CHAPTER SIX
THE LARGEST naval clash in history took place at a time when its outcome could exercise negligible influence upon Japan’s collapse. It was inspired by a decision of Japan’s admirals to vent their frustrations in a gesture of stunning futility. In October 1944 they found themselves stripped of air cover, and facing overwhelmingly superior American forces. They wished to concentrate their fleet in the home islands. Instead, however, most big ships were obliged to operate from anchorages where fuel oil was available, off Borneo and Malaya. The Imperial Navy still disposed a force which, a few years past, had awed the world. Of ten battleships in commission at the start of the war, nine remained. It seemed to Japan’s admirals intolerable—worse, dishonourable—that capital units swung idle at their moorings while on shore the army fought desperate battles. The navy thus sought to precipitate an engagement, even though every projection of its outcome promised defeat.
The Americans were unprepared for such an initiative. As so often in north-west Europe, they credited their enemies with excessive rationality. MacArthur’s headquarters thought a Japanese dash through the San Bernardino or Surigao strait approaches to Leyte Gulf unlikely. The enemy’s ships would lack searoom, and would confront both Halsey’s Third Fleet and Kinkaid’s Seventh. Ever since the summer, however, Japan’s commanders had intended to commit most of their surviving surface units to what they called Shogo—“Operation Victory.” When Vice-Admiral Ugaki of the battleship squadron was shown a draft, he wrote: “Whether the plan is adequate264 or not needs further study, but at a time when we have been driven into the last ditch we have no other choice…It is essential still to hope for victory…and endeavour to attain it.” In other words, it was preferable to do anything than to do nothing. Shogo would be a thrust comparable in its desperation with Hitler’s Ardennes offensive three months later.
Even as Japan’s commanders and staffs pored over charts through September and early October, their vital air squadrons were vanishing into the ocean. Day after day off Formosa, Halsey’s planes inflicted devastating losses. “Our fighters were but so many eggs thrown at the stone wall of the invincible enemy formations,” Vice-Admiral Fukudome wrote wretchedly. U.S. radar picket destroyers enabled the Americans to mass aircraft in holding patterns a hundred miles out from Third Fleet whenever Japanese attacks threatened. Fighter direction had become a superbly sophisticated art. So too had massed attacks on Japan’s air bases and floating assets. On 10 October, 1,396 American sorties against Okinawa and the Ryukyus ravaged shipping and destroyed a hundred enemy aircraft for the loss of twenty-one. Between the twelfth and the fourteenth, the Japanese lost more than five hundred aircraft. Their combat casualties were matched by a steep decline in aircraft serviceability—to 50 percent, even 20 percent, compared with the Americans’ 80 percent. Many Japanese ground crews had been lost in the Pacific atoll battles, and no trained replacements were available.
These setbacks were matched by extraordinary Japanese self-deceit about what had taken place. Vice-Admiral Ugaki rejoiced about a destroyer squadron’s “tremendous feat” of sinking three aircraft carriers, a cruiser and four destroyers. In truth, in the action cited the Americans had lost one destroyer. Here was a high command forsaking that indispensable practice, honest analysis. Instead, in drafting the Shogo plan, Japan’s commanders embraced a tissue of illusions. Most of the 116 planes left to the Japanese fleet were winched rather than flown aboard carriers in their Kyushu anchorage on 17 October, because the pilots were deemed too inexperienced to make deck landings. The fleet now relied upon land-based air cover. Japan’s forty surviving aircraft in the Philippines were reinforced tenfold by 23 October, but remained subject to relentless attrition on the ground and in the air. At sea, the Japanese assembled forces of 9 battleships, 4 carriers, 15 heavy and light cruisers and 29 destroyers. This seemed impressive, until measured against the U.S. Navy’s strength: 19 task groups around the Philippines comprised 9 fleet, 8 light and 29 escort carriers; 12 battleships; 12 heavy and 16 light cruisers; 178 destroyers; 40 destroyer escorts and 10 frigates. The United States now deployed more destroyers than the Japanese navy owned carrier aircraft. Third Fleet’s 200 ships occupied an area of ocean nine miles by forty.
The objective of Shogo, complex as most Japanese operational plans, was to enable three squadrons, two sailing from Borneo and one from Kyushu, to rendezvous off Leyte Gulf, where the Combined Fleet would fall upon MacArthur’s amphibious armada and its covering naval force, Seventh Fleet. Though the Japanese believed that their air attacks had already crippled Halsey’s Third Fleet, operating north-east of the Philippines, they sought to decoy his carriers and battleships out of range of Leyte. For this purpose, Japan’s four surviving carriers and skeletal complement of aircraft were to feint southward, making a demonstration the Americans could not fail to notice. The carriers’ inevitable loss was considered worth accepting, to remove Halsey from the path of the main striking force. Shogo was scheduled for the earliest possible date after the expected American landing.
