Although the Japanese should have expected that their code materials had, by captures such as these, fallen to the Allies, they continued to make only routine obligatory changes in their code systems. It was as though, cryptologically, they had already surrendered. The changes did more to complicate the tasks of Japanese code clerks than to frustrate Allied cryptanalysts. After the June-to-August blackout in 1942, Allied codebreakers were never again shut out for more than short periods.
The new information strengthened the arsenal of intelligence the Allies brought to the next big battles. Although the Japanese warlords knew that a major new Allied fleet operation was forming up to strike them, they could only guess where the blow would fall. They were ripe for another grand deception. Air raids against their bases in the Palau islands convinced them that these would be the objective of the Allied offensive. Instead, Nimitz ordered a giant leap past the Palaus and into Guam, Saipan and Tinian, three of the main islands in the Marianas chain. While Guam was the primary objective, Nimitz directed the first attack against the more northerly island of Saipan, since possession of it would cut off Japanese air support of the garrison on Guam.
One morning the inhabitants of Saipan looked out on serene waters. The next morning they saw the front edge of an invasion fleet that totaled more than six hundred ships. The contrast with the skimpy three-carrier force the U.S. was able to scrape together for the Battle of Midway was a tribute to American productivity. The task force bearing down on Saipan included seven battleships, twenty-one cruisers, scores of destroyers and fifteen aircraft carriers. Transports carried more than 125,000 troops. The landings came on June 15, 1944, at the same time that the Allies in Europe were trying to hold on to their Normandy beachheads.
Control of the Marianas was another of those crisis points vital to both sides. Allied leaders thirsted for the strategic advantages that bases there would provide. They would bisect the supply lines connecting Japan and the Asian mainland with their strongholds in the south. An airfield on Saipan could put Japan itself within reach of America's new B-29 Superfortresses. Also, recapture of Guam would have spirit-lifting significance: it had been a U.S. possession for forty-three years before the small Marine garrison had been overwhelmed two days after the raid on Pearl Harbor.
For the Japanese, their Marianas bases were bastions of the inner defense ring to which they had withdrawn after the first wave of Allied island-hopping successes. They, too, knew that from Saipan U.S. planes would come within striking distance of their homeland, the Imperial Palace, the emperor himself. The Marianas must be held at all costs.
Even though the invasion of Saipan surprised the Japanese by its boldness, their military chiefs had been anticipating that they would have to fight battles such as this closer to home. Characteristically, their planners were not content with a purely defensive posture. They continued to ready their depleted forces for the Decisive Battle. This could come, they believed, in the next big clash between the Allied and Imperial fleets. The Japanese plan called for smashing the Allied ships in a three-phase attack. First, submarines would waylay the Allied fleet and reduce its numbers. Second, the newly organized First Air Fleet would use the islands still under Japanese control as "stationary aircraft carriers" to send land-based bombers and fighters against the Allied ships. And third, the Mobile Fleet would then sally forth to administer the coup de grâce. The plan was, of course, another variation on the strategy that had yielded the legendary success of 1904.
Once again, though, the Japanese were at the enormous disadvantage of having their plans revealed by signals intelligence. Decodes precisely spotted the locations assigned to the submarines, which were dispatched one after another by a trio of Allied destroyer escorts. One of these vessels, the USS England, made six kills in just twelve days. Further, once the Japanese plan for using the islands as stationary carriers was known, the airfields were subjected by Allied forces to incessant air and naval bombardments that destroyed many of the planes before they could go into action. Thus, two phases of the plan were neutralized before the real battle began.
Nevertheless, the Mobile Fleet, under Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa, sailed on into the Marianas, observing radio silence in order to avoid detection. The mighty new battleships Yamato and Misashi, which had been steaming south to blast the ships protecting MacArthur's invasion at Biak, were called back to join Ozawa.
