The Conquering Tide (80 page)

In April and May 1944, every major movement of Ozawa's fleet was tracked and reported by submarines. American boats skulked off Lingga Roads near Singapore, observing and reporting as Japanese ships entered and exited. They assailed tankers shuttling between Tarakan and Tawi Tawi, off the northeast coast of Borneo. Freighters and troop transports carrying reinforcements from China went down between Shanghai and Manila. The veteran light cruiser
Yubari
was destroyed in an attack by the
Bluegill
off Halmahera on April 26. On May 6, the
Crevalle
sank the big tanker
Nisshin Maru
off Borneo.

As the First Mobile Fleet gathered in Tawi Tawi in mid-May, it was reconnoitered by the submarines
Lapon
and
Bonefish
. On May 15, the
Bonefish
(Commander Thomas W. Hogan) damaged a tanker and sank one of its escorting destroyers, the
Inazuma
. His sighting reports confirmed that a major fleet rendezvous was in progress at Tawi Tawi, and two more submarines, the
Puffer
and
Bluefish
, shadowed the approaches during the following week. The
Puffer
's attack on the seaplane tender
Chitose
on May 22 resulted in two hits, both apparent duds. On June 5, she sank two valuable cargo ships, the
Takasaki
and the
Ashizuri
. In a three-day rampage off Tawi Tawi between June 6 and 9, the submarine
Harder
(Commander Samuel D. Dealey) ran up one of the most extraordinary scores in the history of submarine warfare. On the sixth, just south of Tawi Tawi, the
Harder
sank a charging destroyer, the
Minazuki
, with a down-the-throat shot. She repeated the performance the following day with another down-the-throat shot, sinking the destroyer
Hayanami
. On the eighth, Dealey found the veteran destroyer
Tanikaze
in his sights and sank her with a four-torpedo salvo.

Destroyers, having been conceived and designed as submarine hunters, were the submariner's natural enemy. The destruction of so many such vessels was a source of singular satisfaction to the American submarine crews. It also weakened Ozawa's antisubmarine screening force, a factor that would prove decisive in the impending carrier battle.

While fretting over the location and intentions of the Fifth Fleet, the Japanese army and navy were also forced to react to MacArthur's offensive up the northern coast of Dutch New Guinea. In a finely choreographed series of sealifts, Admiral Kinkaid's naval forces had put army amphibious troops ashore on Hollandia (April 21) and Wakde Island (May 17). In each case the
invaders had secured airstrips in a matter of days, and USAAF planes had begun exerting pressure on points farther west. In May, MacArthur was driving toward the “Bird's Head” peninsula of northwestern New Guinea. On May 20, naval and amphibious forces began maneuvering into position to attack Biak Island. About 10,000 Japanese troops held the island, including an elite 222nd Regiment that had been battle-tested in China. The initial landings caught the defenders by surprise, but in the drive to capture Biak's three airfields, the fighting bogged down and both sides suffered heavy losses.

The Japanese deemed Biak a critical outpost in the defense of the southern inner perimeter. The island's airfields were an important node in the forthcoming battle envisioned in A-Go. If they were lost, they would be turned against the Japanese. USAAF B-24 bombers would launch a lethal bombing campaign against western New Guinea, Palau, and the southern Philippines. They would command the sea-lanes east of Mindanao. Therefore, Admiral Ugaki wrote in his diary, “Biak Island is the most critical crossroad of the war.”
⁶⁰
He suspected that the Japanese army was less than sanguine about its prospects on Biak and therefore was inclined to abandon the garrison as it had on so many other islands. But the navy could not countenance such a retreat, and Ugaki urged Ozawa to pressure Tokyo to send all available air and troop reinforcements into the area.

