War and Remembrance (179 page)

W
HEN
it is midnight in Leyte, the sun rides high over Washington. About halfway between them lies Pearl Harbor. From there, Chester Nimitz was transmitting to Ernest King in his Washington headquarters all the Leyte events as they broke. In Tokyo, of course, the naval HQ was following the battle step by step.

So far had the art of communication advanced, so powerful were the transmitters, so swift the coding, so deliberate the movements of fleets traversing long distances at twenty or twenty-five miles an hour, that the far-off high commands could watch this entire battle like Homeric gods hovering overhead, or like Napoleon on a hill at Austerlitz. The Battle of Leyte Gulf was not only the biggest sea fight of all time, it was unique in having all these distant spectators; unique, too, in the flood of on-the-spot facts pouring out of transmitters and cryptographic machines.

It is interesting, therefore, that nobody on the scene, or anywhere else in the world, really knew what the hell was going on. There never was a denser fog of war. All the sophisticated communication only spread and thickened it.

Halsey totally confused everybody. In a very terse dispatch he notified Kinkaid down in the gulf of his decision to leave San Bernardino Strait unguarded, making Nimitz and King information addressees:

CENTRAL FORCE HEAVILY DAMAGED ACCORDING TO STRIKE REPORTS X AM PROCEEDING NORTH WITH THREE GROUPS TO ATTACK CARRIER FORCE AT DAWN X

That was all. Kinkaid assumed this meant that Halsey was taking his three
carrier
groups north, leaving Task Force Thirty-four, the Battle Line, to guard the strait. That is what Nimitz assumed. That is what King assumed. That is what Mitscher assumed. To all of them the dispatch could mean nothing else, for leaving the strait open to the enemy was unthinkable. But to Halsey and his staff it was crystal clear that since he had not ordered the battle plan
executed,
there was no Battle Line. Therefore San Bernardino was unguarded. Therefore Kinkaid was duly warned. Therefore he would have to look out for himself and for the beachhead.

In Pearl Harbor Raymond Spruance, standing at Nimitz’s side by the chart table when the dispatch came in, softly remarked, “If I were there, I would keep my forces right here,” placing his hand off San Bernardino Strait. But he too was referring to the carriers; it did not even cross his mind that Halsey was pulling out the battleships.

Halsey confused the Japanese by waiting until after dark to sally northward. Kurita therefore thought his Main Striking Force was steaming head-on into the Third Fleet. Ozawa in the decoy carriers was doubly confused; he had received word of Kurita’s turn west, but not of his reversal toward San Bernardino Strait, so he did not know whether
Sho
was off or on, and whether or not he had succeeded in luring Halsey. First he fled north, then getting the “Divine assistance” message, turned back south to resume his role of worm on a hook, then again went north. As for the Japanese commanders in Manila and Tokyo, they no longer had the dimmest idea of what to think.

However, the admirals Halsey was taking north with him did have ideas.

Pug Henry was haunting flag plot, hoping for new orders from Halsey. For long dragging hours, there was only dead silence in the transmitters, while the unguarded strait fell farther and farther astern. What was going on? Could Halsey
possibly
have failed to get the word that the Central Force was heading for Leyte again?

Suddenly the TBS began grating out tense harsh questions and answers between Admiral Bogan, the commander of Pug’s task group, and the captain of the
Independence,
the carrier of the night search planes. Pug recognized the admiral’s voice through the gargling wireless distortion. Were those position reports on the Sibuyan Sea force accurate? Had the captain closely questioned the pilots? Absolutely, the captain replied. Those Japs were coming on fast, no doubt of it. In fact, a snooper pilot out on search now had just reported the navigation lights in San Bernardino Strait brilliantly lit.

Pug heard the admiral exclaim in a most irregular and refreshing way, “Jesus Christ!” Within minutes Bogan was on the TBS again, calling “Blackjack personally,” the inter-ship call sign for Admiral Halsey. This took some temerity, but it was fruitless. Not “Blackjack” but an unidentifiable voice responded. Bogan repeated the news of the illuminated strait, underlining its import with his urgent excited tones. The voice said in audible boredom, “Yes, yes, we have that information.”

