Storm Over Leyte

by John Prados

  The diminished availability of destroyers to escort surface forces had some real consequences for the naval forces at Leyte. Kurita’s fleet, for example, had less protection in the Palawan Passage, and similarly, the same proved true for Ozawa’s fleet as it tried to escape from battle.

  In addition, Japanese admirals underemployed what escorts they did have. From what we know of the Kurita fleet’s training at Lingga, there were three or four, or more, gunnery exercises for every one that focused on ASW. Most likely this represents a general phenomenon. When the fleets sortied, the number of false submarine detections was considerable, and a good deal of them were attributable to lack of practice. During the battle, Allied submarines alone accounted for three Japanese cruisers sunk and two damaged, all of which were critical losses to the Kurita fleet, among them the admiral’s very flagship, a singular event to which some attach very great importance.

  Intelligence helped both sides at Leyte Gulf. Though the Allies never achieved the surprise they had often enjoyed, Japanese operations, and even their intentions, were almost an open book to Allied commanders. The intelligence units at Pearl Harbor, in Washington, and with MacArthur did an excellent job of keeping commanders apprised of Japanese moves. Their information ranged from whether or not it could be expected that the Imperial Navy would sortie if the Allies invaded the Philippines to observations of Japanese tanker traffic and what it indicated about naval operations. Even something as specific as warning of the activation of Sho had been seen, too, and taken into account. Intelligence difficulties have also been noted, as in the debate that raged over the true inventory of Japanese combat aircraft, or the number of training aircraft that should be regarded as suitable for combat. For all that, the spooks were no longer so important as they had been in the South Pacific or at Midway.

  At the very height of the Leyte battle, Admiral Nimitz took a chance, possibly exposing Ultra in order to warn the fleets that Kurita had come through the San Bernardino Strait. That kind of move had been unheard-of in the European war. It can be read either as an index of the emergency Nimitz believed existed or as a measure of the diminished importance of intelligence in a world of Allied military might.

  William F. Halsey did not respond to the intelligence because he fixated on destroying the Japanese carrier fleet. That basic structure ensured that the Japanese decoy plan would work. There will be more to say about this in a little while, but here the interesting point to reiterate is that both sides made a mistake at Leyte Gulf. Not only that, but both sides made the identical mistake, and for the same reason. The Japanese belief in decisive battle meant a focus on combat forces. Before the war they would have emphasized battleships, but they had come to rank aircraft carriers as the main combatants. Bull Halsey believed the same thing. He was bound to go after Ozawa just as Kurita had to fight Ziggy Sprague.

  With all of this in mind, was another outcome possible? No. That’s the short answer. There could have been a more diminished outcome—in the sense that it might not have been as great a slaughter of the Imperial Navy. Or it could have differed in that more damage might have been accrued by the Allies. The optimal case required an enormous number of things to go exactly right.

  For the sake of discussion, let’s assume that Combined Fleet held its hand during the Taiwan air attacks, began to gather the tankers to fuel the fleet very early on, and avoided tipping off Allied intelligence by keeping the Shima fleet in port. In this vision, Toyoda and Kusaka would throw everything at MacArthur when he began moving into Leyte Gulf, opening with a fierce hurling of air strikes between the Halsey fleet and the Taffies, on one side, and the JNAF air fleets, on the other. This new focus on the air forces and carrier fleets would most likely prevent much of an attack against the approaching Japanese surface fleet. Like before, Halsey would then discover Ozawa and take off after him, with the Third Fleet. Shima and Nishimura would arrive in Surigao Strait, mostly undamaged, and Kurita would happen upon Taffy 3. Let’s also suppose that Kurita holds on, keeps up the pursuit, and arrives in Leyte Gulf.

