by Toland, John
6.
His prey—Task Force 38—was in reality far out of range to the north in its pursuit of Ozawa. Early that morning three American scout planes had discovered the Mobile Force, and by 8 A.M. 180 dive bombers, fighters and torpedo planes had closed in on Chitose and Zuiho. Only a handful of Japanese fighters came up to intercept. The rest of Ozawa’s planes had been sent to the Philippines to save them. Both light carriers were hit by bombs and Chitose began to sink. Then a bomb exploded in the forward engine room of the destroyer Akizuki, and a torpedo drove into the flagship, Zuikaku.
There were no fighters to oppose the second wave. Through heavy flak the thirty-six planes converged on the fourth carrier, Chiyoda. Bombs exploded along her deck and, aflame, she assumed a sharp list. Ozawa’s flagship could still navigate at 20 knots, but her rudder was damaged and communications were out. Ozawa, who had had to be dragged off the stricken Taiho at the Battle of the Philippine Sea, abandoned Zuikaku without protest. There was no honor involved. He had accomplished his purpose and given Kurita his chance to destroy the amphibious shipping in Leyte Gulf.
Halsey’s arbitrary actions the day before had left a worried Admiral Kinkaid in the gulf. He tried to confirm his impression that an emergency battle line—the newly created Task Force 34 under Admiral Lee—had been formed in front of San Bernardino Strait, but received no reply for more than two and a half hours. And when Halsey’s answer finally arrived it jarred him—Task Force 34 was with the carriers engaging Ozawa!
By this time Kurita’s fleet had hit Taffy 3, and Kinkaid replied with a plea for help: URGENTLY NEED BBS [battleships] LEYTE GULF AT ONCE.
Halsey’s reaction was one of annoyance. It wasn’t his job to protect the Seventh Fleet; he was carrying out a more important mission, attacking the main carrier force of the enemy. The best he could do was order Mitscher’s fourth task group, which was still hundreds of miles to the east, to head for Leyte.
In the meantime Kinkaid (“I’ve had to fight my temper all my life”) had sent Halsey another message with details of the powerful force that seemed certain to crush Taffy 3: … REQUEST LEE COVER LEYTE AT TOP SPEED X REQUEST FAST CARRIERS MAKE IMMEDIATE STRIKE.
This double request irritated Halsey. He had already done as much as he could and was in the middle of his own battle. Twenty-two minutes later Halsey received still another radio from Kinkaid:
… REQUEST IMMEDIATE AIR STRIKE X ALSO REQUEST SUPPORT BY HEAVY SHIPS X MY OBBS [the old battleships which had bombarded Nishimura] LOW IN AMMUNITION.
This was “a new factor, so astonishing” that Halsey found it hard to accept. Why hadn’t Kinkaid informed him of this earlier? Halsey replied that he was “still engaging enemy carriers” and had already sent the fourth task group of five carriers and four heavy cruisers to Kinkaid’s assistance.
Little more than half an hour later yet another desperate message came from Kinkaid, this one not even in code:
WHERE IS LEE X SEND LEE
In Pearl Harbor, Nimitz was following the trials of Taffy 3, and like Kinkaid, he assumed that Task Force 34 had been detached to guard San Bernardino Strait the previous night. Now he, too, asked Halsey where that phantom task force was. A communications ensign added padding to confuse enemy decoders at the beginning and end of the message:
TURKEY TROTS TO WATER GG FROM CINCPAC … X WHERE IS RPT [repeat] WHERE IS TASK FORCE THIRTY-FOUR RR THE WORLD WONDERS
This dispatch reached Halsey’s flagship, New Jersey, a moment after Kinkaid’s message in the clear. The typist, Burton Goldstein, realized that TURKEY TROTS TO WATER was padding and omitted it, but THE WORLD WONDERS, despite the RR which set it off, sounded so plausible that he figured it might be a part of the text itself. So did his superior, a lieutenant, and the message was relayed to the bridge.
Infuriated by the words THE WORLD WONDERS (“as if I had been struck in the face”), Halsey slammed his cap to the deck. Carney grabbed him by the arm and said, “Stop it! What the hell’s the matter with you? Pull yourself together!”
Fuming, Halsey showed him the dispatch. How could Chester Nimitz have sent “such an insult”? He ordered one of Mitscher’s carrier groups to head south while the other two continued the attacks on Ozawa.
