Twilight of the Gods

by Twilight of the Gods (retail) (epub)

  Later, Burke returned with the Task Force 38 operations officer, Jim Flatley. They awakened Mitscher and renewed the appeal, citing the news that the navigation lights in San Bernardino Strait had been illuminated. Mitscher asked: “Does Admiral Halsey have that report?” Flatley admitted that he did. In that case, said Mitscher, it was not their job to second-guess the fleet boss: “If he wants my advice, he’ll ask for it.”

  Several officers of the Third Fleet intelligence staff believed that the carrier force to the north was a lure, and worried that Halsey was about to swallow it. They had not been consulted before the decision to head north. Mike Cheek, the fleet intelligence officer, argued “furiously” with Doug Moulton, the air operations officer who was a long-standing member of Halsey’s inner circle. Raising his voice, which he was not wont to do, Cheek declared that he knew Kurita was coming through San Bernardino. Moulton was unmoved.

  Cheek retreated in defeat, but two of his juniors later convinced him to take his case up the chain of command to Mick Carney. Carney said that if Cheek wished to wake Halsey to plead his case, he (Carney) would not stand in the way. However, said Carney, he doubted Halsey would be moved by Cheek’s reasoning, and added that Halsey “has had little or no sleep in the past 48 hours.”74 Cheek could not bring himself to wake the admiral, and that was that.

  Halsey and his inner circle were determined not to repeat the blunder they believed Spruance had committed the previous June, during the naval battle off the Marianas, when he had refused to let Task Force 38 (then designated 58) chase Ozawa into the west. They were primed, in other words, to run the Japanese carriers to ground and destroy them, and they were willing to gamble heavily to accomplish that goal. According to Mick Carney, in an interview given two decades after the war: “Halsey and Moulton particularly felt very strongly and early expressed the view that if the Japanese fleet was deprived of its tactical air arm, whatever the plan was for the future, that the effectiveness of that fleet was hamstrung for all time, because we had been convinced that they could replace nothing.

  “Out of these discussions came a determination that night, in Halsey’s flagship, that the principal objective should be the carrier air. It became practically—well, I would say it was almost an obsession.”75

  Destroying the Japanese carriers was Halsey’s “obsession.” That was the judgment of his long-serving and loyal chief of staff, the majordomo of the Dirty Tricks Department, who later climbed to the top rung of the navy’s command ladder (chief of naval operations, 1953–1954). Carney’s admission was damning, to Halsey as well as to himself, but it shed light on the breakdown that night of the Third Fleet’s tactical decision-making machinery.

  Halsey and his team seem to have been feeling the effects of prolonged mental and physical fatigue. Many in flag plot were recovering from a recent round of the flu. In six weeks of almost uninterrupted carrier combat operations, they had taken virtually no rest.

  But fatigue and the flu did not tell the whole story. Since Halsey had taken command of the fleet in August, relieving Raymond Spruance, there had been a pattern of confusion, sloppiness, and impulsiveness in basic procedures. The Third Fleet staff was considerably larger than the Fifth Fleet staff, but it gave the impression of being far less efficient. The new outfit generally did not produce detailed operations plans, as Spruance’s staff had done; they preferred to operate through frequent dispatches to the fleet. But communications were often late, ambiguous, or countermanded by eleventh-hour changes. Carrier task group commanders were kept in suspense about their next moves. The slapdash habits of the new fleet boss caused headaches even in Pearl Harbor. Nimitz frequently reprimanded Halsey for exceeding his authority or failing to make clear and timely reports. Of one such mishap in early October, Halsey begged the CINCPAC’s pardon: “I am most apologetic for the present mix-up. I can assure you that my intentions were excellent, but my execution rotten.”76

  Halsey was in the habit of relying on officers who had accompanied him from SOPAC, men he knew personally, even though none had recent experience in carrier operations. According to Admiral Arthur Radford, a carrier admiral and future chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Halsey “either suffered from poor advice in connection with carrier air operations or insisted on making his own decisions, which could be worse.”77 Similar opinions were widely heard in the fleet, even before the most controversial episodes of Halsey’s career. Clark Reynolds, of Mitscher’s staff, judged that Halsey “did not enjoy the keen professional respect” that Spruance had earned, even if he was “loved dearly” as a leader.78 Roland Smoot called him “a complete and utter clown . . . but if he said, ‘Let’s go to hell together,’ you’d go to hell with him.”79