Allied submarine sightings and direction-finding combined with decoded messages to keep Allied commanders informed as to when and where Yamato and Misashi and their escorts would link up with Ozawa's force, where they would refuel, and what course they would follow. The powerful additions to the Mobile Fleet were worrisome; each battleship was a behemoth the length of three football fields, protected by fourteen inches of armor plate and carrying giant 18.1-inch guns capable of hurling a 3,200-pound shell nearly thirty miles.
But the combat would feature aircraft and submarines, not battleships. On June 18, the eve of the battle, when his scout planes sighted the U.S. fleet, Ozawa felt obliged to break his radio silence and send a message to coordinate the next day's carrier- and land-based air attacks. He had no way of knowing that the Allies' preemptive air and naval bombardments had put the stationary carriers almost out of commission. Allied signal teams pounced on his broadcast and used it to gain an exact fix on his fleet's location. Admiral Spruance, in charge of the Allied task force, surmised that Ozawa, to keep his ships beyond the range of U.S. carrier aircraft, would launch his planes from well out, expecting them to land on Marianas airfields rather than return to their carriers.
There followed, on June 19 and 20, what U.S. fliers dubbed the "great Marianas turkey shoot." Inexperienced pilots flew most of Ozawa's planes, for the veterans had been shot down in earlier battles. Intelligence units aboard the U.S. warships awoke to the fact that the Japanese were using flight coordinators who, by radio, assigned targets and lectured the green pilots on how to attack. Translations of these instructions were quickly radioed to combat-hardened Hellcat pilots who gleefully agreed on their countermeasures. Of the sixty-nine planes that lifted off from Ozawa's carriers in his first wave, forty-two were lost. In addition, about fifty of the land-based planes from Guam went down. In this one day Japan's naval arm lost three-quarters of its waning stock of aircraft while doing only negligible damage to the Allied fleet.
Making matters worse for Ozawa, U.S. submarines stole in among his ships and sank two of his carriers, including Japan's newest, which he was using as his flagship.
Operating with minimal information, Ozawa presumed that many of his planes had made it to Guam rather than been shot down and would return to his carriers the next day. What came instead were hordes of Hellcats. They sank a third carrier, seriously damaged other ships and destroyed additional planes. Of four hundred aircraft with which Ozawa had entered the battle, he retreated with only thirty-five able to fly. The troops in the Marianas were left to fend for themselves.
American fly boys had enjoyed a rousing couple of days. For the marines and infantry GIs invading Saipan the story was much less buoyant. In a scenario that was becoming all too familiar, the prelanding bombardments did far less damage than the Americans had hoped, the invaders faced enemy soldiers holed up in caves carved into the island's foundation rock, progress had to come redoubt after burned-out redoubt, and the Yanks had to hold against a final sacrificial charge by soldiers emboldened by sake and beer. In planning this last attack, the Japanese commanders ordered all wounded men unable to walk and bear arms to be shot; the others hobbled into battle carrying sticks and stones because there were not enough rifles to go around. Two American divisions were all but wiped out before the hysterical charge could be stopped. Many of Saipan's civilians joined the troops and their commanders in committing suicide. Admiral Nagumo, hero of Pearl Harbor, now demoted to the command of a land-based sailor contingent, was one who died there by his own hand.
Spruance subsequently drew some criticism for not being more aggressi
ve in seeking out the Japanese fleet and sinking more of Ozawa's capital ships. He preferred to protect the invaders of Saipan and let Ozawa come to him.
The island of Tinian fell within a week. Guam was another matter. Even though the navy tried to do a better job than on Saipan, bombarding the island mercilessly for thirteen days before the troops went ashore, the battle was long and lethal. Partly this was due to geography. The largest of the islands, Guam has a mountainous core into which the defenders had burrowed with molelike energy. Also partly responsible was one of the two Japanese generals in command. Takashima Takeshi had seen the folly of suicidal charges, and he instructed his men to conduct cool, calculated forays. One of these efforts infiltrated the combat line and finally had to be stopped by an impromptu assembly of truck drivers, Seabee construction crews, headquarters troops and wounded men firing from their hospital beds. U.S. casualties in the Marianas campaign ran into the thousands, and those for the Japanese into the multithousands. The U.S. Navy added to the mayhem by sinking three more Japanese aircraft carriers and destroying seventeen submarines—losses that were confirmed by decrypts.
