War and Remembrance (180 page)

0650.
KINKAID TO HALSEY. AM NOW ENGAGING ENEMY SURFACE FORCES SURIGAO STRAIT. QUESTION. IS TASK FORCE 34 GUARDING SAN BERNARDINO STRAIT
.

0730.
HALSEY TO KINKAID. NEGATIVE. IT IS WITH OUR CARRIERS NOW ENGAGING ENEMY CARRIERS
.

Pug thought bitterly that the face of Admiral Kinkaid, far down there in Leyte Gulf, would be a memorable study in shock when he read
that
one.

0825.
KINKAID TO HALSEY. ENEMY VESSELS RETIRING SURIGAO STRAIT. OUR LIGHT FORCES IN PURSUIT
.

That was the last calm message. Now came the howl for help Pug was partly dreading, partly hoping for:

0837.
KINKAID TO HALSEY. ENEMY BATTLESHIPS AND CRUISERS REPORTED FIRING ON TASK UNIT 77.4.3 FROM 15 MILES ASTERN
.

The coding officer had noted “Sent in the clear.” Plain English! Kinkaid’s dropping of secrecy for the sake of fast communication, allowing the Jap to copy, spoke more stridently than his words.

Quickly Pug thumbed through the thick operation order to identify Task Unit 77.43. Ye gods! The jeep carrier outfit of Ziggy Sprague had run afoul of the whole damned Jap battle line. Clifton Sprague was an old friend, class of ‘18, one of the smart ones who had gone into aviation early and had beaten many seniors like Pug to flag rank. God help Ziggy now, and God help those matchbox ships of his!

Pug was at the flag plot desk, with Bradford facing him. Here the messages began to pile up in his file, while the business of flag plot swirled around him, having to do with the fighting up ahead.

0840.
KINKAID TO HALSEY. URGENTLY NEED FAST BATTLESHIPS LEYTE GULF AT ONCE
.

Muttering “At once, hey?” Pug measured off the Battle Line’s distance to Leyte Gulf: two hundred twenty-five miles. At flank speed, a nine-hour
run would get them there by sundown. Too late to save Ziggy Sprague’s unit and the landing force from a holocaust; but providing that Halsey acted at once and sent the battleships back they might yet cut off and sink the marauders.

But the only word from Halsey went to the fourth carrier group, still plodding back from Ulithi:

0855.
HALSEY TO MCCAIN. STRIKE ENEMY VICINITY 11-20 N 127 E AT BEST POSSIBLE SPEED
.

Pug’s plotted track of McCain’s force showed him over three hundred miles from Leyte. Even if he started maneuvers at once to launch his planes, they could not reach the battle scene for hours, and what would be left of Ziggy’s ships?

Meanwhile, pilots’ reports were coming in from the air strikes to the north. Cheers rang through flag plot as sailors posted the score in bold grease-pencil strokes on the Plexiglas. Halsey was chalking up his victory early: one carrier sunk, two carriers and a cruiser “badly hit,” only one carrier left undamaged; all in the first strike!
“Little or no opposition,”
went up in big orange letters. Not much for the Battle Line to do here, obviously. Mitscher’s four hundred planes would mince up this weak wounded force. It would be a sweep like Midway for ships sunk, though of no comparable significance.

The ship’s captain buzzed Pug from the bridge to exult over the news. Flag plot was bubbling with the excitement of victory. Only Victor Henry sat glum and isolated. Even as the reports of triumph were spreading over the Plexiglas, a coding room ensign brought him several Kinkaid messages. Coming thick and fast now!

0910.
KINKAID TO HALSEY. OUR ESCORT CARRIERS BEING ATTACKED BY 4 BATTLESHIPS, 8 CRUISERS, PLUS OTHERS. REQUEST LEE COVER LEYTE AT TOP SPEED. REQUEST FAST CARRIERS MAKE IMMEDIATE STRIKE
.

0914.
KINKAID TO HALSEY. HELP NEEDED FROM HEAVY SHIPS IMMEDIATELY
.

0925.
KINKAID TO HALSEY. SITUATION CRITICAL, BATTLESHIPS AND FAST CARRIERS WANTED TO PREVENT ENEMY PENETRATING LEYTE GULF
.

God in Heaven, how long would Halsey hold out? The messages were arriving in scrambled sequence. There seemed to be major foul-ups in transmission. Still, the import was clear. Surely Nimitz must be picking up these appalling messages from Com Seventh Fleet’s powerful transmitter, and sending them on to King. At this point it seemed to Pug that Halsey’s actual career was at stake; not only a defeat, but a court-martial was building up in these dispatches.