  THREE HUNDRED MILES TO THE SOUTH, in Leyte Gulf, the Seventh Fleet was preparing to meet and repulse Nishimura’s Southern Force as it came through Surigao Strait. Kinkaid signaled Admiral Oldendorf, commander of the bombardment and fire support group: “Enemy can arrive Leyte Gulf tonight. Make all preparations for night engagement.”80

  Oldendorf’s force included most of the U.S. Navy’s older battleships with supporting cruisers and destroyers, including five battleships that had been knocked out of action in the Japanese strike on Pearl Harbor. Two of those five survivors, West Virginia and California, had been gutted by Japanese aerial torpedoes, causing them to sink to the harbor floor. With a herculean salvage effort, they had been raised and repaired. While in drydock at Pearl Harbor, they had been reconstructed from keel to topmasts, and equipped with state-of-the-air gunnery, fire control, and radar systems. Even their crews were new: the West Virginia, especially, was manned by well-trained greenhorns, most of whom had never been to sea before coming aboard in June. According to the ship’s action report, “Only twelve enlisted men had ever had previous sea experience. Two of the turret officers had never been to sea before, the third came from submarine duty, and the fourth from small craft. Yet, in a short three months, these had gone through a grueling shakedown period and had joined the fleet as a fighting unit.”81

  Oldendorf deployed these resurrected battlewagons in a single file across the northern mouth of Surigao Strait. On the flanks, two miles south, the cruiser divisions would steam in diagonal lines, in effect creating a semicircle of big guns trained on the enemy’s expected line of advance. It was a straightforward and conventional arrangement, faithful to the centuries-old naval concept of the “battle line.” Oldendorf deployed his destroyers farther south, down the strait, with orders to hug the shores; they would take cover in the radar shadows created by the hills and cliffs along the coasts of Panaon and Dinagat Islands. When the moment came, they would make torpedo attacks on the Southern Force as it came up the strait.

  Oldendorf also had the use of all of the Seventh Fleet’s forty-five PT-boats. He deployed them in the southern part of the strait and the western approaches to it. The boats were to serve mainly as early warning pickets. After radioing contact reports, they were at liberty to attempt torpedo attacks.82

  With several times Nishimura’s aggregate “weight of metal,” Oldendorf’s forces seemed more than sufficient to score a knockout. The Southern Force would run a long, deadly gauntlet of night torpedo attacks on its way up Surigao Strait. At the head of the strait, if they got that far, the Japanese warships would encounter the massed naval gunfire of six battleships and eight cruisers. Oldendorf’s big ships would be positioned on an east-west axis, while Nishimura’s column must approach on a northerly heading. That meant the Allied fleet would have the opportunity to “cross the T” of the Japanese fleet—that is, bring their full broadsides to bear on ships that could return fire only from their forward turrets. It was an old and venerated tactical concept, dating back to the first mounting of cannon on ships. In effect, the geometry of the action promised to augment Oldendorf’s (already decisive) margin of firepower superiority.

  Knowing they held the high cards, the Americans were confident of victory. Still, there remained some uncertainty ab
out the composition of the approaching Japanese fleet, and moderate concern about the type of ammunition in Oldendorf’s ships. Aerial sighting reports did not agree on the number of battleships in the Japanese column: some had reported two, but at least one pilot thought he saw four. The Americans would hold an advantage even against four Japanese battleships, but it would be a more closely matched fight. Prior to the landings on Leyte, the fire support group had loaded a high proportion of the high-explosive (HE) ordnance preferred for shore bombardment, so their reserves of armor-piercing (AP) ammunition were relatively limited. That would not become a vital factor except in a prolonged fight, but Oldendorf did not want to tempt fate. To conserve AP ammunition, he told the battleships to hold fire until the enemy had closed to medium range, between 17,000 and 20,000 yards, “where their percentage of hits and their fire effect would both be high.”83