Most senior officers and staffs opposed the plan. They perceived its slender prospects of success and likely calamitous losses. They saw that, by waiting until the Americans were ashore, they would have missed the decisive moment in the Philippines. Shogo reflected the Japanese navy’s chronic weakness for dividing its forces. Even the bellicose Ugaki wrote on 21 September that it seemed rash “to engage the full might265 of the enemy with our inferior force…committing ourselves to a decisive battle…There was little chance of achieving victory. Watching a Sumo wrestler taking on five men in succession, it was plain that he could not prevail if he expended too much effort grappling with each opponent in turn.” Some officers said: “We do not mind death, but if the final effort of our great navy is to be an attack on a cluster of empty freighters, surely admirals Togo and Yamamoto would weep in their graves.” Critics challenged a scheme which demanded daylight engagement. Only darkness, they believed, might offer a chance of success, of exploiting the Imperial Navy’s legendary night-fighting skills. Even the army, itself so often imprudent, thought Shogo reckless.
Vice-Admiral Takeo Kurita, designated as operational commander, made the best case he could for the operation. “Would it not be shameful,” he demanded at his captains’ final briefing, “for the fleet to remain intact while our nation perishes? There are such things as miracles.” Yet Kurita himself, though a veteran destroyer and cruiser leader who had seen plenty of action, was notoriously cautious. He had gained his flag by virtue of seniority, not performance. He was to execute a plan devised by Combined Fleet headquarters, which demanded extraordinary boldness. On the eve of sailing, only Kurita’s rhetoric matched the demands of his mission. The fleet, he told his officers, was being granted “the chance to bloom as flowers of death.” His audience responded as custom demanded, leaping to their feet to cry “Banzai!,” but there was no eagerness in their hearts. Kurita and his captains then embarked upon one of the most reckless and ill-managed operations in naval history.
The series of actions which became known as the Battle of Leyte Gulf was fought over an area the size of Britain or Nevada. Following a Japanese naval code change, American intelligence gained no hint of the enemy’s plan, but both of Kurita’s southern squadrons were detected long ahead of reaching Leyte. Before dawn on 23 October, Halsey received one of the most momentous sighting reports of the war from the submarine Darter, patrolling the Palawan Passage with its sister ship Dace: MANY SHIPS INCLUDING 3 PROBABLE BBS 08–28N 116–30E COURSE 040 SPEED 18 X CHASING. This was Kurita’s 1st Striking Force, en route from Brunei Bay. What a spectacle it must have been. No one has bettered Winston Churchill’s imagery of twentieth-century dreadnoughts at sea: “gigantic castles of steel266,” prows dipping as they advanced in stately procession, “like giants bowed in anxious thought.”
Five battleships and ten heavy cruisers steamed in three columns at sixteen knots, without an anti-submarine screen. This was all the more astonishing since the Japanese intercepted the American radio transmission, and thus knew submarines were at hand. At 0632, Darter fired six torpedoes at the cruiser Atago, Kurita’s flagship, from point-blank range—980 yards—then loosed her stern tubes at the cruiser Takao from 1,550 yards. Atago was hit four times, Takao twice. Dace’s skipper, Bladen Claggett, whipped up his periscope to see “the sight of a lifetime”: Atago billowing black smoke and orange flame, sinking fast by the bow. Takao, though hit hard in the stern, remained afloat. Claggett heard two huge explosions. “I have never heard anything like it,” wrote the submarine skipper. “The soundmen reported that it sounded as if the bottom of the ocean was blowing up…Heard tremendous breaking-up noises. This was the most gruesome sound I have ever heard.” The diving officer said: “We’d better get the hell out of here.”
Admiral Kurita and his staff swam from the stricken Atago to the destroyer Kishinami, and thence transferred to the great battleship Yamato. Some 360 of Atago’s crew drowned, including almost all the admiral’s communications staff. If Kurita’s conduct thereafter was clumsy, no fifty-five-year-old could have found it easy to exercise command after suffering such a personal trauma. Darter’s sister boat Dace launched four torpedoes at the cruiser Maya and heard huge explosions, signalling her end. Belated Japanese destroyer attacks prevented either submarine from firing again. Kurita’s ships increased speed to twenty-four knots to escape the killing ground. The first action of Leyte Gulf had inflicted substantial damage on the Japanese before they fired a shot. Some officers of “Centre Force,” as Kurita’s squadron was designated, expressed rueful admiration for the American submarines’ achievement: “Why can’t our people267 pull off a stunt like that?” Why not, indeed? This first American success was made possible by a tactical carelessness amounting to recklessness, which would characterise almost every Japanese action in those days. However gloomy were Kurita and his officers about the operation they had undertaken, it is extraordinary that they spurned elementary precautions. Japanese behaviour suggested a resignation to death much stronger than the will to fight. In this titanic clash, a once-great navy was to conduct itself in a fashion that would have invited ridicule, were not such great issues and so many lives at stake.
