For the day, Mitscher’s airmen had flown a total of 1,396 sorties against Okinawa and other nearby islands. Twenty-one American planes were lost, but most of the downed flyers were rescued by lifeguarding submarines.59
Task Force 38 turned south toward Formosa. Japanese snoopers shadowed the Americans all night long and into the next morning. When confronted by U.S. fighters flying combat air patrol (CAP), the ubiquitous Japanese patrol planes turned away and fled, often escaping into clouds.60 But they were clearly tracking the position of Task Force 38, so the odds of achieving surprise in the upcoming airstrike on Formosa did not look good. The destroyers were already low on fuel—an inescapable consequence of high-speed maneuvers—so on October 11, with the fleet continuing to make way to the south, they refueled directly from the tanks of battleships, including the New Jersey. Throwing a head fake intended to fool the enemy on Formosa, Halsey ordered a sixty-one-plane fighter sweep over Aparri Airfield on northern Luzon. The ruse did not succeed, however—radar screens revealed many Japanese scouts headed out from Formosa in wedge-shaped search vectors. The aviators would have to fight their way into Formosan airspace, where the Japanese would be ready and waiting for them. Halsey realized that he had erred in hitting Okinawa first; he should have aimed the first strike at Formosa.
After sunset on October 11, with Task Force 38 again fueled up, the ships turned onto a north-northwest course and began their high-speed night approach. At first light on October 12, the snow-capped peaks of the East Formosan mountains were seen to the west. The first fighter sweep was airborne as the sun peeked over the eastern horizon. More than two hundred outbound Hellcats climbed over the mountains to reach their targets, the big air complexes on the island’s western plain. Descending through cloud cover, the Grummans found about forty Japanese fighters circling at 25,000 feet. Even the greenest of the Hellcat pilots had little to fear from Japanese Zeros, especially at that altitude; in the ensuing fight, all of the defending planes were shot down, or dove into clouds to escape.
This aerial melee was witnessed by the local air commander, Admiral Shigeru Fukudome, commander of the Second Air Fleet, who watched from his headquarters building at the Takao Air Base in southern Formosa. At first, craning his neck to observe the black dots high above, he could not distinguish between American and Japanese planes. When aircraft began falling in flames, he mistook them for Hellcats, and concluded that his pilots were getting the better of the attackers. He clapped his hands and shouted in exultation: “Well done! Well done! A tremendous success!” Moments later, when he saw that all of the falling planes were Japanese, his heart sank: “Our fighters were nothing but so many eggs thrown at the stone wall of the indomitable enemy formation.”61 Fukudome had scrambled all available fighters (about 230 altogether) when coastal radar had picked up the incoming wave of American carrier planes. About half would be shot down by the end of the day. The island’s main airbases were badly mauled in follow-on strikes, and many aircraft were destroyed on the ground. Fukudome’s own headquarters building was reduced to rubble. After the morning’s initial fighter sweep, he had prudently ordered his entire Second Air Fleet staff into an underground bunker, so none was injured or killed.
Counting up the day’s losses, Fukudome reckoned he had fewer than 150 operational aircraft remaining on Formosa. But his Second Air Fleet command also encompassed airbases in the Ryukyu Islands and Kyushu, where he had about four hundred more planes; and he could always call upon Tokyo for reinforcements. Should he throw everything he had at the American fleet offshore, or was it better to conserve his strength to fight another day? Upon assuming this command in June 1944, Fukudome had found most of his aviators “in the training stage.”62 Four months later the situation was only marginally better, and Fukudome had little faith in any but his most elite flyers. The bomber and torpedo plane squadrons were led by veterans, but most airmen in those units had little experience in overwater navigation and had never attacked enemy ships at sea. He did not like their chances of getting through the screen of defending Hellcats and the wall of antiaircraft fire that the Third Fleet warships would erect to defend themselves.
Admiral Soemu Toyoda, commander in chief of the Combined Fleet, happened to be in Formosa at that moment on an inspection tour. He had left his chief of staff, Rear Admiral Ryuˉnosuke Kusaka, with instructions to order the air forces into action if it appeared that the Americans were making another concerted thrust into the western Pacific. When carrier planes struck Okinawa on October 10, Kusaka ordered all forces on alert. Toyoda concluded that a “general decisive battle” was at hand, and he decided to direct the battle from his temporary advanced headquarters on Formosa. That took the matter out of Fukudome’s hands.