  During these final preparations, Admiral Kinkaid engaged in delicate negotiations with MacArthur. Under ordinary circumstances, the battle group assigned to Oldendorf would include the cruiser Nashville. But the Nashville had also brought General MacArthur from Hollandia, and for the moment she was still serving as his command ship. He had gone ashore every day since the invasion, but had returned each night to the ship. The situation ashore seemed well enough in hand that MacArthur could have moved his headquarters to Leyte; in fact, he had planned to do so the following day. Kinkaid wanted to send the Nashville down to Surigao, and her officers and crew were certainly keen to join the action. But MacArthur was still aboard, and he wanted to go along on the adventure. He told Kinkaid, “There is every reason why I should be present during such a crucial engagement. Besides, I’ve never been in a major naval action, and I am anxious to see one.”84 But Kinkaid saw no reason to put the SWPA commander at risk by sending him into a naval battle. He offered MacArthur the use of another noncombatant ship, and then invited him aboard his own command ship, the Wasatch. When MacArthur declined both offers, Kinkaid detached the Nashville from the battle group and left her in Tacloban anchorage.

  Oldendorf’s ships were on station before sunset. The battleships and cruisers catapulted their floatplanes, sending them to land on Leyte airfields, in order to clear their turrets’ arc of fire. The battleships joined up in column at 6:30 p.m. An hour later, the fleet went to general quarters and set “readiness condition one easy.”85

  In Leyte Gulf, all eyes, ears, minds, and hearts were directed south, toward the impending fight in Surigao Strait. No one in the Seventh Fleet suspected that Halsey had taken his whole enormous force north, or that he had left the gate at San Bernardino standing wide open, without so much as a destroyer picket to raise the alarm. While preparing to ambush Nishimura to his south, Kinkaid was about to be ambushed to his north, and he would not learn the awful truth until Kurita’s big guns opened fire a few minutes after dawn.

  * The Japanese order of battle has been identified by a confusing array of names. Kurita’s old Second Fleet was now designated the First Striking Force, subdivided into Sections A (Kurita) and C (Nishimura), but some Japanese sources called them the First and Second Diversionary Attack Forces. Ozawa’s carrier fleet was formally the First Mobile Force; now the Japanese called it the Main Body. Shima’s column was designated the Second Striking Force, but it had previously been the Fifth Fleet, and some sources cite the earlier name. Following the convention in most Western histories, this account will call them the Southern Force (Nishimura), the Center Force (Kurita), and the Northern Force (Ozawa), in some cases substituting only the commander’s name. Shima’s ten ships will simply be called “Shima’s force.”

  † Willis “Ching” Lee, the veteran battleship division commander who had been serving in that role for several years. Lee had led U.S. forces in the second phase of the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal (November 14–15, 1942), the only battleship gunfight prior to this point in the Pacific War.

  Chapter Six

  THROUGHOUT THE AFTERNOON OF OCTOBER 24, NISHIMURA’S SOUTHERN Force had forged on doggedly through the Mindanao Sea, still on course for Surigao Strait. After that morning’s brief, violent encounter with the Third Fleet’s patrol planes, it had been left unmolested. The Yamashiro’s damage had been contained, her starboard list corrected.

  Concerned by aerial reports placing many American PT-boats in the approaches to Surigao, Nishimura decided to send ahead the cruiser Mogami with four destroyers to scout the area before bringing his two battleships into Surigao. The Mogami reconnaissance force separated from the battleships at 6:30 p.m. and forged ahead to sniff around the northern part of the Mindanao Sea. Shortly after the scouting force left, Nishimura received Toyoda’s message, addressed to all Japanese commanders but implicitly aimed at Kurita: “With confidence in divine guidance, all forces resume the attack.”

