The Second World War (122 page)
Neither Halsey nor Kinkaid expected the Japanese to come out to fight on this occasion. Logic seemed to dictate that the Japanese would hold back to concentrate their forces against an invasion of Luzon itself. This had indeed been the Japanese plan, but any landing in the Philippines threatened to cut Japan off from the oilfields of Java and Sumatra. Imperial General Headquarters simply could not ignore such a threat. Halsey was so relaxed that he sent one of his carrier groups back for refitting, to the vast new US Navy base in the lagoon of Ulithi Atoll in the Caroline Islands.
In the early hours of 20 October, the invasion fleet and escorts entered the straits leading to the Gulf of Leyte. The landing with four divisions began that morning and went according to plan. General MacArthur went ashore with the new President of the Philippines early in the afternoon. Having ensured that pressmen, newsreel cameras and photographers were present, MacArthur waded ashore and made his announcement: ‘People of the Philippines, I have returned! By the grace of Almighty God, our forces stand again on Philippine soil.’ MacArthur’s almost presidential campaign over the last year had included the smuggling in of leaflets, books of matches, packs of cigarettes and propaganda buttons, all decorated with a portrait of General MacArthur, the US and Philippine flags and his slogan ‘I shall return’. They had been distributed by the large resistance network on the islands, and most Filipinos knew these three words of English by the time the landings came.
The fighting on Leyte soon intensified. Once again point platoons stumbled on well-concealed machine-gun posts and foxholes, with bloody consequences. The 302nd Engineer Battalion in the form of Captain J. Carruth came to the aid of the 77th Division by advancing in an armoured bulldozer, either burying or uncovering Japanese foxholes and machine-gun nests, sometimes leaning out of the side of the cab to fire his Thompson sub-machine gun at an exposed Japanese soldier.
On 23 October, while MacArthur was being honoured at another ceremony in the provincial town of Tacloban, the invasion fleet offsore was rushing to ‘General Quarters’. Two US submarines had sighted the Japanese Combined Fleet steaming in their direction.
Admiral Toyoda Soemu, the commander-in-chief of the Combined Fleet, was strong in battleships and heavy cruisers. His force had even been joined by Japan’s two Yamato-class battleships, the largest in the world at 68,000 tons and armed with 18-inch guns. Since Toyoda had been left almost without aircraft and pilots after the disastrous encounters near Formosa, he decided to use his two carriers as a decoy to attract the American fleet away from Leyte. He would then attack the invasion transports and their escorts.
Toyoda’s plan was, perhaps, rather too complicated for its own good. He split his forces in four. There was the decoy carrier group to the north. There were the two squadrons supposedly joining in the Surigao Straits, which eventually failed to unite because their commanders loathed each other. And finally there was the largest group, the First Striking Force commanded by Vice Admiral Kurita Takeo, with the
Yamato
and
Musashi
super-battleships. Toyoda hoped to cut through the Philippine archipelago to approach the San Bernadino Strait north of Leyte. This was the force coming from Brunei on the north coast of Borneo spotted by the two American submarines.
Having sent off their contact report, the submarines had promptly attacked with torpedoes, sinking Kurita’s flagship, the heavy cruiser
Atago
, badly damaging another cruiser, the
Takao
, and sinking a third, the
Maya
. A rather discouraged Admiral Kurita, still in his midnight-blue uniform and white gloves, abandoned the
Atago
as it was settling in the water and transferred his flag to the
Yamato
.
On 24 October, an excited Admiral Halsey prepared for action. He ordered Mitscher’s fleet carriers to attack Kurita’s force, but then radar picked up a formation of some 200 Japanese ground-based aircraft headed in their direction. Hellcat fighters took off rapidly and destroyed seventy of them. A single American pilot managed to down nine enemy aircraft in this engagement. One Japanese bomber, however, slipped through. Its bomb penetrated the flightdeck of the carrier USS
Princeton
and set her ablaze, exploding fuel and torpedoes below decks.
At 10.30 hours, gull-winged Corsair dive-bombers and Avenger torpedo bombers attacked Admiral Kurita’s large battle squadron, with the heavily armoured
Yamato
and the
Musashi
. Avengers slowed down the
Musashi
with torpedo strikes against her slightly more vulnerable bows. Further waves of American pilots, scoring seventeen direct hits with bombs and a total of nineteen hits with torpedoes, crippled the
Musashi
. A naval trumpeter played the Japanese national anthem as she began to list, and the ship’s battle ensign was tied to a strong swimmer, who dived overboard. Soon the great battleship, larger than the
Bismarck
, capsized and sank taking more than a thousand of the crew down with her. The
Yamato
and two other battleships had also been damaged, slowing them down, and nine cruisers and destroyers had been sunk or severely hit.