As the Japanese high command saw it, they had little choice in the matter. The carrier strikes on Formosa might presage an invasion of that island; or perhaps the next big amphibious landing would occur to the south, in the Philippines. In either event, the big fight was upon them. Given the deteriorating logistical situation, and their ignorance of the enemy’s intentions, they had to move quickly just to ensure they had the opportunity to fight at all, let alone to win. Having long since lost the initiative, the Japanese were now, once again, compelled to react to the enemy’s moves. On October 12, at 9:45 a.m. Tokyo time, Admiral Kusaka issued orders to execute Sho-1 and Sho-2, the Imperial Japanese Navy’s contingency plans for an enemy attack on the Philippines or Formosa.
Given the sorry state of his air forces, Fukudome issued orders to “approach the target with a large number of torpedo planes and bombers under the strongest possible escort of our fighter planes and to resort to a simultaneous attack with that large formation.” In other words, the Japanese dive-bombers and torpedo planes would not fly together in formation as trained, and would not even attempt to carry out choreographed attacks. They would simply make a beeline toward the Third Fleet in a disorderly massed aerial armada, with hopes of overwhelming enemy defenses by sheer weight of numbers. Fukudome later explained, “We had to content ourselves with the hope that we had somehow cast a mold for a large formation attack.”63
Mick Carney monitored the incoming strike on the New Jersey’s radar screens. It was a large blip, encompassing about seventy-five to one hundred planes. Combat air patrol fighters were vectored out to intercept. When the Hellcat pilots looked over the incoming formation, “they began to report a great many different kinds of planes. In other words, this was not a homogeneous, well-integrated tactical outfit, but it was very much of a heterogeneous air mob coming up there, composed of all kinds of damn things.”64 Carney and his colleagues wondered whether this higgledy-piggledy airstrike was a sign that Japanese airpower was nearly finished. Most of the attackers were shot down, others lost to flak, and some shied away and turned back toward Formosa. But smaller formations arrived after dark, almost continuously, skimming in at wavetop altitude.65 Lieutenant Solberg of the Third Fleet intelligence staff saw one enemy plane after another illuminated in the glow of red tracer fire: “Before our eyes they cartwheeled one after the other in flaming arcs and exploded spectacularly in black geysers of smoke and seawater.”66
Task Force 38 came through the night unscathed except for a single destroyer, the Pritchett, which was slightly damaged by friendly antiaircraft fire. Of the approximately one hundred Japanese planes that attacked the American fleet that night, twenty-five returned safely to Formosa. Those who returned reported, optimistically and wrongly, that they had sunk two U.S. warships, including an aircraft carrier, and had damaged two more.67
But the Americans were not yet done with Formosa. At 6:14 a.m. on October 13, with dawn’s gray light rising in the east, Task Force 38 carriers launched the first of four huge fighter sweep-airstrikes against airfields and other installations on the island. The attackers encountered thick cloud cover down to 2,000 feet over most of eastern Formosa, with fogs and mists hugging the ground. The bombers had been told to plaster anything that might be militarily useful to
the enemy—runways, hangars, docks, barracks, warehouses, fuel tanks, shipping—but they also targeted the island’s basic infrastructure, including bridges, railheads, power plants, a dam, and even a sugar refinery.68 Kent Lee, a Hellcat pilot with VF-15 of the Essex, dropped through the cloud ceiling to find a swarm of Japanese Zeros waiting to give battle. It was a confused general melee, with both American and Japanese planes weaving in and out of cloud banks. When they shook their aerial adversaries, the Hellcats strafed ground targets. Lee recalled, “Our mission was to destroy everything that was movable—tank trucks, vehicles, people, airplanes—on these airfields. That we did.”69
Bill Davis of the Lexington’s VF-16 dove from 12,000 feet and found himself in a high-speed head-on run with a Zero. Davis knew he should turn away, because the Zero’s 20mm cannon was powerful enough to take down his F6F Hellcat, but his blood was hot and he kept boring in even as the Zero’s guns began winking like strobe lights. “Finally,” he wrote, “after what seemed like an eternity, I raised the nose of the plane slightly and opened up with all six guns. Immediately I could see large pieces flying off the Zero. He kept coming for a few more moments, then slid under my left wing and blew up.”70 Another pilot in Davis’s squadron returned to the Lexington with chunks of Japanese aircraft debris embedded in his F6F, including “five square feet of Zero wing wedged in [his] wing.”71
