Now it remained only for Admiral King to admit defeat. He was due to meet Nimitz in San Francisco at the end of September at one of their periodic COMINCH-CINCPAC conferences. CAUSEWAY’s opponents in Pearl Harbor prepared their chief for the upcoming rendezvous. General Buckner, the prospective ground commander for CAUSEWAY, signed a letter stating that service troops allocated to the operation were “far short of the forces required,” and added that the army could take Okinawa with existing resources.104 Forrest Sherman prepared a paper recommending that MacArthur’s recommendations for the Philippines and Spruance’s for Iwo Jima and Okinawa be approved by the JCS. After taking about three minutes to skim it, Spruance handed it back to Sherman and said, “I wouldn’t change a word of it.”105
In San Francisco, Spruance recalled, King continued to argue the case for CAUSEWAY, “but finally gave in and said he would recommend [Luzon-Iwo Jima-Okinawa] to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, which he did.”106 On October 3, the JCS issued new directives sending MacArthur into Luzon in December 1944, the marines into Iwo Jima in January 1945, and a large combined navy-army-marine force into Okinawa in March 1945. That fixed the sequence of major operations for the last year of the Pacific War.
Up to this point, Ernest J. King had been accustomed to getting his way in the Pacific. In April 1942 he had bargained successfully with General Marshall for a dual-theater command, with the northern half of the Pacific under naval authority. He had stood up to the British, who had wanted to demote the Pacific campaign to a defensive holding operation pending the defeat of Germany. He had championed an early invasion of Guadalcanal over the objections of the South Pacific commanders who would carry it out. Against MacArthur’s ardent opposition, King had won JCS approval to seize the Gilberts in 1943, the Marshalls in early 1944, and the Marianas in mid-1944. He had crushed MacArthur’s hopes of obtaining command of the Pacific Fleet and dominion over the entire Pacific theater. But in arguing for an invasion of Formosa, King had finally met his match.
Later, reflecting on the triumph of Mao Zedong’s communists in the Chinese Civil War in 1949, King regretted that neither he nor anyone else had offered an effective rebuttal to MacArthur’s political arguments for Luzon. China was the most populous nation in the world, with the potential to become the dominant power in Asia. China’s political future was of vital interest to the United States and the world. That was not necessarily true of the Philippines. If it was fair game for MacArthur to argue for Luzon by referring to the “highest point of view of national policy,” an even stronger case might have been made for Formosa on the same grounds.
Could the course of Asian history have been diverted by a different strategy in the last phase of the Pacific War? Posterity can only speculate. Alas, wrote King, the chance was fumbled away, because “little was said about the other basic idea of arranging to help the Chinese help themselves. . . . It seemed to me that Mr. Roosevelt was fated to decide for the ‘poor’ Philippines, although in the long view he was misled by the short view.”107
* For example, in Max Hastings’s half-chapter-length account of the Hawaii conference in Retribution (2008), Leahy’s name does not appear.
† According to Rosenman, it was FDR who kidded MacArthur about the jacket, observing that “it’s darn hot today,” to which the SWPA chief replied, “Well I’ve just landed from Australia. It’s pretty cold there” (Working with Roosevelt, p. 457). Rosenman’s version has been more widely cited, but Leahy’s is more credible. He was an old friend of MacArthur’s, for whom such teasing would come naturally. He was a fellow officer, senior to MacArthur, and thus more likely to call attention to his uniform. The self-effacing Leahy claimed the words as his own, whereas Rosenman’s account was probably an innocent mistake; he witnessed the exchange, but later misremembered who had spoken.
‡ MacArthur’s G-2 (intelligence) staff consistently underestimated enemy troop strength in the archipelago by wondrous margins. The shortfall was especially striking in January 1945 as the invasion of Luzon began. MacArthur’s intelligence chief, General Charles A. Willoughby, said there were 152,500 Japanese troops on the island. General Walter Krueger’s subordinate Sixth Army G-2 staff put the number at 234,500. The actual number was at least 270,000.
§ Samuel Eliot Morison, who was in direct touch with several of the principals, concluded of the Honolulu conference: “Actually no firm decision was made—that was for the J.C.S.—but an agreement was reached on major strategy. . . . The J.C.S. do not seem to have been particularly impressed by this top-level accord, since they continued to argue the questions ‘Luzon, Formosa, or what?’ for months afterward.” Morison, Leyte, vol. 12, pp. 10–11.
