Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45

Many men chafed at their ignorance of the purposes of their ships’ activities, beyond the obvious ones of bombardment and defence against air attack. ‘You never know where you’re going from one island to the next,’ said Louis Irwin, a turret gunner on the cruiser Indianapolis. ‘My lasting regret was that I didn’t know what the hell was going on, where we fitted into the big picture,’ said Lt Ben Bradlee, a destroyer officer. Eugene Hardy served on the cruiser Astoria at Midway, but was unaware that he had taken part in a great battle until somebody told him afterwards. ‘Dear Mom and Dad,’ wrote a twenty-year-old to his family in New Jersey from the Pacific, ‘I really feel like writing a long letter because I have some time, but there isn’t much to write about.’

If routine often became oppressive, in many respects a naval rating’s life was preferable to that of a combat infantryman. Death at sea was horrible, but actuarially much less likely than for a man in a ‘sharp end’ role on land. Daily existence was softened by comforts unavailable to most ground troops. Yet in the Pacific, every seaman was prey to the unyielding heat. Temperatures above a hundred degrees were routinely recorded below decks. Ventilation was relatively crude and always inadequate. Senior ratings competed for prized bunk space near an air outlet. In rough weather, conditions grew much worse, for the blowers could not run. Heat rash was almost universal.

Many men slept on deck, so that warships at night were strewn with slumbering forms on gun positions and galleries, beneath the boats and in hammocks slung between rails on every corner of the superstructure. Prostrate figures crowded under the folded wings of aircraft on carrier flightdecks. Lifejackets served as pillows. Locked into the unchanging routine of four hours on, eight hours off, overlaid with dawn and dusk calls to ‘general quarters’, men learned to sleep in the most unpromising circumstances. James Fahey, a New Englander who served on the cruiser Montpelier, seldom occupied his bunk, instead lying down on the steel deck with his shoes for a pillow. If it rained, ‘you stand back under cover and hope it does not last very long’. Some sought space as far as possible from explosives or fuel, but on a warship almost any refuge was illusory.

Naval forces often kept station in a given area for days on end, steaming circular courses rather than dropping anchor. Machinery was never silent, never still. There were always watches to be kept and duties to be filled; echoing broadcast announcements; hurrying feet on ladders; eyes and ears watching and listening at dials, screens, headphones. Everybody was tired almost all the time, yet so effective had this navy become that ‘there weren’t many fuck-ups’, in the words of a young reservist. ‘It was an exhausting life that discouraged reflection, introspection, or anything more intellectual than reading.’ A destroyer officer observed pityingly that two of his comrades, junior-grade lieutenants, were geriatrics of twenty-seven, ‘too old for the duty they had…The hours were too long and the physical demands too great. That’s when I learned that war is for kids.’ Louis Irwin, a beer salesman’s son from Tennessee, had joined the navy at seventeen in 1942, ‘for lack of anything better to do. I wanted a bunk to sleep in and not a foxhole.’ Irwin found himself most apprehensive not in combat, but on refuelling duty in heavy seas, facing the peril of being washed overboard.

During bombardment missions in the island battles, the big ships’ guns fired hour upon hour, day after day, as long as forward observers pointed targets and ammunition held out. A novice sailor on the battleship Pennsylvania fell asleep under one of its vast gun turrets, then remained oblivious through general quarters and a piped warning that the main batteries were about to fire. Concussion almost killed him. A shipmate recorded: ‘Everyone had a new respect for the fourteen-inch guns after that.’ All 45,000 tons of a battleship shook when its main armament fired. Recoil thrust the vessel aside. Far below in the engine spaces, ‘it felt like being taken apart in the boiler rooms of hell. You could see motor mounts jump and steam lines move.’ Consequences became even more dramatic aboard smaller ships. Repeated concussions from the destroyer Howorth’s five-inch guns caused all the urinals in the heads to break free from their bulkheads.

Off-duty, in quiet times there might be a movie show, but mostly there was nothing to do save sleep and play cards. Machinist’s mate Emory Jernigan saw $20,000 on the table in a messroom poker game. Men played high, because they had nothing else to spend money on. Jernigan reckoned that 20 per cent of the ship’s gamblers ended up with 80 per cent of the players’ money. Ben Bradlee’s commanding officer learned that the torpedo officer on their destroyer owed him $4,000 in card money. The captain ordered Bradlee to play his debtor double or quits until he lost.