The mass of documents captured on the islands soon enabled Allied commanders to know almost as much about the enemy's fleet organization and order of battle as their own admirals did.
While the fighting was still going on, work was started on airfields from which the Superforts could fly. They made their first raid against Japan on November 24.
Japan's defeat in the Marianas and the initial U.S. attacks on the homeland had another important consequence. Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, architect of the empire's war effort, resigned and was replaced by the more moderate Kuniaki Koiso. It was the beginning of a rift in war attitudes that would divide Japan's leaders until the end of hostilities.
With Nimitz closing in from the east and MacArthur driving up from the south and west, the Philippines were now gripped in a giant pincers. At this point in the war the Americans under Nimitz had evolved a resourceful approach to command. For a couple of months, as in the Marianas, Admiral Spruance would head the huge Task Force 58. During this period Admiral Halsey would be preparing for the next phase, when the Allied fleet would become Task Force 38. Invasion of the island of Leyte, in the Philippines, came on Halsey's watch.
The original plan was for him to first take the islands of Peleliu and An-gaur, in the Palaus, while MacArthur invaded the Philippines' southernmost island of Mindanao. When Halsey's carrier-based planes struck at the midarchipelago island of Leyte, however, they found the defenses there surprisingly weak. He advocated leapfrogging the Palaus and Mindanao and landing directly on Leyte. The change, he argued, would advance the timetable by at least two months.
The new plan was approved—except for one detail. Nimitz was concerned about having the untamed Palaus on his flank. Over Halsey's objections he held out for subduing Peleliu and Angaur. For once Halsey was right and Nimitz was wrong. In hindsight it can be seen that the Palaus could have been left to wither as Rabaul and Truk were now withering. The cost of nearly two thousand Americans killed and more than eight thousand wounded for these conquests was too high a price to pay for the islands' limited strategic value.
Eugene B. Sledge in his memoir, With the Old Breed, has left an indelible impression of what it was like to be a raw young marine fighting for thirty days on Peleliu's chunk of coral rock so hard the soldiers couldn't protect themselves by digging holes. To have come through without being killed or wounded made him feel he "hadn't been just lucky but was a survivor of a major tragedy."
When the Palaus were overcome, even Nimitz was ready to reclaim the Philippines.
A Close Call on Leyte
By October 1944, Douglas MacArthur had taken Morotai, the northernmost island of the Molucca chain, only three hundred miles from the Philippines, without losing a man. His bypass strategy had left two hundred thousand Japanese uselessly guarding islands not chosen for assault. It was time for The General to redeem his pledge.
He had first to win out over Admiral King, who argued that the next step in the Pacific war should be against not the Philippines but the island of Taiwan. MacArthur presented his case in masterly fashion before FDR, the Joint Chiefs and operational commanders and won their authorization to capture Leyte as the opening wedge in his Philippines campaign.
Here the Japanese desperation to make a stand was redoubled. To surrender the Philippines would completely block access to their pockets of troops farther south. Defeat there would also be a stunning blow to civilian morale in the homeland. Most important, losing the Philippines would sever the Japanese pipeline to Indonesian oil and immobilize their war machine. To prevent the Americans from taking over, the military leaders were ready to commit much of their remaining ships, their aircraft and their veteran troops.
On the Allied side there was a great deal more to the plan than to stroke the ego of a vainglorious general. The Philippines were seen as an essential stepping-stone to the conquest of Japan itself. Air and naval bases there would supplement those under Nimitz's control. In the war of attrition the land and naval battles would give the vastly superior Allied forces the opportunity to eliminate more Japanese ships, planes and soldiers that would otherwise be available to defend the home islands.
