The Japanese hardly seemed to oppose the invasion at first. Their fleet did not visibly move. Admiral Halsey, panting for his great fleet killing, talked of cutting through the archipelago into the South China Sea to smoke out the enemy, leaving the beachhead for Kinkaid to defend. A severe dispatch from Nimitz cooled that notion. It did not, however, cool Halsey’s itch to trounce the Japanese navy.
Here was the human element coming into play. Halsey’s war record and his public reputation were curiously at odds. He was the only admiral the home front knew about. He radiated the he-man aura of a Western movie star. He had led many carrier strikes. In the South Pacific his pugnacious spirit had revived sagging American morale and rescued the Guadalcanal campaign. The newspapers and the nation loved this rough tough Pacific gunfighter with his quotable taunts like “The Japs are losing their grip, even with their tails.” But with the war winding down, he had yet to get into an actual gunfight. He had missed them all, while Spruance, his junior and his old friend, had fought and won big sea victories.
Halsey’s staff was not sure that the enemy would fight for Leyte by risking a transit from the west of either of the two narrow straits, San Bernardino or Surigao. The Japs might well wait until MacArthur landed on Luzon, it was thought, for there they had a powerful army and big air bases. There, moreover, the Imperial Fleet would have a clear run in to Lingayen Gulf, and MacArthur could be heavily blasted by land, sea, and air. On some such reasoning, once Nimitz vetoed the South China Sea dash, Halsey released the strongest of his four task groups, a group of five carriers — he had nineteen in all — for rest and replenishment at Ulithi, some eight hundred miles away. Another task group was ordered to sail for Ulithi October 23, removing four more carriers from the scene.
These releases deeply troubled Pug Henry. Remembering Halsey from destroyer days, he could well picture the old man chafing and fuming aboard the New Jersey, as his great Third Fleet slowly patrolled empty tropic seas a hundred miles off the Philippines, burning up oil. The idea of charging westward through the islands into the China Sea was Halsey all over. So were the impulsive last-minute shifts of plans and orders. So to Pug’s mind was the airy release of half his carrier strength only three days after the landing. Halsey worked in two modes, casual or ferocious. True, the task force had been at sea for ten months, refueled and replenished by ComServPac’s remarkable ship-to-ship system. Men were weary. Ships needed time in port. But wasn’t the chance for battle paramount? Halsey was behaving as though the sea threat to Leyte had faded away, but in fact the whereabouts of the foe was still a mystery.
Pug also wished Halsey would leave management of the carriers to their commander, Marc Mitscher, the most skilled air admiral in the Navy. Halsey was directly ordering the flattops about, and their real boss had become a silent passenger on the Lexington. It was as though Pug had taken to running the Iowa himself. A very bad business! Spruance had let Mitscher fight his ships at Saipan, overriding him only on the idea of abandoning the beachhead.
Still, the fleet loved Halsey. The sailors liked to say they would follow the “Bull” to hell, and they had hardly been aware of Spruance. Pug himself was excited to be sailing under Halsey again. The electricity of Halsey had the whole Third Fleet hot for the fight. That was something. But cool good sense in the fog of battle was just as important. That was Spruance’s demonstrated strong point, and whether Halsey possessed it, the Navy was now for the first time going to find out.
87
TO: COM THIRD FLEET
FROM: DARTER
MANY SHIPS SIGHTED INCLUDING THREE PROBABLE SB’s X AM CHASING X
“KICKOFF!” Pug thought. The dispatch came from a picket submarine far out to the west, in the Palawan Passage, about halfway from Borneo to Leyte; sent during the night, it gave the position, course, and speed of the heavy enemy force. At once Pug marked the information in orange ink on the chart in his office. It was just sunrise of the twenty-third of October.
So there would be a fight, after all. Those battleships were heading for the Sibuyan Sea and San Bernardino Strait. Halsey’s prompt orders quickened Pug’s pulse. He was cancelling the release to Ulithi of a carrier group. Good! The three flattop groups on hand were to space themselves along two hundred fifty miles of the eastern Philippine coast for air searches and strikes next morning, when the Jap battleships would be steaming within range. Halsey’s own group, including Victor Henry’s BatDiv Seven, would stand off San Bernardino Strait to meet the foe as he came.
