Gambi's planes were the ones doing this. She was the one running away.
Well... Gambi's planes and Leeroy Johnston.
It's both suicidal and completely pointless for a carrier to charge the enemy. The ONE gun (which is the same 5" type of gun destroyers tend to carry 5-12 of) on the Casablanca-class escort carriers was on the rear of the ship (designed solely to discourage submarines from taking her on with deck guns alone just to save the torpedo... yeah, it's never even designed to be anything more than the most feeble of threats), so she can't even fire without turning her tail towards the enemy.
Still, according to a quick reference to Wikipedia, Gambier Bay did manage to score three hits with her rear-mounted gun against the cruiser chasing her, although it did no damage worth writing about (again, A destroyer-level gun firing on a cruiser). Only White Plains is maybe credited with doing real damage when a lucky shot detonated Choukai's torpedoes, crippling her. (Which is part of the reason American cruisers didn't carry torpedoes.)
As for her planes, they were definitely performing admirably, considering several of them were charging with weapons that couldn't damage the ships they were fighting or simply doing fly-bys with empty magazines until the anti-ship ordnance could be readied, but at the same time, the IJN was basically out of aircraft at that point, and the IJN ships always had crap AA, so it's not like they were facing all that much danger doing so.
Johnston definitely deserves the credit, though, along with Samuel B. Roberts, Hoel, and Heerman.