Chapter Two
IN EARLY 1942, AS THE UNITED STATES WAS IN THE THROES OF WAR mobilization, Alexander P. de Seversky published a manifesto entitled Victory Through Air Power. Seversky’s argument, that strategic bombing would do most of the work of winning the Second World War, appealed to Americans, who dreaded the specter of another bloody ground campaign in Europe. The book topped the bestseller lists and sold 5 million copies. The following year, Walt Disney adapted it into an animated documentary feature film, and the same creative team that had made Dumbo and Bambi turned their talents to rendering hand-drawn technicolor scenes of burning and desolated Axis cities.
Seversky was a true believer and an evangelist. He was also a leading aircraft manufacturer, an entrepreneur who had sold thousands of airplanes to the U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF) and hoped to sell tens of thousands more before the war was won. His book earned him plenty of goodwill with his clients, who adopted it as their secular bible. But the Seversky Corporation had done no business with the navy, a fact that may explain the author’s comments on aircraft carriers: “Ship-borne aviation is necessarily helpless against the enemy’s land-based aviation, and the ‘bases’ themselves are extremely vulnerable. Navies have been disqualified for what used to be one of their primary jobs: to take the offensive initiative against enemy shores.”1
By 1944, that portion of Seversky’s argument had been debunked by the exploits of Task Force 58, the main carrier striking force of the Pacific Fleet. Nothing like it had ever been seen on the high seas, nothing like it has existed since 1945, and it is unlikely that a fighting fleet will ever again be built on such a scale. The mighty armada typically comprised twelve to sixteen aircraft carriers with a screen of battleships, cruisers, and destroyers. Its great size rendered it omnipotent in whatever part of the ocean it occupied. Task Force 58 could put more than a thousand warplanes into the air in thirty minutes, send them to attack an enemy 200 miles away, and recover them safely when they returned. The planes attacked with bombs, torpedoes, rockets, incendiary .50-caliber machine-gun fire, and napalm. They punched craters in runways, killed pilots and mechanics in their beds, strafed and bombed parked planes, and turned airfield hangars and machine shops into smoking rubble. Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher, commander of Task Force 58, told a colleague, “There are just so many Jap planes on any island. We’ll go in and take it on the chin. We’ll swap punches with them. I know I’ll have losses, but I’m stronger than they are. . . . I don’t give a damn now if they do spot me. I can go anywhere and nobody can stop me. If I go in and destroy all their aircraft, their damned island is no good to them anyhow.”2
The standard American carrier fighter of this era was the Grumman F6F Hellcat, a machine that weighed 9,000 pounds unloaded and was powered by a muscular 2,000-horsepower Pratt and Whitney engine. The Hellcat outflew and outfought its chief adversary, the much lighter Mitsubishi Zero. It matched the Zero’s climbing speed below 14,000 feet and climbed faster at higher altitudes; in level flight or a dive it was much faster. “I was amazed at how much power the engine produced,” said a veteran pilot who had flown the previous-generation F4F Wildcat. “It seemed like the airplane just leaped off the ground; the take-off roll was so short compared to the Wildcat’s. And once airborne, the Hellcat seemed to want to climb and climb and climb.”3 Its s
ix .50-caliber machine guns could literally tear the Zero wing from wing. With steel armor plating and self-sealing fuel tanks, the brawny Grumman could stand up to considerable punishment in air combat. Often the Hellcats recovered safely on their carriers with wings and fuselage thoroughly perforated by bullets and shell fragments.
On a typical “strike day,” reveille sounded at 3:00 a.m. A bugler played flight quarters through the ship’s loudspeakers, and the boatswain’s mates shouted: “Reveille! Reveille! Reveille! All hands! Up all bunks!”4 Throughout the ship was heard the dogging down of hatches and the slamming of doors, and hundreds of pairs of feet scampered across steel decks. On the hangar deck, in a hot, stifling cavity reeking of fuel and oil, ordnance gangs carted bombs and torpedoes to the underbellies of the bombers. Planes were coaxed into the elevators and brought up to the flight deck. Wooden chocks were placed in front of the wheels. The planes were gassed up and their bombs were fused. As launch time approached, a voice on the loudspeaker commanded: “Pilots, man planes!”
