Herman Wouk - War and Remembrance

by War

  1005. KINKAID TO HALSEY. WHERE IS LEE? SEND LEE.

  The coding officer again noted "Broadcast in the clear."

  A true bellow of agony in plain English for the Japs to pick up!

  Pug's telephone buzzed. The coding officer said in a trembling voice, "Admiral, we're breaking a message from Nimitz." Pug ran to the small top-secret room, and looked over the decoder's shoulder through dense cigarette smoke as he tapped the keys. The message came snaking out of the machine on paper tape: 1000. NIMITZ TO HALSEY.

  TURKEY TROTS 7'0 WATER GG.

  WHERE REPEAT WHERE IS TASK FORCE 34 RR. THE WORLD WONDERS.

  The nonsense padding set off by double letters was standard encoding procedure. Yet "The world wonders from "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (though Pug had no idea that this day was an anniversary) was apt enough to the situation! Well, Pug thought, this does it; this unprecedented rebuke from Nimitz in mid-battle would penetrate the hide of a dinosaur; here we go at last. He strode out on the bridge, absolutely certain that within minutes he would see the New Jersey streaming the colored signal up ordering the Battle Line to reverse course: Turn one-eight.

  Ten minutes passed, a quarter hour, a half hour.

  One hour.

  The Battle Line continued to, steam away from Leyte Gulf at twenty-five knots.

  WHAT ADMIRAL KINKAID did not know, and what Pug Henry could not possibly imagine, was the course the combat off Samar was taking. Of all the long books to be written about the three battles on October 25 the tale of this fray is the one any chronicler would most enjoy writing, for its theme is one that will stir human hearts long after all the swords are, plowshares: gallantry against high odds.

  Sprague's unit of six jeep carriers had the shortwave call sign Taffy Three. When it was surprised, Taffy Three was eighty miles north of the entrance to Leyte Gulf, doing the donkeywork of amphibious warfare; small air strikes at enemy fields, combat air patrol over the beachhead, antisubmarine patrol, bombing of truck convoys, parachuting of supplies to Army units.

  These mass-produced runt flattops were not built to fightNor was the screen of three destroyers and four smaller. destroyer escorts expected to do battle, except against submarines. Most of the sailors and officers of Taffy Three were reserves. A goodly number were draftees. The prima donnas Halsey had taken north, the fleet carriers and fast battleships, were manned by the professional Navy; not the likes of Taffy Three. But Taffy Three, not Halsey, was in Kurita's way as he bore down on Leyte Gulf, and so Taffy Three had to fight himTwo other jeep carrier units, Taffy Two and Taffy One-, were patrolling farther to the south. The gap between each unit was thirty to fifty miles. A glorious harvest for Kurita!

  Merely continuing to sweep southward, he could pick off most of these slow thin-skinned ships and their little screen vessels one by one. The carriers could not escape him, for his powerful gunships were much faster, and could shoot fifteen miles or more; a heaven-sent opportunity, in short, to lay waste an entire flotilla of flattops on his way to his main job of annihilating the invasion.

  But Kurita had not planned to catch the Taffys unawares.

  He was as surprised by this encounter as they were. Relaxed by the luck of finding the strait unguarded, worn down by the swim for his life on the twenty-third, the air strikes of the twenty-fourth, the loss of the mighty Musashi, and three sleepless nights culminating in the tense night passage through mine fields, Kurita was in no jolly mood for pursuing aircraft carriers. The first sight of the low-flat shapes on the horizon in the sunrise confounded him. Who were they?

  Where had they come from? Was Halsey lying in wait here, instead of at the strait? Was the Main Striking Force in for another day of unopposed mayhem from the air?

  The apparition met Kurita's eyes at a bad moment. His vessels were crisscrossing heltir-skelter all around him, for he had ordered the force into AA formation for daylight steaming. To reshuffle his force into line of battle would take time' Yet the AA "ring formation" was no way to pursue a foe. As Kurita tried to think all this out, staring at the minute gray silhouettes to the south, frantic reports were pouring in from the Yamato's lookouts and from other ships: "Fleet corners ahead! Cruisers! Bauleships! Small carriers! Tankers!

