Jap doggedness was admitted, and Commander Third Fleet recognized the possibility that the Center Force might plod through San Bernardino Straits and on to attack Leyte forces, a la Guadalcanal, but Commander Third Fleet was convinced that the Center Force was so heavily damaged that it could not win a decision. . . . Finally, it was calculated that the Third Fleet forces could return in time to reverse any advantage that the Center Force might gain. . . . It was a hard decision to make, and having made it, Commander Third Fleet was gravely concerned until he received word that the Center Force had given up in the face of the valiant efforts of the Seventh Fleet CVE groups.129
Not surprisingly, General MacArthur saw the matter in an entirely different light. It is not known whether he read the lines just quoted from the Third Fleet action report, but this is how he imagined the same scenario:
Should the naval covering forces allow either of the powerful advancing Japanese thrusts to penetrate into Leyte Gulf, the whole Philippine invasion would be placed in the gravest jeopardy. . . . It was a dramatic situation fraught with disaster. . . . Should the enemy gain entrance to Leyte Gulf, his powerful naval guns could pulverize any of the eggshell transports present in the area and destroy vitally needed supplies on the beachhead. The thousands of U.S. troops ashore would be isolated and pinned down helplessly between enemy fire from ground and sea. Then, too, the schedule for supply reinforcement would not only be completely upset, but the success of the invasion itself would be placed in jeopardy. . . . Now I could do nothing but consolidate my troops, tighten my lines, and await the outcome of the impending naval battle.130
If Kurita had been more steadfast, precisely such a calamity might have occurred. The long-term consequences might not have been quite so dire as MacArthur predicted—it is difficult to see how the invasion could have failed, given the state of Japanese air and ground strength. But the reverberations would have reached all the way back to Washington. Every journalist in the Pacific would have pounced on the story, and MacArthur’s censorship apparatus would have let it be told. Regardless of censorship, the facts would have quickly spread to stateside newsrooms, and the story would have broken during the final two weeks of a hotly contested presidential campaign—a campaign in which the challenger had already criticized the incumbent for splitting the Pacific into two commands. On Capitol Hill, where there had been much caterwauling about command disunity in the Pacific, lawmakers would have scheduled hearings. Halsey and the navy would have been blamed for the disaster, justifiably. The massacre of MacArthur’s transport fleet would have been offered as Exhibit A in his case for a unified command in the Pacific. The JCS would have been obliged to revisit the perennially quarrelsome issue under the glare of intense public scrutiny.
Privately at the time, and publicly after the war, Halsey blamed his misunderstanding with Kinkaid on a faulty command setup. He told Nimitz in a private “My dear Chester,” written a week after the battle, that “two autonomous tactical fleet commands cannot be justified from a naval viewpoint. Cooperation can never be a substitute for command in a naval action, and the further employment of the Seventh Fleet in conjunction with but separate and independent from the Pacific Fleet has all the elements of confusion, if not disaster.”131
Nimitz made no reply to these remarks, or at any rate none can be found. But one can imagine what he must have been thinking. None of Halsey’s errors on October 24 could be directly attributed to the command setup. Having often skirmished with MacArthur during his eighteen-month stint as SOPAC commander, Halsey was aware of the obstacles to a unified Pacific command. The situation remained precisely as it had been in April 1942, when the two-theater system had been negotiated by King and Marshall. MacArthur would resign before being subordinated to any admiral, but the admirals were equally unwilling to be subordinated to MacArthur, considering him unqualified to command the Pacific Fleet. The dual-command arrangement was inelegant and even wasteful, but it had functioned adequately for two-and-a-half years, and it still seemed to offer the “least worst” solution to the impasse. Halsey was officer-class—four-star flag officer-class—which meant that he was expected to act as a caretaker of the navy’s institutional interests, to show finesse in managing rivalries with other services and theaters, and to leave no opening for political mischief. The higher dimension of Halsey’s failure at Leyte Gulf is revealed in that light—he nearly wrecked the consensus that had secured the navy’s control of its own crown jewels, the Pacific Fleet.
