The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur (42 page)

Kurita could have pressed his attack, but with the ocean ablaze with American and Japanese ships, he decided that his offensive could not succeed. He veered westward, zigging and zagging as more of Sprague’s aircraft followed him away from the battle. Sprague saved Krueger’s army, but over the next week, questions were raised about Halsey’s decision to move north—questions that have been raised ever since. Back in Honolulu, Nimitz radioed Halsey: “The whole world wants to know where is Task Force 34.” In fact, although Japanese warships had sunk a light carrier, two escort carriers, and three destroyers, Kurita’s losses were far more severe. After taking Toyoda’s bait, Halsey had created havoc among Ozawa’s fleet, sinking three aircraft carriers and a destroyer. The Japanese suffered a major defeat, with one fleet carrier, three light carriers, three battleships, six heavy and four light cruisers, and nine destroyers sunk or otherwise out of action. In the battle’s wake, MacArthur’s senior commanders questioned Halsey’s actions. He had been gulled, they said, and he had followed the promise of glory in yet another show of navy arrogance. Hearing this during a dinner at his headquarters on Leyte, MacArthur pointedly silenced Halsey’s critics. “Leave the Bull alone,” he said gruffly. “He’s still a fighting admiral in my book.”

W
alter Krueger never doubted that Kinkaid would turn back the Japanese; he was far more concerned with the increasingly desperate Japanese air attacks. Krueger’s men had fought under the guns of Japanese aircraft before, but this was different: Because of a lack of usable airstrips, few of Kenney’s fliers could get into the air, which meant that Yamashita was able to successfully reinforce Leyte, sending thousands
of infantrymen on barges into Ormoc, on Leyte’s western coast. The Japanese were aided by the sudden appearance of two successive typhoons, which allowed them to reinforce their defenses with the 41st Infantry Regiment, the 169th and 171st Independent Infantry Battalions, and the elite 1st Japanese Division. From October 25 to November 1, the Japanese pushed their units north, where they dug in along the spur of Leyte’s central spine on a series of interlocking, pockmarked ridgelines. To their front and down the mountain was the town of Pinamopoan on Carigara Bay; to their rear was the town of Limon. To get to Limon, Krueger’s infantrymen would have to fight uphill through thick jungle, then storm over the ridgeline and then down the rear slope, which was interlaced with Japanese single-soldier spider holes. Limon, at the bottom of the ridgeline, would have to be taken house by house.

The typhoons slowed the advance of Krueger’s divisions, forcing army engineers to lay a new road for the use of the 24th Division, which was supplied by miles of trucks mired in mud. The deluge was far more vicious than anything the Americans had faced at Buna. Three days out from its landing zones, the 24th ran into tough Japanese resistance, engaging in increasingly intensive firefights with the Japanese 19th and 34th Infantry Regiments. Despite the resistance, Krueger cleared the Leyte Valley by early November, then moved north and west up Leyte’s eastern coast before hooking south toward Limon. On November 7, elements of the 24th Division ran into the Japanese 1st Division laid out along Breakneck Ridge and mounted a full assault. The Japanese response was murderous. The Battle of Breakneck Ridge went on for the next three weeks, the Japanese taking advantage of the tangled jungle on the forward slopes of their position to pin the 24th into position. American infantrymen were tied down among the ridge’s gullies, their ammunition and rations having to be hustled forward by hand. Progress was slow, with a promised breakthrough toward Limon stopped by a second typhoon that swept over the island on November 8. “The trickle of supplies was at a standstill,” one soldier recalled. “On Carigara Bay the obscured headlands moaned under the onslaught of the seas. Planes were grounded and ships became haunted things looking for refuge. Massed artillery barrages to the summit of Breakneck Ridge sounded dim and hollow in the tempest. Trails were obliterated by the rain. The sky was black.”

Back on the beaches, MacArthur paced his office, railing against the rain and constant Japanese air attacks and fulminating at Krueger. The fight for Breakneck Ridge seemed to go on and on, with Japanese defenses speckled with mines, single-soldier murder and spider holes, pillboxes, strongpoints, booby-trapped pits, and reinforced firing positions, backed by mortars and artillery. Japanese artillery was open-sighted: the muzzles down, firing at American soldiers at point-blank range. Into this maelstrom Krueger’s soldiers threw themselves again and again, as MacArthur’s commanders fought the gelatinous muck and endless rains. Krueger did his own pacing, though his phlegmatic personality served him well. The going was so tough that at least for a time, Krueger left off inspecting the feet of his men. Then too, as a squad of his soldiers later recounted, the Japanese defenses and tropical deluges got the best of him: One bleak night, he found himself in a foxhole with a lone infantry squad. No one recognized him; he was wearing his helmet and underwear, and nothing else.