A third strike of more than two hundred planes at 1:10 P.M. set both Zuikaku and Zuiho afire. The latter steamed off at full speed, but Zuikaku gradually heeled over until the flight deck was awash. At 2:07 the big ship, which had survived so many battles, slid under. Mitscher’s fourth wave, small like the second, concentrated on Ise and Zuiho. The rugged converted battleship managed to escape, but Zuiho, mortally wounded, was sent under.
It was the end of Ozawa’s carriers. Three were at the bottom and the fourth, Chiyoda, was dead in the water. Ozawa had decoyed Halsey to the north but the shipping in Leyte Gulf remained intact. His sacrifice had been in vain.
Ten minutes after Kurita made his decision to turn away from Leyte Gulf, he was attacked by seventy fighters and Avengers from Taffy 3. Tone and Nagato were each hit by bombs but the fleet continued to search for the enemy carriers. Two more air attacks (147 sorties in all from Mitscher’s still-distant fourth task group) did no damage, but Kurita was more certain than ever that his target was close by. All afternoon he pressed the search but found nothing; neither did he hear from Ozawa. By 6 P.M. he had steamed all the way back to San Bernardino Strait. There he patrolled with instructions from Combined Fleet to engage in a night battle if possible.
But the First Striking Force was low on fuel, and since no reports of enemy carriers had come in, Kurita reluctantly ordered a retirement. At 9:25 P.M. the remnants of the once mighty fleet found its way through the dark, dangerous waters of San Bernardino Strait.
The desperate plan to devastate shipping in Leyte Gulf had resulted in catastrophic losses: four carriers, three battleships, six heavy cruisers, three light cruisers and ten destroyers. About 300,000 tons of combat shipping had been sunk, more than a quarter of all Japanese losses since Pearl Harbor. Never again would the Imperial Navy play more than a minor role in the defense of the homeland.
* Halsey later told the author Theodore Taylor, “I wish that Spruance had been with Mitscher at Leyte Gulf and I had been with Mitscher in the Battle of the Philippine Sea.”
† There is no confirmation of this incident from American sources. It was related by Admiral Shima.
‡ In 1570 a Mongol emperor set sail for Japan with an invasion fleet. It looked as if Japan would easily be conquered, but a typhoon dispersed the Mongol ships. Convinced that the typhoon had been called up by the gods, the Japanese named it kamikaze, “divine wind.”
The first Navy kamikaze was Rear Admiral Masafumi Arima. He took off from Clark Field on October 15, during the Formosa battle, intent on crashing his bomber into a carrier, but was shot down before he reached any American ship. The first kamikaze attack, however, had come a month earlier. On the evening of September 12 a group of Army pilots of the 31st Fighter Squadron located on Negros Island decided on their own to launch a suicide attack the following morning. Two were selected—First Lieutenant Takeshi Kosai and a sergeant. Captain Tatsumaru Sugiyama, one of the fifty aviation experts who had plotted to assassinate Tojo, was in charge of maintenance. He rigged 100-kilogram bombs on two fighter planes, and an hour before dawn the two pilots took off, determined to crash into carriers. They never returned. Apparently they, like Arima, were shot down before reaching a target, since there is no record on September 13 of an enemy plane ramming into an American ship.
§ “The destruction of enemy carriers was a kind of obsession with me, and I fell victim to it.” Kurita told author Masanori Ito in a unique interview after the war. “As I consider it now, my judgment does not seem to have been sound. Then the decision seemed right, but my mind was extremely fatigued. It should probably be called ‘a judgment of exhaustion.’ I did not feel tired at the time, but having been under great strain and without sleep for three days and nights, I was drained both physically
and mentally.”
The admiral refused to be interviewed for this book but consented to let Admiral Koyanagi speak for him. “I think now we should have gone into Leyte Gulf,” he said. “So does Admiral Kurita. Then we thought we were doing the best thing but now, with a cool head, I realize we were obsessed by enemy task forces. Just because we got the report—and it turned out to be false—that there was a fleet of enemy carriers nearby, we shouldn’t have set out after them.”