Again, long silence. Pug was working up his nerve to speak his own view over the TBS — for the little it was worth — that the San Bernardino situation was getting desperate, when Willis Lee beat him to it, calling Halsey to say he was sure the Central Force would be coming through San Bernardino
Strait in the darkness. Pug heard the same bored voice say, “Roger,” and no more. That decided Pug against inviting a similar squelching.

Long after the battle it turned out that both Bogan and Lee intended to urge Halsey to send the Battle Line back to the strait. The bland cold anonymous voice silenced both of them. It turned out, too, that talking to Halsey wouldn’t have helped. The old man had made up his mind to get the Jap carriers. He had shut off all further debate in his staff, and gone to sleep. It also turned out that Marc Mitscher’s chief of staff, a belligerent sort nicknamed “Thirty-one Knot” Burke, had awakened Mitscher at midnight, imploring him to tell Halsey to send back the Battle Line. Mitscher’s answer is immortal: “If he wants my advice, he’ll ask for it.” With that he rolled over in his bunk.

So the mighty fleet went pottering north at varying moderate speeds — no faster, for Halsey did not want to run past the elusive Japs in the dark. Halsey’s admirals, in varying states of disagreement, apprehension, and consternation, held their tongues. October twenty-fourth melted at midnight into October twenty-fifth, the day of reckoning at Leyte Gulf; also, as it happened, the ninetieth anniversary of the Charge of the Light Brigade.

On October twenty-fifth, three different battles broke out, touched off by the three-pronged
Sho
approach. The Sibuyan Sea battle of the twenty-fourth is merged with these three, when Leyte Gulf is called “a combat of four engagements.”

Broad wastes of peaceful sea separated the three massive fights on the twenty-fifth. They had no tactical connection. No commander on either side coordinated them, or had any grasp of the whole picture. They started and ended at different times. Any one of the engagements might have gone down in history as the great Battle of Leyte Gulf, had the other two not occurred. In military records they have coalesced into one vast impenetrably tangled sea fight. Each of the three battles would need a long book to tell its violent smoky tale in full. A brief bare sorting out of the famous October twenty-fifth triple melee, which was spaced over six hundred sea miles, is this:

In the southern battle
of Surigao Strait, the action took place in early morning darkness and lasted to the dawn, a smashing American victory.

In the northern battle
off Luzon, Mitscher’s air strikes went on all day against Ozawa’s empty carriers and his supporting force; the carriers were sunk, but most of the supporting force escaped.

In the central battle
off Samar, Seventh Fleet jeep carriers were surprised at sunrise by Kurita as he sped toward Leyte Gulf. In this chance encounter, the odds were totally reversed, in favor of the Japanese. The awesome Main Striking Force stumbled on a cheap victory to be had for the taking, in routine gunnery, on the way to the beachhead: six slow tubby little
flattops and a few destroyers and DEs, not one armed with more than a five-inch gun.

Here took place the crucial battle for Leyte Gulf.

The most spectacular battle, however, was fought in the south, in the dark: a crossing of the
T,
the first on earth’s waters since Jutland, no doubt the last the world will witness.

The Japanese diversionary force, ignoring Kurita’s order to slow down, entered Surigao Strait — the southern entrance to Leyte Gulf — shortly after midnight. Every gunship of Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet lay in wait, in textbook Battle Line formation: in all, forty-two warships against eight, six battleships against two.

Advancing blindly and doughtily in column, the Japanese first ran a gauntlet of thirty-nine PT boats, which they drove off with searchlights and secondary battery fire. Next they butted into destroyer attacks; one column after another, steaming past neatly as in a fleet exercise, discharging volleys of torpedoes, which ran through four miles of black water and blew up one battleship, holed the other, which was the flagship, sank one destroyer and crippled two more. A pitiful little tail for the
T
limped up the strait to be crossed: one battleship, one cruiser, and one destroyer, all damaged. The Battle Line blasted them into oblivion. Pursuit of retreating cripples lasted well into daylight. Only one destroyer escaped to tell the grisly story of Surigao Strait back in Japan.

