War and Remembrance (182 page)

The ostensible reason for taking Leyte, a large central island of the archipelago, was to establish supply depots and a large air base for the attack on Luzon. But Leyte is mountainous, and its one important flat valley is a mass of soggy rice paddies. MacArthur’s own engineers protested at choosing Leyte for such purposes. The generalissimo, in his hunger for his great Return, ignored them. Leyte after its capture never became a significant operational base. The world’s most massive sea battle was fought for a trivial and useless prize.

Following the Nimitz strategy of a Central Pacific drive, Admirals King and Spruance had offered better plans for ending the war. Both proposed to bypass the Philippines. King wanted to take Formosa. Spruance — who has an undeserved reputation for caution — suggested the audacious project of landing on Okinawa. Such a landing, virtually in Japan’s home waters, might well have been the shock to topple the war cabinet and bring peace. The atomic bomb was then still more than half a year from becoming a reality. The barbaric deed of Hiroshima might never have been necessary. But nine
months later when the Americans did take Okinawa, the Japanese were hardened in last-ditch resistance, and only nuclear slaughter could jolt them out of the war.

In short, the overweening ego of Generalissimo MacArthur and the cold-blooded politicking of Franklin Roosevelt gave the Japanese their chance. They seized it, and they should have won. The Americans stumbled, fumbled, and flopped into a sorry “victory,” thanks to one Japanese admiral’s unbelievable folly.

My operational analysis gives the Japanese
Sho
plan in detail, with daily charts of the four main engagements. This sketch will be limited to the outstanding Leyte controversies.

A pincer attack on MacArthur’s landing force through Surigao Strait and San Bernardino Strait was a sound idea. The use of Ozawa’s impotent carriers as a decoy force was brilliant. Unless Halsey’s Third Fleet could be lured from the scene, the pincer attack could not succeed. The chief controversies center around the battle decisions of Halsey and Kurita.

The American commander who botched the battle, William F. Halsey, rushed into print after the war to cover his tracks with a book that ran serially in a popular magazine while the nations were still burying their dead. The book opens with these words, purportedly written by his collaborator, a staff officer:
Fleet Admiral Halsey was attending a reception in 1946 when a woman broke through the crowd around him, grasped his hand, and cried, “I feel as if I were touching the hand of God!”

This first sentence in
Admiral Halsey’s Story
characterizes the man. He was a seagoing George Patton, a blustering war lover with a gift for publicity; but one finds in his combat record nothing to match Patton’s advance in Sicily, his flank march during “the Bulge” to relieve Bastogne, or his dashing drive across Germany.

The critique of Halsey’s actions at Leyte goes to these questions:

a. Did he make the correct decision in pursuing Ozawa’s carriers, even if the force was a decoy?

b. Why did he leave San Bernardino Strait unguarded?

c. Who was to blame for the surprise of Sprague’s “jeep” carriers off Samar?

Admiral Halsey wrote a defensive dispatch to Nimitz on these very points the evening after the battle, when he and his staff were still gloomy at the fearful mess they had made, and had not yet worked up their alibi. By the time he wrote his book, Halsey’s defense had hardened into an explicit position.

a. He was right to go after the carriers. They were the main threat of the Pacific war. Had he not attacked them, they might have “shuttle-bombed” his fleet, the planes hopping from the carrier decks to fields in the Philippines and back again. As to Ozawa’s being a decoy, Halsey suggested he lied under interrogation.
“The Japs had continuously lied during the war.
…
Why believe them implicitly as soon as the war ends?”

b. Staying at San Bernardino Strait was a bad idea, since the Japanese might also “shuttle-bomb” the Third Fleet there. Leaving the Battle Line to guard the strait was also a bad idea. “Shuttle-bombing” would be even more effective against divided forces. He took all his ships north to “preserve his fleet’s integrity and keep the initiative.”

c. Kinkaid was to blame for the surprise off Samar. He had been notified that Halsey was abandoning the strait. Protecting the MacArthur landing and his own jeep carriers was Kinkaid’s job. He was derelict in not sending air searches north that would have spotted Kurita’s approach.

