Rookie F6F pilot Bill Davis, who flew with the Lexington’s VF-16, made his first kill over Cebu that morning. A Zero banked sharply away to the left as Davis dove from above. He lined the target up in his sights and pressed the trigger. A quick burst was enough to tear the Zero to pieces. “I was aware of someone screaming over the radio,” Davis recalled. “I listened for a moment, but it had stopped. Then I realized that that screaming had been me. As I had fired my guns at the Zero, I had automatically screamed at the top of my lungs. That scream had come from somewhere deep in my brain, from the primordial lizard part of my brain.”52
On a second strike that day, Davis flew low over an oil refinery on an island near Cebu City. Almost on a lark, he fired into the heart of the complex. Assuming that a few .50-caliber rounds would do minimal damage to the big complex of tanks, towers, and pipelines, Davis was startled when an explosion rocked his aircraft. He instinctively banked away and pulled up. Corkscrewing back to altitude, “I could see the entire refinery going up in flames. Explosions erupted all over the island as the refinery went up in a gigantic fireball.”
Upon returning to the Lexington, Davis told the story of what he had done. One of his fellow pilots grimaced. “That refinery was the property of Texaco Oil Company,” he said, “and I hoped it would survive the war. I own stock in Texaco.”53
The American flyers would remember the September 12 raid as the “Cebu Barbeque.” More than 1,200 sorties were flown that day. It was the most one-sided aerial slaughter since the Marianas Turkey Shoot two months earlier.
Masatake Okumiya, a senior Japanese air commander, had ordered about 150 Zero fighters from Luzon to Mindanao to reinforce the airfields that had been battered in the raids of the previous week. They staged through Cebu on their way south, and most were on the ground that morning when the armada of American carrier planes came over the eastern horizon. Okumiya happened to be on a transport aircraft inbound for Cebu just as the airstrike began. The pilot banked sharply away to avoid the attacking Hellcats, giving Okumiya a bird’s-eye perspective of the “dive-bombers plunging from the sky, and the fighter planes as they screamed back and forth over the field, their wing guns spitting tracers into the parked Zeros. Within minutes Cebu became utter confusion. The American pilots were remarkably accurate, and the flames and black smoke boiling from the burning Zeros reminded me of a crematorium . . . ours.”54 Okumiya said the Third Fleet airstrikes of this period dealt a crippling blow against his effort to establish a fighter line capable of repelling an invasion of the Philippines.
Even after discounting the exaggerated claims of their returning pilots, the Third Fleet air intelligence officers reckoned that the strikes had destroyed 75 enemy planes in the air and another 123 on the ground. At least five ships had been sunk, another seven damaged. The sampans and small craft strafed, burned, or sunk were too many to count, probably at least forty or fifty. Ground installations at the airfields had been flattened or gutted. The carriers and their screening ships had braced for aerial counterstrikes from Japanese airfields in the Philippines, but no more than a handful of enemy planes had appeared on radar, and all had quickly turned away rather than challenge the orbiting Hellcats of the combat air patrol. Halsey reported to Nimitz on September 14: “Enemy’s non-aggressive attitude unbelievable and fantastic. . . . No airborne opposition and only meager AA encountered. . . . No shipping left to sink. . . . This area is wide open.”55
One of the few American planes lost was piloted by Ensign Thomas C. Tiller of the Hornet, whose Hellcat was struck and badly damaged over Leyte Gulf. Tiller made an emergency water landing and inflated his rubber raft. Local Filipino tribesmen paddled out to him in an outrigger and took him ashore. They treated him well, gave him food and shelter, and made contact with local pro-American guerillas who managed to radio the American fleet offshore. Tiller was picked up by a floatplane from the cruiser Wichita and returned to the Hornet, where he debriefed Admiral Jocko Clark.
The natives on Leyte had given Tiller some remarkable intelligence. There were no Japanese troops on Leyte, they said, and no airbases on the island except bare dirt or grass strips. The enemy garrison on neighboring Cebu numbered only about 15,000 troops. American intelligence estimates had been badly mistaken. An amphibious landing on Leyte would meet little or no opposition, if it could be executed quickly. Clark passed Tiller’s information on to Halsey and Mitscher.
