Kurita became somewhat more animated when invited to explain his decision to turn north on October 25. He gave several reasons, some contradictory. Asked if he had turned north in order to avoid a destructive air attack, he replied: “It wasn’t a question of destruction, that was neither here nor there. It was a question of what good I could do in the bay. I concluded that under the heavy attack from ship and shore-based planes, I could not be effective. Therefore, on my own decision, I concluded it was best to go north and join Admiral Ozawa.” But joining up with Ozawa was never a realistic proposition, and Kurita soon contradicted himself: “My intention was not primarily to join Admiral Ozawa but to go north and seek out the enemy. If I failed to find the enemy, having reached here [indicating a position on the chart, about 13°20´N] my intention was to go north and seek out the enemy but to be able to retire through San Bernardino Strait at dark.” Kurita seemed to mean that he wanted to keep the escape hatch at San Bernardino within reach, but only as a last resort in case he could not find the enemy. But he added a stray remark suggesting that his main intention was always to get away that night, because “if I did not get into the Straits by night, the next day was hopeless for me because I could be brought under attack by land planes and by [Halsey’s] force.”116
Taken together with the interrogations of the Center Force chief of staff (Tomiji Koyanagi) and operations officer (Tonosuke Otani), as well as the diary of Admiral Ugaki, an extraordinary concatenation of reasons was offered to justify the decision to turn north. Koyanagi alone enumerated six reasons, counting them out one by one. (First, they could not catch the Taffy 3 carriers; second, they were too far behind schedule to coordinate attacks with Nishimura; third, they expected a heavy air attack based on Kinkaid’s plain-language transmissions; fourth, they did not want to be caught in confined waters under heavy air attack; fifth, they hoped to fight a pitched battle with Halsey’s force to the north; and sixth, they were running short of fuel.)117 What emerges is a mosaic picture, a decision made under great stress and driven by several interconnected factors. Koyanagi and Otani both affirmed that the decision to turn north was supported unanimously by the staff. In his diary, Ugaki remarked, “I felt irritated on the same bridge seeing that they lacked fighting spirit and promptitude.” But Ugaki also believed that the phantom American carrier force to the north was real, and even recorded that he had seen “takeoffs and landings of planes far over the horizon” on a bearing of 20 degrees. Since no such carrier force was in that location, the apparition recorded by Ugaki only adds to the impression of chaos and bewilderment on the Yamato’s flag bridge that morning.118
Perhaps the whole story will never be known, but this much is clear: Kurita was exhausted. Since leaving Brunei three days earlier, he had not slept at all. His flagship Atago had been shot out from under him in Palawan Passage, dumping the fifty-five-year-old vice admiral into the sea and forcing him to swim for his life. His ships had suffered under the most sustained air attack ever encountered by a fleet at sea, with no friendly air protection at all. To Americans, journalists, and other outsiders, Kurita was loath to admit that fatigue had played any role in his decision to break and run. In private conversations with colleagues, he was more candid. He told Tameichi Hara, the veteran destroyer skipper, “I made that blunder out of sheer physical exhaustion.”119 The staff must have been similarly weary, for they had shared in the long ordeal and did not oppose the decision.
Kurita had held a smashing victory in his grasp, and let it slip through his fingers. That was an egregious command failure, never convincingly justified by the array of rationales offered later. Some have charged him with timidity; many others have implied it. At the very least it would seem that his heart was not in the fight. From the start, Plan Sho had encountered resistance in the fleet. Voices had been raised against it during the command conference in Brunei. The plan to attack transports and troopships in Leyte Gulf had offended the sensibilities of many Japanese officers, who had been trained to believe that warships should fight warships. Others faulted Admiral Toyoda for ordering the operation but failing to lead it in person. While advancing through the Sibuyan Sea against relentless air attacks, with no sign of the air support they had been promised, officers on the bridge of the Yamato uttered quasi-mutinous remarks about the stupidity and rigidity of Combined Fleet headquarters. Kurita turned away from the battle not once but twice, temporarily on the twenty-fourth and permanently on the twenty-fifth—and in the first instance, some of his staff had preferred to keep heading away from the enemy. And while the point is often forgotten, several of Kurita’s fellow commanders also turned back prematurely. Ozawa turned north briefly on the afternoon of October 24, after his Northern Force was sighted by Halsey’s search planes, until instructed to turn south again by radio dispatch from the Combined Fleet command bunker in Hiyoshi. Admiral Shima hightailed it out of Surigao Strait on the morning of October 25, after launching a single salvo of torpedoes. He radioed Toyoda to report that his retirement was only temporary, but American warplanes chased him all the way back to Manila Bay. The samurai Shoji Nishimura carried out his naval banzai charge more faithfully than any of his fellow fleet commanders. Even so, every ship in his Southern Force turned back, or at least attempted to do so, once it became clear that the cause was lost. Even Nishimura’s own flagship Yamashiro turned away at the last moment, after trying in vain to advance alone into the concentrated gunfire of the Allied fleet.
