Twilight of the Gods

by Twilight of the Gods (retail) (epub)

  Seconds ticked away as the torpedoes ran toward the target. Tension in the conning tower rose. Enright kept the circular periscope field trained on the Shinano. As the first torpedo’s estimated runtime ticked down to zero, he feared it must have missed, or was a dud. But then: “In the glass I saw a huge fireball erupt near the stern of the target. Then we heard the noise of the first hit, carried to us through the water. Then Archerfish felt the shockwaves created by the 680 pounds of torpex explosive.”60 Shouting in exultation, Enright kept the scope up for eight more seconds and was rewarded with the sight of a second fireball, fifty yards forward of the first.

  Swinging the scope, Enright saw one of the destroyers turning toward the Archerfish. He slapped the handles against the shaft, ordered down scope, flood negative, and rig for depth charge. As the ballast tanks flooded, the bow grew heavy, and the deck tilted forward as gravity pulled the boat down. The hydroplanes bit into the water as her forward momentum increased, forcing her down at an even steeper angle. The Archerfish passed through 400 feet depth before leveling off.

  The depth charges began: sharp blasts, loud and unnerving but not especially close. Enright estimated that the nearest detonation was 300 yards away. The Japanese seemed to be guessing. After fifteen minutes of scattering “ash cans” at random, they gave up the counterattack. The submarine’s sonar tracked the destroyers as they headed away to the southwest.

  For three hours the Archerfish crept through the depths, running slowly and silently. Dead-reckoning back to the location where he believed he had sunk his target, Enright brought her up to periscope depth. It was 6:10 a.m. Raising the scope and sweeping all the way around the horizon, he saw nothing but sea. It was a bright, sunny morning with moderate breezes. The Archerfish submerged again and remained down all day, surfacing again at 5:22 p.m. to radio the heady news to Pearl Harbor: she had torpedoed an enemy aircraft carrier.61

  SINCE 11:00 THE PREVIOUS NIGHT, it had been clear in Captain Abe’s mind that the Shinano was being shadowed by an enemy submarine wolfpack. Submerged predators might be anywhere, in any direction, or in every direction. There was nothing to do, he concluded, but maintain brisk speed and keep zigzagging erratically. He had been on the verge of ordering another “zig” just as the Archerfish’s torpedoes tore into the starboard side of his ship.

  The first hit just forward of the stern, about 10 feet beneath the waterline, tossing up a pillar of orange-red fire. Three more struck in quick succession, raising three more spikes of fire, each one forward of the last. The blasts flooded compartments on three decks, including three boiler rooms, and killed dozens of sailors asleep in their bunks. Fuel lines ignited and an oil tank ruptured. Damage control parties rushed to put hoses on the flames, but the blaze obstinately traveled into nearby regions of the ship. Hundreds of stretchers were rushed to the sick bay, quickly overwhelming the medical staff. Within minutes of the impact, the Shinano was listing 10 degrees to starboard.

  Like her half-sisters the Yamato and Musashi, the supercarrier had been built to withstand torpedo hits. A month earlier, in the Sibuyan Sea, the Musashi had absorbed almost twenty before sinking. Abe was a bit surprised at how quickly the Shinano had listed to starboard, but he assumed that the list could be corrected by counterflooding, and was confident of keeping her afloat so long as she suffered no fresh blows. Wary of the imagined wolfpack, the skipper rang up the engine room and told his engineers that he needed every possible knot of speed to clear the submarine-infested area. The Shinano and her destroyers did not pause; they forged ahead with speed undiminished.

  Below, along corridors adjoining the stricken area of the ship, a fearsome keening sound rang out from watertight doors, pipes, and ventilation ducts. It was the song of compressed air being forced through watertight seals, caused by the unstoppable pressure of tons of seawater entering the ship through the four gaping breaches in the hull. “As we worked we could hear squeaks and shutters from the tortured metal under at least one hundred tons of pressure,” recalled a member of the crew. “The rivets were shaking and appeared almost ready to burst free from their holes.”62 Jets of water shot through cracks in the seals of watertight hatches. Piping and ventilation ducts burst open. The Shinano’s mighty engines, driving her forward at better than twenty knots, were working indirectly to force thousands of tons of the Pacific Ocean into the starboard side of the ship. Even after pumping 3,000 tons of seawater into port-side bilges, the Shinano leaned farther to starboard. When the list reached 15 degrees, sailors were forced to brace themselves against starboard bulkheads.

