by Perry, Mark
But Major General William Gill, the commander of the 32nd, made little progress. Over a period of nine days, the 32nd advanced a single mile. “I cannot fight with the troops available,” Gill told Krueger, “I am too short now to do the job that I have to do.” Krueger responded by telling Corps Commander Franklin Sibert to “pep that up a little bit so we’ll get some results,” but the hard-luck 32nd continued to bleed. Finally, on November 16, the 128th Regiment fought its way up and over Breakneck Ridge and moved south toward Limon, adding another battle streamer to its regimental flag. The 128th captured the town three days later, then established a reinforced roadblock along Route 2, intending to give back to the Japanese what they had meted out back at the ridge. The Japanese attacked in force, but the roadblock held. The way forward was now clear, with Limon taken. The 32nd, its regiments reinforced by green replacements, headed south, but the Americans left 1,498 dead and wounded in their wake.
Victory in Leyte was within sight, but MacArthur wasn’t pleased. From his Tacloban headquarters, he bombarded Krueger with messages to push harder. This was Krueger’s first try at commanding an entire army; composed of two corps (X Corps and XXIV Corps) of two divisions each, it was larger than anything he had led on New Guinea. He struggled. While Krueger worked well with his subordinates, many of them were new to him. The XXIV’s commander, John Hodge, was tough and adept, despite the fact that his corps had been cobbled together at the last minute. A command veteran of Guadalcanal, New Georgia, and Bougainville, Hodge was a creative tactician, maneuvering his two divisions (the 7th and 96th) expertly into southern Leyte by the end of October, less than a week after the landings. The same could not be said for Franklin Sibert, a low-to-the-ground physical plug who was dependable but given to costly straight-ahead assaults.
With MacArthur giving little credit to Krueger’s difficulties, Robert Eichelberger highlighted MacArthur’s criticism of the older commander in letters to his wife. “You know how sympathetic I am and my tears dripped off my chin when I listened to excuses such as I would not have allowed myself some time ago,” he wrote. Yet, this once, Eichelberger was forced to praise Krueger’s stubbornness. “It seems that our little palsy-walsy is a tough bird,” he commented in the wake of the Battle of Breakneck Ridge. “I have been preaching that for a long time but some people seem to be just finding it out.” Eichelberger added that he thought that MacArthur might finally relieve the “tough bird.”
In fact, MacArthur had no intention of replacing Krueger, but was not above using Eichelberger’s ambition as a prod. When Krueger showed up at Tacloban one day in the middle of his Breakneck Ridge fight, MacArthur made a point of praising Eichelberger in his presence, telling him to “come back and see me often.” Krueger was not the only one under pressure. George Kenney’s fighters and bombers were scoring successes against Japanese convoys putting in at Ormoc, but not enough to keep the enemy from landing enough infantrymen to give Krueger fits. Yet, even with their reinforcements, the Japanese did not have the numbers needed to stop Krueger. On December 3, the 12th Cavalry Regiment shattered Japanese defenses south of Limon, while the 7th Division hoofed north through the mud to cut off enemy reinforcements coming ashore at Ormoc.
The denouement of the Battle of Leyte was played out over the next six weeks. On December 7, elements of General Andrew Bruce’s 77th Division came ashore near Ormoc in a surprise amphibious landing and moved north through Leyte’s broad western valley. The Japanese were trapped, with the 77th moving north against their rear while the 1st Division fought a rearguard action against the Americans crowding south from Limon. The 32nd, with Major General Verne Mudge’s battle-hardened 1st Cavalry Division in support, swept toward the 77th, pushing down Highway 2. The Japanese defenders refused to surrender. By mid-December, the 32nd was engaged in hand-to-hand combat on the road to Ormoc and along the mountainous foothills to the east. On December 21, the 77th and 1st Cavalry Divisions met at Kananga, nearly midway between Pinamopoan and Ormoc, then turned west toward Pompon, pushing the Japanese into Leyte’s western mountains.