A second Japanese group of cruisers and destroyers, sailing down from Japan to join the southern attack, failed to arrive in time for this massacre. Coming on the scene before dawn, seeing the flaming hulks drifting on the sea, hearing the anguished radio exchanges among the doomed ships, the admiral turned and departed, after sustaining one PT boat torpedo hit on a cruiser. A cowardly or a prudent act? Judgments will vary on such discreetness in war.

By all accounts the Battle of Surigao Strait was ferocious fun for the Americans. They took many chances, absorbed some hits, and executed classic slaughter. Men wrote afterward of the beauty and the color of this last Battle Line fight: the long long wait for the enemy on the calm sea in the warm night under a setting moon, the tightening of nerves, the once-in-a-lifetime exaltation of destroyer run-ins against heavy ships in searchlight beams, under star shells, under the red blazing flying arches of tracers; the breathless wait for torpedoes to find their marks in the night; the ships blowing up and burning on the sea, the blue-white searchlights blindingly sweeping the black waters, the great guns erupting in salvo after salvo. The Japanese lost all their ships but one, and thousands of lives. The Americans lost thirty-nine lives and no ships.

So to the south Leyte Gulf was safe. But what of the north? At about four in the morning, with the battle going so well, Kinkaid decided to eliminate any farfetched concern by inquiring directly from Halsey whether Task Force Thirty-four was indeed guarding San Bernardino Strait. Off went the dispatch. By that time, the distance between Halsey and Kurita, who was well along toward the gulf, was widening to two hundred miles.

On the flag bridge of the
Iowa,
Victor Henry paced, sleepless. He knew he should be in his sea cabin, resting before the battle. But whenever he tried to lie down the miles kept clicking off in his mind as on a taxi meter, with the price in hours to get back to Leyte Gulf. Blocking San Bernardino Strait, crossing the
T
of the Central Force; blasted dreams! The Jap was certainly through the strait by now, going hell for leather for the beachhead. When would the first howl for help come? The sooner the better, Pug thought; a historic disgrace eclipsing Pearl Harbor was in the making, and the margin of time for averting it was melting away.

The fleet was moving with slow majesty on a smooth sea under thick-sown stars. Far below, the black swells sliding past the
Iowa’s
hull made a quiet slosh. Dead astern, high over the horizon, the Southern Cross blazed. Pug wanted to enjoy the sweet night air, the splendor of the stars, the religious awe of darkness on the ocean. He tried to force his thoughts away from the fleet’s predicament. Why torture himself with this empty fretful masterminding? Who was he, anyway, to question his chief? Suppose Halsey had top-secret instructions to do exactly what he was doing? Suppose orders or information had come in on channels for which BatDiv Seven lacked the codes?

His watch officer spoke in the darkness. “Admiral? Urgent dispatch from Com Third Fleet.”

Pug hurried into the smoky red-lit flag plot, where sailors slumped at the radars in tired mid-watch attitudes. On the chart desk lay the dispatch. His heart thumped painfully and joyously as his eye caught the words:

FORM BATTLE LINE
.

Halsey was ordering Task Force Thirty-four into existence, after all! But, alas, not to speed south; on the contrary. The six fast battleships, with cruisers and destroyers, were to rush ahead, still farther
northward,
to engage the Jap carriers if they showed up by daylight within gunfire range. Otherwise Mitscher’s carriers would hit them, and the Battle Line would hound down and destroy the cripples. Pug’s hopes died as quickly as they had flared.

Maneuvering the six giant black shapes out of a formation of sixty-odd vessels by starlight was a tedious tricky business. Pug Henry, almost dropping with weariness but unable to rest, prowled flag quarters and the bridge, tried to eat and failed, smoked and drank coffee until his hammering pulse
warned him to take it easy. He had nothing to do; it was the captain’s job to handle the ship. Daylight found the Battle Line on station, ten miles north of the carriers, foaming along on the sunlit sea. Squadrons of aircraft were roaring by overhead to strike the quarry, discovered by search planes a hundred fifty miles away.

Pug had ordered his communications officer to intercept every message between Kinkaid and Halsey that could be decoded, for he was starting a separate file of dispatches bearing on the Central Force crisis, noting the time he read each one. So far the file held three sheets: