CHAPTER SEVEN
GEN. TOMOYUKI YAMASHITA had intended to fight his main battle for the defence of the Philippines on Luzon. Yet he found his judgement summarily overruled by his superiors. Field Marshal Terauchi allowed himself to be deceived by the navy, which asserted with shameless irresponsibility that its Leyte Gulf battles had ended in triumph. Japan’s fliers likewise reported that they were inflicting crippling attrition on American air forces. Fortified with such illusions, Terauchi and his staff became convinced that an important victory was within their grasp, if only Japan’s soldiers did their part to match the achievements of its sailors and airmen. In South Asia Army’s perception, “the Navy succeeded337 in the operations by sinking most of the enemy’s carriers (nine out of twelve), several battleships etc., in the Formosa Sea…It [was also] believed that the sea and air battle on the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth resulted in a 70 percent victory for us. All information received at area army headquarters was favourable.” The navy’s recklessness in launching the Combined Fleet against Leyte Gulf was now, therefore, to be matched by that of the army, in the name of honour but in the service of folly.
Early in November, Lt.-Gen. Akira Muto arrived in Manila to assume the role of 14th Army chief of staff. “Nice to see you,” said Yamashita. “I’ve been waiting for you a long time.” Muto asked: “What’s the plan?” The general responded: “I’ve no idea what we shall do. You’d better have a bath, then we’ll talk.” Muto said ruefully that every stitch of spare clothing he possessed, down to his underwear, had just been incinerated in an American air raid. “Borrow mine,” said his commander generously. Yet even freshly clad, Muto felt no better when he learned of Field Marshal Terauchi’s insistence on a fight to the finish for Leyte. As Yamashita talked, Muto perceived that the general was furiously angry. Transferring units to Leyte by sea meant that many would be ravaged in transit, while those that got through could not be adequately supplied and supported. No reinforcement of Leyte could alter an outcome that was now inevitable. Yet there was nothing to be done. Terauchi was in charge. Yamashita’s orders to Gen. Sosaku Suzuki, his subordinate commander on Leyte, continued to pay lip service to that familiar Japanese expression of purpose, “annihilation” of the enemy. Yamashita knew full well, however, that the only forces destined for annihilation were his own.
Meanwhile, his orders were to throw every possible man onto Leyte, and he did his utmost to fulfil them. Between 20 October and 11 December, though substantial numbers died or lost their equipment, some 45,000 Japanese troops landed in the west and north of the island. Private Eichi Ogita of the 362nd Independent Battalion experienced the sort of nightmare passage familiar to many Japanese soldiers. He was dispatched from Luzon with his unit on a small wooden schooner, but on 25 October the vessel was sunk by an American submarine. Ogita and other survivors somehow struggled ashore on the north-west coast of Leyte. When daylight came, they found that their battalion commander was dead, while the adjutant, company commander and Ogita himself were among the wounded. They had salvaged a few weapons, but no food. For a time they squatted on a nearby hilltop, then realised that it was essential to get moving. A lieutenant and ten men went in search of Japanese forces. When they did not return, next day the remainder of the party set off towards their original destination, the port of Ormoc.
It proved a terrible journey. They wandered uncertainly, lacking maps and compasses. Most of their wounded died. When at last the survivors reached the town, they found it under air attack. “Enemy planes appear, but ours do not,” Ogita wrote gloomily in his diary. “I wonder why.” On 13 November, they had yet to fire a shot: “We have not received orders to start the attack because many of our troops have not yet landed.” He whistled to keep his spirits up: “There are only thirty-four men in our company338, but we have confidence enough to take on an enemy battalion.”
This was typical of the manner in which Japanese reinforcements reached the Leyte battlefield, losing many men and much equipment before even encountering American troops. It is astonishing, in such circumstances, that they achieved as much as they did. MacArthur’s Sixth Army faced an intensity of resistance beyond anything SWPA’s supreme commander had anticipated. By 7 November339 the Japanese 16th Division, original garrison of Leyte, had lost all its battalion commanders and engineer officers, together with most of its company commanders and half its artillery. But much of 1st Division had arrived from Luzon, and more was coming. Suzuki was hopeful of driving the Americans back across the central plain.
Again and again, Krueger’s units found themselves caught off-balance by Japanese entrenched on higher ground. The 1/382nd Infantry were in the midst of a rice paddy when they came under intense fire which killed or wounded every officer of two companies: “Men threw away their packs340, machine guns, radios and even rifles. Their sole aim was to get through the muck and get onto solid ground once more. Some of the wounded gave up the struggle and drowned in the grasping swamp.” Captain George Morrissey, a doctor with the 1/34th Infantry, wrote: “We had just begun to dig in341 when an artillery shell lit in the forward part of the perimeter. I ran up there to find three killed, eight seriously wounded. Just then the rain began to pour furiously and it got dark. The first man I saw was bleeding from a jagged hole in the neck. It was a hell of a thing there in the rain not being able to do anything but having to try anyway. This man died on the way in and another next day. No supper. Foxhole full of water. Our artillery thunders and cracks all night…I have never been so filthy before.”