This flimsy apologia may do for magazine readers, but not for military historians.

As for “shuttle-bombing,” Halsey himself had successfully urged the Joint Chiefs to advance the date of the Leyte invasion, because of the weak air resistance he had encountered from Philippine bases. He had himself crushed most of Japan’s residual air strength in the Formosa operation. He had himself observed the pitiful calibre of the raw Japanese pilots still flying. He had himself struck the Luzon airfields almost with impunity. His own admirals did not think Ozawa’s carriers could be strongly manned. The strategist Lee warned him in so many words that they were a decoy force. The “shuttle-bombing” story is a weak attempt to make the facts fit Halsey’s fatuous action in swallowing the Japanese bait.

His reason for taking all ships north and abandoning the strait — “to preserve his fleet’s integrity” — is bombast. He did not need sixty-four warships to fight seventeen, or ten carriers to fight four. Common sense required leaving a force to guard the strait. All the high commanders thought he had done that. Only his sloppy communications failed to undeceive them in time.

In blaming Kinkaid for the surprise off Samar, Halsey sinks to his nadir. Guarding San Bernardino Strait was Halsey’s responsibility, and he was the senior naval officer present. If he really was shifting such a heavy responsibility to Kinkaid’s shoulders, he should have done so in clear terms by dispatch, preferably after consulting Nimitz, for which there was plenty of time.

At Leyte Halsey made the essential mistake of Napoleon at Waterloo. He faced two forces, and dealt one a hard but not a decisive blow; then, in his obsessive desire to strike the second force, he chose to believe that the first force was done for, and closed his ears and his mind to all evidence to the contrary. Kurita’s advance after his retreat in the Sibuyan Sea parallels Blücher’s advance after his retreat at Ligny. (The reader may wish to glance at my
Waterloo: A Modern Analysis,
published in Hamburg in 1937.)

Halsey was obsessed with the carrier force because he wanted to outdo Spruance. The sickness that had taken him out of the Battle of Midway had been the disappointment of his life. He was wild for a great carrier victory. He intended to be there in person, and in command, when it happened. Since he was riding a battleship, he disposed his forces so that the battleships could have a glorious time sinking cripples, and he went steaming north with the lot of them.

Roosevelt’s straddling between the MacArthur and the Nimitz strategies for defeating Japan — between the naval drive across the central Pacific, and the long plod of armies up the South Pacific archipelagoes — came to catastrophe at Leyte. Halsey was Nimitz’s man. Kinkaid by his orders was MacArthur’s man. The Leyte invasion was the triumph of the MacArthur strategy. Halsey with his simple-minded dash after the carriers thought he was implementing the Nimitz strategy. In swallowing the Japanese bait, he forgot what he was at Leyte for; that is, if he had ever understood it.

Halsey never admitted making any mistake at Leyte Gulf except turning back to help Kinkaid. That, he asserted, was an error made in anger, and due to a misunderstanding. Nimitz’s inquiry at ten in the morning,
WHERE IS TASK FORCE
34, was astounding, so Halsey insisted, since he had notified everybody that the Battle Line was going north with him. But the next phrase,
THE WORLD WONDERS,
seemed a deliberate insult, and threw him into a rage. Only much later did he learn that it was padding added by a coding officer.

This is such foolishness that the worst would be if it were true, and if Halsey had acted in pique. Morison, the American navy’s fine historian, charitably ignores this excuse in his volume on Leyte. So Halsey regrets the only sensible thing he did in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, and blames his putative mistake on some anonymous little “squirt,” to use his own word, at a coding machine.

Halsey was a newspaper tiger the American navy did not dare disown. In the inner circles, after Leyte, there was talk of retiring him. But he stayed on to run the fleet into two typhoons, incurring as much damage and loss of life as in a major defeat. He was promoted to five-star admiral, and he stood on the deck of the
Missouri
by Nimitz’s side when the Japanese signed the instrument of surrender. Spruance was then in Manila. Spruance never received a fifth star. Hitler’s treatment of our General Staff was senselessly unfair,
but the American Congress and the navy have something to answer for in this matter.