  Captain Abe’s reassuring voice came on the loudspeakers. He informed the crew that there was no danger of capsize, but exhorted the pumping teams to do everything they could to correct the list.

  Speed fell gradually until the Shinano was making only ten knots. Flooding and fires spread wantonly, threatening to overwhelm hydraulic pumping stations. Hundreds of men, standing by their posts as ordered, were trapped behind jammed hatches and crushed bulkheads. As the sea broke into their compartments, they drowned. Belatedly realizing that the Shinano was in a desperate fight for her life, Captain Abe sent an S.O.S. signal to Yokosuka. Then he turned the crippled ship north, hoping to run her aground on the nearest island.

  The first faint glow of dawn rose above the eastern horizon. The moon set in the west. The wounded carrier limped north, her three escorts hugging her close. Her great superstructure and funnel leaned drunkenly to starboard, and a pall of smoke trailed to leeward. At 7:00 a.m., her engines shut down for lack of steam. The Shinano lay dead in the water, in the trough of the ocean; each time she rolled, her list increased. Abe ordered two destroyers, Hamakaze and Isokaze, to take the 65,000-ton carrier under tow, but the physics of such an arrangement were out of the question. When a steel cable snapped, the effort was halted.

  Abe was slow to order a general abandonment, and hundreds of the crew paid with their lives. Refugees from the flooded regions of the ship milled about on the hangar and flight decks. Discipline threatened to break down, at least in parts of the ship. Sailors panicked and leapt into the sea without orders. At half past nine, the Shinano rolled over to starboard, slowly but inexorably. The sea flooded into the main elevator wells on her flight deck, sweeping sailors off their feet and hurling them down into the hangar. As the funnel submerged, many scores of swimmers were sucked back into its black maw. When at last Abe passed the word to abandon ship, many of his crew had already done so, but for others it was too late. Around the capsized leviathan, to a radius of about half a mile, castaways clung to debris and awaited rescue by the escorting destroyers.

  Captain Abe did not intend to survive, and a retinue of his officers insisted on remaining with him. He and his followers hiked up the steeply canted flight deck to the bow, which they knew would be the last part of the ship to go under. As the stern dipped, the ship rolled back onto an even keel. Her bow lifted clear of the sea and reared up until the flight deck was nearly vertical. The Shinano hung in that position for a time, seemingly immobile, as the sea invaded from astern. From the interior came the roar of explosions, the hiss of jetting gases, and the crashing of heavy equipment and debris as it tore loose and fell along the longitudinal axis of the ship. She slid under, gradually, until the ocean swallowed her sixteen-petal gold chrysanthemum crest. Captain Abe rode her into the abyss, accompanied by 1,400 other souls.

  That concluded the maiden voyage of the Shinano.

  Upon Archerfish’s return to Guam on December 15, Joe Enright ran into a wall of skepticism concerning his claimed sinking. Naval intelligence had no idea that such a ship even existed, and his description of the target’s superstructure and canted funnel did not correspond to any known aircraft carrier in the Japanese fleet. On November 28, Pacific listening posts had intercepted a Japanese message, which the cryptanalysts quickly broke: “Shinano sunk.” There was no record of a Japanese ship of that name, but “Shinano” was the name of a major river in northeastern Honshu. Based upon t
he Japanese navy’s rigid naming conventions, such a name suggested that the target was probably a cruiser. On that basis, Admiral Lockwood leaned toward crediting the Archerfish with sinking a heavy cruiser of unidentified class, probably an older ship that had been thoroughly rebuilt.

  But Enright was certain that he had sunk a carrier, and he backed up his contention with the pencil sketches he had made while studying the Shinano through his periscope. The analysts in Pearl Harbor were forced to agree: the detailed sketches depicted a carrier. Meanwhile, someone in SubPac headquarters pointed out that “Shinano” was also the ancient name of a province in the Nagano region, which meant that it was a plausible name for an aircraft carrier. On those grounds, Lockwood credited the Archerfish with sinking a 28,000-ton Hiyō-class carrier.63

  Not until after the war was the entire truth known. U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey interrogators confirmed that the Archerfish had sunk a 65,000-ton aircraft carrier, which meant that she had earned the distinction of the single most productive submarine patrol of the war as measured by tonnage sunk. The self-effacing Enright always emphasized that he had been lucky, that blind chance had delivered the zigzagging Shinano into a narrow firing window. That was undoubtedly true: fate had dealt the Archerfish a winning hand. But Enright had played the cards flawlessly, and for that he was awarded the Navy Cross.

