by Herman Wouk
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
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.
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.
Kurita’s Mistakes
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.
Halsey’s Mistakes
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.
“Form Battle Line”
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, an
d 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.”