The Admirals

by Walter R. Borneman

  Halsey had already radioed McCain in TF 38.1 to expedite his return to the Leyte vicinity and launch air attacks when within range of Kurita’s forces. But that might not be enough. For about an hour, Halsey stewed about his own course of action with the remainder of Task Force 38, including the battleships and cruisers that were to have formed the phantom Task Force 34.

  To the north of Halsey’s onrushing ships, four of Ozawa’s carriers and their escorts of the Japanese Northern Force had come under attack from Mitscher’s carrier planes, and in less than two hours they would be within range of the 16-inch guns of the Iowa and New Jersey. It had all the makings of the great sea battle between fleets that both sides had long anticipated. But it was also clear that the main Japanese battleships were with Kurita outside San Bernardino Strait and that if TF 34 had formed a battle line there as Oldendorf had done off Surigao Strait, a similar battleship encounter would have occurred.

  At 11:15 a.m. on October 25, Halsey reluctantly gave the order to his selected battleships to form Task Force 34 and join with the carriers of Bogan’s TF 38.2 to turn 180 degrees and race south to support the efforts of Kinkaid’s escort carriers off Samar Island. Mitscher, with TF 38.3 and 38.4, was to continue north and use his airpower to finish off the Japanese carriers of Ozawa’s force—all of them now mostly without aircraft.

  Halsey told Kinkaid not to expect his arrival until 8:00 a.m. the next day, but even when Halsey charged ahead with Iowa and New Jersey at nearly 30 knots and arrived seven hours before that, he was too late. Determined resistance and heroic sacrifice by the American CVEs and their escorts had led to a cautionary withdrawal by Admiral Kurita just when full speed ahead might have been called for. The escort carriers Gambier Bay and St. Lo were lost, along with the destroyers Johnston and Hoel and destroyer escort Samuel B. Roberts, which made valiant covering torpedo attacks, but the remainder of Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet and the Leyte beachhead were safe.37

  After the war, Kurita explained that “lack of expected land-based air support and air reconnaissance, fear of further losses from air attack, and worry as to his fuel reserves induced him to withdraw.” His American interviewers concluded, “As a result of this decision to retire, the Japanese failed to secure the objective for which catastrophic losses had been risked and suffered by the other two Japanese forces.”38

  The bulk of Kurita’s Center Force, including the battleship Yamato, slipped back through San Bernardino Strait before Halsey could arrive. The planes of Bogan’s TF 38.2 and McCain’s oncoming TF 38.1 hounded their westward voyage the next day, but once again there was to be no battleship-against-battleship encounter.

  If the Battle of the Philippine Sea had been a major American victory with some controversy, the Battle of Leyte Gulf proved more so on both counts. It was indeed a major American victory, perhaps the greatest ever fought by the United States Navy. From the first torpedo attacks by Darter and Dace to Mitscher’s attacks against the Northern Force carriers—what would be called the Battle of Cape Engaño—and Oldendorf’s deft battle line at Surigao Strait, Japanese losses totaled twenty-six combatant ships: three battleships, one large carrier, three light carriers, six heavy cruisers, four light cruisers, and nine destroyers—a staggering 305,710 tons. Against this, the Americans lost one light carrier (Princeton), two escort carriers, two destroyers, and one destroyer escort, a total of 36,600 tons.39

  By any measure, it was a victory that reduced the Japanese navy to home-water operations by survivors such as the Yamato and increasingly desperate kamikaze strikes. But could Halsey have accomplished even more? The criticism of Spruance’s tentativeness off Saipan was nothing compared to the controversy that now descended on Bill Halsey. Against the steadied calm of Oldendorf at Surigao and the finesse of Mitscher’s carrier operations, Halsey was seen to be racing first north and then south without directly engaging the enemy.

  Halsey’s immediate reaction and his enduring belief were to declare a massive victory and move on. Publicly, Nimitz and King did the same. Roosevelt even rushed the news of the victory to the press before all the details were known—no doubt wanting to announce so sweeping a result before the November 7 presidential election, but also because MacArthur, in typical fashion, had jumped ahead with his own premature press release of victory and forced the navy’s hand.