Whereas ashore a combat officer’s life was little better than that of an enlisted man, afloat those with commissions were privileged. Few ordinary sailors enjoyed war service, but some officers like Bradlee did, especially if they were fortunate enough to be able to use their brains, serving in small ships, less vulnerable to ‘brass and bullshit’ than battleships and carriers. ‘I had such a wonderful time in the war,’ wrote Bradlee later. ‘I just plain loved it. Loved the excitement, even loved being a little bit scared. Loved the sense of achievement, even if it was only getting from Point A to Point B, loved the camaraderie…I found that I liked making decisions.’

Emory Jernigan, by contrast, with none of the privileges of rank, wrote that ‘time and distance, plus loneliness, make a tasteless soup, hard to stomach for long periods of time, and ours was a long, long time’. James Fahey wrote in his diary: ‘You want to be free again and do what you want to do and go where you want to go, without someone always ordering you around.’ It was a sore point in the navy, that officers received a disproportionate share of medals—they accounted for less than 10 per cent of personnel, but received almost two-thirds of all decorations. They were the ones in the spotlight if a ship was deemed to have done something good, while their men remained ‘bit players’. On the destroyer Schroeder, for instance, seaman Robert Schwartz dived into heavy seas one day to save a comrade who had fallen overboard—and received no recognition. Emory Jernigan hated seeing fried eggs being carried to the officers’ quarters, while he and his messmates breakfasted off the powdered variety, always watery, together with powdered lemonade: ‘It was a constant, nagging reminder that we were first-class citizens caught in a third-class situation.’ One of the ship’s black mess stewards revenged himself on a bullying captain by spitting or urinating in the wardroom coffee before serving it.

Some men, however, found the experience of naval service deeply rewarding. Carlos Oliveira was the immigrant son of Portuguese parents. He had never been to school and spoke no English. In 1941 the navy rejected him as a volunteer, but in the panic after Pearl Harbor he was enlisted direct into the fire room of the battleship Wisconsin and served three years before being released to attend boot camp. It was there that a young officer, a Southerner named Betts, made a remark that impressed him: ‘Carlos, a lack of formal education is not an impediment if a man can read and will read. Books can take you anywhere you want to go.’ Oliveira said later that the war turned people like himself into real Americans.

Through his years at sea Emory Jernigan, a twenty-one-year-old farmboy from a desperately poor home in Florida, missed more than anything the chance of a walk in the woods. He ate better as a sailor than as a child, but missed grits. At his battle station in a destroyer’s forward engine room, as Jernigan and his comrades heard the concussions of battle overhead, they never forgot that if steam lines fractured, they would cook in seconds. At high speed, propeller shafts shrieked in protest, ‘a warping sound as if they wanted to leave the mounts. The rudders and hydraulic lines would moan in their labors, and underwater explosions would hit the hull just outside.’ After months of combat, nerves became frayed to the limits, ‘so that when a big pipe wrench fell very noisily on a grating behind me, it scared me half to death’. They emerged after hours of such ordeals covered in stinking salt sweat. One of Jernigan’s comrades, after experience of action below, jammed into an ammunition-handling room, successfully begged a station topside.

Some men found small-ship life intolerably uncomfortable and sought transfers, especially after experience of typhoons—three US destroyers foundered with heavy loss of life in the great Pacific blow of December 1944. Conversely, however, life aboard escorts and submarines possessed an intimacy impossible to achieve on a big ship with a crew of up to 3,000, where no one man ever visited every compartment. ‘Each ship is like a city, large or small,’ wrote Emory Jernigan. ‘Even a tugboat is a little town all of its own.’ Personal relationships fluctuated dramatically among men living month upon month in enforced proximity: ‘You’d be playing checkers with a friend one day, and the next you couldn’t stand him.’

The quality and quantity of seamen’s rations seemed to army personnel infinitely enviable. The official Navy Cookbook of the period included such gems as: ‘The following words…are defined for the benefit of those who may not be familiar with some of the terms used in cooking: CANAPE (KA-NA-PA) a slice of bread fried in butter, on which anchovies or mushrooms are served. CAVIAR (KAV-I-AR) prepared or salted roe of the sturgeon or other large fish, used as a relish.’ Everything in big ships’ galleys was on a heroic scale. The recipe for canned codfish cakes began: ‘Take 40 pounds of potatoes and 15 pounds of codfish…’ And for beef chop suey: ‘30 pounds of beef, 30 pounds of cabbage, one pint Worcestershire sauce…’

A sample menu in the 1945 USN Cookbook ran: ‘Breakfast—grapefruit juice, cornflakes, grilled sausages, french toast, maple syrup, butter, milk, coffee. Lunch: cream of vegetable soup, roast beef, brown gravy, buttered potatoes, harvard beets, carrot and celery salad, ice cream, rolls, butter, coffee. Supper: lamb fricassee, mashed potatoes, tossed green salad, french dressing, coconut jelly doughnuts, bread, butter, tea.’ ‘Tin can’ sailors in destroyers never fed in such a fashion, but larger vessels offered astonishing fare save in combat, heavy weather or when operations delayed rendezvous with ‘reefers’—refrigerated ships. Messdeck menus then became reduced to Spam and beans.

