Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45

The Palau invasion convoys were already several days at sea, carrying Maj.-Gen. William Rupertus’s 1st Marine Division 2,100 miles from Guadalcanal. The lumbering landing ships averaged a speed of only 7.7 knots, even slower than the 12.1 knots of the transports. Brig.-Gen. O.P. Smith, assistant commander of the division, passed the voyage reading a couple of novels from his ship’s library: A Yankee From Mount Olympus and The Late George Apley. Tranquillity aboard was marred by the skipper’s insistence on issuing orders and admonishments by loudhailer from the bridge. Smith failed to make friends with the ship’s dog, ‘an aloof cocker spaniel who refused to notice anyone except the captain’. Approaching the Palaus, even veterans of Pacific landings were awed by the size of the force assembled—some 868 ships, 129 in the assault element. Submarine chasers guided the fleet, destroyers guarded it, sweepers cleared mines in its path. Behind these came a great flock of command, survey, repair and hospital ships, anti-submarine net-layers, oilers, salvage vessels, tugs, floating dry docks, a dredger, PT-boats, a floating derrick, LSTs, DUKWs, LSDs, cargo ships and 770 small landing craft for 1st Marine Division, together with as many again for the army’s 81st Division, joining the Marines from Pearl Harbor. Such was the scale on which the United States launched even a modest Pacific amphibious landing in the autumn of 1944.

On the morning of 15 September, amid a calm sea, a glittering array of brass watched from the command ship Mount McKinley as shoals of landing craft headed for the shore. Peleliu had received three days of intensive gunfire from five battleships, five heavy cruisers and seventeen other vessels, which periodically ceased fire only to make space for air attacks. Vice-Admiral Jesse Oldendorf, the bombardment commander, declared: ‘We have run out of targets.’ Nine miles offshore the cocky naval skipper of Col. ‘Chesty’ Puller’s transport enquired, as Puller’s men clambered into their landing craft, whether the Marine would be returning on board for his dinner. The colonel responded testily that he expected to be fighting for several days. Surely not, said the sailor. The navy’s bombardment would ‘allow the regiment to walk to its objective unmolested’. If that proved so, said Puller, the captain should come ashore that afternoon, join the Marines for a meal, and collect some souvenirs. Rupertus, the operational commander, had no experience of a heavily opposed landing, and was himself blithely confident. Four days, he said, should suffice to clear the island. As the Americans approached Peleliu, smoke from the bombardment shrouded the higher ground inland. Rocket ships fired ripples of projectiles ahead of the infantry pitching in their landing craft, then turned aside to open the passage for the assault waves. AA guns on the ships fired airburst shells at rocks behind the landing places. ‘Chesty’ Puller told his men with characteristic theatricality: ‘You will take no prisoners, you will kill every yellow son-of-a-bitch, and that’s it.’

The Marines hit the beaches at 0832. There were no Japanese in their immediate vicinity. Within minutes, however, the invaders found themselves under heavy shellfire, which wrecked dozens of amphibious vehicles, and made the men reluctant to forsake cover and advance beyond the beach. Medical corpsman Bill Jenkins’s unit suffered its first casualty seconds after disembarking. It was ‘Pop’ Lujack, the oldest man in the company, ‘a guy I thought a lot of, and it hurt me badly when I saw he was hit. I didn’t know any better but he was hit in the head and practically the whole back of his head was shot off, and I was laying down there trying to fix him up. One of the guys came up and said, “Doc, get out of there, he’s dead.”’

More than 10,000 Japanese were defending the island. Rather than attempt to hold the coast under American bombardment, Col. Kunio Nakagawa had deployed his men inland, on a series of coral ridges which offered commanding views of the shore. The beach at Peleliu, flailed by enemy fire, became one of the Marines’ most shocking memories of the Pacific war, and cost them over two hundred dead on the first day. Though the beach had been reconnoitred, Rupertus and his staff knew nothing of the terrain inland, which was ideally suited to defence. Peleliu had been a mining site. Each ridge was honeycombed with tunnels, in which the Japanese had installed electricity and living quarters, impervious to shells and bombs. Marine communications proved so poor that commanders were left struggling to discover their own men’s whereabouts, and were thus hesitant about calling in close artillery support. Of the eighteen tanks landed with 1st Marines, three were knocked out before they reached the beach, and all but one were hit by shells thereafter. In the chaos, a senior officer landed to investigate why so many vehicles were blazing. He could discover little. Most of 1st Marines’ headquarters had been wiped out, and 5th Marines’ HQ was also badly depleted. A shell blast concussed a Louisiana-born staff officer so badly that he began to murmur in the French of his childhood.

A Japanese counterattack in the afternoon, supported by light tanks, was easily repulsed, the enemy shot to pieces. When feeble little Japanese ‘tankettes’ surrounded an American medium tank, it destroyed eleven in a circle, ‘like Indians round a wagon train’, as O.P. Smith put it. Here was a pattern which would become familiar in all the late Pacific battles: when the Japanese moved, they were slaughtered; when they held their ground, however, they were extraordinarily hard to kill. Smith was sitting at his forward command post when a mortar bomb landed just short of its protecting bank. A Marine fell back onto the general, a small fragment lodged in the back of his head. Smith’s aide bandaged him: ‘The boy was not badly hurt and was talkative. He was married and had been out of the States for two years. To him, the wound was a ticket home.’ American guns were getting ashore only slowly, because so many amphibious vehicles had been destroyed. Snipers provoked wild retaliatory fusillades, as dangerous to Americans as to Japanese. When Smith wanted to visit regimental command posts, he could find them only by tracking phone wires.

