Fueling operations continued throughout January 13 and into the morning of January 14, draining six fleet oilers of every last drop they carried, at which point all of Task Force 38 had been brought up to at least 60 percent fuel.
The next day, the force launched strikes against Hong Kong, Canton, Hainan Island, Amoy, and (again) Formosa. Over Hong Kong they encountered the heaviest antiaircraft fire that many veteran airmen had ever seen, with the multicolored bursts forming three solid layers between 3,000 and 15,000 feet. One pilot described the flak as ranging from “intense to unbelievable.”58 But it was another red-letter day for the attackers. They destroyed many tens of thousands of tons of shipping and laid waste to waterfront facilities, drydocks, piers, and oil refineries in Canton, Kowloon, and Stonecutters Island. The returning pilots claimed to have destroyed or derailed ten trains in Formosa. But plane losses that day were heavy—thirty in combat and thirty-one in operational accidents. A handful of errant American Hellcats mistakenly bombed and strafed ground targets in Macao, a colony of neutral Portugal. The Portuguese government lodged an angry protest in Washington, and the State Department offered a formal apology and restitution.59
On January 18, it seemed as if the weather were conspiring to keep the task force bottled up in the South China Sea. A low-pressure area was funneling through the Luzon Strait, and seas were rising. Halsey was not keen to take the Third Fleet through those narrow and confined waters in such conditions. He considered withdrawing to the east, through the interior waters of the Philippines—Mindoro Strait, the Sulu Sea, the Mindanao Sea, and Surigao Strait. It would be a high-speed transit of narrow seaways, the same route that Nishimura’s Southern Force had taken during the Battle of Leyte Gulf two months earlier. The individual task groups would be obliged to use a special and unfamiliar cruising formation, and the risk of running aground would be high. The move would likely be discovered by the Japanese, and although enemy airpower in the region had been much reduced, the kamikaze threat could not be ignored. When Halsey proposed the idea to Nimitz, the CINCPAC nixed it, directing that the force remain in the South China Sea until the weather moderated.60 The fleet exited by the Balintang Channel on January 20. Halsey’s foray into the South China Sea had lasted eleven days, during which time the fleet had steamed 3,800 miles.
MacArthur’s forces were safely ashore on Luzon, and driving south toward Manila. But the air attacks on the amphibious fleet in Lingayen Gulf had continued, and as usual the SWPA commander wanted more direct air support from the Third Fleet. January 21 was another long day of strikes against now-familiar targets on Formosa and the Ryukyus, but the Japanese air forces responded furiously, launching waves of counterattacks on the fleet. The Japanese planes approached unseen through the overcast skies, apparently tracking U.S. planes returning from the morning strike, and vanished into clouds when challenged by orbiting Hellcats. Between noon and one o’clock, many enemy planes descended through the cloud ceiling. One dropped a small bomb on the carrier Langley, and a kamikaze hit the destroyer Maddox, killing four of her crew. The Hancock was badly damaged when one of her own airplanes landed with a bomb that detonated, killing forty-eight sailors. Two kamikazes devastated the Essex-class carrier Ticonderoga (CV-14). Her signal bridge was destroyed, the flight deck was rendered inoperable, and the hangar deck was gutted by fire.61 One hundred forty of her crew were killed, including many senior officers. The fires destroyed thirty-six planes, more than one-third of her complement. Lieutenant Bell, watching the floating inferno from the nearby Essex, noted in his diary: “This kamikaze business is the biggest story in the Pacific, but few people at home even suspect it. With a small number of planes manned by a small number of mad little savages, the Japs can seriously damage or sink as many surface ships as we have in combat. . . . In the kamikaze the Japs have the most effective secret weapon of the war. Certainly the most sinister and the most terrifying to contemplate.”62
The Third Fleet’s work was done, at least for this round. It had been at sea for twenty-eight consecutive days, steaming more than 12,000 miles. Its airplanes had destroyed 300,000 tons of Japanese shipping. On January 25, the task force was back in “the barn” at Ulithi. The lagoon anchorage was more crowded than ever before, including major elements of both the Third and Seventh Fleets. Admiral Spruance’s flagship Indianapolis was present; he was scheduled to take command of the Third Fleet the following day. Spruance and an entourage of senior staff officers visited the New Jersey that evening to confer with Admiral Halsey. The two four-star admirals met alone for more than an hour in Halsey’s flag cabin. Neither left a record of their conversation.