Almost every human and mechanical need had to be met by shipment across thousands of miles of ocean. The south-west Pacific was known as the ‘goat and cabbage circuit’, because so much unwelcome food came from Australia. The scale of logistics was staggering. In the five months from 1 September 1944, for instance, fleet tankers delivered to the fast carrier force alone 81/4 million barrels of fuel oil, 121/4 million gallons of aviation gas. In addition, they shifted thousands of drums of lubricating oil in fourteen grades, compressed gases, oxygen, spare belly tanks, mail, personnel and food. Fresh water was a constant issue. The heat caused tanks to become contaminated with bacteria, which necessitated draining them for cleaning. So desperate were some seamen for a serious drink that they built stills or drained alcohol from torpedo propulsion systems. The latter practice may have raised morale, but drastically shortened the torpedoes’ range.

The mood of every ship was different, and strongly influenced by the personality of its captain. Some were admired, ever thoughtful for the welfare of their men. Others were not. The captain of Franklin once bawled out his stewards over the carrier’s broadcast system: ‘You black messmen are the sloppiest bunch of mess attendants I have ever seen.’ A disgusted crewman said: ‘He…sounded just like a Georgia redneck—in front of 3,000 men. It was not right.’ Another carrier captain was described as ‘one of the most irascible and unstable officers ever to earn a fourth stripe, but a man with a slide-rule brain’. Yet another was judged by a fellow officer ‘emotionally unstable, evil-tempered…He drank too much too often; had a capacity for insulting behavior, especially when drunk.’ A destroyer officer’s diary recorded dismay about his skipper: ‘The old man is getting nastier all the time. There is something wrong with that guy mentally. The poor, pitiable old fool told us last night that none of us were any good and that professionally we stink.’ Doctrinal procedures standardised throughout the fleet did something, but not enough, to iron out unhappinesses created by mad or bad captains. Big ships were invariably commanded by regular officers. To run a cruiser or carrier, it was thought essential to possess at least six years’ sea time. Many smaller vessels, however, were committed to the hands of reservists.

Ben Bradlee suggests that some reserve officers, civilians in uniform, performed better than their career counterparts: ‘We hadn’t spent years learning all the stuff about how things worked, we simply knew what they did.’ One of Bradlee’s own captains, a professional navy man, was notoriously inept at mooring ship, often causing lines to snap. Once he turned in disgust to a reservist lieutenant on the bridge and said: ‘Goddamn it, I can’t stop this son-of-a-bitch. You do it.’ Because amateur sailors knew so little, navy manuals detailed the minutest aspects of each man’s duties. The November 1944 Organisation and Regulations for US Pacific Fleet decreed, for instance: ‘Messmen shall keep themselves meticulously clean…cooks, bakers and butchers on duty shall wear the “chef’s cap”. Naked personnel will not be permitted in galleys or messing spaces…The use of profane and obscene language is prohibited.’

Morale was much influenced by the frequency of letters from home. Cheers and whistles rang through a ship when mail call was piped. Emory Jernigan was ashamed to be summoned by his captain and rebuked for failing to write to his mother, who had complained. Rumour, scuttlebutt, was the breath of life: the Japs were ready to quit; the ship was headed for refit; the next target was Okinawa, or Leyte, or Peleliu. Good commanding officers broadcast frequently, telling their crews everything they knew about what the ship and the fleet were doing. This was especially important in action, to hundreds of men imprisoned in steel compartments far below decks. For their very sanity, they needed to know what a huge, unseen detonation meant; whether their team seemed to be winning; sometimes, whether damage to their own ship was as grievous as concussions, screams, smoke pulsing through ventilators made it seem.

By late 1944, even the biggest ships were overcrowded: with gunners for additional batteries of anti-aircraft guns, crammed onto upper decks; up to 10 per cent surplus personnel to compensate for those who habitually ‘missed ship’ on sailing for the combat zone; and staff officers. Experts on one new specialisation or another—flak or human torpedoes or mine counter-measures—were shoehorned into messdecks, to the chagrin of those who had to make space. Commodore Arleigh Burke observed wryly that visitors left an aircraft carrier with an impression that ‘the most important thing was the battle for food and living room’. Nor was overcrowding confined to men. Far more technology was now available than ships could readily carry. ‘Top hamper’, excess weight on superstructures, threatened stability. A staff officer said ruefully: ‘Every time we bring out something new they [ships’ captains] will not give up what they have on board, they want the new item also. We have got to saturation point now, so you can’t put the stuff on.’