Nightfall brought no respite. There were 12,000 Americans onshore, crowded into a beachhead which granted each man a few square feet of coral, sand and insects. The Marines held no clearly defined perimeter, merely scrapes and holes between four and seven hundred yards inland, along more than a mile of coast. Most of the men were utterly bemused, conscious only of incoming fire. Japanese infiltrators crept into American forward positions, grenading and testing nerves. A man who found himself under friendly fire even after shouting the password resorted to singing a verse of the Marine Corps hymn. Some 7th Marines landed amid the shambles, and found themselves unable to locate their objectives. After being harried from place to place, out of radio contact with higher command, under heavy mortaring their amphibious tractors returned to the assault ship, Leedstown. Alongside in darkness, the navy refused to let the men board, supposing that they had run away. Their colonel was reluctantly permitted to climb the side alone, to radio divisional headquarters for new orders. Eventually his men were grudgingly authorised to re-embark, but many boats’ occupants spent the whole night lost at sea.

It took 1st Marine Division a week and 3,946 casualties to secure the key airfield sites, mocking Rupertus’s four-day estimate. Even then the Japanese overlooked them from the Umurbrogol Ridge, and could sustain observed fire. After the Japanese shot down medics recovering wounded, heavy mortars laid smokescreens to protect stretcher-bearers. The whole island occupied only seven square miles. In O.P. Smith’s words, ‘For the first few days, real estate was at a premium.’ The beach area was crowded with makeshift bivouacs. There was little scope for outflanking enemy strongpoints. These could only be assaulted headlong, each yard of progress costing blood. ‘The thousands of rounds of artillery shells, the mortar barrages, the napalm strikes and the bombs poured in…[These] undoubtedly killed many Japanese in exposed positions, but those in caves were untouched and there were always new relays of snipers and machine-gunners to replace those who had fallen on the peaks…For the concentrated fury of the fighting it was only exceeded by Tarawa and Iwo Jima,’ wrote a senior Marine. Reinforced concrete blast walls protected each tunnel mouth. When the Americans finally secured the largest cave system on 27 September, it proved to have housed a thousand defenders.

No place on the island was safe. Bill Atkinson watched a BAR gunner take up position behind a tank and start firing. To Atkinson’s horror, the Sherman suddenly lurched backwards, crushing the man to pulp. 5th Marine Virgle Nelson, hit in the buttock, hollered with glee: ‘Oh my God, I guess I get to go back now!’ Bill Jenkins, a medical corpsman from Canton, Missouri, was awed by a tough machine-gunner named Wayley, who was hit four times. Told that he was to be evacuated, Wayley said: ‘No way.’ Jenkins asked his buddy Jack Henry to get a litter. The moment Henry moved, machine-gun fire caught his arms, and he came running back into the tank trap where they lay. ‘One arm [was] 99.9 per cent off and the other almost as bad. I could have taken a scissors and clipped both arms off and buried them. I wasn’t trained to try and set the cut-up, broken-up arms…all I did was just kind of put them together, both of them, and I wrapped them up the best I could with T-shirts and used tourniquets. I put his arms over his head to keep him from bleeding to death.’ Against the odds, Henry survived.

Another man begged Jenkins for medicinal brandy. The corpsman said sheepishly: ‘Gosh, I had some, but I got so damn scared I drank it myself.’ Seventeen-year-old Tom Evans landed as a replacement rifleman, but was immediately detailed as a litter-bearer. ‘I am carrying this guy on the stretcher and he’s been dead maybe a day and a half but already his body is kind of oily and covered with flies and maggots. I slipped and fell as I was going downhill and naturally he comes sliding down and straddled my neck, and I had maggots on me—Ohh.’ Marines learned to race clouds of accursed blowflies to every meal, sliding a hand across a can top the instant it was opened. Men’s lips and ear tops blistered in the sun. Commanders dispatched from the ships offshore fresh bread—‘a great morale-builder’—and occasionally ice cream in milk cans. ‘Chesty’ Puller asked his Marines if there was anything he could get them. Predictably, they asked for a drink stronger than water. Puller issued medicinal alcohol mixed with powdered lemonade. Others found a cache of Japanese sake and beer, and were briefly heard singing on line.

‘Our troops should understand,’ a command report admonished waverers, ‘that the Japanese is no better able to go without food than we are, his stamina is no greater, the Jap gets just as wet when it rains and he suffers as much or more from tropical ills.’ All this, however, was often hard for Americans on Peleliu to believe. Seventeen-year-old medic Frank Corry had three platoon commanders killed. The last was hit when he rashly stuck up his head to view a Japanese position. Corry watched wide-eyed as his platoon sergeant, big, tough Bob Canfield, cradled the dead man’s head in his arms and burst into tears, saying: ‘Why did you do it?’