The campaign yielded its share of heroes. It is often the case that men distinguish themselves in combat who are an embarrassment everywhere else. Before the Leyte landing, infantrymen confined to the stockade for punishment had been returned to their units. The commander of G Company, 2/34th Infantry, strongly objected to accepting back Private Harold Moon, a persistent troublemaker. He got Moon anyway. On the night of 21 October, the regiment faced a series of violent, almost overwhelming enemy attacks. Dawn revealed foxholes surrounded by enemy dead. Several lay near the body of Private Moon, killed after fighting to the last with rifle and grenades. He received a posthumous Medal of Honor, which roused both admiration and bewilderment among his comrades. “I only knew him as a G Company screw-up342,” wrote Private Eric Diller wonderingly.
Diller was himself an interesting study—the son of German Catholic immigrants who fled to the United States in 1936 because of his mother’s Jewish blood. In a machine-gun squad on Leyte, the twenty-year-old carried papers which still classified him as an alien—indeed, notionally an enemy one. Diller was squeamish about many manifestations of war in the Pacific. When comrades set about extracting gold teeth from dead Japanese, he declined to keep his own share. He felt unhappy about the treatment of the few enemy who became live captives: “I saw an undernourished343, sick-looking, pathetic specimen brought into our perimeter, where a newcomer to the platoon proceeded to punch the helpless prisoner in the face. No one said anything but most felt, as I did, that kind of behaviour was nothing to be proud of.”
Beyond grief inflicted344 by the enemy, there was that created by the weather. Within days of the landings, it began to rain. Deluges of tropical intensity persisted through the weeks that followed. Men grew accustomed to marching, fighting, eating, sleeping soaked to the skin. Roads and tracks collapsed beneath the pounding of heavy vehicles. Phone lines shorted. Tanks and trucks bogged down or were wrecked. Streams swelled and burst. Liver fluke rendered bathing in rivers hazardous. Batteries swiftly deteriorated. It was difficult for gunners to keep cordite dry. Howitzers had to be cleaned three times a day. Blankets became covered with mildew. Folded canvas rotted. Bolts on vehicles and machinery rusted irretrievably into place. Fungus grew in weapon optics. White phosphorus in shells melted in the heat, which also blew out the safety disks of flame-thrower tanks. It proved necessary to keep vehicle fuel tanks fully filled, or moisture seeped in.
Airfield construction became a hopeless task. A minor typhoon on 29 October blew away tentage and created havoc at stores dumps. Many men found themselves on short rations, because the overstrained logistics system was obliged to prioritise ammunition. “The task of supply and evacuation345 of wounded soon assumed staggering proportions,” the American official historian acknowledged later. Richard Krebs of the 24th Division described a blow which struck the island on 8 November: “Floods raced346 in almost horizontal sheets. Palms bent low under the storm, their fronds flattened like streamers of wet silk. Trees crashed to earth…The howling of the wind was like a thousandfold plaint of the unburied dead.”
Though overall American casualties were not excessive, some units suffered severely in local actions. For instance, in three days at the end of October, the 2/382nd Infantry lost thirty-four men killed and eighty wounded, fighting for the town of Tabontabon. George Morrissey wrote on 5 November: “I saw the creek bed347 where the fighting had been yesterday, and we brought the bodies out. Thank God I’m not a rifleman. Near the scene were two sad heaps of humanity. In the first were five Filipino men, bound and bayoneted. In the second three women and three children, bound, bayoneted and partially burned.”
Leyte Valley was secured by 2 November. After ten days ashore, SWPA headquarters announced that the Japanese had suffered 24,000 casualties for American losses of 3,221, including 976 killed and missing. MacArthur’s staff persistently and grotesquely misjudged the campaign’s progress. As early as 3 November, SWPA reports referred repeatedly to enemy “remnants” or “final remnants” in full retreat. “The end of the Leyte-Samar348 campaign is in sight,” asserted a press communiqué. Yet five days later, a bulletin grudgingly acknowledged “sharp fighting…The enemy has rushed reinforcements into this sector.” Two days later still, SWPA announced that Sixth Army had destroyed the entire original Leyte garrison—but added lamely that this had been replaced by reinforcements from Luzon. American intelligence throughout the battle was poor, partly because the Japanese seldom directed local operations by radio, partly because MacArthur and his subordinates were unwilling to heed what they learned. “Ultra,” claimed Sixth Army’s G3 Clyde Eddleman, discussing the role of enemy signal decrypts, “was of little value to Sixth Army directly. It gave some indication of Japanese morale but little else.” There were notable disadvantages to fighting an enemy short of sophisticated communications.
SIXTH ARMY now began the second phase of the Leyte battle: the struggle to clear the mountains which dominated northern and western areas of the island. By 8 November, the Americans had 120,000 men ashore, contesting possession with perhaps one-third that number of Japanese. On the densely covered hills, the enemy could exploit to the utmost his tenacity, fieldcraft and small-unit tactical skills. Krueger’s operations were bedevilled by ignorance of the ground, which was poorly mapped. The Americans suffered two months of pain and frustration, which imposed a serious delay upon MacArthur’s planned landing on Luzon. Names such as Bloody Ridge and Breakneck Ridge became etched into the consciousness of thousands of his soldiers as they strove to dislodge the Japanese from their positions, then to hold these against counterattacks. Private Luther Kinsey of the 382nd Infantry expressed a bewilderment common among Krueger’s men: “I’m surprised it isn’t going faster349. I knew they were camouflaged and dug in, but I didn’t know so few of them would hold up so many of us.”
