All Hell Let Loose (93 page)

A thousand such incidents make it easy to understand why US Marines and soldiers fighting in the Pacific treated their enemies as mortally dangerous wild beasts.

Informed Japanese knew that their home islands, on which millions of houses were constructed of wood and paper, now faced an ordeal by air bombardment; the Marianas airfields brought Japan’s cities within range of US bombers. The shore battles showed that Japanese soldiers’ willingness for sacrifice could extract a high price for each American victory, but the invaders’ firepower was irresistible. Nimitz’s submarines were inflicting a scale of attrition on Japan’s merchant fleet unsustainable by a nation dependent on imports. The combination of naval blockade and air bombardment ensured Japan’s defeat, even if US ground forces advanced no further. But the Japanese government remained committed to fight on: the supremely stubborn military men who dominated Tokyo’s polity believed they could still achieve a negotiated settlement, preserving at least their holdings in China, by convincing the Americans that the cost of assaulting the Japanese homeland would be unacceptably high.

Even as the Marines were fighting for the Marianas, in the South-West Pacific the US was conducting a much more controversial campaign. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the regional supreme commander, was bent upon personally achieving the liberation of the seventeen million people of the Philippines, where he had spent much of his service life. A former chief of the army with powerful right-wing friends at home, in 1944 MacArthur flirted with a presidential election run against Roosevelt, abandoning this notion only when it became plain that he could not secure the Republican nomination, far less beat the White House incumbent. He remained an immensely formidable figure, hard for the chiefs of staff to resist, his prestige raised so high by domestic propaganda that he was effectively unsackable.

Navy planners argued that, with the Marianas air bases in US hands, the large Japanese army in the Philippines could be left to contemplate its own impotence while American forces addressed Iwo Jima, Okinawa and thereafter the Japanese home islands. There was a case for the US to undertake limited operations to secure some Philippines airfields and harbours, but none for what actually followed. MacArthur was bent upon fighting his way through the entire archipelago, and so he did. Although he never gained the formal endorsement of the chiefs of staff for his purposes, no one in Washington was powerful or clear-sighted enough to stop him. Marshall once wrote memorably to MacArthur, ‘Remember, the Navy is on our side’; the South-West Pacific supremo never acknowledged this.

In September 1944, carriers of Halsey’s Third Fleet off the southern Philippines inflicted punitive losses on Japan’s surviving air capability. On the 12th alone, 2,400 American sorties destroyed two hundred enemy planes in the sky and on the ground. Nimitz and MacArthur agreed that the island base of Peleliu should be seized before the army attacked the Philippines. On 15 September, men of 1st Marine Division made an assault landing with massive air and naval support: 10,000 Japanese defenders, supported by deeply emplaced artillery, resisted fiercely. The ensuing campaign, which also engaged a US Army division, proved a nightmare. Vast quantities of ammunition and effort had to be expended to overcome the enemy’s positions bunker by bunker. It was later calculated that 1,500 artillery rounds were fired for each defender killed. The Japanese, as usual, fought almost to the last man, and 1,950 Americans perished before Peleliu’s commander, Col. Kunio Nakagawa, committed suicide on 24 November. The battle, a violently intense miniature, was of doubtful value to American grand strategy. It merely reinforced the message that there was no shortcut to success in seizing Japan’s Pacific outposts.

On 20 October 1944, four army divisions began to land on Leyte island, in the midst of the Philippines. They met light opposition, and by afternoon the beachhead was sufficiently secure for MacArthur to stride ashore and deliver a grandiloquent liberation broadcast. Thereafter, however, increasingly vigorous Japanese resistance turned the campaign into an ordeal by rain, mud and blood for tens of thousands of US soldiers. MacArthur’s staff had ignored engineers’ warnings that Leyte was unsuitable for airfield building, and American troops found themselves overwhelmingly dependent on carrier planes for air support. MacArthur’s chief of public relations, Colonel Bonner Fellers, had made his reputation in 1942 by dispatching daily signals from Cairo reporting British operations and intentions, which were intercepted by Rommel. Now, Fellers added to his sorry record by repeatedly announcing victory on Leyte while MacArthur’s soldiers were fighting for their lives.

