A little after one o’clock on the morning of October 23, the U.S. submarines Dace and Darter spotted a large Japanese naval force off the southern end of Palawan Passage, and immediately attacked.
They fired torpedoes at three cruisers and sank two. But what they had spotted was a much bigger force than anyone imagined, including the superbattleships Yamato and Musashi—and it was headed straight for Leyte.
What was unfolding was the Japanese plan to finally defeat MacArthur by land and sea, and reverse the course of the war by decisively crushing his naval support. It involved a three-pronged thrust with the Imperial Navy’s remaining warships into Leyte Gulf. One prong, the biggest, would navigate through the San Bernardino Strait under Admiral Kurita, who would be commanding not only the Musashi and Yamato with their eighteen-inch guns, but also three other battleships, ten heavy cruisers, and more than a dozen destroyers.43
The second prong, Admiral Shoji Nishimura’s so-called Southern Force with two battleships, a heavy cruiser, and four destroyers, was to pass into the gulf through Surigao Strait. Then both forces would converge and with luck catch the Americans in their trap, crushing the Seventh Fleet and leaving Krueger’s Sixth Army stranded.
The one obstacle was what to do with the Americans’ overwhelming naval air strength, with no fewer than twelve carriers under the command of Admiral Halsey. That job fell to the plan’s third prong, Japan’s four remaining large carriers under Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa, the battered but still unbowed loser of what became known as the Marianas Turkey Shoot in the Philippine Sea in May. There was no question of engaging Halsey’s powerful force even on unequal terms: Ozawa had barely twenty planes per carrier. Instead, he was to act as bait, to allow himself to be spotted and then with luck draw Halsey’s forces far off to the north, where he would be destroyed—while Kurita and Nishimura destroyed the rest of MacArthur’s naval support.
For once, ULTRA missed the entire operation. It was American subs like the Dace and Darter, rather than the navy’s codebreakers, that ended up providing the best information on what the Japanese were up to.44
But even with the element of surprise, the Japanese plan, Sho 1, required precision coordination among three widely separated fleets, all the while evading American attacks from the air. It also required that the wily Bill Halsey and his task force commanders fall for Ozawa’s bluff. In the greatest naval battle of World War Two, the odds were against the Japanese from the start.
But by a combination of bad luck and bad decisions, the U.S. Navy would unexpectedly put victory within reach of the Japanese—and with it the doom of MacArthur’s army.
—
It was shortly after dawn on October 24 that a U.S. Navy Helldiver bomber radioed the message “Enemy in sight,” to Halsey’s flagship, the battleship New Jersey. An hour later Nishimura’s Southern Force was also spotted, and planes from the carriers Enterprise and Franklin dropped bombs and torpedoes on the Japanese ships as they steamed for the Surigao Strait. But the full devastating air attack that Nishimura expected never came. Instead, Halsey’s carriers focused their effort on Kurita’s big battleships and cruisers in the Sibuyan Sea.
Torpedo-carrying Avengers from the Intrepid scored at least four hits on the massive Musashi by midday, while the Yamato, the cruiser Myoko, and other ships took heavy hits from successive waves of dive bombers and torpedo planes. By three o’clock the one-sided battle was all but over. The Musashi was virtually dead in the water (that evening she rolled over and sank, taking more than a thousand sailors with her) and the Myoko was too badly injured to continue. Kurita ordered his ships to reverse course, and jubilant American aircrews reported back to the New Jersey that the Japanese were fleeing the scene.
With Halsey’s planes tied up farther north, it had fallen to Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet to deal with the next prong in the Japanese attack, Nishimura’s Southern Force. MacArthur, as usual, insisted on being part of the action.
Kinkaid’s plan was straightforward: to bottle up Nishimura in the Surigao Strait with his own formidable surface force, which included six battleships. Kinkaid wanted to use the Nashville to help increase the odds, but admitted he was reluctant to ask the commander in chief to give up his flagship.
“Great,” MacArthur answered. “When do we start?”
“I’m afraid you cannot come along, General,” Kinkaid answered firmly. “The Seventh Fleet is my fleet, and this is my flagship. I have to go and I cannot take the risk of your being aboard, so I shall have to ask you to transfer to another vessel if you will, right now.”
