A World at Arms (164 page)

The major Japanese plan was called “Sho-go”, or “Victory” operation with four numbered variants to deal with an American assault on the Philippines, Formosa, the Kuriles or the home islands. The Philippines–Sho-l–seemed the most likely contingency. The land defense of the islands’ quarter million men garrison was to be coordinated by Field Marshal Terauchi Hisaichi. Reinforcements were being sent to
the islands; land based planes lost to earlier American attacks were being replaced; and General Yamashita Tomoyuki, who had been shelved as a possible rival of Tojo after the conquest of Singapore, was sent in to take control of the 14th Army, the major land force. After their earlier experiences with American landings, the Japanese had decided to assume that the landing itself could not be blocked. Instead of fighting at the water’s edge, they would station their main forces a short distance inland, hold there while the navy and naval and ground air decoyed off or destroyed the American fleet which covered the landing, and then drive the unsuppliable and unreinforceable Americans into the sea. It was a strategy which involved risking practically every remaining Japanese warship, and it almost worked.

The American plan provided for a substitution of seaborne for land-based air support in the initial phase of the operation; for the first time MacArthur was sending his soldiers into an area where they would be dependent on the navy beyond the initial landing. Because of the wretched terrain intelligence, which was the more inexcusable since Leyte had been under American control for decades and there was fairly constant communication with guerillas on the island, MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific headquarters erroneously assumed that large airfields could readily be built on the central Leyte plain. The idea was that in short order the 6th Army could seize that plain and thereafter be supported by General Kenney’s land based planes until Leyte was cleared. Thereafter, it was assumed equally erroneously, the big new air bases on Leyte would provide the basis for air support of the Luzon landings. Had MacArthur and his staff had a reasonably accurate idea of what the island they planned to retake from the Japanese was actually like, they would presumably have picked a different target in the central Philippines for a major landing.

The preliminary air attacks launched from Halsey’s 3rd Fleet on air bases on Formosa led the Japanese to make two great errors of their own. In the first place, they temporarily believed that the Americans were planning to attack Formosa, not the Philippines, and reacted by throwing a high proportion of their navy planes at Halsey’s ships. In a series of air battles on October 11–14, the Japanese lost over five hundred planes to fewer than one hundred American planes. This action, of course, very much depleted Japanese air strength for dealing with the subsequent American operation in immediate support of the Leyte landing. Compounding this misallocation of scarce resources was a complete misunderstanding and misrepresentation of what had happened. Unwilling or unable to comprehend that Japan’s naval air force had suffered one of its greatest defeats of the war, the commander informed
Imperial headquarters that eleven American aircraft carriers, two battleships and one cruiser had been sunk while an additional eight carriers, two battleships, one cruiser and thirteen other ships had been damaged–when in reality one carrier and one cruiser had been damaged. There was much celebration in Tokyo and the Emperor announced a special holiday in honor of this great victory.
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In fact, Halsey’s approximately one thousand carrier planes had eliminated a large portion of the Japanese naval aviation available for the defense of the Philippines; as the intact United States 3rd Fleet headed back from the Formosa area to provide close coverage of the Leyte landing, the whole Japanese defense plan had been gravely weakened. Whether the Japanese naval high command would have risked practically the whole navy had the full extent of the Japanese defeat and American victory been understood in Tokyo will never be known. Perhaps they would have gone ahead anyway. As it was, by the time the Japanese naval commanders on the spot realized that the planes on which they had counted had been shot down a week earlier, but the American fleet and its complement of naval aviation was essentially intact, it was too late to change plans. When the Japanese learned on October 17 that an American landing force was obviously headed for Leyte, not Formosa, plan “Sho-I” was ordered into effect as the only possible option.

