Twilight of the Gods
Page 23
Halsey also came in for some personal taunts. Commentaries in the newspaper Mainichi Shinbun recapped Halsey’s past boasts and threats to take revenge on the Japanese people. The sinking of his fleet, said a front-page editorial, was “Heaven’s punishment to the Yankees who have human faces but beastly minds with an insatiable greed for world domination.”83 Halsey was amused to learn from the radio that a zookeeper at Ueno Zoo in Tokyo had prepared a cage for the admiral in the monkey house. “The Japs are losing their grip,” he commented to his staff, “even with their tails.”84
Why did the returning Japanese pilots report such risibly inflated results? The “T” Force airmen had attacked in darkness on the night of October 13, when they could not closely observe the results. Double- and triple-counting of apparent torpedo hits was a problem even in daylight; at night it was endemic. A dozen pilots might see the same “pillar of fire” and count it as a torpedo hit. Flying into a maelstrom of antiaircraft fire, the flyers were temporarily blinded by the colorful bursts. Many Japanese planes shot down among the ships of the American task force remained afloat and burning before sinking. These fires were easily mistaken for burning ships. Local air commanders took their reports at face value, and passed them along to IGHQ in Tokyo. Fukudome wrote after the war: “Airmen, aspiring to fame, were likely to exaggerate their achievements. Night attacks resulted in universal exaggeration.”85
Most interesting to Halsey and his staff were references to a mopping-up operation. Radio Tokyo reported that the Japanese fleet was in pursuit of the beaten and retreating remnants of the U.S. fleet, intending to sink them before they could get to safety: “The Japanese air force, in close teamwork with surface units, are now attacking the doomed enemy task force. . . . The remaining enemy warships are now all doomed to perish at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.”86 All the hullabaloo might be nothing more than propaganda. But the voices on the radio seemed convinced of the truth of their own reports. Moreover, new “Ultras” from Pearl Harbor confirmed that a fleet of surface warships was preparing to put to sea via the Bungo Strait to chase and mop up whatever was left of the Third Fleet.
It dawned on Halsey’s staff that they might have an opportunity to exploit the enemy’s misguided optimism. Carney said of the crippled Canberra: “She was really a dry fly, in my book. She was a fine floating lure.”87 He and Captain Ralph Wilson, the fleet operations officer, devised a plan and sold it to Halsey. The crippled ships would be dangled as bait. With a little luck, the American carriers might spring a trap on the pursuing Japanese naval force, scoring a wipeout victory before MacArthur’s forces even hit the beaches on Leyte. Halsey assented, and new orders were transmitted to the fleet from the New Jersey’s soaring radio masts. Task Groups 38.2 and 38.3 were positioned about 100 miles east of the cripples, far enough to evade detection by Formosa- or Okinawa-based search planes but close enough to ambush a Japanese naval force should it come into range. The rest of the Third Fleet withdrew to a safe distance and commenced refueling from fleet oilers. Halsey advised Nimitz of his plans, and the Pacific Fleet chief ordered all available patrol planes in the region to search for the enemy ships: “Suspicion exists [that] enemy surface force may have departed Empire area to mop up on Blue [U.S.] cripples withdrawing [from] Formosa strikes. Extend search to . . . cover assumed enemy approach from Bungo Channel to approximate position.”88 Halsey also let MacArthur know that he was preparing to come to grips with a major portion of the Japanese navy, and that in view of that contingency, “all strikes on the Philippines were withdrawn until further notice.”89 Halsey told Admiral DuBose in the Wichita to send out a series of mock distress signals. CripDiv 1 was given an even more telling nickname: BaitDiv 1.
