The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors

by James D. Hornfischer

  Standing on the flag bridge of the Yamato, Kurita expected at any moment to see the flash of enemy battleship guns in the distance, to feel the deep reverberations of submarine torpedoes tearing into his battle line as they had in the Palawan Passage the night before. He could not believe the Americans were not there to challenge him. Astonishingly, the night remained quiet. It appeared that luck was on his side.

  Eleven

  Admiral Kurita’s Center Force was far more powerful than the weaponry Nishimura had brought to Surigao Strait. In addition to two squadrons of heavy cruisers, he had the Yamato and the Musashi, the biggest battleships anywhere on the high seas. For the Japanese sailors aboard the cruisers and destroyers escorting them, the sight of the two gargantuan 863-foot vessels in the battle line stirred the heart. Together with the old Nagato and the fast battleships Haruna and Kongo, it was a gathering of heavies such as Japan had never before assembled.

  The decision to commit the Yamato and the Musashi to the gamble to penetrate Leyte Gulf had been controversial. Kurita’s chief of staff, Tomiji Koyanagi, was not alone in his preference for going after America’s carrier groups to slaughtering transports in a harbor. As journalist Masanori Ito summarized the dissent’s position, “We do not mind death, but we are very concerned for the honor of the Japanese Navy. If the final effort of our great Navy should be spent in engaging a group of empty cargo ships, surely Admirals Togo and Gonnohyoe Yamamoto would weep in their graves.”

  Kurita had committed himself to the Sho-1 plan with a resigned fatalism. Like the rest of the Imperial Navy’s high command, he saw that the plan placed him in a desperate position. It was aimed at setting up the Decisive Battle, but so far the only side suffering the attrition upon which the Decisive Battle doctrine depended was the Combined Fleet. The strain was evident in the fuel shortages that had forced Kurita to operate far from home in Brunei, where refined bunker oil was more readily available; in the lack of aircraft to protect his ships; in the perpetual infighting between the army and the navy that arose as much from natural interservice enmity as from the shortages. Prior to departing Brunei, Kurita gathered his demoralized commanders aboard his flagship, the heavy cruiser Atago, and addressed the growing dissent about the wisdom of pressing the attack.

  “I know that many of you are strongly opposed to this assignment,” he said. “But the war situation is far more critical than any of you could possibly know. Would it not be a shame to have the fleet remain intact while the nation perishes?” Though dashing into Leyte Gulf was risky, Kurita deemed it “a glorious opportunity…. You must remember that there are such things as miracles. What man can say that there is no chance for our fleet to turn the tide of war in a decisive battle?”

  The Sho-1 plan’s weaknesses were plain enough to see. It relied on the optimistic notion that Japan could fight a complex sequence of battles on its own precise timetable, at places of its choosing, against an enemy that would acquiesce to every ambush and feint and refrain from the discourtesy of overwhelming it with superior force. The Decisive Battle strategy envisioned Japan holding the Philippines, Guam, and other forward bases but did not reckon with an enemy whose fleet nourished itself at great anchorages such as Ulithi, Manus, and Hollandia. Nor did it account for a flexible, thinking enemy that broke imperial codes and exploited technical breakthroughs such as fire-control sensors and search radar. And it certainly did not allow for an enemy equipped with the audacity of a Bill Halsey, the prudence of a Raymond Spruance, the methodicalness of a Jesse Old-endorf, or the resourcefulness of a Ziggy Sprague.

  After departing Brunei on the morning of October 22, Kurita had walked into one disaster after another. First came the devastating submarine attack in the Palawan Passage. Shortly after dawn on October 23, nearly a full day into his sortie, sailing along the island of Palawan west of the Philippines en route to San Bernardino Strait, Kurita’s group was ambushed by two U.S. submarines. Japanese radio intelligence had traced American sub transmissions that originated near Kurita’s location. But the subs did not announce their presence until they were ready to deliver the crushing blow.

  At 6:34 A.M. Kurita’s own flagship, the Atago, sailing at the head of a column of five cruisers and two battleships, was struck by four torpedoes. Sixty seconds later two more torpedoes blasted the Takao, following the Atago directly astern. These six hits came courtesy of the submarine Darter, captained by Cdr. David H. McClintock. About twenty minutes later four more torpedoes, fired by Cdr. Bladen D. Claggett’s Dace, hit the heavy cruiser Maya, third in line in the Center Force’s eastern column, sailing about five hundred yards ahead of the Yamato. A shattering explosion filled the night as the Maya’s magazine exploded. “After the spray and smoke had disappeared nothing of her remained to be seen,” wrote Rear Admiral Ugaki aboard the Yamato.

