Kurita was being ordered to annihilate himself and his fleet, while trying to inflict some compensatory blows on the American fleet. The survival of Japanese naval forces was not supposed to figure at all in his calculations. He was not to consider, for example, that his destroyers might run out of fuel and be left defenseless against American counterattacks. He was to lead the naval banzai charge that was to secure the Imperial Navy’s honor in defeat.
This thunderbolt arrived more than an hour after Kurita had already turned back toward the strait. According to Masanori Ito, it was greeted with “jeering remarks” aboard the bridge of the Yamato. Kurita’s staff mocked the presumption of those senior officers, safely tucked away in their underground bunker at home, who dashed off such orders while “ignorant of enemy attacks.” The impression given by this account is that the collective mood on the bridge was mordant, contemptuous, perhaps even a bit mutinous. One officer remarked, “Leave the fighting to us. Not even a god can direct naval battles from shore.” Another translated the meaning of Toyoda’s order: “Believing in annihilation, resume the attack!”55
Steaming again to the east, the Center Force passed a few miles south of the smoking, listing, foundering wreck of the Musashi. As one of the two most heavily armored ships in the world, she could take a great deal of punishment, and she had—more than twenty bomb hits topside, and about nineteen or twenty torpedoes below the waterline, including fifteen in her port side. No warship in history had ever suffered such punishment and survived. From the Yamato’s bridge, binoculars brought the scene right up close to Admiral Ugaki’s eye—the 72,000-ton colossus was listing heavily to port, her towering superstructure smashed and blackened by bomb damage, a column of black smoke unspooling thousands of feet into the air. Her long sleek bow was swamped, her weather deck awash to her forward main turret, and the sea was lapping up against her gold chrysanthemum bow crest. The sun was nearly down, so the pitiful spectacle was suffused in low-angle light that cast long shadows across a violet sea. Ugaki told his diary that the Musashi’s “miserable position was a sorrowful sight.”56
The Musashi’s fate was an ill omen for the Yamato. The two behemoths were twin sisters, built on identical lines. Both had been advertised as unsinkable. Japan had poured immense reserves of money, manpower, raw materials, and engineering expertise into their design and construction. An officer in the naval ministry had estimated that for the cost of both superbattleships, the Japanese navy could have built 2,000 state-of-the-art fighter planes and trained top-flight pilots to fly them.57 The program had required major expansions of the two shipyards where they were born, at Nagasaki (Musashi) and Kure (Yamato). Their 2,700-man crews were elite, handpicked from among the navy’s top performers at every level of the chain of command, from skippers to the humblest ordinary seamen. They were the sister-queens of the fleet, whose symbolic importance far surpassed their actual value as weapons. Both had served as flagships to commanders in chief of the Combined Fleet; Ugaki had previously been billeted in both ships as chief of staff to the late Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. With his expert eye, Ugaki did not need a full report to know that nearly all of the Musashi’s available starboard “pumping in” compartments had already been flooded, so there was little more that could be done to correct the list. As he scrutinized the dying Musashi, the implication was clear—if that ship was sinkable, so was the ship under his feet.
Ugaki transmitted orders by blinker light: if there was no hope of reaching Colon Bay, Admiral Inoguchi should try to reach any nearby harbor. Failing that, he should beach his ship on the nearest island. But Ugaki did not really expect the Musashi to survive, and told his diary that she had “sacrificed herself for the Yamato.” He added that he expected the Yamato to meet the same fate the following day: “I therefore finally made up my mind to share the fate of my ship without reservation, having decided to have Yamato as my death place.”58
The Musashi’s port list gradually increased until men had to brace themselves against bulkheads to keep their footing. On the bridge, Inoguchi informed his executive officer, Captain Kenkichi Kato, that he intended to remain with the ship. He penned a quick note to Admiral Toyoda, commander in chief of the Combined Fleet, declaring that he had been wrong to place so much faith in the power of big-gun battleships, and admitting the supremacy of naval aviation. He gave the note to Kato and ordered the younger man to save himself. In a ritual that had become all too familiar, the emperor’s portrait was removed from the wardroom and transferred lovingly to a launch. The enormous “Sun and Rays” battle ensign, some 20 by 10 feet in area, was lowered and folded while a bugler played “Kimigayo,” the national anthem.
