Twilight of the Gods

by Twilight of the Gods (retail) (epub)

  While this vicious attack was unfolding, Group 3 radar screens detected another wave of bogeys approaching from the southeast at range 55 miles. Many were intercepted by the CAP, but others escaped into cloud cover. The intruders orbited the task group for about twenty minutes, playing cat and mouse with the American fighters, then commenced fast gliding approaches. A 40mm antiaircraft gun on Admiral Sherman’s flagship Essex opened fire on one attacker, a D4Y Suisei (“Judy”) bomber, hitting its port wing root. The war diary noted, “While this did not stop him, it at least turned him to the left causing him to miss the after-flight deck which was crowded with planes gassed and armed. He crashed about 15 feet inboard on the port side of flight deck amidships just forward of #2 elevator, bursting into intense flames with great heat and heavy smoke, which appeared worse than it actually was.”53 The explosion tore a hole in the flight deck approximately 16 feet across, and started fires which gutted (among other things) the admiral’s cabin. But damage and casualties were slight in comparison to those suffered by the Intrepid, and the Essex soldiered on without pause, even taking aboard eleven Intrepid fighters that were unable to recover on their own carrier.

  The next day Halsey shot off a dispatch to Nimitz, warning that the air situation in the Philippines was perilous. The Japanese had managed to disperse their airplanes widely across many small dirt fields on Luzon, and had camouflaged them effectively under foliage and netting. Often, individual planes were hidden miles away from the airstrips, and pushed or hauled to the runways under cover of darkness. A steady flow of replacement aircraft and pilots were flying in from Japan and Formosa. The Third Fleet was destroying hundreds of planes, but it was also suffering. Many carriers had been badly damaged, including the Cabot, Intrepid, Lexington, Franklin, and Belleau Wood. Many others had taken hits that did not inflict serious damage, but the threat was omnipresent. The delay in establishing land-based airfields on Leyte, combined with the introduction of deadly suicide tactics, must inevitably lead to delays in the planned invasions of Mindoro and Luzon.

  Meanwhile, the Seventh Fleet was catching it in Leyte Gulf. At midday on November 27, a battleship-cruiser-destroyer task force under Rear Admiral T. D. Ruddock was attempting to refuel from a 14,000-ton tanker. At 10:50 a.m., radar scopes detected about thirty unidentified planes approaching from the north and east. They were stacked at various altitudes, some well above a loosely fragmented cloud ceiling and some skimming the wavetops. A handful of army P-38 fighters patrolled overhead, but not enough to intercept all of the intruders. The West Virginia, alongside the tanker, disconnected her fueling hoses in a hurry and got underway. The deep repeating thuds of the 5-inch antiaircraft guns started up, and brown-black flak bursts mottled the sky.

  At 11:25, three kamikazes plunged on the battleships at the hub of the circular formation. One narrowly missed the West Virginia. Two dove simultaneously on the Colorado and one scored, striking the battleship’s portside secondary 5-inch battery. Nineteen of her crew were killed and seventy-two wounded, but the damage was negligible. Another targeted the cruiser St. Louis and buried itself in her hangar astern. The gasoline in the plane’s tanks started a fire, and the ship trailed a plume of black smoke that appeared to attract more kamikazes as the action developed. Four more suicide planes were shot down while lunging at the St. Louis; one crashed her port side just above the waterline.

  According to the diarist James J. Fahey, seaman first-class aboard the cruiser Montpelier, the enemy planes seemed to attack from every direction at once. At 11:25 a.m., the height of the action, “Jap planes were falling all around us, the air was full of Jap machine gun bullets. Jap planes and bombs were hitting all around us. Some of our ships were being hit by suicide planes, bombs and machine-gun fire.”54 For more than an hour, the 40mm and 20mm antiaircraft guns blazed away with barely a pause. The sea around the task force was roiled by flak and spent casings, as if a heavy rainstorm was pouring down. Shrapnel and fragments of destroyed Japanese planes fell along the length of the Montpelier, injuring many of Fahey’s shipmates. Three kamikazes were blown away at point-blank range. Wreckage from one attacker rebounded off the sea and crashed into a 40mm mount on the ship’s port side. Several crewmen were injured by flying debris or burning gasoline. Fahey noticed that one of the gun captains was shouting into his headphones, not realizing that shrapnel had cut through the wires. “It looked like it was raining plane parts. They were falling all over the ship. Quite a few of the men were hit by big pieces of Jap planes.”55