  Destroyerst"-a bedlam of agitated cries. Desperate for information, Kurita launched the Yanwto's two scout planes.

  They vanished and never reported in again. He had to make his decisions without knowing what force he had encountered, and he had to surmise the worst case: that this was Halsey.

  Sprague, on the other hand, knew exactly what he faced.

  These vessels jutting up in a mass over the horizon were the Jap Central Force. Their foreign TBS gabble was coming in plainly.

  Sprague had assumed with everyone else that Halsey's Battle Line was guarding the strait, and that the Central Force would be none of his business. Now here it was. Most of his planes were already launched, flying CAP over the beachhead, or patrolling for submarines, or circling above his own outfit. The crews of his feeble ships were not even at General Quarters. It took them seconds to abandon their breakfasts and man battle stations, but this scarcely improved the ships' defense stance. Each had one five-inch gun; just one.

  Kurita at last ordered "General Attack." The command let loose every ship in the Central Force to pick and chase its own target. They ran off in an uncoordinated pursuit, firing at will; some ships in column, some acting singly, all bearing down at flank speed on the Americans.

  Sprague reacted like a War College student solving a battle, problem.

  He went to full speed upwind, making smoke with his carriers.

  He ordered the escorts to lay a smoke screen. -He launched all aircraft still on board his vessels. He notified Kinkaid of his danger, calling for battleship help. He put out an emergency combat call to all aircraft within range, Those things done, he headed for a rainsquall lying upwind, sand his. formation gradually disappeared into it, about a quarter of an: hour after sighting the Japanese. Neat-misses had jolted the force, but the ships were safe and whole. At the War College he would have received good marks for his solution, worked out while red, purple, green, and yellow splashes from the big guns sprang up all over the sea about him, and destruction. seemed minutes away.

  In the squall he was far from safe, of course. He was like a fugitive hiding from a cop behind a moving wagon. The rainsquall would not hold still. Nor could he. The enemy kept gaining on him, and could see him with radar. Sprague headed windward and southward through thick rain to keep sea room, and to close with whatever ships were coming to his aid. His tactic was to play for time and keep his carriers together and afloat until deliverance came from some quarter: Halsey, Kinkaid, the other Taffys, Army air, or a merciful God.

  Through the drifting rain and smoke, he could see the battleships getting bigger astern, and cruisers drawing near on his quarters. He ordered his three destroyers to make torpedo attack against the huge force. It was a hardhearted, cold-blooded delaying move. The three slim gray vessels pulled out of the rainsquall and steamed straight toward the battleships and cruisers, through a barrage of big shells.

  On opposing courses, the Main Striking Force and the little ships closed fast. Hit after hit smashed into the destroyers, but they shot off their torpedoes and limped away under fire. Two eventually sank.

  They got only a single hit on a cruiser.

  Still, the pursuers had had to break off the chase to evade the torpedoes, giving Sprague a start on his escape dash. For Kurita the result was very bad. By his own orders the heavy Yamato wheeled north to evade while the fight ran southward. The super-battleship steamed seven miles northward before turning around again, for the destroyer attacks were not simultaneous and the torpedo tracks kept coming.

  Kurita lost contact with the enjagement. His force was headless thereafter, committing itself piecemeal to no plan.

  Meantime, aircraft were showing up: Sprague's planes, planes from Leyte, planes from Tliffy One and Taffy Two; bomb
ing, torpedoing, and strafing the Japanese. During the long fight the air attacks hit three cruisers; all three in the end went down Yet the pursuers fought back hard, knocking down over a hundred aircraft while gaining on Sprague in a 'gun chase lasting two hours. As a last resort Sprague ordered his four destroyer escorts, equipped with torpedoes but untrained in their use, to make another delaying attack.

