To Timshatz
(Cocerning your response about Taffy aircraft being used for ground attack roles when Kurita appeared) Worse, many of the planes were involved in activities like dropping supplies and water to the Marines ashore. Taffy 3 was under attack and launched whatever aircraft that was on board, mostly without any ordnance other than machine gun rounds.
Taffy 1 had sent out aircraft in the other direction looking for the remmants of the southern force. Taffy 2 had the most aircraft on board at the beginning of the battle and did launch some Avengers armed with torpedoes.
The aircraft assigned to covering the invasion were recalled and rearmed with torpedoes, bombs and rockets. As far as rockets were concerned I've only seen references to Avengers armed with rockets but not Wildcats during this battle. And as far as bombs are concerned, at Samar, I've only seen references to Avengers being loaded with 500lb bomb and it's unclear if they were SAP or GP. I haven't read anything that says any Wildcats were armed with rockets or bombs or if any Avengers carried anything larger than a 500lb bomb. I don't think even a 500lb SAP would have much effect on Kurita's BBs, especially the Yamato. I would think that the CVEs would have carried some 1000lb and maybe even 2000lb bombs even if they were GP bombs to be used against land targets.
Also, because of the problems with the aircraft torpedo before the invention of the ring tail version, Avengers had started to move away from torpedo bombing and more towards dropping bombs. Avengers weren't capable of the angles required in actual dive bombing so they used the glide bombing technique which only used an attack angle of 50 degrees. It was around this time that the technique of skip bombing was invented but I don't know if it was ever used by Avengers.
I would greatly appreciate any information concerning the ordnance used during the Battle of Samar (Leyte Gulf).
I would also appreciate any examples of Wildcats being used in a dive bombing role during WW2 .