The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors

by James D. Hornfischer

  The pilots and aircrewmen were the exclusive practitioners of the razor’s-edge lifestyle that the shipbound men could only shake their heads at and admire. The life of a flier was never in more immediate peril than while landing a plane. Bringing an aircraft down through shifting crosswinds to land on a pitching flight deck was an experience that Ernie Pyle likened to “landing on half a block of Main Street while a combined hurricane and earthquake is going on.”

  At night, pilots could enjoy the daily ounce-and-a-half ration of brandy authorized by Navy regulations. But it was rotgut, and enterprising pilots found better use for it hidden inside their pillows, where the steward’s mates would find it and be induced to perform a more thorough cleaning of the quarters. The squadron medical officer could be counted on to keep a secret stash of medicinal alcohol. Sweetened with iodine and burnished with caramel coloring, it could pass, after the third or fourth shot perhaps, for actual sour mash. The enlisted men distilled their own liquor from raisins and yeast. Empty five-inch shell canisters made useful brewing vats for the raisinjack. Ten days of fermentation in the South Pacific sun turned it into palatable moonshine.

  Like the squadrons aboard the five other carriers of Taffy 3, VC-65 had twelve to fourteen Wildcat fighters and roughly the same number of Avengers. Its human complement averaged eighteen fighter pilots and twelve torpedo bomber pilots. The war was turning against the Japanese in part for their inability to replace trained aviators killed in battle. Experienced Japanese “sea eagles” stayed with the squadrons until they were shot down and captured or killed. American pilots, on the other hand, were supported by a massive training and logistics apparatus that ensured a steady rotation of talent and matériel to and from the combat zone.

  Aircraft continued to roll out of American factory assembly lines to reinforce squadrons on the war’s many fronts. “They came out like sausages there for a while,” said one former Navy planner. The Navy’s production of human assets was no less impressive. At naval air stations all over the American mainland, veteran pilots were returning from the fleet to train new fliers to fill squadron vacancies caused by combat or operational deaths. That VC-65 fielded pilots as skilled as Ralph Jones and Tex Waldrop to begin with was one thing. That it could replace its losses along the way with pilots as good as Tom Van Brunt and Bill Brooks was quite another.

  Seven

  The war was going badly for Japan. In June 1944, during the invasion of the Marianas Islands—which contained the important bases at Guam, Saipan, and Tinian—the Japanese Imperial Combined Fleet had sailed with its remaining carrier force to challenge the American colossus. Like the battles of Midway and the Coral Sea before it, the Battle of the Philippine Sea was fought almost entirely in the air. U.S. Navy fliers shot down so many Japanese planes, killed so many of their seasoned pilots, that the Japanese aircraft carriers were effectively detoothed as offensive weapons. A fair number of the American pilots knew their way around the hunting fields back home, and clearly they had benefited from the practice. They took to calling the battle the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot. Afterward, with the Japanese in retreat, the subsequent invasions of Morotai and Peleliu—critical preparation for the move on the Philippines—had gone unchallenged by the Imperial fleet. Already B-29 bombers were raining fire on the empire’s industrial centers. Only one of the aircraft carriers that had struck Pearl Harbor remained afloat, and it, the lucky Zuikaku, had been by October bled of most of its aircraft and experienced pilots. Nursing its strength since its defeat in the Marianas, the Japanese military awaited America’s next move before committing itself to what might well be its final major fight.

  Although the Combined Fleet could not sustain a general offensive in the face of America’s overwhelming superiority, and though its airpower had been whittled down to a paltry force of land-based planes operating from the Philippines and Formosa, its commanders held on to the slim hope that if they could choose the time, place, and circumstances, they might yet land a staggering blow against the oncoming U.S. juggernaut. They would gather their strength and take their best shot. The only question remaining was how to commit limited forces so as to best disrupt America’s next move.

  Would the Americans invade Formosa and Japan’s southern home islands? Hokkaido to the north? Would the Philippines be the next target? Could Nimitz and MacArthur be so audacious as to attack Honshu itself and the central Japanese home islands? Designated the Sho-Go (Victory Operation) plan, a strategy was drawn up by the Supreme War Direction Council to defend against the inevitable offensive. Prepared in late July, as MacArthur was wooing Roosevelt in Hawaii, and debated, revised, and approved by the emperor on August 19, the Sho-Go plan was conceived in four variations depending on the geographical region America targeted for its next major thrust. The Sho-1 plan was aimed at deflecting an American assault of the Philippines; Sho-2 would defend Formosa and the southern Japanese home islands; Sho-3 would be used to counter an invasion of Honshu and Kyushu, the central home islands; and Sho-4 was designed to defend Hokkaido and the Kuriles in the north.