  Privately, it was a different story. On the evening of October 25, even as he raced back south in the New Jersey, Halsey sent Nimitz, MacArthur, Kinkaid, and King a top secret message justifying his actions. When searches by carrier planes located the Northern Force, it completed the picture of all enemy naval forces, Halsey maintained, and “to statically guard San Bernadino Straits until enemy surface and carrier air attacks could be coordinated would have been childish.” Halsey stressed his belief that the Center Force “had been so badly damaged” in the Sibuyan Sea that it could no longer be considered a serious menace to the Seventh Fleet. In proof of that, Halsey offered up Oldendorf’s victory at Surigao, neatly forgetting that it had been against only the southern prong of the triple Japanese attack.40

  Three days later, Nimitz passed his own thoughts on to King in a letter marked both “Personal” and “Top Secret.” He was “greatly pleased” with the fleet operations of the past week, Nimitz told King, with two exceptions. The first was the use of the cruiser Birmingham, instead of a destroyer, to come alongside the burning carrier Princeton. A huge explosion aft on the carrier’s flight deck had decimated the upper decks of the Birmingham. Then there was the matter of Task Force 38. “It never occurred to me,” Nimitz told King, “that Halsey, knowing the composition of the ships in the Sibuyan Sea, would leave San Bernardino Strait unguarded, even though the Jap detachments in the Sibuyan Sea had been reported seriously damaged. That Halsey feels that he is in a defensive position is indicated in his top secret dispatch 251317 [quoted above].”41

  But Nimitz was very careful not to criticize Halsey in any way or to allow even a hint of controversy to enter the official records. He well remembered the uproar during his days at Annapolis over the actions of Sampson and Schley at the Battle of Santiago during the Spanish-American War, and he wasn’t about to condone even a whisper of criticism tarnishing such a stunning victory. Such criticism would come, of course, and be fought by Halsey for the rest of his life, but it would come from historians and armchair observers, not from Halsey’s direct superiors.

  When the initial draft of CINCPAC’s battle report sharply questioned Halsey’s tactics, Nimitz sent the draft back to its author with this note: “What are you trying to do, [Captain Ralph] Parker, start another Sampson-Schley controversy? Tone this down. I’ll leave it to you.”42

  King said very little about the entire Leyte affair in his memoirs, other than to question why Kinkaid had not done a better job on his own of air reconnaissance of the Center Force. By then, he and Halsey were once again exchanging “Dear Bill” and “Dear Ernie” letters, passing on war cartoons of themselves that the other might not have seen.43

  But when Halsey and King first met after the battle the following January, Halsey’s opening words to King were, “I made a mistake in that battle.”

  King didn’t want to hear it. He held up his hand and said, “You don’t have to tell me anymore. You’ve got a green light on everything you did.”

  In Halsey’s mind, however, his mistake was not in leaving San Bernardino Strait unguarded, but in turning Task Force 38 around just before it could engage the Japanese carrier forces in a surface action—“my golden opportunity,” Halsey had termed it in his October 25 message.

  “No. It wasn’t a mistake,” concluded King. “You couldn’t have done otherwise.”44

  But at the time, King was as anxious as Nimitz to know about Halsey’s dispositions off San Bernardino Strait. COMINCH monitored the radio traffic that proposed forming Task Force 34, noted that an “Execute” had never been heard, but assumed that “one had been sent by a means we were not covering and we turned in that night feeling se
cure about a guard on San Bernardino Strait.” When King’s staff intercepted Nimitz’s “Where is…” query, they were “as amazed as Nimitz the next morning to find this was not so.”45

  So, too, was Douglas MacArthur, who ranted and raved throughout the uncertainty of the CVE battle off Samar that Halsey had failed “to execute his mission of covering the Leyte operations” and “should be relieved” because MacArthur no longer had confidence in him.46 But in public, with both his Leyte beachhead and a major naval victory secure, MacArthur closed ranks just as the navy had done and heaped praise on Halsey. That did not stop some of MacArthur’s staff from criticizing Halsey’s actions, until one evening at dinner MacArthur himself pounded his fist on the table. “That’s enough,” the general commanded. “Leave the Bull alone. He’s still a fighting admiral in my book.”47 MacArthur, loyal to a fault, was standing by one who had stood by him.