In truth, the officers and men who manned the Japanese fleet had never really bought into Plan Sho, because it did not offer a realistic prospect of success. They understood that the staff officers who had written the plan did not really expect them to win, but to fight one last glorious battle to crown the Japanese navy’s career. They were being asked to offer up the still-mighty Combined Fleet as a sacrificial lamb. But the Japanese navy differed from the army in this respect: its culture, training, and traditions offered no precedent for a mindless, headlong banzai charge. While the naval air corps was eventually given over to kamikaze tactics, that development was a last resort, long delayed by opposition in the ranks. It involved sacrificing airplanes and novice pilots who lacked the skills to fly and fight using conventional tactics. But the emperor’s ships were major capital assets, state-of-the-art weapons, beloved national icons, built and manned over many decades at monumental expense. It had never been intended that they should immolate themselves for the sake of abstract considerations of honor.
Throughout its history, the Japanese navy had always tried to win. Winning was its prime objective: “dying well” was an ancillary virtue. If a ship’s fate was to be destroyed in battle, she was expected to go down with guns blazing. If a man’s fate was to die in battle, he was expected to die willingly, and afterward his spirit would rest eternally at Yasukuni Shrine. But the overriding purpose had always been victory. Now, in October 1944, the ironically named “Plan Victory” inverted that order of priorities. The Tokyo admirals had foreseen that if the Americans gained possession of the Philippines, the fuel supply problem would become impossible to solve. In that case, the fleet would be immobilized, left to end the war while riding at anchor, or to sink in port under a rain of enemy bombs. Sho’s driving purpose was to avoid that ignominious finale, to ensure that the Japanese navy went out with a bang rather than a whimper. If it was possible to win, so much the better, but the battle must be fought no matter how long the odds.
The point had often been obscured in Western histories of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, partly because the “between the lines” meaning of Tokyo’s operational orders and subsequent dispatches was lost in English translation, and partly because Japanese officers were cagey on the subject with their postwar USSBS interrogators. But the truth shone through in contemporary sources and postwar accounts. Kurita had rallied his officers in Brunei with the remark: “You must all remember that there are such things as miracles.”120 Koyanagi, writing after the war, pointed out that the fleet had been obliged to travel
almost 1,000 miles to the scene of battle, through waters known to be infested with enemy submarines and under skies dominated by enemy airplanes. “This was a completely desperate, reckless, and unprecedented plan that ignored the basic concepts of war,” he concluded. “I still cannot but interpret it as a suicide order for Kurita’s fleet.”121
Perhaps it was not cowardice so much as sagging morale that best explains Kurita’s equivocation and retreat. He and his fellow officers knew better than their civilian countrymen that the war was already lost, and that the high command had tried to hide the truth behind a skein of lies. They could not acknowledge it openly, but the incubus of defeatism was spreading through their ranks. And how could it have been otherwise, when the ludicrously named “Plan Victory” was itself a token of the regime’s defeatism?
