by John Prados
As Admiral Davison had in the Bonins, Sherman found little aerial opposition at Palau. Meanwhile Davison’s group hit Yap on the sixth and then refueled at sea. Second-day strikes at Palau went smoothly, enough so that bombers pasted ground targets to soften them up for the invasion. The lack of opposition at Palau seemed especially odd since just six months earlier it had been the major base of the Japanese Combined Fleet.
Mitscher’s intention had been to move up from the Palaus to Mindanao, the southernmost major island of the Philippines, on September 9 and 10. Order-of-battle specialists for U.S. intelligence estimated JNAF air strength at 145 fighters, 140 bombers, and 83 other planes for September 7. The Japanese would be able to send planes to interfere with the Palau landings, and they had to be stopped. Strikes began soon after dawn on the ninth. JNAF observers, who kept close track of Allied air activities, recorded 300 American sorties (in military parlance, a “sortie” equates to one flight of one aircraft). A few Japanese planes were torched in the air, more on the ground. At Tacloban field, on Leyte, several twin-engine “Gekko” night fighters had just taken flight when they were set upon by Hellcats. All perished, but Petty Officer Tanaka Takumi reported he had splashed two of the intruders.
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Admiral Teraoka Kimpei’s First Air Fleet received a false report of Allied landings on Mindanao and ordered searches from Davao. The scout planes were on the runway when the Americans arrived. Del Monte Field, a hallowed place to American defenders of the Philippines a few years earlier, now faced a U.S. assault. A convoy off the coast was set upon. Lieutenant Commander Harold L. Buell, a dive-bomber pilot from the Hornet, led his strike package on a new type of mission: Instead of going for a designated target, they were to find promising prey and attack it. This would be called “armed reconnaissance” in a later war. Buell torched a Japanese warship off Davao, which he thought was a destroyer but turned out to be a landing ship. Once Halsey steamed away, Allied land-based air from Morotai took over, keeping Davao under constant attack.
Teraoka finally gave up trying to keep air units permanently stationed there. In late July, the First Air Fleet had had just 134 aircraft, all but three dozen of which were fighters. The JNAF’s reorganization, which included adding such aircraft as remained at Yap and Truk, brought strength up to 120 fighters and 56 other aircraft. Admiral Teraoka’s headquarters came to Davao on August 12, and he was moving it to Manila when the Americans struck. That disorganization figured in the paltry JNAF response. So did the weakness of Teraoka’s groups. JNAF maintenance had deteriorated so much that the air command had begun using Japanese Army craft for scout missions, while Teraoka even called on Army fighters for air defense. The admiral forbade his Zero units from intercepting marauding Allied B-24 bombers in order to conserve strength. The reported landings at Davao finally induced Admiral Teraoka to order the 201st Air Group into action. Ninety Zeros flew from Manila down to Cebu to prepare attacks. Once the report proved false, half the fighters returned to Luzon. The others would face the Americans. Somehow Japanese communications became snarled, according to Commander Okumiya Masatake, air officer with the NGS. A radar malfunctioned, and an observer’s warning radioed from Suluan Island got delayed, so reports on the American strike packages headed for Cebu on September 10 never reached the field.
The initial strikes were led by Commander Theodore H. Winters, boss of Air Group 19 in the Lexington. A few Japanese planes were intercepted in the air. Hornet strike package chief Harold Buell recalled the situation as “a dream come true” for dive-bomber pilots—all those planes on the ground revving their engines, desperate to be airborne, forty-one Zeros to mix it up with the F-6Fs. The three-ring circus became, by far, Commander Buell’s most successful attack of the war. The 201st Air Group lost more than two dozen fighters, and another twenty-five were damaged in the air or on the ground. More JNAF aircraft succumbed over Cebu and Leyte on September 13, and when the U.S. task force left, Admiral Teraoka’s fleet had been reduced to thirty-four Zeros and fifty-one other planes. Japanese ships caught along the coast had little chance of survival. Third Fleet wags labeled this action the Cebu Barbecue.
The NGS staffer Okumiya happened to be flying into Cebu—his transport arriving overhead at almost the same moment as the Americans. He witnessed as planes on the ground were slaughtered. At that point, Admiral Davison had rejoined the fast carriers to support the Mindanao hit and participate in the Cebu strikes, bleeding off JNAF strength in the Visayas, Leyte, and Samar.