  These puny vessels too charged into the teeth of the big guns.

  They got no hits, took brutal damage, and one sank. They ganed Sprague a little more time.

  But after two hours his game was about played out. Heavy cruisers were pulling abeam to port and starboard, pumping shells into his carriers. Two battleships were rapidly coming up astern. He had no tricks left but violent zigzagging among the gruesomely beautiful shell splashes. American planes were smoking and burning all over the sea.

  None of hiscarriers was undamaged, and one was sinking.

  Impotently they kept firing their single five-inch guns.

  At this point, Kurita on the distant Yamato ordered all his ships to cease fire and rejoin him.

  The guns fell silent. The Japanese vessels turned away from their gasping prey and headed north. Taffy Three fled southward, its sailors -from the admiral dow'n to the youngest seaman -incredulous at this mysterious deliverance. The Battle of Samar was over. It was about a quarter past nine.

  Under sporadic air harassment, Takeo Kurita next gathered up his force for the thrust into Leyte Gulf. He steamed a slow circle off the entrance, reuniting the scattered units. It took three hours Leyte Gulf now lay open before him. With Taffy Three distantly on the run, nothing any longer barred the way. Against unbelievable odds, despite mistakes, misfortunes, miscalculations, communication failures, and terrible punishment, the Sho plan had worked! Kinkaid's old battleships, trying to hurry back from their Surigao Strait pursuit, were far off and low on ammunition. The MacArthur invasion in the gulf, transports and troops alike, lay helpless before the Main Striking Force.

  At half past twelve, Admiral Kurita, having regrouped his force, decided on his own not to enter Leyte Gulf. Asking no permission from Tokyo, notifying nobody, he turned north to head home through San Bernardino Strait.

  The signal flags for reversing course ran up on the New Jersey halyards about a quarter past eleven.

  TURN ONE-EIGHT

  According to Pug's chart, the crippled carriers were only forty-five miles away, dodging and burning under the air strikes.

  Leyte Gulf was three hundred miles to the south.

  Now, less than an hour's steaming from the force he had run northward all night and half the day to destroy, Halsey was turning back.

  The captain of the Iowa burst into flag plot. Could the admiral tell him what was happening? There was great hunting directly ahead.

  Why were they turning away?

  "Looks like a bigger fight making up back at Leyte Gulf, Skipper.

  "We can't get there until sunup tomorrow, Admiral. At best.

  "I know," Pug said in a dry tone that guillotined the conversation, and the captain left.

  Pug could not trust himself to talk to the captain. He was in the emotional turmoil of a mutinous ensign. Could Halsey really be throwing away one of the major battles of all time, covering the United States Navy with ignominy, endangening the Leyte landing force, fumbling the winning of the war? Or was he himself -deprived of the big chance of his life to fight a battle-line engagement-too upset to think straight?

  Yet he could not stop his mind from working. Even on this turnaround, he judged Halsey was making serious mistakes.

  Why was he taking six battleships? Two could still press ahead to the Northern Force; surface fire was the right way to sink cripples.

  And why was he dragging along a mass of destroyers? They would all have to be fueled first.

  Pug recalled how Churchill, coming to meet Roosevelt at Argentia aboard the Prince of Wales, had left the destroyer screen behind to speed through a gale faster than they could goThat was a man! Here was the redeeming moment, the very last chance to rush back and gun down the Central Force. Halsey had lost six hours by not turning back at Kinkaid's first bellow. Only desperate measures would answer now.

  The Central Force must be a weary battered outfit, perhaps with empty torpedo tubes, low fuel bunkers, possibly even low magazines.

  Surely it was a moment to pitch all on one throw; to forgo destroyer protection and destroyer torpedoes, and roar down there with the big guns.