  We can speculate that the preliminary air battle, because the Japanese this time are concentrated and the Allied carriers are tied to the Leyte invasion, inflicts damage on some fleet carriers, some CVEs, and the Princeton. That’s no detriment to Halsey destroying Ozawa’s aviation ships, so that would happen, as before. In Surigao Strait, Shima and Nishimura would be destroyed again too. Admiral Kurita would catch the Taffies and engage them. They’d shake him up with the desperate air strikes, and the tin cans would make their brave stand. But Kurita, having sustained less damage on the way, is stronger by a battleship (Musashi), a cruiser, and at least one escort. Not a lot, but sufficient for him to feel more comfortable, and enough to keep up the pressure on Ziggy Sprague. Taffy 3 and perhaps Taffy 2 would suffer more losses.

  Thus, the key question in this scenario becomes, does Kurita Takeo turn around?

  • • •

  THE BIGGEST CONTROVERSIES surrounding Leyte Gulf concern Admiral Kurita’s turnaway and Admiral Halsey’s pursuit of the Japanese carriers.

  Because the question of why Kurita turned away is central to the what-if scenario being explored, from earlier, we will turn to that first. Top brass at Combined Fleet, admirals like Toyoda and Kusaka, refrained from criticizing Kurita Takeo, but they were among the few to do so. Vice Admiral Kurita himself certainly felt mortified. He had not long left to fly his flag. A little more than a month after the battle Kurita would be kicked upstairs, promoted to superintendent of the naval academy at Etajima. On January 10, 1945, Emperor Hirohito received Kurita in audience, thanking him for his service.

  The issues surrounding Kurita’s decisions were noted in Chapter 10. Kurita told interrogators later that he made up his mind based upon what good he could do inside the gulf, not the technical issues or inability to effectively communicate with the remaining ships of his fleet. The most recent floatplane report mentioned about thirty cargomen inside Leyte. That number is consistent with what we know of the logistics planning and practices of MacArthur’s supply officers. The destruction of thirty transports and cargo ships, even with a pile of landing craft thrown in, was not going to make any difference in the tempo of Allied invasions. Leyte had been mounted by hundreds of transports, not thirty. To trade the flower of the Imperial Navy for that—because without fail Kinkaid’s battleship fleet would have arrived right in the middle of Kurita’s hypothetical rampage inside Leyte Gulf—just seemed wrong. He agreed with a question that postulated that one factor in his choice could have been the thousands of sailors who were spared because he chose against that battle.

  But the story does not end there. On the bridge of Yamato, Admiral Kurita was beyond tired. In fact, he told Captain Hara Tameichi, “I made that blunder out of sheer physical exhaustion.” Historian Ito Masanori concludes that Kurita held a general view that “death should not be invited unnecessarily” and held human life in great respect. Kurita reflected that his decision had seemed right at the time, but that in retrospect, he ought to have carried out his orders. With Ito, the admiral returned to the issue of exhaustion. The idea of striking another Allied task force was a mistake, Kurita declared—his own mistake, he said, since he held no staff meeting to consider the matter. “The destruction of enemy aircraft carriers was a kind of obsession with me, and I fell victim to it,” Kurita told Ito. “I was, so to speak, the pitcher of the losing team.”

  One of the key elements in Kurita’s decision to break contact with the Taffies had been a sighting report of a U.S. carrier group farther to the north. Kurita had taken off in search of it, realized the futility of it, and then finally simply canceled the operation. Former admiral Shima Kiyohide, who also survived the war, reports a very interesting exchange: Ito Masanori, after publication of his own book on the Japanese Navy, invited Kurita, Shima, and Ozawa Jisaburo to his home, where all four debated the events of Leyte. Shima recounts that he also received the sightin
g report, which establishes that this was not an invention of Kurita’s, that there must have been a real message. As a communications specialist, Admiral Shima looked into this transmission after the battle, but he could not find any Japanese command that admitted to sending it. Shima decided this was a “ghost message” and attributed it to Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet. If so, the ghost message would rank as one of the most successful (and crucial) radio deceptions of the war. Also, one of the most secret, since no one has ever stepped forward to claim credit (which is a reason to doubt this ploy). In the absence of more concrete evidence, the more reasonable conjecture is that some naval unit sent a report discovered to be false and, in view of the enormity of the consequences, denied ever sending it.

