Farther to the southwest was yet another and smaller battle force, the Second Southern Force under the command of Vice Admiral Shima. This was a mop-up force to trap and sink any American ships that might escape the double sledgehammer blow administered by Nishimura and Kurita. The Second Southern Force consisted of two heavy and one light cruiser and nine destroyers.
The scene was being set for what historians would later call the greatest naval battle of all time between capital warships. Eelfish, far behind Vice Admiral Nishimura’s battle force, was running on the surface at top speed in the hope that somehow, in some way, it could take part in the battle that Mike Brannon was sure was going to be joined.
CHAPTER 22
Sunset came at 1815 hours on October 24, 1944, at Tacloban. Ashore the American invasion troops were locked in an increasingly stubborn battle with the Japanese defensive forces. Before Leyte Island was declared to be secured and safely in U.S. hands, on Saint Patrick’s Day of 1945, the U.S. forces would suffer more than 15,000 casualties. The Japanese would pay a much stiffer price. More than 49,000 of their troops would die in the five-month-long battle.
In the crowded reaches of San Pedro Bay, just across from the port of Tacloban, hundreds of tons of supplies were being shuttled to the shore where the beach captains supervised the moving and storage of the vast quantity of materiel coming in from the ships.
Thousands of fighting men were being ferried from the ships that had brought them to this desolate area to the various beach staging areas from which they were moved into the battles raging all around Tacloban. On board the ships in San Pedro Bay there was fear, open naked fear. The movements of the Japanese battle fleets, reported first by the Ultra code breakers and confirmed by submarines, left no doubt that the Japanese intended to strike from the sea at the invasion force.
As the sun set, Vice Admiral Nishimura, his flag flying in the battleship Yamashiro, steamed toward the invasion area. Ahead of him, four destroyers of the Japanese Destroyer Division Four were ranged: the Michishio, the Yamagumo, the Asagumo, and the Shigure. A kilometer astern of Nishimura’s flagship the battleship Fuso steamed, followed by the heavy cruiser Mogami. The navigators on the bridge of the battleship Yamashiro worked at their charts, estimating the overall speed of the task force, and assured the Vice Admiral that they would rendezvous with Vice Admiral Kurita at 0430 on October 25 — providing Vice Admiral Kurita was on time. Once the rendezvous was accomplished the combined battle fleets would steam up the length of Leyte Gulf and administer a smashing attack on the American invasion force.
At 2300 hours of the night of October 24 the Peter Tare boats — the PT boats — sighted the Japanese force in the eastern area of the Sea of Mindanao and hurled themselves into the attack against an enemy force so much more powerful than all the PT boats combined that the very fact of the attack was madness — mosquitoes attacking a herd of elephants.
The Japanese did not even bother to change course as the PT boats came hurtling out of the darkness to loose torpedoes and open fire with .50-caliber machine guns. Vice Admiral Nishimura thought so little of the attack he did not bother to break radio silence and notify his fleet headquarters that his ships had been sighted and were under attack.
The Japanese attack plan for smashing the American invasion force at Tacloban depended on almost split-second timing. The two forces, Nishimura’s Southern Force and Vice Admiral Kurita’s Northern Force were to achieve rendezvous and proceed in line of battle up the Gulf of Leyte to the attack. Hours before the time of the rendezvous Vice Admiral Nishimura suspected that Admiral Kurita might not be able to make the rendezvous at the appointed time. Kurita had broken radio silence to report that he had come under heavy air attack while approaching San Bernardino Strait and might be delayed as much as seven hours. Vice Admiral Nishimura, a stubborn and skilled fighter who relished night battles, decided to carry on with the original plan, confident that his two battleships, the heavy cruiser, and his four large destroyers were more than sufficient to do the job.
The moon set at 0106 on the morning of October 25. The sea was glassy smooth, the night hot, airless, and humid. Occasional flashes of lightning from a storm over the mountains of Leyte Island illuminated the blue-black water.