Men yearned for a chance to stretch legs ashore, but this meant only a glimpse of some thankless strip of coral and palms. On Mongong atoll, for instance—‘Mog Mog island’, as sailors knew it—the genial Commodore ‘Scrappy’ Kessing, an elderly officer who had escaped from hospital to join the war, provided R-and-R facilities which were once utilised by 20,000 sailors in a single day. In March 1945, before Okinawa, 617 ships were anchored there. James Hutchinson of the battleship Colorado joined his ship’s boxing team simply for the excuse to get ashore on Ulithi to train. Ulithi, repair base for the fleets, was a miracle of logistics organisation, but offered few joys to tired sailors. Enlisted men queued for hours for places in a boat to the shore, where they might be allocated four cans of beer apiece. Their commissioned counterparts forced a passage into the most overcrowded officers’ club in the western Pacific for a spasm of noisy drinking before recall to their ships.

Manus was reckoned to have much better facilities, but crews saw the island only when bombs and ammunition needed replenishment. Even this requirement was often fulfilled at sea. Sanctimonious post-war tributes were paid to the partnership between warships and civilian-crewed supply ships. In truth, however, the latter were often slothful and ill-disciplined, flaunting their higher pay in the faces of navy men. A cruiser captain off Leyte was disgusted to hear a supply ship crewman cry contemptuously across the water to his men: ‘Suckers! Suckers! I get twenty bucks a day, whadda youse guys get?’

Aboard a carrier, flight operations and aircraft maintenance demanded almost incessant activity. On other ships, however, weeks or months of monotony were only occasionally interrupted. There was seldom a sight of the enemy, only of the deadly projectiles which he launched. Lt Ben Bradlee saw two Japanese in the whole war. Once he glimpsed a pilot whose frozen features were visible before he crashed into the sea a few yards off the ship’s bow. The second time, from Bradlee’s destroyer off Corregidor a solitary figure was spotted swimming, wearing what appeared to be a torn nightgown. Bradlee was dispatched in a boat to pick him up, while a raucous chorus of sailors lined the rail, jeering ‘Throw him back.’

Naval war imposed abrupt, drastic transitions from routine to mortal terror and back again, which contrasted with an even tenor of discomfort and fear for infantrymen in combat ashore. At any hour of day or night, a ship might be electrified by a broadcast call. ‘Of all the announcements none packs quite the wallop of “GENERAL QUARTERS…GENERAL QUARTERS…ALL HANDS MAN YOUR BATTLE STATIONS!”’ wrote an officer. ‘Though you may have heard it fifty times before, the fifty-first still has the freshness of the first.’ A carrier officer, Ensign Dick Saunders, said: ‘When the action does come, it happens so quickly you are never quite ready for it. It’s all over within a matter of seconds and then you wait, wait, wait again for some more.’

2 FLYBOYS

For all the majesty of the big ships, the thrill of racing destroyers and PT-boats dancing over the waves, by 1944 every sailor in the Pacific knew that the fleet’s airborne firepower was what counted: Avenger torpedo-bombers; Helldiver dive-bombers; Hellcat and Corsair fighters. The fast fleet carriers operated in task groups of four, accompanied by appropriate escorts. Concentrating ‘flat-tops’ economised on standing fighter patrols—CAPs, which covered their operations against Japanese air attack. The big ships sought to operate in open seas, offering maximum scope for manoeuvre, minimum exposure to surprise. They were screened by destroyer radar pickets, posted many miles out to provide early warning. A few years earlier, carrier-borne aircraft had been thought a poor substitute for land-based air support. In 1944-45, it remained true that heavy bombers could not operate from flightdecks, but so vast was the US Navy’s aerial armada that it could deliver a devastating punch against any target afloat or ashore. Each fleet carrier carried a mix of around fifty fighters, thirty dive-bombers, a dozen torpedo-bombers. The chief limitations on the ability of Nimitz’s fleets to support land operations were weather and the admirals’ yearning to pursue their own strategic purposes, unencumbered by responsibilities to soldiers or Marines.

The men of the air groups wore uniforms which implied that they belonged to the same service as seamen, but the ‘flyboys’ of the ‘brown shoe navy’ thought of themselves as a separate breed. Their lives were almost entirely divorced from those of parent ships’ crews. Until the last stage of the war, around one-third of carrier airmen could expect to die, in combat or one of the accidents inseparable from high-pressure flight operations. A catapult failure, careless landing, flak damage which injured hydraulics or undercarriage—all these things could, and did, kill a crew or two most days—10 per cent aircraft losses a month were factored into the planning of carrier operations.

