War and Remembrance (175 page)

Thus Kinkaid was heading a large sea force under MacArthur; Halsey was heading another large sea force under Nimitz;
and there was no supreme commander of the Leyte invasion.

As to the Japanese strategy: Halsey’s Formosa strikes before the battle had led to a vast Japanese victory celebration. Imperial General Headquarters jubilantly announced that the rash Yankees had at last come to grief; Japanese army and navy planes had swarmed out over the Third Fleet and crushed it!

Eleven aircraft carriers sunk, eight damaged; two battleships sunk, two damaged; three cruisers sunk, four damaged; destroyers, light cruisers, and dozens of other unidentified ships destroyed or set afire.

So ran the official communiqué. With this stunning reversal of fortunes, Saipan was avenged! The threat of invasion to the Philippines was over! Mass demonstrations of joy broke out all over Japan. Hitler and Mussolini sent telegrams of congratulation. “Victory is within our grasp,” the new premier
announced, and the Emperor himself issued a rescript commemorating the triumph.

In rude fact, Halsey’s Third Fleet had retired after the strikes without losing a single ship. The Japanese army air squadrons had been slaughtered, and their bases razed. The toll was about six hundred aircraft shot down, with two hundred more smashed and burned on the ground. The Japanese high command, taken in by overoptimism, had stripped the navy’s carriers too, and flung their squadrons into the fight. Army and navy pilots alike were nearly all green recruits. Halsey’s veteran aviators had made sport of them, but the few returning stragglers had brought back ridiculous victory reports. Splashing bombs, or their own comrades’ aircraft exploding in the sea, had seemed to their excited innocent eyes flaming sinking battleships and carriers. The Japanese command had discounted the reports by fifty percent, but they were pure moonshine.

Then MacArthur’s advance units landed on islands in Leyte Gulf, and reconnaissance reported a giant invasion expedition — Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet under MacArthur, seven hundred vessels or more — headed for the Philippines. Search planes from Luzon also found Halsey’s Third Fleet afloat, intact, and on the prowl. The war-weary Japanese woke from the victory dream to the real nightmare. Word flashed out to the Imperial Fleet:
Execute Plan SHO-ONE.
The Japanese code name
Sho
meant “conquer.” There were four versions of
Sho
to oppose a stab at four probable points of the Empire’s shrinking perimeter.
Sho-One
was the Philippines plan.

Sho
was a strategy of desperation. The whole Imperial Fleet would sail, covered by army air forces in the Philippines and Formosa, to blast through the American support forces, sink the troop transports, and wipe out the landing parties with gunfire. The plan assumed that the Japanese would be outnumbered about three to one; and that Halsey alone, with his carriers and fast battleships, would wield striking power the Imperial Fleet could not match.

The whole theme of
Sho
was therefore
deception.
To neutralize the lopsided advantage of the foe, Japan’s remaining aircraft carriers would decoy Halsey’s Third Fleet far away from the beachhead, in quest of a carrier duel. The Main Body would then shoot its way past the support ships of Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet, wreak its havoc on MacArthur’s landing force, and depart.

But the Formosa “victory” had already crippled
Sho.
Land-based support from the decimated army air force would be scant; and the decoy carriers, stripped of their squadrons, could no longer fight. They could at best tantalize the Third Fleet into roaring far away from the beachhead to butcher them. This would suffice, the Japanese command bitterly decided. If only Halsey would take the bait and get out of the way, the Main Striking Force
of battleships and cruisers might still penetrate Leyte Gulf and wipe out MacArthur’s beachhead. The goal of all this sacrifice was only a tolerable peace settlement after a success. The operation was in essence a giant kamikaze attack. In itself the fleet advancing to the sacrifice was formidable, but it faced almost hopeless odds.

Was it wrong to sacrifice the remnant of a great navy at a blow? Hardly, in Japanese thinking. What was there to lose? With the Philippines gone, the oil supply would be cut off anyway. The warships would be like toys with broken springs. Surrender now? A logical course, but logic in war is for the strong. For the weak there is proud defiance, deemed laudable in most cultures, and noble in Japan.