If Kurita had continued on to Leyte Gulf, he would first have encountered Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet and then undergone a series of air attacks in confined waters. There was considerable shipping in the gulf—including twenty-three LST’s and twenty-eight Liberty ships—but what if all these had been sunk? Most of the supplies had been landed, as Kurita had guessed, and there was on shore enough for a month’s military operations. MacArthur claimed that loss of these ships would have “placed in jeopardy” the entire invasion. Still aboard were most of the steel landing mats for the airstrips, and without these he could have lost local air superiority temporarily. Also, a naval bombardment on American troops might have wreaked momentary havoc. Nevertheless, it is doubtful that MacArthur’s advance would have been delayed more than a week or so.
23
The Battle of Breakneck Ridge
1.
Admiral Kurita’s defeat on October 25 meant the virtual isolation of the Philippines but General Sosaku Suzuki, who was in charge of the defense of the central islands, had never been more confident. No American had flown over his headquarters island, Cebu, that day—confirmation that enemy air power had been crushed over Formosa. About noon optimistic reports of Kurita’s battle off Samar began coming in: a number of American carriers had been sunk; Yamato and other battleships were raiding Leyte Gulf.
“General Tomochika,” he told his chief of staff, “we are about to step on the center of the stage. There is no greater honor or privilege. We don’t even need all the reinforcements they are sending us.” Two units were coming from Luzon: the 1st Division would land at Ormoc, on Leyte’s west coast, while the 26th Division landed at the port of Carigara, in the north. The two forces would merge and retake Tacloban in ten days.
Of this Suzuki had no doubt; his concern was that MacArthur might try to surrender only his local forces, as Wainwright had done after the fall of Corregidor. “We must demand the capitulation of MacArthur’s entire forces, those in New Guinea and other places as well as the troops on Leyte.”
Suzuki’s “air superiority” would not last long. That night, steel matting for the strips on Leyte was off-loaded but the laying on the following day was hampered by air raids and heavy rains. By nightfall every field was a quagmire. The engineers worked doggedly through the night of the twenty-seventh, and put down the last section on the Tacloban strip soon after dawn in time to welcome P-38’s of the Fifth Air Force. One cracked up, but the other thirty-three landed safely.
Under persistent attacks by the U.S. 7th Division, the Japanese had retreated across the coastal plain all the way to Dagami. General Makino ordered the rear guard of his 16th Division to hold the town while the main body fell back to the foothills of the mountain range running down the island.
To the north the U.S. 24th Division was also driving west steadily. Their goal was Jaro, like Dagami at the foothills of the mountains. Held up by stiffening resistance and a river, the first GI’s finally broke into the town on October 29 and turned up Highway 2—a twelve-foot-wide road with a crushed-rock and gravel surface—toward Carigara.
Poor communications continued to plague Suzuki. There were only fragmentary reports that the Americans were pushing north. He was, moreover, still ignorant of the debacle at sea. That afternoon Major Shigeharu Asaeda, General Yamashita’s operations officer, flew into Cebu from Manila with more good news: the 1st Division would land at Ormoc a few days ahead of schedule, along with a battalion of the 26th Division.
Asaeda did not enlighten Suzuki about the situation confronting him. Suzuki was an able man but too honest and naïve; if he thought he was going to win he would fight much better. Asaeda, therefore, promised Suzuki continued reinforcements that he knew would never be sent, or if sent, could never arrive intact because of America’s overwhelming air superiority. Suzuki had no chance to win, but why burden him with the truth? There was a saying: “The blind man fears no snake.”
On the morning of November 1, eleven thousand men of the 1st Division left Manila in a driving rainstorm in four large transports escorted by six destroyers and four coastal defense ships. The 1st, also known as Gem Division, was an elite unit established in 1874 which had seen duty in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars. That summer it had been detached from the Kwantung Army and alerted for duty against the Americans. It had gone from northern Manchuria by rail to Shanghai, where it was trained as an emergency force.
En route to Leyte, company commanders explained to their men what lay ahead. On Takatsu-maru Lieutenant Minetoshi Yahiro told his platoon leaders that Americans had landed in force on Leyte and one division was heading for Carigara. Gem Division was to stop it. “We have long been preparing for this day. The hour has come when we must use all our training and skills.”