Airmen were roused from their bunks two hours before take-off, to dress and eat—they were usually briefed for a dawn sortie the previous night. They received the order ‘Pilots, man your planes!’ through bullhorns and the broadcast system, then ran through the hatches along catwalks to the flightdeck, to be strapped into their seats by plane captains waiting on the wings. If it was dark or twilight, deck crews with illuminated batons pointed the way to the port side, where catapult rings and rigs were attached to the heavier torpedo-bombers—fighters usually took off unassisted—while pilots ran through their checklists. Then, on signal, at intervals of a few seconds, one by one they gunned their engines and were hurled forward into the air. Men took off from relative calm and comfort, flew into the heat of combat, experienced thrills and fears such as few seamen knew, then bounced back onto a heaving deck, to be violently checked by an arrester hook. They pulled themselves stiffly out of their cockpits after anything up to seven hours sitting on an unfriendly dinghy pack, went below for debriefing—and probably a shot of bourbon. Aircrew were the despair of many regular navy officers. Most cared nothing for the honour and traditions of the service, nor for ship’s discipline. They reckoned that if they flew and fought, nothing else was anybody’s business.

The rest of the US Navy might be dry, but few air groups were. On the carrier Makassar Strait, for instance, commanding officer Herbert Riley—one of just two regulars aboard, a former naval aide to Franklin Roosevelt—wrote: ‘There was medicinal liquor aboard all the carriers to be used under supervision of flight surgeons. Their supply was generous…Liquor had its uses, believe me.’ After one of his air groups’ first missions, he found flight surgeons ‘dispensing liquor in water glasses…the pilots were high as kites’.

Thereafter, Riley introduced rules. He ordered the vacant admiral’s cabin to be converted into an aircrew club, complete with Esquire pin-ups and cocktail tables. Inside, any aviator was eligible for two drinks a night, provided he was not scheduled to fly. Cmdr Bill Widhelm, operations officer of TF58, complained bitterly about discrimination between officers and men in the allocation of alcohol: ‘There are men out there on those ships that haven’t had a foot on shore for a year. I don’t see why we can’t do like the British, give those enlisted men a grog. Pilots get it. I had it. But those enlisted men never get it.’

Cmdr Jim Lamade of Hancock sought discretion to fine aviators for misdemeanours, because traditional navy punishments held no meaning for them: ‘These young pilots…are not naval officers as we know a naval officer. They’re just flying because it’s their job…Discipline…means nothing to them. If you say, “We’ll ground this pilot,” well…they don’t want to go to combat anyhow, so they’d just as soon be grounded…they will lay around the bunk room all day and read…But if you take some money away from them, they will feel that.’

Likewise Cmdr Jim Mini of Essex: ‘The boys in a squadron these days don’t have the navy as a career. There’s a problem of leadership; you have to have the boys like you. You can’t lean on being a commander and saying, “You’ll do this or else.” You have to present it to the boys in an attractive fashion…I can safely say that if [the tour] had been much longer, we would have had trouble, and the boys would have broken down more than they did.’ A high proportion of aviators caused disciplinary problems, declared a navy report: ‘The very exacting nature of flight duties has combined with the youth and frequent irresponsibility of flying officers to create difficulties which a special board was created to police.’ Fliers’ letters home displayed carelessness about security; they broke the rules by keeping diaries; and ‘drink is often an issue’.

Flying combat planes from carriers was one of the most thrilling, yet also most stressful, assignments of the war. Ted Winters remarked of some of their long, long sorties: ‘It isn’t a question of how much gasoline, it’s how long you can keep your fanny on that seat.’ It was an inherently hazardous activity to operate a plane from a cramped and perpetually shifting ocean platform, even before the enemy became involved. ‘We learned to listen for the slightest change in the sound of the engine which might reveal a loss of power,’ wrote a pilot. ‘We always welcomed a moderate wind which increased the air flow over the flightdeck. Five to ten knots made the difference between a comfortable take-off and “sweating it out”.’

Beyond combat casualties, the log of a Marine Corsair squadron on Essex showed that during a typical fortnight, one plane ‘splashed’ taking off on each of two successive days; on the second of these, another plane crashed on landing. Three days later, one Corsair was lost at sea. Thereafter, three more went into the sea at two-day intervals. Hard deck landings damaged airframes. Sherwin Goodman, an Avenger gunner, suffered a typical mishap one morning when the flightdeck hydraulic catapult failed in mid-launch. His plane slumped into the sea. Seconds later, the huge ship passed close enough to strike the sinking Avenger a glancing blow. A destroyer retrieved the crew intact, however, collecting the usual six gallons of ice-cream ransom for returning them to their carrier, and to operations.

