by War
Roon's slurs on Roosevelt, our greatest President since Lincoln, are not worth discussing, coming as they do from a man imprisoned for faithfully abetting Adolf Hitler's crimes until the day that monster shot himself.
What he says about shock in the last stages of a war is interesting. The well-known Tet offensive in VietNam was such a shock; ai last-gasp effort, and as an attack a costly failure. But President Johnson had assured the American people that the South VietNam communists were done for. The publik was extremely shocked by Tet, the tepid support for the war evaporated, and the agitation for peace prevailed World War II was different. Annihilation of MacArthur's beachhead might have affected the peace terms, but Roon exaggerates its potential. The country was behind that war. The submarine throttling of Japan,-the crushing of Germany between Eisenhower and the Russians, would have continued.
Whether President Roosevelt would have the eion is one of those things beyond determination.
Roon is a little shaky on some facts. Spruance's plan to take Okinawa depended on an unsolved logistical problem, the transfers of heavy ammunition at sea. Nimitz approved the advancch on the Phillippines, after study.
I find Roon's criticisms of Kurita and Halsey facile and trite.
Insight into Leyte requires ai detailed knowledge of what went on, and a sense of the geography, and what the see and air distances meant in terms of hard-sweating time. I was there, and I can point out Roon's obvious sour notes.
Kurita's mistakes
Taking Roon's criticisms of Kurita's actions on October twenty-fifth one by one: a. The order, "General Attack"
Roon follows morison in condemning this move.
Yet think about it. Kurita's surface force had surprised-carriers.
Carriers had given him a terrible pasting and had sunk the Musashi. Carriers needed time to maneuver into the wind for launching.
If he could rush them and start gunning them down before they could get going, he stood his best chance with this target of opportunity.
He hit out at once with everything he had.
That was not "Asiatic excitability," it was desperate aggressiveness.
Roon's racial phrasing is deplorable.
Kurita kept driving to windward to interfere with the carriers' launching and recovery operations during the running fight. He knew what he was about. In fact, his force did catch up at last with Sprague, and "the definite partiality of Almighty God," as Sprague put it in his action report, was all that saved Taffy Three. b. Breaking off the fight with Sprague
Clearly a mistake in 20/20 hindsight. But nothing was clear'to Kurita at the time, far off to the north on the Yamato. He'should have turned south into the torpedo tracks to comb'them, rather than away.
That would have kept him in the picture.
He got some very bum reports from his commanders. it was the Formosa business all over again. If he believed half of them, he had won the biggest victory since Midway. But the air attacks were stepping up, the day was wearing-on, and threei of his heavy cruisers were dead in the water and burning. His ships were scattered over forty square miles of ocean. He decided to rally them and proceed into the gulf. Considering his, faulty information, it was a reasonable move. c. Turning away from Leyte Guff indefensible. Still, "imbecile" is hardly a professional term.
Roon ignores the mitigating factors.
It took Kurita over three hours to round up his force. Air attacks slowed the process, and the buzzing planes and bursting. bombs must have been driving him cuckoo. By the time he was ready to head into the gulf, it was getting on to one o'clock. His surprise was blown. He surmised-quite correctly-that wherever Halsey was, he was coming on fast. Ozawa was silent, and the Southern Force had evidently never made it into the gulf. To Kurita the gulf had become a death trap, a hornets' nest of land-based and carrier planes, where his whole force would be sunk in the remaining daylight hours without laying a glove on MacArthur.
Granted, he was in a funk. All of us like to think that in his place we would have plunged on into Leyte Guff anyway. But if we are honest with ourselves we can understand if not admire, what Kurita did.
The real "solution" of Leyte Gulf is that Ziggy Sprague, an able American few remember or honor, frustrated the Sho plan and saved Halsey's reputation and MacArthur's beachhead. He held up Kurita for six crucial hours: two and a half hours in the running fight. and three and a half hours in regrouping. After midday, proceeding into the gulf was a very iffy shot.
Kurita did not lose the Battle of Leyte Gulf because of one wrong decision or one missing ditch. The U.S. Navy won it with some magnificent fighting. The long and the short of Leyte Gulf was that the Japanese navy was routed and broken, and never sailed again. For all our mistakes, Leyte was an honorable, not a "sorry" victory, and a very hard fought one. We had superiority in Surigao Strait and'in the north, but not off the gulf, where it mattered most.
The vision of Sprague's three destroyers-the Job the Hoel, and the Heermann-charging out of the smoke and the rain straight toward the main batteries of Kurita's battleships and cruisers, can endure as a picture of the way Americans fight when they don't have superiority.
Our schoolchildren should know about that incident, and our enemies should ponder It.
Halsey's Mistakes I have never been madder at anybody in my life than I was at halsey during Leyte Gulf. To this hour I can remember my rage and despair. I can get sick at heart all over again the missed chance to fight the Battle line action off San Bernardino Strait.
Nor am I about to defend either his swallowing the Ozawa lure, or his failure to leave a force to await Kurita- These were blunders.
Roon's criticism of Halsey's published alibi is on target.
