by War
About four o'clock Kurita turned his ships around and retreated westward, to increase the range from Halsey's flattops and stay in open water, where his captains could at kill continue their successful squirming and dodging; for once in the straits, they would lack maneuverability and become easy targets. Again he beseeched Tokyo imd Manila for air cover, citing the damage he was sustaining. Manila made no answer. The air commander there had decided to use his planes against enemy carriers, not in covering Kurita.
It seemed to Takeo Kurita at this juncture, as his ships raffled about on a calm sea bounded by the ridges of green islands, and the blasted Musashi dropped out of sight trying to beach itself and "become a land battery," that the Sho plan was already collapsing. The air and submarine attacks had thrown off the timing. The air cover element was Missing.
The deception was not working. Still, having put off entering narrow waters until darkness was near, he reversed course once again, and made for San Bernardino Strait. As he went the C.O notified the southern force to slow down and postpone the pincer attack on the gulf by several hours. Tokyo headquarters in a helpful mood now sent this message: "All forces will dash to the attack, counting on Divine assistance."
Night once more veiled the Main Striking Force. Yet even so, Kurita faced mounting perils. Ahead lay narrow heavily mined waters.
In traversing San Bernardino Strait, he would have to take his force through in column. Halsey's battleships and cruisers would undoubtedly be patrolling the entrance, waiting to cross the T and pick off his ships one by one as they came out. In precisely such a maneuver, during the great Battle of Tsushima Strait in 1905, the Japanese navy had crushed the czarist fleet and won a war. Now Kurita was cast in the Russian role of that battle he had studied all his life, with no way to escape; no alternative but to steam on to his fate, "counting on Divine assistance."
Astern, a yellow quarter-moon was setting over the dark Sibuyan Sea. Ahead, the Japanese command in Manila had turned on the navigation lights of San Bernardino Strait. The night was clear.
Posting himself on the flag bridge of the giant Yamato, Takeo Kurita sent a blunt final dispatch to his crews: Chancing annihilation, we are determined to break through to the anchorage and destroy the enemy.
The force passed into the narrows, forming into column, and all ships went to battle stations. Despite the hellish day the haggard crews stood to their guns. They were good men, well trained in night action.
Kurita could count on them to give the Americans up ahead a real fight, and die for the Emperor if they must.
At midnight the moon went down. Half an hour later, in starlit darkness, the Main Striking Force began to emerge, ship by ship, between the headlands of Luzon and Samar into the quiet open waters of the Philippine Sea. Admiral Kurita could see nothing ahead. Nor could the lookouts on any of his vessels. Radar sweeping the sea for fifty miles in all directions found nothing.
Nothing! Not so much as a single picket destroyer guarding the entrance to San Bernardino Strait!
Astounded, his hopes rebounding, Kurita formed up for battle and made full speed south along the coast of Samar for Leyte Gulf. He had to accept the evidence of his senses. By some fantastic chance of war Halsey was gone, and MacArthur lay at the mercy of the Emperor's biggest guns.
THE STRANGE EVENN on the American side which led to this ificredible circumstance will remain in controversy as long as anybody cares about naval battles. The events are clear enough. The controversy lies in how and why they happened.
Victor Henry lived through them in the Iowa's flag quarters.
He was up well before dawn of that October twenty-fourth, in flag plot, checking his staffs setup for following the situation, for joining battle, and even for taking command of the task group if necessary. Pug knew very well how junior he was in Halsey's force, yet misfortune might thrust extraordinary responsibility on him. He intended to stay as fully informed as though he were Halsey's chief of staff.
Flag plot was a large dimly lit room over his quarters, reached by a private ladder. Here radar scopes showed in phosphorescent green tracery movements of ships and aircraft, storm patterns, configuration of nearby land, andespecially in night action-a better picture of the foe than eyes could discern on the sea. Here large Pleiiglas displays manned by telephone talkers gave at a glance in vivid orange or red grease hand-printing abstract summaries of what was happening. Here dispatches poured in to the watch officer for quick digest and display.
