Storm Over Leyte

by John Prados

  With MacArthur creating his Southwest Pacific Command in 1942, Mashbir was sent there to take charge of the Signal Corps reference library—until his friend ONI operative Ellis Zacharias told Signal Corps brass that Mashbir’s linguistic skills and knowledge of the Japanese would be wasted there. Mashbir’s boss, Rufus Bratton, the Army officer who had handled the intelligence source code-named “Magic” in Washington before Pearl Harbor, could not miss a ploy like that.

  In September 1942, Mashbir’s assignment changed to heading up translation work at MacArthur’s headquarters. ATIS already existed, but only as an obscure backwater located at Indooroopilly, a run-down estate outside of Brisbane. At the time, it had eight Nisei linguists and three clerks. Hitching rails surrounded an old frame house. The day after Mashbir’s arrival, a stack of captured documents filled his in-box soaked in blood and saturated with grease. That marked the beginning. With Mashbir’s impetus, Nisei and Boulder Boys were enlisted. By July 1944, ATIS had 162 officers and 778 enlisted specialists, about 150 of them Nisei. Their rapacious appetite for documents never slackened, while, at Mashbir’s initiative, mobile teams accompanied almost all MacArthur ground operations to question prisoners. That year, ATIS interrogated 350 prisoners and translated nearly 4,000 documents.

  One document in particular was the extraordinary “ATIS Limited Distribution Translation 4,” issued on May 23. That paper of twenty-two pages featured Combined Fleet Operations Order No. 73. Veteran Sunao Ishio, a senior Nisei at ATIS, recalls it as “perhaps the most important single document” translated at Indooroopilly. The document appeared as a result of an eerie repetition of the slaughter of the Imperial Navy’s fleet commander. In 1943, that had been Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku. Now Koga Mineichi held that post.

  It happened like this: The Japanese fleet commander gradually became skittish, more and more concerned about American encroachments, and especially irked by the carrier raids. Admiral Koga had been driven out of his base at Truk in February 1944. He pulled back to Palau, where respite lasted all of six weeks.

  At the end of March, the Big Blue Fleet struck there too. Japanese radio intelligence pointed to the U.S. task force in motion; then a scout plane from Truk detected it at sea. Koga Mineichi, his headquarters ashore at Palau, ordered the fleet to leave, which it did on March 29—just in time. The next day the admiral had to hunker down as American warplanes smashed his base. That went on for two days. On March 31, as the U.S. aerial assault slackened, Koga decided to move Combined Fleet headquarters to Davao, on Mindanao.

  Koga’s chief of staff, Vice Admiral Fukudome Shigeru, arranged to move the staff in three big flying boats. Then a scout plane, mistaking reefs and rock outcroppings for ships, reported the American fleet closing in again. Fleet intelligence officer Commander Nakajima Chikataka advised Koga to wait until morning before doing anything, even though the admiral preferred to leave immediately. He boarded one plane while Admiral Fukudome took another. The third plane, delayed, left Palau the next morning and made Davao just fine. But the aircraft carrying the fleet commander and his chief of staff encountered a weather front in gathering darkness. Both lost their way, and neither plane survived the storm. Koga’s simply disappeared. Fukudome’s aircraft flew too far in its attempt to get around the storm. Once it ran out of gas, the pilot tried a water landing off Cebu Island, during which the plane stalled and broke up. Admiral Fukudome hung on to a floating seat cushion for eight and a half hours, until Filipino fishermen rescued him. There were others, a dozen in all, including staff operations officer Captain Yamamoto Yuji (no relation to the admiral—or to Yamamoto Chikao of the NGS). Two men escaped, but the injured Fukudome and the rest went to Filipino partisans under Lieutenant Colonel James M. Cushing.

  Colonel Cushing ended up trapped between the Japanese and General MacArthur, who as soon as he learned of the capture demanded that Admiral Fukudome and the other prisoners be sent to Australia on a submarine.

  Meanwhile Fukudome had had a briefcase with him, which the fishermen who rescued him had taken. The briefcase contained papers in a waterproof bag. That went to Australia on the sub Crevalle (Lieutenant Commander Francis D. Walker Jr.), where it appeared at Indooroopilly. The documents turned out to be Koga’s Combined Fleet operations orders for a decisive battle with the Allies, the Z Plan. In fact, they were bound inside a red cover emblazoned with a big Z.