  But it was not to'be. The "rescue run" became an exasperating leisurely saunter at ton knots in the hot humid afternoon. One by one, hour after hour, the destroyers pulled up alongside the battleships to fuel. The carriers went by the other way, at full speed in pursuit of the Northern Force. It was a bitter sight; bitteito be becalmed in this great Battle Line in the midst of vast engigcments, not yet having fired a shot.

  Bitterer yet was the stench of oil. Pug was observing the refueling from the flag bridge. It was a skillfully done business: each small ship nosing up alongside the giant Iowa, its young skipper on his bridge, far below Pug, matching speeds until relative movement was zero; then the touchand-go passing of the swaying off lines over the splashings blue swells between the ships, and the parallel steaming until the little nursing vessel dropped away sated. Pug was used to the sight, yet, like carrier flight operations, he usually enjoyed watching it.

  But today, in his overwrought state, the smell of black oil brought back the night of the Northampton's sinking. That remembrance twisted the knife of his present impotence.

  Division commander of two battleships, he was being robbed of vengeance for the men who had died in the Northampton, by the bellicose blundering of Bill Halsey.

  A despairing vision came over Pug Henry as these dragging hours passed. It struck him that the whole war had been generated by this damned black fluid. Hitler's tanks and planes, the Jap carriers that had hit Pearl Harbor, all the war machinery hurtling and clashing all over the earth, ran on this same stinking gunk. The Japs had gone to war to grab a supply of it. Not fifty years had passed since the first Texas oil field had come in, and the stuff had caused this world inferno.

  At Oak Ridge they were cooking up something even more potent than petroleum, racing to isolate it and use it for slaughter.

  Pug felt on this October twenty-fifth, during this endless, nerve-wracking, refueling crawl toward Leyte Gulf at ten knots, that he belonged to a doomed species. God had weighed modern man in the balance with three gifts of buried treasure - coal, oil, uranium - and found him wanting. Coal had fueled Jutland and the German trains in the Great War, petroleum had turned loose air war and tank war, and the Oak Ridge stuff would probably end the whole horrible business. God had promised not to send another deluge; He had said nothing about preventing men from setting fire to their planet and themselves.

  Pug's mood had reached this depth of dismalness when Captain Bradford came running out on the flying bridge ComBatDiv Seven was being summoned on the TBS by "Blackjack."

  "It's not a communicator, Admiral," said Bradford with some agitation, "it's Halsey."

  Pug's apocalyptic vision vanished. He darted into flag plot and seized the TBS receiver.

  "Blackjack, this is Buckeye Seven, over.

  "Say, Pug," came Halsey's familiar voice, grainy and buoyant, using the informal style privileged to high flag officers, "we're about through refueling here, and time's a-wasting. Our division can sustain a long flank speed run.

  "What say we mosey on ahead down there, and try to catch those donkeys? The others will follow.. Bogan will back us up with his carriers."

  The proposal g's breath out. At that rate the knocked Pu New Jersey and the Iowa could reach San Bernardino Strait about one in the morning"Leyte Gulf at three or four. If they did encounter the enemy, it would mean a night action. The Japs were old hands at that, and BatDiv Seven had no night fighting experience at all. Two battleships would be fighting at.$ least four battleships, including$
one with eighteen-inch guns.

  But, by God, here was Form Battle Line, at long last; wrong,.Tash, tardy", but the thing itself! And Halsey would be right there. Pug could not keep out of his voice a flash of reluctant regard for the crazy old fighting son of a bitch.

  "I'm for it."

  "I thought you would be. Form Task Group Thirty-four point five, Pug. Designate Biloxie, Vincennes, Miami, and eight dEs for the screen. You've got tactical command. Let's get the hell down to Leyte Gulf."

  "Aye aye, sir."

  (from World Holocaust by Armin von Roon)

  TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: When World Holocaust first appeared in German, a translation of this controversial chapter was published in the U.S.

  Naval Institute Proceedings. As a tdiv commander at Leyte, I was invited to write a rejoinder. It is appended here. - V.H.