At midnight on January 26, command automatically passed from Halsey to Spruance. The Third Fleet became the Fifth Fleet, and Task Force 38 became, once again, Task Force 58. Admiral Mitscher returned as commander of Task Force 58, relieving McCain in that role. Halsey flew back to Pearl Harbor and then on to the United States for a long and well-deserved leave.
Chapter Ten
LINGAYEN GULF, A HORSESHOE-SHAPED INDENTATION ON THE NORTHWEST coast of Luzon, had provided the main entry point for the Japanese invasion in December 1941. Three years and three weeks later, history repeated itself, but on a far grander scale. The greatest invasion fleet yet assembled in the Pacific, comprising more than eight hundred combatant and transport ships, began arriving in the gulf on January 6, 1945. Its mission was to land the U.S. Sixth Army on Lingayen’s southern beaches. “Sierra Day,” the designated landing date, was set for January 9.
As new ships arrived, they maneuvered carefully through the congested roadstead, following channels marked by buoys to their preassigned “berths.” Mountainous terrain framed the shoreline. To the east, darkly forested hills and ridges rose toward the craggy green peaks of the Cagayan Range. Crewmen on the warships and transports were on edge, for good reason. The fleet was too big, and the gulf too small, to allow for high-speed evasive maneuvering. Most ships were obliged to remain at anchor throughout the operation. They were close-packed and stationary. Japanese aerial attackers could disguise their approach by hugging the radar shadows cast by the rugged coastal topography. Radar operators kept their noses pressed to their scopes, antiaircraft gunners kept their eyes peeled, and carrier planes of the CAP circled protectively overhead. Smoke generators churned out a chemical haze that clung to the surface of the gulf, and even seemed to defy the breeze.
For the first time in the war, the Americans now encountered the fearsome Shinyo (“Ocean Shaker”) suicide speedboats. These little wooden vessels sallied out from beaches along the western shore of Lingayen Gulf and bore in toward the fleet at high speed. After several American ships and landing craft took bad hits on the night of January 6, the 20mm machine gunners kept their fingers on their triggers and opened fire on anything they could not identify. From dusk to dawn, the shoreline was kept illuminated by starshells and searchlights. Suicidal Japanese swimmers even attempted to carry explosives to the hulls of American ships, concealing their approach by hiding under floating debris. Others disguised themselves as Filipino fishermen and approached the fleet in native canoes laden with hidden explosives. One such attack blew a hole in the side of a transport, killing several of her crew.
During the week-long passage from Leyte Gulf, the Allied invasion force had been hit by the worst kamikaze attacks of the war to date. The ordeal had commenced with a vicious strike on Vice Admiral Jesse Oldendorf’s fire support group as it threaded narrow inshore channels west of Panay. At 5:12 p.m. on January 4, a lone Yokosuka P1Y (“Frances”) bomber plunged through the cloud ceiling and buried itself in the deck of the CVE Ommaney Bay. The attack came so suddenly and unexpectedly that the antiaircraft gunners did not even have time to open fire. Two bombs pierced the jeep carrier’s thin steel flight deck and exploded in her hangar. Fires raged out of control, engulfing the bomb and aerial torpedo storage lockers and setting off internal explosions. The little flattop was torn apart; ninety-three of her crew were killed. Survivors le
apt into the sea and were picked up by escorting destroyers. The burning wreckage was scuttled in the Mindoro Strait.
Although the Americans did not yet know it, Japanese air strength in the Philippines was down to its last gasp. The 201st Air Group, headquartered at Mabalacat, could muster only about forty aircraft in flyable condition. Throughout all of the Philippines, there were probably no more than two hundred remaining planes. In the last week of December, the Imperial Headquarters had decreed that the Philippines would receive no further air reinforcements. The flight route north of the archipelago was no longer tenable. Since the Battle of Leyte Gulf, approximately three of every ten Japanese planes sent into the Philippines from Formosa or Japan had been lost in operational accidents, or shot down by Third Fleet carrier planes.1 Now, by Tokyo’s order, all remaining aircraft were to be launched against the American fleet in suicide attacks. Surviving personnel at the air bases would withdraw to the mountains and join up with Japanese army forces. Senior officers at the 201st Air Group headquarters would evacuate to Formosa by air, under cover of darkness. That last order was kept secret, for fear that the news would undercut morale among those to be left behind.