  This strangely worded message must have puzzled Nishimura, because he did not yet know that Kurita had turned west. Three more hours passed before he got word directly from Kurita that the Center Force was delayed and could not arrive in Leyte Gulf until about eleven the next morning. Undeterred by the discouraging news, Nishimura pressed on at undiminished speed, intending to attack on the original timetable. He must have known that his hopes of penetrating into Leyte Gulf had never been good, but now he could be sure of running into the concentrated gunfire of the entire American fleet, undistracted by the northern prong of the planned pincer attack. His decision to press on also guaranteed that Admiral Shima’s “Second Striking Force,” a stepchild fleet comprising two cruisers and several destroyers, would not have time to fall in with his force. Trailing behind by about 45 miles, Shima would simply charge into the fray, with no prior plan to synchronize operations or tactics with Nishimura.

  Because so few senior Japanese officers lived to tell the tale of what happened in Surigao Strait that night, historians have necessarily relied on inference and speculation. No one can know what was in Nishimura’s mind as his flagship Yamashiro plunged into the unpromising battle. He must have suspected that he was leading his seven-ship column into an ambush. Perhaps he supposed that the Japanese retained some vestige of their superior skill in night surface combat, for which they had trained so intensively before the war, and which they had put on display in several night actions in the Solomons. A naval gunfight under cover of darkness would also cut the risk of air attack.

  But all such tactical considerations overlook the more important point about Nishimura’s mission: no part of his force was expected to survive. Nishimura knew he was leading a naval banzai charge, and he was evidently resigned to die. In one sense his Southern Force was a decoy, intended to divert some portion of U.S. forces south in order to improve Kurita’s odds in the north. In a deeper sense, his little flotilla was to serve as a sacrificial offering to the gods of war. Nishimura’s real duty was to suffer glorious annihilation, guns blazing to the last, thus sustaining the Japanese navy’s honor in defeat.

  Such an assignment could not be spelled out in plain writing, and it was not explicitly communicated in the text of Plan Sho or Toyoda’s subsequent orders. In his postwar account of the battle, Masanori Ito stressed that Western critics had failed to understand these “particular circumstances of [Nishimura’s] assignment.” But the accounts of surviving officers and crew confirmed this understanding of their role. Captain Tomoo Tanaka of the destroyer Michishio said that “all officers in this force considered that they were engaged in a suicide mission and none of them expected to return.”1 An operations officer on the battleship Fuso told the sailors of his division that they would dash into Tacloban Anchorage, where under the superior guns of the American fleet, the ship would run aground on the beach so that she could continue firing her main batteries even while in a sinking condition. “We are going to participate in a surface special attack,” he told his men.2 In this context, “special” (tokko) referred to a one-way suicide attack. During a prebattle briefing, according to another witness, Admiral Nishimura had “emphasized the need for spiritual readiness
as much as combat readiness. Nishimura was reconciled to death. His attitude permeated the ranks, and Nishimura’s men went along with him willingly on this suicidal duty.”3

  American PT-boats lay in wait along the route of Nishimura’s advance. Thirty-nine boats were deployed in thirteen sections, hugging the shores of islands in the Bohol Sea and the southern approaches to Surigao Strait. They lay to in the calm, unruffled sea, their Packard engines rumbling in idle, exhaust fumes floating away on the breeze, waves slapping languidly against their wooden hulls. The night was sultry and mostly clear. A quarter moon hung low in the west, casting a glistening yellow trail across the sea.

  The vanguard section was stationed about 60 miles from the southern mouth of the strait, close inshore to the islands of Bohol and Camiguin. At 10:36 p.m., PT-131 registered two large blips on her radar scope, closing from the west at 20 knots. Scanning the horizon with night binoculars, Ensign Peter Gadd soon caught sight of the enemy: a double column led by four destroyers, followed by the two battleships with their distinctive towering pagodas, and finally the cruiser Mogami.

  While Gadd was radioing the contact report, the Japanese sighted the PT-boats in turn and fired illumination rounds in their direction. Starshells burst overhead, bathing the scene in searing red light. Gadd’s three PTs opened their throttles. Their engines roared, their hulls lifted up out of the sea, and long, white wakes stretched away astern. The destroyer Shigure caught them in her searchlights, and her 5-inch guns opened fire. Whitewater columns shot up around the little wooden vessels as they closed the range at better than 30 knots. “The first thing I knew, the boat was hauling ass,” said a PT-152 crewman. “We were caught in a searchlight. The noise was incredible.”4