Meanwhile, the remaining crew worked frantically to arrest the ship’s increasing list. Everything that could be moved was transferred to the starboard side of the ship, including wounded men and dead bodies. Their efforts were to no avail. At half past seven, the Musashi rolled past 30 degrees, through her point of secondary stability, and capsized. Scores of men went over the starboard rail and climbed the barnacle-encrusted bilge and keel as the ship rolled over. Some fell into the holes left by Task Force 38 torpedoes earlier in the day. The Musashi’s bow slid under and her stern lifted from the sea, water falling in cataracts from her four great propellers. Sailors retreated aft as the ship went down, climbing the rails and deck fittings, some falling as the quarterdeck rose nearly vertical; others jumped from the stern railing, and were seen to strike and glance off the screws as they fell. When the sea finally closed over the stern, an enormous whirlpool sucked down debris and swimmers. Men wearing life vests were lifted back to the surface, where they filled their lungs in relief, but many were quickly pulled down again by this implacable suction, and then surfaced again—and so on, repeatedly, as if the ghosts of dead shipmates were reaching up to clutch their ankles. The farther they swam from the sinking colossus, the greater their odds of survival. A few prevailed and lived to tell the tale. Many others were lost, dragged down into the abyss with their beloved Musashi as she voyaged to the floor of the Sibuyan Sea, 3,000 feet below.
FLAG PLOT, OCCUPYING A DECK in the New Jersey’s superstructure, was crowded, tense, and noisy. Cigarette smoke hung thick in the air. Voice radio transmissions of pilots in flight were piped into the room on loudspeakers. New data continually streamed into this teeming brain center of the Third Fleet, from many disparate sources. It was the job of the “Dirty Tricks Department” to make sense of it all.
The situation was fluid, and immensely complex. Two separate enemy naval task forces were threading the island barrier of the central Philippines, evidently bound for the Surigao and San Bernardino Straits, respectively. This splitting of forces was a familiar tactic of the Japanese; Halsey had seen it in several naval battles of 1942. No brilliant deductions were needed to see that the enemy intended to force the two straits and launch a pincer attack against the amphibious fleet in Leyte Gulf.
As the afternoon’s last big airstrike on the Center Force turned for home, their radioed reports were upbeat. The returning pilots were confident that they had wrecked both Yamato-class battleships, as well as two other smaller battleships of the Nagato or Kongo classes; they also claimed to have pulverized two or three heavy cruisers with torpedoes and bombs. Moreover, reconnaissance flights had sighted remnants of the Center Force on a westerly course. Perhaps they had given up the fight and turned away for good. At any rate, Halsey assumed that Kurita’s surviving ships had been so thoroughly mauled that they “constituted no serious threat to Kinkaid.”59 Even if the Center Force managed to run the strait, “its fighting power was considered too seriously impaired to win a decision.”60
The emerging mosaic suggested that the Japanese were making an all-out attempt to contest the Leyte invasion. But if that were so, where were their aircraft carriers? Intelligence shops in Washington and Pearl Harbor were unanimous in agreeing that Ozawa’s carrier force had been in Japanese waters until at least mid-October. In the past two days, decrypted ra
dio intercepts (“Ultras”) gave circumstantial evidence that Ozawa had sailed from Japan, and was now in the Philippine Sea somewhere north of Luzon. It was a good bet that he was approaching from the north, and that his arrival would be timed to coincide with those of the other enemy task forces. Halsey and key subordinates were alert to the likelihood that Ozawa would attempt to employ “shuttle-bombing” tactics by linking up to airfields on Luzon. They were determined to find and strike the Japanese carriers before they could be brought into action.
Earlier that morning, Halsey had ordered Mitscher to launch a reinforced air search to the northward. But radio circuits were so congested that the directive had not reached the Lexington’s flag bridge until 11:30 a.m. At that hour, Task Force 38 was busy fighting off waves of aerial attackers from Luzon. Therefore, the searches were not sent off until 2:05 p.m., and two hours later they still had not found Ozawa.