Week after week and then month after month, weather and mountains, insects and enemy fire, exhaustion and swamps imposed their toll of misery upon every infantryman on the island. ‘They lost all account of the distance they had covered,’ wrote Norman Mailer, who served in the Philippines, in his fictional account of a patrol which marched in painful step with his own experience. ‘Everything beneath them had blurred, and the individual torments of each kind of terrain were forgotten … They wavered like a file of drunks, plodding along with their heads bent down, their arms slapping spasmodically at their sides … Their shoulders were blistered from their packbands, their waists were bruised from the bouncing of their cartridge belts, and their rifles clanked abrasively against their sides, raising blisters on their hips … Like litter-bearers, they had forgotten everything; they did not think of themselves as individual men any longer. They were merely envelopes of suffering.’

Even as the Americans hacked a painful path across Leyte island, at sea their foes launched an ambitious and desperate attempt to wreck the campaign. The Imperial Japanese Navy dispatched four carriers scantily provided with aircraft to make a feint from the north, designed to lure away Halsey’s Third Fleet at the almost inevitable cost of their own destruction. Meanwhile, Japanese heavy units set forth to converge on Leyte Gulf, where they planned to attack the American amphibious armada and its relatively weak naval support force – Admiral Thomas Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet. Operation
Sho-Go
was never likely to succeed: whatever havoc the attackers contrived, American strategic superiority was overwhelming. But a change of Japanese codes and wireless silence imposed on their fleet at sea denied Halsey and Kinkaid foreknowledge of what was afoot. Only on 24 October was a powerful Japanese battle squadron, commanded by Vice-Admiral Takeo Kurita, spotted entering the Sibuyan Sea between Luzon, Panay and Leyte. American submarines promptly sank two of its cruisers, and Third Fleet launched carrier aircraft which sank the huge battleship
Musashi
and damaged other vessels. Kurita turned away, apparently conceding defeat. The impulsive Halsey, convinced he had seen off the Japanese, then disappeared north with his entire force of sixty-five ships in pursuit of Ozawa’s carrier decoy force, located by reconnaissance aircraft.

That night of the 24th, as Halsey steamed towards a far horizon, Seventh Fleet fought a notable battle of its own. A second Japanese battle squadron was sighted closing on Leyte Gulf from the south, up the Surigao Strait. To meet this, Kinkaid deployed his old bombardment battleships, together with cruisers, destroyers and PT-boats. A remarkable action followed. In darkness soon illuminated by eruptions of flame, the American mosquito craft inflicted little damage on the column of Japanese warships. But just before 0400 destroyer torpedoes and radar-guided fire from the fourteen-inch and sixteen-inch main armament of Kinkaid’s big ships sank the Japanese battleships
Yamashiro
and
Fuso
, together with three of their escorts. The heavy cruiser
Mogami
and the light cruiser
Abukuma
were also hit, and later sunk by US aircraft. The surviving elements of the Japanese task force turned for home – two heavy cruisers and five destroyers escaped. American ships suffered only thirty-nine men killed, most of these victims of friendly fire in the confusion of darkness. It had been a slaughter: the Japanese performance reflected not only inferior technology and gunnery, but resignation to sacrifice. The battle squadron had no realistic prospect of traversing the narrow waters of the Surigao Strait and achieving useful results unless it had the benefit of surprise, and unless the Americans responded as feebly as they had done two years earlier, in similar circumstances off Savo island. This was never likely. The Japanese sailed to meet death, and duly did so.

But the most remarkable action of the battle, and indeed one of the strangest naval encounters in history, was still to come. During the night, the Japanese battlefleet mauled by Halsey’s planes once more about-turned; after steaming eastward through the San Bernardino Strait, it steered south towards Leyte Gulf, undetected even when daylight came, and meeting no opposition. Just before 0700, the six small escort carriers and seven escorts of Rear-Admiral Clifton Sprague’s Task Force 77.4.3 – immortalised by its radio call-sign as ‘Taffy 3’ – had just secured from pre-dawn general quarters when a panic-stricken voice transmission from an anti-submarine patrol aircraft reported four Japanese battleships, eight cruisers and escorting destroyers less than twenty miles away and closing fast. Sprague exclaimed with understandable intemperance, ‘That sonofabitch Halsey has left us bare-assed!’ His ships, slow floating platforms providing air support for MacArthur’s troops ashore, strove desperately to open the range, while flying off such planes as they could muster. The Japanese, however, were soon firing hard and fast into Taffy 3.