Saving the two flooded, dead-in-the-water cruisers would have presented a challenge even if waves of attacking planes had not been descending upon them from hour to hour. The officers and men of BaitDiv 1 knew they were expendable. Watching the slothlike pace of the towed ships, one skipper of the division remarked, “Now I know how a worm on a fishhook must feel.”90 For the towing ships, absorbing the shock of 16,000 tons bucking and lurching on long swells required a mastery of “old-fashioned marlinspike seamanship,” with sophisticated rigs of towing chocks and pelican stoppers.91 The work was perilous, and several crewmen were badly injured. The cruiser Boston first began towing the Houston during a night so dark that the Houston could not be seen from the Boston’s stern even while under tow. The ocean tug Pawnee rendezvoused with the group on October 15 and took over the job of towing the Houston. Miraculously, it seemed to the crews of the salvage group, no Japanese warplanes bothered them that day, or the night following. But on the sixteenth their luck ran out, as a flight of 107 fighters and bombers from Formosa attacked at midday.
The combat air patrol F6Fs of the Cabot and Cowpens shot down about fifty enemy planes, but a few managed to get through the screen. One dropped an aerial torpedo aimed at the Houston’s stern. The fish ran down her wake and struck almost directly between the rudder posts, flipping the hangar hatch up into the sky like a bottle top. Twenty sailors were lifted off their feet and pitched into the sea. The aviation gasoline tanks in the hangar bulkheads ignited, and fires raged on the fantail. The tug Pawnee continued towing throughout the attack and its aftermath, the slack never leaving the cable. The Houston’s captain chose to keep fighting for his ship’s life. The 12,000-ton ship was flooded with about 6,300 tons of seawater, but she kept crawling toward Ulithi. All but about one hundred men of her crew were taken off. She was down very deep in the water, with a draft of 32 feet and an 8-degree starboard list.92 She rolled sickeningly, almost onto her beam-ends, as green seas washed across her decks.
Admiral Toyoda had given initial orders to dispatch a cruiser-destroyer squadron from the Inland Sea, under the command of Vice Admiral Kiyohide Shima, to hunt down the American cripples. In the end, however, the naval high command refused to swallow its own codswallop. On the morning of October 14, as search flights blanketed the area east and south of Formosa, reports confirmed that many undamaged American warships remained in the vicinity. Moreover, the punishing carrier airstrikes launched against Luzon that day proved that the American fleet must be largely intact. Sensing a trap, Toyoda recalled the Shima force to the Amami Islands north of Okinawa, where it would refuel and put to sea again on October 18 to fulfill its role in the pending Sho-1 operations to defend the Philippines.
That concluded the four-day “Air Battle of Formosa.” According to Fukudome’s figures, he had lost 329 Formosa-based aircraft. Of these, 179 had sortied to attack the U.S. fleet and failed to return; the others had been destroyed on the ground or in the air over Formosa. At Takao Air Base, the main air installation on the island, barely a structure was left standing and barely a single airplane was left undamaged. At least two hundred additional planes based on Kyushu, Okinawa, and Luzon had been destroyed, for a total of more than five hundred Japanese warplanes lost between October 10 and October 17. Since the start of Halsey’s Third Fleet operations six weeks earlier, the Japanese had lost approximately 1,200 aircraft in the region.
After a grueling ten-day passage, the Canberra and Houston and their salvage group limped into Ulithi Atoll on the morning of October 27. Both cruisers were returned to the United States for extensive repairs, and both would be returned to service in the postwar navy.
The final day of the Formosa battle was followed, one day later, by the arrival off Leyte of the first elements of MacArthur’s invasion fleet. At dawn on October 17, lookouts at the Suluan lighthouse (at the entrance to Leyte Gulf) radioed a sighting report: a squadron of minesweepers was entering the channel. When the report reached Toyoda about an hour later, he sent a Sho-1 alert to all commands. The various elements of the Japanese fleet, flung across an axis of several thousand miles between Japan and Malaya, began hurried preparations to put to sea.
