There was nothing unusual about that. Pug had always had trouble conversing with Byron. His mere presence was satisfying enough. Pug did not realize that Pamela’s picture had caused an earthquake in his son. He knew it was a surprise, a disconcerting one, and he intended to explain. To get talk going again he remarked, “Say, incidentally, aren’t you the first reserve skipper in the whole submarine fleet?”
“No, three of the guys have S-boats by now, and Moose Holloway just got Flounder. He’s the first one to get a fleet boat. Of course he’s Yale NROTC from way back, and from an old Navy family. I guess being your son did me no harm.”
“You had to have the record.”
“Well, Carter Aster qualified me long ago, but I’ve not yet had a PCO cruise, and — what happened was, my skipper took sick out on station off Sibutu.” Byron was glad to fill the time with talk that stayed off his father’s personal life. “Woke up one morning in a fever and couldn’t walk, not without terrible pain. Dragged himself around for a week, taking aspirin, but then he tried an attack on a freighter and botched it. By then he obviously was so damned sick we headed straight in here instead of returning to Saipan. They’re still giving him blood tests on the Solace. He’s half-paralyzed. I thought SubPac would fly out a CO, but they sent an exec instead, and I got the orders. Floored me.”
“Talking of surprises,” said Pug, by way of leading up to Pamela, “that fellow Leslie Slote is probably a goner. You remember him?”
“Slote? Of course. He’s dead?”
“Well, that’s Pam’s information.” Pug recounted his sketchy knowledge of the parachute mission on which Slote had been lost. “How about that? Would you have figured him as a volunteer for extra-hazardous duty?”
“Do you still have Mom’s picture?” Byron said, looking at his wristwatch and pushing away his half-eaten food. “If you have, I’ll take it.”
“I have it, but not here. Let me tell you about Pamela.”
“Not if it’s a long story, Dad. I’ve got to go. What happened to you and Mom?”
“Well, son, the war.”
“Did Mom ask for the divorce so as to marry Peters? Or did you want it because of her?” Byron jerked a thumb toward the picture.
“Byron, don’t look for someone to blame.”
Pug could not tell his son the truth. On the bald facts Byron would probably absolve him and despise his mother; this hard-faced young submariner was a black-or-white moralist such as he had himself been before the war. But Pug no longer condemned Rhoda for the Kirby business, he only felt sorry for her. These nuances went with being older, sadder, and more self-knowing than Byron could yet be. His son’s silence and the rigid face made Pug very uneasy, and he added, “I know Pamela’s young. That troubles me, and the whole thing may not come off.”
“Dad, I don’t know if I’m fit for command.”
The sudden words hit Pug a hammer blow.
“ComSubPac thinks you are.”
“ComSubPac can’t look into my mind.”
“What’s your problem?”
“Possible instability under combat stress.”
“You’re cool by nature under the severest stress. That, I know.”
“By nature, maybe. I’m in an unnatural state. Natalie and Louis haunt me. Warren’s dead and I’m the one you’ve got left. Also, I’m a reserve skipper, one of the first, and that’s a hot spot. I’ve been emulating you, Dad, or trying to. I came here today hoping for a shot in the arm. Instead —” again, the thumb pointing to Pamela’s picture.
“I’m sorry that you’re taking it that way, because —”
“There’s always a shortage of aggressive COs,” Byron rode over his father, something he never did. “I rate high for aggressiveness, I know that. The trouble is, my stomach for the whole thing is dropping out. This picture” — he touched his breast pocket —"is driving me crazy. If Natalie had listened to me and risked a few hours on a French train, she’d be back home now. It doesn’t help to remember that. Nor does your divorce. I’m not in the best of shape, Dad. I can take the Barracuda back to Saipan and ask for a relief. Or I can go out on lifeguard station off Formosa as ordered, for the air strikes. What would you recommend?”
“Only you can make that decision.”
“Why? You were willing to decide my whole life for me, weren’t you? If you hadn’t pushed me into submarine school — if you hadn’t flown down to Miami the very day I proposed to Natalie, and forced the issue, with her sitting there and listening — she wouldn’t have gone back to Europe. She and my kid wouldn’t be over there now, if in fact they’re even alive.”