The ships the submarine had sighted were in fact Vice Admiral Kurita’s Main Striking Force, on its way from Borneo to storm into Leyte Gulf and wipe out MacArthur’s beachhead. The two chief opponents in the vast melee, Halsey and Kurita, were thus touching gloves at a range of about six hundred miles. Admirals would be plentiful as blackberries around Leyte Gulf, but the battle would turn on what these two would do as they drew together.
Takeo Kurita was a hard-willed dried-up salt of fifty-five. His force — five battleships, ten heavy cruisers, with light cruisers and destroyers — made a mighty parade as it plowed the blue swells of the Palawan Passage. Two of his battleships were the seventy-thousand-ton monsters Musashi and Yamato, with secret eighteen-inch guns built in violation of arms limitation treaties, and never yet fired at a foe. Pug Henry’s Iowa and New Jersey carried sixteen-inch guns. No United States ship packed bigger armament. The two-inch difference in bore meant that Kurita could stand off beyond Henry’s range and smash at him with shells perhaps twice as destructive as any he could fire back. Conceived in 1934, built over fifteen years at a nation-straining cost of manpower and treasure, these were the strongest gunships on the globe. Reckoning only with BatDiv Seven types they might have been invincible, but warfare had moved past them. Submarines and carrier aircraft were menaces the great guns could not fight.
From Admiral Kurita’s viewpoint, therefore, all depended on the decoy carriers. If they would but suck Halsey out of the way, he could perhaps bull through San Bernardino Strait and annihilate the MacArthur beachhead with his giant guns. Under the able Vice Admiral Ozawa, those decoy carriers were already at sea, heading down from Japan toward Luzon. That was about all Kurita knew, for thirty parallels of latitude separated the two forces when they sailed.
Kurita had one more major factor to bear in mind. The Tokyo strategists, with their obsessive taste for razzle-dazzle, had improvised a third force — battleships and cruisers with their destroyer screens — to run far south and come up into Leyte Gulf through the other access route, Surigao Strait. On the war game boards Sho must have looked very pretty indeed: Kurita with the powerhouse armada driving through the central Philippines to steam at Leyte Gulf from the north; the other force closing a pincer from the south; and Ozawa, in waters far north of Luzon, teasing the bellicose Halsey clear of the troops he was supposed to protect.
But in such a slow-moving ballet of great ships over thousands of miles, precise timing was critical. Kurita had to get to Leyte on the morning of the twenty-fifth, when the Surigao force would arrive. Well before that morning, the decoy flattops had to lure Halsey northward. None of this could come off, on the face of it, except at high cost. The question was whether early losses would stop Sho cold, or whether it would bloodily go through.
A hint of the answer came at sunrise of the twenty-third. Without warning, four torpedoes one after the other struck Kurita’s flagship. The whole force had just begun its daylight zigzagging. As the flag bridge of the heavy cruiser Atago shuddered under Kurita’s feet, he saw the next cruiser astern get hit too in smoke, flame, and great climbing showers of white water. Within minutes the Atago was wrapped in fire, shaking with explosions, and going down. Kurita’s attention narrowed to saving himself. Destroyers approached the burning wreck to take him off, but there was no time. The admiral and his staff had to swim for their lives in heaving warm salt water.
A destroyer fished Kurita aboard. There another sad sight met his brine-stung eyes: a third heavy cruiser n
earby, blowing apart like a firecracker in pale flame and dense black smoke, its pieces going down while he stood there dripping. This day was not half an hour old, and he had lost two heavy cruisers out of ten to submarine assault; a third was dead in the water and afire; and he was two full days’ steaming from Leyte Gulf.
The picket submarines Darter and Dace had detected Kurita’s force in the night, chased it on the surface, and submerged for this dawn attack. They escaped the cascade of destroyer depth charges that raised great geysers all over the sea, but tracking the crippled cruiser, the Darter ran up on a reef. The Dace rescued its crew. The Darter had sounded the alarm and drawn first blood, but its day was done.