Back at Manila, to where his plane fled, staff officer Okumiya conferred with 201st Air Group pilots. He found them furious, enraged at their powerlessness, and determined to exact a price at any cost. “It was obvious,” Okumiya wrote later, “that there would soon be radical changes in our battle tactics.”
In contrast, as the days wore on the American pilots noticed an extraordinary lethargy on the part of their enemy. Oddly enough, a shoot-down led to the key insight. Ensign Thomas C. “Cato” Tillar of Hornet was lost off Leyte on September 10. Native fishermen rescued him and took him to shore in their outrigger canoe. Late that afternoon, a representative of the Philippine partisans arrived and told Cato there were no Japanese on Leyte—the Americans ought to land there first. A floatplane from cruiser Wichita retrieved Tillar and brought him to the ship, where Rear Admiral C. Turner Joy questioned him. Cato Tillar had never met an admiral before, and the ship’s surgeon fortified the young ensign with a tumbler of brandy. The pilot then told Admiral Joy his story. Joy recognized the value of this intelligence right away.
Hornet was flagship of Task Group 38.1, and Admiral Joy commanded its screen. He passed Tillar’s intel along to Slew McCain, and the information swiftly percolated upward. Rear Admiral Clark takes credit for ensuring the Leyte intel went immediately to Admiral Halsey.
The fleet commander, who visited Mitscher on the Lexington, mulled over the latest reports. Weak Japanese resistance could mean opportunity.
• • •
BILL HALSEY REALLY looked like a bulldog. Hard eyes peering from a fierce countenance and a square-set jaw gave others the sense the Bull was about to pounce. And that was fine with him. Halsey cultivated his reputation for aggressiveness. If anyone with the Third Fleet had the ability to appreciate the looming opportunity, it would be him.
At least twice in his life, Bill had made radical shifts to get what he wanted. One came when an anticipated appointment to the Naval Academy failed to come through. Halsey instead went to the University of Virginia, premed, planning to join the Navy as a doctor. When the Annapolis appointment materialized later, Halsey dropped medicine to become a midshipman. He received his commission while sailing the Caribbean aboard a gunboat captured in the Spanish-American War. Then the young officer wrangled an assignment to the new battleship Kansas and cruised the globe with Teddy Roosevelt’s “Great White Fleet.” In World War I, he commanded destroyers, then experienced the intricacies of intelligence work after the war with an assignment as naval attaché to Germany.
His other radical shift came when Halsey became interested in airplanes. Deciding that pilots had a better shot at naval aviation commands, Halsey took pilot training as a full captain at the age of fifty-one. Just two months after gaining his wings the budding aviator took over the bridge of the aircraft carrier Saratoga. After that, he commanded at Pensacola, the very place where the Navy trained its pilots.
William F. Halsey was, indeed, a formidable officer. The sailor showed no fear. As a rear admiral in the last days before Pearl Harbor, Halsey ordered his Enterprise fliers to shoot to kill. It did not matter that the Navy had yet to authorize that level of action. Sent to the South Pacific, he ordered a desperate stand by U.S. carriers off the Solomons and ended up in an immediate battle.
At that action in Santa Cruz in October 1942, the Allies were reduced to a single damaged carrier, his old Enterprise. The Bull personall
y supervised efforts to get her back in shape for battle and didn’t wait a moment to use her. That November, when the Japanese were turned away from Guadalcanal in the first battleship actions of the war, the Bull quickly exploited the enemy’s absence by sending even more ground troops to the island. Even though Allied forces were still thin on the ground, Admiral Halsey began the slog toward Japan’s bases. His effort would be crowned in November 1943 by the isolation of the vaunted Japanese fortress of Rabaul. Six months later he received an invitation to one of the get-togethers that Admirals King and Nimitz held periodically in San Francisco. There he learned that his time in the South Pacific was over and he’d be sent back to sea as a combat commander. Halsey’s appointment to lead the Third Fleet in June 1944 marked the culmination of a long road—and for the Bull, the chance to get back in the action. He returned to Pearl Harbor, arriving during President Roosevelt’s visit, in time to attend one of the ceremonial dinners.
