War and Remembrance (181 page)

But after two hours his game was about played out. Heavy cruisers were pulling abeam to port and starboard, pumping shells into his carriers. Two battleships were rapidly coming up astern. He had no tricks left but violent zigzagging among the gruesomely beautiful shell splashes. American planes were smoking and burning all over the sea. None of his carriers was undamaged, and one was sinking. Impotently they kept firing their single five-inch guns.

At this point, Kurita on the distant
Yamato
ordered all his ships to cease fire and rejoin him.

The guns fell silent. The Japanese vessels turned away from their gasping prey and headed north. Taffy Three fled southward, its sailors — from
the admiral down to the youngest seaman — incredulous at this mysterious deliverance. The Battle of Samar was over. It was about a quarter past nine.

Under sporadic air harassment, Takeo Kurita next gathered up his force for the thrust into Leyte Gulf. He steamed a slow circle off the entrance, reuniting the scattered units. It took three hours. Leyte Gulf now lay open before him. With Taffy Three distantly on the run, nothing any longer barred the way. Against unbelievable odds, despite mistakes, misfortunes, miscalculations, communication failures, and terrible punishment, the
Sho
plan had worked! Kinkaid’s old battleships, trying to hurry back from their Surigao Strait pursuit, were far off and low on ammunition. The MacArthur invasion in the gulf, transports and troops alike, lay helpless before the Main Striking Force.

At half past twelve, Admiral Kurita, having regrouped his force,
decided on his own not to enter Leyte Gulf, Asking no permission from Tokyo, notifying nobody, he turned north to head home through San Bernardino Strait.

The signal flags for reversing course ran up on the
New Jersey
halyards about a quarter past eleven.

According to Pug’s chart, the crippled carriers were only forty-five miles away, dodging and burning under the air strikes. Leyte Gulf was three hundred miles to the south. Now, less than an hour’s steaming from the force he had run northward all night and half the day to destroy, Halsey was turning back.

The captain of the
Iowa
burst into flag plot. Could the admiral tell him what was happening? There was great hunting directly ahead. Why were they turning away?

“Looks like a bigger fight making up back at Leyte Gulf, Skipper.”

“We can’t get there until sunup tomorrow, Admiral. At best.”

“I know,” Pug said in a dry tone that guillotined the conversation, and the captain left.

Pug could not trust himself to talk to the captain. He was in the emotional turmoil of a mutinous ensign. Could Halsey really be throwing away one of the major battles of all time, covering the United States Navy with ignominy, endangering the Leyte landing force, fumbling the winning of the war? Or was he himself — deprived of the big chance of his life to fight a battle-line engagement — too upset to think straight?

Yet he could not stop his mind from working. Even on this turnaround, he judged Halsey was making serious mistakes. Why was he taking six battleships? Two could still press ahead to the Northern Force; surface fire was the right way to sink cripples. And why was he dragging along a mass of destroyers? They would all have to be fueled first.

Pug recalled how Churchill, coming to meet Roosevelt at Argentia aboard the
Prince of Wales,
had left the destroyer screen behind to speed through a gale faster than they could go. That was a man! Here was the redeeming moment, the very last chance to rush back and gun down the Central Force. Halsey had lost six hours by not turning back at Kinkaid’s first bellow. Only desperate measures would answer now. The Central Force must be a weary battered outfit, perhaps with empty torpedo tubes, low fuel bunkers, possibly even low magazines. Surely it was a moment to pitch all on one throw; to forgo destroyer protection and destroyer torpedoes, and roar down there with the big guns.

But it was not to be. The “rescue run” became an exasperating leisurely saunter at ten knots in the hot humid afternoon. One by one, hour after hour, the destroyers pulled up alongside the battleships to fuel. The carriers went by the other way, at full speed in pursuit of the Northern Force. It was a bitter sight; bitter to be becalmed in this great Battle Line in the midst of vast engagements, not yet having fired a shot.

Bitterer yet was the stench of oil. Pug was observing the refueling from the flag bridge. It was a skillfully done business: each small ship nosing up alongside the giant
Iowa,
its young skipper on his bridge, far below Pug, matching speeds until relative movement was zero; then the touch-and-go passing of the swaying oil lines over the splashing blue swells between the ships, and the parallel steaming until the little nursing vessel dropped away sated. Pug was used to the sight, yet, like carrier flight operations, he usually enjoyed watching it.

But today, in his overwrought state, the smell of black oil brought back the night of the
Northampton’s
sinking. That remembrance twisted the knife of his present impotence. Division commander of two battleships, he was being robbed of vengeance for the men who had died in the
Northampton,
by the bellicose blundering of Bill Halsey.

A despairing vision came over Pug Henry as these dragging hours passed. It struck him that the whole war had been generated by this damned viscous black fluid. Hitler’s tanks and planes, the Jap carriers that had hit Pearl Harbor, all the war machinery hurtling and clashing all over the earth, ran on this same stinking gunk. The Japs had gone to war to grab a supply of it. Not fifty years had passed since the first Texas oil field had come in, and the stuff had caused this world inferno. At Oak Ridge they were cooking up something even more potent than petroleum, racing to isolate it and use it for slaughter.

