War Stories II (58 page)

Read War Stories II Online

Authors: Oliver L. North

At fifteen minutes past midnight on 25 October, another U.S. torpedo boat encountered Nishimura's force and launched its torpedoes. Others
joined in the fray; altogether they launched thirty-four torpedoes during the three-hour attack, but scored only one hit. Emboldened, Nishimura charged in. He thought he had somehow successfully maneuvered through the gauntlet of American torpedo boats on both sides of his line of ships.
But then Nishimura's luck ran out. He was confronted by Oldendorf's main force, positioned at the top of the strait. Waiting for the Japanese ships were six U.S. Navy battleships, four heavy cruisers, four light cruisers, and twenty-one destroyers. Oldendorf had positioned his ships to trap the Japanese force. It was a traditional old-fashioned naval battle, with extensive use of big guns and torpedoes.
At exactly 0300, Oldendorf's twenty-one destroyers caught the enemy from both sides near the southern tip of Leyte. The gauntlet began to close as Nishimura's ships moved closer to the transports.
In less than an hour Nishimura was confronted first by the destroyers, then by Oldendorf's cruisers and battleships, which proceeded to unleash their big guns. The brutal shelling took a terrible toll.
By the time the engagement was over, the U.S. 7th Fleet had put every one of Nishimura's ships out of commission. He and his crew perished when the Americans sank his flagship, the battleship
Yamashiro
.
Meanwhile Admiral Shima, with his half of the Southern Force, had entered the bottom end of the Surigao Strait. He'd arrived just in time to see the results of Oldendorf's awful destruction of Nishimura's flotilla.
Shima's flagship,
Nachi
, collided with the retreating and blazing
Mogami
of Nishimura's force, and
Nachi
was damaged in the incident. U.S. torpedo boats had already attacked Shima's force on the way in, knocking one of his light cruisers out of formation. Now Shima had a paltry force of three cruisers and four destroyers, and he could see that they didn't stand a chance. His ships made a quick U-turn and headed back to the safety of the Mindanao Sea.
As the battle of the Surigao Strait developed, Lieutenant (jg) Jim Halloway, a twenty-two-year-old gunnery officer from Charleston, South Carolina, was aboard the destroyer
Bennion
. Through his binoculars, he could see the approaching enemy vessels.
LIEUTENANT (JG) JAMES HALLOWAY, USN
Aboard USS
Bennion
Surigao Strait
24 October 1944
0004 Hours Local
I remember thinking at the time, “That looks just like a Japanese battleship!” We'd gotten reports from submarines that had seen this group coming into Surigao Strait. They first reported a battleship, then a second, and a third. Then they submerged and came up and reported, “Now we see a cruiser.”
Their battleships turned out to be the
Fuso
, which had nine fourteen-inch guns, and each projectile is as tall as I am. That's a big hunk of explosive. And the
Yamashiro
had nine or maybe twelve sixteen-inch guns. The
Yamashiro
was followed by the
Mogami
. She was very heavily armed with eight-inch guns, torpedo tubes, and six-inch guns. And I think there were four or five destroyers with torpedoes. We had, in our group, nine destroyers that would be taking on this group as they came through.
The Japanese were coming in a column. And we were coming down on their bow. Our destroyers were at 300-foot intervals, and we were making thirty-two knots.
I was standing up with the binoculars. And there it was, clearly a Japanese battleship. At that point-blank range, we were given our target from the squadron commander of the destroyers. He said, “Your division will attack the second ship, the
Yamashiro.
”
We could see two battleships now. And we cranked the director around, put the crosshairs right on the second battleship, and lowered the crosshairs to the waterline. I told the people in the plotting room, tracking
Yamashiro
by radar, to get her course and speed.
We received the orders to make the run in. That's when we increased speed to thirty-two knots, made smoke, and headed for our launch point for the best torpedo shot, 1,000 yards from the
Yamashiro.
It sort of gave us comfort when our battleships started firing, six in a row, with their tracers. Looking through the lens, I could see them impacting on both the
Fuso
and the
Yamashiro.
Guns were being torn off and the superstructure began to collapse, and fires started. But the Japanese guns didn't slow down a bit.
One torpedo would not sink it. It would take three or four. We could launch ten, but were told to only launch five—our division would launch fifteen—so there would be fifteen torpedoes going against the
Yamashiro.
We fired a spread to take care of the ship's maneuvering area. That way, between three and six torpedoes hit
Yamashiro.
And then she's in trouble.
We could also see where the projectiles from our ship were striking the Japanese ships. When one of those large armor-piercing shells hits, the first thing that happens is that the whole area of the armor where the shell hits turns pink. I guess it's just all that energy being dissipated, and then comes the explosion. It was quite a Fourth of July show because when it hit, the shell exploded, and then it set off ready ammunition topside, and that would also explode, and it was a pretty wild scene.
