You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast.

Hello, this is Matt from the Explorers podcast. I want to invite you to join me on the

voyages and journeys of the most famous explorers in the history of the world. These are the

thrilling and captivating stories of Vigelin,

Shackleton, Lewis, and Clark, and so many other famous and not so famous adventures from

throughout history. Go to Explorerspodcast.com or just look us up on your podcast app. That's

the Explorers Podcast. The date was October 23, 1944.

It was the first day of the largest naval battle in history, the Battle of Laité Gulf.

The podcast, obviously, is not there yet, 1944, and won't be there for quite a while.

But I recently got to read a new book on the topic. Latei Gulf, a new history

of the world's largest sea battle. Latei Gulf is a really interesting battle, not just because

of its size, but because of how it was structured. By 1944, the American naval dominance in the

Pacific was pretty much unassailable. After years of attritional battles,

the Imperial Japanese Navy simply was not the well-oiled machine that it had been when the

award started in late 1941. But in the seas off the Philippines, the Japanese were able to

construct a scenario where most of the strength of the American Navy was not guarding the Japanese

Navy's primary target,

the landing forces, but were instead chasing Japanese carriers to the north.

The carriers were simply a decoy, and they were opening the door to the possibility

of a major Japanese naval victory, or at least that door was open in theory.

Maybe not in reality.

In the end, it would not be a great victory, or a victory at all, for the Japanese. And instead,

...