Panicky false periscope sightings disarrayed Kurita’s force most of that day until he managed to transfer with his staff to the Yamato. There, in the world’s mightiest gunship, in spacious elegant flag quarters, he regained his grip on the situation. His grand armada was, after all, mainly intact. He had not expected to advance without losses. Night would soon fall and cover his movements. Tokyo radioed him that the decoy force had as yet made no contact with Halsey; so aircraft attacks, as well as the submarine menace, lay ahead for the morrow. The day after that, it now seemed, he would run straight into Halsey at the mouth of San Bernardino Strait. But Takeo Kurita had this command because he was a man who would push on through fire walls. As the sun set he went to full speed.
Night gave him twelve hours of a peaceful fast run. With the sunrise on October twenty-fourth the carrier attacks came, and never stopped coming. Five major strikes, hundreds of sorties, repeated and repeated assaults with bombs and torpedoes, kept the air buzzing over the Main Striking Force all day. Kurita had been promised air cover from Luzon and Formosa. There was none.
Still he steamed doughtily on, winding a course past beautiful mountainous islands, throwing up AA fire from hundreds of guns, in desperation shooting his main batteries at oncoming clusters of airplanes. In this greatest of all fights between aircraft and surface ships, on October twenty-fourth, called now the Battle of the Sibuyan Sea, Kurita did very well. Only the supergiant Musashi, hit early by a torpedo, attracted the full fury of the waspish Yank planes. Supposedly unsinkable, it absorbed in the five strikes nineteen torpedoes and uncounted bombs; sank lower and listed farther as it fell astern, the hours passed, and the punishment went on; and toward sundown it rolled over and sank with half its crew, never having fought except with tiny flying machines.
That was the worst. A tragic loss, but the Main Striking Force had weathered the storm with plenty of power to carry out its mission. However, no word had ever come from Ozawa’s decoy force. Was there to be no relief, all the way to Leyte? Halsey obviously had not yet been tricked; this day’s harsh pounding had come from carrier aircraft. Kurita’s radioed pleas for air cover were going unheeded. The day’s attrition so far — the Musashi in tragic death throes, the disabling of yet another cruiser, and much bomb damage to other ships — could be accepted; but how long could a force defenseless from the air survive against fifteen or twenty carriers?
About four o’clock Kurita turned his ships around and retreated westward, to increase the range from Halsey’s flattops and stay in open water, where his captains could at least continue their successful squirming and dodging; for once in the straits, they would lose maneuverability and become easy targets. Again he beseeched Tokyo and Manila for air cover, citing the damage he was sustaining. Manila made no answer. The air commander there had decided to use his planes against enemy carriers, not in covering Kurita.
It seemed to Takeo Kurita at this juncture, as his ships milled about on a calm sea bounded by the ridges of green islands, and the blasted Musashi dropped out of sight trying to beach itself and “become a land battery,” that the Sho plan was already collapsing. The air and submarine attacks had thrown off the timing. The air cover element was missing. The deception was not working. Still, having put off entering narrow waters until darkness was near, he reversed course once again, and made for San Bernardino Strait. As he went he notified the southern force to slow down and postpone the pincer attack on the gulf by several hours. Tokyo headquarters in a helpful mood now sent this message: “All forces will dash to the attack, counting on Divine assistance.”
Night once more veiled the Main Striking Force. Yet even so, Kurita faced mounting perils. Ahead lay narrow heavily mined waters. In traversing San Bernardino Strait, he would have to take his force through in column. Halsey’s battleships and cruisers would undoubtedly be patrolling the entrance, waiting to cross the T and pick off his ships one by one as they came out. In precisely such a maneuver, during the great Battle of Tsushima Strait in 1905, the Japanese navy had crushed the czarist fleet and won a war. Now Kurita was cast in the Russian role of that battle he had studied all his life, with no way to escape; no alternative but to steam on to his fate, “counting on Divine assistance.”
