Twilight of the Gods

by Twilight of the Gods (retail) (epub)

  As night fell, the northernmost of Halsey’s three carrier task groups, Group 38.3, was shadowed by low-flying Japanese night patrol planes, presumably from airfields on Luzon. The fighter squadrons spent a tense and mostly sleepless night, expecting to be launched in darkness to fight off a night attack. No such attack came, but the ubiquitous night snoopers seemed to presage a big airstrike the following morning, as indeed they did.

  Halsey had hoped for a brief reprieve, so that he could rotate his carrier groups back to Ulithi for rest and replenishment. He had already dispatched Group 1 (McCain) to the atoll, which lay 800 miles east, and had hoped to send Group 4 (Davison) the following day. But there was to be no rest for the weary. Halsey ordered McCain to pause, refuel, and await further orders, and he summoned his three other carrier groups to concentrate close inshore, in waters off southern Luzon and the San Bernardino Strait, and to keep their boilers on the line, ready to make maximum speed. At first light on the twenty-fourth, Task Force 38 launched a huge aerial “reconnaissance in force.” Two-plane sections, comprising one Hellcat and one Helldiver, would each cover a 10-degree “slice of the pie” to a distance of 300 miles. Climbing to altitude, they fanned out in a great arc on diverging headings, ranging from southwest to northwest, taking them over the Visayan Sea, the Sibuyan Sea, the Mindoro Straits, and all the multitude of other seas, straits, bays, and gulfs of the central Philippine archipelago. Another dozen Hellcats were dispatched as “relay planes” to circle at altitude about 100 miles west of the task force, their purpose to serve as radio links to aircraft at or near the far western end of their search vectors. In a pinch they could also defend the task force against enemy airstrikes approaching from the west.

  The morning was clear and beautiful, with scattered high clouds and a thin layer of broken cumulus at 1,500 feet. From 8,000 feet above the earth, the searchers could see nearly a hundred miles in every direction. Below them unfolded a majestic tropical panorama, a repeating pattern of azure shallows, white sandy cays, and mountainous jungle-clad islands. Broad white beaches merged into lush coconut palm groves, lighter greens darkened to deeper greens inland, and steep slopes rose to brown peaks six or seven thousand feet high, or to black volcanic cones with gaping, smoking calderas. The sea was lighter here and darker there, varying by depth, bottom, and angle of light, with lighter cerulean bands running parallel to the beaches, the shallows strewn with coral reefs that went on for miles, and the sea darkening as it deepened in the straits between the islands, its surface glistening in the morning sun. The carrier airmen had no problems matching the landmarks and channels to the charts they carried in their cockpits. Having flown so many missions over the Philippines during the past six weeks, they knew the region well—and they knew precisely where to look for Japanese warships in the relatively few navigable passages through the intricate archipelago.

  Approaching the island of Mindoro at 7:46 a.m., an Intrepid SB2C pilot noted a cluster of blips on his airborne radar. They were about 10 miles south of the island. He turned toward the contact and soon spotted parallel white wakes, the first indication of a big fleet on the move. In another minute he could estimate the composition of the fleet: thirteen destroyers, eight cruisers, and four battleships. The contact was received on the New Jersey at 8:10 a.m. Monitoring the VHF circuits in flag plot, Halsey and his team awaited confirmation and soon had it: a pilot from the Cabot reported: “I see ’em. Big ships.” Two minutes later, the Intrepid’s Bombing Squadron Eighteen commander came on the circuit, loud and clear: “Four battleships, eight heavy cruisers and 13 destroyers, course east, off the southern tip of Mindoro.”24

  That left no doubt: this could only be Kurita’s Center Force, rounding the southern cape of Mindoro and entering Tablas Strait. Kurita’s armada was a bit smaller than it had been before crossing paths with Darter and Dace, but it remained formidable by any measure. Judging from his location and heading, it was a good bet that Kurita intended to force the San Bernardino Strait and sweep down on Leyte Gulf from the north. Halsey was preparing to order an airstrike against him when another contact report arrived, this one from an Enterprise search group about 200 miles south, in the Sulu Sea, southwest of the island of Negros: a column of seven surface warships, including two battleships. This was Nishimura’s Southern Force. Based on its location and northeasterly course, it was easy to surmise that it was bound for Surigao Strait.