The phrase which dogged the experience of every American commander on Leyte was “pinned down.” “The 1st battalion made little progress,” says a typical account, describing the 128th Infantry’s attack on a position named Corkscrew Ridge. “Company A was immediately pinned down by machine-gun, mortar and rifle fire.” A unit could legitimately declare itself to be in this condition if it suffered substantial casualties, then incurred more by every attempt at movement. Yet all too often, the words merely indicated that a force had come under fire, taken to cover and stayed there even before suffering significant loss. Footsoldiers hoped that support arms—artillery, aircraft or tanks—would discover a means of silencing resistance without need for those “pinned down” to expose themselves to a further advance under fire.
A battalion commander in the Philippines described a typical combat conversation with a fresh second lieutenant: “The new john radioed back350 to battalion requesting reinforcement—he was pinned down. I took the radio mike…and asked the lieutenant if he had anyone hit. He answered that he had not, and then I asked: ‘How then do you know you are pinned down?’ He replied that they were being shot at and couldn’t move. I told him that I was not convinced, and he would have to get out on his own. When the patrol returned, without a single casualty, I found him an unhappy and resentful 2nd john. I admonished him to face up to the facts of life, for combat was a serious business. He had to do his job, which meant not calling for help unless he truly needed it.” Much of the story of the Leyte campaign, and indeed of infantry action in World War II, was of commanders struggling to make men move forward, when those at the sharp end feared that to comply would prove fatal to their welfare.
The CO of the 307th Infantry sent a brusque, ungrammatical circular to his regiment: “I don’t want this business351 of when someone calls ‘litter-bearers,’ for everyone to stop fighting. You must not attack without your bayonets fixed. The Corsairs will not support us unless we stop firing on them…Right now we are not aggressive enough, although we are getting lots of experience.” Everything hinged on what a few bold men would do. On 15 December 1944, Sgt. Leroy Johnson of the 2/126th Infantry led a nine-man patrol to reconnoitre a ridge near Limon. Spotting an enemy machine gun, Johnson crawled to within six yards of it, then returned to report. He was told to destroy the gun, and advanced with three other men. They found themselves in a grenade duel with the Japanese, which continued until Johnson saw two grenades land close to his comrades, and threw himself on them before they exploded. Johnson was awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor for his sacrifice, but it would have been unrealistic to expect many men of Sixth Army to emulate it. Aggressive junior leadership is what makes things happen on battlefields, and there were never enough Sergeant Johnsons.
ONE OF THE EPIC actions of the campaign was fought by the 1/34th Infantry, under Lt. Col. Tom Clifford. Early on the morning of 10 November, his battalion was shipped seven miles along the north coast in landing craft, to a beach in the midst of Carigara Bay. There, they offloaded without opposition, and began marching into the hills. Three days later they took up position on Kilay Ridge, a nine-hundred-foot elevation which commanded much of the surrounding countryside, and provided vital flanking support for American operations on Breakneck Ridge. The battalion remained on Kilay until 4 December, in almost continuous contact with the Japanese. Clifford’s men were isolated, dependent for supply on Filipino porters and spasmodic airdrops. They suffered much, but held their ground. During one firefight, Clifford himself was visiting a company headquarters where he found a man wounded in the thigh, unable to walk. The colonel carried the casualty a mile on his own back over a mountain trail to his command post. On leave in the U.S. shortly before, Clifford was detained by military police without his dogtags, and accused of impersonating an officer. Now he received a Distinguished Service Cross for outstanding leadership.
Conditions on Kilay Ridge were never less than dreadful. “Rained all night and still raining hard,” medical officer George Morrissey wrote on 20 November “…The ground is a deep gooey churned mixture of mud, urine, faecal matter, garbage. The floor of our aid station is three inches deep with caked mud.” He described the terror of his helpless patients when shooting came close. It became especially hard to treat men when mud-stained fragments of clothing were blown into their wounds. So tenuous were the battalion’s communications that it took three days to move each casualty to a first-surgery facility. Some did not make it, despite the devotion of their Filipino carriers. Morrissey noted bleakly that the yearning to go home, common to every man in the Pacific theatre, was replaced in those days by a much more modest ambition—to get off Kilay. On 26 November, he wrote: “No loud talking or laughing352 around here these days. People converse in low voices, as at the bedside of a sick patient…Platoons have twelve to fifteen men at most…The mortality among our good non-coms has been very high…These are jittery days.”
They drank from potholes of milky water, and in the deep darkness of the nights cursed the bats which flew in thousands around their heads. There was no mail, and often they felt abandoned by their higher formation. Clifford explained by radio his difficulties with sick and hungry men, the Japanese crowding them. Corps headquarters shrugged: “You are in a tough spot.” The colonel was finally reduced to threatening: “Either you give us artillery or I’m going to pull my men off the ridge and leave the Japs looking down your throat.” The battalion got its gunfire support. Each morning, Morrissey viewed with disgust the heap of soaked, slashed, stinking clothing and dirty bandages lying outside the aid station to be burned. A sick call produced a queue of a hundred men, most suffering inflamed feet or fever. The doctor grew wearily accustomed to the cry: “Will you look at my feet? Will you look at my feet?” The 1/34th was relieved on 4 December, and made its weary way down to the coast. Clifford had lost 28 killed and 101 wounded, but his battalion could boast one of the most impressive performances of the campaign.
