The battle of Cape Engano is very one-sided. Ozawa's carriers are almost devoid of aircraft while Halsey, his US opponent, had more than thousand at his disposal. The end result was never in doubt and the Japanese lost all of his carriers, either during the carrier battle or later in the night, finished up by US cruisers detached for that mission. End of the decoy after he had fulfilled his mission.

The battle off Samar is one-sided too, but it turned in favor of the US David against the Japanese Goliath. Despite his huge advantage in guns, Kurita did not push his advantage up to the landing beaches in the Golf of Leyte. The group of escort carriers delayed him and finally incited him to reverse course after a two and a half hours battle.

With hindsight, it is certain that Kurita would not have come back from the Golf of Leyte, had he pushed until there. He would have come between the steel of Oldendorff's battleships coming back from Surigao (he was short on anmunition though) and the hammer of Halsey's carriers coming back from Cape Engano. But at the time of the events, Kurita was unaware of all that. He just did not know where the US fleet carriers and battleships were gone ! He feared them to come up at any moment. That fear is probably the main reason why he retreated. He crossed nightly the Passage of San Bernardino and set sails to Brunei. The fast battleships sent to his pursuit by Halsey found only one destroyer as prize for their race.

Two other events are worth mentioning during this day of October 25th. First, the start of the first of the TA convoys for Ormoc Bay (west of Leyte). For more than a month, they would bring to the defenders of Leyte Island the reinforcement needed to prolong the resistance well beyond what the allies had expected.

The second still more momentous and spectacular event is the first Kamikaze attack, the Japanese suicide planes. They took as targets the escort carriers that have just fought the battle off Samar and inflicted them new losses. This new form of war took the Americans by surprise. They had to get used to it though, because the Japanese went on fighting that way until the end of hostilities.