“I regret what I did. At the time it seemed right.”
This answer caused Byron’s eyes to redden. “Okay, okay. I’ll tell you something, it’s a bad symptom of my instability that I throw that up to you.”
“Byron, when I was in bad shape myself, I requested the Northampton. I found that command at sea made life more bearable, because it was so all-absorbing.”
“But I’m not a professional like you, and a submarine is a mortal responsibility.”
“If you return to Saipan, some aviators may drown off Formosa that you might save.”
After a silence Byron said, “Well, I’d better get back to my boat.”
They did not speak again until they were out on the warm breezy quarterdeck in a magnificent sunset, leaning side by side on the rail. Byron said as though talking to himself, “There’s something else. My exec’s an Academy man. Taking orders from me grates on him.”
“Judge him on performance at sea. Never mind how he feels.”
Below from astern came the clanging of the barge. Byron straightened up and saluted. It hurt Pug to look into his son’s remote eyes. “Good luck and good hunting, Byron.” He returned the salute, they shook hands, and Byron went down the accommodation ladder.
The barge thrummed away. Pug returned to his quarters, and found the operation order for the Formosa strike on his desk, just delivered. Concentrating on the thick pile of inky-smelling mimeographed sheets was almost impossible. Pug kept thinking that he could not survive as a functioning man the loss of Byron.
And with this strained parting, father and son headed out into the biggest fleet battle in the history of the world.
PART SEVEN
Leyte Gulf
86
THE great sea fight turned on four elements: two strategic, one geographical, one human. The fate of Victor Henry and his son now rode on these four elements, so they should be borne in mind.
The geographical element was simply the conformation of the Philippines. Seven thousand islands straggle roughly north and south over a thousand miles of ocean between Japan and the East Indies. Capture of the Philippines meant cutting off Japan from oil, metal, and food. Luzon, the northernmost and largest island, was the key to the archipelago; and Lingayen Gulf, the classic landing area on Luzon for a drive to Manila, opens northwestward into the South China Sea.
Choosing as his stepping-stone to Luzon the smaller island of Leyte far to the southeast, MacArthur planned a landing in force on the shores of Leyte Gulf; a body of water hemmed in by island masses and small islets, opening eastward into the Philippine Sea. From the east, the American attackers could steam straight into the gulf, but from the west, the land masses and islets of the archipelago barred the way. Nearly all the water passages that threaded through the island maze were too shallow for fleet use.
Getting to Leyte from Japan itself, counterattacking Japanese units could steam down the eastern side of the archipelago and head straight in. Coming from the west or southwest, however — say from Singapore, or Borneo — there were but two usable ways through the archipelago to Leyte Gulf for warships: San Bernardino Strait, which would bring a task force past the big island of Samar for a turn down into the gulf from the north, or Surigao Strait, which enters the gulf from the south.
To be near fuel sources, the Main Striking Force of the Imperial Fleet was based off Singapore. It was scheduled t
o refuel in Borneo, if it had to do battle for the Philippines.
The human element was Admiral Halsey’s frame of mind. This was dominated by an event five months in the past.
Back in June, the Pacific Fleet under Spruance had taken Saipan, an island in the Marianas chain, as a long hop toward Japan. The landing had provoked a major carrier duel, at once dubbed by American naval aviators as the “Marianas Turkey Shoot”; an aerial disaster for Japan, in which most of her surviving first-line pilots were shot down with small loss to Spruance. The Japanese carriers fled. The Americans in a short brutal land fight for Saipan gained an air base within bomber range of Tokyo. Spruance’s opponent of Midway, Admiral Nagumo, the man who had bombed Pearl Harbor, committed suicide on Saipan; for with this breach of the Empire’s inner defenses he deemed the war lost. So did many of Japan’s leaders. The fall of Tojo, the militarist prime minister, was a world sensation, but the cause was not. The battle for Saipan was fought while Eisenhower’s troops were grinding toward Cherbourg; so, like Imphal and Bagration, it was eclipsed in the newspapers.