Soon after sunset the throbbing noise of the engines stopped and the troops, jammed snugly in tiers of bunks, heard the clatter of chains as anchors plunged down. They had arrived at Ormoc, on Leyte. Orders were shouted; the men, their filthy uniforms crawling with lice, disentangled themselves and started up steep iron ladders to the upper decks out of stifling holds, foul with the stench of bodies.
Corporal Kiyoshi Kamiko, one of Yahiro’s squad leaders, gulped in the fresh tropical air. Overhead, stars were bright pinpoints; the sea was calm. He had been a primary-school teacher before being conscripted just after Pearl Harbor. Determined and idealistic, he had enjoyed the years of training in Manchuria, accepting most of the brutalities of noncoms as necessary conditioning. He liked the comradeship of the Army, the feeling that each man depended on the next. Like the other men of Gem Division he was eager to prove himself in battle and do his duty for Japan and the Emperor.
The frightening but exhilarating rumble of distant guns came over the water. To remember the moment, Kamiko looked at his watch in the starlight. It was seven-thirty. Rope ladders tumbled over the sides of the transports, and the men, each weighed down with ninety pounds of equipment, swung awkwardly over the rail. At a flashlight signal from below, Kamiko leaped clumsily into a gently pitching boat. He landed on his back and finally realized why they had been instructed to remove their heavy ammunition belts.
On shore General Tomochika was anxiously observing the landing. He had preceded Suzuki to Leyte, to be greeted by the dismaying report that Makino’s entire 16th Division was close to collapse. He stepped forward to meet Lieutenant General Tadasu Kataoka, commander of Gem Division, and his staff. “The First Division,” he told them, “will proceed with the greatest possible speed along the Ormoc–Limon–Carigara road [Highway 2] and assemble to the area southeast of Carigara and prepare to attack.”
Being a cavalry officer, Kataoka looked for the unexpected. What if they were attacked before they reached Carigara in the mountains near Limon?
“Proceed to Carigara,” Tomochika answered. The possibility was ridiculous. “There’s nothing to worry about.”
“Is that so?” Kataoka remarked, but without sarcasm. He asked no more questions.
Yahiro Company settled down in a coconut grove, waiting for the rest of their regiment, the 57th, to come ashore. They began digging takotsubo (octopus traps), four and a half feet deep. The dugouts had a lateral scoop at the bottom where a man could huddle during a bombardment. In cross section a takotsubo looked like a Christmas stocking.
Sweat stung their eyes, and their shirts were plastered to their backs, but the warm air was preferable to the harsh winds of Manchuria. To the east the sky bloomed a pinkish glow with the unreal dawn of an exotic travel poster. The war seemed
far away. Then came a distant buzzing. Someone shouted “Take shelter!” and the men leaped into their holes. The buzzing became a roar. Bombers approached in relentless formation, seeming invincible even when engulfed in black balls of ack-ack explosions.
Bombs from the planes—they were B-24’s from Morotai—began to tumble toward the transports, which were still disgorging men and matériel. Zero fighters were suddenly all over the bombers, which continued sedately on course. Three Zeros burst into flames simultaneously, arching toward the ground like comets. A second wave of bombers followed shortly, their silver wings glinting in the sun.
A string of bombs fell in a great parabola toward the transport Noto-maru. One bomb disappeared in the smokestack. There was a dull detonation, followed by a chain of muffled blasts. The ship’s whistle began to blow mournfully and without stopping. Helpless, Colonel Yoshio Miyauchi, commander of the 57th Regiment, watched the ship he and his troops had just left. He knelt on the beach and prayed, then wandered aimlessly toward the pier. His trucks, horses and most of his ammunition were on the burning ship. General Tomochika told the dazed colonel to get his men on the road to Carigara as soon as possible. He was to follow a small advance group which had left hours earlier. The division commander, General Kataoka, had already started up Highway 2 with two platoons, and Miyauchi, accompanied by an aide, now set out north on foot to regain his composure.
His regiment didn’t start moving out of Ormoc until after midnight. They marched through the night strung out for miles along the narrow highway—unlike their commander, eager for battle. They were unaware of the significance of the sinking of Noto-maru.
In the dim light of early dawn—it was November 3—the advance group, under Major Yoshio Imada, was approaching Carigara. It unexpectedly encountered GI’s of the 24th Division coming the other way. There was a brief fire fight and Imada retreated into the hills south of Highway 2.