On this night in 1944, a Japanese fleet steamed into a narrow strait in the dark and straight into a trap, where a line of American battleships, several of them raised from the mud of Pearl Harbor, was waiting to take its revenge. It was the last time in history battleships would ever fight battleships. This is the Battle of Surigao Strait. As the great Battle of Leyte Gulf raged, a southern Japanese force under Admiral Shoji Nishimura was ordered to force its way through the Surigao Strait and fall on the American landings from below. To get through, Nishimura had to pass up a long, narrowing channel in the night. And waiting for him at the far end was the American commander Jesse Oldendorf, who had arranged one of the most perfect ambushes in naval history. First, as the Japanese column pushed up the dark strait, American patrol boats and then waves of destroyers slashed at it from the flanks, racing in to launch torpedoes and then darting away. Torpedoes found their marks, and Japanese ships began to blow up and sink in the blackness, the column shredded before it ever reached the main battle. And then came the hammer blow. Across the top of the strait, Oldendorf had drawn up his battle line, and as the surviving Japanese ships steamed up toward him, he executed the classic maneuver every admiral dreamed of, crossing the enemy's T. His battleships and cruisers, strung out in a line across the head of the strait, could fire all their guns in full broadsides at the oncoming Japanese, while the enemy, approaching bows on, could barely reply. The result was annihilation. The American line erupted, pouring a storm of heavy shells down the strait into the head of the Japanese column. Nishimura's flagship was smashed and sunk and the admiral killed. His force was almost completely destroyed, shattered by torpedoes and gunfire in the dark. And there was a special meaning in it for the American crews. Several of the old battleships in Oldendorf's line had been at Pearl Harbor on the day of the Japanese surprise attack in 1941. They had been bombed and torpedoed, some sunk at their moorings, then raised from the harbor mud, rebuilt, and sent back to war. Now, three years later, those same resurrected battleships stood in the line at Surigao and poured their broadsides into the Imperial Japanese Navy, a long awaited revenge for Pearl Harbor delivered from the guns of the very ships that had been its victims. Surigao Strait was a crushing, one sided American victory. And it holds a unique place in history, because it was the last time battleships ever dueled battleships with their big guns. The weapon that had dominated the seas for generations fought its final gun line action here, in the dark of a Philippine strait, on this night in 1944, even as the aircraft that would replace it was sinking the Musashi not far away.