Twilight of the Gods

by Twilight of the Gods (retail) (epub)

  An American destroyer, the Grant, had failed to clear the field of fire and found herself taking heavy fire from two directions. The Yamashiro, firing from a range of about 3 miles, dropped shells all around her. But the most punishing fire was friendly, from the right-flank cruiser line. Grant was pulverized by about twenty hits, most probably fired by the cruiser Denver. Thirty-four of her crew were killed, ninety-four wounded. The commander of the right-flank cruisers, Admiral Russell S. Berkey, got on the circuit to warn that a destroyer lay dead in the water and was taking friendly fire. At 4:09 a.m., Oldendorf warned the entire force: “Grant is hit and lying dead in the water. All ships take special precaution.”25

  As the American fleet complied, the guns fell quiet, and the strait was suddenly eerily serene. The respite was extended when the American battleships turned north in order to avoid torpedoes fired by Mogami.

  Notwithstanding Nishimura’s brave pledge to keep charging the enemy, the crippled, burning Yamashiro turned south shortly after the Allied guns ceased fire. Perhaps he intended to fall in with Shima, perhaps to retreat to safety: no one can know, as neither he nor any other bridge officer survived to tell the tale. Somehow the engineers managed to bring the Yamashiro’s speed back up to 12 knots, but that only increased the inward press of water through the wounds in her hull. At 4:19 a.m. she began keeling over to port, and Nishimura’s chief of staff ordered abandon ship. Then she rolled all the way onto her beam ends, and her great pagoda lay down on the sea. She sank quickly, stern first, taking all but a few of her crew down with her.

  To the south, meanwhile, visibility had worsened. Rainsqualls swept through the Mindanao Sea and the lower part of the strait. Charging east through dirty weather at 25 knots, Shima’s little fleet had nearly run aground on Panaon Island; it had turned sharply at the last possible moment, when the island’s mountainous ridgeline had suddenly loomed out of the mist.26 While Shima’s squadron was making this emergency turn, PT-137 fired a torpedo at the destroyer Ushio. The weapon ran under its target but continued on and struck the deeper-draft cruiser Abukuma, 3,000 yards away. That was the only torpedo fired by a PT-boat to score in the battle. Abukuma, badly damaged, fell out of column and limped away at 10 knots.

  Entering Surigao Strait, and steaming north through darkness at 28 knots, Shima’s lookouts caught a distant glimpse of the sinking Fuso. Smoke added to rain and haze made for poor visibility, and Shima’s men mistakenly thought they saw two burning battleships, not one. This may have been because the Fuso’s bow had been torn from the ship, and was still afloat; it is also possible that the lookouts had mistaken a large oil fire for a second ship. At any rate, the newcomers did not pause, but continued up Surigao Strait at high speed.

  At 4:22 a.m., Shima’s column turned right and began firing torpedoes. The missiles raced away at 49 knots. Just as the flagship Nachi’s torpedoes were away, her lookouts spotted the Mogami. To their eyes she appeared dead in the water, still burning; but as the range closed the bridge officers realized that the ship was underway on a fast-converging course. The Nachi’s captain ordered full reverse power, but it was too late to avoid the head-on collision. The Mogami’s steering room was flooded and her speed cut in half. The Nachi was also badly damaged, with her top effective speed cut to 19 knots. The Nachi turned south, the crew investigating the damage.

  During this interval, the Fifth Fleet torpedo officer, Kokichi Mori, conferred with Shima on the Nachi’s bridge. Considering the damage to the ship, the near-annihilation of Nishimura’s force, and the deteriorating visibility at sea level, Mori argued that it would be suicidal to keep advancing. A trap had been laid for them: “Admiral,” he said, “up ahead the enemy must be waiting for us with open arms.”27 Shima, convinced, decided to call it a night. He radioed Toyoda: “This force has concluded its attack and is retiring from the battle area in order to plan subsequent action.”28 Samuel Eliot Morison called Shima’s decision “the most intelligent act of any Japanese commander in the entire battle.”29

  At 5:00 a.m., with a pale gray dawn budding in the east, the surviving remnants of the two Japanese fleets limped down Surigao Strait. Leaving the battleships on station, Admiral Oldendorf led a group of cruisers and destroyers (including his flagship Louisville) south to pursue and “polish off enemy cripples.”