In the end, of course, no such crisis occurred, because Kurita’s retreat had saved the day. There was some grumbling against Halsey in the Seventh Fleet, and even in the Third Fleet—but those sour notes were muffled by the louder celebrations of a historic Allied victory. MacArthur issued a triumphant communiqué on October 26. Secretary Forrestal, determined that the navy should share the next morning’s headlines, released Halsey’s earlier message of that date declaring that the Japanese fleet had been “beaten, routed, and broken by the Third and Seventh Fleets.”132 At a White House press conference, FDR read Halsey’s message aloud, and it was quoted in hundreds of American newspapers the following day. In the eyes of the American people, Halsey now loomed larger than ever before.
No one was interested in letting a public feud ruin the moment. Kinkaid scrubbed his action report of any direct criticism aimed at Halsey. When one of Nimitz’s subordinates drafted a report critical of Halsey’s decisions, Nimitz brusquely instructed the man, “Tone it down.” When a number of SWPA officers disparaged Halsey’s performance at a meeting that week, General MacArthur cut them off: “That’s enough. Leave the Bull alone. He’s still a fighting admiral in my book.”133
Many have contended that Halsey kept his job because his fame and popularity were valuable to the navy. No direct evidence for this claim can be found in communications between Nimitz and King, or in their later interviews and writings. So far as is known, it was never cited by Secretary Forrestal, Admiral Leahy, or any other member of the Joint Chiefs. Nevertheless, it is plausible. The Leyte battle and its aftermath coincided with Forrestal’s drive to upgrade the navy’s public relations. For the rest of the war, Halsey’s blustering personal style and his “Kill More Japs” sloganeering were featured widely in press accounts and newsreels. At a Washington press conference in February 1945, Halsey boasted that the Third Fleet had wrested command of the sea from the “bestial apes.” He added: “We have knocked down their planes, we have burned them, we have drowned them. And they’re just as pleasant to burn as they are to drown.”134
Halsey retained a fund of goodwill with his colleagues and superiors, for whom the disasters and emergencies of 1942 remained fresh in memory. Often in the past, his fearless and rousing leadership had seemed reckless, but it had succeeded. He had earned the right to a few mistakes. Relieving him of command would only draw unwelcome attention to the near-disaster in Leyte Gulf. And who would replace him? Four-star officers who possessed the requisite seniority and were qualified for the job were vanishingly few. Mitscher could have been fleeted up, but he was overdue for a long rest, and his replacement (John McCain) was still learning the ropes. King and Nimitz apparently discussed the possibility of relieving Halsey, at least temporarily, but quickly discarded the idea. The two-platoon rotation system, alternating every few months between Halsey and Spruance, would remain intact through the end of the war—and Halsey (but not Spruance) would eventually receive a fifth star.
THE COMMAND CONTROVERSIES of Leyte Gulf had a long and tortuous postwar afterlife. Halsey could never quite bring himself to acknowledge that the Japanese had deliberately set out to lure him north, and that the aircraft carriers of Ozawa’s Northern Force had been nothing more than bait. That self-serving conviction somehow persisted even after copies of Plan Sho were recovered and translated, and even after Ozawa, Kurita, Toyoda, and others told the whole story to U.S. interrogators after the war. The role of the Japanese carriers, Ozawa told the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, was strictly lim
ited: “A decoy, that was our first primary mission. . . . The chief concern was to lure your forces further north; we expected complete destruction.”135 More than six years after that important disclosure, Halsey still claimed to be perplexed by the failure of Ozawa’s carriers to put up a better fight. In an article for the U.S. Naval Institute journal Proceedings, he wrote: “A curious feature of this engagement is that the air duel never came off. Our strikes found scarcely a handful of planes on the enemy carriers’ decks and only fifteen on the wing.”136
A little humility would have gone a long way at this late stage of Halsey’s distinguished career. He was a five-star fleet admiral, one of only four in history, a position that entitled him to active duty status with full salary, an office, lodging allowance, and a car and driver until the end of his life. Through the sale of his memoirs and a lucrative tour on the public speaking circuit, he became rich. Seats on corporate boards added another generous source of income. “Bull” Halsey was a major celebrity with a devoted public following, often appearing on television in the 1950s. He could have remained aloof from the judgments of historians. It would have cost him little to acknowledge error at Leyte Gulf—indeed, it probably would have enhanced rather than diminished his legacy. He might have said publicly what he once admitted privately—that he wished Spruance had been in command at Leyte Gulf, and he (Halsey) in command at the Battle of the Philippine Sea.137 But until his death in 1959, the proud old fleet admiral fought a losing rearguard action against the hardening judgment of history.
During the war, he had counted Samuel Eliot Morison a friend. In 1950, however, Morison delivered a lecture to naval officers in which he called Halsey’s decision to leave San Bernardino Strait unguarded a “blunder.” Halsey heard about the remark through the grapevine and confronted Morison in an angry letter. The historian agreed not to use the term “blunder” again, but he did not back off his thesis. In future lectures, he told Halsey, he would substitute the term “error of judgment.” Considering this reply unsatisfactory, the admiral called Morison a “splendid Monday morning quarterback.”138
A frosty silence followed until 1958, when Leyte—the twelfth volume of Morison’s series on the naval operations of World War II—appeared in print. In it, Morison bluntly concluded that Halsey had fallen for the Japanese ploy to lure him north, and that he was chiefly responsible for the near-debacle at Samar. The admiral, incensed, tried to rally his old Third Fleet officers to launch a counterattack. “My idea is to get the son of a bitch’s cojones in a vice and set up on them,” he wrote one of the Dirty Tricksters. “I hope you will join me.”139 Some were willing to join in such a campaign, but Mick Carney (who had subsequently risen to the navy’s top rung, chief of naval operations) threw cold water on the project. Morison’s reputation was unassailable, warned Carney, and “No blast of yours, however justifiable, will destroy that structure; it would far more likely boomerang.”140 He suggested that Halsey instead file a statement of refutation with the Naval History office.
The old fleet admiral apparently took his former chief of staff’s advice. But a few months later he added another leading scholar to his blacklist. E. B. Potter, a professor at the Naval Academy, had asked Halsey to read the manuscript of a forthcoming book. Not liking the professor’s account of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the admiral sent this peevish and even menacing reply: “I do not intend to allow grossly wrong statements about my thoughts to go into a book which will be used to teach midshipmen, without making trouble for you.”141
In Halsey’s declining years, the nickname “Bull” gained wider currency. Halsey had never much liked it, even when it was fixed upon him by an adoring press and public in 1942. It had never caught on in his Nouméa headquarters or among his Third Fleet staff. MacArthur must never have received the word, because he had used the nickname almost exclusively when referring to Halsey, and even when addressing Halsey directly. The admiral had let it stand, probably because MacArthur seemed to mean it with sincere respect and affection. But now, in his later years, Halsey refused to answer to the “fake, flamboyant” nickname.142 He told a friend, “Only those people who don’t know me call me Bull.”143
It was no wonder that Halsey rejected the nickname. It was decidedly double-edged, and grew more so on reflection. The bull is respected for its size, strength, and aggression, but not for its tactical acumen. The bull is stubborn, unreasoning, “bull-headed.” It goes about its work heedlessly, “like a bull at the gate.” Other large beasts are clumsy in tight quarters, but it is the bull that is most dreaded by the world’s china shop proprietors. Every mammal leaves its feces on the ground, but it is the bull’s that has a revered place in American slang, signifying “nonsense, lies, or exaggeration.”
The bull chases the matador’s cape while failing to notice his sword. Seeing red, the bull lowers its horns and charges, confident of striking down this feeble antagonist. But in the end, it is almost always the bull’s bloody carcass that is dragged from the bullring, while the matador leaves on his feet.
* Hagen believed his ship was hit by a 14-inch salvo fired by a Kongo-class battleship. Most accounts have endorsed this view, crediting the Kongo. Based on his analysis of Japanese action reports, and the Yamato’s log entry at 0725 claiming a fatal hit on a cruiser, Robert Lundgren builds a persuasive case that the Yamato fired the salvo. (Lundgren, The World Wonder’d, pp. 69–74.) In 1944, the Americans did not know that the Yamato mounted 18-inch guns, or even that such weapons existed. If Hagen had known, he might have concluded that the puppy had been hit by a train instead of a truck.