  The presentation caught the eye of Major John E. Anderton, ATIS executive officer, and once he was told of the take, Colonel Mashbir immediately called for special handling. All the translation would be after-hours and in total secrecy. Anderton, known for his knowledge of Japanese kanji characters, led the team, which was comprised of Navy Lieutenant Richard Bagnall and Army First Lieutenant Fabian Bowers. Once they had a rough draft, Nisei checked it, with Yoshikazu Yamada and George K. Yamashiro correcting critical translation errors. When they had a completed document, Colonel Mashbir personally ran the copying machine (a mimeograph) to produce just twenty copies, all very tightly held.

  The Allied communications system provided for the exchange of secret pouches between SOWESPAC and Nimitz’s command. JICPOA sent copies of all publications to MacArthur’s intelligence staff. MacArthur’s people, including ATIS, returned the compliment. When Translation 4 arrived at the Zoo, Commander Holmes instantly glommed on to it. He recalls being struck by the special handling restrictions, which required General MacArthur’s personal approval for copying the document. The Zoo published most of its documents at a lower level of classification and positively encouraged copying—it wanted the intel to reach users.

  Holmes saw right away why the translation had been rated the way it had. Not only did the Z Plan contain the Imperial Navy’s recipe for decisive battle—right down to the assignment of some forces to divert Allied opponents—but Japanese knowledge that the order had been compromised would lead to changed plans, rendering the intelligence useless. Jasper Holmes showed the document to CINCPAC fleet intelligence officer Layton, who recognized that the ATIS team had not been aware of certain naval terminology. Layton and Holmes pulled an all-nighter retranslating the Z Plan, and a photographic copy of the Combined Fleet order was rushed forward to the fleet. It had to be air-dropped to reach Admiral Spruance. Layton and Holmes implored Chester Nimitz to obtain Douglas MacArthur’s approval for wider dissemination. With that in hand, JICPOA made and circulated 100 copies. One of these Solberg took to Bull Halsey on the New Jersey.

  MacArthur’s intelligence people completed the circle by sending the briefcase back to the Philippines. The Japanese needed to think their secret remained safe. Admiral Fukudome’s documents were resealed in their waterproof bag. At one point the idea had been to drop the briefcase in the ocean at the crash site for Japanese divers to find, but then Imperial Army commanders began to demand of Colonel Cushing that the partisans give up the documents. In the Imperial Navy, a chief of staff enjoyed much greater power than officers with that post in most Western military services. For someone like Fukudome, who basically possessed the authority of a commander in chief, to be an enemy prisoner was intolerable. And when the Japanese learned what had happened from the escaped sailors, soldiers on Negros and Cebu immediately began patrolling, making harsh threats against the villages about what would happen to them if the Japanese sailors were not returned. Cushing stalled while the Japanese started bombing and shelling Filipino villages to pressure him. Eventually Admiral Fukudome, the survivors, and the briefcase were given up.

  Fukudome went to a Manila hospital to recover. The Imperial Navy convened a board of inquiry to investigate Koga’s disappearance and Fukudome’s capture. The board concluded the Combined Fleet commander had been lost in a tragic accident and his chief of staff had been the victim of imponderables. Fukudome was cleared for a fresh assignment. But Allied knowledge of the Z Plan had played a role at the Battle of the Philippine Sea.

  And its story had not ended. Leyte Gulf was yet to come.


  • • •

  THE COMBINED FLEET commander, Admiral Toyoda Soemu, had his hands full coordinating all the far-flung preparations for Sho. He had no time to worry about the Z Plan documents. In Japan, the problem of energizing aircraft carrier construction and the formation of new carrier air groups loomed large. Toyoda was constantly pushing JNAF officials to accelerate their reorganization, and with the Allied carrier raids on the Philippines, it became increasingly necessary to replenish the air strength there.