  Nimitz faced his own dinnertime criticism of the Leyte command decisions, and it came from an impertinent source. During a cocktail hour discussion of the battle with his senior staff the day after Halsey’s sprint back to San Bernardino Strait, a young lieutenant commander who had been invited as a guest expressed surprise that Nimitz had not queried the location—or even the existence—of Task Force 34 much earlier.

  Later, when the discussion turned to Nimitz’s operational orders to take every opportunity to engage and destroy the enemy fleet, the same lieutenant commander asserted that Nimitz had practically given Halsey “carte blanche to abandon the beachhead.” The room fell silent as Nimitz turned a steely gaze on this outspoken young officer, who went by the name of Chester W. Nimitz, Jr. He told his son, “That’s your opinion”—ending the discussion.48

  In the end, it was King who said of Halsey and his luck, “I should not say it but it is true. Halsey made two mistakes; not the great battle; what I had against him were the two typhoons.”49

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Two Typhoons and Five Stars

  If countries reflexively prepare to fight the last war, can commanders help but be influenced by the latest battle? Bill Halsey’s buddy Raymond Spruance had done his strategic duty in defending the amphibious landings on Saipan and in the process had still put his planes in a position to render the bulk of Japanese naval aviation—save for those who would turn to kamikaze attacks—largely impotent. But according to some critics, Spruance had missed a chance to destroy the main Japanese fleet.

  The next opportunity for destroying the Japanese fleet—even carriers whose decimated air wings rendered them largely decoys—had proved irresistible to Halsey, a dogged fighter who had missed the earlier clashes at Coral Sea and Midway. Even Halsey’s most vehement critics can understand his rationale for his actions at Leyte. Far less understandable are Halsey’s actions in not one but two crippling typhoons in the weeks and months that followed.

  After the Battle of Leyte Gulf, Halsey’s Third Fleet was called upon to provide continuing air support for MacArthur, as his “I have returned” pronouncement for a time appeared a little premature. Leyte land operations bogged down in a sea of mud and miserable monsoon-weather flying conditions. Japanese land-based aircraft on Luzon, lying to the west in a protected rain shadow, took advantage of this and repeatedly challenged American control of the air above the eastern Philippines. A major part of this effort was led by the first concerted kamikaze attacks, which momentarily upset the fighting punch of Halsey’s carriers, as well as those transports and supply ships that the Japanese targeted off the beachhead.

  Just as the Japanese navy had determined the defense of the Philippines to be a do-or-die effort, the Japanese army made a similar effort. In fact, it had managed to land two thousand reinforcements on Leyte even as the sea battles raged around it. Because many of Kinkaid’s CVEs were exhausted and short of aircraft after the Leyte Gulf fight, MacArthur requested Halsey to stay on station around the Philippines with the big carriers of the Third Fleet for another month instead of raiding Tokyo. Nimitz concurred and directed Halsey to do so. Meanwhile, Nimitz’s old shipmate from the gunboat Panay, “Slew” McCain, replaced Marc Mitscher as the commander of Task Force 38 under Halsey.

  Operating in concert around the Philippine archipelago, McCain’s carrier planes and submarines took a toll on Japanese transports and shipping to the islands, and by early December a quarter of a million American troops on Leyte had succeeded in getting the upper hand. But kamikaze raids continued to batter Halsey’s fleet. One carrier after another sustained heavy battle damage.

  McCain had enough aircraft to initiate what came to be called the big blue blanket. It gave air cover to the big blue fleet by monitoring every Japanese airfield within range and attacking the enemy’s aircraft as they took off. There were also innovations in recognition signals. Returning American aircraft did a slow flyby of picket destroyers to keep kamikazes from slipping into the landing pattern and then plunging onto a flight deck. Finally, the Third Fleet retired eastward to the anchorage at Ulithi for a well-deserved two-week rest and resupply.

  Halsey and his staff used the interval to plan their next set of operations. Their first priority was to return to the Philippines and support MacArthur’s planned invasion of Mindoro on December 15. Even as they did so, Halsey was anxious to strike westward and take operations into the South China Sea. On December 17, with commitments to MacArthur to strike Luzon on December 19, 20, and 21, Task Force 38 steamed for a refueling rendezvous some three hundred miles east of the Philippines.

