War and Remembrance (183 page)

Certainly a setback at Leyte would have called for a rethinking of American strategy, including “unconditional surrender.” With a resurgent Japan at their backs, the Russians might have halted on the eastern front. Germany and Japan could no longer have won; but with less draconic peace terms, both nations would have recovered sooner from the war, and become more credible counterweights to Chinese and Russian communism.

As it was, thanks to his good luck at Leyte, the dying Roosevelt had his dear wish of crushing all competition to American capitalism in the short run. He may thereby have sold out Western Christian civilization to the Marxists in the long run. That seems not to have occurred to him or to have troubled him.

“Form Battle Line”

A Rejoinder by Vice Admiral Victor Henry, USN (Ret.)

Not being equipped to discuss General von Roon’s peculiar geopolitics, I will make one or two general comments and then get to the battle.

Roon’s slurs on Roosevelt, our greatest President since Lincoln, are not worth discussing, coming as they do from a man imprisoned for faithfully abetting Adolf Hitler’s crimes until the day that monster shot himself.

What he says about shock in the last stages of a war is interesting. The well-known Tet offensive in Viet Nam was such a shock; a last-gasp effort, and as an attack a costly failure. But President Johnson had assured the American people that the South Viet Nam communists were done for. The public was extremely shocked by Tet, the tepid support for the war evaporated, and the agitation for peace prevailed.

World War II was different. Annihilation of MacArthur’s beachhead might have affected the peace terms, but Roon exaggerates its potential. The country was behind that war. The submarine throttling of Japan, the crushing of Germany between Eisenhower and the Russians, would have continued. Whether President Roosevelt would have lost the election is one of those “ifs” beyond determination.

Roon is a little shaky on some facts. Spruance’s plan to take Okinawa depended on an unsolved logistical problem, the transfer of heavy ammunition at sea. Nimitz approved the advance on the Philippines, after study.

I find Roon’s criticisms of Kurita and Halsey facile and trite. Insight into Leyte requires a detailed knowledge of what went on, and a sense of the geography, and what the sea and air distances meant in terms of hard-sweating time. I was there, and I can point out Roon’s obvious sour notes.

Taking Roon’s criticisms of Kurita’s actions on October twenty-fifth one by one:

a. The order, “General Attack”

Roon follows Morison in condemning this move.

Yet think about it. Kurita’s surface force had surprised carriers. Carriers had given him a terrible pasting and had sunk the
Musashi.
Carriers needed time to maneuver into the wind for launching. If he could rush them and start gunning them down before they could get going, he stood his best chance with this target of opportunity. He hit out at once with everything he
had. That was not “Asiatic excitability,” it was desperate aggressiveness. Roon’s racial phrasing is deplorable.

Kurita kept driving to windward to interfere with the carriers’ launching and recovery operations during the running fight. He knew what he was about. In fact, his force did catch up at last with Sprague, and “the definite partiality of Almighty God,” as Sprague put it in his action report, was all that saved Taffy Three.

b. Breaking off the fight with Sprague

Clearly a mistake, in 20/20 hindsight. But nothing was clear to Kurita at the time, far off to the north on the
Yamato.
He should have turned south into the torpedo tracks to comb them, rather than away. That would have kept him in the picture.

He got some very bum reports from his commanders. It was the Formosa business all over again. If he believed half of them, he had won the biggest victory since Midway. But the air attacks were stepping up, the day was wearing on, and three of his heavy cruisers were dead in the water and burning. His ships were scattered over forty square miles of ocean. He decided to rally them and proceed into the gulf. Considering his faulty information, it was a reasonable move.

c. Turning away from Leyte Gulf

Indefensible. Still, “imbecile” is hardly a professional term. Roon ignores the mitigating factors.

