At the Japanese headquarters near Ormoc, basic command and control was disintegrating. Contact with frontline units was intermittent, and then lost. Orders continually went out urging that Japanese forces attack, when they were barely able to maintain their defensive positions. On December 6, a staff officer of the First Division reported that it had “reached the stage of collapse.”69 The headquarters staff was vexed to hear Japanese radio broadcasts predicting an imminent triumph on Leyte. Press offices in Manila and Tokyo rewrote the frontline dispatches to conform to the sanctioned version of events. “The enemy is now on the defense,” one such bulletin declared. “Our reinforcements coordinating with the main strength advanced toward the western part of Carigara. They opened hostilities with the American 24th Division. On 7th November a portion of our units using enveloping tactics advanced rapidly over rough terrain, and cut off the avenues of retreat and dealt a severe blow. Under our pressure the enemy vainly struggled to escape.”70
At dusk on December 6, American troops and engineers stationed near San Pablo airstrip, near the main beachhead at Leyte Gulf, were surprised to see a formation of transport airplanes pass overhead at medium altitude. White parachutes began to blossom in the sky behind them. The alarm was raised, and antiaircraft guns, artillery, machine-gun, and small arms fire was directed upward. It was an audacious paratrooper attack, involving about four hundred “Takachiho” paratroopers of an Airborne Raiding Brigade based on Luzon. The Japanese troopers returned rifle fire from aloft, and threw hand grenades as they approached the ground. Several Seabee engineers were in the shower as the enemy paratroopers hit the ground, and “bolted, buck naked, for their guns.”71 Fierce firefights continued late into the night. Squads of attackers set demolition charges in parked airplanes and fuel storage dumps, and fires blazed through the area. Fighting continued for three days. The 11th Airborne Division, supported by Seabees and miscellaneous other units, took back the airfield on December 9. The attack had accomplished some material damage, but otherwise failed.
The fight for Leyte had entered its endgame. But victory could not be secured until the island was completely cut off from its sources of reinforcement and resupply. That meant shutting the enemy’s “back door” to Leyte, the port of Ormoc. On December 7, the 77th Division under Major General Andrew D. Bruce stormed ashore at Desposito, four miles south of Ormoc. The surprise amphibious assault included the same basic features of previous landings, such as those on Saipan, Guam, or Leyte’s east coast, but on a miniature scale. The landing caught the enemy by surprise, and two regiments of Bruce’s division got safely ashore and dug into entrenched positions before the Japanese could muster a counterattack.
Japanese air forces arrived too late to interfere with the landing, but they dealt a severe beating to Admiral Arthur D. Struble’s amphibious convoy. Kamikazes hit the destroyer Mahan and the high-speed transport Ward. On both ships, the damage was so grave that the ships were abandoned and scuttled. During the long withdrawal to Leyte Gulf by way of Canigao Channel and Surigao Strait, the force suffered under a relentless series of air attacks. The transport Liddle took a bad hit on her bridge, which killed most of her senior officers, but she managed to continue under her own power.72
The newly landed troops attacked north, taking heavy casualties, and fought their way into Ormoc City on December 10. The 7th Division pushed north from Baybay, overcoming scattered but fanatical resistance. With American forces in possession of Ormoc’s bay and port facilities, the last big Japanese convoy from Manila was forced to divert to San Isidro, thirty miles up the coast. American airstrikes sank five large transports. About two Japanese battalions managed to get ashore, but they were quickly surrounded and overpowered by U.S. forces already in the area.
On December 15, MacArthur declared that organized resistance on Leyte had come to an end. Small unit fighting would continue in the rugged highlands, but the battle for the Philippines was already moving west: the amphibious landing on Mindoro occurred that same day. “The enemy fought valiantly,” the SWPA chief wrote, “but found it impossible to cope with our three-way offensive. His forces were chopped into isolated segments, either struggling in small pockets or being scattered into the mountains.”73
HALSEY AND HIS CARRIER ADMIRALS had been asking for at least ten consecutive days at Ulithi, for an extended period of “three Rs”—rest, repairs, and replenishment. On December 1, three Task Force 38 task groups dropped their anchors into the sandy holding ground at the bottom of Ulithi lagoon.74 The service and logistics fleet had completed its move from Eniwetok, so the roadstead was more congested than ever before. Boats and barges plied the waters to and fro between the fleet and the main islets of Asor, Falelop, Potangeras, Sorlen, and Mog Mog. Occasionally, through binoculars, one might catch a glimpse of native fishermen, clad only in loincloths, gliding over the sapphire lagoon in their hand-carved outriggers.
