Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45

6 ‘Flowers of Death’: Leyte Gulf (#ulink_c04b0de3-0579-5676-a538-530a1c362423)

1 SHOGO

The largest naval clash in history took place at a time when its outcome could exercise negligible influence upon Japan’s collapse. It was inspired by a decision of Japan’s admirals to vent their frustrations in a gesture of stunning futility. In October 1944 they found themselves stripped of air cover, and facing overwhelmingly superior American forces. They wished to concentrate their fleet in the home islands. Instead, however, most big ships were obliged to operate from anchorages where fuel oil was available, off Borneo and Malaya. The Imperial Navy still disposed a force which, a few years past, had awed the world. Of ten battleships in commission at the start of the war, nine remained. It seemed to Japan’s admirals intolerable—worse, dishonourable—that capital units swung idle at their moorings while on shore the army fought desperate battles. The navy thus sought to precipitate an engagement, even though every projection of its outcome promised defeat.

The Americans were unprepared for such an initiative. As so often in north-west Europe, they credited their enemies with excessive rationality. MacArthur’s headquarters thought a Japanese dash through the San Bernardino or Surigao Strait approaches to Leyte Gulf unlikely. The enemy’s ships would lack searoom, and would confront both Halsey’s Third Fleet and Kinkaid’s Seventh. Ever since the summer, however, Japan’s commanders had intended to commit most of their surviving surface units to what they called Shogo—‘Operation Victory’. When Vice-Admiral Ugaki of the battleship squadron was shown a draft, he wrote: ‘Whether the plan is adequate or not needs further study, but at a time when we have been driven into the last ditch we have no other choice…It is essential still to hope for victory…and endeavour to attain it.’ In other words, it was preferable to do anything than to do nothing. Shogo would be a thrust comparable in its desperation with Hitler’s Ardennes offensive three months later.

Even as Japan’s commanders and staffs pored over charts through September and early October, their vital air squadrons were vanishing into the ocean. Day after day off Formosa, Halsey’s planes inflicted devastating losses. ‘Our fighters were but so many eggs thrown at the stone wall of the invincible enemy formations,’ Vice-Admiral Fukudome wrote wretchedly. US radar picket destroyers enabled the Americans to mass aircraft in holding patterns a hundred miles out from Third Fleet whenever Japanese attacks threatened. Fighter direction had become a superbly sophisticated art. So too had massed attacks on Japan’s air bases and floating assets. On 10 October, 1,396 American sorties against Okinawa and the Ryukyus ravaged shipping and destroyed a hundred enemy aircraft for the loss of twenty-one. Between the twelfth and the fourteenth, the Japanese lost more than five hundred aircraft. Their combat casualties were matched by a steep decline in aircraft serviceability—to 50 per cent, even 20 per cent, compared with the Americans’ 80 per cent. Many Japanese ground crew had been lost in the Pacific atoll battles, and no trained replacements were available.

These setbacks were matched by extraordinary Japanese self-deceit about what had taken place. Vice-Admiral Ugaki rejoiced about a destroyer squadron’s ‘tremendous feat’ of sinking three aircraft carriers, a cruiser and four destroyers. In truth, in the action cited the Americans had lost one destroyer. Here was a high command forsaking that indispensable practice, honest analysis. Instead, in drafting the Shogo plan, Japan’s commanders embraced a tissue of illusions. Most of the 116 planes left to the Japanese fleet were winched rather than flown aboard carriers in their Kyushu anchorage on 17 October, because the pilots were deemed too inexperienced to make deck landings. The fleet now relied upon on land-based air cover. Japan’s forty surviving aircraft in the Philippines were reinforced tenfold by 23 October, but remained subject to relentless attrition on the ground and in the air. At sea, the Japanese assembled forces of nine battleships, four carriers, fifteen heavy and light cruisers and twenty-nine destroyers. This seemed impressive, until measured against the US Navy’s strength: nineteen task groups around the Philippines comprised nine fleet, eight light and twenty-nine escort carriers; twelve battleships, twelve heavy and sixteen light cruisers, 178 destroyers, forty destroyer escorts and ten frigates. The US now deployed more destroyers than the Japanese navy owned carrier aircraft. Third Fleet’s two hundred ships occupied an area of ocean nine miles by forty.

The objective of Shogo, complex as most Japanese operational plans, was to enable three squadrons, two sailing from Borneo and one from Kyushu, to rendezvous off Leyte Gulf, where the Combined Fleet would fall upon MacArthur’s amphibious armada and its covering naval force, Seventh Fleet. Though the Japanese believed that their air attacks had already crippled Halsey’s Third Fleet, operating north-east of the Philippines, they sought to decoy his carriers and battleships out of range of Leyte. For this purpose, Japan’s four surviving carriers and skeletal complement of aircraft were to feint southward, making a demonstration the Americans could not fail to notice. The carriers’ inevitable loss was considered worth accepting, to remove Halsey from the path of the main striking force. Shogo was scheduled for the earliest possible date after the expected American landing.