  Shima’s overall analysis is worth noting. In his view, the first and foremost reason for the defeat at Leyte had been the squandering of airpower over Taiwan. Next to that he ranks the Japanese communications problem. Ozawa’s decoy mission, though successful in its own terms, also depended upon Kurita knowing about it—and the surface admiral never learned anything directly from the decoy commander. Radio silence only complicated matters. Had Kurita known of Ozawa’s achievements in a timely fashion, he would have had reason to doubt the ghost message and would have had better background information as he approached Leyte Gulf. As it was, his information came late and secondhand, via Mikawa in Manila. By the time Kurita knew of Ozawa’s success, he had started for home. Shima Kiyohide, incidently, completely agreed with Kurita’s decision to turn around.

  In later days, Kurita clammed up, no longer speaking of his experiences, to the point that people began to call him the “Silent Admiral.” Twice a year he visited the Yasukuni Shrine to honor the sailors who had died under his command. When John Toland came to Japan to research his opus on the Pacific war, The Rising Sun, Kurita Takeo refused to talk with him, instead asking Koyanagi Tomiji to speak in his place.

  Not long afterward, toward the end of 1967, Kurita moved in with his son and began meeting periodically with a circle of men who had been with the seventy-eighth class at Etajima—midshipmen of the class Kurita supervised in 1945. It was among this group the admiral opened up. Kurita so cottoned to one of them, Oka Jiro, that he starting talking about a biography. Oka enlisted his comrades in the project. To this group, Kurita dismissed his previous explanation that the abandonment of the Samar action had been an error brought on by exhaustion. Instead, he reported thinking that he had come very far to achieve victory, and if he could catch a carrier group, it would go a long way. Both the decision to regroup and that to head north had been his alone. Kurita believed the ghost message came from Mikawa Gunichi. He dismissed the exhaustion argument as unworthy. No senior naval commander had a right to exhaustion. Be that as it may, Kurita had used that explanation not only with historian Ito and Imperial Navy officer Hara Tameichi, but also with Allied intelligence interrogators.

  It’s difficult to decide what to make of all this. I draw the following conclusions: Admiral Kurita did indeed make the decisions by himself. Sensitive to the sailors under his command, he carried the burden of the Leyte losses for the rest of his life, and it is probable that the growing death toll played at least some part in Kurita’s decision to regroup—if not the one to withdraw. The latter choice, apart from the issue of the ghost message, can be attributed to Kurita’s inability to revise his concept of naval war and decisive battle being about destroying warships. He had that in common with most of his fellow naval officers. Some bit of responsibility remains with the admiral, but the greater amount lies with higher commanders who sought to transform long-held tenets of Imperial Navy doctrine but did little to sell the program.

  On the Allied side, William F. Halsey attracts similar levels of criticism. The notion that the San Bernardino Strait could have been shut tight and that the Kurita fleet could have been prevented from ever transiting it has so much allure. The controversy over “Bull’s Run” also has some of the same features as that surrounding Kurita’s withdrawal. Rather than the ghost message, we have the dispatches Admiral Halsey sent that discussed formation of the fast-battleship unit, Task Force 34. Americans dispute whether or not Halsey’s colleagues were right to assume, on the basis of the warning message, that the fast-battleship unit had actually been constituted.

  After the war, Admiral Halsey defended himself in interviews, articles, and his own memoir. It was a robust defense and the admiral never publicly admitted to be at fault. There are rumors he softened before his death in 1959, though there’s no evidence to prove it. But the criticisms have been persistent and seem to revive with each new generation of scholarship on the war.