That week an aerial photographer snapped a photo of “Murderers’ Row”—a long row of Task Force 38 aircraft carriers riding at anchor. All were painted in blue-gray camouflage “dazzle” patterns. They were surrounded by flotillas of cruisers, battleships, and destroyers—and beyond, to the north, the innumerable service ships of the logistics fleet. It was an unprecedented concentration of naval power, more ships than had ever squeezed into Pearl Harbor at one time.
Measures were taken to conceal the fleet’s presence. For the duration of the war, the word “Ulithi” was never permitted to appear in the press. The fleet observed strict radio silence. All outgoing dispatches were flown to Guam, 400 miles northeast, for transmission from that island. The Japanese were not fooled, however: they knew that the U.S. fleet had adopted Ulithi as its new homeport. On November 20, several kaitens—one-man suicide submarines—were released by a large “mother” submarine north of the atoll. At least two of the stealthy little boats penetrated into the lagoon by secondary entrance channels. At dawn on November 20, one struck the tanker Mississinewa. Laden with tens of thousands of tons of avgas, diesel, and bunker oil, the ship erupted in flames. Tugs put hoses onto the burning wreck, but nothing could be done. At 10:00 a.m. she turned over and sank, taking sixty of her crew to the bottom.75 Destroyers scattered depth charges through the area, and at least one other kaiten was sunk.
From that day to the end of the war, the Americans never felt entirely secure at Ulithi. Admiral Sherman recalled, “We felt that we were sitting on a powder keg which might go off at any time. Far from enjoying a rest, we felt we might be safer in the open sea.”76
Even so, fleet recreation at Ulithi was serious business. A new movie was screened on every ship in the fleet, every night. A destroyer designated as the “movie exchange ship” kept a library of hundreds of films and thousands of reels, which rotated around the fleet according to a published calendar.77 USO musical revues travelled from ship to ship, as the entertainers often performed four or five identical shows per day. Admiral Halsey especially liked Eddie Peabody, “King of the Banjo,” and his “All Navy Band.” On Mog Mog, a picturesque island at the north end of the lagoon, Seabees had been hard at work building a fleet recreation area. Footpaths led inland from the piers to a network of picnic grounds, tennis courts, volleyball courts, boxing rings, baseball diamonds, bandstands, barbeque pits, and beer gardens. For thousands of war-weary and sea-weary men, it was the first opportunity in months to feel solid ground under their feet. Sailors were rationed beer at two cans per man, but some finagled harder stuff by backhanded means. Officers arranged to have cases of liquor put ashore at the officers’ club on Mog Mog, located in a native-built canoe shed in a quiet corner of the island. One recalled, “it was just a hog-killing.”78 In that first week of December 1944, noted the Third Fleet war diary, Mog Mog “was crowded daily with from 10,000 to 15,000 enlisted men and 500 to 1,000 officers.”79 In the evenings, as the western sky blazed with majestic tropical colors, boats loaded to capacity pulled away from the piers and motored slowly back to the fleet anchorage.
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p; On December 11, the fleet staged another grand sortie through Mugai Channel, bound for another round of airstrikes on Luzon to support MacArthur’s invasion of Mindoro. Beginning on the fourteenth, Halsey recalled, “We struck with all our strength, for three days running.”80 The “Big Blue Blanket” was thrown over Luzon once again, as large formations of F6Fs kept watch over ninety known or suspected enemy airfields. Returning pilots claimed sixty-two kills in the air and another 208 enemy planes destroyed on the ground. The “Moose Trap” and other defensive measures seemed to pay off, as no enemy planes got within 20 miles of the task force. On December 14, the day’s first outgoing strike ran into a flight of eleven Japanese aircraft on a reciprocal heading, “and splashed 100 percent near the east coast of Luzon.”81
The Mindoro landing, delayed ten days at Kinkaid’s insistence, involved a deep foray into waters easily reached from Luzon’s airfields. Japanese ground forces on Mindoro were not expected to give the invaders much trouble, but the approach would be dangerous, and the amphibious transport fleet would have to pull out quickly. The invasion convoy was commanded by Rear Admiral Struble, whose force had been roughed up just a week earlier in the Ormoc Bay operation. At 2:57 p.m. on December 13, in the channel between Negros and Mindanao, Struble’s flagship Nashville took a bad kamikaze hit. The admiral was unharmed, but the Nashville was forced to turn back. Struble transferred his flag to the destroyer Dashiell. On December 15, U.S. ground forces landed on Mindoro and quickly overran the small Japanese garrison.