We were sent south again to sink the rest of the Japanese ships that were trying to escape. As we went again into the strait, it was really a scene out of Dante's
Inferno
. The seas were covered with oil, there was wreckage all over the place, and there were Japanese sailors hanging onto the wreckage as we went by.
That's when
Bennion
encountered the
Asagumo
, a Japanese destroyer about five miles away. It looked like it was badly hit and was limping away. But the commander of the 7th Fleet ordered us to destroy it.
”One of our destroyers, the
Grant,
was badly shot up and dead in the water, but she was able to get steam up and get under way again. I think
Grant
lost something like sixty people.
Early in the melee, just as we were beginning to withdraw, we saw a large shape on our starboard side. It started firing toward the
Grant.
We were only about 2,000 yards away but the cruiser hadn't seen us—it was shooting
over
us. The plotting room said, “We have her course and speed, and she looks like she's in a turn.” The captain said, “Fire five torpedoes!”
So we swung the tubes out, ready to fire, hit the switch, and away they went. We sank the cruiser
Asagumo
.
We listened to the TBS, the VHF radio to “talk between ships.” Normally, it wouldn't range that far, but we were getting some skip distance and we heard this voice say, “This is Taffy 2. I'm under fire by some sixteen-inch guns, and two battleships and three cruisers are bearing down on me.”
Here we'd just finished this night action, and thought we'd destroyed the Japanese threat to the Leyte beachhead. Now, suddenly we find that aircraft carriers providing our air cover are under attack from Japanese surface ships in the vicinity.
I went from the elation of great victory to a feeling of, “This can't be happening.” It was a tremendous reversal for all of us.
The only advantage we had was that, for a while, the Japanese ships were firing armor-piercing shells and they went in one side of the carrier and out the other before exploding. But then the Japanese caught on and began using 2,000-pound bombs.
TASK UNIT TAFFY 3
BATTLE OFF SAMAR ISLAND
25 OCTOBER 1944
0815 HOURS LOCAL
Admiral Oldendorf's destroyers, cruisers, and battleships had set a trap for the Japanese Southern Force and it had worked. The crossing of the “T”—a classic maneuver taught at naval schools for centuries—had caught Admiral Nishimura off guard. His flagship, the
Yamashiro
, was sunk, taking its skipper to the bottom of the bloody, oily, fiery waters of the Surigao Strait.
For Oldendorf and his men, victory had been complete. But Halsey's move north was having devastating consequences. Admiral Kurita, having changed his mind about retreating, entered the San Bernardino Strait just after midnight and was surprised that the 3rd Fleet was nowhere in the vicinity. Four hours later, Kurita's ships slid unnoticed through the strait and headed south to Leyte Gulf.
Kurita planned to reposition his ships from a search and patrol night formation to the circle formation used for anti-aircraft defense. It was just about the time that the Battle of Surigao Strait was ending to his south. At 0415 Admiral Kinkaid radioed Halsey and asked about Task Force 34, inquiring whether it was still guarding San Bernardino Strait. Halsey didn't get the message until two and a half hours later.
At about 0720, Oldendorf recalled his ships from the Surigao Strait, and about that time, Halsey—a few hundred miles north of Leyte Gulf—was composing a radio message in response to Kinkaid's earlier query. This message should have informed Kinkaid that Task Force 34 had not been deployed and was not guarding the San Bernardino Strait. Instead, it merely informed the 7th Fleet commander that Task Force 38 was heading north in its entirety.
Ten minutes later, Oldendorf received an urgent radio message from an carrier escort with one of the 7th Fleet's task units. The 7th Fleet had eighteen carrier escorts, divided into three task units of six small carriers each, code-named “Taffy” 1, 2, and 3.
Task Units Taffy 1 and 2 were 120 miles out from Leyte on submarine and anti-aircraft patrol. Taffy 3's commander, Admiral Clifton Sprague, had launched twelve fighters and six planes of an anti-submarine patrol just after 0600 to provide cover for the ships in Leyte Gulf, to combat air patrol over the invasion beachhead, and to execute ground attacks on the enemy troops on Leyte. The Taffy task units and their aircraft weren't trained, or even equipped, to fight an enemy fleet.
Then, just after dawn on 25 October, Kurita's Center Force off Samar Island surprised the carrier escorts of Taffy 3. About 0700, a recon plane from Taffy 3 located the Japanese ships but Kurita reacted first, ordering a “general attack.”
Kurita's order meant that each Japanese skipper would initiate independent action. When the shells from Kurita's battleships and cruisers began splashing in the ocean near his carriers, Sprague sent Kinkaid an urgent radio message that they were under heavy attack from Kurita's fleet, and that their own small force was no match for the Japanese. Sprague
asked for immediate help from Task Force 34, which he assumed to be nearby, or from the rest of the 3rd Fleet somewhere north of his position.
The terrible news that the enemy fleet was already halfway into Leyte Gulf was passed up the line. The entire Leyte invasion operation was now in jeopardy.

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