  Having gotten off their contact reports, and summoned aerial reinforcements from adjacent search sectors, the Enterprise planes prepared to attack the Southern Force. They climbed to 12,000 feet, the ideal push-over altitude for the SB2Cs. The 14-inch batteries of the two Japanese battleships, elevated to maximum angles, threw up antiaircraft shells that made spectacularly large bursts. These commanded the American aviators’ respect, but none was close enough to bother them. The Hellcats dove first, fired their 5-inch aerial rockets from 2,000 feet altitude, then pulled out of their dives and flew strafing runs over the enemy ships. Behind them were the Helldivers, hurtling down at 70-degree dive angles and releasing 500-pound bombs. Several narrowly missed the Yamashiro, exploding close aboard; one near-miss caused the starboard hull to buckle slightly, and tons of water entered the ship through the ruptured seams, causing her to list to starboard. The flagship’s pagoda superstructure was shot up by the F6Fs’ rockets and strafing runs, and about twenty crewmen were killed. The battleship Fuso was hit by two bombs. The first hit near her No. 2 turret and exploded two decks down; another struck near her stern, smashing through her armored deck and exploding in the wardroom. An aviation fuel tank ignited and started a raging fire that devoured her floatplanes on their catapults. For a time, it looked as though the Fuso might not survive, but her crew contained the damage, and she resumed her station in the formation. The destroyer Shigure was also hit by a 500-pounder, but the bomb glanced off her forward turret and exploded in the sea alongside the ship.

  During this brief, vicious air attack, Admiral Nishimura watched impassively from the bridge of the Yamashiro. A shipmate later recalled, “He looked as cool as a cucumber, and was not perturbed at all. He was completely fearless and had iron nerves. Such a commander instilled composure and bravery to his men.”25 First blood had been drawn against his force, but no ship was forced to turn back, and all remained in column with speed undiminished.

  Judging that the Southern Force was small enough to leave to Kinkaid, Halsey decided to concentrate on the Center Force. Bypassing Mitscher, the Task Force 38 commander, he got on the low-power TBS (“Talk Between Ships”) circuit and gave the order in his own voice: “Strike, Repeat: Strike! Good luck!”26 Here was Halsey as the attention-seeking thespian, putting his own personal stamp on the battle. Circumventing the chain of command that had been set up by his self-effacing predecessor, he chose a phrase that would be recognized throughout the fleet as a callback to his electrifying order at the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands two years earlier: “Attack, Repeat: Attack!”

  At just that moment—8:27 a.m.—a wave of incoming planes appeared on the Task Force 38 radar scopes, approaching from the direction of airfields on Luzon. As expected, the American carriers were going to have to fight off air attacks throughout the morning. As a result, only Admiral Bogan’s Task Group 2 managed to put an outgoing strike into the air: a forty-five-plane formation of dive bombers, torpedo bombers, and fighters from the carriers Intrepid and Cabot.

  Strike leader Bill Ellis led the flight on a slightly circuitous northwesterly course, skirting the island of Cebu (where Japanese airbases were thought to have been reinforced) and then turning south toward Tablas Strait. After a flight of less than an hour, the Americans spotted their quarry in clear weather. From the air they could see the whole fleet—visibility remained excellent over the Sibuyan Sea—but every airman’s eyes were drawn to the two superbattleships, the largest warships in the world, steaming at high speed near the hub of a concentric-circular array of smaller battleships, cruisers, and destroyers.

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p; There were no Japanese airplanes in the vicinity, so the American aviators circled overhead and took their time preparing their attacks. The torpedo-armed TBM Avengers would make “anvil” attacks on both bows of their targets, to be timed closely with the dive-bombing runs of the SB2C Helldivers. Earlier in the war the Americans had struggled to get this choreography right, but in 1944 they had learned to coordinate their attacks with split-second timing.