For more than two months Halsey had been pressing Nimitz to cancel interim operations in favor of an accelerated invasion of Mindanao in the southern Philippines. Now he considered an even bolder proposal. Perhaps MacArthur should bypass Mindanao and strike directly at Leyte, as soon as the invasion force could be mounted. Carney and others on the Third Fleet staff agreed. Still, Halsey hesitated; he sat in a corner of the New Jersey’s bridge and mulled it over. Nimitz had rebuffed most of his prior suggestions, and he knew that “Such a recommendation, in addition to being none of my business, would upset a great many applecarts, possibly all the way up to Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill.”56 Finally he decided to go ahead. The urgent dispatch was addressed to Nimitz with MacArthur and King as coaddressees. Halsey renewed his proposal to cancel the pending amphibious landings in Yap and the Palaus, as they did “not offer opportunity for destruction of enemy forces commensurate with delay and effort involved in STALEMATE.” The forces slated for those operations should be transferred to MacArthur’s command, where they could be deployed in seizing Leyte “immediately and cheaply without any intermediate operations.”57
Nimitz responded by suspending the landing on Yap, and he told King that he was willing to endorse an earlier landing on Leyte if MacArthur responded favorably. But Nimitz continued to insist that American forces must take the islands in the southern part of the Palau group. Noting that invasion fleets were already underway for Peleliu and Angaur, the CINCPAC ruled that these forces “will be sailed as planned.”58 In a separate cable to King later that day, Nimitz wrote that possession of those islands was “of course essential and it would not be feasible to reorientate the plans for the employment of the Palau attack and occupation forces as rapidly as Halsey’s 130230 appears to visualize.”59 However—and here Nimitz raised a tantalizing possibility—if MacArthur resisted the proposal to accelerate the Leyte operation, “it may be feasible to take Iwo Jima in mid-October using the Yap force. . . . Am preparing plans along these lines for use if required. The foregoing represents concepts which may or may not eventuate but which are submitted now to keep you fully informed of possibilities.”60
Peleliu was a bloody island fight that was, in retrospect, probably unnecessary. Iwo Jima was an even bloodier island fight that might have been less so if it had occurred earlier, before the Japanese had time to reinforce the island and dig a network of underground fortifications. If Nimitz had been willing to cancel the landing on Peleliu as Halsey had suggested, and had authorized a surprise assault on Iwo Jima in October using the same troops, the two decisions in combination might have saved thousands of American lives.
MacArthur was at sea on the cruiser Nashville with the Morotai invasion force. Due to radio silence requirements, he could not immediately reply. But he was “jubilant” about the prospect of an accelerated invasion of the Philippines, and as soon as the beachhead at Morotai was secure he flew back to his headquarters in Hollandia and drafted his affirmative reply to Halsey’s proposal, stating, “I am prepared to initiate at once the execution of KING TWO [Leyte] with target date of October 20.”61
The Joint Chiefs were in Quebec with Roosevelt, Churchill, and the British military chiefs. MacArthur’s message arrived on the evening of September 15, when they were dining with their British counterparts. Excusing themselves, the four chiefs stepped out of the dining hall and into a nearby conference room to discuss it. None dissented. If Halsey, Nimitz, and MacArthur were all in agreement, they did not feel the need to give it much thought. Ninety minutes after receiving MacArthur’s cable, the new orders were on their w
ay back to the Pacific: “The Joint Chiefs of Staff authorize MacArthur to execute LEYTE Operation target date 20 October. . . . MacArthur and Nimitz arrange necessary coordination. . . . Inform Joint Chiefs of Staff of your plans.”62