Snipers behind the lines caused chronic jumpiness, intensified by undisciplined rear-area troops firing weapons for the fun of it. After O.P. Smith investigated one panic, he found that it had been provoked by black stevedores on the shore shooting at an abandoned tractor: ‘They claimed no one had ever told them they were not to fire their rifles, which was probably correct.’ Nor was every panic unjustified. When the exasperated divisional HQ commandant set off with a shotgun to suppress an outbreak of apparently needless firing near his headquarters, he found two dead Marines beside the corpses of three Japanese who had killed them. Until a well could be sunk, every American was desperately short of water. Emergency supplies were landed in oildrums, which sickened those who sampled them. Temperatures sometimes reached 115 degrees. Scores of men succumbed to heat exhaustion, for which salt tablets proved an essential prophylactic. The jagged coral caused boots to wear out within days. A thousand new pairs and 5,000 sets of socks were flown in from Guam.

The army’s 81st Division landed on neighbouring Angaur on 17 September. After an easy disembarkation, inland the invaders met thick, matted, almost impenetrable rainforest. The beaches were clogged with traffic. The soldiers, fresh to combat, readily panicked in encounters with even small numbers of Japanese. Angaur was only two miles long, and by 20 September it was secure, but the conquerors had not enjoyed their experience. They were still less happy to find themselves loaded back onto ships and transferred to Peleliu. Marines and soldiers were seldom comfortable fighting together. O.P. Smith wrote sceptically: ‘It is hard to put your finger on it, but there is quite a different atmosphere in an army command post as compared to the CP of a Marine outfit. Orders are given like the book says you should give them, but you have the impression they are not carried out.’ Rupertus was reluctant to enlist army aid. After a week of fighting and alarming casualties, however, he perceived no choice.

Long-range flame-throwers proved the most effective weapons against Peleliu’s cave mouths, but each assault was painfully slow and costly. In October, gales and torrential rain added to the invaders’ miseries. Marine Corsairs at last began to use the island’s airstrip on 21 October, but organised resistance persisted for weeks more. Lt Ilo Scatena of the 2/5th Marines kept a platoon roster. Of forty-two men with whom he landed, fourteen were killed and fourteen wounded. In all, the island’s capture cost 1,950 American lives, and gave the invaders one of the most unwelcome surprises of the Pacific war. Almost all the defenders chose to perish rather than quit. A month after Peleliu’s commander, Col. Kunio Nakagawa, committed suicide on 24 November, his surviving soldiers killed a group of souvenir-hunting American soldiers. The last five known Japanese surrendered on 1 February 1945. Statisticians afterwards calculated that it had taken 1,500 rounds of artillery ammunition to kill each member of the garrison. To capture this tiny outpost, Marine and army infantrymen also used 13.32 million .30 calibre rounds, 1.52 million of .45 calibre, 693,657 rounds of .50 calibre, over 150,000 mortar bombs and 118,262 grenades.

As so often in the Pacific, a marginal objective inflicted worse than marginal casualties. It is widely agreed today—as indeed it was in the winter of 1944—that the decision to occupy the Palaus was one of Nimitz’s few bad calls of the war. The Japanese lacked means to exploit their remote island airfields. The defenders of Peleliu could not interfere on Leyte, or anywhere else. Its garrison could have been left to rot. American aircraft could use Morotai’s strips as easily as those on the Palaus. Once the Peleliu operation was launched onto implacably hostile terrain, there was no shortcut by which firepower or technology could overcome resistance. Although the Marines had fought terrible battles on the Pacific islands, at Tarawa and Saipan they attacked before the defenders had completed the construction of their positions. Now, however, as Japan’s Pacific perimeter narrowed, the enemy knew where to expect the Americans, and had been granted ample time to prepare to receive them.

In the Pacific there were no great battles resembling Normandy, the Bulge, the Vistula and Oder crossings, exploiting mass and manoeuvre. Instead, there was a series of violently intense miniatures, rendered all the more vivid in the minds of participants because they were so concentrated in space. Such contests as that for Peleliu were decided by the endeavours of footsoldiers and direct support weapons, notably tanks. This was a battle fought on Japanese terms. Like others that would follow in the months ahead, it suited their temperament, skills and meagre resources. The defenders of Peleliu possessed no means of withdrawing, even had they wished to do so. Their extinction therefore required a commitment of flesh against flesh, the sacrifice of significant numbers of American lives. The US, whose power seemed so awesome when viewed across the canvas of global war, found itself unable effectively to leverage this in battles of bloody handkerchief proportions, such as that for Peleliu.

2 LEYTE: THE LANDING

The struggle to regain the Philippines became by far the US Army’s largest commitment of the Asian war. MacArthur’s long campaign on New Guinea had never caught the imagination of the American public as did the Marines’ battles for the Pacific atolls. The general’s grandeur was more imposing than his forces—until late 1944 he seldom controlled more than four divisions in the field, in Europe a mere corps command. His next campaign, however, would become the main event of America’s conflict with Japan. More than 400,000 Japanese awaited the invaders. The Philippines represented a critical link on the sea route between Hirohito’s South-East Asian empire and the home islands. Tokyo believed that a confrontation there would offer its best chance to bloody the Americans, if not to throw them back into the sea, before the ‘decisive battle’- a chorus reprised in all Japan’s war plans—for Kyushu and Honshu. The Japanese difficulty was that their scattered forces lacked mobility in the face of American air and naval superiority. MacArthur could choose where to make his landings. It would be hard for the defenders swiftly to shift large bodies of troops in response.