Admiral Kurita, reluctant to tackle the San Bernardino Strait in daylight and unsure what to do next, turned his ships around. When Halsey heard of this from his pilots, who had optimistically reported greater losses than they had inflicted, he assumed that the enemy was running away. During that afternoon, Halsey had sent a signal announcing that he would separate four battleships, five cruisers and fourteen destroyers from his Third
Fleet. They would constitute Task Force 34. When Admiral Kinkaid off Leyte, Admiral Nimitz in Pearl Harbor and Admiral King in Washington were informed of this move, they all approved, assuming that Task Force 34 would be left to guard the San Bernardino Strait. But at 17.30 hours a signal informed Halsey that the Japanese carrier force had at last been sighted 300 miles to the north of the strait. In his report, the pilot had unintentionally exaggerated the number of battleships in the group commanded by Vice Admiral Ozawa Jisaburö to four. Unaware that Ozawa had been sailing in a rectangle in order to be spotted, the impetuous Halsey leaped at the bait.
Kinkaid and MacArthur expected the Third Fleet to help protect the invasion. Halsey, on the other hand, wanted to act in the spirit of Nimitz’s order instructing him that, if an opportunity arose for the destruction of a major portion of the enemy fleet, then that should become his primary task. Halsey also remembered the criticism directed at Admiral Raymond Spruance for not having followed up the Japanese carriers off the Marianas. So he steamed in pursuit with the whole of the Third Fleet, without leaving Task Force 34 behind to guard the San Bernardino Strait. Halsey had fallen for the decoy force, despite warnings from his own task group commanders.
As darkness fell, Admiral Kinkaid deployed the battleships of the Seventh Fleet at the top of the Surigao Strait. He knew from air reconnaissance and signals intercepts that Toyoda’s other two battle squadrons would soon be upon him. He still assumed that the San Bernardino approach to Leyte was firmly guarded by Task Force 34. Five out of Kinkaid’s six old battleships were resuscitated victims of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The rest of his ambush force consisted of destroyers. Out ahead, fast PT boats were called in to attack, but their torpedo runs shortly before midnight failed to strike.
The Japanese battle squadron, which consisted of four destroyers, two battleships and a cruiser, sailed right into the night-time trap. American and Australian destroyers sped past in the dark firing torpedoes. Then, in an obsolete but highly effective manoeuvre, the six old battleships formed line ahead across the strait. The radar directing their main armament ensured the accuracy of the massive broadsides. Only one Japanese destroyer escaped. All the other ships, including the battleships
Fuso
and
Yamashiro
, sank then or later. Kinkaid’s group suffered just one destroyer badly damaged. The commander of the second Japanese battle squadron, who had failed to link up with his detested rival, decided that he would not risk the same fate.
Admiral Kinkaid was understandably satisfied with the night’s events. But before turning in–it was now around 04.00 hours on 25 October–
he asked his chief of staff if there was anything else they should think of. He replied that perhaps they should double-check with Halsey that Task Force 34 was still guarding the San Bernardino Strait to the north of Leyte. Kinkaid agreed, and a signal was sent off. Due to a backlog in decoding, Halsey did not receive the message until three hours later. He answered: ‘Negative. TF34 is with me pursuing enemy carrier force.’ This reply was alarming enough, but then at 07.20 hours Kinkaid received a signal from one of the small escort carriers off Leyte. They were under heavy attack. Admiral Kurita’s battleships, including the
Yamato
, had come back and passed through the San Bernardino Strait unchallenged. The whole of MacArthur’s invasion fleet was at risk.
Calls for help to Halsey and the Third Fleet did not produce the response expected. Far from acknowledging his error, Halsey was still determined to continue the pursuit. Mitscher’s carriers had launched their aircraft in strikes against Ozawa’s force, so far sinking two carriers and a destroyer. All Halsey was prepared to concede in the crisis was to recall the carrier task group on its way to replenish in the Ulithi Atoll. Even Nimitz, who avoided interfering with a subordinate commander once battle had commenced, sent a signal at 09.45 hours asking the whereabouts of Task Force 34. ‘Bull’ Halsey was furious, his obstinacy hardening by the hour.