The American military leadership of the Second World War had resolved to spurn the creeping inertia that would lock them into existing plans and operations. In principle, they were ready and willing at all times to throw out their plans and adopt new ones, to move quickly to exploit changing circumstances. Adhering to this principle required steady pressure from the top of the command ladder, because large organizations tended to resist or even sabotage sudden changes in direction. The transpacific campaign was the largest and most complex multiservice amphibious war in history. Major changes in planned operations required a corresponding run of smaller changes across geographically far-flung units. In retrospect, then, it was remarkable that such momentous shifts in strategy could be and often were decided in the eleventh hour. The overnight decision to bypass Mindanao and hit Leyte in October 1944 was the most dramatic and far-reaching of all such changes. The Dirty Tricks Department had earned the right to congratulate itself, as it did in its war diary entry of September 14: “The Third Fleet suggestion had been approved and the Pacific War advanced three months.”63 FDR indulged in a spot of well-deserved boasting in his State of the Union address the following January, when he told Congress: “Within the space of 24 hours, a major change of plans was accomplished which involved Army and Navy forces from two different theaters of operations—a change which hastened the liberation of the Philippines and the final day of victory—a change which saved lives which would have been expended in the capture of islands which are now neutralized far behind our lines.”64
But Nimitz nixed Halsey’s urgent appeal to cancel the invasion of Peleliu, a sun-scorched patch of mangrove swamps and limestone badlands at the southern end of the Palaus. Peleliu hosted the most important Japanese airfield in the region, although most of its ground installations were destroyed by aerial and naval bombardment before American forces landed on the island. Initially the CINCPAC noted that the invasion forces earmarked for Peleliu were either at sea or had nearly finished combat-loading, which seems a rather threadbare rationale. Nimitz was not the sort of man to let interservice or inter-theater rivalries influence a decision when the lives of his troops were on the line. Nevertheless, a full accounting of this history must include the following facts. The main force slated to take Peleliu was the storied 1st Marine Division of Guadalcanal fame. The CINCPAC staff had quarreled heatedly with MacArthur’s staff over control of that division. Halsey’s proposal would require returning it to MacArthur’s command. Without the Palau operation, there would be no major amphibious invasions in Nimitz’s theater until 1945, and Nimitz would be obliged to transfer much of his idled amphibious shipping, landing craft, and troops to MacArthur for deployment in the Philippines campaign.
More than any major commander in the Pacific, Admiral Nimitz had preached the virtues of nimble and opportunistic decision-making. He had championed bold bypass maneuvers in the past—most notably during the FLINTLOCK operation the previous winter, when he had insisted upon bypassing the eastern Marshalls atolls over the opposition of his naval and ground commanders. In this instance, however, he insisted on taking Peleliu without providing a convincing justification for his decision. Samuel Eliot Morison, one of Nimitz’s greatest admirers, was gently critical on this score. Until the end of his life, Nimitz continued to insist that the Palau landings had been indispensable—just as, for example, Spruance never conceded that the invasion of Tarawa in November 1943 had been unnecessary. In each case, time and experience showed that bypassing the islands could have been accomplished without loss of momentum in the broader offensive.
This axiom generally held true throughout the Pacific War—that each time American commanders considered and debated the option to bypass an island, and finally decided to go ahead and take it, their decision would seem tragically mistaken in hindsight. But they were naturally loath to admit error, either to historians or to themselves, because the blood spilled in those sands could never be unspilled, and no one wanted to hear that young men had died for a mistake.
Chapter Three
THE “OLD BREED,” ALSO KNOWN AS THE 1ST MARINE DIVISION (1stMarDiv), was back in the vicinity of Guadalcanal—the island they had invaded, defended, and made famous two years earlier. Now they were stationed on Pavuvu, a 50-square-mile blotch of fetid green jungle that lay 30 miles west of Guadalcanal. They had been sent to this island for rest and training after their most recent campaign, a landing at Cape Gloucester on New Britain.
The Guadalcanal veterans, who comprised about a third of the division in September 1944, reminisced about their 1943 sojourn in the paradise of Melbourne, Australia, with its fine weather and complaisant women, and wondered why they could not go back. The others, replacements who had joined after Guadalcanal and before Cape Gloucester, or freshly trained boots who had just shipped in from the States, listened to the stories and cursed their bad luck for being sent instead to this godforsaken boondock.