Most senior officers and staffs opposed the plan. They perceived its slender prospects of success, and its likely calamitous losses. They saw that, by waiting until the Americans were ashore, they would have missed the decisive moment in the Philippines. Shogo reflected the Japanese navy’s chronic weakness for dividing its forces. Even the bellicose Ugaki wrote on 21 September that it seemed rash ‘to engage the full might of the enemy with our inferior force…committing ourselves to a decisive battle…There was little chance of achieving victory. Watching a Sumo wrestler taking on five men in succession, it was plain that he could not prevail if he expended too much effort grappling with each opponent in turn.’ Some officers said: ‘We do not mind death, but if the final effort of our great navy is to be an attack on a cluster of empty freighters, surely admirals Togo and Yamamoto would weep in their graves.’ Critics challenged a scheme which demanded daylight engagement. Only darkness, they believed, might offer a chance of success, of exploiting the Imperial Navy’s legendary night-fighting skills. Even the army, itself so often imprudent, thought Shogo reckless.

Vice-Admiral Takeo Kurita, designated as operational commander, made the best case he could for the operation. ‘Would it not be shameful,’ he demanded at his captains’final briefing, ‘for the fleet to remain intact while our nation perishes? There are such things as miracles.’ Yet Kurita himself, though a veteran destroyer and cruiser leader who had seen plenty of action, was notoriously cautious. He had gained his flag by virtue of seniority, not performance. He was to execute a plan entirely devised by Combined Fleet headquarters, which demanded extraordinary boldness. On the eve of sailing, only Kurita’s rhetoric matched the demands of his mission. The fleet, he told his officers, was being granted ‘the chance to bloom as flowers of death’. His audience responded as custom demanded, leaping to their feet to cry ‘Banzai!’, but there was no eagerness in their hearts. Kurita and his captains then embarked upon one of the most reckless and ill-managed operations in naval history.

The series of actions which became known as the Battle of Leyte Gulf was fought over an area the size of Britain or Nevada. Following a Japanese naval code change, American intelligence gained no hint of the enemy’s plan, but both of Kurita’s southern squadrons were detected long ahead of reaching Leyte. Before dawn on 23 October, Halsey received one of the most momentous sighting reports of the war from the submarine Darter, patrolling the Palawan Passage with its sister ship Dace: ‘MANY SHIPS INCLUDING 3 PROBABLE BBS 08-28N 116-30E COURSE 040 SPEED 18 X CHASING.’ This was Kurita’s 1st Striking Force, en route from Brunei Bay. What a spectacle it must have been. No one has bettered Winston Churchill’s imagery of twentieth-century dreadnoughts at sea: ‘gigantic castles of steel’, prows dipping as they advanced in stately procession, ‘like giants bowed in anxious thought’.

Five battleships and ten heavy cruisers steamed in three columns at sixteen knots, without an anti-submarine screen. This was all the more astonishing since the Japanese intercepted the American radio transmission, and thus knew submarines were at hand. At 0632, Darter fired six torpedoes at the cruiser Atago, Kurita’s flagship, from point-blank range—980 yards—then loosed her stern tubes at the cruiser Takao from 1,550 yards. Atago was hit four times, Takao twice. Dace’s skipper, Bladen Claggett, whipped up his periscope to see ‘the sight of a lifetime’: Atago billowing black smoke and orange flame, sinking fast by the bow. Takao, though hit hard in the stern, remained afloat. Claggett heard two huge explosions. ‘I have never heard anything like it,’ wrote the submarine skipper. ‘The soundmen reported that it sounded as if the bottom of the ocean was blowing up…Heard tremendous breaking-up noises. This was the most gruesome sound I have ever heard.’ The diving officer said: ‘We’d better get the hell out of here.’

Admiral Kurita and his staff swam from the stricken Atago to the destroyer Kishinami, and thence transferred to the great battleship Yamato. Some 360 of Atago’s crew drowned, including almost all the admiral’s communications staff. If Kurita’s conduct thereafter was clumsy, no fifty-five-year-old could have found it easy to exercise command after suffering such a personal trauma. Darter’s sister boat Dace launched four torpedoes at the cruiser Maya and heard huge explosions, signalling her end. Belated Japanese destroyer attacks prevented either submarine from firing again. Kurita’s ships increased speed to twenty-four knots to escape the killing ground. The first action of Leyte Gulf had inflicted substantial damage on the Japanese before they fired a shot. Some officers of ‘Centre Force’, as Kurita’s squadron was designated, expressed rueful admiration for the American submarines’ achievement: ‘Why can’t our people pull off a stunt like that?’ Why not, indeed? This first American success was made possible by a tactical carelessness amounting to recklessness, which would characterise almost every Japanese action in those days. However gloomy were Kurita and his officers about the operation they had undertaken, it is extraordinary that they spurned elementary precautions. Japanese behaviour suggested a resignation to death much stronger than the will to fight. In this titanic clash, a once-great navy was to conduct itself in a fashion that would have invited ridicule, were not such great issues and so many lives at stake.