On a map, the Philippine islands resemble a dense scatter of jigsaw pieces. Their combined mass is almost as large as Japan, rich in luxuriant vegetation and extravagant weather cycles. After the 1898 Spanish- American War, which ended European hegemony, US Senator Albert Beveridge spoke for many Americans when Washington decided against granting independence to the Filipinos. He cited ‘the divine law of human society which makes of us our brother’s keeper. God has been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples to bring order out of chaos…He has made us adepts in government so that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples.’

Filipinos resisted US dominance, in the early days by violent insurgency, and never ceased to crave independence. Socially, the islands were dominated by a rich landlord class. The mass of peasants remained poor and bitterly alienated from the plantocracy. Two-thirds of Filipinos between twenty and thirty-nine were uneducated. Yet many Americans retained a romantic conviction that the virtue of their intentions made US rule over the Philippines somehow more honourable than that of, say, the British in India. US soldiers who served on the islands before 1942 regarded them as a leisure resort offering cheap comforts, servants and amenities of a kind they never knew back home, amidst a lazy Spanish culture. The 1944 US armed forces’ Guide to the Pacific noted: ‘For Isaac Waltons: The Philippines are a fisherman’s paradise…Recommended for deep sea trolling is a split bamboo rod, a drag reel capable of holding 400 yards of 12 thread line, and a good gaff hook.’

Japan’s thirty-month-old occupation had been patchy in its impact: oppressive and brutal in some places—the most strategically important, naturally including the capital, Manila—while scarcely felt in remote areas. In 1943 the Japanese granted the Philippines, along with most of their other occupied territories, notional self-government under a local puppet regime. Yet such was the mindless cruelty of Tokyo’s soldiers that this gesture inspired little gratitude among Filipinos. Imperial General HQ reported in March 1944: ‘Even after their independence, there remains among all classes a strong undercurrent of pro-American sentiment…Guerrilla activities are gradually increasing.’ The Japanese fully controlled only twelve of the country’s eighteen provinces. Elsewhere, guerrilla bands roamed widely, American-armed and sometimes American-led. Several US officers, such as the legendary Col. Russell Volckmann, had survived in the hills of Luzon since the spring of 1942, and now directed forces thousands strong. The more idealistically inclined guerrillas inflicted four hundred casualties on Japanese occupation forces in 1944, a modest enough achievement. Others merely pursued lives of banditry.

The Japanese South Asia Army moved its headquarters to Manila in April, when uncertainty persisted in Tokyo about whether the Americans would land in the Philippines at all. Its commander, Field Marshal Count Hisaichi Terauchi, had no such doubts. ‘If I was MacArthur, I would come here,’ he growled at a staff conference in the summer of 1944. ‘He must know how weak are our defences.’ Terauchi, once a candidate to replace Tojo as prime minister, was not held in high esteem either by the Americans or by most of his peers. His staff, however, respected the fact that, although a rich man, he succumbed to few personal indulgences. ‘He could have filled his headquarters with geishas if he wanted,’ said one officer admiringly, ‘but he never did. He was a really clean-living soldier.’ Terauchi was exasperated by the need to refer every detail of his deployments to Tokyo. The general staff only gave final endorsement to his defensive plan for Leyte two days before the Americans landed there.

Until the autumn of 1944, Terauchi’s principal subordinate was the Philippines’ occupation commander, Lt-Gen. Shigenori Kuroda, a mildmannered little man devoted to women and golf. Kuroda said cheerfully: ‘Why bother about defence plans? The Philippines are obviously indefensible.’ Such remarks caused Tokyo to conclude that he was a trifle illsuited to confront an American amphibious assault. Two weeks before MacArthur’s invasion, Kuroda was supplanted by Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita, who assumed command of 14th Army under Terauchi. The newcomer summoned his staff and addressed them at his headquarters in Manila: ‘The battle we are going to fight will be decisive for Japan’s fate. Each of us bears a heavy responsibility for our part in it. We cannot win this war unless we work closely and harmoniously together. We must do our utmost, setting aside futile recriminations about the past. I intend to fight a ground battle, regardless of what the navy and air force do. I must ask for your absolute loyalty, for only thus can we achieve victory.’

In truth, there was no more chance of the rival services working harmoniously together in the Philippines than anywhere else in the Japanese empire. One day in September, a naval officer convinced himself that he saw American ships offloading troops on Mindanao. A standing order of South Asia Army decreed that all signals on an issue of such gravity must be dispatched jointly by responsible naval and military officers. Ignoring this, the navy sent a flash message to Tokyo announcing an American invasion. Every Japanese formation in the field and at sea was alerted. Hours of alarm and confusion followed. Soldiers in Manila remained disbelieving, and of course their scepticism was justified. The army regarded the false alarm as further evidence of the navy’s proclivity for fantasy, displayed daily in its wildly exaggerated claims of US ships sunk and planes destroyed.