Aboard his flagship, the cruiser Nashville, MacArthur headed a seven-hundred-ship, hundred-mile-long flotilla bearing two hundred thousand troops ready to carry out his carefully devised battle plan. At daybreak on October 20, the U.S. warships began their bombardment of the Leyte beaches. Heedless of the Japanese planes buzzing overhead, The General stood on the bridge observing the Higgins boats ferrying the assault troops to the landing site. In his memoir MacArthur says he went in with the third wave, but in truth the invasion was four hours old before he, his staff, the soon-to-be-restored Filipino leaders and the necessary gaggle of war correspondents and photographers descended into a barge and made for the shore. MacArthur was dressed immaculately, expecting a dry landing. Instead, a harried beachmaster was too busy directing vitally needed traffic to honor Mac's small boat's request for pier space. "Let 'em walk," he said, not knowing who " 'em" was. Trying to reach the beach, the overloaded barge grounded fifty yards from shore. Waiting only for the cameramen to precede him, MacArthur leaped into the knee-deep surf and waded in, setting up one of the war's most renowned photographs.
On the beach, with combat guns blazing in the background, he spoke into microphones and recording devices, delivering the speech he had been preparing for years: "People of the Philippines, I have returned," he said. "Rally to me."
Meanwhile the intelligence blindness of the Japanese was leading them to two calamitous blunders. The first involved Japan's diminishing supply of aircraft. Not knowing when the invasion would come, the admiral directing the defense of the Philippines ordered hundreds of land-based and naval aircraft to the islands prematurely. The planes of Halsey's fleet enjoyed another turkey shoot, destroying some five hundred aircraft before the battle for Leyte began.
Second was a grave mistake at sea. The miscalculation was triggered when Japanese land-based planes broke through the protective screens of Halsey's Third Fleet and hurled torpedoes at the U.S. ships. The returning Japanese pilots exultantly claimed great successes: the sinking of two battleships and no less than eleven carriers, with other ships severely damaged. The triumph was trumpeted on Tokyo radio, which inflated the number of carrier sinkings to nineteen. Unlike the Americans, whose Hawaii-based Estimate Section used decrypts to reduce overoptimistic reports to hard facts, the Japanese had no way to verify the actual results of the raid. Consequently, Japanese navy chiefs were convinced that the American fleet had been seriously weakened and could be defeated by an all-out attack. Assessing the Philippine seas as perhaps their last chance to win the Decisive Battle, they committed still more of their warships.
In actuality, the Japanese fliers had grossly overestimated their results. Halsey's fleet had suffered damage only to two cruisers, hardly a d
ent in so huge a force.
The American plan was for Halsey's Third Fleet to coordinate with Admiral Thomas Kinkaid's Seventh Fleet to protect the Leyte landings and perhaps to engage in a showdown if the Japanese contested them at sea. Decrypted messages assured the U.S. admirals that a showdown was exactly what their opponents had in mind.
Although the Japanese were, as ever, surprised by the Allies' choice of an island to invade, they responded quickly in two ways. One was to shift reinforcements from other islands to Leyte. The other, deriving from their belief in a severely damaged Allied naval task force, was to mount a complex series of offensive sea maneuvers meant to hammer the remaining U.S. ships from all sides.
Two straits in the Philippines gave ready access to Leyte Gulf: San Bernardino in the north and Surigao to the south. The Japanese plan was to have four different fleets converge on Leyte. Two would link up as the Southern Force and attack through Surigao. The main formation, the Center Force, under Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita, was to descend on Leyte through San Bernardino. The fourth unit, the Northern Force, made up largely of the aircraft carriers and the handful of planes Admiral Ozawa had been able to salvage from the Marianas defeat, was to sail down from Japan and offer itself as a sacrifice to lure Allied ships away from Leyte.
Except for Ozawa's decoy operation, the plan was poorly carried out. Half the Southern Force never did meet with the other half, which alone tried to run through the Surigao Strait. It was ambushed there by Kinkaid's lurking ships and was all but wiped out. Informed by decrypts, U.S. subs shadowed the approach of Kurita's Center Force and sank two of his heavy cruisers, including his flagship, and damaged a third. The next day Halsey's carrier-based planes sank the superbattleship Musashi and damaged other vessels. Kurita turned back to regroup his battered fleet.
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