  Wary of blundering into a torpedo attack, Oldendorf held his speed to a cautious 15 knots. Visibility at sea level remained poor, hindered by squalls, mists, and persistent smoke from burning ships and floating oil fires. The sea was polluted by spilled bunker oil and littered with debris and floating bodies. Hundreds of Japanese sailors were seen among the flotsam, treading water or clutching wreckage. As usual, nearly all refused offers of rescue, even attempting to drown themselves when American ships approached. The pursuers came upon the floating wrecks of what they took to be four different Japanese ships in a sinking condition, but these vessels “could not be identified because of the heavy oil smoke and flames surrounding them.”30 Part of the Fuso remained afloat, possibly her bow: the passing Louisville fired several salvos at this remnant and apparently sank it.

  At first, the damaged Nachi, Mogami, and Shigure managed enough speed to stay ahead of Oldendorf. Off Kanihaan Island, however, they were slowed by a swarm of pesky PT-boats. The Mogami, still afire and barely able to steer, traded blows with the little attackers. She scattered 8-inch shells around the boats and drove them off, and even scored a direct hit on PT-194, which destroyed three of the boat’s engines and killed a 40mm gunner. Oldendorf’s cruisers sighted the distant Mogami at 5:29 a.m. and opened fire at long range, scoring about ten hits. The captain of the Columbia, observing the target through binoculars, reported that she was “completely ablaze and burning worse than the Arizona burned at Pearl Harbor.”31 Admiral Shima took the hard-hearted decision to keep moving, leaving the Mogami behind to divert the American pursuers. The Nachi, the Shigure, and the rest of the Second Striking Force slipped away and rounded Panaon.

  Incredibly, however, the Mogami refused to die even when left behind in this desperate condition. Her intrepid engine crew got her moving at 12 knots again, and she escaped to the Mindanao Sea.

  The last Japanese ship left afloat in Surigao Strait was the crippled destroyer Asagumo, which had earlier been shorn of her bow by Coward’s torpedoes. She lay dead in the water, her foredeck awash. One gun turret still had life in it, and fired gamely back at a swarm of PT-boats that attempted to sink her with torpedoes. The captain had ordered abandon ship sometime before 7:00 a.m., and the men were transferring into boats when the pursuing American ships came into range. Asagumo came under fire at 7:04 a.m., first by a destroyer, followed minutes later by many more cruisers and destroyers: in all, ten American ships participated in the final pummeling of the dying destroyer. Ripped open at the waterline, flames bursting from all of her hatches, the Asagumo rolled over and went down by the bow. Someone on her bridge radioed a valedictory report to Admirals Toyoda and Kurita: “I went down under attack.”32 By some accounts, her single operative turret kept firing even as the ship sank. James L. Holloway III, gunnery officer on the Bennion, saw the last of this plucky little warrior: “When we had closed to about 2,000 yards, the Japanese destroyer slid beneath the gray, choppy waters, bow first, her screws still slowly rotating as we passed close aboard.”33

  Carrier airstrikes would chase the fleeing ships, and the nine-lived Mogami would finally succumb to air attack later that afternoon. The Shigure, the only surviving unit of Admiral Nishimura’s Southern Force, would reach Brunei on October 27. Aerial pursuit and mopping-up operations would continue in the days that followed, eventually chasing Shima all the way to Manila Bay, where his flagship Nachi would be sunk by air attack on November 5.

  But Oldendorf’s part of the battle was finished. At 7:25 a.m. on October 24, he received the first of several urgent distress calls summoning him north. The Seventh Fleet escort carriers, stationed north of Leyte Gulf, were under attack by a powerful Japanese sur
face fleet that had seemed to materialize out of nowhere.

  SAN BERNARDINO STRAIT being a narrow and precarious passage, Kurita’s Center Force was compelled to pass through it in single-column formation. Fearing a reprise of the devastating submarine attack in Palawan Passage, the 13-mile-long file of ships rushed through at a breakneck 20 knots. An 8-knot current was running, and the danger of grounding seemed high. But the night was clear, with visibility unimpeded—and as Halsey’s night patrol planes had earlier noted, the channel buoys and lighthouses were illuminated. The fleet emerged intact, debouching into the Philippine Sea at half past midnight. Six hours behind schedule, its crew still had no word of Nishimura’s fate.