On May 29, Admiral Toyoda of the Combined Fleet ordered “Operation KON” to commence. KON involved the massing of land-based air units and troops behind the lines, and plans to move troops quickly into disputed areas to respond at the point of attack. It was thought that the U.S. Fifth Fleet might even be lured south to intervene in the campaign, an event that would activate A-Go and perhaps lead to a war-altering decisive naval victory. Kakuta was ordered to fly some 480 planes into airfields at Sorong and Halmahera island, from which they could attack the American amphibious fleet off Biak. Encouraged by reports from the island, where the Japanese garrison had repeatedly driven American forces back in counterattacks, the Imperial General Headquarters resolved to send in land reinforcements. Short of transports, the navy resorted to the old tactic of using destroyers and cruisers as makeshift troopships, which staged at Sorong. The flotilla, committed by Vice Admiral Naomasa Sakonju, would fetch 2,500 troops of the Second Amphibious Brigade from Zamboanga, Mindanao, on May 31 and land them on Biak three days later. Much of their weaponry and supplies would be towed in by barges.

Sakonju's approach was detected on June 3 by Allied reconnaissance planes,
and the flotilla was intercepted by a cruiser-destroyer force under Admiral Victor A. C. Crutchley. Heavy air attacks on June 8 sank one of Sakonju's ships and damaged another. The Japanese warships, crowded with troops and in no condition to fight, withdrew in a running battle.

The failure of the first reinforcement mission only redoubled Ozawa's determination to hold Biak. At Tawi Tawi, where divisions of ships were arriving from Lingga Roads, the staff pored over maps of Biak and western New Guinea and contemplated their options. Their prevailing view remained that the U.S. fleet would sail through the Palau islands to force a diversionary fight. Ugaki was keen to bring his heavy ships into action but reluctant to risk them to force the troop reinforcements through to Biak. On June 10, Admiral Toyoda ordered the battleships
Yamato
and
Musashi
, with the light cruiser
Noshiro
and six destroyers, to attempt another troop landing. Admiral Ugaki, who had admitted in his diary the previous morning that “I thought we had no choice but to give up Biak,” would command the combined force. He sailed from Tawi Tawi that afternoon and rendezvoused with additional forces in Batjan on June 11.
⁶¹

With nothing to compare to the Americans' sophisticated amphibious equipment and landing craft, the Japanese warships were forced to the expedient of carrying army landing craft on their decks—one each on the destroyers, two each on the cruiser and battleships. With the decks awkwardly burdened in this way, the ships could not come to action or use their guns to bombard shore positions. The troops would have to be landed before the squadron went into action; if the Americans interfered, this reinforcement mission was likely to end in another failure. En route, Ugaki admitted in his diary that he was “worried” about his anemic air cover, and considered that his ships were likely to come under punishing air attack before they could get troops ashore or bring their naval guns to bear on any enemy target: “I think that to reach the front line itself without air cover is awfully difficult, but I won't grumble about it now. I shall do all that is humanly possible.”
⁶²

The Biak operation was complicated by a series of indications that the Americans were staging a major operation north of the equator, probably aimed at the Marianas. Long-range scouting flights launched from Nauru had photographed a powerful American fleet anchored at Kwajalein and Majuro. A few days later, on June 9, another flight confirmed that the carriers and battleships seen earlier were gone. Where were they? Where were they going? On Toyoda's flagship, still anchored in Tokyo Bay, the staff officers
continued to believe that the Pacific Fleet's next thrust would be aimed toward Palau and the southern Philippines. Only the staff intelligence officer, Commander Chikataka Nakajima, predicted that the enemy was headed to Saipan. On June 10, American carrier planes were sighted about 300 miles east of Guam. The next day came a powerful fighter sweep over Saipan and Guam. On the night of June 12, Kakuta's headquarters radioed its best estimates of the situation off the Marianas, judging that the enemy force consisted of eleven carriers.
⁶³

Kakuta's early reports on the air fight over the Marianas were largely upbeat. Though he was losing a great many planes, he believed (or said he believed) his forces were inflicting proportionate damage on the American carrier forces. Air scouts had not yet detected Turner's amphibious fleet, so the Japanese surmised that the action in the Marianas might be nothing more than a raid or a feint. Other air scouts had seen MacArthur's transports passing through the Admiralties, indicating that a major landing might be at hand in the south.

At this moment, the strategic merit of the Americans' double-headed offensive was plainly in view. The Japanese high command found itself frozen in place, awaiting clarity on the location and objective of the Fifth Fleet.