It was now plain to the Americans that Kurita’s ships were headed for the San Bernardino Strait, at the north end of Samar Island. On reaching its eastern exit, they intended to turn south for the seven-hour run to Leyte Gulf, and MacArthur’s invasion anchorage. The second Japanese squadron, under Admiral Shoji Nishimura, had also been spotted, steaming towards the same objective from the south, past Mindanao. Halsey dared not lead his own battleships into San Bernardino, which had been heavily mined by the Japanese. Instead, he ordered three fast carrier groups to close the range and launch air strikes. The Japanese, however, moved first. Three groups of fifty aircraft apiece, flying from Luzon, attacked the carriers of Sherman’s Task Group 3. A long, bitter battle ensued. One Hellcat pilot, the famous Cmdr. David McCampbell, shot down nine Japanese planes, his wingman six; five other pilots claimed two each. McCampbell had initially been rejected for flight training back in 1933, because of poor eyesight. Yet the aggression indispensable to all fighter pilots made him one of the most successful of the navy’s war. “It’s competitive all the way268through,” he said wryly. On 24 October 1944, nearly all the prizes were won by the Americans. The Japanese attacking force was almost wiped out.
Just one Judy dive-bomber penetrated the American screen and landed a 550-pound bomb on the light carrier Princeton, crowded with planes preparing for take-off. Fuel caught fire, torpedoes exploded, hundreds of desperate men crowded the flight deck. At 1010, half an hour after the initial explosion, all crewmen save damage-control parties abandoned ship. The cruiser Birmingham steamed close alongside to help fight Princeton’s fires, sending thirty-eight volunteers aboard the stricken carrier. A jeep and a tractor slid from Princeton’s lofty deck onto the destroyer Morrison, which was taking off men while using machine guns to ward off sharks from survivors in the water. Princeton’s agony continued for 21/2 hours, until a new Japanese air raid was signalled. Birmingham temporarily stood off. After Lexington’s Hellcats broke up the attackers, however, the heroic cruiser closed in once more, and tried to take Princeton in tow.
A huge explosion in the carrier’s torpedo stowage put an end to the salvage attempt, and inflicted shocking damage on Birmingham. The ship’s war diary recorded: “Dead, dying and wounded, many of them bloody and horrible, covered the decks…Blood ran freely down the waterways.” The hulk of Princeton was sunk by American torpedoes. Birmingham retired from the fleet, “a dockyard case.” Amazingly, thanks to the courage and skill displayed aboard all the ships involved, only 108 men died and 190 were wounded. If this was a bitter morning for Halsey’s TG3, it was also a time for pride.
The Battle of Leyte Gulf, 23–25 October 1944
Third Fleet’s first air strike fell upon Kurita’s ships at 1026, followed by a second wave at 1245, another at 1550. Aboard a nearby American submarine, sailors eavesdropped on the airmen’s radio chatter. One pilot interrupted his controller’s instructions impatiently: “Let’s get this over with269.” Then there was a clamour of yells: “Yippee! I’ve got a battleship!” followed by: “All right, let the battleship alone. Line up on the cruiser.” Kurita was now flying his flag in Yamato, in uneasy concourse with Ugaki, who commanded the battleship element from the same ship, and despised his superior. The admiral pleaded in vain with shore command for air support. This was refused, on the absurd grounds that fighters were more profitably engaged in attacking U.S. carriers. Here, once again, was the Japanese obsession with the inherent virtue of offensive action, matched by impatience with the humdrum requirements of defence. Kurita was obliged to watch, almost impotent, as American aircraft struck his ships again and again.
Avenger gunner Sherwin Goodman was quietly contemplating the sky amidst a huge formation of American aircraft when his thoughts were interrupted: “It was a beautiful day270…My goodness, what have we got here?” It was the Yamato group, far below them. The torpedo-carriers dropped and circled, to reach firing positions. Goodman rotated his turret forward, and could see only gun flashes from the enemy ships: “It looked like a tunnel of fire.” At a thousand yards, they released their torpedo, the plane lifted, and Goodman cried at his pilot, “Break left! Break left!” Gazing down as they swung away, he exclaimed triumphantly: “We hit him!” Their victim was the light cruiser Noshiro, which sank almost immediately. Two American bombs caused slight damage to Yamato, giving Kurita another bad fright. His chief of staff was wounded by splinters.