MacArthur was inclined to argue. He admitted he had never been in a major naval action and he was eager to see one. But he finally saw reason.
“You’re right,” he said with a rueful smile. “We’ll get off.”45
MacArthur and his staff transferred to Krueger’s command ship, the Wasatch, as Kinkaid and the Nashville sailed away. With six battleships and supporting cruisers, the Seventh Fleet had more than enough firepower to overwhelm Nishimura’s ill-fated fleet.
A picket line of PT boats were the first to pick up Nishimura’s approach on radar around 10:30 that night. At 12:26 A.M. Kinkaid’s battleships, led by Admiral Jesse Oldendorf, learned the Japanese were coming, and radioed Kinkaid and the Nashville with the news. By then Kinkaid and MacArthur had also learned two pieces of important news from farther up the gulf. The first was that Kurita’s force had been beaten and was headed away from Leyte.
The second was that Halsey had received confirmation around 4:40 that afternoon of a large formation of Japanese carriers and escorting vessels approaching from the north, and that after considerable deliberation, Halsey had decided to set out with his full carrier force to catch and destroy them. The Seventh Fleet could expect little or no help from his planes in the upcoming fight.
Although no American knew it, the carriers were, of course, Ozawa’s decoy fleet, and Halsey had swallowed the bait in one bull-like gulp.
—
Halsey’s departure left the Seventh Fleet exposed and helpless, just as the Japanese had hoped. Kinkaid did have at least sixteen aircraft carriers in his fleet, but they were small escort carriers called “baby flattops,” each of which carried eighteen or so planes equipped for providing air cover against troops on the ground—but certainly not enough to protect a naval armada from attack. Indeed, the thin-skinned baby flattops would themselves be sitting ducks for any big Japanese warships that got into Leyte Gulf, as would the nearly six hundred cargo and landing ships huddled together in the gulf, on which the future of the liberation of the Philippines depended.
But Halsey did assure Kinkaid by radio that a group of battleships and cruisers “will be formed as Task Force 34” to guard the San Bernardino Strait in case Kurita tried to come back. So Kinkaid’s battleships went into battle with no worries about the remainder of the fleet; even without Halsey’s carriers, they would be safe. And Nishimura’s pair of aging battleships, the cruiser Mogami, and quartet of destroyers were now sailing to their doom.
The two fleets spotted each other around 2:00 A.M. Aboard the Wasatch MacArthur watched as the night sky came alive.
“Small flashes, big flashes, lightning-like flashes, the sound of guns, and the explosions of hits,” Egeberg remembered. “[S]ome tremendous explosions, magazines going up. When one thought of the meaning of those sounds, it was horrifying.”
MacArthur was pacing, more quickly than usual, with more pipe-lighting than usual. Then they noticed small lingering lights dancing far off on the horizon, and MacArthur learned that the Japanese were using magnesium flares to illuminate the dark.
He became intensely excited. “If they’re using flares they can’t have radar,” he said, clutching his pipe, “and without radar we’ll get them in the dark. We’ll get them!”46
He was right. The West Virginia, Tennessee, California, Maryland, and Pennsylvania—all survivors of Pearl Harbor—were able to take their revenge in an almost continuous hailstorm of fourteen- and sixteen-inch shel
ls, with cruisers Louisville, Portland, and Minneapolis joining in. Admiral Nishimura went down to the bottom of Leyte Gulf with his fleet; one lone destroyer escaped.
Kinkaid and his commanders were relieved and elated. The admiral ordered one final staff meeting in the last dark hours before dawn, and turned to his chief of staff to ask if there was anything left to do.
“Admiral, I can think of only one thing,” he said. “We never directly asked Halsey if Task Force 34 is guarding San Bernardino Strait.”
“Well, let’s ask him,” Kinkaid promptly answered. A radio message went out.
IS TF 34 GUARDING SAN BERNARDINO STRAIT?
An hour passed, then another hour without an answer. Thanks to poor handling and delays, it wasn’t until 7:00 A.M. the next morning that Kinkaid got his reply. It turned his stomach to ice.
NEGATIVE TF 34 IS WITH ME PURSUING ENEMY CARRIER FORCE.