  Though the Japanese had hints of the American decision to invade the Philippines almost as soon as MacArthur, Nimitz, and President Roosevelt had adjourned their conference at Pearl Harbor, they got their first solid markers of American intentions on October 12, when, just before dawn, four fast carrier groups of Mitscher’s Task Force 38—the backbone, muscle, and fist of Halsey’s Third Fleet—closed to within fifty miles of the Formosan coast and began launching air strikes intended to neutralize Japanese airpower in the theater as preparation for an invasion of the Philippines.

  By seven A.M. the first echelons of Grumman F6F Hellcat fighters were sweeping over Japanese airfields on Formosa, interrupting the breakfast of the ground crews scattered along their runways. Resistance was futile. Those few of Vice Adm. Shigeru Fukudome’s 230 fighter pilots who managed to get aloft, Fukudome wrote, “were nothing but so many eggs thrown at the stone wall of the indomitable enemy formation.” Three days of carrier strikes, consisting of 1,378 sorties, left Formosa in ruins.

  The Third Fleet’s savaging of Formosa and nearby islands forced an unnerved Japanese high command—both Admirals Fukudome and Toyoda were caught on Formosa during the attack—to prepare both the Sho-1 and Sho-2 plans for activation. In fact, Rear Adm. Ryunosuke Kusaka, who as Toyoda’s chief of staff was effectively in command of the Combined Fleet while his superior was hunkered down on Formosa, ordered Sho-2 activated on the morning of the first attack. But a few days later, on the morning of October 17, Japanese lookouts spotted an advance force of U.S. Army Rangers coming ashore on Suluan Island in Leyte Gulf. It was then they knew that the Philippines was America’s real objective. On the evening of October 18 Admiral Kusaka ordered Sho-1, the Philippines variation, into effect.

  The Sho-1 plan was massive in scale, Byzantine in complexity, and exacting in its requirement that four fleets separated by thousands of miles of ocean time their movements with near-impossible precision. From the far-flung imperial anchorages in Japan’s Inland Sea, from Borneo in Malaysia, and from Singapore’s Lingga Roads, the fleets would sortie to the attack. If they could execute the Sho-Go plan as written, land-based aircraft would assault the American carrier groups while a decoy force of aircraft carriers under Vice Adm. Jisaburo Ozawa lured Halsey’s Third Fleet north. Exploiting the gap created by the diversion, two battleship forces, one under Vice Adm. Takeo Kurita, the other under Vice Adm. Shoji Nishimura, with Vice Adm. Kiyohide Shima’s Third Section in support, would then slip through the waters north of Samar and south of Leyte respectively.

  The plan played to Japan’s strength, for the Imperial Navy still fielded a formidable force of big-gunned surface ships. Two of its 71,659-ton battleships, the Yamato and the Musashi, were the largest warships in the world. The Nagato, the Fuso, and the Yamasbiro, aged though they were, had displacements in the neighborhood of 40,000 tons. The imperial fleet had two fast 36,601-ton battleships in the Kongo and the Haruna. And its doze
n-odd 13,000-to-15,000-ton heavy cruisers and several squadrons of hard-hitting destroyers were capable combatants that had drawn their share of American blood earlier in the war.

  Converging from north and south on MacArthur’s landing beach, the two battleship forces would catch the U.S. troops in a pincers movement. The heavy ships would sink at their leisure any transports or supply ships off Leyte, then turn the guns inland and blast the American armies from the rear while imperial troops rallied ashore. If they worked quickly enough, the Japanese fleet might rout MacArthur and make good its escape before Halsey recovered and inflicted an overwhelming air attack upon them. The challenge, of course, would be to move the big ships that formed the two pincers through long stretches of American-patrolled seas, intact and on time, and hope that Admiral Halsey would act as they suspected he might when presented with Ozawa’s bait.

  There was good reason for Japan to expect Admiral Halsey, whose Third Fleet guarded MacArthur’s northern flank, to take the bait and chase Ozawa north. Japan’s carriers had long been his obsession. And indeed, recent history proved the necessity of knowing where the carriers were. Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor on a day when the Enterprise and the Lexington were at sea. This cost her the chance to destroy, rather than merely wound, the U.S. Pacific Fleet. The carriers, having dodged the treacherous blow, went on to spearhead the Allied counteroffensive in the Pacific. At Midway six months later a U.S. scout pilot’s fortuitous peek through a break in the clouds enabled the American carrier planes to strike the Japanese flattops first and turn the tide of the war.