Kurita’s role at Leyte had elements of the noble and the pathetic, before his collapse into imbecility. He set out on a suicidal mission. He bore on bravely through submarine and air blows that staggered and shrank his force. His reward was finding the exit of San Bernardino Strait unguarded. He should have gone on to penetrate Leyte Gulf and crush MacArthur’s landing. That he did not was high tragedy for Japan; also, as I shall show, for Germany.

Kurita’s disintegration on the morning of October twenty-fifth was due to the human limits of strain and fatigue, and the failure of Japanese communications. American communications were poor, considering their wealth of sophisticated equipment, but the only word for the Japanese performance is
lamentable.
Kurita also suffered from the absence of air support and air reconnaissance, as we did in the Ardennes. To an extent hard to imagine, he fought blind.

He made three major blunders, and the third is the crux of Leyte Gulf. One man’s mental blackout ruined the last hopes of two great nations.

The first mistake was to order “General Attack” on sighting Sprague’s escort carriers. He should have formed for battle, then speeded up and wiped Sprague out. He could then have proceeded into the gulf after a shining victory, while scarcely breaking stride. “General Attack,” a lapse into Asiatic excitability, released his ships like a pack of hounds each chasing its own rabbit. In the ensuing confusion Sprague escaped.

The second mistake was breaking off the action when his disorganized forces had managed to overhaul Sprague. Because of the abominable communications Kurita did not realize what had happened in the smoke and rainsqualls far to the south. He thought that he had done very well: surprised Halsey’s big carriers, routed them from his path to Leyte Gulf, and sunk several, as his excited subordinates reported. So he decided to get on into the gulf.

The puzzle at which military writers stand confounded is Kurita’s fatal third mistake: his turnabout and departure without entering Leyte Gulf, when he had fought his way to the entrance and could no longer be stopped.

Under American interrogation, Kurita later explained that by midday of October twenty-fifth he could accomplish little in the gulf. The landing was “confirmed,” and the question was, what could he do instead? He got word of a large carrier force about a hundred miles to the north (a false report) and he decided to head that way to attack it, perhaps in conjunction with
Ozawa. Northward was also the way to escape, but he always denied that intention.

One report Kurita certainly never received was that Ozawa was under attack by Halsey three hundred miles from Leyte Gulf.
Had Kurita received such a dispatch he would have entered the gulf and accomplished his mission. Kurita’s ignorance of the fact that Halsey had been decoyed is the solution to the mystery of Leyte Gulf.

This abysmal communication failure, so reminiscent — once again — of episodes at Waterloo, by no means absolves Kurita of imbecility. Like Halsey, he forgot what he was there for. Halsey was distracted by lust for a showy triumph. Kurita was distracted by bad information, fatigue, and the enemy’s spate of plain-language messages. Kinkaid’s cries for help, instead of reassuring Kurita, appear to have worried him with fears of enormous reinforcements on the way.

But none of these excuses will answer. It was not for Kurita to decide that MacArthur’s landing was “confirmed.” He was there to sail in, destroy that landing, and perish if he had to, like the wasp that stings and dies. This was the whole mission of
Sho.
Kurita had the prize in his grasp. He let it slip and fled the field. One short dispatch of less than ten words from Ozawa to Kurita —
AM ENGAGING ENEMY FLEET NE OF LUZON
— could have altered the outcome of the battle and the war.

For the American election was then less than two weeks away. There was growing disillusionment with the old hypocrite in the White House and his pseudo-royal family. There was also widespread suspicion that he was a dying man, as he was. His lead over his Republican opponent was fragile. Had Roosevelt fallen, and his relatively young and unknown Republican opponent, Dewey, taken office, the shape of the future might have been different. American antipathy for the Bolsheviks might have broken to the surface, in time to save Europe from the spectre of Soviet domination, which now rots our culture and our politics with the leprosy of communism.