  The end had come fast for the three stricken cruisers. The Atago sank in eighteen minutes; the Maya died in four. The Takao, her rudder blown away together with two of her four screws, limped back to Brunei under destroyer escort for repairs. As the rest of his destroyer screen scoured nearby waters for their undersea assailants, Kurita was fished from the sea and that afternoon moved his flag to the more expansive quarters of the battleship Yamato.

  Having weathered the onslaught of submarines, Kurita had pressed on northeastward, entering the Sibuyan Sea on the morning of the twenty-fourth. That body of water was some two hundred nautical miles wide, a rabble of islands and passages that provided a haven for enemy submarines and restricted a large formation’s ability to maneuver while under attack. On the eastern side of the Sibuyan Sea was San Bernardino Strait, the bottleneck that separated the Sibuyan from the Philippine Sea. Beyond the strait were the waters where Halsey’s Third Fleet lurked between the Center Force and its Leyte objective.

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  JAPAN’S FAITH IN MIRACLES was rooted in its history, replete with the apparent results of godly intervention, from the typhoon-assisted triumph over Kublai Khan in the thirteenth century to the rout of the Russians at Tsushima Straits in 1905. But if Kurita was counting on Heaven’s blessings to fall upon the Yamato and the Musashi, there would first have to be a reckoning with the treachery of their very existence.

  At least one Japanese commentator implied the existence of a dark curse in their extralegal origins. “The giants of Japan’s Navy were good ships,” Masanori Ito wrote, “but they were built in bad conscience.” When secret plans to build them began in earnest in October 1934, Japan violated in spirit the Washington Naval Treaty. Negotiated in 1922, the arms-limitation agreement held Japanese, American, and British battleship forces to a 3-5-5 tonnage ratio. At the time none of the three major seagoing powers had built a new battleship in fifteen years. That suited Japan’s proponents of the treaty very well. The Combined Fleet’s ten prewar battleships maintained the sixty percent proportion. When more militant voices on the general staff prevailed and Japan defiantly withdrew from the treaty in 1936, detailed design work on the Yamato was already nearly two years along. Work on her sister ship the Musashi would run just a year behind. The omens of their construction almost immediately began to reverberate in the larger culture. The rope netting that screened the Yamato’s construction site from view was so expansive that for months Japanese fishermen had suffered a shortage of hemp.

  Even with the 3-5-5 treaty ratio in place, Japanese planners had figured they could maintain at least a regional advantage over the Americans. With the United States saddled with two oceans to defend, Japan could gain superiority in the Pacific. And because American ships had to have beams small enough to fit between the locks of the Panama Canal, the Japanese, free from constraints of intercontinental geography, would hold a size advantage as well. The addition of the two giants increased the ratio of Japanese to American battleship tonnage to 4-to-5. Displacing 72,000 tons each, they were more than twice the size of any warship Japan had ever built.

  But as Japan had already proven at America’s expense, the age of the battleship wa
s passing. At about ten A.M. on the morning of October 24, the radar operators on the Musashi reported enemy aircraft approaching: the harbingers of Marc Mitscher’s Task Force 38. And now the second catastrophe fell upon Kurita en route to San Bernardino Strait.

  A scout plane from the Intrepid had brought the good news of the sighting to Admiral Halsey. The admiral spent fifteen minutes querying the pilot and conferring with his staff. Then he sent a terse but catalyzing order over the TBS circuit to his task force commanders: “Strike! Repeat: Strike! Good luck!”

  When the American aviators arrived over Kurita’s fleet, the spectacle of the Center Force steaming eastward was a commanding one. The wide circle of distinct white wakes was visible from as far as thirty miles away. The first wave struck at 10:26 A.M., with four dozen planes from the Intrepid and the Cabot air groups winging over to the attack. The former occupant of the Fanshaw Bay’s flag quarters commanded those carriers, and it was he, Admiral Bogan, who sent the first of four waves of planes against Kurita. During the course of the afternoon as Admiral Oldendorf was preparing to fight the Southern Force in Surigao Strait, Halsey would launch 259 planes against the Center Force.