As the torrent subsided, on November 9 Krueger pressed his attack along Breakneck Ridge, while the Japanese countered by landing more reinforcements at Ormoc Bay. Finally able to fly, Kenney’s airmen hit the transports before the ships finished unloading, but the Japanese put enough men ashore to strengthen their teetering lines in the north. It was now clear to Krueger that the Japanese intended to make their stand on Leyte among its northern mountains, so he ordered his southern divisions to move west, seizing the rest of the island. By November 11, after a series of bloody attacks, Krueger’s forward commanders brought tanks into the battle—they moved up Breakneck Ridge and down its reverse slope, destroying twenty-five enemy pillboxes. Exhausted and with his casualties mounting, Krueger reinforced the 24th with the 32nd Division on November 14.

But Major General William Gill, the commander of the 32nd, made little progress. Over a period of nine days, the 32nd advanced a single mile. “I cannot fight with the troops available,” Gill told Krueger, “I am too short now to do the job that I have to do.” Krueger responded by telling Corps Commander Franklin Sibert to “pep that up a little bit so we’ll get some results,” but the hard-luck 32nd continued to bleed. Finally, on November 16, the 128th Regiment fought its way up and over
Breakneck Ridge and moved south toward Limon, adding another battle streamer to its regimental flag. The 128th captured the town three days later, then established a reinforced roadblock along Route 2, intending to give back to the Japanese what they had meted out back at the ridge. The Japanese attacked in force, but the roadblock held. The way forward was now clear, with Limon taken. The 32nd, its regiments reinforced by green replacements, headed south, but the Americans left 1,498 dead and wounded in their wake.

Victory in Leyte was within sight, but MacArthur wasn’t pleased. From his Tacloban headquarters, he bombarded Krueger with messages to push harder. This was Krueger’s first try at commanding an entire army; composed of two corps (X Corps and XXIV Corps) of two divisions each, it was larger than anything he had led on New Guinea. He struggled. While Krueger worked well with his subordinates, many of them were new to him. The XXIV’s commander, John Hodge, was tough and adept, despite the fact that his corps had been cobbled together at the last minute. A command veteran of Guadalcanal, New Georgia, and Bougainville, Hodge was a creative tactician, maneuvering his two divisions (the 7th and 96th) expertly into southern Leyte by the end of October, less than a week after the landings. The same could not be said for Franklin Sibert, a low-to-the-ground physical plug who was dependable but given to costly straight-ahead assaults.

With MacArthur giving little credit to Krueger’s difficulties, Robert Eichelberger highlighted MacArthur’s criticism of the older commander in letters to his wife. “You know how sympathetic I am and my tears dripped off my chin when I listened to excuses such as I would not have allowed myself some time ago,” he wrote. Yet, this once, Eichelberger was forced to praise Krueger’s stubbornness. “It seems that our little palsy-walsy is a tough bird,” he commented in the wake of the Battle of Breakneck Ridge. “I have been preaching that for a long time but some people seem to be just finding it out.” Eichelberger added that he thought that MacArthur might finally relieve the “tough bird.”

In fact, MacArthur had no intention of replacing Krueger, but was not above using Eichelberger’s ambition as a prod. When Krueger showed up at Tacloban one day in the middle of his Breakneck Ridge fight, MacArthur made a point of praising Eichelberger in his presence,
telling him to “come back and see me often.” Krueger was not the only one under pressure. George Kenney’s fighters and bombers were scoring successes against Japanese convoys putting in at Ormoc, but not enough to keep the enemy from landing enough infantrymen to give Krueger fits. Yet, even with their reinforcements, the Japanese did not have the numbers needed to stop Krueger. On December 3, the 12th Cavalry Regiment shattered Japanese defenses south of Limon, while the 7th Division hoofed north through the mud to cut off enemy reinforcements coming ashore at Ormoc.

The denouement of the Battle of Leyte was played out over the next six weeks. On December 7, elements of General Andrew Bruce’s 77th Division came ashore near Ormoc in a surprise amphibious landing and moved north through Leyte’s broad western valley. The Japanese were trapped, with the 77th moving north against their rear while the 1st Division fought a rearguard action against the Americans crowding south from Limon. The 32nd, with Major General Verne Mudge’s battle-hardened 1st Cavalry Division in support, swept toward the 77th, pushing down Highway 2. The Japanese defenders refused to surrender. By mid-December, the 32nd was engaged in hand-to-hand combat on the road to Ormoc and along the mountainous foothills to the east. On December 21, the 77th and 1st Cavalry Divisions met at Kananga, nearly midway between Pinamopoan and Ormoc, then turned west toward Pompon, pushing the Japanese into Leyte’s western mountains.