The fighting on Leyte exhausted Krueger and the Sixth Army, and although the campaign is remembered as a triumph of American arms, the bitter slog had turned into a straight-ahead battle of attrition. The Americans took less than a thousand prisoners on Leyte—the rest were dead or had faded into the jungle. This was precisely the kind of fight that terrifies even the best soldier, and it was the bloodiest campaign MacArthur’s forces had ever fought. But despite these challenges, American soldiers acclimated themselves to Leyte’s climate, watching open-air movies in rear bases during downpours by inventively affixing their helmet liners so the rain wouldn’t wash into their eyes. The GIs watched the movies after dark, even doing so as Japanese Zeros came overhead on strafing runs. By now, American soldiers had grown accustomed to the shelling, so no one moved unless an attack was close by. “Thus, with vision clear, you were a proper and appreciative audience for the artistry of Gloria Gumm in Passion’s Darling,” Eichelberger commented.
The biggest surprise of the campaign came on December 6, when the Japanese mounted a parachute assault on the headquarters of Major General Joe Swing’s 11th Airborne Division in the mountains of central Leyte. As darkness fell, the Japanese paratroopers communicated with each other with “bells, horns, whistles, and even distinctive songs for each small unit.” The fight involved rear-echelon troops—cooks and clerks and aides—and was characterized by hundreds of vicious, small-unit actions and individual acts of heroism. The Japanese troopers were fortified by bottles of liquor. “Many men were killed on both sides during that bedlam night,” Eichelberger later wrote. “Eventually dawn came. Some three hundred Japanese were killed the next day, and the remainder were hunted out in surrounding areas and killed over a period of three days. The attack failed completely.”
There was much fighting yet to come, but for MacArthur, the Battle of Leyte was over. Four days before the 77th and 1st Cavalry met at Kananga, he ordered Robert Eichelberger’s Eighth Army to take control of Leyte and destroy the last pockets of Japanese resistance. On December 25, in Manila, General Yamashita radioed his Leyte commander, General Sosaku Suzuki. Yamashita said that Suzuki was on his own: From here to the end of the war, his 35th Army “would be self-sustaining and self-supporting.” Eichelberger arrived on Leyte on December 26, received a briefing from Krueger, and took command. The campaign had been brutal, and though Krueger praised his troops for their courage in a communiqué issued on Christmas Day 1944, the Japanese had bloodied his units. The Americans left 3,504 graves on Leyte, with another 11,000 wounded. This was not Los Negros, or Hollandia, or Biak—or even “Bloody Buna.” The Japanese, with 48,000 of their own dead, were now fighting for their national survival, burrowing into caves, where they were crushed or burned or simply left to die.
Walter Krueger turned over command of his forces on Leyte to Eichelberger on Christmas Day. He then immediately immersed himself in the staff planning for the invasion of Luzon, which would be the most complex amphibious operation in American history, with the sole exception of Eisenhower’s invasion of France. Krueger could count on the leadership of two battle-hardened veterans to head up his two-corps assault. Innis Palmer Swift would lead the I Corps, and the brainy Oscar Griswold, who had commanded on New Georgia and Bougainville, would head up the XIV Corps. Neither man would be accorded the public acclaim of a Patton or Bradley, but Krueger admired their skills. Facing them on Luzon were Tomoyuki Yamashita’s 275,000 Japanese soldiers, whose goal was to buy time for the Tokyo high command to prepare for the invasion of the home islands. For this reason, Yamashita decided that he would dig most of his men in along the ridges and mountains of central and northeast Luzon—the type of terrain that had caused the Americans headaches on Leyte.
Krueger, short of transports and air cover, was forced to shuffle and reshuffle his naval and air assets to protect the landings. Tommy Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet had no battleships or large carriers and only a min
imal number of destroyers and destroyer escorts. Dan Barbey’s amphibious engineers had only enough landing craft to put a single division ashore, so Krueger was required to rely on Rear Admiral Theodore Wilkinson’s III Amphibious Force—loaned to MacArthur by Nimitz for the operation. Nor did Krueger have enough transports in the initial landings to bring ashore enough engineer officers or their equipment, so he simply scheduled their arrival for follow-on waves. The scheduling problems that had previously plagued MacArthur continued, so he requested that Nimitz provide air cover to destroy Japanese air opposition flying from Formosa and the China coast. But MacArthur was uneasy with releasing Halsey’s Third Fleet too early, pointing out to his staff that the South China Sea was ringed with Japanese airbases. He requested that instead of sailing east for the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the Third Fleet sortie south, protecting his forces from Japanese fighters and bombers in Indochina. Nimitz agreed to the request, though it created havoc for his planners. “The execution of the air plan,” the official army history notes, “entailed the efforts of nearly fifteen major air commands, both Army and Navy, directing the activities of both carrier-based and land-based aircraft, operating in separate theaters and across theater boundaries, and reporting to higher headquarters through slightly differing channels.”