Undeterred by the PT boat attacks, Vice Admiral Nishimura swept into Surigao Strait and turned to make the run up the Gulf of Leyte to his targets, the invasion fleet. He formed up his fleet into line of battle, the four destroyers in the van followed by the battleship Yamashiro, the battleship Fuso, and the heavy cruiser Mogami bringing up the rear.
To the north of him, completely undetected by Japanese intelligence, was one of the mightiest naval forces ever assembled for a sea battle: 27 U.S. destroyers and one Australian destroyer; four heavy cruisers, one of them an Australian ship; four light cruisers; and six battleships.
At 0300 on October 25 a lynx-eyed lookout on the Shigure, the Japanese destroyer leading the way, reported seeing the outlines of enemy destroyers. Nishimura ordered the big searchlights on the bridge of his flagship turned on to sweep the ocean ahead, but the American destroyers were too far away to be seen in the searchlight beams. The Japanese battle fleet swept onward through the quiet night.
Then, from both sides of the Japanese battle line, the destroyers roared in to the attack, each ship pouring a dense cloud of smoke from its funnels, each ship’s multiple torpedo tubes trained toward the Japanese battle line.
It was, as naval historians were later to write, the classic, time-honored attack by the hornets of the sea, the destroyers. The small ships, vulnerable to a hit from a gun of almost any caliber, roared in to the attack, loosing their torpedoes, their small deck guns barking at the huge battleships and the enemy’s larger destroyers.
The first salvo of torpedoes slammed into the battleship Fuso, cruising a kilometer behind the Yamashiro. The Fuso turned out of the battle line as its crew fought raging fires below decks. No one told Vice Admiral Nishimura that the Fuso had been hit and was no longer in the battle line. Nishimura plowed forward, not even bothering to order evasive tactics for his ships.
The first wave of attacking destroyers peeled off and made room for the main destroyer attack. The destroyers, their thin hulls vibrating heavily as their engines drove the ships through the seas at thirty knots or more, charged in at the Japanese ships. As the attack developed, as destroyer after destroyer, funnels belching black smoke, torpedoes lancing into the air from the deck tubes to drop in the water and race toward the Japanese ships, guns blazing, raced in, Nishimura knew he had erred. A torpedo hit his flagship and slowed it for a few moments. The Japanese destroyer Yamashiro was hit and blown apart by the American torpedoes. A torpedo hit the Asagumo’s bow and blew the entire bow away, but that ship’s captain, a doughty seaman, reversed his engines and began to steam backward to keep the sea from caving in the thin bulkheads back of the missing bow. He managed to reverse course 180 degrees and steamed toward the attacking American destroyers stern first, his deck guns firing.
At 0330 Nishimura broke radio silence to say that he was under heavy attack by American destroyers, that he had lost two of his destroyers but would continue to press home his attack. At this point in the developing battle Vice Admiral Nishimura still did not know that his other battleship had been hit, was, in fact, exploding internally with such massive force that the Fuso was broken into two huge pieces, each of which floated, burning brightly. Nishimura steamed straight ahead, preceded by two destroyers and followed by the heavy cruiser Mogami.
There is a classic naval strategy for war on the high seas that is known as “Crossing the T.” The concept calls for catching the enemy battle fleet steaming in a straight line. The objective at that point is to cross the top of that straight line with one’s own battle fleet, to cross the “T.” The advantage, an enormous advantage, lies with the ships that cross the T; those ships can bring their entire broadsides to bear on the line of ships advancing toward them. The ships that make up the vertica
l bar of the letter T can fire only their forward guns.
The last time this maneuver had been successfully carried out was in 1905 when Admiral Togo succeeded in crossing the T against a Russian battle fleet in the Battle of Tshushima Strait, just north of Japan. Now, 39 years later, Vice Admiral Nishimura was unwittingly advancing into trouble.
Lying in wait halfway up Leyte Gulf was the greatest concentration of naval fire power ever assembled in one body of water. The four heavy and four light cruisers were the lightweights of the force. Just north of the cruisers there were six battleships, leisurely steaming from west to east across the Gulf of Leyte. Two of those battleships, the U.S.S. California and the U.S.S. West Virginia, had been torpedoed and sunk on December 7, 1941, at Pearl Harbor. Three of the others, the Maryland, the Tennessee, and the Pennsylvania had also been hit and damaged in the attack on Pearl Harbor. Now, in company with the U.S.S. Mississippi, the five battleships, their officers and crews thirsting for revenge, waited, cruising slowly, the cross bar of the classic T as Nishimura steamed toward them.