His excessive eagerness for action, his lack of cool analytical powers-which I observed when I was an ensign on a destroyer he commanded-were his ruination. If he had stayed at San Bernardino Strait and sent Mitscher after Ozawa, or if he had simply left Lee and the Battle Line on guard, he would have creamed both Japanese forces, and William Halsey would stand in history with John Paul Jones. As it was, both partially escaped, and his name remains under a cloud.
And yet, I say Armin von Roon misses the truth about Admiral Halsey by a wide sea mile.
His concern about shuttle-bombing was not a mere weak excuse after the fact. October twenty-fifth was not two hours along when planes from Luzon knocked out the Princeton.
Halsey was right to worry about more such attacks. If he gave that worry too much weight, that's another matter.
In Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, which all military men have read (or should have), there are some pretty questionable historical and military theories; among them, the notion that strategic and tactical plans do not actually matter a damn in war.
The variables are infinite, confusion reigns, and chance governs all.
So says Tolstoy. Most of us have had that feeling in battle, one time or another. Still, it is not so. The battles of Grant and Spruance-to take American instances-show solid results from solid planning. However, the author makes one telling point: that victory turns on the individual brave spirit in the field, the man who snatches the f lag, shouts "Hurrah! " and rushes forward when the issue is in doubt. That is a truth we all know too.
In the Pacific war, William F. Halsey was that man.
After his botch at Leyte there was indeed thought of retiring him.
The powers that be decided that he was a "national asset," and could not be spared. They were right. Nobody but the professional officers, and the high-ranking ones at that, knew who Spruance was.
Scarcely any more knew of Nimitz and King.
But every last draftee knew about "Bull" Halsey, and felt safe and proud sailing under him. In the dark days of Guadalcanal, he made our dispirited forces believe in themselves again with his "Hurrah!" and they came from behind to win that gory fight.
On the afternoon of October twenty-fifth, Halsey called me on the TBS. I commanded BatDiv Seven in the Iowa, and he
was in the New Jersey. We were heading back with most of the fleet to help Kinkaid.
With the gallant good humor of a star quarterback leading a team in trouble, he asked me-not ordered me, asked me-what I thought about making a high-speed run with satDiv Seven, ahead of the fleet, to take on the Central Force. I agreed. He put me in tactical command, and off we roared at twenty-eight knots.
We missed Kurita. He had hightailed it through San Bernardino Strait a few hours earlier, thanks to his decision not to enter the gulf. We caught one lagging destroyer about two in the morning, and our screen vessels sank it. As Halsey writes in his book, that was the only gunfighting he ever saw, in his forty-three years at sea.
Furious as I was at Halsey, I forgave him that day as we talked on the TBS. Rushing two battleships into a night action against Kurita was foolhardy, perhaps fully as bullheaded as his run after Ozawa. Yet I couldn't help shouting my "Hurrah!" to echo his. Spruance wouldn't have dashed ahead like that, perhaps; but then Spruance wouldn't have run six battleships three hundred miles north and then three hundred miles south during a great battle without firing a shot. That was Halsey, the good and the bad of him. I executed Form Battle Line with Halsey at Leyte Gulf, and went hunting the enemy through the tropical night with great trepidation against great odds. Nothing came of it, and I may be a fool, but that-farewell "Hurrah!," of my career remains a glad memory.
"Form Battle line This order will not be heard again on earth.
The days of naval engagements are finished. Technology has overwhelmed this classic military concept. A very old sailor may perhaps be permitted to ramble a bit, in conclusion, on the real lessons of Leyte Gulf.
Leyte stands as a monument to the subhuman stupidity of warfare in our age of science and industry. War has always been violent blindman's buff, played with men's lives and nations' resources. But the time for it is over. As the race has outgrown human sacrifice, human slavery, and duelling, it has to outgrow war. The means now dwarf the results, and destructive machinery has become a senseless resort in politics. This was already the case at Leyte. It was truly "imbecile" to launch the colossal navies that clashed there, at a cost of manpower and treasure almost beyond imagining, and to pin the fate of nations on the decisions of a couple of agitated, ill-informed, fatigued old men, acting under impossible pressure. The silliness of it all would be slapstick if it were not so tragic.
Yet granting all that, what alternative was there but to fight at Leyte Gulf? That is the crack we were in, and still are.
Forty years ago, when I was a lieutenant commander and our pacifists were pointing out quite accurately the obsolete folly of industrialized war, Hitler and the Japanese militarists were arming to the teeth, with the most formidable weapons science and industry could give them, for a criminal attempt to loot the world. The English-speaking countries and the Russians fought a just war to stop the crime. At horrible cost, we succeeded. What would the world be like had we disarmed, and Nazi Germany prevailed and won world dominion?
Yet today, when every intelligent man is sick with unspoken fear of n I uclear weapons, the benighted Marxist autocrats in the Kremlin, ruling the very great, very brave, very unlucky peolae who were our comrades-in-arms, are conducting foreign affairs as though Catherine the Great were still running the show there; only they call their grabby czarist policy the "struggle against colonialism."