The airmen swarmed up the ladders from their squadron ready rooms, festooned with gear and parachutes, goggles pushed up on their foreheads. Hooded deck crewmen led them through the maze of parked planes, each to their assigned machine. They climbed onto the wings, slid down into their cockpits, and buckled their shoulder straps. In the predawn darkness the cockpit was a black hole, with only the instrument gauges dimly lit, and the pilot felt blindly for the stick and pedals. At the order “Start planes!” the cartridge fired and the engine sputtered, coughed, backfired, and roared to life. The propeller turned, missed, and then dissolved into a blurred disk; the engine settled into a throaty, throbbing purr, and blue clouds of exhaust wafted down the deck. The carrier heeled sharply as the ship turned into the wind. The red and white “fox” flag went up at the yardarm, signaling the start of flight operations. With the actual wind added to the apparent wind created by the ship’s forward momentum, a powerful gust swept aft along the flight deck. Flight deck crewmen armed with light wands braced themselves, taking care not to be blown into the propellers. They coaxed each plane forward to its takeoff spot.
The wand twirled. The pilot pushed the throttle forward while standing on the brakes, causing the engine to ascend to a savage, quaking roar. He checked the magnetos, the fuel mixture, and the propeller pitch; he glanced at the engine instruments and confirmed that oil temperature and pressure were good; he ran the engine up to 2,700 rpm and watched his manifold pressure. Tongues of blue flame licked out of the exhaust pipes and threw a faint glow over the engine cowling. The flight deck officer, satisfied with the sound of the engine, lowered his wand and pointed down at the deck. The pilot lifted his feet from the brakes and was immediately shoved into his backrest. The dark shape of the carrier’s island flashed by on his right. The tail lifted from the deck, then the wheels, and the Hellcat was airborne and climbing. The pilot pulled a hydraulic lever to raise the landing gear and banked left, keeping an eye on the needle and ball to avoid dropping into the dark sea below.
Strikes commenced with a fighter sweep comprising dozens or even hundreds of Hellcats, intended to clear the skies of enemy planes ahead of the arrival of the SB2C Helldiver dive-bombers and TBM Avenger torpedo planes. The outbound fighters performed a “group grope,” a running rendezvous into formation. The eagle-eyed pilots studied the faint blue exhaust flames that were the only visible trace of the planes ahead. Formation flying in darkness required constant adjustments to airspeed, course, and altitude, and sustained concentration to fight off the vertigo and disorientation that could easily lead to crashes. They put on their masks and climbed to altitude, 20,000 or 30,000 feet. Soon the cockpits were as cold as meat lockers. They clapped their gloved hands and danced in their seats to keep warm. They relaxed a bit as dawn broke and they could see the horizon and the planes around them. Since the first days of their training they had been told to “keep their heads on a swivel,” and they continually shifted gaze, scanning the sky for enemy aircraft—ahead, above, below, to the left, to the right, ahead again, and repeat.
As they approached the target, they lowered their noses and picked up speed to fly through antiaircraft bursts. If there were enemy planes in the sky, they were usually at lower altitude. David McCampbell, one of the most prolific F6F aces of the Second World War, noted that they almost always spotted their Japanese adversaries beneath them, which allowed for diving attacks. The Hellcats peeled off the formation, “zoomed down and would shoot a plane or two. . . . We’d make an attack, pull up, keep our altitude advantage and speed, and go down again. We repeated this over and over.”5
In 1944, the Hellcat was the best carrier fighter in the Pacific, but it was also versatile enough to be employed as a bomber. Experiments soon proved that the F6F could carry and deliver bombs almost as effectively as a purpose-built dive-bomber—but unlike a dive-bomber, once relieved of its bomb the Hellcat could defeat any rival in air-to-air combat. The plane was sometimes armed with six HVARs—high-velocity aerial rockets, nicknamed the “Holy Moses”—which proved more effective than bombs against certain ground targets. Each HVAR carried a 5-inch shell as its warhead, matching the destructive power of a 5-inch naval gun, and so a Hellcat firing six rockets in one salvo packed a punch equivalent to a destroyer’s full broadside. In time another rocket was introduced—the 10-foot-long “Tiny Tim,” which matched the destructive power of a shell fired from a 12-inch naval gun. These air-to-ground weapons grew increasingly effective in the later stages of the war, as the aviators gained more experience with them.