Yamashita himself, fifty-nine in 1944, had acquired three reputations: first, as an intensely nationalistic political soldier; second, as an outstanding commander; third, as possessing the loudest snore in the Imperial Army, a vice which made his staff reluctant to sleep anywhere near him. The general had been sidelined from high command in 1936, following an equivocal role in an attempted coup against the Tokyo government, but his abilities and popularity among junior officers earned his recall in 1941. As commander of 25th Army in Malaya he achieved his greatest triumph, securing the surrender of a superior British force at Singapore. Yet the government, nervous of his new status as a national hero, once more sidelined Yamashita. Japan’s ablest commander was serving in Manchuria when the summons to the Philippines arrived. He said quietly to his chief of staff: ‘So it’s come at last, has it? Well, my going won’t change anything. It’s my turn to die, isn’t it?’ When his wife suggested that she should stay in Manchuria, the general said: ‘You’d better go home and die with your parents.’ The Manchurian puppet emperor Pu Yi claimed that Yamashita covered his face and wept at his official leave-taking before embarking for the Philippines. ‘This is our final parting,’ said the Japanese. ‘I shall never come back.’

In Tokyo en route to Manila, at a series of meetings with the nation’s leaders, ‘Hobun’ Yamashita strove in vain to persuade them to share his own brutally realistic appraisal of the strategic situation. A clever and good-natured man who had travelled widely in Europe, he knew the war was lost. Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai, the navy minister, already privately committed to negotiating a way out of the war, merely shook his head sorrowfully in the face of the general’s blunt words and said: ‘Do your best, Hobun, do your best.’ Yamashita attended a formal farewell ceremony with Hirohito, which he seemed to enjoy. He told an aide as he left the Imperial Palace that he felt as happy as he ever had in his life. Having saluted his emperor, he was ready to die.

In Manila, the general was unimpressed by the staff which he inherited, and even more dismayed by the quality of the troops he inspected, most of them rendered slothful by long occupation duty. Subordinates shared his misgivings. Lt Suteo Inoue of the 77th Infantry Regiment, for instance, recorded in his Philippines diary: ‘Soldiers here lack comradely spirit. I have never seen such an undisciplined outfit as this one. To be strong, units need a sense of shared identity. This regiment is the worst in the Japanese army…It took a hundred men almost seven hours to cross a river 150 metres wide…due to lack of barges. I presume this reflects Japan’s general lack of resources. We have underestimated the importance of material strength, and are now suffering the consequences. If this state of affairs continues for another year, Japan will be in trouble, and our withdrawal from Greater East Asia will become inevitable.’

Yamashita ordered a supply officer to transfer service troops to combat duty, and to draft Filipino labour to shift stores in their stead. To his chagrin, he was told that local people could not be trusted in such a role. The commander of 14th Army now had only days in which to prepare for the coming of the Americans. He knew that months would not have sufficed.

Luzon, in the north, is the Philippines’ principal landmass, seconded by Mindanao in the south. Between lies a jumble of densely populated lesser islands, of which Leyte is among the easternmost. In October 1944 this was MacArthur’s choice for a first lodgement. Some 115 miles long and forty-five miles broad at its widest point, it was inhabited by 915,000 of the Philippines’ seventeen million people, in modest towns of sun-bleached stucco and villages of straw-thatched huts. Leyte Gulf lies open to the ocean, and thus to an invasion fleet. The immediate American objective after securing the beaches was the rice and corn belt of Leyte Valley. There MacArthur planned to build airfields to relieve his dependence on carrier air support. He would then dispossess the Japanese of the mountainous regions beyond the plain. When the island was secure he would address Luzon, and thereafter liberate the rest of the archipelago.

Once American forces had secured a firm foothold in the Philippines and achieved command of local skies and seas, piecemeal ground operations could contribute nothing towards the defeat of Japan. But the islands had been the general’s home. He viewed their people with a paternalistic warmth as great as any British sahib felt towards Indians. Liberating them from Japanese rule was the most compelling objective of MacArthur’s war. Around three-quarters of a million Filipinos, Japanese and Americans would pay with their lives for its accomplishment.

In the weeks preceding the landing at Leyte, American carrier aircraft struck again and again at Japanese airfields and shipping. On 10 October, 1,396 sorties were launched at the Ryukyu islands south of Japan, which destroyed significant shipping and a hundred enemy aircraft, for the loss of twenty-one American planes. Two days later, Halsey’s flat-tops dispatched 1,378 sorties to Formosa. Japan’s Vice-Admiral Shigeru Fukudome, commanding 6th Base Air Force, described later how he watched the air battles, applauding as planes fell, until he perceived that most were Japanese. The struggle was not entirely one-sided—forty-eight American planes were downed on the twelfth. But next day the Japanese lost forty-one in futile attacks on Third Fleet. Over five hundred Japanese aircraft were destroyed between the twelfth and the fourteenth, an intensity of attrition dwarfing the 1940 Battle of Britain, and indeed all air combat in the European theatre. Even Japanese aircrew being trained on Kyushu for carrier operations were thrown recklessly into the battles with Halsey’s squadrons. Most were lost, and with them Japan’s last chance of sustaining a seaborne air capability.