As the destroyers finished their attacks and hauled off to the sides, the heavy and light cruisers began to bark at the Japanese fleet. Nishimura answered with his auxiliary batteries and one or two salvos from his forward turrets.
At 0351 on the morning of October 25, 1944, the radar screens in the American battleships showed the enemy line of ships to be 21,000 yards distant — 11.9 miles.
The order was given to open fire. In a matter of eighteen minutes the six battleships fired over 3,200 rounds of fourteen-and sixteen-inch shells toward the Japanese ships.
Vice Admiral Nishimura, his flagship Yamashiro still afloat despite the terrible volume of heavy shells that had been poured into the ship, ordered the ship’s captain to turn so he could bring his main battery to bear against the American ships. The Yamashiro made the turn and capsized. Almost all of the crew, including Vice Admiral Nishimura, drowned in the dark water.
The heavy cruiser Mogami, staggering under the impact of heavy shells hitting the ship, showed its teeth. It opened fire on every target its gunners could see, and as it turned to make its escape it fired torpedoes toward the American ships.
A salvo of heavy shells hit the Mogami’s bridge, blowing it completely off the ship, killing the commanding officer and his entire staff. The Mogami slowed and stopped, afire above decks and below. Somehow the Mogami’s crew got the fires under control and repaired extensive damage in the ship’s engine rooms and got the ship under way, steering with a jury rig. With no navigator, and with hardly any officers left alive, the ship moved south away from the merciless rain of shells. The Mogami was to survive for another five hours. At 0900 of that day the Mogami came under heavy air attack, and its crew, gallant men by any standards, abandoned ship.
Meanwhile, Vice Admiral Shima’s Second Southern Force was steaming toward Leyte Gulf to carry out its assignment of sweeping up any American ships that had escaped Nishimura’s attack. This force, consisting of two heavy and one light cruiser and nine major destroyers, came under attack by the dauntless PT boats. The light cruiser Abukuma was hit by one torpedo and forced to drop out of formation. Vice Admiral Shima, operating in an informational vacuum — he had heard nothing from Vice Admiral Nishimura since Nishimura had reported he was under attack from destroyers — decided that discretion was the order of the day and ordered his Second Southern Force to reverse course and head back toward Borneo.
The battle of Surigao Strait, except for some mopping up, was over. Rear Admiral Jesse B. Oldendorf, USN, had pulled off the ultimate maneuver of naval warfare between heavy capital ships. He had crossed the enemy’s T and in eighteen short minutes had smashed an enemy battle fleet to bits.
There was no one sleeping aboard the Eelfish as it raced through the western reaches of the Sea of Mindanao on that night. Elmer Rafferty, the ship’s leading radioman, tuned in on the battle radio circuit of the American fleet in the Gulf of Leyte and patched the circuit into the Eelfish’s 1-MC system, the ship’s internal communication system. The off-duty crewmen clustered in the two torpedo rooms and the Crew’s Mess. They heard the first reports from the PT boats when they sighted the destroyers in the van of the Japanese battle force, heard their exultant messages as they hurled their fragile little torpedo boats against the larger ships.
“Fucking PT boat sailors,” Fred Nelson growled in the After Torpedo Room. “They can’t shoot torpedoes worth a damn! We should be there, damn it! All they’ll do is get their asses shot off. Fuckers!” He turned and faced the people in his torpedo room.
“But give ‘em marks for guts. Lots of guts.”
There was silence on the radio circuit after the PT boat attacks, and then the Eelfish crew heard the crisp orders from the first destroyers as they moved to the attack, heard the sharp commands to make smoke, to attack, and then the laconic reports that torpedoes had been fired, that hits had been made.
“Sounds like the little boys got in a good torpedo attack,” John Olsen said as he and Mike Brannon stood in the Control Room looking at a chart of Leyte Gulf. The radio crackled again with the word that the main destroyer attack was beginning.