Other units suffered almost as badly in the November actions. “These bearded, mud-caked soldiers came out of the mountains exhausted and hungry,” said a 24th Division report on the experience of the 2/19th Infantry. “Their feet were heavy, cheeks hollow, bodies emaciated and eyes glazed.” When they left the line 241 officers and men—about a third of the battalion—were immediately hospitalised with skin disorders, foot ulcers, battle fatigue and exhaustion. “The men looked ten or fifteen353 years older than their ages,” wrote Kansan Captain Philip Hostetter, medical officer of the 1/19th Infantry. “They spoke little and moved slowly. There was no joking or horseplay.” Hostetter consigned three exhausted company commanders to hospital.
It sometimes seemed, to commanders and footsoldiers alike, that the Leyte campaign was being conducted in slow motion. “The infantry policy was to avoid battle unless great force could be brought to bear on that particular point, and never to substitute courage of men for firepower,” wrote Philip Hostetter. “This meant a long war354 with much maneuvering.” It became a matter of bitter debate whether blame for American sluggishness lay with Walter Krueger of Sixth Army, or with those under his command. The general circulated a highly critical report detailing his units’ perceived failings: poor junior leadership; an instinct to seek cover in the face of modest resistance, and to call down artillery fire to suppress it. “How many officer casualties?” Krueger once demanded after an operation on New Guinea. “Good,” he said, when told that they had been high. He thought stiff losses an indication that junior leaders had been doing their jobs properly.
On Leyte, the general asserted that units were too roadbound, and relied on frontal attack, rather than attempting envelopments. Patrols withdrew as soon as they glimpsed Japanese, rather than linger to assess enemy strength and pinpoint defensive positions. Some U.S. officers, Krueger claimed, were shockingly inattentive to their soldiers’ welfare, failing to ensure that they received regular hot food, leaving them to sleep in wet foxholes even when no enemy was within range. In his view, “many commanders were indifferent to such matters”—a damning indictment. “If more than minor resistance was encountered, the troops frequently fell back and called for fire from supporting weapons,” claimed Sixth Army. “On one occasion a company called for artillery fire upon a roadblock and then withdrew 350 yards while the concentration was delivered.” By the time the infantry resumed their advance, the Japanese had reoccupied their positions: “The natural reluctance of American infantrymen to engage the enemy in close quarters had to be overcome. There were several instances in which the American attacking force simply felt out the Japanese position and then sat back to wait it out. In one area no progress was made for four days.” Several unit commanders, including the regimental CO of the 21st Infantry, were dismissed for being “insufficiently aggressive.”
The 1944 edition of the U.S. War Department Handbook on Japanese Military Forces described the enemy with something close to contempt:
To the Japanese officer355, considerations of “face” and “toughness” are most important, and they are therefore prone to indulgence in “paper heroics.” Despite the opportunities presented during six years of active combat, the Japanese have continued to violate certain fundamental principles of accepted tactics and technique…such violations are based…upon their failure to credit the enemy with good judgement and equal military efficiency. Whether or not they have profited from recent experiences remains to be seen…The defensive form of combat generally has been distasteful to the Japanese, and they have been very reluctant to admit that the Imperial Army would ever be forced to engage in this form of combat.
On Leyte, such assertions were recognised as nonsense by every American from Krueger downwards. Sixth Army reported with respect on the enemy’s tactical skills: “The Japanese…displayed356 superior adeptness, and willingness to go into the swamps and stay there until rooted out…The most notable characteristics exhibited were the excellent fire discipline and the effective control of all arms. Without exception individual soldiers withheld their fire until it would have the greatest possible effect.” It is interesting to contrast the manner in which the two sides used weapons. An analysis of 519 Sixth Army fatal casualties showed that 1 man died of bayonet wounds, 2 from blast, 170 from fragments—mortar or artillery. Ninety-seven proved unclassifiable; the remaining 249 were victims of small-arms fire. In other words, in contrast to the World War II battlefield norm, on Leyte the Japanese relied chiefly upon rifles, machine guns and mortars. Short of artillery and lacking tanks, they had no choice. The Americans, meanwhile357, inflicted an estimated 60 percent of Japanese ground losses with their artillery, 25 percent with mortars, only 14 percent with infantry weapons, and 1 percent with aircraft. Military operational researchers rated nine rifles as possessing the value of one machine gun, and a medium mortar as matching the destructive capability of three machine guns. On Leyte, the U.S. Army sought as usual to exploit its overwhelming firepower, under most unfavourable conditions; the Japanese were obliged to make the most of the humble rifle—and did so.
The frustrations of Sixth Army persisted through November. Krueger’s divisions were gaining ground, and killing many Japanese. But it was all happening painfully slowly. Hodge, commanding XXIV Corps, wrote: “The difficulties of terrain and weather358 were fully as difficult if not more so than was the enemy…Supply problems ranged towards the impossible.” An alarming number of Sixth Army soldiers succumbed to combat exhaustion and disease. The 21st Infantry, for instance, reported 630 battle casualties and 135 losses to “other causes.” Replacements were nowhere near keeping pace with such a drain, either in quantity or quality. By 12 November, Sixth Army was short of a thousand officers and 12,000 men—almost the equivalent of a combat division. These deficiencies were, as always, worst in infantry rifle companies. Some platoons were reduced from forty to twelve or fifteen men.