Every gun in the Japanese fleet fired on the incoming Americans, yet achieved small success. Since 1942, U.S. ships had made great strides in countering air attack by radio fighter direction, radar-controlled gunnery and radio-guided proximity shell fuses. The Japanese had not begun to match such advances. Their anti-aircraft defences were woefully inadequate. “Our captain was a271 great gunnery enthusiast,” said Petty Officer Kisao Ebisawa, who served on a warship through many U.S. air attacks. “He was always telling us that we could shoot the Americans out of the sky. After innumerable raids in which our guns did not even scratch their wings, he was left looking pretty silly. When air attacks came in, there was nothing much we could do but pray.”
On 24 October, huge “beehive” shells from the battleships’ main armament did more damage to their own gun barrels than to American planes, but pilots were shaken by the spectacle. “It’s nerve-racking,” said one, “because you see the guns on the ships go off. And then you wonder what in hell you are going to do for the next ten or fifteen seconds while the shell gets there.” Amid the erupting black puffballs in the sky, again and again American torpedo-and bomb-carrying aircraft got through unscathed.
The Japanese navy’s Lt. Cmdr. Haruki Iki commanded a squadron of Jill torpedo-bombers, based at Clark Field on Luzon. On the twenty-fourth, entirely ignorant of Shogo, they were ordered to launch a “maximum effort” mission in search of the American carriers. They could carry sufficient fuel only to reach Third Fleet. Early afternoon found Iki leading his formation of eighteen aircraft north-east over the sea. They received their first intimation of the desperate drama of the Combined Fleet when they saw far below the battleship Musashi, under American attack. They had scarcely absorbed what was happening when Hellcats fell on them. A massacre followed. As inexperienced pilots strove to jink out of American sights, within a matter of minutes fifteen Japanese planes were shot down. Two aircraft escaped back to Clark. Iki himself found refuge in cloud.
By the time he emerged, sky and sea were empty, his fuel exhausted. He turned south-east and ditched in shallow water a few hundred yards off the north shore of Leyte Island. He and his gunner stood on a wing waving at figures on the beach, who were plainly Japanese. Iki fired flares to attract attention. Eventually, a small boat approached. “We’re navy!” cried Iki. “We’re army,” the occupants of the boat responded dourly. Familiar animosity between the two services asserted itself. The soldiers were alarmed to perceive that the plane’s torpedo had fallen from the fuselage, and lay menacingly on the bottom, a few feet below. They pointed: “Can’t you do something about that thing?” “Like what?” demanded Iki crossly. Eventually the soldiers were persuaded to close in and rescue the airmen. Once ashore, Iki begged the local commander to signal his base, report his survival, and provide him with transport to get back. No message was sent, and it was a week before he reached Clark. He arrived to find that a memorial parade had just been held for himself and the rest of his unit. His commander embraced him, back from the dead. “Somehow, I knew we hadn’t seen the last of you,” said the officer emotionally. With no planes and no crews, there was nothing more for them to do on Luzon. Iki was evacuated to Kyushu to organise a new squadron.
THE JAPANESE PILOT was by no means the only airman to land “in the drink” that day. There was also, for instance, twenty-two-year-old Joseph Tropp from Cheltenham, Pennsylvania, gunner of a flak-stricken Helldiver. As his air group faded away to the east after making its attack on Kurita’s ships, Tropp was left bobbing alone in a dinghy—his pilot had been fatally injured when their plane ditched. He found himself in the path of the entire Japanese fleet. Their battleships did not deign to notice him, but when a destroyer passed within fifty feet “a Jap sailor yelled272 and I could see others pouring out of their hatches talking, gesticulating. They lined up at the rail shaking their fists, yelling and laughing. One of them disappeared and came back with a rifle, and I was sure he intended to strafe me, but I could see and hear them yelling about something else that distracted their attention.” More American aircraft were approaching, and Tropp was left to his own devices. After two days in the dinghy he landed on Samar, met guerrillas who delivered him to the Americans, and eventually returned to his carrier.
Far graver misfortunes now overtook Kurita. Cmdr. James McCauley, directing Third Fleet’s torpedo-bombers, divided his planes between the three biggest Japanese ships. Musashi was struck nineteen times by torpedoes, seventeen times by bombs. This attack, declared pilot David Smith, was “absolutely beautiful273. I’ve never seen anything like it…no bombs missed. The torpedo planes came in on a hammerhead attack, four on each bow, and you could see the wakes headed right for the bow. They all ran hot straight and normal, and exploded. Well, she stopped and burned like hell, and when I left her about thirty minutes later the bow was flush with the water.”