The Japanese navy plan provided that a group of four aircraft carriers and two carrier–battleships plus escorts under Admiral Ozawa Jisaburo would head southward from home waters with only 108 planes to serve as a decoy for Halsey’s fleet. The Japanese hoped that this would divert the 3rd Fleet from close protection of the Leyte landing force, making it vulnerable, once the troops were ashore, to their main battle fleet, which would destroy the unprotected American transports and supply ships off the beaches once the few smaller warships guarding them had been sunk. The main Japanese fleet, however, was not in one body; as in the plan for Midway, the naval leadership had made its dispositions as complicated as possible. In addition to the decoy fleet, no fewer than four groupings were to act as two strike forces, of which one was supplemented by still a fifth coming from Singapore.
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While the Japanese were assembling and sending out the components of their great operation, the Americans were already landing on Leyte, and many of the transports would in any case be gone by the time the Japanese arrived. Without substantial air support, the Japanese were sending seven battleships, four carriers, two hybrid battleship-carriers, and twenty cruisers against the American 3rd and 7th fleets with twelve battleships, thirty-two carriers and twenty–three cruisers, assisted by well over 1200
planes. The Americans, in addition, had a force of submarines out scouting and ready to strike. Ironically, while the Japanese navy had for decades stressed the role of submarines as one of attacking the enemy fleet to reduce its size so that it could be overwhelmed in surface battle, it was American submarines which played this role in World War II’s greatest naval battle.

As the American warships provided cover and Japanese striking forces gathered for battle, the American 6th Army was approaching Leyte in several hundred transports. A bombardment group of old battleships under Admiral Oldendorf pounded beach defenses, engineers cleared obstacles, and the first assault units of four divisions went ashore on a lo–mile front in the morning of October 20, 1944. There was little resistance in the beachhead area, and the American soldiers quickly pushed about two miles inland.
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The landing operation was on a scale resembling the June invasion in Normandy; involving smaller forces but having come over a very much greater distance, it encountered far less
initial
resistance. Two events of the first day were of major significance, one political, the other military. General MacArthur had personally accompanied the invasion force, went ashore in a scene widely reported with a famous photograph, and spoke by radio from the beachhead to the people of the Philippines, telling them that he had indeed returned and calling on them to rally to him. The Philippine Commonwealth flag flew alongside the Stars and Stripes as he was speaking, and on October 23 the civilian government of the Philippines was formally reinstated at Tacloban, the island capital, under President Sergio Osmefia, who had replaced Manuel Quezon after the latter’s death. Whatever one may say about MacArthur’s grandstanding or the problems faced by the civil government of the Commonwealth, there could be no doubt that MacArthur really did intend for the islands to continue on their road to independence, and he had every reason for believing that on this critical issue he fully and accurately represented the views of President Roosevelt.

The military event which was to have even greater significance than anyone immediately anticipated was the quick capture of the Tacloban airfield by a swing northward from the invasion beaches. With personal attention from General Kenney, this rather primitive and narrow field was built up quickly so that land-based airplanes could replace those from the escort carriers of Admiral Kinkaid when the carriers would have to leave for refitting and refueling. As the fighting on Leyte developed into a long and bitter slugging match, the Tacloban field, in spite of its narrowness and small size–it was located on a small sand spit–became an essential part of the American effort.
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For a moment,
however, the fate of the whole invasion hung in the balance as the Japanese navy implemented its plan for defeating the Americans.

The Japanese naval contingents under Admiral Kurita Takeo and Admiral Nishimura Shogi left Brunei anchorage in northwest Borneo on October 22. Kurita was to take his ships through the San Bernadino Strait north of Samar Island (to the north of Leyte), while Nishimura was to go south of Leyte through the Surigao Strait ahead of still a further naval force, with all meeting in Leyte Gulf on the east side of the island, where the Americans had landed and where the Japanese hoped to destroy them. Kurita’s force was sighted by American submarines which radioed the approach of the Japanese and sank two while damaging a third of the heavy cruisers, one of the submarines being lost. One of the cruisers sunk had been Kurita’s flagship; being dumped into the water and forced to transfer to the super-battleship
Yamato
cannot have helped his disposition in the battle about to heat up.