I have no answer to this.dilemma, and I will not live to see it resolved. I honor the young men in our armed forces who must man machinery of hideous potential, in a profession despised and feared by their fellow countrymen. I honor them to my very soul, and they have my sympathy. Their sacrifice is far greater than ours ever was. We could still believe in, and hope for, the great hour of Form Battle Line. We were looked up to for that by our country. We felt proud.
That is no more. The world now loathes the very thought of industrialized war, after two big doses of it. Yet, while belligerent fools or villains anywhere on earth consider it an optional policy, what can free men do but confront them with what met the Japanese at Leyte Gulf, and Adolf Hitler in the skies over England in 1940-daunting force, and self-sacrificing brave spirits ready to wield it?
If the hope is not the coming of the Prince of Peace, it has to be that in their hearts most people, even the most fanatical and boneheaded Marxists, even the craziest nationalists and revolutionaries, love their children, and don't want to see them burn up. There is no politician imbecile enough, surely, to want a nuclear Leyte Gulf. The future now seems.to depend on that grim assumption.
Either war is finished or we are.
AN OFFICIOUS JEW from the Transport Section stops Aaron Jastrow by bustling through the crowd and grabbing his arm, as he and Natalie are climbing the wooden ramp into the train.
"Dr. Jastrow, you'll ride up ahead in the passenger coach."
"I would rather stay with my niece."
"Don't argue or it will be the worse for you. Go where you're told, quick march."
All along the track SS men are bellowing obscenities and threats, and thrashing at the transportees with stout sticks.
The Jews are panicking up the ramps into the cattle cars, ,dragging suitcases, bundles, sacks, and whimpering children.
Natalie manages one hasty kiss on Aaron's bearded cheek.
He says in Yiddish, which Natalie can barely hear over the German shouting, "Zye mutig." ("Keep up your spirit.") The shoving crowd thrusts them apart.
As the moving crush bears her inside the gloomy car, the cow-barn smell gives her an incongruous memory flash of childhood summers.
Places to sit along the rough wooden walls are being fought over with exasperated yells and violent pushing and pulling. She makes her way as through a rush-hour subway mob to a corner under a barred window where two Viennese coworkers from the mica factory are sitting with husbands, children, and luggage crammed around them. They make a bit of room for her by moving their legs.
Natalie sits down in a place which becomes hers for the next three days, as though she has bought a ticket for this one dung-caked spot on the slatted floor, where the wind whistles through a broad crack, the racket of the wheels sounds loud as the train rolls, and querulous people press against her from all sides.
They leave in rain, and they travel through rain. Though it is almost November the weather is not cold. When Natalie struggles to her feet and takes her turn at the high barred window to look out and breathe sweet air, she sees trees in autumn colors and peasants picking fruits. These moments at the window are delicious. They pass all too quickly and she rmist drop back into the fetor of the car. The barn odor and the smell of unwashed crowded people in old wet clothes is soon overwhelmed by a stink of broken toilets. The men, women, and children in the car, a hundred or more, must relieve themselves into two overflowing pails, one at each end, to which they must squirm and struggle through the crowd, and which are emptied only when the train stops and an SS man remembers to slide open the door a crack. Natalie has to face away from the pail not five feet from her; less to avoid the stench and the sounds, for that is futile, than to give the pitiful squatters some privacy.
This one breakdown of primitive human decency-more even than the hunger, the thirst, the crowding, the lack of sleep, the wailing of miserable children, the grating outbreaks of nerve-shattered squabbles, more even than the fear of what lies ahead-dominates the start of this journey; the stink and the humiliation of lacking a clean private way to dispose of one's droppings. Weak, old, sick people, helpless to get to the pails through the jam, even void where they sit, choking and disgusting those around them.
Yet there are brave spirits in the car. A strong gray-headed Czech Jewish nurse pushes around with one bucket of water, which the SS refills every few hours, doling out cupfuls to the sick and the children ahead of others. She recruits women to help tend the sick and clean up the unfortunates who foul themselves. A burly blond-bearded Polish Jew in a sort of military cap makes himscif the car captain. He rigs blankets
to screen the pails, puts a stop to the worst quarrels, and appoints distributors for'the food scraps thrown into the car by the SS. Here and thei-e in the lugubrious crush sour laughter can be heard, especially after a share-out of food; and when things have settled down, the car captain even leads some doleful singing.
Rumors keep rippling through the car about where they are going, and what will happen when they arrive. The announced destination is a "work camp outside Dresden," but the Czech Jews say that the line of stations they are going through points toward Poland. Each time the train passes a station the name is shouted around and fresh speculation starts up. Oswiecim is hardly mentioned. All eastern Europe lies ahead. Tracks branch off every few miles; if not toward Dresden, then to many other places. Why necessarily must they be travelling to Oswiecim? Most of these Theresienstadt Jews have heard of Oswiecim.
Some have received cards from transportees who have landed there, though it is a long time since any postcards have come. The name evokes a shadowy terror laced with whispered details too gruesome to be believed. No, there is no reason to assume they are going to Oswiecim; or even if they are, that conditions there in any way resemble the frightful stories.