‘Oh I’d rather be a bellhop than a flyer on a flat-top,’ the pilots sang, ‘with my hand around a bottle not around the goddamn throttle.’ Unpredicted violent weather could write off whole squadrons of aircraft, because it made navigation problematic. Error meant a descent into the sea when gas ran out. As on shore, almost every aviator wanted to be a ‘fighter jock’, with the thrill of engaging enemy aircraft in the war’s best carrier fighter, the Grumman Hellcat. It is intoxicating to go into battle knowing that your own side possesses much better-trained, and thus more proficient, pilots than the enemy. By late 1944, the average Japanese flier had just forty flying hours’ experience before entering combat. His American counterpart had at least 525 hours, and it showed. In the last phase of the war, US carrier fighters were inflicting amazingly disproportionate losses on their failing foes. Cmdr Winters: ‘Most of our kills were from the rear end. [The Japanese] are scared to death of the Grummans. Only when they outnumber you terrifically will they even stay near you. They will make passes, but stay far away and scram when you turn on them.’ Such cautious enemy behaviour seemed a long march from the kamikaze spirit, of which so much would be heard in 1945.

Flying became more hazardous, however, when planes were committed to ground strafing or ship attacks. Low-level dive-bomber and torpedo-carrier missions remained gruelling to the end. Lamade of Hancock was shocked by the intensity of the Japanese barrage as he and his men dive-bombed targets around Hong Kong. With unusual sophistication, enemy anti-aircraft gunners followed the American planes down almost to ground level, from 15,000 feet to 8,000, then 3,000. ‘From pull-out, I looked back and saw five planes of my group going down in flames. We’re going to have to figure out some way to combat that AA,’ Lamade told navy debriefers. ‘After that attack, Admiral McCain said he was very sorry we had lost so many pilots. I told him we…can’t go on fighting Japs continually without suffering some losses.’

To beat flak, pilots learned to dive faster and more steeply than they had ever trained for. Cockpit glass fogged with the dramatic change of atmosphere as they pulled out of a descent and soared upwards after releasing bombs. As ever in combat, the men who survived were those who were determined but careful: ‘We had four or five pilots who were over-eager,’ Fred Bakutis of Enterprise told debriefers. ‘They were excellent boys, very energetic and hard to hold down. It is these people who generally don’t come back, because they are so anxious to do damage to the Japs that they take risks beyond reason.’ Yet there were also shy pilots, content to release their bombs and swing away towards safety with a carelessness of aim that exasperated their commanders. And because these were very young, sometimes wild young men, they were sometimes reckless in the use of their lethal weapons. Senior officers were irked by the frequency with which American planes misidentified as Japanese were shot down by ‘friendly fire’ from combat air patrols. A pair of bored young pilots unable to identify an enemy target might work off their frustration on a Filipino fishing boat or lumbering cart ashore.

The job nobody wanted was night operations. Take-offs and landings in darkness were more hazardous, the monotony of patrols usually unrelieved by action. If a pilot made a poor deck approach in daylight, he was ‘waved off’ to try again, but in darkness he had to land and take the consequences, rather than hazard the ship by having it switch its landing lights on again. ‘What the boys want to do,’ said a night-fighter squadron commander, Turner Caldwell of Independence, ‘is to get into a day fighter squadron or a day torpedo squadron and get to be aces and sink Jap carriers and that sort of thing. And so we have to give them inducements of various kinds because they are kids and they don’t understand enough about the military life to know that this stuff has to be done. All they know is that they don’t want to do it.’

While the carrier crews might remain at sea for years on end, the men of the air groups knew that they were only passing visitors. If injury or death spared them, they were rotated ashore after six months’ duty. After two combat tours, asserted a navy report, pilots ‘lose their daring…feel they have done their parts and other pilots who have not fought should take over the burden’. One pool of replacement pilots was held ashore on Guam. A second group waited on fleet supply ships, condemned to weeks of crucifying boredom before being abruptly informed one morning that their turn had come, and trans-shipped by breeches buoy to join an air group. Some replacements idled at sea for months before reaching a carrier. ‘Upon arrival,’ complained a squadron CO, ‘they were practically worthless, because they had forgotten everything they had been taught.’ It was tough for a man to be pitchforked among strangers, beside whom within hours he was expected to fly and die. ‘All of a sudden,’ said Jim Lamade of Hancock, ‘they’re expected to go ahead and hit the ball right smack on with a combat fighting squadron…those boys get discouraged and you can’t blame them.’ Some such men reported sick. Flight surgeons felt obliged to be harsh. ‘Combat fatigue is a word we use continuously,’ said Lamade, ‘and nobody knows what it means. It covers a multitude of sins. I think it ought to be thrown out of our language.’