  Peace returned with jarring suddenness. At 2:10 p.m., the last of the enemy planes was gone or shot down. The sea around the task force was littered with aircraft wreckage and floating gasoline fires. None of Montpelier’s crew had been killed, but eleven were wounded, some seriously. Wreckage and the bloody remains of Japanese pilots were scattered across the ship. Lifeboats were smashed, cables down, and steel stanchions bent over, and empty shell casings were still hot to the touch. The deck near Fahey’s battle station was strewn with “blood, guts, brains, tongues, scalps, hearts, arms etc. from the Jap pilots.” As hoses were brought out to wash the mess off the deck, souvenir hunters stooped to sift through the grisly mélange. A marine cut a ring off the finger of a dead enemy airman. A sailor picked up a scalp. “One of the men on our mount got a Jap rib and cleaned it up,” Fahey wrote. “He said his sister wants part of a Jap body. One fellow from Texas had a knee bone and he was going to preserve it in alcohol from the sick bay.”56

  The following day brought a respite, but the twenty-ninth was another long day of intermittent air attacks. The claxon kept ringing, calling men back to their battle stations. Just after sunset, the radar screens grew busy with many “blips.” A kamikaze darted through the cloud ceiling and dove on the Denver, but was deterred by a storm of antiaircraft fire. It banked sharply away and climbed back into the clouds. Several other planes were seen weaving in and out of cloud cover, dodging flak bursts and looking for a target. One plane performed a number of acrobatic maneuvers, almost as if taunting the Americans. Then it pushed over into a throttle-stop dive, aiming for the battleship Maryland. There was no time for the ship to change course, and the gunners could not take the rocketing plane down. It hit the Maryland’s forecastle, dead center between the forward 16-inch turrets. “You will never see a stunt like that again,” wrote Fahey, who watched the attack from the nearby Montpelier. “Something like that happens only once in a lifetime. One thing about these suicide pilots there is never a dull moment, they go all out to kill themselves.”57

  The diving kamikaze was probably traveling at more than 500 miles per hour, a velocity that gave it fearsome penetrating force. Its bomb pierced two of the Maryland’s heavily armored decks and laid waste to much of the third deck between frames 26 and 52. Smoke filled the stricken area, forcing damage-control parties to retreat. Thirty-one men were killed; thirty more were wounded. The sickbay was gutted by the blast, so emergency medical stations were set up in the junior and warrant officers’ wardrooms. The dead were identified and placed in bunks in a screened-off compartment, to be buried at sea later. Crew morale, according to the Maryland cruise book, fell to a low ebb: “The terrific heat, the persistent air raids, the tense living and the recent disaster put many men almost at their breaking point.” The crew was “overjoyed” to learn that the Maryland would return to Pearl Harbor for extensive repairs.58

  TAKING STOCK OF THE AIR, NAVAL, and ground campaign at the end of November, Admiral Kinkaid concluded that the planned invasion dates for Mindoro (December 5) and Luzon (December 20) were out of the question. In a long memorandum to MacArthur on November 30, Kinkaid urged that the invasions of Mindoro and Luzon be “cancelled.” (He did not say “postponed.”) To attempt landings on these islands before General Kenney’s Fifth Air Force had taken control of the air, he wrote, “could result in a disaster seldom equaled in the annals of warfare.”59

  Kinkaid tapped his staff liaison to the SWPA headquarters, Lieutenant Commander Arthur McC
ollum, to act as his emissary to MacArthur. He told McCollum to deliver the message that the campaign must be delayed indefinitely, given the current state of U.S. naval and airpower in the Philippines. McCollum was thought to have a good personal rapport with MacArthur. The two had joked about their common nickname: “Mac.”

  Perhaps thinking of the fate of the messenger who had brought bad news to an ancient Armenian king, McCollum replied: “Well, I think that’s a hell of a thing, Admiral, for you to do to me. I mean, to send me in there.”60

  Kinkaid told him, “You’re the only guy that I know who can go up there and maybe talk to him face-to-face without getting into a big hassle over something, army-navy relations, or what have you. God damn it, get on in there and go see the general and then tell me.”

  McCollum thought the assignment was “a dirty trick to play on a junior guy,” but he went ashore and made his way to SWPA headquarters, near Tacloban.

  In the weeks since the invasion of Leyte, fierce monsoonal storms had battered the island’s eastern coastal plain. Twenty-five inches of rain had fallen since A-Day. Seventy-mile-per-hour winds had uprooted trees and swept tents and shacks up into the ether. Engineers had excavated deep drainage ditches in an attempt to control the relentless flooding, and laid wooden boards across muddy footpaths. Plans had called for temporary field hospitals providing 9,000 beds, but due to the deplorable state of access roads, construction lagged. (The deficit was met by Seventh Fleet hospital ships anchored off Tacloban.) DDT was sprayed throughout the area, but mosquitos bred abundantly in the soggy, fecund soil—and “in the evening,” recorded General Eichelberger, “we went to bed amid a cloud of insects.”61

  Japanese air attacks often targeted the complex of relatively well-appointed buildings that served as SWPA and Sixth Army headquarters. On November 3, MacArthur had been in his headquarters office when a Japanese plane flew low overhead and strafed the building. A .50-caliber round blasted a hole in the wall behind his head. As others rushed into the room, MacArthur was grinning. Gesturing to the hole, he exclaimed: “Not yet!” The incident was described in an SWPA press release, and made headline news in the United States the following day.62

  When McCollum arrived and delivered Admiral Kinkaid’s message, MacArthur reacted as expected. “Let me tell you something, Mac,” he said. “I came in here on the assurances of your damned navy admirals that they would support me all the way, and now you come in and tell me this.” He charged that the admirals were “welshing” on their commitments.

  “General,” McCollum replied, “that’s not the way it is. I mean, Heavens, General Kenney has welshed on you. He was going to have all those damned airfields built around here.”

  To which MacArthur replied, “Yes, I reckon that’s true.”

  The general summoned Dick Sutherland into the office. “McCollum has come here to tell me that the god-damned admirals aren’t going to carry me any farther!” The SWPA chief of staff, McCollum observed, was always ready to “light a fire” under McArthur’s wrath. The conversation continued, with MacArthur booming his disapproval. McCollum held his ground, recounting the hard realities. The ground campaign on Leyte had taken longer than expected, the Japanese were still landing reinforcements on the west coast, and the kamikazes were raising havoc with the Sixth Army’s seaborne supply line. Admiral Halsey shared many of these concerns and had said so.

  At last MacArthur gave way. “I don’t give a damn what you tell [Kinkaid], but go on up there and tell him it’s okay,” he said. “I don’t like it, but I understand, and there we are.”63

  Providing logistical support to U.S. ground forces grew more difficult as they advanced into the onerous terrain of Leyte’s “cordillera,” or mountainous interior. Roads running inland were often washed out, or petered out into the jungle. Fighting bogged down in high country the Americans called Breakneck Ridge. The entrenched positions on the ridge were manned by elite, hand-picked units of the First Japanese Infantry Division, recently shipped in from the Kwantung Army in Manchuria. For days the lines did not move at all. Units trudged up steep paths, sometimes losing their boots in the muck. In flooded rice fields, the water came up to their waists. Other American forces seized Limon, at the head of the valley leading down to Ormoc Bay, on November 5. However, further progress in that direction was stymied by the deplorable supply situation.

  Anxious to break the bloody stalemate, and conscious that Japanese reinforcements were arriving on the west coast by sea, General Krueger convinced MacArthur to release the infantry reserves. With more than 120,000 troops on the island, he intended to overwhelm the Japanese with a huge pincer attack in the Ormoc Valley. Japanese positions on Breakneck Ridge were finally broken down by a double-envelopment, as one battalion bushwhacked to the east around Hill 1525, and another was sealifted up the coast in eighteen LVTs, to land near the southward turn of Highway 2. The maneuver left local Japanese forces in untenable positions in remote jungle terrain, cut off from their sources of resupply on the west coast.