Shoestring Ridge, a few miles inland and south of Ormoc Bay, was so named by the Americans because it was the scene of a desperate defensive action, fought with slender resources against six Japanese attacking battalions. To support 6,000 Americans on the line, the 32nd Infantry could muster just twelve trucks and five DUKWs, with access restricted to a single narrow mountain track. Each vehicle journey required crossings of fourteen precarious bridges and fordings of fifty-one streams. To sustain a single infantry regiment required thirty-four tons of supplies a day. It took 31/2 days, for instance, for stores shipped from the beaches to reach forward units of 12th Cavalry. Rainstorms impeded airdrops. Somehow, the fighting men were sustained in action, the position was held; but Sixth Army could never fully exploit firepower on Shoestring, because of ammunition shortages.
The pattern of American activity was grimly monotonous. Each dawn a unit moved out, advancing up some precipitous hill until the enemy was encountered. Companies rotated the dubious privilege of taking point. Captain Paul Austin, leading F Company of the 2/34th Infantry, learned to dread his CO’s phrase, “It’s your turn in the morning359.” The first intimation of meeting Japanese was a burst of fire, often fatal to the leading Americans. The rest hugged cover until stretcher-bearers were summoned, artillery called in, a set-piece attack organised in company or battalion strength. This required hours, sometimes days. When the assault closed in, Japanese survivors withdrew—to do the same thing again a few hundred yards back.
Often, before the Americans consolidated on new positions, the enemy counter-attacked. Important ground left untenanted was swiftly seized by the enemy. There was a black comic moment on Shoestring Hill in early December, when a runner shouted an order for a three-man picket of the 2/32nd Infantry to pull back. Wilfully or not, the whole of G Company took this as a cue, climbed out of its foxholes and streamed away downhill. By the time the movement was halted, Japanese had occupied the American positions. Huge exertions were required to win them back next day.
The terrain’s steepness almost defied belief. On 6 December, a company of the 1/184th Infantry was working its way along a trail beside a clifftop. Japanese machine guns opened fire, hitting twenty men, of whom all but two fell over the precipice. Eight wounded survivors crawled into the battalion aid station that night, but the remainder died. One night in late November, in bright moonlight Sgt. Marvin Raabe of 7th Division led thirty men in three successive bayonet charges to dispossess Japanese of vital ground, a feat for which he received a field commission. Dug in once more, some men were exasperated by the noisiness of Japanese wounded in front of their positions. “One enemy soldier, about thirty-five yards360 in front of the platoon position…had delivered a regular little ritual,” wrote an infantryman. “First he would moan and wail for a few minutes, then sing in Japanese, then string out a long line of epithets, decidedly uncomplimentary, at the defenders.” An NCO, George Parked, endured the racket as long as he could, but finally climbed out of his foxhole, marched down the hillside and fired three shots. “Now sing, you bastard,” he said, returning to his post.
At night on the coast, fireflies swarmed around the coconut palms, “giving them the appearance361 of Christmas trees,” in the words of a Marine officer. In the hills, Japanese sustained intense activity through the hours of darkness, probing and raiding Sixth Army positions. Little damage was done, but such “jitter parties” kept tired men from sleeping, precipitated barrages of illuminant flares and often promiscuous American shooting. There were many “friendly fire” casualties on Leyte, but these were never quantified. It was thought kindest to relatives to report all fatalities simply as “killed in action,” and so it probably was. Krueger’s artillery sustained harassing fire, shooting occasional blind rounds at likely-seeming places on Japanese-held ground. The enemy responded by creeping close to the American lines, sometimes within twenty-five yards, to gain safety from shelling. Private Jack Norman became so exhausted that he once fell asleep during a barrage. In the morning, his companions in the foxhole announced that at one point he had woken, declared angrily, “If they don’t quit this shooting362, I’ll get up and go home,” then gone smartly back to sleep. He recollected nothing of this.
Norman got his ticket out one morning shortly afterwards, during an advance to clear a canyon of Japanese. They moved cautiously, shooting into each rock opening, following up with flamethrowers and grenades. “We thought we’d cleaned out363 those caves—but we hadn’t.” Shots suddenly echoed across the canyon, one of them hitting Norman in the shoulder, holing his collarbone and puncturing his lung. He remained coherent enough to point to his companions where the gunfire had come from, to watch a flamethrower team address the cave mouth, and hear the screams which followed. Then an unknown Samaritan helped him over a log bridge across a creek, and onto a jeep ambulance. After that, he remembered only a succession of operating tables until he glimpsed the Golden Gate Bridge.
Airmen based on Leyte found compensations immeasurably remote from the experience of the fighting soldiers: “It was pleasant to have houseboys364 around quarters and laundry services, even if the native women did pound garments destructively upon rocks in muddy streams to ‘clean’ them,” in the words of the air force historians. “Barter with the natives produced wooden sandals, mats, knives and other trinkets for souvenirs, while cockfights, a national Filipino institution, became a fad.” When Eric Diller was posted from a rifle company on Leyte to a motor pool, “for the first time365 in my army career, I enjoyed every moment of it…No one was shooting at me. I was fed three hot meals daily in a mess hall. We lived in tents with wooden floors. Showers were available. Movies were shown on a regular basis. The working hours were reasonable and enough time was left to play volleyball daily…It absolutely reconfirmed my opinion that infantry does not receive nearly adequate recognition.”