  * Five weeks earlier, it will be recalled, the Dace, under a different skipper, had ambushed Admiral Kurita’s Center Force in Palawan Passage, striking the opening blow in the Battle of Leyte Gulf.

  Chapter Eight

  THE SEAS AROUND LEYTE WERE LITTERED WITH DEBRIS, THE REMNANTS OF U.S. and Japanese ships sunk in the great naval battle. Oil slicks polluted the beaches along Surigao Strait. Bodies, mostly Japanese, drifted with the tides and washed ashore. A Seventh Fleet officer noted that the entire area was choked with “the odor of decaying flesh.”1 According to an American intelligence officer embedded with anti-Japanese guerillas on Samar, much “treasure” was found on the beaches in the days after the battle between Kurita’s fleet and the Taffys. Crates of rations floated ashore, containing crackers, cheese, jam, dehydrated potatoes, spam, cigarettes, and coffee. Clothing and mattresses were salvaged by civilian Filipinos. A waterlogged paperback copy of Gone with the Wind was laid out in the sun to dry. Drums of gasoline were carried away and stored in hidden caches.2 A headless body washed ashore, probably Japanese: it was cremated atop a pile of driftwood.

  In the enclosed waters of Leyte Gulf, some 650 ships of Kinkaid’s transport and amphibious fleet settled in for a long stay. The work of unloading cargo onto the landing beaches would require many weeks. The sea grew fetid, an open sewer for a floating city with a population exceeding 100,000. “The water in the bay is a sickly green, filthy with the toilet wash of many, many ships,” a sailor reported in a letter home.3 To protect itself against Japanese air raids, the fleet produced screens of chemical gray, brown, and yellow smoke. Smoke pots were mounted in the stern racks of landing craft; smoking floats were anchored to windward of transports; Besler fog oil generators mounted on larger ships spewed out vast clouds of the stuff for hours at a time.4 Every dusk and dawn, when the threat of air attack was greatest, a gossamer veil descended over the gulf.

  The east coast of Leyte was well suited to amphibious logistics. Long white-sand beaches shelved abruptly to navigable water, and no coral reefs blocked the approaches. Larger vessels, LCTs and LSTs, could nose up onto the beaches and unload supplies directly over ramps and pontoon causeways. Jeeps, trucks, and tanks drove ashore directly from the landing ships. Aerial photos of the coast near Tacloban depicted dozens of these big amphibians, bows wedged securely on the beach, ramps extended like tongues from gaping clamshell doors. The white wakes of hundreds of small craft were seen plying the waters between the beaches and the transports anchored offshore. In the two months after “A-Day,” Kinkaid’s amphibious forces unloaded a daily average of 11,000 deadweight tons of weaponry, ammunition, provisions, vehicles, and miscellaneous supplies onto those beaches.5

  But the heroic pace of unloading left a disorderly pileup of cargo in the landing zone. By October 1944, this was an old and familiar headache. As usual, amphibious commanders blamed a shortage of labor on the landing beaches, while ground commanders replied (not unreasonably) that their troops were preoccupied with fighting an actual battle ashore. The flat country just inland of the beaches was soon a teeming supply dump, covering many square miles of terrain. It was roughly laid out in a grid pattern, with dirt tracks running between stacks of crates, fuel drums, and parked vehicles. This great concentration of war matériel was exposed to attack from the air, and much of it was destroyed in the first week of the campaign. On the evening of October 25, for example, a Japanese bomb struck a 4,500-drum gasoline dump. The fire was still burning twenty-four hours later. But an even greater aggravation was the relentless, hammering, monsoonal rains, which turned roads and footpaths into hog-wallows and drainage ditches into swollen brown rivers. General Eichelberger described the coastal region south of Tacloban as “a swamp and a mud hole and nothing more.”6

  A ground echelon of the 308th Bomb Wing of the Army Air Forces worked over the Tacloban airstrip, racing to turn it into a major air base. But circumstances conspired against them. The ground was soft and soggy, and no amount of bulldozing and grading could tame its muddy expanses. Trucks dumped dirt and gravel along its length, but there were no coral deposits within easy reach, and thus no suitable materials for making concrete or asphalt. Frequent emergency landings of carrier planes forced the construction teams to clear the field. Brave men stood out on the strip with flags and flares, marking the locations of treacherous spots to be avoided by the planes. Crashes were a near-daily ordeal. Bulldozers shoved the wreckage to the edges of the field. Rain and enemy air raids interrupted the work, as they did everywhere else on Leyte. Marston steel mats were brought ashore and laid over the surface, but that did not entirely solve the problem, as the soft soil underlying the mats caused them to become misaligned. Similar problems dogged the airfields to the south, in Dulag, Bayug, Buri, and San Pablo. General Kenney’s Fifth Air Force did not operate in force from Leyte until December 1944, when the Philippine campaign was already moving on to Mindoro and Luzon.