  Assuming that they were being tracked by radar, night reconnaissance planes, and Filipino coastwatchers along the shores of the strait, Kurita and his officers could hardly believe their good fortune. No enemy submarines had bothered them. They had expected to find the massed guns of U.S. battleships blocking their exit from the strait—the same sort of T-crossing ambush that had just walloped Nishimura 300 miles south. Operations officer Tonosuke Otani later said that such a scenario would have given the Center Force a “hard time,” and the expectation caused “grave concern” on the bridge of the Yamato.34 But here they were, safely through the strait, with nothing standing in their way.

  For two hours the force ran east, straight out to sea. The single column re-formed into a night-search disposition, six columns covering a swath of ocean nearly 20 miles wide. The Japanese had no intelligence of Halsey’s whereabouts; they were merely guessing at where they might find him, based on the headings the American carrier planes had flown the previous afternoon. At 3:00 a.m., the Yamato blinkered orders to alter course to the southeast, toward Leyte Gulf. For the next three hours the fleet charged south, keeping Samar’s distant mountains broad on the starboard beam.35

  At half past five, the Yamato received Admiral Shima’s report that the Yamashiro and Fuso were gone, the Mogami was in flames, and all surviving Japanese forces were retiring from Surigao Strait. The dismal news could not have come as a great surprise, but it confirmed that the envisioned pincer attack would not come off. If the Center Force managed to push through to Leyte Gulf, it would do so alone. At 6:14 a.m., the new day broke with a characteristically vivid tropical sunrise. The northeasterly wind was gentle and the sea was docile, but a gray ceiling of broken cumulus drifted overhead, and dark rainsqualls swept low over the sea.

  Standing between Kurita and his objective were the escort carrier groups of the Seventh Fleet. This force amounted to sixteen small flattops with twenty-two destroyers and destroyer escorts (DEs) as screen. Together they were designated Task Group 77.4, under the command of Rear Admiral Thomas L. Sprague. The group was subdivided into three task units, “Taffy 1,” “Taffy 2,” and “Taffy 3.” The northernmost unit, Taffy 3, was led by Rear Admiral Clifton A. F. (“Ziggy”) Sprague.

  The two Spragues were not related. By an improbable fluke, these two Naval Academy classmates (class of 1917), who shared a relatively uncommon surname but not a bloodline, had landed together as rear admirals in the same little section of the Seventh Fleet.

  The escort carriers, “CVEs,” were small auxiliaries sometimes known by their nicknames, “jeep carriers” or “baby flattops.” They were about one-half the length and one-third the weight of the Essex-class fleet carriers. They were 500 feet long, displaced about 10,000 tons, and carried just twenty-five to thirty aircraft. Their greatest virtue, from the navy’s point of view, was that they could be built and launched quickly and cheaply. They were deployed in limited roles: to provide air cover for merchant convoys and transport fleets, to support amphibious landings, and to ferry replacement aircraft across the Pacific. They were too slow to keep company with the big fighting carriers of Task Force 38: most could do no better than 18 knots. They were considered too frail to stand up to a concerted air or submarine attack, because their thin steel skin was too easily pierced by bombs or torpedoes. The crews joked that “CVE” stood for “combustible, vulnerable, and expendable,” and their mordant appraisal was accurate on all three counts.

  The first CVEs had been improvised by throwing a flight deck over the hull of a cargo ship or oil tanker, but a subsequent generation was purpose-built by Henry Kaiser in his Vancouver, Washington shipyard. The Kaiser-built units (hull numbers 55 through 104) were disparaged as “Kaiser’s coffins.” Of the sixteen escort carriers in Task Group 77.4, thirteen had been built by Kaiser.

  Thus far, the Leyte operation had been fairly uneventful for the Taffy units. The ships had been on station off Samar and Leyte for nearly a week. The air groups had been busy flying combat air patrol over the transport fleet and reconnaissance flights over the central Philippines, and attacking ground targets on the beach. But the ship’s crews had barely seen any enemy airplanes. There had been a few submarine scares, but no sign of Japanese warships. The destroyers had faithfully executed their screening functions, hunting the perimeter for submarine intruders and lifeguarding downed aviators. The Taffy units had not expected to participate in the sea fights raging to the south, the east, and (prospectively) the north. So it came as a rude surprise when the pagoda masts of Kurita’s giant battleships and cruisers first peeked over the northwest horizon, shortly before seven o’clock that morning.