Admiral Halsey had his own ideas about Pacific strategy. He thought the Allies should move next to the central Philippines, develop that as a base, then hop directly to Japan via the Bonin and Ryukyu islands. The Bull thought Admiral Nimitz agreed with his approach, though that is not quite what the CINCPAC told Roosevelt and MacArthur at Pearl Harbor. In any case, Halsey did not like the operation Nimitz had slated for him, a move on Palau and the western Carolines. Halsey chipped away at the fervor of proponents, and the evident lack of Japanese resistance helped his argument.
The Bull asked to be assigned a battleship for his flag, and the Pacific Fleet gave him the New Jersey. She left Pearl Harbor on August 24. Escorted by several destroyers, the fleet flagship steadily neared the battle zone. The first week of September, with Mitscher’s Task Force 38 pounding Okinawa and Palau, the New Jersey was almost there. When Mitscher shellacked Mindanao and the Visayas, Halsey lay just beyond the horizon. His flagship joined its flock on September 11, taking position in Admiral Gerald F. Bogan’s Task Group 38.2. The fleet commander could see the mountains of Samar Island from his flag bridge. Excited to be with the fleet, Admiral Halsey hastened to visit Mitscher on the carrier Lexington. Sailors rigged a breeches buoy line between the two ships to get Halsey aboard Mitscher’s flagship. The Bull marveled that his chair had a surrey top and came equipped with an ashtray. Here Halsey discovered another change from the way things had been the last time he commanded at sea—U.S. warships were competing for who had the fanciest transfer chairs.
While aboard the Lexington with Mitscher, Admiral Halsey learned of the intelligence highlighting Japanese weakness on Leyte. The Bull took note but for the moment confined himself to observation. Over the next two days, Task Force 38 hurled no fewer than 2,400 sorties against the Japanese in the Visayas. Cebu and Negros airfields were primary targets. The Japanese now had more warning and put up a stiff fight. Over Negros, Japanese Army fighter aircraft had a dogfight with the Hellcats. A formation from the Japanese Army Air Force (JAAF) 32nd Air Regiment lost a dozen planes from a training flight. General Tominaga Kiyoji’s 4th Air Army made a weak counterstrike the following morning with four fighter-bombers. Lieutenant Fujimoto Katsumi of the 30th Squadron claimed a bomb hit on a cruiser. His plane would be the only one that came back—and American sources do not mention any damage to U.S. warships. The JAAF lost between sixteen and twenty more aircraft.
The Third Fleet had one plane crash and lost eight more in combat. But the intelligence officers pegged Japanese losses at 173 planes shot down and 305 destroyed on the ground, plus fifty-nine ships sunk and another fifty-eight damaged. Those were enormous results. The box score seemed incredible. With these results in hand, Admiral Halsey decided he would renew the attack—on Luzon, at Manila, the center of Japanese power. As he wrote after the war, “My decision to poke a strike into this hornet’s nest was not made hotly, without forethought. . . . I intended probing just as an infantry patrol probes—finding a soft spot and pressing it until I met resistance that I could not overcome.” Halsey signaled the fleet, “BECAUSE OF THE BRILLIANT PERFORMANCE MY GROUP OF STARS HAS JUST GIVEN, I AM BOOKING YOU TO APPEAR BEFORE THE BEST AUDIENCE IN THE ASIATIC THEATER.”
FAST TRAIN TO LEYTE
Bull Halsey made another decision too. The Third Fleet had encountered little substance in probing the Japanese defenses. Halsey realized that a whole series of Allied military moves had been pinned to a certain timetable based upon estimates of Japanese strength. Those did not seem borne out by the resistance Task Force 38 encountered. Under the schedule, his own fleet had prepared to fight a series of battles in the Palau group. General MacArthur’s forces took Morotai and were to move on Davao, then to Leyte. They expected to arrive there in December. Now Halsey felt that plan was too conservative. As the Bull put it, “The South Pacific campaign had impressed us all with the necessity of being alert for symptoms of enemy weakness and of being ready to exploit them.” He decided he could afford to curtail planned landings, skipping Palau and the western Carolines, lending the amphibious ships to MacArthur so the Philippines landing could be accelerated. The XXIV Corps, slotted to be the Third Fleet’s principal troop strength, could join MacArthur too. The Bull figured the Allies could skip Davao altogether and move directly on Leyte, reaching it in October and saving two months. The intelligence that there were no Japanese troops on Leyte proved extremely tempting.