HALSEY WENT TO HIS GRAVE refusing to concede that he had erred in leaving San Bernardino Strait undefended on the night of October 24, 1944. His only error, he told anyone who would listen, was in reversing course when Ozawa’s carrier group was nearly under his guns. Carney and the Third Fleet staff upheld this party line, but virtually all carrier group and task force commanders were convinced that their chief had blundered, and their whispers quickly circulated back to Guam, Ulithi, Manus, Pearl Harbor, and Washington. Moreover, keen observers noted discord even among the dirty tricksters. Rear Admiral Arthur Radford, who would soon take command of a task group, reported on board the New Jersey on November 17, having just arrived in the theater. He wanted to discuss the recent battle with Mick Carney, his old friend and Naval Academy classmate. “To my surprise,” said Radford, “the usually garrulous Mick was rather noncommittal, and the same was true of Admiral Halsey and several other members of the staff. The impression that remained with me was definite: they did not want to talk about those days in October. I felt distinctly that all were displeased with their performance but had not yet agreed on the reasons for it.”122
For one reason or another, often bad luck, Halsey had missed all of the Pacific War’s previous carrier-versus-carrier battles. In May 1942, his Enterprise-centered task force had arrived too late for the Battle of the Coral Sea, because he had been sent north to cover the Doolittle Raid against Japan. The following month he was laid low by a skin disorder, and ordered to the hospital by Nimitz, thus missing the Battle of Midway. (His trusted understudy, Raymond Spruance, stepped into Halsey’s shoes and won the immortal victory.) Halsey was not in the South Pacific for the Guadalcanal landing in August 1942, or the clash of carriers later that month at the Battle of the Eastern Solomons. In October 1942, during the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands, he was shorebound at his SOPAC headquarters in New Caledonia. Then followed an eighteen-month hiatus, during which the Japanese carriers did not come out to fight. When they finally reappeared in June 1944, at the Battle of the Philippine Sea, Spruance was commanding the Fifth Fleet.
In the South Pacific, Halsey had earned a reputation as a “rough brush”—that is, an artist who painted in big, sweeping strokes, rather than a draftsman who drew fine, precise lines. Tactical subtleties did not much interest him; he simply gathered up his forces and hurled them at the enemy, trusting to the fortunes of war. His more famous nickname, “Bull,” got at the same trait. Since taking over the Third Fleet in August 1944, Halsey’s major ambition had been to destroy the enemy’s carrier task force—not simply to meet it in battle, not just to defeat it, but to annihilate it, to wipe it out, to burn and sink every remaining Japanese flattop with all their airplanes and screening vessels. He was proud to declare himself a naval meleeist in the tradition of Horatio Nelson, who won several such wipeout victories against the enemies of England during the Napoleonic Wars. In his memoir, he quoted Nelson’s instructions before the Battle of Trafalgar: “No captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of an enemy.” Halsey added, “If any principle of naval warfare is burned into my brain, it is that the best defense is a strong offense.”123
His friend Spruance had allowed most of the Japanese fleet to escape after the Battle of the Philippine Sea four months earlier. Task Force 58 commander Marc Mitscher had wanted to move west against the enemy on the night of June 18, to be in position to launch airstrikes the next morning. Spruance had declined, for fear of an end-run attack on the beachhead at Saipan. That conservative decision was decried by many of the navy’s influential brownshoes (aviators), who charged that the blackshoe (non-aviator) Spruance was fundamentally ignorant of the capabilities of modern carrier airpower. During this period, Halsey was encamped at Pearl Harbor, preparing to assume command of the fleet. He and his staff received an earful from the aviators, who begged them to avoid another such letdown. Carl Moore, Mick Carney’s counterpart in the Fifth Fleet, believed that Halsey “was among those who sat around and panned Spruance during those first few days. And I think that the idea got into his head that he would never get himself into that kind of a position. . . . Now, I have no proof of it. I think Carney would deny it. And Halsey certainly, in hindsight, describing everything, denied it. But there you are.”124
As usual, Nimitz allowed his seagoing commander broad latitude to handle his forces as he chose, depending on tactical circumstances. His operations plan charged Halsey with “covering and supporting the Leyte Gulf-Surigao operations.” But it also specified: “If opportunity for destruction of major portion of the enemy fleet is offered or can be created, such destruction becomes the primary task.”125 A critical ambiguity lay in the seam between these two clauses. Ruses, feints, and lures were familiar hallmarks of Japanese strategy. In several previous naval battles, including all four carrier duels prior to the Battle of the Philippine Sea, the Japanese had divided their forces and approached the scene of action by different routes. What if several “major portions” of the enemy fleet advanced from different directions, as they did at Leyte Gulf? How to weigh the impulse to chase and destroy one part of the enemy fleet against the competing mandate to “cover and support” the Seventh Fleet and beachhead? Those contingencies were left to Halsey’s judgment.
