Across the country other young men itched to join the navy, and some of them were destined to meet and serve in a single ship, the USS Gambier Bay, from her shake-down cruise to her final resting place, 34,000 feet below the warm surface of the South Pacific Ocean in the Philippine Trench.

   Unbeknownst to these soon-to-be-pup-sailors, the greatest naval battle in the history of the world was yet to be fought, and it would not be played out in the Atlantic; in the treacherous waters between the east coast of the U.S. and shell-shocked Europe, nor in the Mediterranean between North Africa and the beaches of Italy; but heave and roil and explode between rain squalls, fog and fabricated smoke in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, off the island of Samar in the Philippines Islands of the South Pacific Ocean.