On 14 October, Admiral Soemu Toyoda reported to Fukudome that the US Third Fleet was retiring defeated. A Japanese communiqué of 16 October announced American losses of eleven aircraft carriers, two battleships, three cruisers and one destroyer, besides eight carriers, two battleships and four cruisers damaged. The nation was urged to celebrate the ‘glorious victory of Taiwan’. In truth, of course, Halsey had achieved overwhelming success. He departed to wreak havoc elsewhere. All the Japanese had to show for their efforts was severe damage to two US cruisers. American carriers had demonstrated that they could range at will, inflicting overwhelmingly disproportionate injury upon any Japanese force they met at sea or in the sky.

Yamashita received his first indication of MacArthur’s Philippines armada in a fatuous signal from his divisional commander on Leyte: ‘Enemy fleet approaching, uncertain whether they are sheltering from weather or fleeing from Formosa battle.’ At dawn on 20 October, the seven hundred ships of MacArthur’s central Philippines attack force began offloading seven miles off the shore of Leyte Gulf. Almost 200,000 men of Sixth Army were mustered in the transports, commanded by Lt-Gen. Walter Krueger. Krueger was born in Prussia in 1881. When his father died, in 1889 his mother emigrated to the US. Her son began his military career ten years later, as a volunteer infantryman on Cuba. He rose to the rank of sergeant, then elected to seek a commission as a regular soldier. In the Pacific, to the mystification of officers who thought him a dull dog, slow and cautious, Krueger became MacArthur’s favoured field commander, his primacy rewarded by the key role on Leyte.

American warnings had been broadcast to the local population to move inland to avoid the bombardment. Filipino guerrillas were alerted by radio flashes the day before the landing. It was widely believed at SWPA headquarters that the campaign would be easy. But MacArthur’s staff intelligence estimates seriously underestimated Japanese strength, even if the Leyte garrison was not reinforced. Gen. George Kenney, MacArthur’s air chief, predicted on 24 September: ‘The objective is relatively undefended the Japanese will not offer strong resistance.’ He wrote likewise: ‘If my hunch is right…the Japs are about through.’ Kenney was an able air commander, but like all those who worked with MacArthur, his judgement was impaired by wishful thinking.

So practised had become the art of amphibious operations that since 1942 the delay between a US fleet’s arrival offshore and its first landings had been cut from four hours to two. The Leyte bombardment force carried heavier metal than that which supported the 6 June D-Day landings in Normandy. For soldiers aboard transports, almost any peril seemed worth enduring to escape the crippling heat below decks. Some units, formerly earmarked to land on the island of Yap, had been at sea since 27 August. Now they clambered clumsily down the scrambling nets into their landing craft, which circled until signal flags gave the order to head for the shore. Men of four divisions began to land in two main bodies: one at the north end of the gulf near the capital, Tacloban; the second fourteen miles southwards. Conditions were perfect. There were no mines, no surf. Fires blazed along the shoreline in the wake of the naval bombardment. Desultory Japanese artillery, mortar and machine-gun fire began to harass the invaders only after the first waves had landed, for coastal defensive positions were weakly held. American casualties were concentrated in a few unlucky units, such as two companies of the 3/32nd Infantry which lost eight killed and nineteen wounded to machine-gun fire in a matter of seconds. Several American tanks were knocked out by a nearby 70mm gun. It was mid-afternoon before tanks and infantry demolished the strongpoint and passed on westward.

In most places, however, resistance was negligible. Only 20,000 of Yamashita’s 400,000 men were deployed on Leyte. They were deemed low-grade soldiers, mostly recruited from the commercial workers of Osaka and Kyoto. Terauchi decreed: ‘The navy and air force will attempt to annihilate the enemy on X-Day…The Area Army will at the same time annihilate the enemy on Leyte.’ Yet despite these grandiose phrases,

Yamashita planned to make his principal stand on Luzon. On Leyte, the Japanese intention was to inflict pain and buy time, rather than to defeat Sixth Army. Thus, as landing craft shuttled to and fro, Krueger’s four divisions were easily able to stake out positions inland. A few hundred yards behind the beach, in the deserted village of San José, men of the 7th Cavalry found several abandoned Japanese cars and crates of Japanese beer bottled in Manila. ‘Leyte, like most of the other islands we had landed on during the last three years, was better seen at a distance,’ wrote Private Bill McLaughlin. ‘Lying offshore the perfume of the land was exotic, but on close inspection about all that could be seen was mud and rotting vegetation. The only inhabitants lived in squalid huts of grass and thatch, and looked half-starved.’

The first Filipino the Americans met was wheeling a bicycle between the tall palm trees, frantically waving his broad-brimmed hat. ‘As he approached, his face appeared to be composed entirely of smile,’ wrote correspondent Robert Shaplen. ‘It was impossible to understand what he was saying, but it was easy to see that he was filled with an almost hysterical happiness. He grabbed the hand of every soldier he could reach and shook it ecstatically.’ This ‘first liberated Filipino’, as he was dubbed, proved to be Isaios Budlong, a former Tacloban telegraph operator. Soon hundreds of local people were milling around the Americans, exuding holiday exuberance. One man presented a box of Japanese biscuits to the 7th Cavalry’s colonel. An elderly villager kept fingering soldiers ‘as a woman would fondle a piece of silk’.