Admiral Halsey put his recommendations in a dispatch he sent to Pearl Harbor during the forenoon of September 13. The message, copied to Chester Nimitz and Ernest J. King, arrived on the U.S. East Coast that evening. As it happened, Admiral King and the other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were in Quebec to meet with the British at a conference known as “Octagon.” They were at dinner when the message arrived. The Chiefs took less than ninety minutes to agree that the offensive could be accelerated. Returning to Washington, they advised the Southwest Pacific commander to accept the suggestion. MacArthur did exactly that. He certainly knew—as did the Joint Chiefs—that Ultra disproved denials that any Japanese were on Leyte. But MacArthur was not about to squander this opportunity.
Meanwhile Admiral Nimitz warned Halsey that securing positions in the Carolines and the Palau group were required to complete the isolation of bypassed islands. Halsey carried out part of the original plan, landing a Marine and an Army division to capture Peleliu and Angaur. The Palau landings were scheduled for September 15. That morning one of his sailors saw the admiral on the flag bridge, perched on his chair, reading a paperback book. Looking back, the officer recalled that day as the only time Admiral Halsey ever did such a thing. The Bull not only felt confident his boys could take care of business, but also felt the invasion seemed unnecessary. At that point, Halsey was already anticipating the next phase—his run to strike at the heart of Japanese strength in Manila and Luzon.
The breeches buoy came into play once more. This time, while the New Jersey refueled, Third Fleet staffers left for MacArthur’s headquarters at Hollandia. One, General Riley, sought to coordinate the new scheme for accelerating to Leyte in October. The other, Lieutenant Carl Solberg, needed to check the status of Manila. Lieutenant Solberg, of Halsey’s air intelligence staff, had last been with the Seventh Fleet Intelligence Center (SEFIC), the naval intelligence unit that served MacArthur.
Top spy Major General Charles Willoughby, suspicious to a fault—and prickly too—tended to see anyone who left MacArthur’s command as an enemy, and he took special notice of Solberg now. But with Halsey intending to throw the Third Fleet at Luzon as soon as it rearmed, Solberg’s mission to check on General MacArthur’s declaration making Manila an “open city”—not to be bombed or shelled—became urgent. He could hardly mince words. The lieutenant got some guidance from Seventh Fleet commander Vice Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid. His best access came through his old chief Captain Arthur H. McCollum, the SEFIC director. McCollum affirmed that Manila should not be attacked but went on to say that nearby airfields, ships in the harbor, and fuel stocks serving the p
ort were legitimate targets. Lieutenant Solberg hurried back to Halsey with the scoop.
• • •
CARL SOLBERG HAD wanted to be a pilot. He had volunteered, been commissioned an officer on the strength of his education and work as a reporter for Time magazine, and completed a brief training course at Quonset Point, Rhode Island. But Solberg couldn’t pass the Navy’s flight school evaluation. He’d been regraded an aviation specialist instead, and in the summer of 1942, that appointment led to his post in air combat intelligence.
In April 1943, Solberg had had a midfield seat at SOWESPAC headquarters as Ultra intercepts warned Halsey, who was by then leading U.S. forces in the South Pacific, of a big Japanese air offensive. That had led directly to the aerial ambush of the Imperial Navy’s commander in chief, Yamamoto Isoroku—an amazing feat. Solberg considered the intercepts, which made that possible, to be the greatest wartime contribution of radio intelligence.
While the young naval reservist was not privy to the contents of Ultra—in the Third Fleet only Halsey saw the intercepts and decided whom to tell about them—as an air intelligence officer working next to radio intel maven Gil Slonim, Lieutenant Solberg knew the Ultra had lost some of its timeliness and fluency of eighteen months earlier. Solberg worked directly with aerial photography, interpreting the photos and writing intelligence reports based on them, and he saw the pictures begin to dominate the data flow. The United States had become so strong that finding targets—Japanese ships and aircraft revealed by the photo coverage or by radio traffic analysis—seemed more important than the enemy’s intentions. Halsey’s Third Fleet steamed at the tip of the spear.