As the campaign moved into the western Pacific, F6Fs increasingly struck Japanese ground fortifications with napalm bombs. Napalm was a simple incendiary composed of gasoline thickened by a gelatinous chemical. It tended to cling to whatever surface it landed upon—a pillbox, an antiaircraft battery, a parked aircraft, human skin—and burned intensely until the fuel was exhausted. A napalm blaze atop a concrete bunker would drive the occupants out into the open, where they could be cut down by strafing Hellcats that followed close behind the napalm-armed leader.
The versatility of the F6F made it the most valuable aircraft in the carrier task forces, and commanders lobbied for a higher proportion of Hellcats on the carriers. In turn, that led to shrinking bomber squadrons. By war’s end, a typical Essex-class complement of ninety-six planes included a dozen SB2Cs, a dozen TBMs, and seventy-two Hellcats.
A long-accepted tactical catechism—reiterated by Seversky in his bestseller—had held that aircraft carriers were no match for shore-based air power. Like many old orthodoxies, this one had been unseated by convergent advances in radar, antiaircraft gunnery, and communications technologies. The task forces could now confidently fight off even the heaviest air attacks, and commanders like Mitscher were increasingly emboldened to hover in the offing near an enemy-held island. According to Arleigh Burke, Mitscher’s long-serving chief of staff, operations were “gradually evolving from the hit-and-run tactic to stay-and-slug-it-out tactic. The stay-and-slug-it-out business meant that we had to get rid of the enemy air permanently.”6 Aerial counterstrikes on the task force were inevitable, but much-improved radar systems could “see” inbound enemy planes when they were a hundred miles out, with accurate readings of altitude, speed, and heading. IFF (“Identification, friend or foe”) technology could now reliably discern friendly and enemy planes on the radar screens. All these data were channeled into the Combat Information Center (CIC) on each carrier, from which a Fighter Director Officer (FDO) and his assistants radioed the orbiting Hellcats and directed them to intercept the approaching threat. In the later stages of the Pacific War, the CICs and the defending fighters routinely performed near-flawless interceptions. Often the crews of the ships did not even lay eyes on a hostile plane.
If an intruder managed to run the gauntlet of defending Hellcats and penetrated into the heart of the task force, it flew into a storm of antiaircraft fire. The screening battleships and cruisers bristled with antiaircraft we
apons, ranging from the powerful long-ranged 5-inch/.38 guns, to the newer 40mm quad Bofors batteries, to the last-ditch 20mm Oerlikons that were aimed and fired by a single man strapped into the gun. Anticraft shells became much more lethal with the introduction of the VT (variable time) or “proximity” fuse, which used a miniaturized Doppler radar to detect the target aircraft and detonate in close proximity. In the carrier duels of 1942, ships had relied on aggressive high-speed maneuvering to dodge air attacks—the “snake dance,” as it was called—but in 1944, when task forces were larger and the risk of collisions greater, new tactical doctrines placed less emphasis on the helms and more on the guns. It was thought better to stay on course and let the gunners wrap the ships in a protective screen of deadly flak.
Task Force 58 was built for speed. It could lace up its “seven-league boots” and travel thousands of miles in any direction before the enemy suspected it was on the move. The big Essex-class fleet carriers (CVs) and the smaller Independence-class light carriers (CVLs) could carve a track through the ocean rollers for days without dipping below 23 knots, and could ring up more than 30 knots for combat. During the Yorktown’s shakedown cruise in 1943, she achieved a peak speed of 34.9 knots—a breathtaking pace, the fastest of any carrier in history up to that time. The fast carriers were escorted by new Iowa-class “fast battleships,” 45,000-ton leviathans that had no trouble keeping the pace. There were no lame horses in Mitscher’s cavalry; all older and slower classes had been banished to the amphibious or logistics fleets. Task Force 58’s speed lent it mobility and range, a vital consideration in the Pacific’s blue immensities. It was a great nomadic air base, racing headlong from one part of the ocean to another, crossing and recrossing the equator, climbing up and down the latitudes. One day, sailors wore wool hats, fur-lined gloves, and heavy watch coats; a day or two later, they sweated through their dungarees and stripped to the waist under the pitiless equatorial sun. The great fleet plunged deep into enemy waters, remaining incognito by practicing strict radio silence. It hid itself in weather fronts and chased north behind tropical storms. It snuck over horizons in darkness, undetected, and attacked with complete surprise and overwhelming force. Perhaps it would stay and fight for a while—or perhaps it would vanish back into the interminable ocean wastes, from which it might suddenly reemerge a thousand miles away to devastate another enemy target. The Japanese could only guess.
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