A CALL TO COLORS: A NOVEL OF THE BATTLE OF LEYTE GULF

by JOHN J. GOBBELL

  CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR

  18 October, 1944

  IJN Atago

  Lingga Roads

  The warships of the First Striking Force waited expectantly, their anchors at short stay. Steam was up, boats were griped in their davits, and loose gear was secured. It had rained earlier and the decks were still wet, but now, at just after midnight, the atmosphere was thick with the humidity that hovered at a shirt-soaking ninety-five percent. Mercifully, a light wind blew out of the northeast, carrying a promise of cooler and drier air.

  A three-quarter moon shimmered over an anthracite sea, letting the night develop a character all of its own. Each man, from the lowest enlisted to the top flag-ranked officer, wondered what lay ahead. After months of waiting and planning and shouting at one another, they were poised to take action, whether it was good, bad, or indifferent. They were going to strike back, and stealth was the order of the moment. Lest prying eyes report their movement, they would wait until after moonset to get under way; all communication would be by flag hoist or flashing light. Radar and radio transmission was forbidden.

  It was crowded on the Atago’s starboard bridge wing. Noyama was shoved between the pelorus and the bulwark. Besides the underway watch, Captain Araki, the commanding officer, the exec, and what seemed like the whole flag staff had turned out. Noyama didn’t complain. Indeed, the occasion seemed historic, and he felt privileged to be up here with these men, their tired old jokes barely covering the tension.

  All eyes were fixed either on the moon or the destroyer Yukikaze, anchored just five hundred meters off the port bow. In accordance with the SHO-1 op order, she would be first to get underway.

  The unspoken question on the bridge was about the old man’s condition. Dr. Koketsu, constantly at the admiral’s side, was not talking. Neither was Kurita. Hard to read, he nevertheless seemed vital, the timbre in his voice near par. Just a few minutes ago, laughter ranged on the bridge as the old man hissed at someone in an exaggerated voice,AI’m fine, you damn fool. And you better be, too, because I don’t want excuses from anybody.@ A good sign, Noyama thought, as he peered into the night.

  Conversation became sporadic and stopped altogether as the moon dropped to the western horizon. When the lower limb touched Sumatra, they held their collective breath. Moments later, the yellow spherical orb descended behind sharp volcanic peaks and was gone. Noyama checked his watch: 0029. Except for a massive carpet of stars overhead, it was pitch black. And it was quiet, almost eerie.

  Moonset was the signal. Rear Admiral Seiichi Abe, Kurita’s chief of staff, turned aft and grunted in a hoarse voice, “Hai!”

  The fleet signalman, a first-class petty officer, anticipated the order. He switched on his lantern and, with a red-lensed flashlight, double-checked the fleet code signal on his message pad. Satisfied, he swiveled the signal lantern toward the Yukikaze, and clacked the lever. The bright, pencil-thin beam stabbed the darkness: Dah-dit-dit-dit-dit.

  YOU HAVE PERMISSION TO RAISE ANCHOR AND GET UNDER WAY.

  He did it once more. Dah-dit-dit-dit-dit.

  The Yukikaze flashed back a single dash.

  UNDERSTOOD

  Almost immediately, Noyama heard the Yukikaze’s anchor clanking up her hawse pipe. Soon, there was a collective release of breath as the Acacias’s anchor housed with a hollow thud. Noyama caught a whiff of the ship’s stack gas as her engineers cracked her throttles. She was the first destroyer of DESRON 10 to get under way. In minutes, her sisters raised anchor, cleared the log boom, and slipped out to sweep for submarines. Joining them were the destroyers of DESRON 2. After that, the cruisers raised anchor and slipped through the log boom. Following them were the battleships, all veterans of previous battles. Last to clear the log boom were the massive super-battleships Yamato and Musashi, ponderous, powerful, and sinister.

  Long, rolling swells greeted the Atago, making her pitch easily as she steamed due east into the Natuna Sea. Kurita checked aft, waiting until they were all out. When his fleet had safely exited, he flashed the next message. It was 0127 on October 18.

  Dit-dah, dit-dit-dit. Dit-dah, dit-dit-dit.

  FORM NIGHT FORMATION.

  It took twenty-two nail-biting minutes for the destroyers to sort themselves into six columns. The cruisers and battleships wove in between them, taking another twenty minutes. Finally it was done. No collisions. Satisfied they were properly arranged, Kurita summoned Noyama and spoke quietly. Noyama stepped into the red lighted pilothouse and wrote on a message blank. He signed it and handed it to the chief signalman. Two minutes later, the signal lamps blinked to all units:

  COURSE 046T, SPEED 20.

  Kurita’s striking force turned left to shape course for Brunei for refueling and then resumption of the war.

  CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE

  24 October, 1944

  Flag Wardroom

  USS Nashville (CL 43)

  Leyte Gulf, Philippines

  General MacArthur had called a staff meeting at 2000. It was a little past 2300 when, yawning and scratching, they got to the last item on the agenda: the draft of a short speech the general would deliver after stepping ashore tomorrow. The room grew silent as mimeographed pages were passed out.

  Lieutenant Colonel Owen Reynolds was fidgety. So he laid the paper down to read while sitting on his hands.

  At length everyone looked up.

  “Well?” asked MacArthur.

  Someone coughed. Finally, Dr. Roger O. Egeberg, MacArthur’s physician, said, “General, with all respects, Sir... “

  “Go on, Roger.”

  “It stinks. It’s a cliché.”

  MacArthur’s eyes narrowed. The only sound was that of exhaust blowers. “Ummm,” he murmured.

  But when it became obvious MacArthur wasn’t going to chew Egeberg’s head off, Willoughby jumped in. “Too much Christianity,” he complained.

  “It’s cornball,” said Lieutenant General Richard Sutherland, MacArthur’s aide.

  Everybody else went the me-too route and began clamoring to be heard. For Reynolds, the smoke was too thick, their voices too strident, and the walls were pressing in.

  “Excuse me, gentlemen.” No one paid attention as Reynolds scraped his chair back, stood, and walked for the door. A marine sentry opened for him and he stepped into the night. The hatch banged shut behind and he was relieved to see the weather had moderated from the windy and choppy seas of today. Amazing, it was so dark Reynolds couldn’t see one hundred feet away. And plenty of other ships were out there, nestled in their own little cocoons. Amazing too, that no one ran into each other: the miracle of radar. Nashville was darkened, enveloped in a mist that gave Reynolds a sense of isolation and comfort, distancing him from the others and the living hell that was to be waged on the enemy tomorrow.

  The general’s flagship, a light cruiser of the Brooklyn class, hardly rolled as she paced lazily in a racetrack pattern around a point designated Point Fin, an arbitrary position approximately twenty miles southeast of Dinagat Island near the entrance to Leyte Gulf. Like the other Seventh Fleet ships, they were just marking time.

  The invasion was on. Suluan, Dinagat, Hibuson, and Homonhon islands were now occupied, the mine fields swept, and the Nashville waited along with 738 other ships of Admiral Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet for tomorrow, October 20: General MacArthur’s “A–Day,” the day scheduled for the invasion of Leyte Gulf.

  Reynolds splayed his hands before his face. Again they shook. He grabbed the rail, hard, and squeezed until his knuckles turned white. Damn hands! That hadn’t happened since he’d been shot on Bougainville. It had been a vicious little firefight. They’d been ambushed, and Reynolds was trapped in the open. He was sure it was coming. And then it came. The shot hit him in the rump and flipped him on his back. He cried and prayed and played dead for twenty eternal minutes as the battle raged around him. Reynolds had almost bled to death by the time reinforcements arrived, and his hands shook for the next ten days until a crusty old army nurse walked in his
room and yelled at him to knock it off.

  A tear ran down Reynolds’s cheek. But he was afraid to wipe at it, lest he release his death grip from the rail and his hands begin shaking again.

  Those damn photographs had brought it all back! The greatest mistake in his military career was admitting he knew something about photography. General MacArthur wanted photographs of the invasion force off Leyte, so Reynolds was stuck with the job. This morning, they’d strapped him in the rear cockpit of a low-winged Vought-Sikorsky Kingfisher, one of the Nashville’s catapult-launched observation floatplanes. They fired him off over white-capped seas, and the Kingfisher clawed for altitude.

  Actually, the Kingfisher wasn’t that bad. It was the pilot, a thin, pop-eyed ensign, Elmer Dodd, that scared Reynolds. Fresh from amphibious flight training in Corpus Christi, Texas, the kid had just joined the fleet. Frustrated that he’d been passed over for fighters and bombers, Ensign Dodd grumbled and bitched about everything until Reynolds pulled rank and told him to shut up and just get the trembling wheezing, Kingfisher up to ten thousand feet.

  When they reached their altitude, Reynolds leaned out of the Kingfisher’s rear cockpit and clicked his pictures. As he did, it seemed these ships not only stretched from horizon to horizon, but over several horizons. He marveled at the men-of-war lying down there; engines of death populated with young men and boys who, just a year ago, were baling hay or jerking sodas or chasing girls. Among the 738 ships maneuvering below were eighty combatants. Six of these were old battleships, five of which had been raised from the muck of Pearl Harbor, now poised to deliver vengeance. Screening the battleships were three heavy cruisers, five light cruisers, and forty-eight destroyers.

  There were also eighteen “escort carriers,” divided into three groups of six each along with their destroyer screens. The carriers’ decks were built on ponderous, single-screw merchant ship hulls, capable of no more than eighteen knots. But these “baby flattops,” as they were known, were crucial to the invasion. The fighters were to provide combat air patrol for the Seventh Fleet while the bombers were to do bombardment and other ground support work for the troops ashore. Reynolds clicked away, realizing Mike Donovan was down in that mess. He made a note to look him up to see if he were close by when he returned to the Nashville.