It was a common delusion among MacArthur’s riflemen that they were the principal victims of the Leyte experience. Yet for the Japanese, matters were infinitely worse. On 26 November, a battalion commander of the 77th Infantry Regiment gave a bleak briefing to his officers: “The tactics we have been using366 against an enemy with superior firepower only increase our losses. Our cherished night attacks lose their potency when the enemy can illuminate the battlefield. The most effective tactical methods are to stage raids in small groups.” Lt. Suteo Inoue of the same regiment wrote in his diary for 3 December: “Soldiers have become very weak367, and only half the platoon are physically fit…the majority are suffering from fever.”
Bill McLaughlin, a reconnaissance scout, was once exploring his unit’s frontage with another man when, to their horror, they found that they had blundered into Japanese positions. “As we crouched there368 hardly daring to breathe, listening to their jabbering, it came to both of us at once that we were listening to some pretty scared Japanese boys looking for reassurance that they were not alone. It was so absurd, a couple of frightened Yanks playing Indians and crawling around on one side of the grass screen and a bunch of frightened Japs crouching on the other.” The two Americans crawled thoughtfully away.
Krueger’s men took few prisoners on Leyte: 389 before 25 December and a further 439 thereafter. If this was partly because not many Japanese wished to surrender, it was also because few Americans were willing to accommodate them. A U.S. divisional commander, Maj.-Gen. William Arnold of the Americal, was asked after the war if he encouraged surrenders. His response was ruthlessly pragmatic: “No…for the simple reason that an average Japanese prisoner knew nothing whatever about anything…and I doubt whether an officer would know anything.” Arnold rejected “emotional talk of war crimes” committed by either Japanese or Americans: “You’ve got soldiers with no brains369 at all, some of them, and they’d kill you just as soon as look at you. You have them everywhere. The Americans are just as bad as anybody else as far as that’s concerned. In the heat of combat, you shoot people who would have probably surrendered.”
One of the small number of Japanese370 who survived in American hands was a twenty-two-year-old private named Sumito Ideguchi, who successfully deserted from his unit. A former truck driver, he had endured a familiar sequence of miseries. His transport was sunk en route to Leyte. Rescued by a minesweeper, he was eventually sent into the line. Ideguchi found himself serving alongside strangers from unfamiliar regions of Japan, whom he could not relate to. Perceiving himself banished from home, he told his captors that he would like to settle in the United States.
An unusual perspective on the American soldier’s experience can be gained from letters home which were intercepted in transit by U.S. military censors, and still repose in their old files. All references to atrocities, looting or other forms of unsoldierly behaviour were deemed inappropriate, and caused men’s letters to be confiscated. For instance, Private George Hendrikson of the 21st Infantry wrote to his wife in Dallas, Oregon: “One of my buddies and I went out on a souvenir hunt one day up there and we capture 1 Jap and two Philippines that were helping the Japans I got a good fountain pen off of them and my buddy got a good Cig lighter which he sold for $20 and he got a watch also so we were luckily [sic].”
Staff Sergeant G. Gionnarli of the 34th Infantry described a Japanese attempt to surrender: “One came out with his hands up. One of my men shot him through the arm.” Lt. William Spradlin wrote: “If one [ Japanese prisoner] gets to our rear area alive it’s only because we…can’t afford to shoot.” Private Rex Marsh’s letter, recalling how he cut off the head of a dead Japanese with a bolo knife, went undelivered, likewise that of a soldier who described his withering contempt for Filipinos. Sgt. Leonard Joe Davis of the 34th Infantry was rash enough to confide his misery in writing to a former comrade now living in Waterloo, New York: “The Japs have been giving us hell, Monty, even worse than any yet. I’m sure glad to get out of the fight for a while, we have replacements twice since you left and now, guess how many we have in the company—50. I would have shot myself in the foot if I would have had to stay much longer, I have been trying to for a long time, you know how you feel. Lots of the boys did it.”
IN THE PHILIPPINES, the landmasses being contested were much larger than the islands or atolls on which the Americans had been fighting for so long, save Papua New Guinea. Since the Japanese had nothing like enough men to defend everything, Krueger possessed much more scope for manoeuvre than American attackers on Saipan or Peleliu. Yet, just as Sixth Army’s commander criticised his subordinates for missing chances to bypass Japanese strongpoints, so Krueger’s critics complained of their general’s lack of drive and imagination. In particular, he was accused of lacking an eye for terrain—failing to identify key features and secure them ahead of the Japanese. Reality probably lay somewhere between the two claims: the high command was without flair, and many infantry units were slow. Whatever the causes, the protraction of the campaign bred recrimination.
Most serious of all for MacArthur was the frustration of his fundamental justification for taking Leyte: its exploitation as an aircraft and logistics base. The waterlogged plains were wholly unsuitable for intensive aircraft usage, and even for stores depots. Kenney’s Fifth Air Force, charged with supporting and protecting Sixth Army, possessed 2,500 aircraft, yet two months after the invasion hardly any of these could operate from Leyte’s landing grounds.