  In the early days of the Leyte campaign, U.S. forces took more territory than they had expected with fewer casualties than they had feared. The U.S. Sixth Army, commanded by the German-born Lieutenant General Walter Krueger, had four fully equipped divisions lodged on the island’s eastern coastal plain, and the great naval battle offshore had secured their seaborne supply lines. Dirt tracks through the lowlands climbed into a long spine of high rugged country, roughly arrayed on a north-south axis, with heavily forested mountains ascending to peaks of 4,000 feet. Tanks and heavy equipment could run up those roads, though the weather was always a joker in the deck, and Japanese troops occupied strong positions on the commanding heights. Near the northern end of the island, the eastern Leyte Valley connected to the western Ormoc Valley by Highway 2, a steep and winding mountain road. This road continued south down the island’s west coast to the port of Ormoc and farther south to the town of Baybay. There the road turned inland and climbed into the mountains, crossing the central range and terminating at Abuyog on the east coast.

  Sixth Army made steady early progress inland, while Japanese forces generally moved back in fighting retreats. Advance patrols crossed the mountainous waist of the island, taking possession of Baybay without running into any serious enemy resistance. X Corps, commanded by Major General Franklin C. Sibert, cleared the northern Leyte Valley and began pushing north along the coast of the San Juanico Strait. On the 24th, units of the 8th Cavalry Regiment crossed the strait in landing craft to land at La Paz, on Samar, and held that position in order to guard against Japanese small-craft incursions into the strait. With firm control of the waterway, the Americans could now lift troops and supplies up the coast by sea.

  On November 7, elements
of the U.S. 24th Division stormed ashore on the western side of Carigara Bay, on the northern coast of the island. The roads leading south from Carigara were steep, winding, and frequently washed out by heavy rains. Pushing south into high country, the Americans ran into a stout line of defense in a horseshoe-shaped circle of heavily forested hills which they called “Breakneck Ridge.” The elite Japanese First Division was well entrenched in a network of log-lined trenches and firing positions. Here the fighting grew hard and heavy, stalling the American advance for nearly two weeks.

  JAPANESE ARMY COMMANDERS HAD DEBATED their strategy to meet the U.S. invasion right up until the eve of MacArthur’s landing. Field Marshal Count Hsaishi Terauchi, commander in chief of the South Asia Army, had dominion over all army forces in the South Pacific and much of Southeast Asia. Six months earlier, in April 1944, he had transferred his headquarters from Singapore to Manila. To oversee the defense of the Philippines, he tapped Lieutenant General Tomoyuki Yamashita, who had earned his name by conquering Malaya and Singapore in early 1942. Yamashita arrived in Manila in early October, only two weeks before the American invasion of Leyte, to find that no firm strategy was in place to meet the coming threat. Japanese commanders in the Philippines had expected an American landing around October 1, but no one knew where it would come. The southern island of Mindanao presented one obvious possibility, and Leyte another—but a bolder thrust directly at Luzon could not be discounted. Their dilemma was identical to that faced by MacArthur in December 1941—the vast archipelago offered hundreds of possible entry points to an invader with local naval and air superiority.

  Fundamental disagreements over strategy had riven the Manila headquarters. Some argued that air supremacy was the only sure defense, and wanted to pour the army’s collective manpower and resources into building and improving airfields. Through the end of August 1944, the Japanese army had devoted most of its major effort to building and improving airstrips throughout the theater, particularly in Luzon. Wide dispersal was the keystone of this strategy, with airplanes distributed to a network of many small dirt strips in remote and heavily forested regions. But other commanders wanted to pour their efforts into preparing fixed fortifications facing the most likely invasion beaches, or constructing strongholds on high ground, where the terrain would favor the defenders. Here again, there were two rival schools of thought, summed up by one senior officer as “annihilation at the beachhead” versus the “battling withdrawal.”7