It took Kurita over three hours to round up his force. Air attacks slowed the process, and the buzzing planes and bursting bombs must have been driving him cuckoo. By the time he was ready to head into the gulf, it was getting on to one o’clock. His surprise was blown. He surmised — quite correctly — that wherever Halsey was, he was coming on fast. Ozawa was silent, and the Southern Force had evidently never made it into the gulf. To Kurita the gulf had become a death trap, a hornets’ nest of land-based and carrier planes, where his whole force would be sunk in the remaining daylight hours without laying a glove on MacArthur.

Granted, he was in a funk. All of us like to think that in his place we would have plunged on into Leyte Gulf anyway. But if we are honest with ourselves we can understand, if not admire, what Kurita did.

The real “solution” of Leyte Gulf is that Ziggy Sprague, an able American few remember or honor, frustrated the
Sho
plan and saved Halsey’s reputation and MacArthur’s beachhead. He held up Kurita for six crucial hours: two and a half hours in the running fight, and three and a half hours in regrouping. After midday, proceeding into the gulf was a very iffy shot.

Kurita did not lose the Battle of Leyte Gulf because of one wrong decision
or one missing dispatch. The U.S. Navy won it with some magnificent fighting. The long and the short of Leyte Gulf was that the Japanese navy was routed and broken, and never sailed again. For all our mistakes, Leyte was an honorable, not a “sorry” victory, and a very hard-fought one. We had superiority in Surigao Strait and in the north, but not off the gulf, where it mattered most.

The vision of Sprague’s three destroyers — the
Johnston,
the
Hoel,
and the
Heermann
— charging out of the smoke and the rain straight toward the main batteries of Kurita’s battleships and cruisers, can endure as a picture of the way Americans fight when they don’t have superiority. Our schoolchildren should know about that incident, and our enemies should ponder it.

I have never been madder at anybody in my life than I was at Halsey during Leyte Gulf. To this hour I can remember my rage and despair. I can get sick at heart all over again at the missed chance to fight the Battle Line action off San Bernardino Strait.

Nor am I about to defend either his swallowing the Ozawa lure, or his failure to leave a force to await Kurita. These were blunders. Roon’s criticism of Halsey’s published alibi is on target. His excessive eagerness for action, his lack of cool analytical powers — which I observed when I was an ensign on a destroyer he commanded — were his ruination. If he had stayed at San Bernardino Strait and sent Mitscher after Ozawa, or if he had simply left Lee and the Battle Line on guard, he would have creamed both Japanese forces, and William Halsey would stand in history with John Paul Jones. As it was, both partially escaped, and his name remains under a cloud.

And yet, I say Armin von Roon misses the truth about Admiral Halsey by a wide sea mile.

His concern about shuttle-bombing was not a mere weak excuse after the fact. October twenty-fifth was not two hours along when planes from Luzon knocked out the
Princeton.
Halsey was right to worry about more such attacks. If he gave that worry too much weight, that’s another matter.

In Leo Tolstoy’s
War and Peace,
which all military men have read (or should have), there are some pretty questionable historical and military theories; among them, the notion that strategic and tactical plans do not actually matter a damn in war. The variables are infinite, confusion reigns, and chance governs all. So says Tolstoy. Most of us have had that feeling in battle, one time or another. Still, it is not so. The battles of Grant and Spruance — to take American instances — show solid results from solid planning. However, the author makes one telling point: that victory turns on the individual brave spirit in the field, the man who snatches the flag, shouts
“Hurrah!” and rushes forward when the issue is in doubt. That is a truth we all know too.

In the Pacific war, William F. Halsey was that man.

After his botch at Leyte there was indeed thought of retiring him. The powers that be decided that he was a “national asset,” and could not be spared. They were right. Nobody but the professional officers, and the high-ranking ones at that, knew who Spruance was. Scarcely any more knew of Nimitz and King. But every last draftee knew about “Bull” Halsey, and felt safe End proud sailing under him. In the dark days of Guadalcanal, he made our dispirited forces believe in themselves again with his “Hurrah!” and they came from behind to win that gory fight.