Yamato and Nagato were also slightly hit. The heavy cruiser Myoko was obliged to turn for home with shaft damage. At 1930, the 67,123-ton behemoth Musashi, each of its main turrets heavier than a destroyer, the huge gold imperial chrysanthemum still adorning its prow, rolled over and sank. Some 984 of its 2,287 crew perished—it was four hours before Japanese escorts addressed themselves to seeking survivors. Ugaki afterwards composed a haiku about the death of Musashi’s captain, Rear-Admiral Toshihira Inoguchi. This ended winsomely: “Who can read the heart274 of an admiral brooding?” The weather—“Fair”—was the only aspect of 24 October about which Ugaki could bring himself to comment favourably in his diary. On this, “the first day of the decisive battle,” he lamented how few American planes had been shot down. Anti-aircraft fire from Kurita’s ships had accounted for only eighteen attackers. Inoguchi’s last testament, scribbled as his ship foundered, recorded regret that he and his comrades had placed exaggerated faith in big ships and big guns.
Yet given the fact that Halsey’s aircraft had been able to strike all day without interference from Japanese fighters, the results were far less comprehensive than the Americans might have expected, and than their pilots claimed. Halsey wrote after the war: “The most conspicuous lesson learnt from this action is the practical difficulty of crippling by air strikes alone a task force of heavy ships at sea and free to maneuver.” This is wholly unconvincing. Far more relevant was the fact that the American fliers started their battle tired, desperately tired, after days of intensive action. The carrier Bunker Hill had already been detached to Ulithi because of the exhaustion of its air group, and other ships’ pilots were in little better case. Fatigue diminished accuracy. A Hellcat commander, Lamade of Hancock, was especially critical of the Helldivers’ performance during this period: “The dive-bombers are not hitting275 what they’re aiming at—I don’t think they’re aiming at all.” An analysis of one air group’s operations on 24 October concluded: “Too many targets were attacked276 scattering light damage to many ships…radio discipline must be improved.” That day, only around 45 of 259 U.S. strike aircraft achieved hits. This fell far short of the best performances by carrier pilots in the autumn of 1944. Despite the sinking of Musashi, American sorties on 24 October were relatively unsuccessful.
Yet they were enough to shake Kurita. At 1400 that afternoon, the Japanese force reversed course away from the San Bernardino Strait. The admiral signalled to naval headquarters: “It is…considered advisable to retire temporarily beyond range of enemy air attack, and resume our operation when the actions of [other] friendly units permit.” Whatever Kurita did thereafter, his force could no longer achieve its scheduled dawn rendezvous off Leyte Gulf with the southern Japanese squadron. Ashore, the Japanese mood was already grim. One of the day’s luckier men was Maj. Shoji Takahashi in Manila. When the Shogo squadrons sailed, the navy requested the presence of an army liaison officer, to sail aboard Musashi. Takahashi volunteered. He thought the trip sounded rather fun. That night, when South Asia Area Army learned that the great battleship and many of her crew lay on the sea bottom, the intelligence officer’s colonel wagged a grim finger at him: “Lucky I wouldn’t let you go277, isn’t it?” Admiral Halsey, hearing his pilots’ reports, was convinced that Third Fleet had achieved a decisive victory, that Kurita’s force was broken and in retreat.
NISHIMURA’S “C” Force, comprising two old battleships, a heavy cruiser and four destroyers, was absurdly weak for independent action. A further element of the Combined Fleet, Shima’s small squadron, was pursuing the same route as Nishimura, but lagging hours behind him. It was as if the Japanese high command was offering its enemies a feast in successive courses, each scaled to fit American appetites, with convenient pauses for the cleansing of palates. As “C” Force began its long approach to Leyte Gulf from the south on the morning of the twenty-fourth, it suffered one ineffectual American air attack before Halsey’s carriers moved north to address Kurita. Thereafter, it was plain to Admiral Thomas Kinkaid, commanding Seventh Fleet, screening the Leyte beachhead, that it would be up to his ships to dispose of Nishimura; and that the Japanese would traverse the Surigao Strait during darkness.
Kinkaid was a fifty-six-year-old New Hampshireman who had spent much of his early service in battleships. He nursed some resentment that he had been removed by Halsey from a carrier group command earlier in the war, and was generally deemed a competent rather than an inspired officer. At 1215, he ordered every ship to prepare for a night engagement, signalling: “General situation: enemy aircraft278 and naval forces seem to be assembling…for an offensive strike against Leyte area…attack tonight by enemy striking group may occur after 1900. General plan: this force will destroy [by] gunfire at moderate ranges and by torpedo attack enemy surface forces attempting to enter Leyte Gulf through…Surigao Strait.”