Admiral Kurita, commanding the Japanese squadron, was offered an easy opportunity to annihilate the small, pathetically weak American force. Sprague’s destroyers and planes lunged repeatedly and with extraordinary courage at the enemy, but they lacked numbers and armour-piercing bombs. Kinkaid’s battleships were away to the south, many hours’ steaming, after fighting their night duel in the Surigao Strait. The escort carriers and aircrew knew that they alone must fight off the enemy battlefleet. Many pilots displayed prodigies of valour, though a few cracked under the strain of making repeated attacks: one man who landed back on
Manila Bay
proved reluctant to take off again, to make his third torpedo attack of the morning. Captain Fitzhugh Lee summoned the young man to his bridge. ‘He was pretty shaken up because he had watched his pals get shot down … We had just one torpedo left … We didn’t have any other pilot on board – ours were all flying. So we loaded him up and I gave him a fight talk on the bridge and patted him on the back and said, “Go out and do your best.” He did make a third run, and survived.’

Overwhelming Japanese fire sank three American escorts and one carrier of Taffy 3 in a succession of mêlées at point-blank range; some fifty American aircraft were lost as they pummelled the Combined Fleet. But the cruisers
Chokai
,
Suzuya
and
Chikuma
sank under air attack, and Kurita’s nerve broke. Dismayed by the energy of American resistance, convinced that he was in the presence of elements of Third Fleet, whose big ships would soon engage and overwhelm him, 143 minutes after the first shells were fired he broke off the action and turned for home. Taffy 3’s heroics had repulsed a battlefleet in a fashion which bewildered thousands of American sailors, who earlier that morning thought themselves doomed men.

The Americans lost one further escort carrier sunk and two seriously damaged when Philippines-based Japanese planes delivered the first suicide strikes of the campaign. Halsey’s aircraft duly attacked Ozawa’s decoy squadron, sinking all four carriers, a light cruiser and two destroyers. Third Fleet then turned south, to face bitter recriminations about its desertion of the Leyte squadrons. Halsey’s recklessness merited his dismissal. But, given the scale of the American triumph in what became known to history as the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the largest naval clash in history, his folly was overlooked. The Japanese had committed sixty-four ships against 216 American and two Australian vessels. They lost 285,000 tons of warships, the Americans just 29,000 tons; only 2,803 Americans died, against more than 11,000 Japanese. Operation
Sho-Go
ended with the Imperial Navy shorn of four carriers, three battleships, ten cruisers and nine destroyers. The Americans lost three small carriers, two destroyers and a destroyer escort. Several other vessels were badly hit, and would have sunk but for the energy and courage of American damage-control teams amid blazing fuel, bursting steam pipes and exploding munitions.

Leyte Gulf vividly demonstrated the collapse of Japanese naval skills: gunnery, seamanship, ship identification – and nerve. Japan’s admirals conducted
Sho-Go
as if they expected to lose. They seemed more ready to die than to fight, a strange transition for men who, in 1941–42, showed themselves ardent and effective warriors. In many of the earlier Pacific battles, signals intelligence gave the Americans a critical edge, which they were denied in the Leyte Gulf actions. Thanks to Halsey’s blunders, the power of Third Fleet was never fully engaged. Yet at every turn, the US Navy outfought its enemies. To be sure, technology and especially radar were deployed to American advantage. The destruction of Japan’s naval air arm enabled Halsey’s and Kinkaid’s pilots to fly almost unchallenged. But the essential message of the battle was that the Imperial Navy had suffered a moral as well as a material collapse.

Leyte island was secured at the end of December; thereafter, on 9 January 1945 US forces landed on the main Philippine island of Luzon, to begin a campaign which lasted for the rest of the war, against Japanese forces directed with stubborn skill by Gen. Tomoyoki Yamashita, the 1942 ‘Tiger of Malaya’. Manila, the capital, was razed to the ground during weeks of fighting, in which forces of Japanese sailors fought almost to the last man. These men also committed massacres of civilians which lacked the smallest military purpose, but demonstrated Japan’s determination to impose death upon every victim within reach, often accompanied by rape and mutilation, before meeting its own fate.