Airfields on Luzon were visited almost daily by U.S. bombers and strafing fighters. Unless parked well away from the airfields and hidden under camouflage nets or brush foliage, Japanese airplanes were quickly destroyed on the ground. The young, inexperienced kamikaze pilots were briefed to take off quickly, as soon as their planes were uncovered and pushed into position, and to climb to altitude before being intercepted by American fighters. They would need skill and good luck just to reach the enemy fleet, let alone to score in a diving attack on a ship. But there was never any shortage of volunteers to fly suicide missions. At Clark Field, where there were more pilots than flyable planes, young men mobbed their air commanders and begged to be chosen to fly. On the evening of January 5, only thirteen aircraft were available for the next day’s strike, and thirteen pilots were chosen. Those who had been disappointed hunted among the grounded and disabled planes on the airfield, and “begged mechanics to put the best parts of condemned planes together into something that would fly.”2 After a gallant overnight effort by the ground crews, five derelicts were patched up to the extent that they could take off.
At dawn, a solemn departure ceremony was held on the edge of the airfield. The pilots took a cup of sake from a white linen-covered table and were saluted by their comrades before climbing into their cockpits and taking off for the last time.
Later that morning, as Oldendorf’s 164-ship shore-bombardment group took position off Lingayen Gulf, kamikazes swarmed in from the east. Oldendorf’s flagship, the Pearl Harbor survivor California, was hit on her starboard side near the mainmast; the blast killed 32 men and wounded dozens more. A plunging bomber hit the portside bridge of the battleship New Mexico, flagship to Rear Admiral George Weyler, and blew up in a tremendous ball of fire. Among the thirty men killed was the skipper, Captain Robert W. Fleming, and two prominent guests—Lieutenant General Herbert Lumsden of the British Army, and Time magazine correspondent William Henry Chickering. Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser, the highest-ranking British officer in the Pacific, was riding aboard the New Mexico as an observer; he survived the attack. Late that afternoon, a lone kamikaze flew through a storm of antiaircraft fire to strike the cruiser Louisville. The plane’s two bombs detonated, igniting a fierce fire around Turret No. 2 and the pilot house. Rear Admiral Theodore E. Chandler, commander of Cruiser Division 4, suffered grievous burns and died the next day. When the headless, naked body of the kamikaze pilot was recovered, the Louisville’s damage control party simply heaved it over the side.
In the five days before the first amphibious landings in Lingayen Gulf, kamikazes struck or near-missed thirty Allied vessels. Three warships were destroyed, fourteen heavily damaged, and thirteen lightly damaged. A witness on the attack transport Doyen described a “grotesque-looking procession” of ships with smashed superstructures and “blackened and torn spaces that had once been gun turrets.”3 General MacArthur, riding on the cruiser Boise, personally witnessed several attacks that might easily have killed him. Brusquely refusing all suggestions to take cover below, he watched the action from the rail of the quarterdeck while coolly puffing on his pipe. In his memoir, he described a “blazing barrage of antiaircraft fire as every ship opened in a deafening blast of flak.”4
On January 7, in response to urgent requests from Kinkaid and MacArthur, Halsey threw his “Big Blue Blanket” over Luzon. The carrier airmen returned to their ships with claims of at least seventy-five Japanese planes destroyed on the ground. In the following days, mercifully, the kamikaze threat abated significantly.
The command roster for the Luzon invasion was much the same as it had been for the Leyte operation. General Krueger remained in command of the Sixth Army, consisting of two army corps of two divisions each—I Corps under Major General Innis P. Swift (the 6th and 43rd Divisions), and XIV Corps under Lieutenant General Oscar W. Griswold (the 37th and 40th Divisions). A fifth division, the 25th, was to be kept in “floating reserve” offshore. Admiral Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet would blockade Manila and Subic Bay and protect the long seaborne supply line. General Kenney remained in charge of the Fifth and Thirteenth Air Forces. His USAAF fighters and bombers would fly into Clark Field and other Luzon airfields as soon as they were secured. The Eighth Army, still under General Eichelberger, would employ deceptive measures in hopes of convincing the Japanese that the main landings would occur in southern Luzon. On “S-Day,” Krueger’s four assault divisions would land abreast on a 20-mile-wide beachhead at the foot of Lingayen Gulf, then drive inland to take control of the Luzon Central Plain. I Corps, on the left, would keep Japanese forces bottled up in the Cagayan Mountains, while XIV Corps raced south to descend on Manila. Later, an Eighth Army force would land on the island’s south coast. The Sixth and Eighth Armies would envelop Manila and its bay in a pincer movement. If all went as planned, the bulk of Japanese ground forces would be isolated in the island’s mountainous north, cut off from the capital and other Japanese army detachments to the south.