The problem of oil further complicated
Sho.
So low had the nation’s supply sunk from the submarine attrition that the fleet could not even fuel at home. That was why the Main Striking Force under Vice Admiral Kurita — two new monster battleships, the biggest and most powerful in the world, with three other battleships and many cruisers and destroyers — laid off Singapore, so as to have access to the oil of Java and Borneo. The decoy carriers were in the home waters of the Inland Sea.

So the gigantic
Sho
deception, which hinged on many precise interlocking moves, had to start with its forces far apart, in touch only by radio. Yet communication personnel, like pilots, were in low supply. The best technicians had mostly drowned in the Coral Sea, at Midway, around Guadalcanal, and at Saipan. The Imperial Fleet sallied forth to execute
Sho,
in short, scattered over thousands of miles by the oil shortage, and stuttering with communication failures; still powerful, however, and bent on victory or self-immolation.

On October 20, MacArthur’s forces landed on Leyte. The general waded up on the beach to broadcast,
“People of the Philippines, I have returned! Rally to mel
…
For your homes and hearths, strike! For future generations of your sons and daughters, strike!… Let no heart be faint. Let every arm be steeled…. Follow in His name to the Holy Grail of righteous victory!”
etc. These glorious thoughts provoked much unseemly snickering and snorting in the Navy crews gathered at radios.

The Japanese hardly seemed to oppose the invasion at first. Their fleet did not visibly move. Admiral Halsey, panting for his great fleet killing, talked of cutting through the archipelago into the South China Sea to smoke out the enemy, leaving the beachhead for Kinkaid to defend. A severe dispatch from Nimitz cooled that notion. It did not, however, cool Halsey’s itch to trounce the Japanese navy.

Here was the human element coming into play. Halsey’s war record and
his public reputation were curiously at odds. He was the only admiral the home front knew about. He radiated the he-man aura of a Western movie star. He had led many carrier strikes. In the South Pacific his pugnacious spirit had revived sagging American morale and rescued the Guadalcanal campaign. The newspapers and the nation loved this rough tough Pacific gunfighter with his quotable taunts like “The Japs are losing their grip, even with their tails.” But with the war winding down, he had yet to get into an actual gunfight. He had missed them all, while Spruance, his junior and his old friend, had fought and won big sea victories.

Halsey’s staff was not sure that the enemy would fight for Leyte by risking a transit from the west of either of the two narrow straits, San Bernardino or Surigao. The Japs might well wait until MacArthur landed on Luzon, it was thought, for there they had a powerful army and big air bases. There, moreover, the Imperial Fleet would have a clear run in to Lingayen Gulf, and MacArthur could be heavily blasted by land, sea, and air. On some such reasoning, once Nimitz vetoed the South China Sea dash, Halsey released the strongest of his four task groups, a group of five carriers — he had nineteen in all — for rest and replenishment at Ulithi, some eight hundred miles away. Another task group was ordered to sail for Ulithi October 23, removing four more carriers from the scene.

These releases deeply troubled Pug Henry. Remembering Halsey from destroyer days, he could well picture the old man chafing and fuming aboard the
New Jersey,
as his great Third Fleet slowly patrolled empty tropic seas a hundred miles off the Philippines, burning up oil. The idea of charging westward through the islands into the China Sea was Halsey all over. So were the impulsive last-minute shifts of plans and orders. So to Pug’s mind was the airy release of half his carrier strength only three days after the landing. Halsey worked in two modes, casual or ferocious. True, the task force had been at sea for ten months, refueled and replenished by ComServPac’s remarkable ship-to-ship system. Men were weary. Ships needed time in port. But wasn’t the chance for battle paramount? Halsey was behaving as though the sea threat to Leyte had faded away, but in fact the whereabouts of the foe was still a mystery.

Pug also wished Halsey would leave management of the carriers to their commander, Marc Mitscher, the most skilled air admiral in the Navy. Halsey was directly ordering the flattops about, and their real boss had become a silent passenger on the
Lexington.
It was as though Pug had taken to running the
Iowa
himself. A very bad business! Spruance had let Mitscher fight his ships at Saipan, overriding him only on the idea of abandoning the beachhead.