0930.
KINKAID TO HALSEY. TASK UNIT 77.4.3 UNDER ATTACK BY CRUISERS AND BATTLESHIPS AT 0700. REQUEST IMMEDIATE AIR STRIKES. ALSO REQUEST SUPPORT BY HEAVY SHIPS. MY OLD BATTLESHIPS LOW ON AMMUNITION
.

This message did at last provoke a response.

0940.
HALSEY TO KINKAID. I AM STILL ENGAGING ENEMY CARRIERS. MCCAIN WITH 5 CARRIERS 4 HEAVY CRUISERS HAS BEEN ORDERED TO ASSIST YOU IMMEDIATELY
.

Now for the first time Halsey gave his own latitude and longitude. So Kinkaid had the bad news, flat out, that the Battle Line was about ten hours from Leyte Gulf. What Kinkaid did not know was that it was still going the other way at full speed.

1005.
KINKAID TO HALSEY. WHERE IS LEE? SEND LEE
.

The coding officer again noted “Broadcast in the clear.”

A true bellow of agony in plain English for the Japs to pick up!

Pug’s telephone buzzed. The coding officer said in a trembling voice, “Admiral, we’re breaking a message from Nimitz.” Pug ran to the small top-secret room, and looked over the decoder’s shoulder through dense cigarette smoke as he tapped the keys. The message came snaking out of the machine on paper tape:

1000.
NIMITZ TO HALSEY. TURKEY TROTS TO WATER GG. WHERE REPEAT WHERE IS TASK FORCE 34 RR. THE WORLD WONDERS
.

The nonsense padding set off by double letters was standard encoding procedure. Yet “The world wonders” from “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (though Pug had no idea that this day was an anniversary) was apt enough to the situation! Well, Pug thought, this does it; this unprecedented rebuke from Nimitz in mid-battle would penetrate the hide of a dinosaur; here we go at last. He strode out on the bridge, absolutely certain that within minutes he would see the
New Jersey
streaming the colored signal flags ordering the Battle Line to reverse course:
Turn one-eight.

Ten minutes passed, a quarter hour, a half hour.

One hour.

The Battle Line continued to steam away from Leyte Gulf at twenty-five knots.

W
HAT
Admiral Kinkaid did not know, and what Pug Henry could not possibly imagine, was the course the combat off Samar was taking. Of all the long books to be written about the three battles on October 25, the tale of this fray is the one any chronicler would most enjoy writing, for its theme is one that will stir human hearts long after all the swords are plowshares: gallantry against high odds.

Sprague’s unit of
six
jeep carriers had the shortwave call sign Taffy Three. When it was surprised, Taffy Three was eighty miles north of the entrance to Leyte Gulf, doing the donkeywork of amphibious warfare; small air strikes at enemy fields, combat air patrol over the beachhead, antisubmarine patrol, bombing of truck convoys, parachuting of supplies to Army units.

These mass-produced runt flattops were not built to fight. Nor was the screen of three destroyers and four smaller destroyer escorts expected to do battle, except against submarines. Most of the sailors and officers of Taffy Three were reserves. A goodly number were draftees. The prima donnas Halsey had taken north, the fleet carriers and fast battleships, were manned by the professional Navy; not the likes of Taffy Three. But Taffy Three, not Halsey, was in Kurita’s way as he bore down on Leyte Gulf, and so Taffy Three had to fight him.

Two other jeep carrier units, Taffy Two and Taffy One, were patrolling farther to the south. The gap between each unit was thirty to fifty miles. A glorious harvest for Kurita! Merely continuing to sweep southward, he could pick off most of these slow thin-skinned ships and their little screen vessels one by one. The carriers could not escape him, for his powerful gunships were much faster, and could shoot fifteen miles or more; a heaven-sent opportunity, in short, to lay waste an entire flotilla of flattops on his way to his main job of annihilating the invasion.

But Kurita had not planned to catch the Taffys unawares. He was as surprised by this encounter as they were. Relaxed by the luck of finding the strait unguarded, worn down by the swim for his life on the twenty-third, the air strikes of the twenty-fourth, the loss of the mighty
Musashi,
and three sleepless nights culminating in the tense night passage through mine fields, Kurita was in no jolly mood for pursuing aircraft carriers. The first sight of the low flat shapes on the horizon in the sunrise confounded him. Who were
they? Where had they come from? Was Halsey lying in wait here, instead of at the strait? Was the Main Striking Force in for another day of unopposed mayhem from the air?