The colonel commanding the 2/34th Infantry directed the attention of a 75mm tank gun onto a cluster of farm shacks which he feared might harbour Japanese. ‘The smaller building erupted in a flash of fire—lumber, chicken feathers, chickens and debris filling the area,’ wrote Captain Paul Austin, a Texan. ‘We waded the rice paddy waist-deep, and I walked past the farmhouse. A Filipino man and woman had appeared and were standing near the rear of their house. They smiled and bowed as we went past. They seemed so glad to see us that they did not mind that we had just blown their chicken house to smithereens.’

All morning, from the cruiser Nashville MacArthur watched his men move ashore. Then, after an early lunch, the great man set forth to join them. This was his first visit to Leyte for over forty years, since he was a young army engineer, and he devoted intensive attention to its stage management. ‘Regard publicity set-up as excellent,’ he signalled to his large public-relations staff shortly before the landings. ‘I desire to broad cast from beach as soon as apparatus can be set up. After I have done so you can use records made to broad cast to the US and to the Philippines at such times and in such ways as you deem best.’ Now he stepped down the ramp of a landing craft a few yards off the beach, and waded serenely through knee-deep water and a cluster of photographers who immortalised this great symbolic moment of the Pacific war. He said to Richard Sutherland, his chief of staff: ‘Well, believe it or not, we’re here.’

Once on Philippine sand, he ignored distant small-arms fire and greeted a few soldiers. Then, standing beside the islands’ new president Sergio Osmena—who scarcely disguised the fact that he would have preferred to stay in America until the battle for his country was won MacArthur broadcast a resounding proclamation: ‘People of the Philippines, I have returned! By the grace of Almighty God, our forces stand again on Philippine soil.’ His words fell on unsympathetic ears among some American soldiers and seamen who later heard them. More than a few recoiled from the fashion in which MacArthur treated this vast commitment of US power and hazard of American lives as a personal affair. Yet what else save theatre might have been expected from a great actor? Yamashita, when told of the beach photographs of ‘Maggada’, as Japanese pronounced his name, assumed them to be faked. Yet they were no more the product of stage direction than everything else about Douglas MacArthur.

That first day, the Americans lost just fifty-five men killed and missing, 192 wounded. Most of the invaders’ difficulties were created not by the enemy, but by nature. Along the landing frontage it was hard to move even a few hundred yards inland through dense cover and swamps, where heavily-laden soldiers could plunge up to their necks. The landing of stores proved a nightmare. Many ships had been poorly loaded, so that the wrong equipment came off first. Far too few men had been allocated to handling parties. Terrain impeded transfer of rations, ammunition, medical supplies forward to combat units. Some 1.5 million tons of equipment, 235,000 tons of combat vehicles, 200,000 tons of ammunition and the same weight of medical supplies were scheduled for offload in the first days, with 332,000 tons being added each month thereafter. Within hours the beaches became crowded with stores, vehicles, weapons, fuel drums, debris, piled anywhere and going nowhere in a hurry. Logistics, on an island almost bereft of metalled roads, would become a dominant issue of the campaign.

For ten days following the landings, most invaders found themselves advancing across swamp-ridden flatlands, meeting limited resistance. They gazed apprehensively at the steep, densely-covered mountains in the distance. ‘The simple truth about war,’ a soldier who fought the Japanese has written, ‘is that if you are on the attack, you can’t do a damned thing until you find your enemy, and the only way to do that is to push on, at whatever speed seems prudent, until you see or hear him, or he makes his presence known by letting fly at you.’ On the second day, ‘long before noon, the rate of the regiment’s advance was measured by the ability of the infantry to overcome the terrain’, wrote a historian of the 32nd Infantry. By the following evening, five miles inland, some men were succumbing to heat exhaustion, and all were drenched in sweat: ‘The cogon grass was so high that men smothered in its growth. Everywhere swamps and rice paddies had to be crossed.’ Sometimes the Japanese were rash enough to launch charges, which the Americans repulsed with much slaughter. One such suicidal rush against a company of the 32nd cost the Japanese seventy-five killed for one American wounded.

Much more often, however, the enemy exploited local conditions to inflict surprises as the invaders struggled through cover. A US infantry platoon was emerging from a banana grove when a single machine-gun burst wounded eleven men. Japanese soldiers sprang out and bayoneted casualties, until driven back by automatic fire. Even in allegedly secure areas, infiltration by small groups of enemy, assisted by the dense vegetation, remained a hazard: one Japanese soldier crawled up to an American artillery piece and laid a satchel charge against its breech before being killed by a grenade. Advancing infantry suffered long waits, sometimes under mortar or artillery fire, while engineers repaired bridges for tanks and checked for mines. There were never enough engineers.