The fighting on Leyte exhausted Krueger and the Sixth Army, and although the campaign is remembered as a triumph of American arms, the bitter slog had turned into a straight-ahead battle of attrition. The Americans took less than a thousand prisoners on Leyte—the rest were dead or had faded into the jungle. This was precisely the kind of fight that terrifies even the best soldier, and it was the bloodiest campaign MacArthur’s forces had ever fought. But despite these challenges, American soldiers acclimated themselves to Leyte’s climate, watching open-air movies in rear bases during downpours by inventively affixing their helmet liners so the rain wouldn’t wash into their eyes. The GIs watched the movies after dark, even doing so as Japanese Zeros came overhead on strafing runs. By now, American soldiers had grown accustomed to the shelling, so no one moved unless an attack was close by. “Thus, with
vision clear, you were a proper and appreciative audience for the artistry of Gloria Gumm in
Passion’s Darling
,” Eichelberger commented.

The biggest surprise of the campaign came on December 6, when the Japanese mounted a parachute assault on the headquarters of Major General Joe Swing’s 11th Airborne Division in the mountains of central Leyte. As darkness fell, the Japanese paratroopers communicated with each other with “bells, horns, whistles, and even distinctive songs for each small unit.” The fight involved rear-echelon troops—cooks and clerks and aides—and was characterized by hundreds of vicious, small-unit actions and individual acts of heroism. The Japanese troopers were fortified by bottles of liquor. “Many men were killed on both sides during that bedlam night,” Eichelberger later wrote. “Eventually dawn came. Some three hundred Japanese were killed the next day, and the remainder were hunted out in surrounding areas and killed over a period of three days. The attack failed completely.”

There was much fighting yet to come, but for MacArthur, the Battle of Leyte was over. Four days before the 77th and 1st Cavalry met at Kananga, he ordered Robert Eichelberger’s Eighth Army to take control of Leyte and destroy the last pockets of Japanese resistance. On December 25, in Manila, General Yamashita radioed his Leyte commander, General Sosaku Suzuki. Yamashita said that Suzuki was on his own: From here to the end of the war, his 35th Army “would be self-sustaining and self-supporting.” Eichelberger arrived on Leyte on December 26, received a briefing from Krueger, and took command. The campaign had been brutal, and though Krueger praised his troops for their courage in a communiqué issued on Christmas Day 1944, the Japanese had bloodied his units. The Americans left 3,504 graves on Leyte, with another 11,000 wounded. This was not Los Negros, or Hollandia, or Biak—or even “Bloody Buna.” The Japanese, with 48,000 of their own dead, were now fighting for their national survival, burrowing into caves, where they were crushed or burned or simply left to die.

W
alter Krueger turned over command of his forces on Leyte to Eichelberger on Christmas Day. He then immediately immersed himself in the staff planning for the invasion of Luzon, which would be the most complex amphibious operation in American history,
with the sole exception of Eisenhower’s invasion of France. Krueger could count on the leadership of two battle-hardened veterans to head up his two-corps assault. Innis Palmer Swift would lead the I Corps, and the brainy Oscar Griswold, who had commanded on New Georgia and Bougainville, would head up the XIV Corps. Neither man would be accorded the public acclaim of a Patton or Bradley, but Krueger admired their skills. Facing them on Luzon were Tomoyuki Yamashita’s 275,000 Japanese soldiers, whose goal was to buy time for the Tokyo high command to prepare for the invasion of the home islands. For this reason, Yamashita decided that he would dig most of his men in along the ridges and mountains of central and northeast Luzon—the type of terrain that had caused the Americans headaches on Leyte.

Krueger, short of transports and air cover, was forced to shuffle and reshuffle his naval and air assets to protect the landings. Tommy Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet had no battleships or large carriers and only a minimal number of destroyers and destroyer escorts. Dan Barbey’s amphibious engineers had only enough landing craft to put a single division ashore, so Krueger was required to rely on Rear Admiral Theodore Wilkinson’s III Amphibious Force—loaned to MacArthur by Nimitz for the operation. Nor did Krueger have enough transports in the initial landings to bring ashore enough engineer officers or their equipment, so he simply scheduled their arrival for follow-on waves. The scheduling problems that had previously plagued MacArthur continued, so he requested that Nimitz provide air cover to destroy Japanese air opposition flying from Formosa and the China coast. But MacArthur was uneasy with releasing Halsey’s Third Fleet too early, pointing out to his staff that the South China Sea was ringed with Japanese airbases. He requested that instead of sailing east for the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the Third Fleet sortie south, protecting his forces from Japanese fighters and bombers in Indochina. Nimitz agreed to the request, though it created havoc for his planners. “The execution of the air plan,” the official army history notes, “entailed the efforts of nearly fifteen major air commands, both Army and Navy, directing the activities of both carrier-based and land-based aircraft, operating in separate theaters and across theater boundaries, and reporting to higher headquarters through slightly differing channels.”