Coffee, tobacco smoke, and ozone from the electronic gear stewed together in an unchanging flag-plot smell. Loudspeakers hoarsely spouted bursts of signal jargon: "Baker Jig How Seven, Baker Jig How Syen, this is Courthouse Four. Request Able Mike Report Peter Slant Zed. Over," and the like.
But sometimes-as now at five in the morning, when the admiral looked in-flag plot was quiet. Shadowy sailors sat at the scopes, their faces ghastly in the glow, drinking coffee, smoking, or munching candy bars. Telephone talkers murmured into their receivers or wrote on the Plexiglas; stationed behind the display, they were adept at printing backward.
Officers bent over charts, calculating and talking low. The chief of staff was already at the central chart desk. In the Formosa strikes Captain Bradford had satisfied Pug that he could run flag plot and sort out pertinent facts from the torrent of noise. Pug went below and alone in his quarters heartily ate canned peaches, comflakes, ham and eggs, and fresh biscuits with honey. It might be a long time before he sat down to a meal again. He was drinking coffee when Bradford buzzed him.
"Preparing to launch air searches, Admiral."
"Very well, Ned."
Pug ran up the ladder, went out on the f4 bridge in a clear warm violet dawn, and watched the dive-bomber squadrons soaring off under the morning stars from the Intrepid, the Hancock, and the Independence.
A quiet pain stirred in his heart. (Absalom, Absalom!) When the last planes left he. returned below to a small office off his sea cabin. Pug meant to keep his own command chart here. Only in combat would he post himself In flag plot near the radars, the TBS, and the flag bridge. For many hours yet, bald plotted facts would matter most: sightings, distances, courses, speeds, damage reports, and what these implied.
It was Blue versus Orange again, after all, the old clash of the War College game boards and the peacetime fleet exercises. The real thing was flaringly different, yet one factor would not change. Even in make-believe combat the hardest thing to do was to keep one's head; how much more so now! Let Bradford enjoy the excitement and the hot news in flag plot. Pug meant to weigh essen here until the fight was on, and talk to his staff only when he had to.
In the peace of this office, as he plotted on his chart in" orange and blue ink reports of the morning sightings and strikes, what struck him most was the steady Jap advance.
This fellow heading for San Bernardino Strait meant business. The reported submarine sinkings the day before had failed to shake him.
Unless the air strikes could turn him back, it looked like night battle off the strait, perhaps only sixteen to twenty hours hence.
An early sighting of a second surface force far to the south heading for Surigao Strait didn't surprise Pug. Diversionary mind ruji, standard Jap tactics. This was exactly why Spruance had refused to leave the Saipan beachhead. The Japs were really throwing everything in! Davison's task group, to the south, would probably go after that force. N'o, wrong guess-, Halsey was ordering him to concentrate off San Bernardino, too. Well, Kinkaid's fleet down in the gulf had six old battleships, five of them resurredted from the Pearl Harbor graveyard, including the good, old California - also plenty of cruisers and escort carriers, to hit that diversionary force making for Surigao.
The jeep flattops were converted merchantmen, slow as molasses, small and flimsy; but in the. aggregate they could launch a fair air strike.
First damage to the Halsey fleet! Sherman's flattops, the northernmost group, under air attack at nine-thirty A.M.; Princeton bombed and on fire. Planes
could be from Luzon or ap carriers, according to Sherman. His aviators massacring; the enemy pilots. Now a welcome intercept: Halsey calling back the fourth carrier group, until now bound for Ulithi. At last, and none too soon! The chart indicated that they would. have to fuel at sea, and were a full day's run away. If the blow to the Princeton had jolted this decision out of Halsey, it, might prove worth the cost.
More air strikes against the oncoming Japs in the center; more jubilant, damage reports; battleships and cruisers bombed, torpedoed, on fire, turned turtle. On Pug's chart these reports looked thrilling.