It is a shocking indictment of MacArthur and his staff that they chose to ignore forecasts of these difficulties, submitted long before the landings. On 10 August 1944, Col. William J. Ely, executive officer of Sixth Army’s engineers, delivered a report in which he highlighted the “soil instability” of Leyte Valley, and the impossibility of accomplishing vital engineer tasks—above all airfield construction—with the troops available, at the height of the rainy season. “Perhaps we can mud and muddle through again on a shoestring,” wrote the colonel gloomily, “but the shoestring must be frayed by this time and if it broke we may lose our shirt as well as our shoe.” Ely’s commanding officer strongly concurred with this report, which was forwarded to SWPA HQ—and dismissed. The rejection of prudent professional advice about the shortcomings of Leyte as a forward air base reflected reckless irresponsibility by the supreme commander and his staff.
By 21 November, the appalling weather infected even MacArthur’s notoriously bombastic communiqués with gloom. “Another tropical typhoon371 with continuous rains is lashing Leyte,” declared one bulletin. “Bridges are washed out, streams are torrents and roads have become waterways. All traffic air, ground and sea is fraught with great difficulty and hazard and battle conditions are becoming static.” Almost twenty-four inches of rain fell on Leyte in November, double the customary monsoon dose. Few of the men on the mountains, Americans or Japanese, had effective shelter. That winter of 1944, providence was ungenerous to the Allied armies both in Europe and Asia, subjecting Eisenhower’s and MacArthur’s forces alike to weather which crippled their operations. In adverse conditions, it is vastly easier for defenders to hold ground than for attackers to advance.
Engineers exercised heroic ingenuity to overcome the airfield problem. The Japanese had never laid hard surfaces on their strips. The Americans scoured the island for suitable material. At Tacloban, it was found that a naval dredger’s mighty 2,800-horsepower pumps could move solid substances a mile through hoses. Coral was shifted directly from the seabed offshore to the airfield. Yet still it proved a massive task to create serviceable landing grounds: “A battalion [of engineers] could accomplish no more in a month than a platoon could have carried out in a week under good weather conditions.” Two airfields had to be abandoned, and a third did not become operational until 16 December.
The Japanese were unaware that Kenney’s aircraft could scarcely fly out of Leyte. Ironically, therefore, on 27 November and 6 December they lavished scarce resources on launching commando and paratroop landings against the American strips. These attacks caused panic in Krueger’s rear areas—air corps service personnel fled one position, abandoning all their weapons, which the Japanese promptly turned on the Americans. The intruders were soon killed or dispersed, order restored, but Leyte never became a significant USAAF base. The difficulties of stockpiling and shifting stores increased, rather than diminished. MacArthur had allowed the geographical convenience of the island to blind him to its unsuitability for every important strategic purpose.
AN AMPHIBIOUS landing south of Ormoc on 7 December enabled the Americans three days later to seize the port, and cut off the Japanese from further resupply or reinforcement. Troops entering the ruined town found “a blazing inferno372 of bursting white phosphorus shells, burning houses, and exploding ammunition dumps, and over it all hung a pall of heavy smoke from burning dumps mixed with the gray dust of destroyed concrete buildings, blasted by…artillery, mortar, and rocket fire.” In the week 15 to 21 December, western Leyte’s Ormoc Valley was secured. MacArthur announced the formal completion of operations across the entire island on Christmas Day, 1944: “The Leyte-Samar campaign can now be regarded as closed except for minor mopping-up,” said a SWPA communiqué. “General Yamashita has sustained perhaps the greatest defeat in the military annals of the Japanese army.”
In Manila, the Japanese high command sought to preserve formalities, somewhat hampered by American air raids. On 23 December, Yamashita held a sumptuous full-dress dinner in honour of the local naval commander, Vice-Admiral Mikawa. The power supply failed in midfeast, plunging a glittering array of officers into darkness until a young staff officer bustled round, distributing candles. Two days later, Mikawa returned the compliment on a ship in Manila harbour. Yamashita limped aboard, having been injured by metal fragments during demonstrations of a new weapon. His chief of staff murmured to Mikawa that it might be wise not to give the invalid too much wine. “Rubbish, you damn fool!” exploded Yamashita, who overheard. “I drink what I like.” The general had plenty to forget, and indulged freely. That same day, 25 December, he had signalled General Suzuki that thenceforward Japanese troops on Leyte must fend for themselves. There could be no further reinforcement or resupply. The battle for the island was lost. Suzuki’s remaining elements dispersed into the mountains.
But as many as 20,000 Japanese remained. Even though they now adopted guerrilla tactics rather than fighting as regiments with support weapons, for four more months they sustained the struggle. A communiqué from MacArthur asserted that 117,997 enemy troops had been killed on Leyte, at least double the real total. MacArthur’s soldiers were infuriated by his public announcement of a victory which was still far from secure. Though Krueger’s Sixth Army was withdrawn from combat to prepare for the Luzon landing, Eichelberger’s Eighth Army endured hard fighting to accomplish the “mopping up” of which their supreme commander spoke so carelessly. “MacArthur’s communiqués are373 inaccurate to a disgusting degree,” wrote Lt. Gage Rodman of the 17th Infantry. “We who were on the spot knew we were only beginning to fight when he made his ridiculous announcement that our objective was secured.”