  The heavy cruiser Myoko and the Yamato were hit, but the Musashi took the brunt of the assault. Her skipper, Adm. Toshihira Inoguchi, sailed with 769 survivors of the heavy cruiser Maya, sunk by the Dace in the Palawan Passage. Manning whatever battle stations their cruiser training suited them for, supplementing the efforts of the Musashi’s own crew, they fought bravely. SB2C Helldiver dive-bomber pilots drew first blood, landing four near misses near the bow and opening minor leaks in the hull. A direct hit atop a heavily armored 18.1-inch turret was closely followed by a torpedo hit forward. Inrushing water caused a five-degree list to starboard.

  The agony of the ship’s destruction was only prolonged by her efficient damage control. Belowdecks a network of pumps emptied and filled compartments on both sides of the ship to avoid capsizing. Directing three teams of sailors in control rooms spread throughout the ship, the Musashi’s damage-control officer, Lt. Masanao Naito, orchestrated the pumping and counterflooding to ensure that the wounded ship remained upright. About an hour later, around 11:45, Avengers placed three more torpedoes into the ship’s port side. The flooding was so great that emergency pumping could not keep pace. Naito filled every compartment on the ship’s starboard side but could not stop the list. Admiral Inoguchi slowed his ship to twenty-two knots to reduce the water pressure on the fractured bulkheads.

  The last wave of Third Fleet planes arrived over the Center Force at about two P.M. Lt. Cdr. Joseph T Lawler, leading a group of sixteen Hellcat fighter planes from the Enterprise, had spotted the long white wakes trailing from the ships of Kurita’s Center Force as they maneuvered in the Sibuyan Sea. The spectacle of such a huge fleet was familiar to any pilot who had flown over one of Halsey’s sprawling task groups. But still a lump rose in Lawler’s throat. He led his flight beyond the enemy ships to the west, then circled back at twelve thousand feet in order to attack with the sun to their backs. Spreading out into three groups, they chose up targets and dove down in an attack that converged on the stricken Musashi.

  Fires were already raging in one of her engine rooms. The blaze had severed a main steam pipe, stopping one of her propeller shafts. Near misses and torpedo strikes had pierced some lower compartments and filled others with lethal carbon monoxide. A bomb exploded on the large tower that housed the bridge, ruining Admiral Inoguchi’s left arm and killing several other officers. Then four more torpedoes burst into the forward part of the ship. The battleship’s heavy armored bow plates were torn outward. One of them jutted out like a cataract, carving into the sea like an armored plowshare. Now the inrushing torrents of seawater were too great even for the Musashi to endure.

  Though the imperial crest fixed to her prow stood proudly above the water, her bow was nearly submerged. The ship settled until water lapped over the forecastle. Her two forward turrets, each one heavier than a large destroyer, appeared to float atop the surface of the ocean, just offshore of what appeared to be a small steel isle: her superstructure. It occurred to Admiral Inoguchi to beach his ship and fight her as a shore battery, but her bow was tilling so deeply beneath the waves that a course change would likely have capsized her. As her crew shifted all movable objects to the port side to keep the ship from turning turtle, Inoguchi gave the order to abandon ship. His final report that he handed to his executive officer, Capt. Kenkichi Kato, included an apology to the emperor for his failure to carry his ship to its assigned destiny. His executive officer asked to join him in the ship’s final plunge. “Damn fool!” the captain replied to Kato. “My responsibility is so great it can’t even be compensated by death and I must share the ship’s fate, but the executive officer is responsible for taking the crew to safety and getting them aboard a second and third Musashi to avenge today’s battle.”

  Kurita had appealed for air support from the army’s Second Air Fleet on Luzon and from Ozawa’s decoy carrier group. But just ten fighters were available to cover Center Force. The four unlucky pilots who happened to be patrolling over the fleet when the Americans attacked were downed immediately. There was little point sending the rest of them. They wouldn’t stand a chance against the fighters from the Third Fleet.