Plan Sho had been conceived in desperation, but even the most pessimistic planners at Imperial General Headquarters in
Tokyo had not anticipated the loss of so much Japanese airpower immediately prior to the arrival of the U.S. invasion fleet. Replacement airplanes and aircrews were pouring into the Philippines from Japan and China, but what chance did they have against the American carrier airmen, given the fate of their recently slaughtered comrades? Though they could not afford to admit it, either to their subordinates or perhaps even to themselves, the Japanese admirals knew that the last big naval confrontation of the Pacific War was upon them. They would fight it without effective air support, and therefore they would lose it—but at any rate their real mission was not to win at all, but to go down fighting in a final blaze of glory.
Chapter Four
THROUGHOUT THE SUMMER OF 1944, TOKYO was hot, dirty, and discontented. The city’s once vibrant commercial districts were shabby, colorless, and half-deserted. Michio Takeyama, a boy during the war years who later became one of Japan’s most celebrated novelists, recalled that “suffocating winds blew through town, and ash-like dust piled up on rooftops. Even around Shibuya whole rows of shops were closed and roads dug up, and few people were to be seen, except that here and there, in front of food stores, there were long lines.”1
Food had become a universal preoccupation. Famine had not yet touched the country, but for ordinary citizens it took planning and effort to find enough to eat. One could see it in one’s neighbors’ faces: many Japanese had grown visibly emaciated. Takeyama noted that his school headmaster appeared to be wasting away week by week, so that he scarcely looked like the same man. “His jaw narrowed; his neck shrank, pathetically. With unruly white hair, eyes glittering beneath baggy eyelids, gradually wrinkling skin, he often looked like an old carved mask.”2 People tired easily and had less energy to face the day; at the same time, however, the daily effort required to obtain food began to crowd out other concerns. One source estimates that the average Japanese family spent five hours per day shopping for food or standing in ration lines. Shops remained shuttered all week, until an occasional delivery of rationed food arrived—and then they would open only until the inventory gave out. People who had waited in line for hours were often sent away empty-handed. The practice of begging had been virtually unknown in prewar Japan, but now even well-dressed people were seen imploring their fellow citizens to share a morsel. The struggle to put food on the family table taxed the time and energy of women, especially—and many of those same women ate less in order to feed their children and husbands, which in turn deprived them of energy to brave the shops and ration lines.
City dwellers traveled out to the country in hopes of buying food directly from farmers. But the commuter trains were groaning under the crush of a much-enlarged wartime ridership, so the journey was always an exhausting struggle. Train stations looked like refugee camps. People waited hours to catch a train, perhaps bribing a station attendant for a ticket. Once aboard, they found themselves squashed into a seething throng. Broken ribs were common, and in a few widely reported cases, infants suffocated to death. The compartments were shabby and filthy, the upholstery threadbare and ripped open, hanging straps gone from the overhead rails, windows broken, floor tiles torn up. Overcrowded trains charged through stations without stopping, for fear that those waiting on the platforms would try to fight their way into the cars.
An urbanite who braved the ordeal and reached the countryside entered a bucolic landscape of hills and rice terraces arranged in jigsaw patterns around sleepy hamlets. In this serene, picturesque setting, she detected no visible sign that the nation was waging a war for its survival. But she found the farmers insolent and brazen. They charged scandalous prices and expected the buyers to make signs of exaggerated gratitude. Then it was straight back to the train platforms and the desperate and degrading struggle to return to the city.
White rice had been the foundation of the Japanese diet since time immemorial, but now it could rarely be found even at inflated prices. Wartime rationed rice was adulterated with dried noodles, barley, soybeans, or sweet potatoes, and as the war dragged on those inferior substitutes grew steadily as a proportion of the allocation.3 To stretch this rice-like farrago, people tossed it with wheat flour and sautéed it in oil to make a much-despised dish called “nukapan.” Fresh meat and fish were vanishing from the rationing rolls, to be replaced by tofu, vegetables, and crispy dried sardines called “niboshi.” For dietary variety, people made do with whatever they might find in the markets on any given day—descending the culinary scale, eggplants, fresh radishes, dried radishes, bean sprouts, pumpkin squash, bamboo shoots, and chrysanthemum leaves. Fresh eggs were almost never to be found; instead they mixed powdered “shanghai eggs” with water to make a sickly egg-like gruel. Ham was replaced by something called “whale ham,” and when bakers could not obtain wholesale flour, they produced a breadlike substitute using sweet bean paste. Thus the popular Japanese lunchtime sandwich, a tidy square of white bread and ham, was supplanted by an imposter that contained neither ham nor bread.
