Down to the Sea

by Bruce Henderson

  Halsey’s actions had raised the formidable ire of the Navy’s top admiral, Chief of Naval Operations Ernest J. King, who in the midst of the sea battle paced “like a tiger…up and down in a towering rage” in his Washington office. Following in-progress dispatches from the Philippines, King vented his anger to a visitor, Rear Admiral Joseph J. Clark: “[Halsey] has left the strait of San Bernardino open for the Japanese to strike the transports at Leyte.” The two admirals agreed Halsey had given the enemy fleet a “golden opportunity to wreak havoc on MacArthur’s invasion forces.” King and Clark were not alone in criticizing Halsey, as there was “persistent grumbling” in Washington about Halsey’s “careless ways.” Some officers who had served under Halsey even opined that he was “not sufficiently skilled to command a fleet.” Audacious by nature, he was “prone to ad hoc rather than detailed planning” and “guilty of sloppy techniques,” which resulted in his sending “often vague dispatches” to his commanders and ships. While these traits were overlooked when the goal had been simply to hang on at Guadalcanal or unleash a fast carrier strike against an enemy island outpost in the early days of the war, by late 1944 the “complex offensive” was at its height and such “inefficiency was intolerable.”

  The nearly bungled outcome at Leyte—and with it MacArthur’s long-awaited return to the Philippines, where a final victory would not only free the oppressed Filipinos and “shorten the war” but also “guarantee Japan’s defeat as a great power”—had been won with equal parts of luck (the Japanese fleet turned around “within forty miles of the invasion force”) and heroism by a thin line of outgunned U.S. ships and their crews. In Navy wartime parlance, Halsey’s foul-up became derisively known as the “Battle of Bull’s Run,” a pun on his nickname and the Civil War battle.*

  For his part, MacArthur was a fan of Halsey’s for his resourcefulness and aggressiveness in battle—the general found “the bugaboo of many sailors, the fear of losing ships, was completely alien to [Halsey’s] conception of sea action.” However, MacArthur, whose Leyte invasion had been jeopardized by Halsey, was greatly upset with the admiral’s “failure to execute his mission of covering” the operation. While MacArthur sent an official “gushing” telegram to the commander of the Third Fleet—“Everyone here has a feel of complete confidence and inspiration when you go into action in our support”—the general privately seethed at Halsey, unleashing a “verbal castigation” of him. MacArthur “charged” Halsey with “threatening the destruction” of the invasion force by leaving unguarded the San Bernardino Strait. MacArthur’s chief of staff, Lieutenant General Richard Sutherland, noted that MacArthur “repeatedly stated that [Halsey] should be relieved and would welcome his relief as he no longer has confidence in him.” Although MacArthur took no steps to have Halsey relieved of command—and castigated his own staff officers one night over dinner for their nonstop criticism of Halsey with “He’s still a fighting admiral in my book”—Leyte Gulf had come between two of the Pacific’s top military commanders.

  Now Halsey and the Third Fleet were headed back to the Philippines for a return engagement: MacArthur’s invasion at Mindoro—250 miles northwest of Leyte and “under the shadow of Luzon” and its beehive of enemy airfields. The invasion of Luzon, the largest and northernmost island in the chain and the last enemy stronghold in the Philippines, where Japan had “thousands of superb ground forces,” was scheduled to start after that, but MacArthur first wanted a foothold on Mindoro. MacArthur had planned to land at Mindoro on December 5, but ten days before D-Day, Halsey, although he “hated” to do so, had requested a postponement. With his fleet exhausted from continuous action in October (including attacks on Okinawa and Formosa) and throughout November in support of Leyte ground operations while fighting off the latest and most desperate weapon of the Japanese—kamikaze planes making suicide dives into U.S. ships, including six of Halsey’s aircraft carriers in the past month—Halsey sought “an adequate rest period.” His own flagship had spent all but ten of the last ninety-five days at sea, much of it in combat operations, and Halsey himself felt “tired in mind, body and nerves.” He had accepted the decision that given the amount of carrier air support required by the U.S. Sixth Army, he would be unable to “break off supporting the Leyte operation” and strike the Japanese home islands before the close of 1944, which he “longed to do.” It was a “bitter disappointment” for Halsey that there would be “no wings over Tokyo until next year.” As soon as “MacArthur’s obliging reply was decoded”—the Mindoro invasion was rescheduled for December 15—Halsey’s ships had turned their prows toward Ulithi, where the admiral knew they would also have an “unexpected opportunity for maintenance.”