Squadron commanders found that the strain of leading their men in combat left them little patience or energy for routine duties back on the ship. They complained about bureaucracy and paperwork. A CO was exasperated to find that after some of his men hit the airfield of neutral Portuguese Macao by mistake, a court of inquiry was summoned. Planes, by contrast, were casually expendable. Salt corroded paintwork, yet the remedy was always in short supply, because nobody cared to store large quantities of notoriously flammable paint aboard a carrier. If an airframe was badly damaged, or a plane completed eight months’ service, it was most often tipped overboard. With American factories producing new aircraft by the thousand, a worn one seemed worth little.

There were accidents, always accidents. When tired young men were pushing themselves and their equipment to the limits, mistakes were inevitable. The guns of aircraft parked on flightdecks were triggered, injuring neighbouring planes and people. Badly battle-damaged planes were discouraged from landing on their carriers, to avoid messing up flightdecks. Ditching in the sea was an almost routine occupational hazard. Destroyers shadowed carriers during flight operations, to retrieve sodden fliers. As long as pilots were lucky, and ensured that their cockpit hoods were locked open to avoid plunging to the bottom with their planes, they could expect to survive an ocean landing. Ninety-nine men in Jim Lamade’s air group endured the experience, most with an insouciance conceivable only at such a time and place.

Fred Bakutis of Enterprise spent a week on a raft in the Sulu Sea after coming down in the Surigao Strait. Comrades dropped him a two-man liferaft. ‘That plus my own one-man raft made my seven-day tour of duty out there pretty pleasant,’ he told his debriefers with studied nonchalance. ‘The weather was pretty good except at night when it rained pretty hard. I had lots of water, using my one-man raft as a water wagon. My food consisted of minnows, seaweed, candy rations. My main problem in the raft was to stay comfortable. The hands became very sore—and also my rear end.’ On Bakutis’s seventh night adrift, he was wakened from a doze by the sound of diesels, and for a few heart-stopping moments feared that a Japanese vessel was approaching. Instead, however, to his infinite relief an American submarine loomed out of the darkness.

The submarine rescue service, often operating close inshore amid treacherous shoals or under Japanese fire, received the gratitude of every American flier. Together with ‘dumbo’ amphibians and patrolling destroyers, the submarines achieved miracles in saving hundreds of precious aircrew from sea, sharks and the enemy. Cmdr Ernie Snowden of Lexington’s AG16 paid warm tribute to the submariners: ‘If they had wheels I think they would climb right up over the beach and pick us up. We have nothing but praise for them.’ On 10 October 1944, for instance, twenty-one aircraft were shot down attacking the Ryukyu islands. Yet only eleven pilots and crewmen were lost, the remainder being rescued, six of them off Okinawa by a single submarine, Sterlet. When Lt Robert Nelson crashed in Kagoshima Bay off Kyushu, his dinghy began to drift inshore. A tiny cruiser-based Kingfisher seaplane landed alongside him, and Nelson clung to its float while it taxied several miles across the water to rendezvous with a submarine—adding a torpedo-bomber crew to its burden on the way.

During an air battle off Iwo Jima, Japanese Zero pilot Kunio Iwashita was astonished when the surface of the sea was suddenly broken by a long black shape, as an American submarine surfaced to pick up a ditched pilot. An American flying boat, apparently bent on the same mission, was shot down by Japanese fighters. Iwashita said: ‘We were amazed to see the Americans taking so much trouble about their people. Nobody provided that sort of service for us.’ An extreme example of ‘force protection’ was displayed on 16 September 1944, when Ensign Harold Thompson ditched three hundred yards off Waisile, while strafing Japanese barges in his Hellcat. A Catalina dropped a liferaft which Thompson boarded, only to find himself drifting relentlessly towards a pier. Two other Hellcats were shot down trying to protect him by strafing the shoreline—one pilot was killed, the second rescued by ‘dumbo’. Thompson moored his raft to a chain of Japanese barges, and two American PT-boats raced in to rescue him. Their first attempt was frustrated by coastal gunfire, but after Avengers dropped smoke floats to mask their approach, a boat snatched Thompson just as the Japanese closed in on him. More than fifty aircraft were involved in the rescue, ‘which sure was a wonderful show to watch’, said Thompson, back on his carrier Santee.