The capture of Leyte cost some 15,500 American casualties, including 3,500 dead—almost 700 of the latter, a battalion’s worth, after MacArthur proclaimed his “victory.” Japanese losses were confused by uncertainty about how many troops were drowned in transit to the island when transports were sunk by U.S. aircraft or submarines, but the total approached 50,000. Eighth Army claimed a “body count” of 24,294 Japanese merely for the period from Christmas 1944 to May 1945. Even if this figure was much exaggerated, it reflected the severity of continuing operations. From January onwards, the surviving Japanese on Leyte were dependent on local food taken from civilians, and even on growing their own crops. They lacked salt, radio batteries, ammunition. Many of the stragglers had had enough. Whether they were fortunate enough to be able to surrender, however, depended upon escaping the eyes of their own superiors—and then meeting Americans willing to take them alive. One soldier who did so was a certain Private Saito, who lingered in hiding for weeks after being wounded, and kept a diary. “A year ago tomorrow I was inducted,” he wrote.
That was an unhappy day, for I left behind everything worthwhile. Today I experienced the first stage of a new life. I heard the voices and footsteps of American soldiers, and my heart leapt. Instead of fear, I find that I feel a certain warmth towards them. I cannot help but think that those voices have come to save me. Though I wanted to go out to meet them, the wound in my foot prevented it.
For forty-three days now, I have been grateful for this hut because of my gangrene. I feel deeply grateful to my friend Nakata, for without him I would have died on 7 December, under that terrific naval bombardment. He saved me at the risk of his own life. To lose one’s life in a war of this kind is extremely regrettable. I could not teach him that the conflict arose from the greed of the military and capitalist clique. My hatred for the army hierarchy is stronger than I can express. I must survive and tell this story to the [ Japanese] people, or my soul will never rest. The things that we did in China are being done to us. Japan will soon be defeated. We have learned from this war how inferior are our science and industry to those of the enemy. From the outset, I never thought that we could win.
Private Saito was fortunate enough to be taken alive on 13 January, by men of the 17th Infantry. It is unknown whether he survived to return to Japan.
At Clark Field on Luzon, navy fighter pilot Kunio Iwashita and his comrades knew the war was going very wrong indeed. “The longer one fought, the more sobered one was by the reality of so many friends being killed. One morning in November 1944 when we were escorting twelve bombers on a mission to attack American transports at San Pedro, I saw below on the sea the whole array of their carriers, battleships, transports, destroyers. I realised what very bad trouble Japan was in—and I thought that looked like my own day to die.” Iwashita survived, but around 70 percent of his fellow aircrew at Clark were lost on operations in the Philippines. Just four of thirty-five fighter pilots who graduated in his flight-training course survived the war.
Some Japanese senior officers from Leyte reached other islands in a series of night dashes, spending their days hiding in the jungle behind deserted beaches in a fashion uncommonly like that of Allied fugitives from Japan’s great offensive of 1942. General Suzuki, Leyte’s commander, was killed in April, when a launch in which he sought to escape was strafed by American aircraft. Some of his men survived, to join other island garrisons. Yamashita dispatched fanciful orders to surviving elements which reached Mindanao and Cebu: “The army will attempt to drive back the advancing enemy…reduce [his] fighting capability…and hold the area as a foothold for future counter-offensives by Japanese forces.”
While the Americans had prevailed in their largest ground campaign of the eastern conflict thus far, few of those who fought had relished the experience. “Perhaps the best way to describe374 life in the Pacific war would be to say we endured,” wrote Private Bill McLaughlin, a recon scout with the Americal Division. “…The heat, the insects, disease, combat and the boredom in between…We came to expect little, and to be satisfied with little in the way of comfort: a few candles, some playing cards, a little hard candy.” American soldiers felt that they had suffered much, to gain possession of a few thousand square miles of swamp and mountain, peasant huts and ruined towns. “This theater has been a victim375 of over-optimism almost as much as the European one,” wrote Lt.-Gen. Robert Eichelberger of Eighth Army on 8 January, soon after accepting responsibility for “mopping up” Leyte.
Only senior officers, privy to the airfields fiasco, understood that MacArthur had landed Sixth Army on the wrong island. It was fortunate that this American strategic error was partially redeemed by a matching Japanese one. Terauchi’s folly in compelling Yamashita to reinforce failure enabled Krueger’s formations to inflict heavy losses, to destroy units which would otherwise have been awaiting the Americans on Luzon. In Japan, the fall of Leyte precipitated the resignation of the government of the prime minister, Lt.-Gen. Kuniaki Koiso. Koiso had proclaimed this to be “the decisive battle”—so often a doom-laden phrase for his nation. Now it had been lost. Koiso paid the price, unlamented by his own people. He was replaced by a deeply reluctant Admiral Kantaro Suzuki, seventy-seven years old, deaf and ill, bereft of a coherent vision of his own purpose in power, save to preside over the cabinet.
If U.S. casualties in this first Philippines campaign seemed painful, they were in truth modest, either by the standards of the Japanese or by those of the European war. It was impossible to beat such a formidable enemy without suffering some attrition. Leyte proved a worse defeat than the Japanese need have suffered, a more substantial victory than MacArthur deserved.