  The men of the Third Fleet had been rejuvenated by their two weeks at Ulithi. Everyone, including Halsey, who had turned sixty-two, “rested and tried to relax.” Men who had been “too long at sea and faced death too often” spent afternoons playing sports and getting sunburned on Mogmog, a tiny atoll that had been turned into a thatched-hut recreational area, complete with a swimming beach, basketball courts, horseshoe pitches, baseball diamonds, and a football field. Sailors were allotted two bottles of beer daily—usually paid for from their ships’ crew-welfare funds—and for officers there was a bar where bourbon and Scotch cost twenty cents a shot.

  Before departing, men caught up on their letter writing; for too many, it would be their last missives home. Aboard Spence, which after rendezvousing with the Third Fleet off the Philippines in mid-November had been screening for a carrier group, Machinist’s Mate Robert Strand, the bowler who hoped to marry his sweetheart, Jane, and own his hometown bowling alley one day, wrote to his parents in Pennsylvania. He made a point to do so—after “sitting in the sun all afternoon”—even though he had written home a day earlier. “Well, just brace yourself for it will be the last shock like this for awhile.” He admitted to having been “a bad boy” and gambling. “But lucky!!!!”

  Wish everyone a Merry Christmas for me and hope you’ll have a lot of fun. I know I’ll enjoy myself with a big banquet, Navy style. Don’t worry, it will really be good chow on that day anyway…. You know I’ll be thinking of you so very much and missing you all. Bye for now—take good care of yourselves and just keep writing even though your letters are being delayed.

  As always,

  Your loving son, Bob

  En route to the Philippines, the Third Fleet conducted exercises to bring ships and crews back to fighting form. The fleet was divided into three main task groups, each commanded by a rear admiral, then into smaller units. Halsey had with him seven Essex-class (attack) and six light (or escort) aircraft carriers with 540 fighter planes, 150 dive-bombers, and 140 torpedo bombers, eight battleships, fifteen light and heavy cruisers, and about fifty destroyers. Their mission would be the “neutralization and destruction of hostile air strength on Luzon.” The danger in failure was understood by Halsey, who knew the passages of MacArthur’s invasion force “through restricted waters and between hostile island air bases” to land troops at Mindoro was “admittedly hazardous” unless Japanese air power could be “knocked out and kept out for the critical approach and unloading period.” There could be no abandoning the invasion force to chase other targets. Halsey’s intent—and the promise he had communicated to MacArthur and his staff “by conference at Leyte”—was to “support the Mindoro operation properly,” which meant keeping enemy aircraft on Luzon from “intercepting our transports.”

  The morning of December 13 was used for fueling ships from waiting fleet oilers—topping off tanks that were already nearly full—and that afternoon, leaving behind the logistics group, Halsey ordered a “high speed run” started for Luzon in an effort to secure “tactical surprise.” At dawn, his carriers launched their attacks. Every known or suspected enemy airfield on Luzon had been assigned to a specific carrier for its aircraft to hit. Tactical surprise “with its accompanying dividends” was achieved as the planes struck their targets on Luzon. “Very few Japanese plan
es were found airborne” that morning, and immediate air supremacy was achieved. Carrying out a new operation dubbed the “Big Blue Blanket”—named after the oversized blankets used on the bench by Annapolis football players—designed to meet the threat of kamikazes, continuous combat air patrols overflew Luzon airfields day and night to prevent enemy planes from taking off. Other methods tried for the first time to neutralize the kamikaze threat—most “masterminded” by Vice Admiral John S. McCain, who a month earlier had relieved Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher as Halsey’s top task force commander—also worked, such as placing picket destroyers 60 miles away to provide “early warning of impending air attack” to be met by a wave of fighters patrolling at low altitude.