  On the Japanese ships, buglers sounded general quarters and men hurried to their stations. The Japanese cursed their lack of air protection, but at least their ships had been reinforced with dozens of new antiaircraft batteries. The Yamato and Musashi each mounted about 150 individual AA weapons; collectively, the guns of each ship could throw up 12,000 shells per minute. The smaller battlewagons had about 120 AA guns, the cruisers 90, the destroyers between 30 and 40. In Lingga Roads they had trained intensively to improve their aim and rate of fire. New sanshikidan shotgun-type “beehive” antiaircraft shells had been designed for the 18.1-inch main batteries of the two superships. As the U.S. planes descended and started their attack runs, Kurita distributed a message to all ships: “Enemy attackers are approaching. Trust in the gods and give it your best.”27

  Bill Ellis said it was the greatest volume of antiaircraft fire he had ever seen. The huge main batteries of the battleships had been raised to maximum elevation. As the SB2Cs and Hellcats rolled into their dives, the big naval weapons erupted into fire. The flak bursts were weirdly colorful, Ellis recalled—“pink with streamers, purple with white tracer, and an abundance of white phosphorus and one shell that burst and ejected silvery pellets.”28 The Helldivers dove from the east, the sun behind them; they hurtled down at near-vertical angles, flying through the antiaircraft bursts, turning as the Japanese ships turned, keeping their bombsights fixed on their targets, and releasing their 1,000-pound bombs from a height of about 2,000 feet. Both the Yamato and Musashi were momentarily hidden behind curtains of spray thrown up by near-misses. The Musashi took a hit on her No. 1 main battery turret, but the bomb did little damage to the well-armored weapon, only removing a circular patch of paint. The near-misses apparently loosened the hull plates slightly, causing a sudden surge in leaks, but as the spray subsided, it was clear that the Musashi was forging on with undiminished speed.

  The Avengers made full-power descents from 15,000 feet to about 200 feet above the sea, collecting speed in the process, so that they leveled off at about 300 knots. They bore in toward the Musashi at this great velocity, from both sides simultaneously. “I saw that damned pagoda,” said the torpedo section leader. “But it was the size of the ship that got me. It was so long and you couldn’t miss.”29 From a range of 900 yards, the TBMs dropped their fish and turned to escape. The Musashi maneuvered to evade, and two tracks passed narrowly ahead of her, but the third tore into her starboard hull amidships, throwing up a 200-foot tower of whitewater. The shock of the explosion threw hundreds of her crew off their feet. The ship listed to starboard slightly, but counterflooding quickly returned her to an even keel.

  As the American planes droned away to the east, the Musashi reported that she could still make 24 knots. She and her sister, the Yamato, had been designed to stand up to twenty or more torpedo hits; one was just a pinprick. But the Avengers had also sent a torpedo into the heavy cruiser Miyoko, a more serious blow; she was forced to drop out of the column and turn back for Brunei Bay.

  BACK AT THE U.S. TASK FORCE, the orbiting Hellcats of the CAP had been fighting off Japanese airplanes since early that morning. Three successive waves of planes launched from Luzon airfields, each comprising fifty to sixty aircraft, fell upon Admiral Sherman’s Task Group 3, the northernmost of the Third Fleet’s carrier units. The defenders managed to prevail in a series of one-sided aerial dogfights throughout the morning. The Hellcats were also needed elsewhere—to accompany outgoing airstrikes on the approaching Japanese fleet, and to fly fighter sweeps over enemy airfields—but the attacking swarms were numerous, persistent, and dangerous. If even a single intruder slipped through the fighter screen, it might score a lucky hit on a carrier, and the American fleet was a long way from any friendly port. “Bogies came early and stayed late during this day,” noted Sherman’s war diary.30

  David McCampbell, commander of Air Group 15 on the Essex, was preparing to accompany an outbound airstrike when his squadron received an emergency call to scramble. McCampbell rushed out of the ready room and climbed into his F6F Hellcat, which was being fueled on a catapult. The hoses were disconnected when his tanks were about half-filled, and McCampbell was catapulted off the deck. He did not circle for a rendezvous with the rest of his squadron; he just pointed his nose west and climbed. Seven more F6Fs followed him to 14,000 feet altitude, gradually executing a “running rendezvous” that left them in a workable flight formation. Presently they spotted their adversaries, a composite group of torpedo bombers, dive bombers, and Zero fighters, about fifty planes all told, flying a reciprocal heading at slightly lower altitude. McCampbell radioed the sighting call, “Tally Ho!” Then he climbed, his wingman Roy Rushing climbing with him, to about 18,000 feet. They prepared to make diving attacks on the enemy, but the Japanese now slipped into an old-school defensive maneuver known as a Lufbery Circle, a merry-go-round flight pattern in which each aircraft guarded the plane ahead.