  The Navy did not fully appreciate it at the time, but with Japanese naval airpower virtually wiped away in the Marianas Turkey Shoot, it really no longer mattered where the Japanese carriers were. Japan didn’t have enough trained pilots to make them a threat. That the hopes of the Sho-1 plan were vested in battleships was a sure sign that Japan knew its tenure as a carrier power was at an end.

  That hard truth was not lost on Jisaburo Ozawa, the most talented of Japan’s carrier admirals. His seniority in the Combined Fleet lagged behind only that of its commander in chief, Adm. Soemu Toyoda. But for the distinguished vice admiral, widely thought the most capable commander in the Japanese Navy, reality could not have been more bracing: in the age of the aircraft carrier, the Sho-1 plan relegated him to leading Japan’s remaining carrier strength on a mere decoy mission. It was likely a suicide mission as well. Steaming from Japan’s Inland Sea with the fleet carrier Zuikaku, the light carriers Cbitose, Cbiyoda, and Zuibo, two hybrid battleship-carriers Ise and Hyuga, and a force of light cruisers and destroyers, Ozawa fielded the last of Japan’s paltry naval air strength.

  Ozawa’s carriers were like dragons whose fiery breath had been quenched. At the controls of their 116 combat aircraft were rookie pilots whose training barely sufficed to land them safely aboard their carrier after a mission. His screen included not only fast fleet destroyers but coastal defense vessels prone to crippling mechanical breakdowns.

  But prevailing in battle was not Ozawa’s mission. If he could just get Halsey’s attention, chances were good that the Bull’s predilections would get the better of him. If Ozawa could entice the Third Fleet commander to chase him, it might open for Kurita the northern path around Samar, through San Bernardino Strait, and into Leyte Gulf, where the Center Force’s big ships, rendezvousing with Nishimura’s Southern Force, could devastate MacArthur’s landing beach. Like an aikido master, Ozawa would turn Halsey’s aggressiveness against him. All of it hinged on Ozawa’s allure as bait.

  On October 24 Ozawa steamed down from the north, making radio noise and planning to launch an air strike on any American ships it might find. Steaming off Cape Engaño, a peninsula jutting out from the northeastern shore of Luzon, Ozawa did everything he could to be noticed. It was oddly appropriate: engahar is the Spanish verb “to deceive.”

  If Ozawa’s deception worked, battleships would do the rest. The Southern Force, with elements under Admirals Shoji Nishimura and Kiyohide Shima, would approach MacArthur through Surigao Strait, south of Leyte. The more powerful group, the Center Force under Takeo Kurita, would trace the coast of Palawan—a long slash of an island that separated the South China and Sulu Seas—maneuver through the ramble of islands in the Sibuyan Sea, and then exploit the gap created by Ozawa’s diversion, moving through an unprotected San Bernardino Strait before turning southward around Samar Island and attacking Leyte Gulf as the Sho-1 plan’s northern pincer.

  With the superbattleships Yamato and Musashi, the battleships Nagato, Kongo, and Haruna, ten heavy cruisers, and several squadrons of destroyers, Kurita had more than enough muscle for the job. His challenge would be to survive the inevitable onslaught from American planes and submarines on his approach to San Bernardino Strait. If he could, he might yet hope to meet the Southern Force in Leyte Gulf.

  * * *

  GUARDING THE LEYTE INVASION beach’s northern flank was Admiral Halsey’s Third Fleet. Its primary strength lay in the seventeen fast aircraft carriers of Task Force 38, nominally led by the legendary carrier boss, Admiral Mitscher. The carriers, supported by a powerful surface force that included six new battleships, had greater speed and a much longer reach than the Seventh Fleet did. But Halsey’s fleet had a somewhat less clearly established mission. His orders, drawn up by Chester Nimitz in line with the agreement brokered by President Roosevelt in Hawaii, required the Third Fleet to “cover and support” MacArthur’s troops “in order to assist in the seizure and occupation of all objectives in the Central Philippines” and to “destroy enemy naval and air forces in or threatening the Philippines area.” But an amendment to the operations order, added by Nimitz a few days later, stated, “In case opportunity for destruction of major portion of the enemy fleet is offered or can be created, such destruction becomes the primary task.”