  MacArthur’s forces landed on the southern beaches of Mindoro on December 15, finding resistance minimal. Third Fleet air attacks conducted over the next three days netted 270 enemy planes (more than 200 destroyed on the ground), and “not a single bogey” from Luzon was able to deliver a strike on MacArthur’s invasion forces.* In its first deployment, the Big Blue Blanket had been an unqualified success in “paralyzing the enemy’s air effort over Luzon.” Other results by marauding carrier planes: thirty-three enemy cargo vessels caught and sunk in shipping lanes, locomotives and truck convoys wrecked, and fuel and ammunition dumps blasted, along with antiaircraft batteries and airfields. Halsey’s own losses those three days: twenty-seven planes and no ships.

  With the Mindoro operation ongoing as troops and supplies poured ashore, air cover was still required. The operations during the last three days, however, had consumed much fuel and ammunition. Halsey planned to replenish his ships on the seventeenth and return for three more days of air strikes on Luzon no later than the nineteenth, when “the congestion of supplies on the Mindoro beachhead and of ships offshore would demand all available air cover.”

  As soon as the last of the carrier planes were recovered on the evening of December 16, Halsey ordered a change of course for a rendezvous with Third Fleet’s replenishment group in the Philippine Sea some 400 miles east of Luzon. The location was selected as the “nearest spot to Luzon outside of Japanese fighter-plane radius,” while remaining close enough to the launch position so the carriers could “get back in time to meet their strike deadline.” Halsey was “driven” to continue to give MacArthur “his fullest support,” and considered it “imperative” that all his ships be fueled and resupplied rapidly so the fleet could get back in time to resume air operations as promised.

  Fueling could not come too soon for many destroyers, some “dangerously low” after three days of air strikes. Steaming with aircraft carriers, which seldom slowed when conducting flight operations, required destroyers to execute full-speed maneuvers, resulting in high fuel consumption. It “became standard practice” for destroyers, being “shortest in fuel capacity” with their limited storage compared with larger ships, to be fueled every few days.

  Steaming in excess of 20 knots, the Third Fleet soon left behind the Japanese on Luzon. No one on the darkened ships heading into the night on a zigzag course in an increasing swell and wind had any idea they were about to engage in a battle for survival with an onrushing enemy of a different nature.

  Eleven

  U.S. Army Air Corps captain Reid A. Bryson, twenty-four, a meteorologist based on Saipan with the Twentieth Air Force, had been tracking for the past ten days the steady westward movement of what he had marked on his weather map as a “potential typhoon.” When the latest weather report from Guam came in on December 17, 1944, he knew his worst fears had been realized. A tall, slender, fresh-faced midwesterner with a blond crew cut that made him appear even younger, Bryson had only months earlier received his first “real-world forecasting experience,” and with it a painful lesson: typhoons had to be watched “very carefully” and avoided by fleets and ships at all times—even if doing so held up the “progress of operations” and the war.

  A 1941 graduate of Ohio’s Denison University with a degree in geology, Bryson had gone from being a geology graduate student at the University of Wisconsin to “meteorological cadet” in early 1942 in the Army Air Corps program at the University of Chicago. Similar training courses for military weathermen were taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the University of California at Los Angeles, and New York University. Upon his graduation nine months later, Bryson received his commission and became an instructor in the program. The following fall (1943) he was sent to study at the Institute of Tropical Meteorology at the University of Puerto Rico, and after a few months he became a teacher there, too. With still “no practical forecasting experience,” he was assigned in summer 1944 to a seven-member weather group that would be handling forecasting for a wing of the Twentieth Air Force in the Pacific. They first gathered at Hamilton Air Field in California, then were flown to Pearl Harbor, where they were to await deployment to Saipan in the Mariana Islands—some 1,500 miles east of the Philippines and an equal distance southeast of the Japanese mainland. Saipan was still in the process of being secured by U.S. forces prior to establishing a major air base from which long-range bombing runs against mainland Japan were soon to be flown.