  McCampbell and Rushing waited patiently, circling about 2,000 feet above this whirlpool of enemy planes, “figuring that some were apt to come out of this Lufbery circle, and then we could go to work on them.”31 The standoff lasted almost a full hour. The two men actually smoked cigarettes in their cockpits as they waited. Now and again a Japanese plane unwisely broke out of the formation or tried to climb to altitude. “It was simply a question of watching for an opening, knocking them down, converting into altitude the speed we had obtained in the dive, and then waiting for a couple more to lay themselves open.”32 Eventually the circular formation began to unravel, as Japanese planes turned west and fled the scene. The Hellcats gave chase and continued making kills. Concerned that he might lose count, McCampbell made pencil marks on his dashboard: “I’d cross them when I got to five, and that way kept score.”33 When Rushing ran out of ammunition and McCampbell’s fuel needle was bouncing on empty, they turned for home. There were eleven pencil marks on McCampbell’s dashboard. Just as he landed on the Essex, his engine conked out, and the deck crew had to push his plane forward of the crash barrier.

  Asked how the flight had gone, McCampbell was “almost embarrassed” to answer. He was certain he got nine, maybe as many as eleven. Based on his gun camera footage, he was credited with nine, a single-flight kill record. The seven Essex Hellcats that had sortied with him were credited with twenty-four kills overall. For that remarkable flight, McCampbell was awarded the Medal of Honor.

  But the enemy warplanes kept coming, all morning long. The network of Japanese (once American) airfields north of Manila had become an aerial cornucopia, having been reinforced heavily from other airbases on mainland China and Formosa. The Japanese must not have been aware of the existence to the south of two more carrier task groups, because the whole weight of this day’s airstrikes fell on Ted Sherman’s four flight decks off the east coast of Luzon—the big carriers Essex (his flagship) and Lexington, and the light carriers Princeton and Langley. Sherman worried that the Japanese might eventually wear down his overworked CAP by sheer weight of numbers.

  By mid-morning, dawn’s clear skies gave way to transient weather fronts and rainsqualls. Poor visibility at sea level was a joker in the deck, a capricious factor that could work to either side’s advantage. After a chaotic aerial melee shortly after nine that morning, half a dozen surviving Japanese warplanes eluded the defending American fighters by diving repeatedly into low-lying cloud banks. These enemy strays could be tracked on radar, but the F6F pilots could not shoot what they could not see. The intruders remained in the vicinity, circling the task force at low altitude, presenting an omnipresent danger. Thi
s was white-knuckle warfare, in which fortunes could turn suddenly and blindly in any direction. Helmsmen steered into every passing squall, which could hide ships as well as airplanes. Antiaircraft gunners sent up terrific volleys whenever an enemy aircraft appeared in a break in the clouds, and falling shell casings roiled the sea like a steel hailstorm.

  At 9:49 a.m., the light carrier Princeton’s luck ran out. She was turning into the wind for flight recovery operations when a lone D4Y Suisei (“Judy”) dive bomber dropped out of the cloud ceiling overhead. The plane was already in a high-speed dive, lined up perfectly on the centerline of the ship. Captain William H. Buracker called for hard left rudder, but there was no time to evade. The 250-kilogram bomb descended like a missile from 1,500 feet and struck dead center amidships. It penetrated the flight deck and the hangar deck, and detonated in the bakeshop and the adjoining scullery on the second deck, killing the men stationed there.34

  At first, Buracker was hopeful. “I wasn’t too much concerned,” he said. “I thought it was a small bomb and we could patch up the damage quickly.”35 But a fire in the aft part of the hangar deck fed upon gasoline spilled from a destroyed TBM Avenger. Firefighting and damage control teams were on the job, and the captain maneuvered the Princeton to put the wind on her port bow, intending to contain the blaze in the aft part of the ship. Fire main pressure was soon lost, and firefighters could not keep hoses on the fire. The inferno engulfed five more TBM Avengers on the hangar deck: one by one, their fuel tanks ignited, and at 10:10 a.m., the torpedoes in their bomb bays went up all at once. The tremendous blast caused the forward and aft elevators to pop free of their wells, and black smoke boiled out of the aft hangar bays and flight deck. Smoke spewed out of ventilation shafts in the island and pilot ready rooms. No one could remain in the hangar without masks and oxygen tanks. Hundreds of crewmen stumbled up the ladders and poured out onto the flight deck, their faces and clothing blackened by smoke. They pressed up toward the forward end of the flight deck and out onto the port catwalks, seeking relief from the heat, flames, and smoke radiating from the hangar.