Despite the command difficulties, neither MacArthur nor Krueger were concerned with Japan’s ability to reinforce Yamashita’s forces. During the three months of the Leyte operation, American submarines had sent more than nine hundred thousand tons of Japanese shipping to the bottom of the Pacific. By November, the Americans had so eroded Japan’s merchant capacity that submariners were running out of targets. So by December, MacArthur was confident that—though the Japanese would continue their nearly suicidal attempts to reinforce Yamashita—few of their convoys would get through. In all, the American submarine offensive of late 1944 and early 1945 crushed Japan’s last hope for a victory on Luzon. From the beginning of the war until Krueger’s men came ashore, Japanese merchant losses were fatal, with the American navy taking advantage of Japan’s poor antisubmarine tactics and weapons. This was hardly a palliative for either MacArthur or Krueger, who knew that Yamashita would fight them every day to the end of the war. Which meant that Luzon would not be another Leyte—it would be worse. Far worse.
CHAPTER 14
Luzon
I’m a little late, but we finally came.
—Douglas MacArthur
As Walter Krueger’s soldiers were fighting for their lives on Leyte, Franklin Roosevelt began his 1944 presidential campaign by excoriating the Republicans for blaming him for the Depression. The Republicans, he said, were masters of the “big lie” that even extended, as he noted in a speech to the Teamsters Union in September, to his Scottish terrier “Fala.” Republicans claimed that Roosevelt had left Fala behind on an Alaskan island when he had visited there, then ordered a destroyer to retrieve him at the cost of millions of taxpayers’ dollars. “These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons,” he said. “No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don’t resent attacks, and my family doesn’t resent attacks—but Fala does resent them. . . . He has not been the same dog since.” The partisan audience roared with laughter.
The scratched and aging Movietone newsreel of “the Fala speech” shows a man beset by the ravages of paralysis, bronchitis, and hypertension. Roosevelt’s eyes are hollow and fading, his hands bony, his face droopy. The president’s poor health wasn’t a secret, but the public didn’t want to hear of it, and his Republican opponent, Thomas Dewey, thought better of exploiting it. “The President’s health is perfectly O.K.,” Roosevelt physician Ross McIntire told reporters. “Frankly, I wish he would put on a few pounds.” While he was battling to stay alive, Roosevelt campaigned in New York at the end of October, touring the city’s boroughs and waving to crowds from the back of an open car in the midst of a chilling rainstorm. He was fortified by shots of brandy. He then went on to Philadelphia, and on October 27, Teddy Roosevelt’s birthday—and Navy Day—he appeared before a packed house at Shibe Park.
The Shibe Park address remains a classic of campaign oratory, but it was unusual, even for Roosevelt. While he had never taken personal credit for any of the U.S. victories, Roosevelt didn’t simply want to beat Dewey, he wanted to crush him. And he wanted to torpedo allegations made by Republicans that he had kept troops from MacArthur. It all came boiling out:
Since Navy Day, a year ago, our armed forces—Army, Navy and Air forces—have participated in no fewer than twenty-seven different D-Days, twenty-seven different landings in force on enemy-held soil. Every one of those landings has been an incredibly complicated and hazardous undertaking, as you realize, requiring months of most careful planning, flawless coordination, and literally split-second timing in execution. I think it is a remarkable achievement that within less than five months we have been able to carry out major offensive operations in both Europe and the Philippines—thirteen thousand miles apart from each other.
But then, after a pause, Roosevelt issued a stinging jab at his critics: “And speaking of the glorious operations in the Philippines, I wonder—whatever became of the suggestion made a few weeks ago, that I had failed for political reasons to send enough forces or supplies to General MacArthur?”
