The Second World War (89 page)

Although the Japanese army was unprepared for the Leyte landing, the Japanese navy was not. It was now divided into two halves, the remaining carriers and their escorts being kept in home waters, the battleships – of which there were still nine, including the
Yamato
and
Musashi,
the largest in the world, of 70,000 tons and mounting 18-inch guns – lying at Lingga Roads, near Singapore, to be near their supply of East Indies oil which could not be shipped to the home islands. Both sections of the fleet had sensibly held back from involvement in the latest of the American island landing operations, the descent on Peleliu in the Palaus on 15 September – an uncancelled operation of the original central Pacific strategy which had lost its point (though it inflicted agony on the veteran 1st Marine Division). The home fleet did not evade involvement in the pre-Leyte air offensives on Formosa, Okinawa and Luzon, during which the American Third Fleet destroyed over 500 Japanese carrier-and land-based aircraft between 10 and 17 October; but Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa’s carrier force risked none of its ships, while the bulk of the Combined Fleet at Lingga remained intact.

It was in these circumstances that imperial headquarters decided to launch a decisive naval offensive, codenamed Sho-1, against the American Third and Seventh Fleets covering the Leyte landings. Of great complexity, as large Japanese offensives always were, in essence it was diversionary: Ozawa’s carriers, brought down from Japan’s Inland Sea, were to lure Halsey’s Third Fleet away from the Leyte beaches; then the battleships and heavy cruisers, divided into the 1st and 2nd Attack Forces and Force C, were to attack the transports and landing craft in Leyte Gulf and destroy them. The 1st Attack Force was to approach through the San Bernardino Strait to the north of Leyte, the 2nd Attack Force and Force C through the Surigao Strait to the south.

What followed was the largest naval battle in history, larger even than Jutland, but, like Jutland, confused by misreportings and misunderstandings. First into the fray was Vice-Admiral Takeo Kurita’s 1st Attack Force, which had sailed from Lingga. It was intercepted and damaged by American submarines en route but reached the western approaches to the San Bernardino Strait on 24 October. The land-based aircraft which supported it inflicted heavy damage on one of the American carriers from Halsey’s Third Fleet, USS
Princeton,
which eventually sank, but they lost more heavily themselves against the American Hellcat fighters; and as the day developed American torpedo-bombers took Kurita’s own battleships under attack. During the afternoon the
Musashi
suffered nineteen torpedo hits, more even than its enormous bulk could absorb, and at 7.35 in the evening rolled over and sank. Kurita decided he could not risk
Yamato,
his two other battleships and his ten heavy cruisers in the confined waters of the San Bernardino Strait, without the assurance of support from Ozawa’s carriers (of which he had heard nothing), and so turned back to retreat to Lingga.

At the moment he did so, however, the Sho-1 plan was on the point of success, for Halsey in the Third Fleet’s flagship
New Jersey,
stationed off the southern tip of Luzon, had just received news that Ozawa’s carriers had been sighted 150 miles to the north. Halsey had been offended by whispered allegations that he had let the Japanese escape too easily in the Battle of the Philippines Sea the previous June, and he was determined to make Ozawa fight. He therefore extemporised plans to leave behind part of his force, designated Task Force 34, to guard the San Bernardino Strait while he raced his heavy units northward to seek and destroy the Japanese carriers.

Two changes of mind now supervened to alter the course of the battle. The first was Kurita’s. Shamed by urgings from the Combined Fleet that he was shrinking from the chance of victory, he reversed course to pass through the San Bernardino Strait after all on the night of 24/25 October and sailed onward towards Leyte Gulf. The second was Halsey’s. Excited by reports of how vulnerable Ozawa’s carriers were, he decided not to leave any part of his force to guard the San Bernardino Strait but to take those ships which would have formed Task Force 34 with him northward to attack them.

Sho-1 was suddenly after all on the point of success. Kurita’s 1st Attack Force was about to appear off Leyte Gulf, where the landing force was protected only by a fragile fleet of destroyers and escort carriers. Vice-Admiral Kiyohide Shima’s 2nd Attack Force and Vice-Admiral Shoji Nishimura’s Force C were meanwhile heading for the Surigao Strait to take the Leyte landing force in the rear from the south. While Halsey proceeded northwards to a putative encounter with the Japanese carriers, unknown to him the American invasion of Leyte was threatened with disaster.