Destroyers traditionally extracted ‘ransom’ for every flier they sent back. ‘Rescued pilots were prized possessions,’ wrote a destroyer officer. ‘Before returning them, we would strip them of all their fancy clothes—silk scarf maps, survival kits with great knives, compasses and magnifying glasses, and their pistol. Then we would ask the carrier to send over all the geedunk—ice cream—they had, plus a minimum of two movies our crew hadn’t seen.’

At sea in the Pacific, by the fall of 1944 the might of the US Navy was unchallengeable. That is to say, no rational adversary would have precipitated a headlong confrontation with such forces as Nimitz now deployed. The summer clashes, the ‘great Marianas Turkey Shoot’, had fatally crippled Japanese air power. Only the Japanese navy, in the mood of fatalism and desperation which afflicted its upper ranks, could still have sought a ‘decisive encounter’ against such odds. The struggle for the Philippines was to provide the setting not only for America’s major land campaign of the Pacific war, but also for the largest sea battle the world would ever know.

5 America’s Return to the Philippines (#ulink_bac27126-012a-5369-a157-3fa7facb0323)

1 PELELIU

MacArthur left Hawaii on 27 July 1944 confident that he had secured endorsement of his commitment to retake the Philippines. Nonetheless, when the American and British chiefs of staff met at Quebec on 11 September to open the Octagon strategic conference, plans were still on the table not only for landings in November on Mindanao, thereafter on Leyte and Luzon, but alternatively for seizing Formosa and the port of Amoy on the Chinese mainland. In the days that followed, however, the assembled US leaders—for the British were not consulted about this exclusively American issue—found themselves confronted by new circumstances. During planning for Third Fleet’s autumn operations, Halsey and his staff had agreed that in future, instead of merely addressing predetermined objectives, they would search for opportunities. In pursuit of this policy the fast carriers were now roaming the western Pacific, launching massive assaults on Japan’s surviving air forces. Off the southern Philippines on 12 September, 2,400 American sorties accounted for some two hundred Japanese aircraft in the sky and on the ground.

At noon on the thirteenth the admiral signalled a report to Nimitz, who speedily forwarded it to Quebec, that Japanese resistance was feeble. Halsey, unaware that the enemy was deliberately husbanding resources for a ‘decisive battle’ on the Philippines, urged fast-forwarding the strategic programme. He proposed cancelling all preliminary island landings, and staging a speedy assault on Leyte. This was Halsey’s most influential intervention of the war. Such a change of plans was complex, but perfectly feasible in a theatre where every man and ton of supplies earmarked for shipment to one objective could be redirected to beaches elsewhere, by a nation which now possessed mastery of the ocean and the sky above.

MacArthur was at sea and observing wireless silence, but his staff immediately accepted Halsey’s proposal as a means of foreclosing the Formosa-Philippines debate. The general, once back in communication, hastened to add his endorsement. He said nothing of his intelligence staff’s well-justified belief that the Japanese defenders of Leyte were stronger than Halsey recognised. Much more serious, he made no mention of his engineers’ opinion that it would be hard to build good airfields on the island, and almost impossible in the imminent monsoon months. Over the thirty months since he himself had escaped from Bataan, MacArthur’s personal interrogations of every American who escaped from the Philippines ‘revealed the concern of a man whose yearning to get back to his beloved “second homeland” had become virtually an obsession’, in the words of a biographer. The general had no intention of advertising any impediment to its fulfilment.

In Quebec, after hasty consultation the American chiefs of staff set a target date of 20 October for a landing on Leyte. Admiral King’s persistent arguments against following this with a move to Luzon, the main Philippine island, were overruled. The navy withdrew its support for attacking Formosa when it became plain that a landing there was logistically impossible before March 1945, and would require much larger ground forces than were available. The Philippines, by contrast, were immediately accessible. Planning for Leyte began at MacArthur’s new headquarters on the banks of Lake Sentani, in the Cyclops Mountains above Hollandia, New Guinea. Once the decision was made to retake the Philippines, there was neither logic in nor resources for an early assault on Formosa. Since the seizure of Formosa was essential to any landing on the China coast that too was now ruled out. As the US Navy’s great historian Samuel Eliot Morison wrote, ‘The two rival roads were…converging on Leyte.’ All intervening operations were cancelled, save two. First, on 15 September almost 20,000 men landed on the island of Morotai, south-east of the Philippines, and secured its airfield against negligible opposition. By late October, Morotai was crowded with US aircraft waiting to rebase on Leyte. Second, Nimitz and MacArthur shared a conviction that it was important to seize the tiny Palau Islands, of which Peleliu was the key, and to secure their airfields, before assaulting Leyte.