  Kurita was calm amid the chaos, assessing the damage and weighing his prospects for fulfilling his part of the Sho-1 plan mission. The Musashi was gone. The Nagato had taken two torpedo hits but was seaworthy except for a reduced twenty-knot maximum speed. The light cruiser Yahagi had been hit, limiting the fast ship to just twenty-two knots. As worrisome to Kurita as his lack of air cover was the shorthanded status of his destroyer screen. Two of the escorts had broken formation to stay behind with the stricken Musashi. The day before, two more had accompanied the heavy cruiser Takao, torpedoed off Palawan, back to Lingga Roads. Held by their slowest member to an eighteen-knot cruising speed, his ships would be sitting ducks for any enterprising U.S. sub commander lurking in the area. His eleven remaining destroyers would be hard pressed to cover him. Aggravating his concerns, a dispatch from Combined Fleet Headquarters brought this warning: “PROBABILITY IS GREAT THAT ENEMY WILL EMPLOY SUBMARINES IN THE APPROACHES TO SAN BERNARDINO STRAIT. BE ALERT.”

  Kurita’s staff informed him that American carriers, wherever they were, had enough daylight left to launch as many as two additional waves of air attacks against him before night fell. He had not yet heard from Ozawa, who was supposed to be maneuvering northeast of Luzon and drawing this devastating offensive power to himself. If Kurita continued eastward toward San Bernardino Strait in these last hours of daylight on the twenty-fourth, it would only make the trip shorter for his attackers.

  Kurita feared that the air attack had put him hopelessly behind schedule to meet Nishimura in Leyte Gulf. Was Nishimura still even alive? Kurita had not heard from him since the previous night, at 10:10 P.M., when the Southern Force commander had radioed him that he was on schedule to penetrate Leyte Gulf with the Fuso and the Yamashiro at four A.M. on the twenty-fifth. If he turned away now, Kurita knew he would be hard pressed to meet him.

  Twelve

  At 3:30 P.M., seeing little point in continuing to sail into the American meat grinder and despairing of his ability to adhere to the Sho-1 plan’s timetable while under constant air attack, Kurita ordered his remaining ships to withdraw westward. He transmitted a message to Combined Fleet Headquarters: “IF WE CONTINUE WITH OUR PRESENT COURSE OUR LOSSES WILL INCREASE INCALCULABLY, WITH LITTLE HOPE OF SUCCESS FOR OUR MISSION. THEREFORE, HAVE DECIDED TO WITHDRAW OUTSIDE THE RANGE OF ENEMY AIR ATTACK FOR THE TIME BEING, AND TO RESUME OUR SORTIE IN COORDINATION WITH SUCCESSFUL ATTACKS ON THE ENEMY BY OUR AIR FORCES.

  The turn westward brought the fleet back to the Musashi, dead in the water and settling. Adm. Matome Ugaki, the commander of the First Battleship Division, hoped the crew would do their best to save the ship but could not muster the words to cheer them on.

  Steam
ing away from the Americans gave Kurita a change of heart. Emboldened by a lack of further air strikes and feeling he should at least attempt a rendezvous with Nishimura—he still did not know the fate of the Southern Force—Kurita decided at 5:14 to resume heading east. The Yamato, the Nagato, the Haruna, the Kongo, and their heavy cruiser and destroyer accompaniment heeled around toward San Bernardino Strait again. An hour later the response to Kurita’s four P.M. dispatch to headquarters arrived. Toyoda’s order—his exhortation—was classically fatalistic, steeped in the Japanese propensity for invoking destiny: “WITH CONFIDENCE IN HEAVENLY GUIDANCE, THE ENTIRE FORCE WILL ATTACK!” As grim as the message’s implications were, at least it removed from Kurita’s weary shoulders the burden of discretion. The Sho-1 plan had come too far to turn back. The decision to commit the Imperial Japanese Navy’s most powerful squadron had been made by its supreme commander.

  Back on its way toward San Bernardino Strait, the Center Force passed the Musashi once more at sunset, around six P.M. on the evening of October 24. An hour and a half later the great battleship, left behind by her comrades, rolled suddenly to port and vanished beneath the sea. Admiral Inoguchi remained aboard to the end, to perish along with half the ship’s crew.

  A plume of steam and smoke rising above the point of her sinking was the Musashi’s farewell to her task force, and to the wider world to whom her existence had been a lurking mystery. Built to conquer leviathans, the Musashi was done in by swarms of tiny flying machines. The rules of war had changed. Now the survivors of the Musashi understood it as surely as did their counterparts from the USS Arizona.

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