Pug felt on this October twenty-fifth, during this endless, nerve-wracking, refueling crawl toward Leyte Gulf at ten knots, that he belonged to a doomed species. God had weighed modern man in the balance with three gifts of buried treasure — coal, oil, uranium — and found him wanting. Coal
had fueled Jutland and the German trains in the Great War, petroleum had turned loose air war and tank war, and the Oak Ridge stuff would probably end the whole horrible business. God had promised not to send another deluge; He had said nothing about preventing men from setting fire to their planet and themselves.

Pug’s mood had reached this depth of dismalness when Captain Bradford came running out on the flying bridge. ComBatDiv Seven was being summoned on the TBS by “Blackjack.”

“It’s not a communicator, Admiral,” said Bradford with some agitation, “it’s Halsey.”

Pug’s apocalyptic vision vanished. He darted into flag plot and seized the TBS receiver.

“Blackjack, this is Buckeye Seven, over.”

“Say, Pug,” came Halsey’s familiar voice, grainy and buoyant, using the informal style privileged to high flag officers, “we’re about through refueling here, and time’s a-wasting. Our division can sustain a long flank speed run. What say we mosey on ahead down there, and try to catch those monkeys? The others will follow. Bogan will back us up with his carriers.”

The proposal knocked Pug’s breath out. At that rate the
New Jersey
and the
Iowa
could reach San Bernardino Strait about one in the morning, Leyte Gulf at three or four. If they did encounter the enemy, it would mean a night action. The Japs were old hands at that, and BatDiv Seven had no night fighting experience at all. Two battleships would be fighting at least four battleships, including one with eighteen-inch guns.

But, by God, here was
Form Battle Line,
at long last; wrong, rash, tardy, but the thing itself! And Halsey would be right there. Pug could not keep out of his voice a flash of reluctant regard for the crazy old fighting son of a bitch.

“I’m for it.”

“I thought you would be. Form Task Group Thirty-four point five, Pug. Designate
Biloxi, Vincennes, Miami,
and eight DDs for the screen. You’ve got tactical command. Let’s get the hell down to Leyte Gulf.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

* * *

(from
World Holocaust
by Armin von Roon)

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE:
When
World Holocaust
first appeared in German, a translation of this controversial chapter was published in the
U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings.
As a BatDiv commander at Leyte, I was invited to write a rejoinder. It is appended here. — V.H.

Our Ardennes offensive in late 1944, the so-called Battle of the Bulge, and the Battle for Leyte Gulf were parallel operations. In each case a nation close to defeat staked all on one last throw of the dice. Hitler wanted to panic the Western allies into a settlement that would give him a breather to hold off the Russians; he even harbored grandiose delusions of getting the Anglo-Americans to fight on his side. The Japanese wanted to make the Americans sick of the distant war, and willing to negotiate a peace.

Our Ardennes offensive, discussed in my next section, gave Roosevelt and Churchill anxious weeks. The two aging warmongers thought Germany was done for, but we split their front in France and made good progress for a while, though Hitler’s overambitious battle plan and tactical meddling, plus Allied air power, probably doomed us from the start.

The Japanese, however, almost brought off a world-shaking success. The chance for this success was created by the imbecility of the American fleet commander, Halsey. It was thrown away by the greater imbecility of the Japanese fleet commander, Kurita. The Battle for Leyte Gulf is a study in military folly on the vastest scale. Its lessons should be pondered by the armed forces of all countries.

War is politics implemented by the use of force. A military undertaking seldom rises above its political genesis; if that is unsound the guns will
speak and the blood flow in vain. These Clausewitzian commonplaces will shed light on the grotesque fiasco at Leyte Gulf.

The political situation in the Pacific in late 1944 was this. On the one hand, the Japanese nation, in its gallant try for hegemony in its own geographical area, had already been ruthlessly beaten by the American imperialists; but its leaders wanted to fight on. Unconditional surrender was unthinkable to these Samurai idealists. Yet Franklin Roosevelt had laid down those terms to suit the mentality of his countrymen, on whose soil not one bomb had yet fallen, and who were fighting a Hollywood war.

This being the political deadlock in the Pacific—for on military grounds the Japanese should have been suing for peace once Tojo fell — a military
shock
was needed to break the stalemate. In long wars, peace parties develop: in democratic systems openly, in dictatorships within the ruling cadre. A shock strengthens the peace party of the shocked side. The Japanese planned to lie back until the Americans struck the Empire’s inner perimeter, and then smash them. At the end of extended supply lines, near Japanese air and naval bases, the Yanks would be at a transient disadvantage, and might be shocked by a bloody setback into a reasonable peace.

The American concept behind the invasion of the Philippines was a mere empty gratification of General MacArthur’s vanity, which would also palliate some home-front grumbling. It brought major Japanese land forces in the Philippines unnecessarily into action. These were already stymied by the horrible unrestricted U-boat warfare of the Americans, and should have been left to wither on the vine. But Douglas MacArthur wanted to return to the Philippines, and Roosevelt wanted such a theatrical reconquest right before the election.