In the interim, at 3:12 p.m., Halsey distributed a housekeeping order that was fated to play an outsized role in the next day’s events. Designated as a “battle plan,” it directed that six battleships, five cruisers, and fourteen destroyers currently deployed as screening vessels throughout the carrier groups “will be formed as Task Force 34 under Vice Admiral Lee, Commander Battle Line.”† Its purpose would be to “engage decisively at long ranges.”61 The message was addressed to all subordinate Third Fleet commanders and copied to Nimitz and King. Halsey intended it as a “preparatory dispatch,” or a warning order, to be executed if and when an opportunity for a surface engagement arose. To drive home the point, he subsequently informed his forces by TBS: “If the enemy sorties [through San Bernardino Strait], TF 34 will be formed when directed by me.”62
Halsey later stressed that the first message was not intended for anyone beyond his own Third Fleet. But since all U.S. naval commands could intercept radio traffic, and were privy to the same codes, it was possible for others to eavesdrop on such message traffic. Indeed, it was the usual practice to do so. Halsey’s message was copied by the Seventh Fleet communications team and delivered to Admiral Kinkaid aboard the Wasatch. The subsequent clarification by short-range voice radio was not copied (and could not have been copied) by Kinkaid, nor by Nimitz or King. Given the stilted phrasing common in military dispatches, the words “will be formed” were ambiguous, especially without benefit of the second, clarifying message. They could be read as a present-tense imperative, meaning that Halsey was telling his subordinates to form the new task force right away, in preparation for the planned battle. Or his use of the future tense “will” might merely signify that the various ships, deployed in three widely separated carrier task groups, would need several hours to rendezvous under Admiral Lee. That was the sense in which Kinkaid understood Halsey’s order, and it was similarly misconstrued in Pearl Harbor and Washington.
At 4:40 p.m. came news from one of the search planes up north. A large enemy carrier force was sighted about 190 miles off Cape Engano, on the northeast coast of Luzon: speed 15 knots, course 210 degrees.63 That could only be Ozawa, and he appeared to be inbound. Given the late hour, he was far out of air-striking range.
In flag plot on the New Jersey, Halsey and his staff studied the charts and analyzed the position. Three enemy naval forces were converging (or had intended to converge) on Leyte Gulf from three different directions. Significantly, or so it seemed to Halsey and his team, all three formations were traveling at the “deliberate” speed of about 15 knots, well short of their best cruising speed. As the Third Fleet action report put it, “it was inferred that there was a pre-determined focus of geographical location and time. The movements indicated that a carefully worked-out coordinated Japanese plan was in motion, with 25 October as the earliest date of concerted action.”64 The Southern Force was headed for Surigao Strait, south of Leyte; it was relatively weak, and could be safely left to Kinkaid. The Center Force had suffered a savage day-long beating from Task Force 38’s air groups, and appeared to be in retreat. The Northern Force, newly discovered, was the only enemy naval task force with aircraft carriers. It was fresh, unscathed, its striking power unimpaired. Ozawa probably intended to shuttle-bomb the American fleet—meaning that his bombers would strike Task Force 38 at dawn, fly to Luzon to refuel and rearm, and then strike again before returning to their carriers.
Halsey could be fairly certain of winning the air battle, given the comfortable margin of superiority possessed by American carrier airpower at that stage of the war—but he wanted to annihilate the Northern Force, to cripple it with multiple airstrikes and finish it off with his surface warships. To be sure of a total wipeout, he would need to close the range. Several officers of the close-knit “Nouméa gang,” who had served under Halsey since the fight for Guadalcanal, advised taking the whole fleet north.65 Halsey put his finger down on the chart, indicating the reported position of Ozawa’s fleet, and told Carney, “Here’s where I’m going. Mick, start ’em north.”66
At 8:22 p.m. on October 24, the New Jersey’s radio transmitters summoned Bogan and Davison to raise steam and head north at 25 knots, to fall in with Sherman’s Group 3. The Princeton, gutted by fire and abandoned by her crew, was ordered scuttled; the job was carried out by a salvo of torpedoes fired by one of her own escorts. Significantly, all three available carrier groups would join the run north, including the fast battleships and other surface warships that would otherwise have been detached as Task Force 34 and left to guard the eastern mouth of the San Bernardino Strait. The entire armada, sixty-five ships altogether, would join the northbound charge. Kurita’s much-weakened Center Force, should it pull itself together and traverse the strait, would be left to the guns and escort carriers of Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet.