From the day the Old Breed stepped onto the little wooden pier at Pavuvu, they reviled the place. Living conditions were primeval. The main “road” inland was little more than a muddy footpath, which led into a clearing between symmetric rows of soaring palms, the last remnants of an abandoned British coconut plantation. There they were told to pitch camp. Rummaging around in the underbrush, they found their tents, cots, and blankets piled on the ground, rain-soaked and filthy. Since no one had harvested the plantation in two-and-a-half years, the ground was covered with layers of fallen, rotting coconuts and palm fronds. Clearing the campground was a labor of the damned. The accumulated debris emitted a putrid stench that grew stronger as they excavated the layers. Rotten coconuts fell apart and spilled foul-smelling juice on the handlers. As they dug, they exposed nests of corpulent rats. Resolving to drive the creatures from their camp, the marines attacked with flamethrowers. Burning rodents scurried in every direction, and the tart scent of burning rat hair blended with the earthy reek of decomposing coconuts.
Before they could begin training in earnest, the marines could look forward to weeks of pick and shovel work in the stultifying heat and humidity. They dug drainage ditches and latrines. They built wooden boardwalks through mangrove swamps. They cleared and widened the old roadways by hacking at the jungle with machetes. In many areas the ground was too soft and wet to accommodate the weight of trucks, so they carted in crushed coral rock and poured it into the roadbeds. Each afternoon, with clocklike regularity, came a short, heavy tropical downpour. Since the island had no shower facilities, the marines stripped off their fatigues and ran soap over their bodies. They hurried, hoping to be clean and rinsed before the rain let up.
Without a proper mess hall, they ate C-Rations heated over sterno canisters. They slept in six-man pyramid tents, in a camp lit by makeshift torches made of empty ammunition cans and gasoline. Each night, an army of land crabs invaded and occupied the camp. The marines soon learned to shake the little bluish-black crustaceans out of their boots before putting them on each morning. Every few days, a private recalled, “we reached the point of rage over these filthy things and chased them out from under boxes, seabags, and cots. We killed them with sticks, bayonets, and entrenching tools. After the action was over we had to shovel them up and bury them, or a nauseating stench developed rapidly in the hot, humid air.”1
They trained as best they could on Pavuvu, within the limitations of time, geography, and equipment shortages. Each morning they did calisthenics and ran a three-mile track around the island. After clearing a rifle range, they practiced marksmanship and refreshed their skills in the use of field weapons, including the Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR), the carbine, the Thompson submachine gun, the bazooka, the flamethrower, and the new 60mm shoulder mortar. Because the island was small and covered in dense undergrowth, there was little room to
maneuver, and field exercises were necessarily done at the company level. But there were 15,000 marines on the island, more than one hundred companies; troops marching in column were constantly running into one another, and one had to stand aside to let the other pass. At first, there were scarcely any amphibious landing vehicles available to the division, and no tracked LVTs (“amtracs”). An urgent call went out to nearby islands to borrow any type of landing craft, including the army DUKWs and ordinary Higgins boats (LCVPs). Small-scale amphibious exercises followed, with individual companies landing in live-firing drills on one of Pavuvu’s beaches. The rifle squads landed first, followed closely by machine gunners, bazooka gunners, and mortar squads. The sergeants shouted at them to race up the beach and take cover in the palm groves: “Get off the damn beach as fast as you can and move inland. The Nips are going to plaster it with everything they’ve got, so your chances are better the sooner you move inland.”2
On August 28, they embarked on transports and LSTs anchored off Pavuvu, shuttling to the anchorage in landing craft. During a two-week westward passage through the South Pacific, marines killed time by writing letters, playing cards, reading books and magazines, or repacking their gear. They stripped their rifles, oiled them, and reassembled them; they sharpened their Kabar knives; they painted camouflage patterns on bazookas and flamethrowers. “I liked to stand at the railing and watch the porpoises play in the wake of the ship, the flying fish glide over the crests of the waves,” recalled R. V. Burgin, a mortarman with K-Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines. “We were all zigzagging as we sailed along, changing direction every fifteen minutes or so.”3 Belowdecks was stifling, as the heat surging up from the engines merged with the heat radiating down from the equatorial sun, but the navy crews attempted to limit the number of marines who could come up on deck for a breath of fresh air.
Twilight of the Gods Page 17