MacArthur demanded to be allowed to stay aboard the cruiser Nashville for the battle, and only under protest transferred his headquarters ashore. The twenty-eight supply and command ships in San Pedro Bay were left to be screened by destroyers. Admiral Jesse Oldendorf, commanding the force of old battleships and cruisers providing bombardment support for Leyte, deployed these in line across the mouth of the strait to await the enemy. The five destroyers of Captain Jesse Coward’s Squadron 54 took station ahead as a skirmishing force, supported by six further destroyers of Desron 24 and nine of Desron 56, in readiness to launch successive torpedo attacks. A swarm of little PT-boats patrolled still further forward, riding easily on the glassy sea. The PTs’ first, unfortunate engagement involved an American plane: they shot down a night-flying “Black Cat” Catalina which was searching for Nishimura.
The night was full of apprehension. Kinkaid, on his command ship Wasatch in San Pedro anchorage, was dismayed to hear of a Japanese bombing raid on Tacloban, which detonated a fuel dump. The American battleships at the entrance to Surigao heavily outgunned Nishimura’s squadron. Because they did not expect to engage enemy warships, however, they carried little armour-piercing ammunition. A night action was always chancy, especially against the Japanese. It was most unlikely that Nishimura’s feeble force could break through Seventh Fleet, but a few lucky Japanese shells might wreak havoc.
The battle began at 2236, as the little jungle-green-painted wooden PT-boats raced at twenty-four knots to launch the first attacks. One after another, amid foaming wakes and flickering Japanese searchlights, they strove to close the columns of advancing ships. Nishimura’s secondary armament fired repeated salvoes at the fragile craft. In the course of skirmishes that lasted almost four hours, thirty boats fired torpedoes—and all missed. The PTs were the navy’s special forces, chiefly employed for reconnaissance and rescue duty. Their torpedo training had been neglected. One craft was lost, three men killed. Nishimura’s squadron surged on northwards.
The American destroyers fared better. These were almost new Fletcher-class ships, displacing 2,000 tons apiece. Their five-inch guns were irrelevant to a contest with capital ships. Coward ordered his turret crews to hold their fire, for muzzle flashes would only pinpoint them for the Japanese. It was the destroyers’ torpedoes that mattered, launched from much stabler aiming platforms than the PT-boats, and capable of sinking anything. Even in darkness after the moon set just past midnight, visibility was better than two miles. The temperature on deck was eighty degrees, the heat below stifling. In combat information centres, anti-submarine sonars pinged monotonously. Five or six men crowded into the dark, sweaty space behind or below each ship’s bridge, dominated by an illuminated, glass-covered plot on which a pinpoint of light showed the ship’s position. On American radar screens, the sea slugs that represented Nishimura’s ships were closing fast.
As those with a view watched the PT-boat actions, the captain of one destroyer, Monssen, broadcast to his ship’s company at general quarters: “To all hands. This is the captain. We are going into battle. I know each of you will do your duty. I promise that I will do my duty to you and for our country. Good luck to you, and may God be with us.” The harshest predicament was not now that of men manning the upper decks, but that of hundreds more sweating in their flashproof denims and anti-flash hoods at switchboards and ammunition hoists, machinery controls and casualty stations below, where they could see nothing of events until a ghastly moment when explosives might rip through thin plate, blood and water mingle with twisted steel. Such images were vivid in the imaginations of most sailors, as they drank coffee and ate sandwiches through the interminable wait to engage.
Nishimura’s column was led by four destroyers. His own flagship, the old battleship Yamashiro, followed, with Fuso and Mogami at thousand-yard intervals behind. At 0240 McGowan reported “Skunk 184 degrees distant fifteen miles.” Fifteen minutes later, Japanese lookouts glimpsed the distant enemy, but their huge searchlights failed to illuminate Coward’s ships. Now the American destroyers began to close, thrashing down the twelve-mile-wide strait at thirty knots. Even with the Japanese slowed by an adverse current, Nishimura’s ships and the Americans were approaching each other at better than fifty miles an hour. At 0258, with the Japanese in plain sight, Coward’s squadron made protective smoke. He ordered the three ships in his own division: “Fire when ready.” A few seconds after 0300, the Americans began loosing torpedoes at a range just short of 9,000 yards. To have gone closer, the destroyer leader believed, would have invited devastation from Nishimura’s gunfire. A Japanese searchlight suddenly fixed Remey in its dazzling glare, making its crew feel “like animals in a cage.” The battleships began lighting the sky with star shells, while striving in vain to hit American destroyers making a land speed approaching forty mph. In seventy-five seconds, twenty-seven torpedoes left their tubes. Coward swung hard to port, then zigzagged through their eight minutes of running time. At 0308, they heard a single explosion aboard a Japanese ship, probably Yamashiro.