  A continuing quandary for Imperial Navy planners became the role of the Fifth Fleet. This force had conducted Japan’s Aleutian campaign and still guarded the Empire’s northeast sea frontier. If the Sho threat came across the northern Pacific, the Fifth Fleet would play a major role. But the region had been quiet for such a long time that a threat seemed unlikely. In all other scenarios, this force, built around just a pair of heavy cruisers and their escorts, would have a problematic role. Too weak to be a strike force on its own, too far away from the main surface fleet at Singapore, and too unaccustomed to working in tandem with aircraft carriers to fit easily in the carrier fleet, the Fifth Fleet represented a discordant element. For a time it was expected to operate with the Mobile Fleet, but Ozawa recommended that the Combined Fleet take it over. Admiral Toyoda, on the other hand, could not make up his mind what to do with it.

  In August, Toyoda and senior staff went to Manila to huddle with subordinate commanders and their staffs. Attending from the Second Fleet—also called the 1st Diversion Attack Force, but more familiarly known as the Kurita fleet—was its chief of staff, Rear Admiral Koyanagi Tomiji, and the staff operations officer, Commander Otani Tonosuke. Officers from the Ozawa fleet were also present. Admiral Fukudome was late arriving. The JNAF boss for the Philippines, Admiral Teraoka, brand-new on the job, did not know the situation and concerned himself with reestablishing the First Air Fleet. Their host, Vice Admiral Mikawa Gunichi, was also new. He attended as the incoming chief of naval forces in the Philippines, the Southwest Area Fleet. Notably missing were Admiral Ozawa and his staff chief, Obayashi—the importance of their work regenerating the carrier air groups was such that Toyoda kept them focused there.

  The command conference opened on August 10, and the scene was redolent with the vapors of times past. The headquarters of the Southwest Area Fleet, located at the foot of Legaspi Wharf, had been the U.S. Army-Navy Club before the war. The surroundings were opulent: Rooms at the Manila Hotel, where Douglas MacArthur had lived before the war, were impressive. But the food—thin soup and prematurely harvested rice—reflected Japan’s difficulties in this third year of conflict.

  Japanese officers participated in tabletop war games based on the Combined Fleet directives for Sho. Toyoda’s own operations staffer, Captain Mikami Sakuo, briefed the Sho plan, doing a creditable job. Watching him, Toyoda’s senior staff officer, Captain Kami Shigenori, very likely felt conflicted. A notoriously aggressive figure, Kami here listened to a scheme that targeted the enemy’s means of transport instead of its main strength. Kami had been with another man in this room, Vice Admiral Mikawa, on a glorious night off Guadalcanal in August 1942 when Kami held the same job for Mikawa he now performed for Admiral Toyoda. Kami’s advice had been to go for the combat ships, not the transports. At the Battle of Savo Island the Japanese did that. Two years later the decision was universally regarded as a grave mistake.

  Imperial Navy officers uniformly believed in the tenets of the fleet’s decisive battle doctrine. So it came as no surprise when the Kurita fleet representatives spoke up during a break in the conference. Rear Admiral Koyanagi did the talking. Operations staffer Otani kept silent. Koyanagi objected to the goal. He knew his boss, Vice Admiral Kurita Takeo, took a dim view of targeting mere transports. Koyanagi asked what the Kurita fleet was supposed to do if it encountered aircraft carriers.

  Captain Kami gave chief of staff Koyanagi the impression he was convinced the Sho plan was right. But Kami Shigenori believed passionately in decisive battle, the very thing that had guided his advice at Savo. Years later, Koyanagi told historian John Toland of Kami’s calm advice to go after the warships. Any Imperial Navy officer would have understood that.

  Responsibility for preventing the Imperial Navy’s commanders from misunderstanding their orders lay with the Combined Fleet commander. Admiral Toyoda could have intervened. His top subordinate, Kusaka Ryunosuke, considered Toyoda the best Japanese fleet commander of the war. Chief of staff Kusaka saw his boss as brilliant and very precise. The best interpretation for why the commander in chief failed to step up, permitting officers to think they had contingent permission to go after warships, is that the C-in-C believed in decisive battle too. He realized the Navy had been so steeped in tradition that it could not change—at least not immediately.

  WAITING FOR BATTLE

  Down at Lingga Roads, an island located about 100 miles south of Singapore, no one questioned the fleet’s role. Lingga, a sheltered anchorage off Sumatra, lay practically on the equator. Steamy and pestilent, it had no claims to being a dream base, but the Kurita fleet busily rehearsed battle tactics there from mid-July onward.