The apparition met Kurita’s eyes at a bad moment. His vessels were crisscrossing helter-skelter all around him, for he had ordered the force into AA formation for daylight steaming. To reshuffle his force into line of battle would take time. Yet the AA “ring formation” was no way to pursue a foe. As Kurita tried to think all this out, staring at the minute gray silhouettes to the south, frantic reports were pouring in from the
Yamato’s
lookouts and from other ships:
“Fleet carriers ahead! Cruisers! Battleships! Small carriers! Tankers! Destroyers!”
— a bedlam of agitated cries. Desperate for information, Kurita launched the
Yamato’s
two scout planes. They vanished and never reported in again. He had to make his decisions without knowing what force he had encountered, and he had to surmise the worst case: that this was Halsey.

Sprague, on the other hand, knew exactly what he faced. These vessels jutting up in a mass over the horizon were the Jap Central Force. Their foreign TBS gabble was coming in plainly. Sprague had assumed with everyone else that Halsey’s Battle Line was guarding the strait, and that the Central Force would be none of his business. Now here it was. Most of his planes were already launched, flying CAP over the beachhead, or patrolling for submarines, or circling above his own outfit. The crews of his feeble ships were not even at General Quarters. It took them seconds to abandon their breakfasts and man battle stations, but this scarcely improved the ships’ defense stance. Each had one five-inch gun; just one.

Kurita at last ordered “General Attack.” The command let loose every ship in the Central Force to pick and chase its own target. They ran off in an uncoordinated pursuit, firing at will; some ships in column, some acting singly, all bearing down at flank speed on the Americans.

Sprague reacted like a War College student solving a battle problem. He went to full speed upwind, making smoke with his carriers. He ordered the escorts to lay a smoke screen. He launched all aircraft still on board his vessels. He notified Kinkaid of his danger, calling for battleship help. He put out an emergency combat call to all aircraft within range. Those things done, he headed for a rainsquall lying upwind, and his formation gradually disappeared into it, about a quarter of an hour after sighting the Japanese. Near-misses had jolted the force, but the ships were safe and whole. At the War College he would have received good marks for his solution, worked out while red, purple, green, and yellow splashes from the big guns sprang up all over the sea about him, and destruction seemed minutes away.

In the squall he was far from safe, of course. He was like a fugitive hiding from a cop behind a moving wagon. The rainsquall would not hold still. Nor could he. The enemy kept gaining on him, and could see him with
radar. Sprague headed windward and southward through thick rain to keep sea room, and to close with whatever ships were coming to his aid. His tactic was to play for time and keep his carriers together and afloat until deliverance came from
some
quarter: Halsey, Kinkaid, the other Taffys, Army air, or a merciful God.

Through the drifting rain and smoke, he could see the battleships getting bigger astern, and cruisers drawing near on his quarters. He ordered his three destroyers to make a torpedo attack against the huge force. It was a hardhearted, cold-blooded delaying move. The three slim gray vessels pulled out of the rainsquall and steamed straight toward the battleships and cruisers, through a barrage of big shells. On opposing courses, the Main Striking Force and the little ships closed fast. Hit after hit smashed into the destroyers, but they shot off their torpedoes and limped away under fire. Two eventually sank. They got only a single hit on a cruiser.

Still, the pursuers had had to break off the chase to evade the torpedoes, giving Sprague a start on his escape dash. For Kurita the result was very bad. By his own orders the heavy
Yamato
wheeled north to evade while the fight ran southward. The super-battleship steamed seven miles northward before turning around again, for the destroyer attacks were not simultaneous and the torpedo tracks kept coming. Kurita lost contact with the engagement. His force was headless thereafter, committing itself piecemeal to no plan.

Meantime, aircraft were showing up: Sprague’s planes, planes from Leyte, planes from Taffy One and Taffy Two; bombing, torpedoing, and strafing the Japanese. During the long fight the air attacks hit three cruisers; all three in the end went down. Yet the pursuers fought back hard, knocking down over a hundred aircraft while gaining on Sprague in a gun chase lasting two hours. As a last resort Sprague ordered his four destroyer escorts, equipped with torpedoes but untrained in their use, to make another delaying attack. These puny vessels too charged into the teeth of the big guns. They got no hits, took brutal damage, and one sank. They gained Sprague a little more time.