The two ships of Coward’s western group were much more successful. They fired at 0311, just as Nishimura ordered his ships to take evasive action, which turned them smartly into the tracks of the incoming torpedoes. McDermut achieved a remarkable feat, hitting three Japanese destroyers with a single salvo. One blew up immediately, a second began to sink, a third retired with the loss of her bow. Lt. Tokichi Ishii, forty-four-year-old279 engineer officer of Asugumo, suddenly found paint peeling from the deckplates above his head, in the heat from fires. A series of explosions rocked the ship as American gunfire detonated their own torpedoes. He saw pressure gauges crack, telephone wires burn. Smoke poured into the engine room. As the men coughed and choked, they strove in vain to close hatches and shut off ventilators. Finally, as conditions became intolerable, Ishii ordered his men topside. On deck, they worked frantically to douse the fires—and at last succeeded. Returning to the engine room, at 0345 he reported to the bridge that the ship had regained power. He was just descending the ladder to return to his post when another American torpedo hit the ship. The blast catapulted him into the sea. He clung to a plank, watching the ship settle by the stern under renewed American shellfire. Ishii swam to a raft with difficulty, for his leg had been gashed wide open in the torpedo explosion. Hours later he was washed ashore on Leyte, seized by guerrillas, and to his embarrassment delivered alive to an American PT-boat.
A torpedo from Monssen hit Yamashiro, now crippled. The next American destroyer attack, by Squadron 24, probably achieved two hits. It is still disputed whether battleship gunfire or torpedoes were responsible, but what is certain is that the battleship Fuso, laid down in 1912, caught fire and broke in two after a huge explosion. Bewilderment persists about how readily such a huge ship succumbed, but senility plainly rendered it vulnerable. At 0335 the last American destroyer squadron engaged, urged to “Get the big boys!,” of which only two were left, one damaged. The “tin cans’” moment had passed, however. All Desron 56’s torpedoes missed. Shells from the American battleships and cruisers began to straddle the Japanese. One of Desron 24’s torpedoes may have hit Yamashiro, but she was already racked by the fire of American fourteen-and sixteen-inch guns. Some naval officers later criticised the destroyers’ performance in the Surigao Strait, asserting that they erred in launching torpedoes 3,000 yards beyond optimum range. Technically, such strictures are valid. Torpedo-guidance technology was relatively unsophisticated. It required extraordinary luck and skill to score hits at distances of four or five miles, in the strong currents of the strait. But this was not a situation in which suicidal courage was needed. A close engagement would almost certainly have resulted in gratuitous American destroyer losses, when Nishimura’s squadron was anyway doomed.
The American big ships sounded general quarters only at 0230, shortly before the flares of explosions from the destroyer actions became visible. A small black mess attendant who served belowdecks in Maryland’s ammunition supply pleaded emotionally for a post where he could do some shooting: “I want to be on the guns—I know I can hit them good. I know I can.” With a nice touch of human sympathy, he was posted to a 20mm mount. In the shell decks below the turrets, men shifted charges for the ships’ slender supply of armour-piercing ammunition—the battleships carried mostly high-explosive projectiles for shore bombardment. Warrant gunners checked temperatures: precision was indispensable to accurate fire. “We didn’t know too much, but like all sailors, we could sure speculate,” said Lt. Howard Sauer, in the main battery plot high in the foretop of Maryland.
All the odds were with the Americans, but in Sauer’s words, “We remembered the Hood”—a 42,000-ton British battle cruiser which blew up in consequence of a single hit from the German Bismarck in May 1941. They watched red tracers converging on the skyline, then heard the order to Oldendorf’s battleships: “All bulldogs, execute turn three.” Barely maintaining steerageway at five knots, they thus presented their flanks and full broadsides to the enemy. As Nishimura’s ships closed within range, the vast turrets traversed. Gunners pleaded for the order to fire: “Shoot, shoot, shoot.” One by one, main batteries reported readiness: “Right gun turret 2, loaded and laid,” and so on. On the command “Commence firing,” the chief fire controller in each turret touched his left trigger to sound a warning buzzer, prompting upper-deck crewmen to close eyes and muffle ears. Then a right finger pressure prompted brilliant flashes, thunderous detonations: “On the way.” Amid the concussions, Howard Sauer recalled, “we rode the mast280 as it lashed to and fro, just as a tree moves in a strong gale.”