Astern, a yellow quarter-moon was setting over the dark Sibuyan Sea. Ahead, the Japanese command in Manila had turned on the navigation lights of San Bernardino Strait. The night was clear. Posting himself on the flag bridge of the giant Yamato, Takeo Kurita sent a blunt final dispatch to his crews: Chancing annihilation, we are determined to break through to the anchorage and destroy the enemy. The force passed into the narrows, forming into column, and all ships went to battle stations. Despite the hellish day the haggard crews stood to their guns. They were good men, well trained in night action. Kurita could count on them to give the Americans up ahead a real fight, and die for the Emperor if they must.
At midnight the moon went down. Half an hour later, in starlit darkness, the Main Striking Force began to emerge, ship by ship, between the headlands of Luzon and Samar into the quiet open waters of the Philippine Sea. Admiral Kurita could see nothing ahead. Nor could the lookouts on any of his vessels. Radar sweeping the sea for fifty miles in all directions found nothing.
Nothing! Not so much as a single picket destroyer guarding the entrance to San Bernardino Strait!
Astounded, his hopes rebounding, Kurita formed up for battle and made full speed south along the coast of Samar for Leyte Gulf. He had to accept the evidence of his senses. By some fantastic chance of war Halsey was gone, and MacArthur lay at the mercy of the Emperor’s biggest guns.
88
THE strange events on the American side which led to this incredible circumstance will remain in controversy as long as anybody cares about naval battles. The events are clear enough. The controversy lies in how and why they happened. Victor Henry lived through them in the Iowa’s flag quarters.
He was up well before dawn of that October twenty-fourth, in flag plot, checking his staff’s setup for following the situation, for joining battle, and even for taking command of the task group if necessary. Pug knew very well how junior he was in Halsey’s force, yet misfortune might thrust extraordinary responsibility on him. He intended to stay as fully informed as though he were Halsey’s chief of staff.
Flag plot was a large dimly lit room over his quarters, reached by a private ladder. Here radar scopes showed in phosphorescent green tracery movements of ships and aircraft, storm patterns, configuration of nearby land, and — especially in night action — a better picture of the foe than eyes could discern on the sea. Here large Plexiglas displays manned by telephone talkers gave at a glance in vivid orange or red grease hand-printing abstract summaries of what was happening. Here dispatches poured in to the watch officer for quick digest and display. Coffee, tobacco smoke, and ozone from the electronic gear stewed together in an unchanging flag-plot smell. Loudspeakers hoarsely spouted bursts of signal jargon: “Baker Jig How Seven, Baker Jig How Seven, this is Courthouse Four. Request Able Mike Report Peter Slant Zed. Over,” and the like.
But sometimes — as now at five in the morning, when the admiral looked in — flag plot was quiet. Shadowy sailors sat at the scopes, their faces ghastly in the glow, drinking coffee, smoking, or munching candy bars. Telephone talkers murmured into their recei
vers or wrote on the Plexiglas; stationed behind the display, they were adept at printing backward. Officers bent over charts, calculating and talking low. The chief of staff was already at the central chart desk. In the Formosa strikes Captain Bradford had satisfied Pug that he could run flag plot and sort out pertinent facts from the torrent of noise. Pug went below and alone in his quarters heartily ate canned peaches, cornflakes, ham and eggs, and fresh biscuits with honey. It might be a long time before he sat down to a meal again. He was drinking coffee when Bradford buzzed him.
“Preparing to launch air searches, Admiral.”
“Very well, Ned.”
Pug ran up the ladder, went out on the flag bridge in a clear warm violet dawn, and watched the dive-bomber squadrons soaring off under the morning stars from the Intrepid, the Hancock, and the Independence. A quiet pain stirred in his heart. (Absalom, Absalom!) When the last planes left he returned below to a small office off his sea cabin. Pug meant to keep his own command chart here. Only in combat would he post himself in flag plot near the radars, the TBS, and the flag bridge. For many hours yet, bald plotted facts would matter most: sightings, distances, courses, speeds, damage reports, and what these implied.
It was Blue versus Orange again, after all, the old clash of the War College game boards and the peacetime fleet exercises. The real thing was flaringly different, yet one factor would not change. Even in make-believe combat the hardest thing to do was to keep one’s head; how much more so now! Let Bradford enjoy the excitement and the hot news in flag plot. Pug meant to weigh essentials here until the fight was on, and talk to his staff only when he had to.