Twenty minutes after that came a frantic message with even worse news. It came from the baby flattops and destroyers guarding the landing forces in Leyte Gulf.47
They were under heavy attack from Kurita’s battleships and cruisers. It was going to take something extraordinary, possibly even a miracle, to save MacArthur’s invasion fleet.
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To his credit, MacArthur had never believed Halsey’s air support would last. “Get the Fifth Air Force up here as fast as you can,” he had told Kenney on the very day of the invasion. “I’m never going to pull another show without land based air, and if I even suggest such a thing, I want you to kick me where it will do some good.”48
The problem was airfields. After inspecting the captured field outside Tacloban, Kenney had concluded that with work it might be able to handle a group of P-38s, but nothing heavier. Dogan was no better. Until they found new strips deeper inland, MacArthur and his Sixth Army were entirely dependent on the navy for any air cover. And now, thanks to Halsey’s blunder, the bulk of that cover was gone.
As if on cue, Kurita had spent the night of the 24th regrouping his ships to continue through the San Bernardino Strait, despite their losses, and as dawn broke on the 25th they were steaming into open sea.
An alert Avenger pilot soon spotted the fleet and radioed back to Clifton Sprague, commander of FT3 or Taffy 3, the northernmost group of baby flattops. Sprague dismissed the report at once; the kid must be wrong, he decided. He must have seen part of Halsey’s carrier fleet on its way north and gotten confused. So Sprague, along with his five carriers and seven destroyers and destroyer escorts, paid no attention.
Sprague’s first indication that something was truly wrong came around 7:00 A.M., when strange, multicolored splashes began to appear around his flagship Fanshaw Bay and another escort carrier, White Plains. Sprague looked to the northwest to see, to his horror, the top masts of a large enemy fleet appearing on the horizon. The splashes had been shells from Kurita’s battleship Yamato, the yellow, green, blue, and red dye colors telling Japanese gunners where their shells were falling. Sprague’s entire task force was under direct attack from the most powerful battleship in the world, along with three other battleships and half a dozen cruisers.49
Clifton Sprague sprang into action. He ordered every ship to lay down a smoke screen to cover a hasty retreat to the southwest, while ordering his carriers to come into the wind so their planes could take off. By now shots from the battleships Kongo and Haruna were zeroing in on the carriers; one near miss on the White Plains sent men flying across the flight deck and sent one plane colliding with another, its whirring propeller slicing off the other plane’s wingtip. The carrier St. Lo suffered similar near misses, with shrapnel from the Japanese ships, still more than fifteen miles away, cutting men down on deck.
Meanwhile, a series of frantic messages went out to Halsey: Send help, we’re under attack. Sprague remembered thinking that “it did not appear any of our ships could survive another five minutes.”
Then Sprague, and MacArthur, received their miracle.
It came in the form of a sudden rain squall, which cast a heavy mist that hid the carriers from Japanese view. The Japanese continued to fire, blindly, in the direction of Taffy 3, but the squall had bought Sprague and his ships precious time to put some distance between themselves and Kurita’s battleships, and to get all their planes aloft and out of range of the Yamato and her mammoth eighteen-inch guns.
Sprague’s only real fighting ships were three destroyers—Johnston, Hoel, and Heerman—and they now swung back to take the fight to the enemy. Their cause was hopeless. They had only five-inch guns to take on the Yamato’s eighteen-inchers and Kongo’s and Haruna’s fourteen-inchers—but the sudden squall gave them time to close the gap and launch a series of torpedo attacks. One from the Johnston blew off the prow of a Japanese cruiser, the Kumano, and left her dead in the water, and while the others did little damage, they nevertheless caused the Japanese ships to swerve away from the attack, buying Sprague’s helpless carriers still more time.
All the while, Taffy 3’s planes were also trying to carry the fight to the enemy, even though most had only small general-purpose bombs and some none at all—they could still make “dry runs” over the Japanese cruisers to confuse and distract, even as tracers and antiaircraft shells swept wildly around them. Then torpedo planes from Taffy 2 arrived and had a more deadly effect, wounding and eventually sinking three of Kurita’s cruisers.50
All the same, the Americans’ odds in the battle were swiftly turning from slim to nonexistent. The carrier Kalinin Bay was on fire, destroyers Hoel and Johnston were heavily damaged although still fighting, Sprague’s own ship had sustained four hits by fourteen-inch shells but was somehow still afloat, while the White Plains, St. Lo, and Gambier Bay were constantly dodging near misses.