Kurita’s force now became the target of a series of attacks by carrier planes of Task Force 38, the main carrier and fast battleship component of Halsey’s fleet under Admiral Marc Mitscher. They attacked on October 24 after losing the aircraft carrier
Princeton
to a bombing attack the day before. A long series of torpedo and bomb hits first crippled and then sank the
Musashi,
the world’s largest battleship; other ships were damaged, including the battleships
Yamato
and
Nagato.
Without air cover from either land or carrier based planes, Kurita decided to turn back from the Sibuyan Sea westward lest all his ships be sunk before even reaching the San Bernadino Strait. But even as the Japanese warships turned away, the American attacks were slackening. The decoy maneuver had drawn off Halsey’s main force, and Kurita turned his surviving ships around once again to head for the San Bernadino Strait and Leyte Gulf. Although neither observed nor hindered by the Americans, he could no longer expect to meet Nishimura’s ships coming north through Surigao Strait. The southern arm of the Japanese pincer was destroyed that night.

Nishimura’s force had also been sighted shortly after Kurita’s and was subjected to some air attacks as it headed for the Surigao Strait. Admiral Kinkaid ordered the bombardment group of Admiral Oldendorf to block the Strait, which he did by deploying the six old battleships across the exit from the Strait, placing his eight cruisers in front of them, and having the destroyers and PT boats on station to attack the approaching Japanese in front of the larger ships.

In what would be history’s last great surface contest, the Japanese attack force was utterly defeated. The PT boats did little beyond disorienting the Japanese, but the destroyer attacks badly damaged several of
their warships. Oldendorf had successfully performed the dream maneuver of all navies, he had crossed the “T”. As the Japanese batdeships and cruisers approached his own line, they were met by withering broadsides. The batdeship
Fuso
had already been split in two by the torpedoes of American destroyers; the batdeship
Yamashiro
and the cruiser
Mogami
were sunk, the latter after running into the heavy cruiser
Nachi,
which was the flagship of the Japanese follow-up naval squadron under Admiral Shima Kiyohide. The latter had sense enough to make off, but Nishimura was dead and most of his force sunk or damaged. Of Oldendorfs six batdeships, two had been “sunk” and three badly damaged in the attack on Pearl Harbor.
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In the meantime, Halsey’s scout planes had discovered Admiral Ozawa’s decoy force of carriers. Believing them to be the most important portion of the Japanese fleet and assuming that Kurita’s main attack force had been driven back after its heavy losses, Halsey now raced north as the Japanese had hoped. The carrier planes attacked Ozawa’s force on the 24th and soon scored hits on the four Japanese carriers which were sunk one after the other. Ozawa’s signals, however, did not reach or make clear to Kurita that the main American naval force was attacking him, and therefore was not protecting the Leyte landing. This was one of the most fateful failures in communications during the war. The sacrifice of the large carrier
Zuikaku,
last survivor of the carriers of the Pearl Harbor attack, and of the smaller carriers
Chiyoda, Zuiho,
and
Chitose
was to prove useless. The two carrier–batdeships and most of the other escorts of Ozawa’s force were, however, saved from destruction because Halsey had to order his fast batdeships to turn around and head back for Leyte Gulf, where Kurita’s fleet was threatening the American landing force now defended only by the light carriers and escorts of Kinkaid’s 7th fleet; Oldendorf’s heavy ships being by now short of fuel and ammunition.

The calls for assistance from Leyte had led Admiral Nimitz to make one of his few interventions in tactical decisions; whatever Halsey might think and say–and quite profanely at that–Nimitz knew that first priority had to go to the Leyte landing force and its naval protection. The navy had let down a landing force in the Pacific badly when it left the marines stranded on Guadalcanal in August, 1942; there was to be no repetition. In the event the fast batdeship force under Admiral Willis Lee arrived too late to take part in the naval battle off Leyte, as Halsey
had anticipated; but if Kurita had handled his ships with determination, there would have been plenty of action for Lee’s battleships.

What had happened in the interim and had caused the anguished queries about the location of Halsey’s main fleet was the decision of Kurita to turn around and head for the San Bernadino Strait once more after reforming his fleet. He was, therefore, approaching the Strait unobserved while Halsey was off chasing the decoy fleet commanded by Ozawa. The result was that Kurita’s battleships and cruisers now ran into the small escort carriers of Kinkaid’s 7th Fleet rather than the big fleet carriers and fast battleships of Halsey.