Jesse Oldendorf’s flagship Louisville was so impatient to fire that the gunners failed to press the warning buzzer, causing the admiral to be temporarily blinded by muzzle flashes. He slipped into the cruiser’s flag plot and gazed at the blips on the screen indicating Nishimura’s ships. Soon, however, he became distracted by incessant voices echoing through the broadcast system, and returned to the flag bridge. The battleships fired their first rounds at 26,000 yards, the cruisers at 15,600. By an exquisite chance, four of the six capital ships under Oldendorf’s command had been salvaged from the bottom of Pearl Harbor in the years following the “Day of Infamy.” They were now deemed too old and slow to sail with Halsey, but three—Tennessee, California and West Virginia—were equipped with the latest fire-control radar, infinitely superior to anything the Japanese possessed. These monsters, taking their last bow in a contest between “ships of the line,” fired sixty-nine, sixty-three and ninety-three rounds respectively from their main armament. The Japanese Vice-Admiral Ugaki281 once enquired sourly why, if battleships had become redundant as some people claimed, the Americans used so many. This night, they wreaked havoc. Yamashiro, flying Nishimura’s flag, was soon blazing brilliantly. The heavy cruiser Mogami turned to flee. At 0402 a hit on the bridge killed all her senior officers. She continued to steam, heavily on fire. Seven minutes later Yamashiro capsized and sank, with the loss of the admiral and almost her entire crew. A cruiser and a destroyer, both badly hit, thus became the only survivors to escape. By contrast, three U.S. cruisers were straddled by Japanese fire, but no American heavy unit was hit. At 0405, after just fourteen minutes, Oldendorf ordered his battleships to cease firing. He knew that the Japanese squadron was devastated, and was alarmed by reports of American destroyers in the target zone.
The night actions were not yet ended, however. Twenty miles behind the main Japanese force, Vice-Admiral Kiyohide Shima led a further squadron of three heavy cruisers and escorts. Its first casualty was the light cruiser Akubuma, hit by a PT-boat torpedo aimed at a destroyer. At 0420, Japanese radar detected enemy ships, and Shima ordered his own captains to launch torpedoes. These were fired against the nearby Hibuson Islands, which survived undamaged, a nonsense that highlighted the pitiful limitations of Japanese radar. Shima then approached the two blazing parts of Fuso, and mistook them for separate ships. He was in no doubt, however, that disaster had befallen Nishimura. Turning south once more, he signalled naval headquarters: “This force has concluded its attack and is retiring from the battle area to plan subsequent action.” Retreat merely presaged further humiliations. The cruiser Nachi collided with a fugitive from Nishimura’s squadron, the burning Mogami. The two somehow limped away southwards. Mogami later suffered an American air attack, and was finished off with a Japanese torpedo. Another Japanese destroyer was sunk by land-based U.S. aircraft.
As Oldendorf’s force advanced slowly down the Surigao Strait, the Americans saw only two burning Japanese ships, together with survivors in the water, most of whom declined rescue. By dawn, the stem of Fuso was the sole visible relic of Nishimura’s squadron. Louisville catapulted a floatplane aloft, which reported no sign of enemy activity. It had been a ruthless slaughter, but this did not trouble Oldendorf. “Never give a sucker282 an even break,” he said laconically. Hiroshi Tanaka, a bedraggled aircraft mechanic from Yamashiro who fell into American hands, observed bitterly that Nishimura had handled his squadron “more like a petty officer283 than an admiral.” It is hard to disagree, and even harder to conceive of any other outcome of such an ill-matched encounter. Oldendorf made no attempt to pursue the surviving Japanese, urging Kinkaid to put carrier aircraft on the case. He had fulfilled his own executioner’s role. Just one Japanese heavy cruiser, together with five destroyers, reached home. The Leyte anchorage seemed safe. American casualties from the Surigao Strait action numbered 39 killed and 114 wounded, almost all of these inflicted by “friendly fire” on the destroyer Grant, which had disobeyed orders to hug the shore when the American heavy guns opened fire.
What else could the Japanese conceivably have expected? The action’s outcome reflected strategic folly, technological weakness and tactical incompetence. The Americans deployed overwhelming firepower under almost ideal circumstances. They were able to array their big ships broadside so that every gun could bear. The obliging enemy, who could use only his forward turrets, headed into the crossbar of Oldendorf’s T. As dawn came on 25 October, America’s veteran battleships could retire from the history of fleet warfare, having written a last memorable page. Yet the most bizarre action of Leyte Gulf was still to come.