  During that time, the warships practiced as much as they could. There were damage control practices, underway refueling trainings, towing practices, and antiaircraft and antisubmarine warfare practices. There were exercises by single ships, divisions, and the fleet. Gunnery exercises and night fleet exercises consumed many hours; antiaircraft gunnery received equal emphasis. Tabletop war games rehearsed fleet maneuvers, afforded junior officers a wider perspective. They were able to work out kinks, such as when the Japanese discovered that active sonar interfered with acoustic detectors. I-boats were detailed to the destroyers for them to gain a sense of the noises made by a real submarine. Both destroyers and subs simulated torpedo attacks. In gunnery practice, battleship Yamato’s salvo patterns tightened up. Night gunnery shoots. Radar-controlled gunnery practice. Musashi’s accuracy did not seem to improve. Yamato and Musashi often split up and served as flagships for different forces, one to attack an anchorage, the other to defend it. Then there were the exercises by division, when the superbattleships would be together. When they finally sallied forth, Admiral Kurita would say the fleet had crammed a year’s worth of training into those few months. The interminable exercises at least had the virtue of getting the warships under way, generating a bit of wind over the bow. In Admiral Ugaki’s unit, Battleship Division 1, the boss lost track of the days. The climate and scenery changed so little Ugaki began to think they had arrived in early spring rather than summer. He had to count the days on his fingers.

  Battlewagon Haruna suffered a real torpedo attack on August 18 in the South China Sea. Escorted by several destroyers and a few days out from Lingga, Haruna became the target of the U.S. submarine Sailfish. The sub, east of the Spratly Islands and brazenly on the surface, detected the Japanese by radar and launched four tin fish from a distance of 3,600 yards. By this time Allied subs were attacking major Japanese warships with depressing frequency.

  In terms of technological advancements, Imperial Navy battleships, including Yamato, Musashi, and Nagato Battleship Division 1, received radars discriminating enough to track targets for gunfire. Sailors at Kure shouted their delight when news of the upgrade was announced. Perhaps, now with radar too, the Imperial Navy’s traditional night-fighting advantage might return. At Lingga, the crews worked furiously to attain proficiency. Coordination between radar specialists and gunners was required to make radar fire control practical.

  The Imperial Navy, however, did not believe in it. To quote Ugaki, “to depend entirely and blindly on [radar control] should be limited to cases where no other means are available.” At a conference in the war room of the Yamato on August 20, specialists argued that guns aimed exclusively by radar would never be accurate. Ugaki was a gunner by trade and wholeheartedly agreed with this negative view.

  In addition, battleship Musashi’s gu
nnery received special attention. Her skipper went ashore to a staff slot, and a new man, Captain Inoguchi Toshihei, took command. Previously, Inoguchi had been director of the Imperial Navy’s gunnery school, and before that, a senior instructor there. By late September Inoguchi had the superbattleship shooting better. Admiral Kurita made him a special adviser on gunnery. In line with a round of promotions throughout the fleet in mid-October, Inoguchi suddenly found himself a rear admiral.

  This latter development illustrated the Navy’s careful preparations. Constant combat losses had shrunk the number of ships in the Imperial Navy, and fewer vessels meant fewer commands to go around. And while the Navy had long been abstemious about promotions, with officers serving many years before attaining higher rank, it could be that the Navy Ministry decided a round of promotions might just make skippers fight harder. Virtually every battleship and many heavy cruisers would go into the next battle with a rear admiral at the helm—and every big ship division would be led by a vice admiral.

  Another sailor who would enjoy his promotion to rear admiral, Araki Tsutau, had been flag captain of Admiral Kurita’s command ship since that fateful day at Rabaul Harbor when the Atago, crippled, had had her skipper killed right on the bridge during a savage U.S. carrier raid. Araki’s heavy cruiser had been the Second Fleet flagship then too; but then the force comprised only cruisers, its role to weaken an enemy before the Imperial Navy’s battlewagons intervened. Now the Second Fleet had morphed into Japan’s primary surface attack force, battleships and heavy cruisers together as a juggernaut. The Japanese nevertheless maintained the custom of assigning a heavy cruiser as the flagship. At the end of July Araki had the Atago in dry dock at Singapore for fitting of her own gunnery radars plus extra antiaircraft guns. Cruiser Takao then got the flagship duty, followed by Chokai when the Takao dry-docked behind Araki’s ship.