Historical events turn into movies

[Anomalocaris]

Halsey did as ordered.

No he didn’t.   He ordered this on his own initiative.   Nimitz certainly didn’t order him to do this, hence the “…..world wonders” query, which Halsey interpreted to be a personal rebuke.   This caused the temperamental and prideful Halsey to go ballistic with anger and shed tears of rage, even though by this time Taffy’s desperate plea for some assistance, any assistance was heard for all forces in the region,   Halsey had to be slapped in the face by his chief of staff to regain control of his emotions.

When he initially decided to go after Ozawa’s carriers, even his own staff were surprised.    They prepared and transmitted orders to detach the Halley’s fast battleship escorts to form an independent task force to continue to guard Taffy against any possible penetration by Kurita and Nishimura’s forces while the fast carriers went after Ozawa’s carriers.    The transmission was overheard by both Nimitz as well as Taffy, which caused them to assume these orders were executed so that Taffy was guarded by a force of 6 fast battleships.     But Halsey neglected to send the signal to actually execute that order.    So the fast battleships that could have stopped kurita before ever coming in contact with Taffy stayed in company with Halsey as the latter went on the wild goose chase after Ozawa’s decoy force.     Halsey went after Ozawa’s force which had no strategic value remaining, with a force of 6 modern battleships that ridiculously overmatched Ozawa’s two old WWI vintage battleships plus a handful of empty aircraft carriers, while leaving nothing to guard against Kurita, who had the Yamato on hand and could certainly have put up a real fight against these same modern battleships.