Despite this historic if obscure victory, Spruance came in for savage insiders’ criticism. His carrier commanders had yearned to steam out from Saipan to meet the oncoming Japanese for a head-on battle; they felt they could have annihilated the Imperial Fleet once for all. Spruance had reluctantly vetoed the idea. He would not be pulled away from the landing force he was there to shield, not knowing what other enemy forces might cut in behind him and wipe out the beachhead. So the Japanese aircraft had attacked in a cloud the Spruance forces hugging Saipan, and had fallen in the “Turkey Shoot,” but their flattops and support forces had for the most part gotten away. King and Nimitz afterward praised Spruance’s decision, but it remains in controversy. There were no other enemy forces at sea, critics still argue, and Spruance in his caution had passed up a chance for a big killing that might have shortened the war.
That was certainly Admiral Halsey’s view. His character was eagerly aggressive, and at Leyte, he did not intend to repeat what he regarded as Spruance’s great mistake.
As to strategy: on the American side two conflicting concepts for the Pacific war at last collided head-on — MacArthur’s push northwest from Australia in land campaigns, the “South Pacific strategy”; and the Navy’s island-to-island thrust across the broad watery wastes between Pearl Harbor and Tokyo, the “Central Pacific strategy.”
The Navy planners wanted to bypass the Philippines altogether, land on Formosa or the China coast, and so “cork the bottle” of East Indies supplies. The bombing of shipping lanes, ports, and cities, they contended, with the submarine stranglehold, would in time force a surrender. MacArthur held the classic Army view that the enemy armed forces had to be defeated on land. New Guinea, the Philippines, then the home islands: that was his path to victory. King and Spruance, the chief Navy strategists, thought this would waste blood and time. Spruance even argued for a waterborne thrust straight to Iwo Jima and Okinawa. From these two small manageable objectives, he believed, air and submarine warfare could finish off Japan.
After Saipan, the Joint Chiefs of Staff got interested in the Navy strategy. MacArthur was outraged. In 1942 he had fled the Philippines by air on Roosevelt’s orders. On arriving in Australia, he had publicly vowed, I shall return. He did not mean to return in a civilian airliner, after the Japanese had been beaten the Navy way. He demanded a personal meeting with the President, and he got it at Pearl Harbor in July.
Roosevelt had just been nominated for a fourth term. With the war going brilliantly in Europe, he undoubtedly wanted no trouble with MacArthur, whom the political opposition was portraying as a neglected and mistreated military genius. Arriving at Pearl Harbor an ailing man, Roosevelt heard out MacArthur’s impassioned appeal for recapturing the Philippines as a “requirement of the national honor”; also Nimitz’s quiet professional argument for the Navy plan.
MacArthur won. The invasion of the Philippines was on. Yet the radical Army-Navy split persisted. Nimitz assigned to MacArthur for his amphibious operation the entire Seventh Fleet under Vice Admiral Thomas Kinkaid; a grand armada of old battleships, with cruisers, escort carriers, and a train of destroyers, minesweepers, and oilers. But Nimitz kept tight control of the new fleet carriers and fast battleships, his striking arm; called Fifth Fleet when Spruance was leading it, and Third Fleet during Halsey operations.
Thus Kinkaid was heading a large sea force under MacArthur; Halsey was heading another large sea force under Nimitz; and there was no supreme commander of the Leyte invasion.
As to the Japanese strategy: Halsey’s Formosa strikes before the battle had led to a vast Japanese victory celebration. Imperial General Headquarters jubilantly announced that the rash Yankees had at last come to grief; Japanese army and navy planes had swarmed out over the Third Fleet and crushed it!
Eleven aircraft carriers sunk, eight damaged; two battleships sunk, two damaged; three cruisers sunk, four damaged; destroyers, light cruisers, and dozens of other unidentified ships destroyed or set afire.
So ran the official communiqué. With this stunning reversal of fortunes, Saipan was avenged! The threat of invasion to the Philippines was over! Mass demonstrations of joy broke out all over Japan. Hitler and Mussolini sent telegrams of congratulation. “Victory is within our grasp,” the new premier announced, and the Emperor himself issued a rescript commemorating the triumph.