The Americans flew a total of 947 sorties that day, with not-inconsiderable losses of forty-five planes to combat and accidents. Clearly the Japanese had flown in air reinforcements overnight, but the newcomers’ average skill was noticeably lower. The American airmen also discovered many Japanese airfields that had not been on their briefing maps and had been overlooked the previous day. Task Group 38.3 aviators reported that they had found fifteen airfields in their assigned sector, when they had been briefed to expect only four.72
As expected, aerial counterattacks began shortly before sunset, as the last of the CAP were recovered aboard the carriers. At sundown (6:26 p.m.), radar indicated low-flying bogeys approaching simultaneously from several directions. Hellcats poleaxed several intruders as the last light drained out of the western sky, but more of the low-flying twin-engine torpedo planes appeared as darkness fell. Leaders dropped floating flares to mark a path for following planes. “The enemy seems quite determined and came in whenever they found us,” noted the Task Group 38.3 war diary. “There were approximately 40 to 50 bogeys in the sector, and judging by gunfire on the horizon the other groups were not overlooked.”73
Aboard the command ships, air staffs lamented that their pilots had apparently left many Formosan airfields in operation. In fact, most of these latest attackers had flown all the way from Kyushu. They were Mitsubishi G4M (Allied codename “Betty”) bombers, which had often proven their effectiveness as night torpedo bombers. They were elements of an elite Japanese mixed navy-army squadron known as the “T” Attack Force. Among the leaders were some of the most seasoned and skilled airmen remaining in the Japanese military. Admiral Toyoda, still commanding from his temporary advanced headquarters on Formosa, had personally ordered the “T” force into action, and he expected them to deal a heavy blow against the American fleet.
Crewmen in Task Force 38 would remember that night as one of the hairiest of the war. Air attacks continued for hours. Green phosphorescent torpedo tracks passed through the heart of the task groups’ circular formations, narrowly missing their intended targets. Antiaircraft fire brought enemy planes down just as they were reaching a position to make torpedo drops. An officer in the Lexington’s hangar recalled a moment shortly after dark when “all hell broke loose. Every antiaircraft gun in the fleet opened fire. Looking out through the open doors on the side of the hangar deck, I saw Japanese planes everywhere.”74 He heard an earsplitting cacophony of large- and small-caliber fire. The sea and sky were lit by tracers and flak bursts. Enemy planes were torn apart and went flaming into the sea.
Four G4Ms penetrated into the heart of Group 4 and attacked the carrier Franklin. Two went down in flames before they could drop their fish, but two actually made good drops, and the Franklin’s crew considered it a miracle that she was not hit. A torpedo missed ahead only because the ship’s skipper ordered her engines backed at maximum. Another passed directly under the ship and was seen to emerge on the far side. A G4M flew low over Franklin’s flight deck and was shot down while attempting its getaway; another was set afire by anticraft fire, but the pilot aimed a suicide crash at the ship’s island. He missed and crashed into a catwalk. Flaming wreckage skidded across the deck and was carried by its own momentum into the sea on the far side.
Only one U.S. warship was struck that night. A G4M attacking Admiral McCain’s Group 38.1 shortly after sunset aimed a torpedo at the carrier Wasp. The weapon missed narrowly but continued on its track and struck the heavy cruiser Canberra, sending flames to the height of her masthead. The blast tore a great, jagged hole in the cruiser’s bow, beneath her armor belt; 4,500 tons of seawater poured into the ship, flooding her engine and fire rooms, and killing twenty-three of her crew. Her engineers judged that there was no chance whatsoever that the Canberra could make way under her own steam.
Halsey now confronted a high-stakes decision. Should he order the Canberra’s crew taken off and the crippled ship scuttled? Or could she be towed out of the combat zone? No one would have faulted him for choosing the first, more conservative option. The Third Fleet could afford to lose a single cruiser, and trying to bring her to safety might expose other ships to risk. But Halsey was obstinate, and he chose to save her. He ordered the cruiser Wichita to take the Canberra under tow. Soon the pair were underway, but at the heartbreaking pace of 4 knots. The distance to Ulithi was 1,300 miles. The retreating ships would be subject to daily and nightly air attacks launched from more than one hundred Japanese airfields in three directions for more than a week.
To suppress the airstrikes that were sure to follow, Halsey ordered another round of fighter sweeps against Formosa on the morning of October 14. Task Group 4 was sent to hit the Japanese airfields on the north coast of Luzon, a defensive measure that would also reassure MacArthur. From his headquarters in Pearl Harbor, Nimitz summoned land-based air units from all over the Pacific to get into the act against Formosa, Luzon, and the Ryukyus. The Army Air Forces launched one hundred B-29s from airfields in China to hit the Takao complex on Formosa.