All that stood between the two advancing Japanese forces and disaster were three tiny escort carriers in the San Bernardino Strait and Admiral Oldendorf’s six battleships in the Surigao Strait. Oldendorf’s battleships were a spectre from the past, since all predated the Second World War and five had been raised from the bottom of Pearl Harbor. In the intervening years, however, they had been refurbished and re-equipped, particularly with modern radar. In the darkness of the night of 24/25 October, the images of Nishimura’s ships appeared distinct on Oldendorf’s radar screens. His destroyers crippled the battleship
Fuso
as it approached; his own battleship salvoes then finished her off and sank the other Japanese battleship
Yamashiro
as well. The survivors of Force C beat a retreat, not alerting the 2nd Attack Force as it passed them to the danger that lurked in the Surigao Strait. It too suffered damage, hastily reversed course and followed in Nishimura’s wake.

The Battle of the Surigao Strait was a lucky escape for the Americans. The second round in the San Bernardino Strait promised not to be. Kurita’s 1st Attack Force greatly outgunned any American force which stood between it and the landing fleet, while the United States Navy’s heavy metal was far away. As Halsey cruised in search of Ozawa, he was pursued by messages which included the notorious ‘Where is Task Force 34 the whole world wonders’; the last four words were a misunderstood piece of security padding, but to Halsey they were eternally galling. In the meantime Kurita had fallen among the landing fleet’s protecting warships. Those he found first were a puny group of five escort carriers, converted merchant ships with little speed and few aircraft, which were equipped for anti-submarine rather than torpedo strikes. The five nevertheless rose to the occasion with aplomb and superb bravery. While Admiral Clifton Sprague manoeuvred Task Force 3 at all available speed to escape 16- and 18-inch salvoes, his pilots flew off their aircraft to launch anti-submarine bombs at the battleships. One of the carriers,
Gambier Bay,
was hit and left on fire. The rest, to which another group of ‘baby flattops’ from Task Force 2 lent assistance, managed to cover their retreat by air strikes and torpedo attacks launched by their own escorting destroyers. In the face of this Tom Thumb defiance, and dispirited by the non-appearance of Ozawa’s carriers, Kurita decided to break off action and retreat through the San Bernardino Strait. It was 10.30 on the morning of 25 October.

To the south, Oldendorf’s battleships were steaming to the rescue from the Surigao Strait but were still three hours away; to the north, Halsey had reversed course from his pursuit of Ozawa but would take even longer to reach the scene. Halsey’s aircraft had nevertheless taken their toll. In an early-morning strike they left the light carriers
Chitose
and
Zuiho
sinking. A second strike destroyed the carriers
Chiyoda
and Ozawa’s flagship
Zuikaku,
a veteran of Pearl Harbor; though they had come to the battle with only 180 aircraft embarked, their loss virtually completed the extinction of the great Japanese naval air force. To their loss, moreover, had to be added that of three battleships, six heavy cruisers, three light cruisers and ten destroyers, in total a quarter of the losses the Imperial Japanese Navy had suffered since Pearl Harbor.

Leyte Gulf was therefore not only the largest but also one of the most decisive battles of naval history, even though for the Americans it had been a close-run thing. The battle for Leyte itself was a more long-drawn-out affair. The Japanese, recognising that their hold on the Philippines stood or fell by the defence of Leyte, rushed in reinforcements by destroyer from elsewhere in the islands – the 8th, 26th, 30th and 102nd Divisions, as well as the elite 1st Division from the dwindling general reserve in China. The Americans too reinforced the four divisions with which they had made their initial landing, so that by November they deployed six of their own – the 1st Cavalry, 7th, 11th Airborne, 24th, 32nd, 77th and 96th Divisons. Fighting during the next month was bitter, and on 6 December the Japanese launched a counter-attack to take the main American airfield complex on Leyte. When the attack failed, the campaign for the island was effectively at a close. It had cost the Japanese 70,000 and the Americans 15,500 losses.