The symbols for sunk or damaged ships crowded the Sibuyan Sea. If the reports were true the Jap would never make it, he was a goner already.
But, why in that case was he continuing to advance? Strikes by thirty to seventy planes were hitting him at will, yet on he came.
Why did he have no air cover? Where were the Jap carriers?
The question had been nagging at Victor Henry all day, and not only at him; it was troubling William Halsey and his staff, and his group commanders, and Admiral Nimitz in Pearl Harbor, where night had already fallen, and Admiral King in Washington. Those missing flattops weren't covering the oncoming San Bernardino force. They weren't with the end runners to the south. What then was their role in this supreme gamble of the Imperial Fleet? It was unthinkable that they could be idling in the Inland Sea. Pug saw two possibilities.
He wrote them, for his own future smiles or groans, on a separate sheet of paper.
24 October, 1430, off Leyte.
Q: Where are the enemy carriers?
A: (1) Hanging back outside search range in the South China Sea.
They'll run in toward us at high speed once the sun gets low, to strike at dawn tomorrow the cripples of the coming night action off San Bernardino Strait.
(2) They're heading downftom the north to decoy us away from San Bernardino Strait. If so, they'll make certain they're seen before dark, probably well north of Luzon.
There was nothing prescient in Pug's second guess. Several of Halsey's group commanders were making the same surmise. A captured Japanese tactical manual recently sent out by O.N.I had discussed sacrificing carriers as a diversion gambit. Somehow the carrier force had gotten out of the Inland Sea undetected by submarine pickets. They might just now be moving into air search range. The answer-so Pug felt as the last Halsey strike was heading home-would come before sundown.
Vice Admiral Ozawa's gambit carriers were in fact already to the north of Luzon, and Ozawa was doing everything to attract Halsey's attention except-so to say-stand on his head and wiggle his ears. But Halsey had assigned the northward search to Sherman, and in the confusion of the air attack and the Princeton fire the launch had stalled. So Ozawa had dispatched the motley aircraft in his flattops-only seventy-six in all -to attack Sherman's group, hoping to alert Halsey if nothing else. This flight had less luck than the land-based strike that had fired the Princeton. Many of the pilots were shot down; most of the rest were too green to land on a moving carrier, so they flew on to Luzon or else dropped in the sea. Halsey was not alerted; this straggling strike was evaluated as probably coming from Luzon.
Ozawa also broadcast copious radio signals, hoping to be detected.
Late in the day, desperate to be seen and pursued, he sent southward two hermaphrodite battleships-bizarre gunships with flight decks grafted on-to engage Sherman's group in surface combat. Ozawa notified Kurita by radio of all these actions. The two forces were about a thousand miles apart, well within radio range. But Kurita received'no messages from him, either directly or via Tokyo or Manila.
Halsey's battle plan for the night came through about three o'clock. It named four battleships, including the Iowa and the New Jersey, two heavy cruisers, three light cruisers, and fourteen destroyers.
THESE SHIPS WILL BE FORMED AS TASK FORCE 34 UNDER VICE,.
ADMIRAL LEE COMMANDER BATRLE LINE X TASK FORCE 34
WILL ENGAIGE DECISIVELY AT LONG RANGES X FORM Battle Line!" Pug Henry had studied battle-line tactics all his life. He knew the manual by heart. He had gamed, times beyond counting, Jutland and Tsushima Strait, and Nelson's classic actions at Trafalgar and Saint Vincent' The showdown between ships of the line was the supreme historical test of. navies. So far in this war, the graceless weak floating barns called carriers had eclipsed the battleship. well, by God, here was Japan sending its battle line through San Bernardino Strait to smash the Leyte invasion, and all Halsey's carriers were not stopping it from coming on.
Form Battle Line! It was the sounding of the charge. His blood racing as though he were twenty, Victor Henry pulled the telephone from its bracket and buzzed Captain Bradford.