On the afternoon of October twenty-fifth, Halsey called me on the TBS. I commanded BatDiv Seven in the
Iowa,
and he was in the
New Jersey.
We were heading back with most of the fleet to help Kinkaid. With the gallant good humor of a star quarterback leading a team in trouble, he asked me — not ordered me, asked me — what I thought about making a highspeed run with BatDiv Seven, ahead of the fleet, to take on the Central Force. I agreed. He put me in tactical command, and off we roared at twenty-eight knots.

We missed Kurita. He had hightailed it through San Bernardino Strait a few hours earlier, thanks to his decision not to enter the gulf. We caught one lagging destroyer about two in the morning, and our screen vessels sank it. As Halsey writes in his book, that was the only gunfighting he ever saw, in his forty-three years at sea.

Furious as I was at Halsey, I forgave him that day as we talked on the TBS. Rushing two battleships into a night action against Kurita was foolhardy, perhaps fully as bullheaded as his run after Ozawa. Yet I couldn’t help shouting my “Hurrah!” to echo his. Spruance wouldn’t have dashed ahead like that, perhaps; but then Spruance wouldn’t have run six battleships three hundred miles north and then three hundred miles south during a great battle without firing a shot. That was Halsey, the good and the bad of him. I executed
Form Battle Line
with Halsey at Leyte Gulf, and went hunting the enemy through the tropical night with great trepidation against great odds. Nothing came of it, and I may be a fool, but that farewell “Hurrah!” of my career remains a good memory.

This order will not be heard again on earth. The days of naval engagements are finished. Technology has overwhelmed this classic military concept. A very old sailor may perhaps be permitted to ramble a bit, in conclusion, on the real lessons of Leyte Gulf.

Leyte stands as a monument to the subhuman stupidity of warfare in our age of science and industry. War has always been violent blindman’s
buff, played with men’s lives and nations’ resources. But the time for it is over. As the race has outgrown human sacrifice, human slavery, and duelling, it has to outgrow war. The means now dwarf the results, and destructive machinery has become a senseless resort in politics. This was already the case at Leyte. It was truly “imbecile” to launch the colossal navies that clashed there, at a cost of manpower and treasure almost beyond imagining, and to pin the fate of nations on the decisions of a couple of agitated, ill-informed, fatigued old men, acting under impossible pressure. The silliness of it all would be slapstick if it were not so tragic.

Yet granting all that,
what alternative was there but to fight at Leyte Gulf?
That is the crack we were in, and still are.

Forty years ago, when I was a lieutenant commander and our pacifists were pointing out quite accurately the obsolete folly of industrialized war, Hitler and the Japanese militarists were arming to the teeth, with the most formidable weapons science and industry could give them, for a criminal attempt to loot the world. The English-speaking countries and the Russians fought a just war to stop the crime. At horrible cost, we succeeded. What would the world be like had we disarmed, and Nazi Germany prevailed and won world dominion?

Yet today, when every intelligent man is sick with unspoken fear of nuclear weapons, the benighted Marxist autocrats in the Kremlin, ruling the very great, very brave, very unlucky people who were our comrades-in-arms, are conducting foreign affairs as though Catherine the Great were still running the show there; only they call their grabby czarist policy the “struggle against colonialism.”

I have no answer to this dilemma, and I will not live to see it resolved. I honor the young men in our armed forces who must man machinery of hideous potential, in a profession despised and feared by their fellow countrymen. I honor them to my very soul, and they have my sympathy. Their sacrifice is far greater than ours ever was. We could still believe in, and hope for, the great hour of
Form Battle Line.
We were looked up to for that by our country. We felt proud. That is no more. The world now loathes the very thought of industrialized war, after two big doses of it. Yet, while belligerent fools or villains anywhere on earth consider it an optional policy, what can free men do but confront them with what met the Japanese at Leyte Gulf, and Adolf Hitler in the skies over England in 1940 — daunting force, and self-sacrificing brave spirits ready to wield it?