  The first hints of the intruders’ presence had arrived half an hour earlier, when Taffy 3’s antisubmarine patrol planes had catapulted from the flight decks. Japanese voices were overheard on a short-range low-power radio channel. The nearest enemy ships were thought to be more than 150 miles away, but the transmissions could have originated on an island of the nearby Philippines. An unidentified SG radar contact seemed to reveal something approaching from the north, but the blips had not resolved into anything resembling a fleet. It could be a portion of Halsey’s force, or perhaps just a weather front. At 6:46 a.m., lookouts in Taffy 3 sighted distant antiaircraft bursts over the northwest horizon. That was definitely strange, and Ziggy Sprague was about to tell his orbiting planes to investigate when a pilot radioed: “Enemy surface force . . . 20 miles northwest of your task group and closing at twenty knots.”

  Assuming that “some screwy young aviator” had foolishly misidentified elements of the Third Fleet, Admiral Sprague was irritated. He shouted into the squawk box, “Air Plot, tell him to check his identification.”

  The reply came back a minute later. “Identification of enemy force confirmed,” said the pilot. “Ships have pagoda masts.”36

  Sprague and his officers scanned the northwest horizon with disbelieving eyes. More flak bursts mottled the sky. The dark shapes of Japanese topmasts emerged above the horizon. The nearest pursuers were 17 miles away and bearing down quickly.

  On the Franks, a destroyer in the nearby Taffy 2 screening group, breakfast was interrupted by a hair-raising call to general quarters. “We ran to the battle stations,” recalled sailor Michael Bak Jr. “I ran to the bridge and looked out, and I saw what looked like toothpicks on the horizon, right across the horizon—many, many ships.”37

  Blindsided by the sudden emergency, Sprague reacted quickly. He broadcast a contact report and called for air support from the neighboring Taffy groups. He turned his carriers east, into the wind, and ordered them to work up to maximum speed. All airplanes spotted on the flight decks were launched immediately, even if they were not armed with antiship ordnance. The destroyers were told to zigzag astern of the fleeing CVEs while laying down the heaviest smoke screen they could manage. The carriers, too, were instructed to blow as much smoke as possible from their stacks, and to deploy chemical vapor units ordinarily employed by aircraft.

  The Japanese were almost as surprised as the Americans. Lookouts caught sight of Taffy 3 only minutes before they were sighted in turn, at about the maximum distance permitted by the curvature of the earth. Even before the Americans began laying smoke screens, visibility was less than ideal. The sky was overcast, with gray mists at sea level. The str
ange ships were hull-down in the southeast, and at first it was not obvious that they were aircraft carriers. Some on the bridge of the Yamato even said that they must be Japanese ships. Had they found Admiral Ozawa’s Northern Force? Soon the masts of the second escort carrier group, Taffy 2, peeked over the ocean rim to the south. As the range closed, lookouts saw planes launching, and the rectangular profiles of the CVEs rose above the horizon. They were carriers, and not Ozawa’s. But what sort of carriers? The Japanese did not know that the U.S. Navy had deployed a large force of small auxiliary aircraft carriers in the Pacific. The officers on the Yamato’s bridge concluded that they must have stumbled upon part of Task Force 38.

  In any case, victory seemed within their grasp. “This was indeed a miracle,” said Tomiji Koyanagi, Kurita’s chief of staff. “Think of a surface fleet coming up on an enemy carrier group! We moved to take advantage of this heaven-sent opportunity.”38 Their prime objective was to overtake and destroy the American flight decks before they could launch planes to attack their pursuers. The tactical circumstances called for making an all-out chase—and also, if possible, maneuvering to windward of the quarry so that they could not conduct flight operations while running away. Kurita ordered “General pursuit,” which meant that each Japanese ship was to give chase at its best individual speed, not bothering to remain in fleet cruising formation. At 6:59 a.m., he ordered, “Ready for surface battle.”39 In deference to custom and tradition, the other ships waited for the flagship to fire the first salvo. The Yamato’s 6-inch secondary batteries spoke first, followed quickly by her two forward 18-inch main battery turrets.