"Staff meeting in my quarters at sixteen hundred. Leave one watch officer in flag plot. You come down."
It did not escape Pug's notice that Halsey, in the New Jersey, would be O.T.C of the Battle Line. Willis Lee would form the task force, and he would do a superb job, but Halsey would take over and fight the engagement. What wild excitement must be fizzing over in the flag quarters of the New Jersey! If Pug Henry had been waiting thirty years for this, Bill Halsey had been waiting forty years. Of all admirals in history, not one had been more hungry or ready for an all-out fleet battle. The man and the moment had come together for the forging of a famous victory.
Pug ran up to the flag bridge to air out his lungs. He had gone through three packs of cigarettes. The scene on the sea could not be more tranquil: carriers, battleships, and their screening vessels spreading as far as the eye could see in afternoon sunshine, extending below the horizon north and south, gray familiar shapes of war steaming slowly in AA formation on the mildly foaming blue ocean. No land was in sight, no foe, no smoke, no firs. An the excitement was in the chatter of the flag plot loudspeakers, in the facts tumbling out of the coding machines in Navy abracadabra. Wireless communications, airplanes, and black oil had made for a new kind of sea warfare reaching out hundreds, thousands of miles for contact, encompassing millions of square miles as the field of battle. Yet the signal of signals was unchanged from Trafalgar, and no doubt from Salamis.
FORM Battle Line!
Battle was the ultimate risk. The giant Iowa could go down like any other warship. The sinking of the Northhampton was much on Pug's mind, and he was running over what he would say to the staff about torpedo attack. Yet he felt, as he stood, there alone in rumpled khakis, taking deep breaths of the streaming tropic sea air, that this night would do much to justify his life. He was filled with exaltation that was half-guilty because the business was only slaughter, and many Americans might die, and yet he was so damned happy about it.
The-staff conference was not fifteen minutes along when flag plot called him with a new position report on the Japs in the Sibuyan Sea.
Noting the latitude and longitude on a scratch pad, Pug snapped, "Check the decoding, that's a mistake," and hung up. Soon the watch officer apologetically called again. The decode checked out. There was another sighting, a much more recent one. Pug wrote down the numbers, abruptly went off into his office, and presently called in the chief of.staff.
"What do you make of that?"
. On his chart the orange track of the Jap force now hooked around to westward. Retreating "Admiral, I didn't see how he could keep comingas longas he did." Running his fingers through his white hair, Bradford shook his head. "He was like a snowball rolling along on a hot stove. He'd have arrived with nothing."
"You think he's quit?"
"Yes, sir."
"I don't. Meeting's suspended. Get on up there, Ned. Sift the dispatches. Pick up what you can on TBS. Double the coding watch on command channel intercepts. Let's get the word on these position reports."
Soon Bradford telephoned down that the whole fleet was buzzing with the Jap turnaround- Pug stared at the chart, calculating the possibilities, as in a chess game after a surprise move. He began to write: 24 October, 1645. Central Force turns west.
Why?
1. Beaten
by air strike. Slinking home to Nippon.
2. Ahead of schedule. Carriers not yet in search range.
Rendezvous off Leyte foukd up. Killing time. Also confusing us.
3. Avoiding a night action. Jap minor forces prefer night fighting, what with long-range torpedoes, etc. This fellow wants good visibility for his big guns.
4. Preserving maneuverability in daylight hours.
5. Made damage report to Tokyo and awaits further orders.
6. Remember Spruance "retreating" at Midway? This is a tough individual, a strong force, and a resourceful mind at work. May be tantalizing Halsey to charge through San Bernardino Strait after him, whereupon he'll come about and cross our T.
As Pug sat mulling over these possibilities an excited knock came at his door. "Admiral, I thought I'd better bring you this." Eyes gleaming, Bradford laid a decode on his desk, strips of tape pasted on a blank form. It was from Halsey.