On the night before the landings, the bombardment flotilla put on a pyrotechnic extravaganza as they showered the beaches with heavy naval shells. In a letter to his wife, James Orville Raines of the destroyer Howorth described the projectiles as they raced into shore on their long, high-arching trajectories. “You know, they seem to travel very slowly when you watch them. They seem to float across the sky like slowly falling stars. We were shooting seven miles and between were layers of clouds and smoke. I stood on the wing of the bridge and watched the red balls disappear and reappear in and out of the layers. It was so far away, I could see only a very few tiny red flashes when they hit.”5 Fire was directed against suspected Japanese shore positions along the entire shoreline of Lingayen Gulf, especially on the designated landing beaches at the lower bend of the horseshoe, around the towns of Lingayen, Dagupan, Mabilao, and San Fabian. There was little counterfire from enemy shore batteries, and none at all from the vicinity of the southern landing beaches. In the town of Lingayen, at dawn, a crowd of civilian Filipinos was seen marching under an American flag. After surveying the scene through binoculars, Oldendorf ordered that fire be shifted away from that area.
As the assault troops descended the rope nets into their landing boats, the weather was calm and mild, with light breezes, scattered clouds, and barely any swell in the gulf’s enclosed waters. Crux, the Southern Cross, hovered directly over the landing beaches, which were shrouded in a low haze. The boats milled around the transport zone, engines rumbling in idle, while awaiting the signal to land. A few Shinyo speedboats made desperate runs from the western shore, but all were destroyed or driven away before they could strike home.
At 9:30 a.m., the first wave was away. More than 1,000 landing craft motored in toward the beaches, their long wakes carving parallel white lines. By 9:40, nearly 20,000 troops were ashore; by noon, 68,000. They stor
med ashore along a 12-mile stretch of beaches at the southern end of the gulf, adjacent to the towns of Lingayen, Dugupan, and Mabilao. The beach was wide and continuous, large enough to accommodate two full army corps (four infantry divisions abreast) and the gigantic amount of heavy equipment, vehicles, weaponry, and supplies scheduled to come ashore in a matter of hours. Resistance was scant. Joyful Filipinos greeted them with handshakes and kisses. Japanese defenses were concentrated along the eastern part of the gulf, where General Masaharu Homma’s invasion force had landed three years earlier. On the right flank of the American lines, the 40th Division met no enemy opposition at all: no artillery, no mortars, no small arms fire, and no Japanese to be seen. Advancing patrols found a few pillboxes and blockhouses, and inspected them cautiously—but not a single enemy soldier was to be found. The division moved inland and captured a working airstrip in Lingayen.
To the east, the 6th Division landed on Blue Beaches 1 and 2 near Mangaldan, while the 43rd Division landed on White Beaches 1, 2, and 3 near San Fabian. They took some desultory long-range artillery and mortar fire from Japanese positions in hills to the east, above San Fabian. This fire was an irritant rather than a threat; it was not heavy or accurate enough to inflict heavy casualties, but cargo unloading was diverted farther down the coast to the west. Among the handful of casualties was a soldier who had been knocked down by a stampeding water buffalo.6
General MacArthur went ashore at noon, trailing an entourage of staff officers, war correspondents, and photographers. His barge motored toward the center of the beachhead, where the engineers had rigged a temporary pier by anchoring a pair of pontoon barges into the sand. The helmsman intended to go alongside this pier, but veered away at MacArthur’s signal. The general instead disembarked in knee-deep surf and waded ashore. This ritual had become something of a trademark. Now, as at Leyte and Mindoro, the event was documented by photographers. In his familiar field marshal’s cap and aviator sunglasses, MacArthur walked erect and unflinching, even when a lone Zero flew low overhead. He watched in approval as the enemy plane was destroyed in a “solid wall” of antiaircraft fire.7
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