  As the refueling of destroyers from the larger ships started while en route, Commander George F. Kosco, Halsey’s chief aerologist, fretted over a series of weather warnings that were both vague and at least twelve hours old. Somewhere in their part of the wide Pacific, a tropical storm was gathering strength. That noon, as Halsey joined his staff for lunch aboard the New Jersey, he got a close-up glimpse of what lay ahead.

  The destroyer Spence came alongside the big battleship’s starboard side to take on fuel. This was in the lee of the battleship and should have made for easy maneuvering. But a fluky 20- to 30-knot wind was blowing across the running sea, and it proved difficult to hold the destroyer in position. Halsey watched from his flag mess as the Spence first dropped astern and then raced ahead, only to drop astern again, all the while pitching and rolling heavily. Suddenly, the Spence yawed sharply to starboard and then twisted back to port on a collision course with the New Jersey. Halsey reflexively ducked as the destroyer’s superstructure came within feet of slamming into his flagship.1

  Kosco quickly excused himself from lunch and went to the navigation bridge to analyze the latest weather information, while Halsey himself was soon swamped with numerous reports of similar fueling difficulties throughout the fleet. Well versed in at-sea refueling though they were—a far cry from Nimitz’s early experiments during World War I aboard the Maumee—Halsey’s sailors reported hoses snapping like bullwhips and the lighter destroyers bouncing wildly with all the control of fishing bobbers.

  Finally, Halsey ordered refueling attempts to cease and set a new rendezvous location with the services group for 6:00 a.m. the next day, one hundred and fifty miles to the northwest. These decisions were made in large part on Kosco’s best guess that the storm was 450 miles to the southeast and would track north to northeast and clear the fleet to the east. Actually, it was only about 120 miles from Halsey’s position, and far from veering northward, it was doggedly following the fleet northwest on this new course.

  Halsey’s commanders followed his orders, but not all did so without questioning his sense of the weather. Captain Jasper T. Acuff, commanding the services group of oilers and support ships, conferred with the captains of two escort carriers in his group, and all three concluded that the 6:00 a.m. rendezvous would be smack in the path of what increasingly appeared to be a building typhoon. On board the new Essex-class carrier Lexington, Rear Admiral Gerald Bogan, commander of Task Group 38.2, was certain, based on his own aerologist’s report, that a typhoon wa
s forming and moving in a northwesterly direction with the fleet.2

  For some reason—probably because these subordinates assumed that Halsey had both sea sense and weather information superior to theirs—these analyses were not passed on to Kosco or the admiral himself. Instead, Halsey conferred with Kosco and, as winds continued to build, picked a second revised refueling location directly to the west. But instead of diverging at a wider angle from a storm track running north or northeast, this course took the fleet on a course generally parallel to the oncoming storm. Bogan finally radioed his frustration to McCain, the task force commander, and urged that the best chance of escape lay to the south.

  As it turned out, this second revised rendezvous location would have been better than the third location that Halsey picked late on the evening of December 17. Evidently concerned about his commitments to MacArthur to launch air raids on December 19, Halsey set course for another revised rendezvous at 7:00 a.m. on the 18th back to the north. He apparently ignored Kosco’s advice that doing so might bring the fleet right into the path of what Kosco was convinced was becoming a powerful typhoon.3

  Halsey asked McCain’s advice as to the storm’s location, but McCain merely replied that he thought the fleet should not attempt to refuel under the current conditions. Aboard the key command ships, everyone seemed to have a different opinion as to where the center of the storm was located. By 5:00 a.m. on December 18, it was in fact about ninety miles east-southeast of the New Jersey.

  Halsey finally ordered a course change to 180 degrees due south, but the delay running north had kept the fleet in the crosshairs of the advancing storm. By 8:00 a.m., McCain, with Halsey’s concurrence, ordered a momentary jog back to the northeast in yet another attempt to refuel the destroyers before turning south again, but this lapse only had the effect of holding the fleet in the storm’s path.4