  Whether it was offered by the Japanese or created by the Americans, that opportunity began to materialize on the morning of October 24, when Third Fleet pilots made multiple sightings of Japanese warships. At 8:22 A.M. Halsey received a report from an Intrepid flier that a Japanese fleet was in the Sibuyan Sea, in the waters west of Samar. Less than an hour later, at 9:18, planes from the Enterprise patrolling the Sulu Sea to the south spotted and attacked another Japanese flotilla containing two battleships evidently headed east toward Surigao Strait. The sightings themselves were more important than the minor damage the planes inflicted. All of the reports coming in from the Navy’s interlocking web of search planes and picket submarines were telling the Americans the same thing: the enemy had been stirred to action.

  Because the Imperial Combined Fleet faced serious fuel shortages, U.S. naval intelligence had learned to predict its maneuvers by tracking the advance movements of its fleet oilers. To divine the intentions of the Imperial Navy, one had only to follow the trail of oil.

  The Joint Intelligence Center, Pacific Ocean Area (JICPOA), had reported more than a month earlier, on September 18, that “large scale logistic preparations are in the making.” On October 2 JICPOA reported that Japanese tankers had left Sumatra for the fleet anchorage at Lingga and were rehearsing underway-refueling operations. Two weeks later the Combined Fleet was reported to have placed seven fleet oilers at Admiral Kurita’s disposal and ordered two freighters to yield their fuel to the Center Force’s warships if Kurita needed it. On October 20 Navy intelligence discovered that two tankers awaiting Kurita’s orders in the Tonkin Gulf had been directed to rendezvous with the admiral in the western Philippines and refuel the Center Force, also known as the First Diversion Attack Force.

  So the tea leaves were there to be read. The only remaining question was exactly when and how the Japanese would strike. On October 23 two U.S. submarines operating west of the Philippines had ambushed a large northbound surface force steaming through the Palawan Passage. The Darter and the Dace sunk two heavy cruisers, the Atago and Maya, and forced a third, the Takao, back to Singapore for repairs. With the morning sighting on October 24 of th
is same enemy flotilla in the Sibuyan Sea west of Samar, and of the battleship force headed toward Surigao Strait in the south, the full picture was beginning to emerge. From his Seventh Fleet flag quarters aboard the USS Wasatch in Leyte Gulf, Vice Adm. Thomas Kinkaid could at last see the Japanese plan unfolding: a Japanese task group would navigate Surigao Strait and challenge Leyte Gulf from the south. Another threat loomed to the north, in the Sibuyan Sea. But it was accounted for—Halsey’s carrier pilots were all over it, striking hard on the afternoon of October 24 and sinking the superbattleship Musashi. Now Kinkaid had his own welcoming party to prepare.

  At 2:45 P.M. that afternoon he ordered Jesse Oldendorf to ready his big ships for a night battle. If the Imperial Navy was going to break through Surigao Strait and reach Leyte Gulf, they would have to defeat the multilayered trap that Oldendorf would set for them. Having seen MacArthur’s Sixth Army to the beach on the twentieth without incident, Oldendorf’s Pearl Harbor battleships, those resurrected old souls of the U.S. Navy, prepared to return to doing what they had been built to do. A challenge was coming. The challenge would be met.

  Eight

  Steaming by night toward Surigao Strait aboard his Southern Force flagship, the battleship Yamashiro, Admiral Nishimura knew what awaited him and held no illusions about his chances for victory. At 12:35 P.M. the previous day a float plane catapulted from the heavy cruiser Mogami had radioed the fifty-nine-year-old admiral with word that a powerful American battleship force was gathering at the far end of Surigao Strait. The pilot may have been prescient. It was not until mid-afternoon on the twenty-fourth that Admiral Kinkaid, having anticipated that Nishimura was headed his way, ordered Jesse Oldendorf to move his heavies down to the strait and prepare for a night action.

  What drove the Japanese admiral to sail to nearly certain death is between his ghost and his Maker. A close friend of the Japanese admiral had seen in him a death wish ever since Nishimura’s only son, Teiji, a top student at the naval academy at Etajima, had died when his float plane exploded during operations in the Philippines in 1942. That Nishimura did not now withdraw from Surigao Strait, that he did not pause and regroup with Admiral Shima’s cruisers and destroyers, trailing him by some forty miles, suggested bravery more than foolhardiness, for bravery is motivated by purpose, and Shoji Nishimura’s purpose had been established not by his own personal loss but by the strategic designs of the Japanese naval command. With the Imperial Japanese Navy’s far-flung forces committed to the attack, the Sho-1 plan was beyond the point of no return.