passing us by, it would have thrown our screen into an absolute state of chaos. What
would they do? So here we were the Japs coming at us at 25-30 knots and the rest of us
just running away as fast as our task group commander would allow. Finally, as a result
of our continuing making the smoke screen, it was decided that the other ships eventually
all started making smoke and even later on even the carriers were making smoke. While
we were the only ones the first four or five minutes making smoke, we got shot at a lot.

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