As the quality and quantity of rationed food declined, the black market became essential to sustain the lives of ordinary Japanese. By the last year of the war, “Mr. Black” probably represented about half of the nation’s retail sales. The disparity between official and black-market prices widened considerably in mid-1944, so that nearly every category of foodstuff commanded tenfold its official listed price. In March 1944, black-market rice commanded fourteen times the legal listed price; in November 1944, it fetched forty-four times the official price.4 For certain rare items, the prices quoted were so astronomical that people wondered whether any of their fellow citizens could afford them. In Tokyo, in late July 1944, tomatoes were offered for the previously unimaginable price of fifty-seven sen, and peaches fetched the breathtaking price of 1.25 yen.5 Skyrocketing costs inevitably aroused class resentments. Rich or well-connected Japanese were visibly better fed than their poorer neighbors. The amount of extra flesh on a person’s face and body was a measure of his privilege, and perhaps of his corruption. Tsunejiro Tamura, a seventy-four-year-old man living in Kyoto, complained in his diary: “The rich can do anything with the money they have, and they buy up the lower classes’ goods and food and circulate them back to the black market. . . . It’s the age of the strong eating the weak.”6
Under the close scrutiny of an omnipotent police state, the Japanese people offered no organized resistance during the war, and precious little public dissent of any kind. Indeed, they gave signs of continued support for the war and its aims. Since the nation’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the great mass of Japanese had grown accustomed to war as a natural and quasi-permanent condition. Many did not think it strange or immoral to conquer and subjugate foreigners, and they took hotblooded pride in the overseas triumphs of their military forces. But by the late summer of 1944, they were beginning to grasp that the Pacific War was essentially different. As the Allies advanced westward across the Pacific, anyone who could read a map could see that Japan was losing territory. One by one, entire island garrisons had been annihilated as gyokusai, “smashed jewels.” This was nothing like the war in China. It was a total war against an enemy resolved to occupy and disarm Japan, an enemy who possessed the power and will to do so—and the only alternative to complete destruction might be an appeal to the conqueror’s mercy. As that realization dawned on the population, defeatist sentiments proliferated. The process hit an inflection point in July 1944, with the simultaneous fall of Saipan and the ouster of Prime Minister Hideki Tojo.
In low voices or secret diaries, ordinary citizens were asking hard questions about the reliability of official reports. In the quest to separate fact from propaganda, they inevitably traded in rumors. The police went to great lengths to suppress rumormongering, but their efforts were largely futile, because the public now had every reason to fear for their safety and the nation’s future. While outright defiance was rare, there were increasing signs of passive resistance to the regime. Ordinary citizens were more likely to complain about official corruption an
d the rapacity of the black markets. They mocked local authorities during the mandatory civil defense and air-raid drills, and gave only the minimum effort required. Tardiness, absenteeism, shirking, and “calling in sick” were common syndromes both in the workplace and at mandatory neighborhood events. According to the Japanese industrial journal Diamond, the daily absentee rate in munitions factories was 10 percent in 1943, rising to 15 percent in 1944.7 Crime, vandalism, and juvenile delinquency were on the rise: many Japanese noted and lamented the corrosion in basic manners, kindliness, and honest dealing. Enthusiasm waned at the quasi-obligatory patriotic rallies, parades, and send-off parties for departing military recruits. A mother whose son had died in the war refused to visit Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, where the spirits of the nation’s war dead were laid to rest. “When those who have lost a precious child go to the Yasukuni Shrine, they’re made to squat on the white sand like beggars, and they have to bow their heads,” she declared. “I will never go to that stupid place!”8