The clause concerning “destruction of major portion of the enemy fleet” was boilerplate: versions of it had been included in the operational orders for amphibious operations since GALVANIC, the invasion of the Gilbert Islands in November 1943. Still, orders were orders, and the designation of such destruction as the “primary task” would seem to justify Halsey’s aggressive mindset. Facing a dilemma comparable to the situation in the Marianas four months earlier, Halsey’s instinct was to reverse the order of priorities. Spruance had refused to risk an end-run attack on the beachhead, even if it meant letting the enemy carriers get away. Halsey would refuse to let the enemy carriers get away, even at the risk of allowing an end-run attack on the beachhead.
When Ozawa’s Northern Force appeared off Cape Engano, Halsey was confronted with a high-stakes decision. Broadly speaking, he had three alternatives. He could stay where he was, he could divide his forces, or he could chase north with his entire fleet. He rejected the first option, keeping his entire force off San Bernardino Strait, for sound reasons: he wanted to sink the enemy carriers before they could link up with airfields on Luzon and “shuttle-bomb” him. But his justifications for rejecting the second option (leaving Task Force 34 off San Bernardino) in favor of the third (taking everything north and leaving the strait unguarded) persuaded virtually no one beyond the handful of staff loyalists who took part in the decision. The reasons offered in the Third Fleet action report were too nebulous to be convincing. Taking the whole fleet north, it argued, “maintained the integrity of the Blue [U.S.] striking fleet; it offered best possibility of surprise and destruction of enemy carrier force.”126 To say that the decision “maintained the integrity” of the fleet was true, inasmuch as the fleet stayed together as an undivided whole, but that only rephrased the decision without explaining or justifying it. It was a tautology, disguised by a semantic sleight of hand. Fleet concentration for its own sake was Mahanian orthodoxy, which had reign
ed supreme when Halsey’s generation had passed through the Naval Academy. By 1944, advances in radio, radar, and aviation had changed the game, and the old rule of concentration was as obsolete as a square-rigger.
Halsey had no compelling reason to concentrate his entire sixty-five-ship fleet against the nineteen-ship carrier force to his north, but he had urgent reasons to guard the strait. Moreover, he did not have to pick between alternatives, because he had more than enough strength to deal with Kurita and Ozawa simultaneously. His action report described the Northern Force as a “fresh and powerful threat,” deserving the Third Fleet’s full attention. It was fresh in the sense that it had not yet been attacked, while the Center Force had suffered a terrific thrashing from the air. But the Japanese carrier force had already been emasculated by the loss of its leading aviators, a fact widely known and understood in American aviation and intelligence circles even before the Battle of Leyte Gulf. “We all knew at that time the Japanese had very little carrier aviation,” said Truman Hedding, a former Task Force 58 chief of staff now posted to Nimitz’s CINCPAC headquarters. “It was practically nothing . . . and any one of our carrier task groups could have overwhelmed them.”127 Hedding’s judgment was corroborated by many other authorities at the time and after the war.
As for the Center Force, Halsey considered it “so heavily damaged that it could not win a decision . . . with battle efficiency greatly impaired by torpedo hits, bomb hits, topside damage, fires, and casualties.”128 But that assessment was based solely upon the reports of Task Force 38 pilots returning from the day’s strikes in the Sibuyan Sea. Three years of war had revealed that such claims were generally exaggerated, often to a prodigal extent. The various task group commanders were amazed that Halsey would bet so much upon their accuracy, especially after new air patrols confirmed that the Center Force was again headed toward San Bernardino Strait, where the navigation lights had been turned on. On this point, Halsey convicted himself with his own pen, or rather his yeoman’s typewriter. He thought it so vital to take his whole enormous fleet north that he would risk letting Kurita’s battleships have their way with the transports in Leyte Gulf:
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