Capture of Mindoro’s two small airfields changed the complexion of the entire Philippines campaign, as it put nearby Manila and its environs into the crosshairs for General Kenney’s USAAF fighters and bombers. The island’s capture also left Leyte in the position of a strategic backwater. On the eighteenth, General Yamashita radioed General Suzuki to advise that Leyte would receive no further reinforcements or material support. As Yamashita had feared, the fight for that island had consumed a major portion of Japanese strength in the Philippines, darkening the outlook for the pending fight for Luzon. Based on a methodical attempt to count bodies during the last week of December, the Americans estimated that 60,809 Japanese troops had perished on the island. Just 434 had been taken prisoner.82 U.S. Sixth Army losses were just 2,888 killed and 9,858 wounded.
Task Force 38 withdrew to the east for a fueling rendezvous, intending to return for a second round of airstrikes on Luzon. On the morning of December 17, about 500 miles east of Luzon, the fleet fell in with its trusty at-sea logistics support group and commenced its familiar refueling ritual. As usual, the destroyers were especially low, and many sidled up to the battleships and carriers to drink from their cavernous tanks. But a heavy swell was on the make, with winds gusting from twenty to thirty knots, and the smaller vessels were pitching and corkscrewing hazardously. Fuel served as ballast for the lightly built “tin cans,” so a destroyer whose tanks were mostly empty was intrinsically unstable. The problem was exacerbated as new radar and communications devices were mounted on the masts and topsides of the little ships, raising their center of gravity. While fueling from larger ships, an officer recalled, deballasted destroyers “bucked and twisted like mustangs.”83 When they collided with their larger neighbors, as they often did in heavy seas, the impacts damaged their superstructures and tore equipment from their rigging. Fueling hoses broke, pouring cataracts of brown bunker oil over their decks and into the sea between them. On that tempestuous morning of the seventeenth, Admiral Halsey watched from his flag bridge as the destroyer Spence attempted to fuel from his flagship New Jersey. After it had taken on only 6,000 gallons of fuel, the hoses broke and the Spence was forced to sheer away.84
The barometer was falling, winds were backing into the north, and seas were building. Wisps of high cirrus sped across the sky, and the sun wore a menacing halo. The fleet meteorologists had noted a “tropical disturbance” forming about 500 miles to the southeast, headed north at about 12 to 15 knots—but they were not ready to call it a tropical storm, much less a typhoon. At any rate, they were fairly confident that it would collide with a cold front and recurve away to the northeast. Many veteran seamen in the fleet were not so sure. This was typhoon season, and the fleet was near the heart of the region known as “typhoon alley.” The navy was not yet doing any systematic long-range weather reconnaissance flights, and was thus obliged to rely on intermittent reports from aircraft, ships, and submarines. Judging whether a “disturbance” would develop into a full-scale tropical witches’ brew was as much an art as a science. So was predicting the path that a storm would travel. On bridges across the fleet, officers consulted their charts and instruments. Some thumbed through old copies of Bowditch’s The American Practical Navigator. As the afternoon wore on, the wind and seas continued to build. Admiral Radford, sailing as an observer on the Ticonderoga, judged that “we were in for it.” The carrier’s skipper agreed and issued orders to secure for a typhoon.85 Many others throughout the fleet, including all of the task group commanders and many senior captains, reached similar conclusions.