Roosevelt’s statement didn’t go unnoticed in Leyte, where the press besieged LeGrande “Pick” Diller, the SWPA commander’s public relations handler, for a comment on Roosevelt’s speech. Was it evidence of a Roosevelt-MacArthur agreement that MacArthur would remain silent during the election campaign in exchange for Roosevelt’s approval of a Philippine invasion? Surprisingly, in a moment of candor, Diller all but conceded the point, saying that MacArthur didn’t mind that his Philippine victories were helping the president: “The elections are coming up in a few days, and the Philippines must be kept on the front pages back home.” And so they were, if only for the next week. On the morning of November 8, the nation’s newspapers were filled with reports of Roosevelt’s victory over Dewey. Roosevelt carried thirty-six of forty-eight states and 53 percent of the popular vote. Dewey responded graciously to his loss, but Roosevelt was unimpressed. “I still think he’s a son-of-a-bitch,” he told an aide. In Leyte, MacArthur shrugged. It was what he had predicted, even if he’d had more than a little something to do with it.
In truth, MacArthur had ceded the stage to Roosevelt, which was something he would have never done before meeting him in Honolulu. When invited to present celebrated fighter ace Richard Bong (who had shot down thirty-six Japanese aircraft) with the Medal of Honor, he demurred. “I’m not running for any office,” he told the press. “I don’t want the publicity.” That was only half true, of course, for MacArthur always wanted publicity: What he meant to say was that Bong—and Roosevelt—should have the headlines. Yet, with Krueger’s soldiers battling through Leyte’s maelstrom and with Japanese suicide pilots barreling through the sky overhead, MacArthur had other things to worry about. He paced the veranda of the Price House, his headquarters in Tacloban, planning how to defeat Tomoyuki Yamashita on Luzon. The planning for Luzon, dubbed Operation Musketeer, had begun even before the Leyte invasion, but it accelerated as Krueger’s Sixth Army fought up the slopes of Breakneck Ridge. Its latest version was Musketeer III (Ernie King derisively called it “the three musketeers”), and MacArthur hoped it was its last. MacArthur plied his staff with questions and paced and paced—the only time he paused was to watch as Japanese fighters whirled overhead, heading east toward Kinkaid’s navy.
In early November, MacArthur became increasingly irritated, and when supply ships piled up off Tacloban, he exploded. “Gentlemen,” he told his staff, “I have captains who can get those ships unloaded and, by God, if you don’t get the job done I am going to let them do it.” Several days later, he then engaged in an argument with Sutherland about additional troops for Krueger, before Kinkaid arrived to complain that
half of his light carriers were disabled. The admiral wanted the Luzon landings postponed until late December, he added. On November 29, Halsey cabled that his ships needed refitting. “It’s the first time the old blowhard has talked like this,” MacArthur growled. Kinkaid then returned, just before Thanksgiving, to press his earlier argument. “He marched manfully into MacArthur’s office with the report and braced himself for the reaction,” aide Paul Rogers remembered. “Kurita’s attack was probably easier to face than MacArthur’s. In this encounter MacArthur sailed around Kinkaid far more aggressively than Kurita had done, firing salvo after salvo of retribution at the reluctant admiral’s head. MacArthur paced, gesticulated, pointed an accusing finger, filled the air with oratory.” MacArthur gave Kinkaid “hell about his fear of kamikazes,” but the admiral held his ground, “leaning against a bedstead, silently absorbing the reprimand.” Kinkaid then pointed out the obvious: His men were exhausted and Krueger was mired in mud. The ships loaned from Nimitz would be sent back to Nimitz, would sail back to Luzon, and then would turn again and sail east to help Nimitz, their air crews and sailors fighting every day against an enemy hell-bent on dying. The breathless reasoning was too much, even for MacArthur. Relenting, the general placed his hands on Kinkaid’s shoulders. “But, Tommy,” he said, “I love you still.”
It was the Japanese, and not Kinkaid or Halsey, who were causing problems. Their ferocity on Leyte threw off Operation Musketeer’s schedule, as did the unrelenting typhoons. Hugh Casey’s construction crews worked around the clock, bulldozers now assigned to sweep the runways of water. It didn’t work. Pilots got into the air but died as their fighters flipped end-on-end on flooded tarmacs when they returned. In mid-November, MacArthur conceded that his forces wouldn’t be able to invade Luzon until late December, and then only after they had captured dry airfields on lightly defended Mindoro, off Luzon’s southern coast.