It was now plain to the Americans that Kurita’s ships were headed for the San Bernardino Strait, at the north end of Samar island. On reaching its eastern exit, they intended to turn south for the seven-hour run to Leyte Gulf, and MacArthur’s invasion anchorage. The second Japanese squadron under Admiral Shoji Nishimura had also been spotted, steaming towards the same objective from the south, past Mindanao. Halsey dared not lead his own battleships into San Bernardino, which had been heavily mined by the Japanese. Instead, he ordered three fast carrier groups to close the range and launch air strikes. The Japanese, however, moved first. Three groups of fifty aircraft apiece, flying from Luzon, attacked the carriers of Sherman’s Task Group 3. A long, bitter battle ensued. One Hellcat pilot, the famous Cmdr David McCampbell, shot down nine Japanese planes, his wingman six, five other pilots claimed two each. McCampbell had initially been rejected for flight training back in 1933, because of poor eyesight. Yet the aggression indispensable to all successful fighter pilots made him one of the most successful of the navy’s war. ‘It’s competitive all the way through,’ he said wryly. On 24 October 1944, nearly all the prizes were won by the Americans. The Japanese attacking force was almost wiped out.

Just one Judy dive-bomber penetrated the American screen and landed a 550-pound bomb on the light carrier Princeton, crowded with planes preparing for take-off. Fuel caught fire, torpedoes exploded, hundreds

of desperate men crowded the flightdeck. At 1010, half an hour after the initial explosion, all crewmen save damage-control parties abandoned ship. The cruiser Birmingham steamed close alongside to help fight Princeton’s fires, sending thirty-eight volunteers aboard the stricken carrier. A Jeep and a tractor slid from Princeton’s lofty deck onto the destroyer Morrison, which was taking off men while using machine guns to ward off sharks from survivors in the water. Princeton’s agony continued for 21/2 hours, until a new Japanese air raid was signalled. Birmingham temporarily stood off. After Lexington’s Hellcats broke up the attackers, however, the heroic cruiser closed in once more, and tried to take Princeton in tow.

A huge explosion in the carrier’s torpedo stowage put an end to the salvage attempt, and inflicted shocking damage on Birmingham. The ship’s war diary recorded: ‘Dead, dying and wounded, many of them bloody and horrible, covered the decks…Blood ran freely down the waterways.’ The hulk of Princeton was sunk by American torpedoes. Birmingham retired from the fleet, ‘a dockyard case’. Amazingly, thanks to the courage and skill displayed aboard all the ships involved, only 108 men died and 190 were wounded. If this was a bitter morning for Halsey’s TG3, it was also a time for pride.

Third Fleet’s first air strike fell upon Kurita’s ships at 1026, followed by a second wave at 1245, another at 1550. Aboard a nearby American submarine, sailors eavesdropped on the airmen’s radio chatter. One pilot interrupted his controller’s instructions impatiently: ‘Let’s get this over with.’ Then there was a clamour of yells: ‘Yippee! I’ve got a battleship!’ followed by: ‘All right, let the battleship alone. Line up on the cruiser.’ Kurita was now flying his flag in Yamato, in uneasy concourse with Ugaki, who commanded the battleship element from the same ship, and despised his superior. The admiral pleaded in vain with shore command for air support. This was refused, on the absurd grounds that fighters were more profitably engaged in attacking US carriers. Here, once again, was the Japanese obsession with the inherent virtue of offensive action, matched by impatience with the humdrum requirements of defence. Kurita was obliged to watch, almost impotent, as American aircraft struck his ships again and again.

Avenger gunner Sherwin Goodman was quietly contemplating the sky amidst a huge formation of American aircraft when his thoughts were interrupted: ‘It was a beautiful day…My goodness, what have we got here?’ It was the Yamato group, far below them. The torpedo-carriers dropped and circled, to reach firing positions. Goodman rotated his turret forward, and could see only gunflashes from the enemy ships: ‘It looked like a tunnel of fire.’ At a thousand yards, they released their torpedo, the plane lifted, and Goodman cried at his pilot, ‘Break left! Break left!’ Gazing down as they swung away, he exclaimed triumphantly: ‘We hit him!’ Their victim was the light cruiser Noshiro, which sank almost immediately. Two American bombs caused slight damage to Yamato, giving Kurita another bad fright. His chief of staff was wounded by splinters.

Every gun in the Japanese fleet fired on the incoming Americans, yet achieved small success. Since 1942, US ships had made great strides in countering air attack by radio fighter direction, radar-controlled gunnery and radio-guided proximity shell fuses. The Japanese had not begun to match such advances. Their anti-aircraft defences were woefully inadequate. ‘Our captain was a great gunnery enthusiast,’ said Petty Officer Kisao Ebisawa, who served on a warship through many US air attacks. ‘He was always telling us that we could shoot the Americans out of the sky. After innumerable raids in which our guns did not even scratch their wings, he was left looking pretty silly. When air attacks came in, there was nothing much we could do but pray.’

On 24 October, huge ‘beehive’ shells from the battleships’ main armament did more damage to their own gunbarrels than to American planes, but pilots were shaken by the spectacle. ‘It’s nerve-racking,’ said one, ‘because you see the guns on the ships go off. And then you wonder what in hell you are going to do for the next ten or fifteen seconds while the shell gets there.’ Amid the erupting black puffballs in the sky, again and again American torpedo-and bomb-carrying aircraft got through unscathed.