Halsey informed Kinkaid that he was “proceeding north with three groups to attack carrier force at dawn.”67 Much was left out of this missive, and perilous misapprehensions crept into the resulting voids. Halsey did not mention Task Force 34 at all. He did not inform his colleague that the fourth carrier task group had previously been sent away to the east, and was too distant to provide direct support. Kinkaid’s attention was not directed to the vital fact that no part of the Third Fleet was guarding (or even watching) the San Bernardino Strait.
Having given his orders, Halsey went down to his sea cabin and turned into his bunk. He was bone-weary, having barely slept during the previous forty-eight hours. He needed shut-eye and would take it now, while he could get it.
Among certain members of his intelligence staff, and on flag bridges throughout the Third Fleet, there was an outbreak of second-guessing. Halsey’s decision to leave none of his considerable force to guard the San Bernardino Strait seemed peculiar, even inexplicable. Did he know something that others did not?
As Halsey’s chosen battle plan was being set in motion, new sighting reports cast doubt on the premise that Kurita was in retreat. The light carrier Independence, in Admiral Bogan’s Task Group 2, was equipped with a night flying squadron. Several night patrol flights had been sent over the western approaches to the San Bernardino Strait. Some of their reports were garbled and confusing, but taken together they suggested that the Center Force was eastbound at high speed. At 6:35, the enemy column was spotted about 6 miles north of its previous position, apparently headed northeast. Another Independence plane reported it adjacent to the middle of Burias Island, which put it 25 miles farther northeast than at the previous point of contact. Then came a report that the Japanese ships were between Burias and Masbate Islands, which meant that Kurita had turned east and was making an imputed speed of 24 knots. If Kurita could cruise at that pace, his force must be in better condition than earlier supposed. Finally came news that navigation lights marking the channel in the San Bernardino Strait had been turned on.
Admiral Bogan got on the voice radio and spoke directly to the skipper of the Independence, who told him that the Japanese fleet was traveling on a northeasterly course at high speed. They would soon reach the western approaches of the San Bernardino Strait, w
here the navigation lights had been turned on. Bogan then hailed the New Jersey directly and was connected to an unknown officer in flag plot. Passing on what he had learned, Bogan proposed that Task Force 34 and one carrier group (his own) be left in charge of the strait. With a “rather impatient voice,” the other man cut him off, saying, “Yes, yes, we have that information.”68
Bogan said later, “I thought that Admiral Halsey was making one hell of a mistake.”69 He regretted that Lee’s battleships were not matched against Kurita’s, a fight he believed the Americans would have won handily. “It could have meant the end of Japanese naval power right there,” Bogan concluded. “Completely. It was extremely frustrating.”70
Admiral Lee was thinking along the same lines. He tried to reach the New Jersey, first by blinker light and then by TBS. He asked whether the Third Fleet command had noted the latest sighting reports, and was answered simply, “Roger.”71 Like Bogan, he concluded that there was no more he could do.
Ralph Davison, commander of Group 4, told his chief of staff, James Russell: “Jim, we’re playing a hell of a dirty trick on the transports in Leyte Gulf.” Russell agreed and asked if Davison would like to contact Admiral Mitscher to recommend a different course of action. Davison declined, remarking, “He must have more information than we do.”72
On the Lexington, the Task Force 38 staff asked for and received confirmation that Halsey had taken direct tactical command of the carriers. Since August, Admiral Mitscher had grown accustomed to riding sidecar in this fashion. He was obviously very tired, physically and mentally, having served continuously since the beginning of 1944; now he seemed resigned to whatever Halsey and his posse were cooking up. Mitscher was crawling into his bunk when his chief of staff, Arleigh Burke, popped his head into the admiral’s sea cabin. He wanted to radio the New Jersey to warn that the Northern Force was a decoy. “I think you’re right,” replied Mitscher, “but I don’t know you’re right. I don’t think we should bother Admiral Halsey. He’s busy enough. He’s got a lot of things on his mind.”73
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