† In Halsey’s memoir, he contends that he did “not know the truth for several weeks.” He may have meant that he did not receive Nimitz’s personal assurance that no insult was intended until the latter visited the fleet in late December. Halsey and Bryant, Admiral Halsey’s Story, p. 220.
Chapter Seven
IN AN AWARD-WINNING ESSAY FOR THE U.S. NAVAL INSTITUTE PUBLISHED after the war, Captain J. C. Wylie Jr. argued that Japan had been beaten by a synergetic combination of “sequential” and “cumulative” operational strategies. The first was represented by the westward naval-amphibious offensive, a sequence of battles and invasions carrying Allied forces ever closer to Japan. The sequential campaign could be diagrammed with arrows on a map, indicating the territorial gains of fleets and armies. It lent itself to a conventional chronological narrative. It was intuitively graspable, even to laymen without formal military training or education. To those who had followed the war in the newspapers, or read the early campaign histories, the sequential campaign was the story of the Pacific War.
By contrast, according to Wylie, a cumulative operational strategy does not involve territorial offensives and pitched battles, but a “less perceptible minute accumulation of little items piling one on top of the other, until at some unknown point the mass of calculated actions may be large enough to be critical.”1 It weaponizes the logic of “death by a thousand cuts.” In the Pacific, cumulative strategies chipped away at the economic and political foundations of Japan’s imperial empire. One example was propaganda, sometimes called “psychological warfare,” aimed at foreign peoples under Japanese occupation, Japanese civilians, the rank and file of Japan’s armed forces, and eventually even the senior leadership circle in Tokyo. Another was strategic bombing. Beginning in November 1944, a sustained bombing campaign was launched against Japan’s industrial heartland, aimed at crippling major war industries. Eventually it laid waste to most of the nation’s urban areas. Most tellingly, U.S. air and naval power (especially submarines) were deployed against Japan’s overseas shipping routes, in a campaign that cumulatively throttled the nation’s warmaking potential. By 1945, quite apart from the sequential territorial gains of MacArthur’s and Nimitz’s twin offensives, the Japanese economy was running on fumes and sputtering toward a final breakdown.
More than any other industrial nation, and certainly more than any other major combatant of the Second World War, J
apan lacked self-sufficiency in raw materials. The home islands were all but destitute of natural resources, offering little or no oil, iron ore, bauxite, or other useful minerals, and only limited reserves of timber and low-grade coal. Since the Meiji period, when Japan had first aspired to become the leading power in Asia, the chief aim of its foreign policy had been to secure access to these basic commodities. Through the 1920s, foreign trade had met the requirements, and Japanese diplomacy was shaped by the need to protect and sustain that trade. But in the 1930s, the era of Japan’s “dark valley,” the ascendant militarist-imperialist regime was determined to seize and colonize overseas territories that could supply the necessary inputs to its industrial economy and war machine.
In 1931, the invasion of resource-rich Manchuria locked down a copious supply of iron ore and coking coal for Japanese steel mills. But Japan had remained helplessly dependent on the United States and certain European colonial territories in Southeast Asia for imports of crude oil, rubber, bauxite, copper, zinc, and other ferro-alloys and nonferrous metals. Japan’s most important foreign suppliers—the United States, Britain, and the Netherlands—were aligned against Nazi Germany. Even so, in September 1940, Tokyo joined with Berlin and Rome to form the Axis alliance, a rash decision that triggered an onslaught of trade sanctions. Prior to 1940, the United States had supplied 74 percent of Japan’s scrap metal imports, 93 percent of its copper imports, and (most vitally) about 80 percent of its oil imports. In 1940, the Roosevelt administration began imposing embargos on these and other goods, and these measures escalated steadily in scope and severity. In August 1941, the West Texas crude oil spigots were entirely shut off. With no other viable source of oil, Japan was forced to tap into a finite and diminishing domestic stockpile. More than any other single factor, that crisis prompted the Tojo cabinet’s fateful decision to launch the Pacific War.
Twilight of the Gods Page 40