Still, the fleet loved Halsey. The sailors liked to say they would follow the “Bull” to hell, and they had hardly been aware of Spruance. Pug himself
was excited to be sailing under Halsey again. The electricity of Halsey had the whole Third Fleet hot for the fight. That was something. But cool good sense in the fog of battle was just as important. That was Spruance’s demonstrated strong point, and whether Halsey possessed it, the Navy was now for the first time going to find out.

TO: COM THIRD FLEET

FROM: DARTER

MANY SHIPS SIGHTED INCLUDING THREE PROBABLE SB’s X AM CHASING X

“
K
ICKOFF
!” Pug thought. The dispatch came from a picket submarine far out to the west, in the Palawan Passage, about halfway from Borneo to Leyte; sent during the night, it gave the position, course, and speed of the heavy enemy force. At once Pug marked the information in orange ink on the chart in his office. It was just sunrise of the twenty-third of October.

So there would be a fight, after all. Those battleships were heading for the Sibuyan Sea and San Bernardino Strait. Halsey’s prompt orders quickened Pug’s pulse. He was cancelling the release to Ulithi of a carrier group. Good! The three flattop groups on hand were to space themselves along two hundred fifty miles of the eastern Philippine coast for air searches and strikes next morning, when the Jap battleships would be steaming within range. Halsey’s own group, including Victor Henry’s BatDiv Seven, would stand off San Bernardino Strait to meet the foe as he came.

The ships the submarine had sighted were in fact Vice Admiral Kurita’s Main Striking Force, on its way from Borneo to storm into Leyte Gulf and wipe out MacArthur’s beachhead. The two chief opponents in the vast melee, Halsey and Kurita, were thus touching gloves at a range of about six hundred miles. Admirals would be plentiful as blackberries around Leyte Gulf, but the battle would turn on what these two would do as they drew together.

Takeo Kurita was a hard-willed dried-up salt of fifty-five. His force — five battleships, ten heavy cruisers, with light cruisers and destroyers — made a mighty parade as it plowed the blue swells of the Palawan Passage. Two of his battleships were the seventy-thousand-ton monsters
Musashi
and
Yamato,
with secret eighteen-inch guns built in violation of arms limitation treaties, and never yet fired at a foe. Pug Henry’s
Iowa
and
New Jersey
carried sixteen-inch guns. No United States ship packed bigger armament. The two-inch difference in bore meant that Kurita could stand off beyond Henry’s range and smash at him with shells perhaps twice as destructive as
any he could fire back. Conceived in 1934, built over fifteen years at a nation-straining cost of manpower and treasure, these were the strongest gunships on the globe. Reckoning only with BatDiv Seven types they might have been invincible, but warfare had moved past them. Submarines and carrier aircraft were menaces the great guns could not fight.

From Admiral Kurita’s viewpoint, therefore, all depended on the decoy carriers. If they would but suck Halsey out of the way, he could perhaps bull through San Bernardino Strait and annihilate the MacArthur beachhead with his giant guns. Under the able Vice Admiral Ozawa, those decoy carriers were already at sea, heading down from Japan toward Luzon. That was about all Kurita knew, for thirty parallels of latitude separated the two forces when they sailed.

Kurita had one more major factor to bear in mind. The Tokyo strategists, with their obsessive taste for razzle-dazzle, had improvised a third force — battleships and cruisers with their destroyer screens — to run far south and come up into Leyte Gulf through the other access route, Surigao Strait. On the war game boards
Sho
must have looked very pretty indeed: Kurita with the powerhouse armada driving through the central Philippines to steam at Leyte Gulf from the north; the other force closing a pincer from the south; and Ozawa, in waters far north of Luzon, teasing the bellicose Halsey clear of the troops he was supposed to protect.

But in such a slow-moving ballet of great ships over thousands of miles, precise timing was critical. Kurita had to get to Leyte on the morning of the twenty-fifth, when the Surigao force would arrive. Well before that morning, the decoy flattops had to lure Halsey northward. None of this could come off, on the face of it, except at high cost. The question was whether early losses would stop
Sho
cold, or whether it would bloodily go through.