The safest move would have been to turn south. But that would have taken Task Force 38 out of position to launch the planned airstrike on Luzon two days later, and Halsey was determined to keep his promises to MacArthur. Given that his meteorologists were forecasting that the storm (if such it was) would turn right rather than left, the admiral kept the fleet on a northwesterly heading. “Halsey felt that we should live up to that commitment to the last minute, rather than retreat before a situation which really had not fully developed as a threatening typhoon situation,” Mick Carney later explained. “So we did.” The chief of staff emphasized that the boss was calling the shots: “This was his decision and nobody was disposed to argue with it.”86
The sea was lumpy and disgruntled. The sky was painted in freakish colors, a dull coppery glow beneath a purple scudding murk. Gale-force gusts blew streaks of spindrift off the wave crests. At 2:37 p.m., noted the fleet diary, “the seas were getting heavy and the winds were now 40 knots from 020.” Halsey suspended fueling and fixed a new fueling rendezvous for 6:00 a.m. the next morning, 200 miles to the northwest. Many ships found it difficult to keep station, and Halsey approved Admiral McCain’s request to slow the task force from 17 to 15 knots and cease zigzagging.87 As the hours wore on, conditions worsened and the weather predictors revised their forecasts. It was a cyclonic storm building to typhoon strength, and its track had swerved to the west. A report from an aircraft tender placed the storm only 200 miles away. According to Carney, the storm seemed to be chasing after them, as if “imbued with some intelligence of its own.”88 Halsey ordered a course change to the south and changed the location of the next morning’s rendezvous. Even now, he had hopes of refueling at dawn and getting the carriers into position to launch the promised airstrikes on the nineteenth.
At dawn the wind was gusting to fifty knots, and barometric pressure was sinking like a stone. Sailors on deck reached for handholds and bent their heads against the driving sheets of spray. All around the horizon, the ocean was gray, torn, and tormented. From high in the superstructures of the bigger ships, one could see ranks of tall, forbidding combers marching down from the north. Unaccountably, given those raging conditions, Halsey signaled the fleet to come north to a heading of 60 degrees, with speed ten knots, and commence fueling operations. But it was soon clear to all that no fueling was possible, and the fleet turned south again.
An hour after sunrise, the sun could not be seen and the sky had barely lightened. Visibility deteriorated, the seas grew mountainous, and the winds gusted higher—to 60 knots, then to 70 knots. The PPI radarscope in the Wasp, on the northern flank of Task Force 38, depicted a tightly constructed circular storm-eye passing only about 35 miles to the north.89 Halsey and his team could no longer deny it; the fleet was caught in the “dangerous semicircle” of a proper typhoon, and could do nothing but run before the wind and seas and hope for the best. At 8:18 a.m., Halsey radioed MacArthur and Nimi
tz to report that he was cancelling the next day’s raids on Luzon.90
The storm mounted in strength and malevolence. The distance between the crests lengthened as the waves grew. At the top of each sea the wind howled in their ears and the rain and spray blasted them like buckshot. In the troughs between the crests, the noise and wind fell to almost bearable dimensions, but white water broke across their decks and cascaded through the scuppers. Orders were given and then countermanded by both Halsey and McCain, but it was soon clear to every skipper that he was alone, and must do whatever he could to save his ship. At 11:49 a.m., Halsey instructed McCain by short-range radio to “take the most comfortable course with the wind on the port quarter.”91 But the smaller vessels, especially the destroyers, could do nothing but steer for their lives, regardless of heading.
Visibility continued to fall until most ships could not see their neighbors at all, and the danger of collision was added to the violence of the storm. Sometimes another ship loomed suddenly out of the maelstrom, then turned away and vanished. The gusts grew more violent, eventually surpassing 100 knots. Barometer readings fell below 27 inches. Halsey informed Nimitz that the fleet was fighting through “heavy confused seas, ragged ceiling, heavy rains, wind west northwest, 70 knots . . . typhoon of increasing intensity.”92
The destroyers, still deballasted by low fuel, suffered the worst. No combination of engine and steering would keep them on course, so they wallowed helplessly in the troughs between the great seas. The storm reached its zenith at about noon, when the gusts touched 120 knots and the waves measured about 80 feet from trough to crest.93 According to the captain of the Dewey, the rain and scud was so thick that men on the bridge could not see the bow. If a man was exposed to it, “it felt like a barrage of thousands of needles against the face and hands,” and it “removed the paint from metal surfaces in many places like a sandblaster.” Again and again the little ship was knocked down almost onto her beam ends. In the pilot house, men seized handholds and hung with their feet swinging free of the deck until she righted herself. One astonished sailor found himself standing on a stanchion that was normally vertical. Holding up his palms, he shouted to his shipmates, “Look! No hands!” On an especially deep roll, with the inclinometer against the stop (73 degrees was the maximum on the gauge), the starboard wing of the Dewey’s bridge dipped under the sea and scooped up solid green water. “None of us had ever heard of a ship righting herself from such a roll,” noted the skipper, “but this one did!”94
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