Kinkaid, meanwhile, had sent some of his battleships north to help the screen of escort carriers and destroyers facing Kurita’s mighty battle squadron. They were not fast enough to be of use, yet astonishingly they were not needed. With great skill and bravery, the anti-submarine pilots from the escort carriers, who had no torpedoes or bombs, made dummy attack after dummy attack to distract Kurita’s battleships. At one moment, the
Yamato
turned in the wrong direction to avoid what it thought was a torpedo run and, by the time it had turned back to rejoin the other ships, found itself way behind.
All the time, US destroyers nipped in and out of a smokescreen to fire off torpedoes. A convenient rain squall also helped. One escort carrier, the USS
Gambier Bay
, was on fire and three destroyers were lost, yet the damage to the task group was extraordinarily light in the circumstances. Suddenly, to the amazement and delighted relief of the remaining escort carriers and destroyers, they saw Kurita’s ships turn away towards the north. Kurita, who still had not heard from Ozawa that Halsey was continuing to pursue him as planned, feared that he might now be caught from behind by the Third Fleet. His signallers had picked up a message in clear from Kinkaid demanding he return. By mid-morning, Kurita decided to withdraw back through the San Bernardino Strait.
Halsey, who by now had sunk all four of Ozawa’s carriers, finally came to his senses. He sent his fast battleships back south, but they were too
late to cut off Kurita’s escape. Halsey justified his actions on the grounds of Nimitz’s order to pursue the destruction of the enemy fleet, but he was still loath to admit that he had been pursuing the wrong one. The press referred to his chase as the ‘Battle of Bull’s Run’. Nimitz took no action against such a bold leader. The Battle of Leyte Gulf, as the Japanese themselves acknowledged, had been a decisive defeat in any case. They had lost all four carriers, the giant
Musashi
and two other battleships, nine cruisers and twelve destroyers.
On that morning of 25 October, right at the end of the battle, the Japanese unleashed a new weapon in the form of suicide air attacks by pilots from the First Air Fleet based on Luzon. They were called kamikaze, or ‘divine wind’, in memory of the typhoon in the thirteenth century which smashed the Emperor Kublai Khan’s invasion fleet. There was an obvious advantage for the Imperial Japanese Navy. Most of its remaining pilots were incapable of aerial combat, so all these young men needed to do was aim their aircraft as a flying bomb at a ship, especially at the flightdeck of an aircraft carrier. The Americans lost an escort carrier and three others were severely damaged, but the shock effect of the kamikaze attack would prove dangerously counter-productive for Japan. The mentality it revealed undoubtedly contributed to the decision to use atomic weapons against the country less than a year later, rather than mount a conventional invasion of the home islands.
SEPTEMBER–DECEMBER 1944
I
n the last days of August 1944, the collapse of the German armies in Normandy and the liberation of Paris produced a sense of euphoria in the west that the war would be over ‘by Christmas’. This impression grew with the headlong advance of Allied armies towards the Rhine. On 3 September, the Guards Armoured Division entered Brussels to a welcome as ecstatic as that in liberated Paris a week earlier. Patton’s Third Army was approaching Metz.
A day after Brussels, Antwerp fell to the 11th Armoured Division, which had advanced 550 kilometres in six days. On their right, the US VII Corps near Mons trapped a large force of Germans retreating from Normandy and the Pas de Calais. They killed 2,000 and took 30,000 prisoners. Among these Germans must have been the troops who, reacting to attacks by the Belgian resistance, had set fire to houses near Mons and killed sixty civilians in reprisals. Other atrocities and looting, mainly carried out by Waffen-SS units, took place elsewhere in Belgium over the next few days during the
German retreat
.
It then looked as if the US First Army was about to take Aachen, the first German city. Many inhabitants fled eastwards in panic. The momentum of events seemed unstoppable, and German resistance appeared on the point of collapse. The Allies did not consider that the abandoned West-wall, which they called the Siegfried Line, would prove a major obstacle. Hitler recalled Generalfeldmarschall von Rundstedt as commander-in-chief west, but it was Generalfeldmarschall Model who, in General Omar Bradley’s words, ‘
miraculously grafted
a new backbone on the German army’ and stopped the panic. Göring provided six Fallschirmjäger regiments, to which were added another 10,000 Luftwaffe personnel, including ground crews and even trainee pilots whose flying courses had been stopped because of fuel shortages. They formed the basis of Generaloberst Kurt Student’s First Paratroop Army deployed in southern Holland.