Then at 9:10 the next miracle happened. Admiral Kurita suddenly ordered his fleet to turn around and head back up the San Bernardino Strait.
To this day no one knows exactly why. It was true Kurita had been convinced that he was actually engaged with Halsey’s big Essex-class carriers and that he was facing a far larger and deadlier force than Taffy 3, one that could administer fierce punishment from the air if he drew too close. It was also true that his ships were now scattered across the ocean, with the Yamato trailing far behind, and would be vulnerable to any counterattack on the surface like the one that sent Nishimura and his fleet to the bottom. Or it may be that the fierce American resistance had simply stunned the Japanese commander, who had been on his feet for forty-eight sleepless hours, into a state of panic.
In any case, the order went out, and one by one the Japanese ships turned away and the shell fire ceased. “Godammit boys,” one of the signalmen on the Fanshaw Bay shouted jubilantly, “They’re getting away!” Sprague stared out in disbelief. “At best I expected to be swimming by this time,” he later wrote. “I could not believe my eyes…I could not get the fact to sink into my brain.”51
The ordeal of Task Force 3 was not over. Later that morning it became the target of a new deadly threat, Japan’s first kamikaze suicide attacks of the war. Planes screamed in and crashed into the St. Lo, setting off the bombs and torpedoes in her hold and blowing up the ship. Two other of Kinkaid’s escort carriers, Santee and Suwanee, also took kamikaze hits.
As for Task Force 3’s pilots and aircrews, their ordeal had also just begun—and MacArthur on the Wasatch was a horrified witness. They were now out of fuel and had nowhere to go. Their carriers were either under attack or, like the Gambier Bay and the St. Lo, already on fire and sinking. The planes had no choice but to crash-land on the primitive airstrip at Tacloban. MacArthur and his staff had to watch helplessly as the Hellcats and Avengers came in, more than a hundred in all, some spiraling out of control as they landed, others flipping over. A few of the staff, like Doc Egeberg, actually wept at the sight. MacArthur did not.
“There was only a look of deep sadness on his face,” Egeberg remembered, as he and the doctor gripped the rail and thought of the young airmen’s lives needlessly
sacrificed—and the terrible risk they had all run, thanks to Halsey’s carelessness.52
Yet the fact remained that the Seventh Fleet, and the landing force, were safe. And although Kurita managed to get his remaining battleships and cruisers, including the Yamato, back to home waters, the Imperial Japanese Fleet was finished as a fighting force. MacArthur would be able to complete the rest of his operations in the Philippines without interference from that quarter.
Yet MacArthur knew how close he had come to disaster, and he knew who had almost let it happen. The next night when he and his staff gathered for dinner there was considerable talk about that “stupid son of a bitch” and “that bastard Halsey.”
MacArthur slammed the table with his fist. “That’s enough,” he ordered. “Leave the Bull alone. He’s still a fighting admiral in my book.”53
And that was the end of that.
* * *
* General Yamashita, who managed to see copies of the photograph, assumed the scene had taken place back in New Guinea.
CHAPTER 23
ON TO MANILA
Mac never blamed Halsey for what had happened in the Leyte Gulf, then or later. Instead, blame “can be placed squarely at the door of Washington,” he wrote years later, and the decision to keep Halsey operating in support of, but also entirely independent from, MacArthur and SWPA. “I believe it was the first time a ground commander ever placed his complete trust in naval hands”—and that trust had been let down. Three times, MacArthur said after the war, he sent messages to Nimitz asking him to order Halsey to come back, but received no answer.1
The lesson in his mind was clear. If he couldn’t fix Washington, he could fix his own airpower. That same night Kenney dropped by and found MacArthur reading the biography of Robert E. Lee by one of his favorite historians, Douglas Southall Freeman.
“You know,” MacArthur remarked, “both Lee and Stonewall Jackson’s last words were, ‘Bring up A.P. Hill’s light infantry’ ”—the fighting force that had saved the Confederate army at Antietam and both generals relied on in a tight spot.
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