A force of three cruisers and eight destroyers, mordantly nicknamed “Cripple Division 1,” was detached to accompany the damaged Canberra in her withdrawal. A task group built around the light carriers Cowpens and Cabot was assigned to provide close air protection. Japanese planes dogged this new “CripDiv” throughout the daylight hours of October 14. Ships screening the crippled cruiser dodged aerial torpedoes and fought off strafing attacks.75
Getting the flooded Canberra under tow was no mean feat of seamanship. The Wichita first took her in tow with a 1 1/8-inch plow-steel towing wire, rigged with manila mooring lines, snubbing gear, and chafing gear to take up the strain of sudden jerks without breaking or tearing out the reels. Both ships struggled against wind and sea with a dangerous corkscrewing motion, leading to near-collisions and injuries as sailors were pinned to the deck by the wire. By the early hours of October 14, the crippled ship was pointed in the right direction (southeast) and underway. With a partly flooded cruiser under tow, the salvage group made a fat target. Rainsqualls and a low ceiling worked in the Japanese planes’ favor by enabling them to hide from the orbiting Hellcats. The attackers came in low, under the radar, from many directions at once. Leading planes dropped parachute flares to mark the way for the planes winging in behind them. As on the previous two days, the Japanese suffered heavy air losses, but still threatened to overwhelm the Americans by sheer numbers. The screening ships, circling the lumbering Wichita-Canberra pair at about four times their speed, put up a barrage of antiaircraft fire to protect the two nearly immobilized cruisers.76
At dusk on October 14 came
the day’s worst attack. At 6:45 p.m., the new light cruiser Houston took a devastating torpedo hit amidships that flooded her engineering spaces, cut her power, and seemed likely to break up the ship. The main deck was underwater, said one of the ship’s crew, and “waves were 14 feet high.”77 As she listed heavily to starboard, her captain ordered abandon ship, and destroyers began picking up swimmers. But an hour later, the captain changed his mind, summoned his crew back on board, and called for a tow.78
Several hundred miles east, on the New Jersey’s flag bridge, Halsey paced the deck, chain-smoked, and wondered whether he had made the right call. The day’s air attacks had been much heavier than expected. Now he had two cruisers crippled and under tow. The navy had not taken such a severe beating since 1942, in the Solomons. Radio intelligence (informally designated “Ultra,” short for “Ultra-secret”) had confirmed that the Japanese were pouring air reinforcements into Formosa. Every fifteen minutes or so, Halsey looked at the pin on the chart table that represented the salvage group and confirmed that it was barely moving. The crippling of the Houston, he later wrote, “reawakened my fears that an attempt at salvage would mean throwing good ships after bad.”79
No one could have faulted Halsey for making the conservative decision to “scuttle and skedaddle”—that is, to send the two cripples to the bottom and get the undamaged ships out of the area. But the Dirty Tricks Department had been monitoring news broadcasts by Radio Tokyo, and what they heard piqued their interest. The Japanese were reporting, to their own public and to the world, that their Formosa-based air forces had scored an annihilating victory over the American fleet. The newscasters claimed, in giddy tones and with apparent sincerity, that the Japanese planes had sunk between eight and eleven U.S. aircraft carriers. Successive bulletins added to the chimerical tally until early on the morning of October 15, when Radio Tokyo proudly declared that no fewer than seventeen American carriers had been sent to the bottom. Altogether, it asserted, the Americans had lost thirty-six ships sunk and another seventeen “seriously damaged.”80 The broadcasts included vivid firsthand accounts drawn from interviews with returning Japanese airmen. Military experts provided color commentary. The extraordinary claims had been corroborated by other evidence, they said—such as the diminished intensity of American carrier raids in the area, the “fact” that many castaways had been seen in rafts, the silence of Nimitz’s headquarters concerning results of the battle, and the appearance of China-based B-29s over Formosa, which was interpreted as an act of desperation on the part of the Americans. The tremendous victory off Formosa, said one expert, proved that “the Japanese hold undisputed supremacy in that area. . . . Action of the past few days has given truth that the nearer the enemy approaches Japan proper and Japan’s formidable ring of defenses, the greater will be the losses to the enemy.”81 Radio Tokyo reported that Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher’s flagship had been sunk, and therefore “it is highly probable that the commander of the American task force would by this time be enjoying eternal repose in his watery grave together with many other men under his command.”82
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