On June 13, with minesweepers working off Saipan's leeward beaches and battleships bombarding the coast, it seemed clear that an invasion of that island was imminent. Without waiting for orders, Ugaki suspended the Biak operation and began clearing his decks of the landing craft. Impatient for orders to fall in with Ozawa, he weighed the pros and cons of rushing north on his own initiative. Two hours later, Admiral Toyoda suspended Operation KON and gave new orders: “Set Op A in motion for the decisive battle.”
⁶⁴
The First Mobile Fleet filed out of the channel at Tawi Tawi. Ozawa set course at high speed for the Guimaras Strait in the Western Visayas region of the Philippines, where the fleet would take on 10,800 tons of fuel before sailing for the San Bernardino Strait. Ugaki's force of battleships, cruisers, and destroyers broke off the attack on Biak and sped north at 20 knots, keeping Mindanao to port, intending to rendezvous with Ozawa in the Philippine Sea. The Biak garrison was left to make the now-customary last stand, and die to the last man.

^*
The nickname was
Oni Gawara
in Japanese. Ozawa had suffered a facial injury while serving on a destroyer early in his career. The injury had immobilized his facial muscles, making it impossible for him to smile or show other emotions through facial expressions.

Chapter Fourteen

O
N
J
UNE
6, 1944,
AS
A
LLIED TROOPS STORMED THE BEACHES OF
northern France, President Roosevelt offered a simple prayer over the radio: “Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity. . . . With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy force of our enemy.”
¹

The president knew, but could not yet disclose, that another great amphibious flotilla was underway in the Pacific. If not for the invasion of northern France (
OVERLORD
), the Pacific operation (
FORAGER
) would have surpassed all previous amphibious landings in scale and sophistication. That two such colossal assaults could be launched against fortified enemy shores, in the same month and at opposite ends of the Eurasian landmass, was a supreme demonstration of American military-industrial hegemony. The force that sailed against the Marianas included more than 600 ships carrying more than 300,000 men. Admiral Marc Mitscher's Task Force 58 now included fifteen aircraft carriers divided into four task groups. Task Force 51, the Joint Expeditionary Force, carried 127,000 amphibious assault troops, including the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Marine Divisions and the army's 27th Infantry Division. Records enumerated 40,000 discrete categories of supplies and munitions in the holds of the transports. These had been combat-loaded so that they could be removed and transferred to the beachhead quickly and in exactly the quantities requested by the troops ashore. For every one marine or soldier in the landing force, the transport fleet carried more than a ton of supplies and equipment. A single supply ship brought rations to feed 90,000 men for a month. Mitscher's task force carried
eight million gallons of aviation fuel, and would burn more than four million barrels of bunker oil during the operation.
²

An F6F pilot, flying above Task Force 58 during the five-day passage from Eniwetok to Saipan, was impressed by the sight of the fleet as it turned into the wind to launch aircraft. Carriers, battleships, cruisers, and destroyers turned together and steadied on the same course. “The wakes from all of those ships were perfectly symmetrical with each other, like a perfect corps de ballet, but some of these ships weighed thirty-five thousand tons. I looked down on this power and wondered what kind of fools these Japanese were. They had made one of the greatest miscalculations of all time, and boy, were they going to pay a price.”
³

The top echelon of the command roster was unchanged from previous operations. Spruance would command the entire fleet from his flagship, the cruiser
Indianapolis
, but he would leave tactical command of the carriers to Mitscher. Kelly Turner commanded Task Force 51, consisting of 486 vessels ranging in size from battleships (the older, slower class, optimized for shore bombardment) to landing craft. The marine Holland Smith retained his job as commander of the Fifth Amphibious Corps. General Ralph Smith of the U.S. Army remained his subordinate as commander of the 27th Infantry Division. Task Force 51 was subdivided into a Northern Attack Force, which would take Saipan (and which Turner commanded directly), and a Southern Attack Force, which would tackle Guam. The southern group was commanded by Admiral Richard L. Conolly, and the assault troops of that group were commanded by General Roy Geiger, the marine who had very adeptly run the Cactus Air Force during the Guadalcanal campaign.