  While in Hawaii, some of the Army Air Corps meteorologists had been put to work at the Navy’s Pacific Fleet Weather Center, which had been “practicing forecasting for some time.” One of their first mornings at Fleet Weather, Bryson and his friend William Plumley, an Army captain who had also taught in the Chicago program, found themselves working with an aerologist (what the Navy calls its weathermen) who had been one of their students. Their assignment was to make a weather forecast for a carrier-based strike at Marcus Island the following day. They looked at the “nearly blank” weather map, then at each other, and again at the map, feeling “a little like Magellan setting out into the western sea.” At that point in the war, a typical Pacific weather map had data for the western parts of North America, the chain of Alaskan islands, a handful of U.S.-held islands west of Hawaii, a “few low quality Russian and Chinese bits and pieces on the western rim of the map,” and a smattering of ship, submarine, and aircraft reports spread across an expanse of ocean covering roughly one-third of the Earth’s surface. On the map they were analyzing, Bryson noted “seven areas larger than the United States that had no data whatsoever.” Notwithstanding the limited data, one thing was immediately clear: southeast of Marcus Island (aka Minami-Io-Jima), neighbor to Iwo Jima, there was a “cyclonic storm.”

  By definition, a typhoon in the Pacific (or hurricane in the Atlantic) had to meet a specified wind force based on an early-nineteenth-century scale created by British admiral Sir Francis Beaufort, who had charted the effects on the canvas sails that could be carried by a fully rigged frigate in different wind conditions. Up to that time, reports of wind conditions were subjective by nature; one sailor’s “squall” might be another’s “stiff breeze.” Beaufort determined that a ship’s canvas was unable to withstand a wind of 75 knots or higher. The scale—ranging from 1 to 12—was modified several times and had long since become a standard for ship’s log entries documenting observable wind and sea conditions. For a storm to be categorized as a typhoon the winds had to reach Beaufort 12, which equates to a wind speed of more than 73 knots or 90 miles per hour, although winds in a typhoon “may reach double that speed.” Beaufort 12 wave height is listed as 46 feet or greater.

  As for what looked to be a developing typhoon south of Marcus Island, the limited data showed “a cyclonic whirl of winds and dense clouds several hundred miles across that fed a vast layer of high clouds.” How strong the winds were, how large the waves, and whether the storm had developed an eye “could only be imagined” by the weathermen at Pearl Harbor. In the final analysis, an accurate forecast would come down to one key finding: where was the storm headed? From their studies of meteorology, they knew that in the trade wind regions—an area of converging winds extending between two belts of high pressure located some 2,000 miles on either side of the equator—strong upper winds
could work to steer a storm. They discussed how they could not predict if that would happen in this case—or in which direction the storm would head—because they lacked upper-air data for the area. Suppose there were no upper winds blowing that day? They decided to “construct an upper-air chart, somehow.” From a few wind observations across a wide region at or near the 10,000-foot level and some surface data (pressures, winds, temperatures, and cloud amounts and types) combined with their “basic knowledge of atmospheric physics,” they plotted an upper-level pressure map. Soon they had “a picture of the wind flow,” which allowed them to project on the map the path of the storm. When they finished, their collective “hearts sank.” They saw that the upper winds could be predicted to curve the storm north-ward—on a path toward Marcus Island, and a “rendezvous with the fleet at about strike time.” The high winds and waves—they were sure by now that they were looking at a full-fledged typhoon, although none had yet experienced one—coupled with dense clouds and heavy rain made a U.S. carrier attack in the area “hazardous at best.” In fact, adequately forewarned, the fleet would do well to steer clear of the entire region. They discussed their findings, “recalculated and reconsidered,” and finally were convinced. The duty officer wrote out a forecast for the fleet showing the “recurved typhoon” heading for Marcus Island. Just before the forecast was to be transmitted via radio, the Pacific Fleet’s senior aerologist—a Navy captain—walked into the room “drunk as a lord.” He “blearily looked” at the intended message and “roared out: ‘Nonsense! Typhoons don’t recurve at that longitude at this season, they move straight west!’” He ordered the forecast to be changed, which it was prior to being sent to the fleet. The next day the typhoon curved and hit Marcus Island and the fleet, causing “losses of planes and brave men.” Those tragic results, in which Bryson felt he had played a role in sending out the “bad forecast,” as well as the cavalier way the accurate forecast “based on a combination of good science” and data had been rejected in favor of a “totally subjective, off-the-cuff opinion” by a senior officer, had made a “strong and lasting impression” on the young Air Corps weatherman. They were dealing not just with theoretical predictions here but with real-world weather forecasts that could hold countless lives in the balance.