Private Jack Norman was a twenty-one-year-old from Chester, Nebraska, who had dropped out of college to become a hotel bellhop, ‘which made good money, but it wasn’t all legal’, as he observed wryly. Drafted at nineteen, he experienced a not unusual odyssey through the US military system. He served in a dozen Stateside camps, first being exhaustively trained as a gunner, then as an engineer, finally becoming a most reluctant infantryman in the 96th Division. He and his comrades landed on Leyte in complete bewilderment about what was going on around them, and learned slowly through the days that followed: ‘You were wet all the time…There were spiders this big.’ He counted eagerly the Japanese whom he thought he killed with his BAR, and got to twenty-five. Once he found an empty gun emplacement, wandered over to it and suddenly saw two Japanese soldiers on the other side. Before bolting, they threw a grenade, fragments of which lodged in Norman’s leg. These removed him from the line for a few days, until they were extracted. Private Norman did not like Leyte.

The Japanese too were scarcely enjoying their own experience. As soon as word reached Manila of the landings, Maj. Shoji Takahashi of South Asia Army’s intelligence staff decided to discover for himself what was happening, though explicitly ordered to remain at headquarters. Takahashi, a thirty-one-year-old farmer’s son and career soldier, with some difficulty begged a lift on an aircraft landing on Leyte, then hitchhiked to the forward area, under constant American shellfire. He spent his first night not uncomfortably, in a civilian house with two other staff officers. Next morning, however, they emerged to find themselves in the path of an American air strike. A bomb buried Takahashi in four feet of earth, killed one roommate and badly wounded the other. After digging himself out, he toured the perimeter under a storm of American shells and bombs. He reflected gloomily that if he was killed while acting in defiance of superior orders, his soul would be denied a resting place at the Yasukuni Shrine, and offered his services to the local regimental commander. ‘Forget it,’ said the colonel. ‘You’ll be much more useful if you get back to Manila and tell them just how rough it is down here.’ Takahashi escaped on a minesweeper to Area Army headquarters.

On 23 October, at a little ceremony in Tacloban, MacArthur and Osmena celebrated the restoration of civil government to the Philippines. Sixth Army struggled to grapple with the administrative problems of meeting the needs of local Filipino people, many of whom expected to be fed. Unruly bands of guerrillas and bandits—the two were indistinguishable milled around the American columns, offering aid that was sometimes useful, often not. Most local people were in rags, and the Americans learned to mistrust those who looked more presentable. A grand figure in lavender trousers, yellow shirt and yellow hat introduced himself to the liberators as Bernardo Torres, former governor of Leyte province. He said that he hated the Japanese, but proved to have served them as director of food production. A crowd at a town meeting in Tacloban shouted: ‘Long live Americans, lovely Americans!’ Filipino assistance in humping supplies and casualties soon became indispensable to MacArthur’s units. Senior officers were exasperated by the generosity of soldiers who gave rations to local people, because this made food a less tempting inducement for them to risk their lives as battlefield porters. ‘Filipino labour…performed manual labour with lassitude,’ an American official historian observed sourly.

Each day the invaders were killing substantial numbers of enemy, and gaining ground. Yet the Americans were dismayed to discover that on the northern and western coasts beyond the mountains, the Japanese were reinforcing strongly. Units from Luzon were being ferried to Ormoc and several lesser ports. Few ground-based US aircraft could operate from Leyte, and it was weeks before carrier planes effectively interdicted supply routes. Meanwhile, thousands of enemy troops got through. On the plains, American infantry were strafed by Japanese aircraft, an experience that grew distressingly familiar: ‘Empty casings jingled down upon us like sleighbells,’ in the fanciful image of one soldier. Though Japanese squadrons flying against Leyte from Luzon were much mauled by US fighters, their attacks on American airfields seriously hampered deployment of the air support MacArthur needed. To his chagrin, the general was obliged to demand continuing cover from the carrier aircraft of Halsey’s Third Fleet.

Movement on Leyte was tough. An army report observed acidly: ‘It is foolish to land large numbers of vehicles if there are insufficient engineers to maintain the roads.’ Tanks and trucks chewed tracks into quagmires. There was dismay about service troops’ lack of enthusiasm for deploying close to the front, or performing their duties when gunfire was audible: ‘It is essential that all units…be imbued with the spirit that when necessary they shall take the same chances as the infantry. Artillery may have to be placed close up to the front line, or to provide its own local defensive protection at night; engineers must often build bridges under fire; MPs, especially in the pursuit phase, must direct traffic under fire. Service units…must take their places in the defensive positions when troops are limited.’

On 24 October a local Japanese regimental commander, Lt Col. Takayoshi Sumitani, issued a defiant handwritten order to his men of the 24th Infantry: ‘The fate of the Empire depends on this decisive battle of the Philippines. This force will fight the decisive battle around Tacloban, and will smash the barbaric enemy. There is no greater glory and honour than this…Now, the rigorous training you have received will be put to the test…Every officer and man will unite to fight courageously in a spirit of self-sacrifice. Annihilate the enemy as his Majesty the Emperor expects, and show your respect for Imperial benevolence.’

This was vain bombast. The Americans were now far too strongly established to be evicted from Leyte. What Sumitani and his kind could and did achieve, however, was to engage Sixth Army in much harder fighting than MacArthur and his staff had anticipated. And even as the invaders advanced across the island, offshore there now unfolded one of the most spectacular dramas of the Philippines campaign, indeed of the Second World War.