  Belatedly, the Americans grasped that the enemy was determined to pour reinforcements into the island at any cost. MacArthur and his commanders had started with the assumption that Leyte was an interim fight, a stepping stone to Luzon. At first, they had guessed that columns of transports putting into the port of Ormoc were there to evacuate Japanese troops, rather than to deliver fresh ones. But the Japanese headquarters in Manila was committed to win the battle for Leyte, and continued to push reinforcements into the island through the first week of December 1944. “By the end of November,” wrote MacArthur, “despite large convoy losses and severe combat attrition, there were many thousand more enemy troops on Leyte than there had been at the end of October.”64

  Japanese supply runs into Ormoc touched off a series of ferocious air and sea battles in the Camotes Sea. In many respects, it was a reenactment of the Guadalcanal campaign, when the combatants had fought to isolate an island and to dominate the sea lanes around it. Several long convoys of troop transports and cargo ships escorted by destroyers left Manila Bay between November 3 and 9. They traveled 600 miles through the inland seas of the Philippines, and debarked more than two full divisions at Ormoc Bay. American carrier warplanes attacked those convoys, sinking more than a dozen Japanese ships. Fifth Air Force B-24s and B-25s, flying from airfields on Morotai, hit and sank two large transports on November 8. Still the convoys continued. Since Manila Bay was under constant air attack, the Japanese judged that there was no point in trying to save the ships for some future purpose. If they were not sent out immediately, they were likely to be destroyed at anchor.

  On November 11, a major reinforcement landed at Ormoc Bay and debarked most of the Twenty-Sixth Japanese Infantry Division. But while the division’s heavy weapons and supplies were still unloading, a wave of American carrier planes descended on the scene, sinking four large transports and four destroyers. The Task Group 38.3 war diary noted, “The Nips spent a hapless day as TF 38 methodically set about eliminating the convoy.”65 According to Japanese sources, the division got ashore with minimal casualties, but carrying only their rifles and about ten units of ammunition.66

  In the first week of December, Seventh Fleet destroyers ventured through Surigao Strait and up through the Canigao Channel to sweep the west coast of Leyte. These naval attacks took the Japanese by surprise. They had mined Canigao Channel heavily and did not believe the mines could be swept while aerial patrols were overhead. On December 2, a three-destroyer task force led by Commander John C. Zahm left Leyte Gulf at dusk, charged around southern Leyte, and arrived at Ormoc Bay shortly before midnight. A Japanese convoy was unloading troops and supplies onto the piers. With complete surprise, Zahm’s three “tin cans” poured out 5-inch fire and launched torpedoes at the Japanese ships and dock areas. An American destroyerman recalled, “Shortly into the battle, the night began to light up like a huge fireworks display from the red and green tracers going in all directions, from ships and shore installations burning an
d exploding in multi-colored fireballs, and from winks of fire coming from the many guns firing at us. It was just hell!”67 The destroyers demolished two enemy ships and laid waste to valuable war matériel in supply dumps ashore. At 12:22 a.m., the destroyer Cooper was hit by a torpedo that tore the ship in two; she sank immediately with the loss of 191 lives. Under heavy enemy fire, the other two destroyers cleared the area without stopping to pick up survivors. Three PBY “Black Cat” float planes landed in Ormoc Bay and picked up dozens of survivors of the Cooper. One managed to take off with no fewer than fifty-six survivors aboard, in addition to the nine crew members—a PBY record never surpassed or equaled.68

  Having finally cleared the Breakneck–Kilay Ridge area, X Corps launched an unstoppable drive down the Ormoc corridor. The 32nd Division joined forces with the 1st Cavalry Division to overrun well-prepared Japanese positions. Remaining elements of the elite First Japanese Division fought desperately and well, but they could not resist the sustained energy and violence of the American ground attack. Infantry and tank attacks were preceded by long, heavy, and accurate mortar and artillery barrages. The Americans attacked Japanese pillboxes and bunkers with tanks, flamethrowers, and hand grenades. A westward advance across the rugged middle of the island was spearheaded by the 11th Airborne Division, assisted by elements of the 32nd Infantry. At the same time, the southern pincer pressed north from Baybay. On that front, the Japanese were surprised. Scouts had assured General Suzuki that the one road leading into that area from Dulag, on the east coast, was impassable. Nor had the Japanese anticipated the ease with which enemy forces in that area were resupplied by sea.