On 9 January 1945 Krueger’s Sixth Army moved from Leyte – and the nearby islands of Mindoro and Samar, which had also been cleared – to invade Luzon, where the Philippines capital, Manila, was located. In the far south the Australian First Army was mopping up Japanese resistance in New Guinea, New Britain and Bougainville. In Burma, while Slim’s Fourteenth Army opened its offensive into the plains of Burma by its capture of Kalewa on the Chindwin on 2 December, Chiang’s troops, with American assistance, were also making progress on the north-eastern front. They were no longer commanded by the vitriolic Stilwell, who had definitively fallen out in turn with the British, the Chinese and ultimately President Roosevelt. After Stilwell’s removal on 18 October, his role was divided between Generals Albert C. Wedemeyer, the architect of the American ‘Victory Plan’ of 1941, and Daniel Sultan. The former had taken over as the American commander in China; the latter now commanded Merrill’s Marauders (renamed Mars Force) and the Indian-trained Chinese forces in Burma.

In China, Chiang’s armies, strengthened by two Indian-trained divisions brought from Burma, at last managed to halt the Ichi-Go offensive at Kweiyang, after it had threatened to drive a corridor from the Japanese-held coastal areas to Chiang’s capital at Chungking itself. Ichi-Go had achieved a subsidiary object in opening a continuous corridor from northern Indo-China to Peking, but it had not brought about the destruction of Chiang’s army. Indeed, in January 1945 the best of his troops (under Sultan’s command) finally succeeded in breaking across the mountainous north of Burma through Myitkyina, which Stilwell had taken in August, to join up with the so-called Y-Force of Chiang’s China forces advancing from Yunnan. On 27 January the two reopened the Burma Road, thus assuring a direct source of land supply from the Anglo-American base in India to the Kuomintang heartland around Chungking. The Japanese nevertheless remained the dominant force in southern China. British strength was aligned towards the plains of Burma, into which the Fourteenth Army was making its advance, and neither Wedemeyer’s, Sultan’s nor even Chiang’s troops were powerful enough to stem any determined Japanese operation south of the Yangtse. In the spring of 1945, as in every year since 1941, the future of the war in China was closely bound to the outcome of the main battle between the Imperial Japanese and United States Navies’ fleets and their amphibious forces in western Pacific waters.

With the fall of the Philippines and the capture of the Marianas, the war in the Pacific approached its climactic amphibious phase. Ground fighting was to continue throughout 1945 at a score of places inside or close to the Japanese ‘defensive perimeter’ of 1942; in Burma and the northern Philippines, where Manila would become a ghost city as devastated as Warsaw, fighting was to be very heavy indeed. The character of the Pacific war, however, now underwent a radical change. No longer would there be two separate and competitive American strategies, with the navy bringing overwhelming force to the landing of individual Marine divisions on tiny, remote atolls, while the army moved by shorter hooks in greater strength to seize large land masses in the Indies. Navy and army would now combine to mount large-scale amphibious operations against the outlying islands of Japan itself, involving several divisions at a time, enormous fleets and naval air forces as well as dense concentrations of embarked troops. The success of these operations would depend entirely on the combined amphibious skills of sailors, soldiers, airmen and Marines.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff had confidence in the outcome of the projected operations, of which the most important was to be the landing on Okinawa in the Ryukyu islands, only 380 miles from Kyushu, the southernmost of the large Japanese home islands. American amphibious skills were now very high but had taken time to develop – indeed, they had been developing throughout the Pacific campaign. Credit for their conception, however, belonged above all to the United States Marine Corps, which had seen the need to learn how troops could best be transferred from ship to shore twenty years before the Second World War began. The United States Marine Corps put forward the idea that transit between ship and shore must be essentially a tactical movement. The idea, so arrestingly simple, had been grasped by none of the oceanic powers before. Neither the British nor the French, though they had built great empires by projecting military through naval force, had perceived that there was more to landing troops than putting them in ships’ boats and debarking them at the water’s edge. When in 1915 they jointly mounted the great amphibious landing at Gallipoli the result was catastrophic. Hastily adapted lighters, towed to shore by steam pinnaces, were grounded under Turkish machine-guns and the soldiers on board were massacred in the water. After the First World War the US Marine Corps determined that such would not be its men’s fate. It had, admittedly, an institutional reason for wishing to make amphibious landing tactics its own particular specialism, for it entertained the fear – common to small organisations which operate between the margin of two larger ones – of being absorbed by either the army or the navy; but there was more to it than that. The Marines foresaw the danger of a Pacific war with Japan. They also saw that it could be won only with specialised methods and specialised equipment, and they set about developing both.