In rude fact, Halsey’s Third Fleet had retired after the strikes without losing a single ship. The Japanese army air squadrons had been slaughtered, and their bases razed. The toll was about six hundred aircraft shot down, with two hundred more smashed and burned on the ground. The Japanese high command, taken in by overoptimism, had stripped the navy’s carriers too, and flung their squadrons into the fight. Army and navy pilots alike were nearly all green recruits. Halsey’s veteran aviators had made sport of them, but the few returning stragglers had brought back ridiculous victory reports. Splashing bombs, or their own comrades’ aircraft exploding in the sea, had seemed to their excited innocent eyes flaming sinking battleships and carriers. The Japanese command had discounted the reports by fifty percent, but they were pure moonshine.
Then MacArthur’s advance units landed on islands in Leyte Gulf, and reconnaissance reported a giant invasion expedition — Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet under MacArthur, seven hundred vessels or more — headed for the Philippines. Search planes from Luzon also found Halsey’s Third Fleet afloat, intact, and on the prowl. The war-weary Japanese woke from the victory dream to the real nightmare. Word flashed out to the Imperial Fleet: Execute Plan SHO-ONE. The Japanese code name Sho meant “conquer.” There were four versions of Sho to oppose a stab at four probable points of the Empire’s shrinking perimeter. Sho-One was the Philippines plan.
Sho was a strategy of desperation. The whole Imperial Fleet would sail, covered by army air forces in the Philippines and Formosa, to blast through the American support forces, sink the troop transports, and wipe out the landing parties with gunfire. The plan assumed that the Japanese would be outnumbered about three to one; and that Halsey alone, with his carriers and fast battleships, would wield striking power the Imperial Fleet could not match.
The whole theme of Sho was therefore deception. To neutralize the lopsided advantage of the foe, Japan’s remaining aircraft carriers would decoy Halsey’s Third Fleet far away from the beachhead, in quest of a carrier duel. The Main Body would then shoot its way past the support ships of Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet, wreak its havoc on MacArthur’s landing force, and depart.
But the Formosa “victory” had already crippled Sho. Land-based support from the decimated army air force would be scant; and the decoy carriers, stripped of their squadrons, could no longer fight. They could at best tantalize the Third Fleet into roaring far away from the beachhead to butcher them. This would suffice, the Japanese command bitterly decided. If only Halsey would take the bait and get out of the way, the Main Striking Force of battleships and cruisers m
ight still penetrate Leyte Gulf and wipe out MacArthur’s beachhead. The goal of all this sacrifice was only a tolerable peace settlement after a success. The operation was in essence a giant kamikaze attack. In itself the fleet advancing to the sacrifice was formidable, but it faced almost hopeless odds.
Was it wrong to sacrifice the remnant of a great navy at a blow? Hardly, in Japanese thinking. What was there to lose? With the Philippines gone, the oil supply would be cut off anyway. The warships would be like toys with broken springs. Surrender now? A logical course, but logic in war is for the strong. For the weak there is proud defiance, deemed laudable in most cultures, and noble in Japan.
The problem of oil further complicated Sho. So low had the nation’s supply sunk from the submarine attrition that the fleet could not even fuel at home. That was why the Main Striking Force under Vice Admiral Kurita — two new monster battleships, the biggest and most powerful in the world, with three other battleships and many cruisers and destroyers — laid off Singapore, so as to have access to the oil of Java and Borneo. The decoy carriers were in the home waters of the Inland Sea.
So the gigantic Sho deception, which hinged on many precise interlocking moves, had to start with its forces far apart, in touch only by radio. Yet communication personnel, like pilots, were in low supply. The best technicians had mostly drowned in the Coral Sea, at Midway, around Guadalcanal, and at Saipan. The Imperial Fleet sallied forth to execute Sho, in short, scattered over thousands of miles by the oil shortage, and stuttering with communication failures; still powerful, however, and bent on victory or self-immolation.
On October 20, MacArthur’s forces landed on Leyte. The general waded up on the beach to broadcast, “People of the Philippines, I have returned! Rally to mel… For your homes and hearths, strike! For future generations of your sons and daughters, strike!… Let no heart be faint. Let every arm be steeled…. Follow in His name to the Holy Grail of righteous victory!” etc. These glorious thoughts provoked much unseemly snickering and snorting in the Navy crews gathered at radios.