  Halsey biographer Elmer B. Potter asks why anyone should think the Bull would do any differently—and he is right. The standing directives on the American side were very much like the Japanese doctrine for decisive battle. The enemy fleet was the target. Aircraft carriers, over the course of World War II, had been established as the most dangerous element of enemy fleets, and consequently, the enemy fleet should be the target. Chester Nimitz issued a basic order for Third Fleet’s support to the Philippine invasion, which provided that Halsey should engage the Japanese fleet if it emerged to do battle. Halsey put that language into his instruction for his own sailors. He added only slight elaboration. Halsey’s directive circulated back to Admiral Nimitz, to General MacArthur, and to Admiral Kinkaid. No one objected then.

  Not only did no one object, but Admiral Halsey’s method of operation was also on display for them for weeks before Leyte Gulf. His technique was to push every advantage. When air strikes in the southern Philippines went well, Halsey added the Manila area to his target list. When that had been saturated, he went for Coron Bay. Along the way he recommended advancing the timetable for the Philippine invasion and aiming at Leyte. No one objected there either. Then he went off to strike the Ryukyu Islands and Taiwan. He added days of battle against the Japanese on Taiwan and more strikes on the Japanese in the Philippines. Halsey was rewarded for that aggressiveness. Barely a week before the Leyte battle began, he received a commendation from President Roosevelt, an early version of what is known today as the “Presidential Unit Citation.” Thus, it’s hard to believe that when a Japanese fleet actually materialized, no one expected Halsey to go after it.

  Part of Halsey’s aggression was linked to his ideas about fighting the Japanese. Evan Thomas pictures Halsey as a product or tool of cultural hysteria: He bought the stereotypes about the Japanese and felt as infuriated as anyone after Pearl Harbor. But a bigger element was sheer professional competency and his development of a smoothly functioning military machine combined with a formula that taught that dynamic operations produced results.

  Another level of this analysis concerns a different element of naval doctrine. One cardinal rule for U.S. officers concerned concentration of force. Such forces as existed were to be used together. Concentrated force achieved goals. American officers frequently criticized Japanese methods of creating many naval formations for an operation, thus dissipating their available force. Halsey had absorbed that doctrine too. The Big Blue Fleet evolved a very conscious technique of spreading heavy gunnery ships through the carrier units as core antiaircraft protection. Detaching the fast battleships meant diluting the force. Halsey was not about to do that without a damned good reason.

  The situation during the afternoon of October 24 was that the Kurita fleet had turned away in the Sibuyan Sea in the face of Halsey’s fierce air armada. The Japanese were badly damaged, having lost superbattleship Musashi. Meanwhile, scouts had seen the enemy Halsey had really wanted, the Japanese carriers. And they were pretty close. By Third Fleet reckoning, Kurita was not coming back, and if he was, he would be reduced by enough that Kinkaid’s forces would be able to cope with him. Preliminary estimates were lurid: fifty-five bomber attacks on Yamato-class battleships for thirty-one hits. A half dozen other hits on battleships. Torpedo hits at 40 to 46 percent on battleships, 51 perc
ent on cruisers. Even with air intelligence officers shaving away at the damage estimates, these were pretty high claims, and Halsey had some reason to feel confident.

  Finally, there is Halsey’s analysis of the position and navigation data once Kurita was through and fighting with the Taffies, who were begging for help. Even the fast battleships, he argued, could not arrive in time to do any good. Reexamining positions and plotting courses and headway, as was done here, confirms the admiral’s original argument. The run of the fast battleships had no military point, except to keep the ships out of battle altogether. The only value of Task Force 34, in the end, would be a psychological one, furnishing some aid and comfort to Seventh Fleet.

  • • •

  MANY OTHER ASPECTS of these events invite comment. The most important is that Leyte Gulf became a further demonstration of the transformation of warfare through technological dominance that became prominent in World War II.

  The intelligence reporting, briefly referred to already, owed a very great deal to technological means, including both aerial photography and code breaking. (In the Pacific, unlike Enigma in Europe, Ultra depended much more on card-sorting devices—simpler machinery but just as technological.) The intelligence brought combat the closest it would come to dispelling the fog of war prior to the advent of the reconnaissance satellite.