“Holy cow!” Brannon muttered. “That first tin-can attack was only for openers. Now they’re throwing a lot of tin cans in. You can’t even make sense out of the orders, there are so many of them reporting.” He listened as destroyer after destroyer reported that it was going in to attack. A cheer went up from the crewmen in the Crew’s Mess and the torpedo rooms when a report came in of a hit on a battleship, that two destroyers of the Japanese force had been hit and sunk.
“That was our damned battleship,” Brannon growled. “We had that bastard in the periscope and within five thousand yards and we couldn’t attack! Damn, damn, damn!”
A burst of static blurred the order from Rear Admiral G. L. Weyler for the main battle line to open fire with broadsides against the Japanese. Seconds later, clear as a bell, came the report from the U.S.S. West Virginia that it was commencing broadside fire at a range of 21,000 yards, followed by similar reports from five other battleships.
“That’s it,” Brannon said quietly. “They must have the Japs in a box. Six battleships firing broadsides? My God, no fleet in the world can stand up to that sort of firepower!”
Eighteen minutes later the order to cease fire came. Mike Brannon lifted a telephone off the bulkhead and spoke to the crew.
“From what we heard, what all of us heard, I conclude that a major sea battle has been fought up in Leyte Gulf. My interpretation of what we’ve heard is that with six of our battleships firing broadsides for twenty minutes and then being ordered to cease fire the Japanese fleet we sighted the other day must either be destroyed, or what’s left of it is in full retreat.
“We heard no reports of any of our ships taking any hits, so the odds are that the battle is over, but if we’re lucky, if there are any ships left in that Japanese fleet we picked up in the Sulu Sea, maybe we can get them.” He put down the telephone and motioned to Jim Michaels.
“I want a constant radar search, Jim. If anything did get away I want to go after it.”
A few hours later, just before dawn, the Eelfish radar reported a multiple contact. Eelfish tracked, heading toward the contact at top speed, and got off a contact report. But Admiral Shima’s Second Southern Force, then in full retreat toward Borneo, was moving too fast for the submarine to catch up.
The report from the Eelfish bore fruit. On the morning of October 27, 1944, Admiral Shima’s ships were found by 44 bombers from the Fifth and Thirteenth Army Air Forces, based at Noemfor and Biak. The light cruiser Abukuma, hit earlier by a torpedo from a PT boat, went down in flames under the aircraft bombs. The rest of Admiral Shima’s force scattered and evaded the bombers. After two days of fruitless search the Eelfish was ordered to return to its original war patrol off Tawi Tawi. The radio message from Fremantle congratulating the Eelfish for finding the Japanese battle force that had been destroyed in Leyte
Gulf was greeted with silence by the ship’s crew.
CHAPTER 23
Ten days after Eelfish had arrived on station, orders were received to scout the port of Brunei on the northwest coast of Borneo and report on any shipping seen in the port and then return to Fremantle.
“About six hundred miles from here,” Brannon mused as he looked at the course Olsen had laid down on the chart. “Where’s Jerry Gold, I didn’t see a fuel oil report this morning. We’ve done an awful lot of running at top speed on this patrol.”
Gold came into the Wardroom minutes later, wiping his hands on a piece of rag.
“Didn’t know you wanted me, sir,” he said genially, “until the messenger came looking for me.”
“Anything wrong back there?” Brannon asked, eyeing the rag Gold was using as a towel.
“No, sir,” Gold said. “Just adding to my education in how to clean a fuel injector.”
“What’s the fuel oil situation?” Brannon asked. “I didn’t get a report this morning.”
“My fault,” Gold said with a grin. “Got it in my pocket, right here. Meant to lay it on your plate this morning but I just plain forgot.”
“We’ve got to run over to the other side of Borneo and do a look-see for Fremantle and then go home,” Olsen said.
“Can you give me an offhand guess about how much farther it is from here to there to Fremantle against how far it is from here to Fremantle?” Gold said.
Silent Sea (The Silent War Book 2) Page 29