Read it twice. Also an excellent read: Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors by the same author. About Leyte Gulf.
Great book...I read that book as well.
A little off subject, but with the state of art of CGI, I wish someone would make a movie about that entire battle. There is so much in it, failure, desperation, triumph, and even a Charge of The Light Brigade by US destroyers in a virtual suicide mission, accompanied by an inadvertent reference to the same poem in communication to Halsey (as you know from reading it!)
I wish it could be made without some POS liberal director managing to put his own spin on it.