  Close to the Leyte coast were the hundreds of amphibious and service ships supporting the 160,000 ground troops of General J. R. Hodges’ XXIV Corps and Major General F. C. Silbert’s X Corps who would storm ashore over the next two days.

  And this wasn’t the end of it. One hundred miles farther out, Halsey’s Third Fleet paced back and forth. Responsible for overall protection of Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet and the disembarked troops, Halsey had eighty-five of the U.S. Navy’s newest warships. This included eight Essex-class carriers, eight light carriers, six fast battleships, six heavy cruisers, nine light cruisers, and forty-eight destroyers.

  Time to go home; he’d shot two rolls. Reynolds had just picked up the intercom mike when something jarred the little Kingfisher. Smoke poured from her Pratt & Whitney R-985 radial engine. The canopy glass shattered around him and his instrument panel disintegrated. Something flashed overhead and swooped into a climbing turn.

  Reynolds was sure his heart stopped when he focused on the sleek airplane’s pale green wings and fuselage. There were bright red orbs near the wing tips. Meatball! A Zero. That was a Jap!

  Reynolds shouted into his mike, “Elmer! Elmer! Did you see that?”

  Silence. Reynolds looked up and to his left. The Zero was halfway through its turn. He’d be back on them in thirty seconds. Thirty seconds to live. Oh, dear God. “Elmer! Do we bail out?” Reynolds shouted, his eyes fixed on the Zero.

  “Shut up, dammit,” Dodd shouted back. He flipped the Kingfisher into a hard right bank and soon they were in one of the white puffy clouds that dominated the skies.

  That was when Reynolds’s hands began to shake. Just like on Bougainville, he’d known it was coming. Just like on Bougainville, he’d been exposed and there was nothing he could do about it. Just like on Bougainville, he’d wanted to crap in his pants. Tears ran from his eyes; bitter frustration and anger was lodged in his heart. “Ensign Dodd, what is going on?” yelled Reynolds.

  “Losing oil, sir,” came the response. “Think the sonofabitch hit our oil reserve tank and–”

  They burst from the cloud. The Zero shot past, smoking heavily, its pilot slumped over the instrument panel. Two F6F Hellcats followed, squeezing off rounds from their .50-caliber machine guns. With a gloved hand, the pilot of the second Hellcat waved casually as he flashed past. But Reynolds couldn’t wave back. His hands still shook.

  “Damn,” muttered Dodd. “They told us they’d wiped out the Jap air force.” The Kingfisher’s engine backfired and caught.

  “Looks like they forgot to check with Tojo,” said Reynolds. “We gonna make it?”

  “Yes, sir. This thing will glide forever. That is, if there’s no more Japs out there.”

  “If one comes again, I’ll get his picture,” said Reynolds drily.

  * * * * *

  Reynolds was still clutching the rail when someone moved beside him. He looked up. “Evening, General.”

  MacArthur nodded. “You okay, Owen?”

  “Of course, sir.”

  “Thanks for getting those pictures. They turned out just fine. Glad to hear they bagged that Jap.”

  “Thank you, General,” lied Reynolds.

  The mist had cleared, and they watched as a destroyer regally overtook them, steaming regally along their starboard side. She was close enough to hear her exhaust vent howling. But it was strange. Reynolds couldn’t see a sign of anyone on her weather decks or bridge; not even the glint of binoculars: a ghost ship.

  “You didn’t offer any thoughts about my statement tomorrow,” asked MacArthur.

  Statement. Strange word. Reynolds said, “Wasn’t trying to duck the issue, General. The smoke just got too thick in there for me. I needed fresh air.”

  “Can you believe Egeberg?” asked MacArthur.

  “There was a lot coming from every direction,” hedged Reynolds.

  MacArthur turned to Reynolds. “I repeat. You didn’t give your opinion in there. You’re the only holdout.”

  “General, I don’t think that I’m qualified to...”

  “That’s an order, Colonel,” MacArthur said gently.

  Doing his best to steady his hands, Reynolds said, “I’d play it the way you have it. It’s not meant for people back home. It’s meant for the Philippine people. Yes, it may sound cornball to the average American Joe, but these aren’t average Josés out here. They’re Hectors, and Pablos, and Carmellas. And they’re tastes are different. They’re more simple. They don’t need a lot of politics and whoop-de-do.” Reynolds looked aside for a moment, then added, “No, sir. I don’t go along with those in there. I wouldn’t change a word.”

  MacArthur looked out to sea. “I love it here. And soon I’ll again walk on Philippine soil. You know, this message is from the heart. That’s what I really feel right now. That’s what I want to say.”

  “I’d go with that, General.”

  “Thank you, Owen.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Everything lined up for tomorrow?”

  Reynolds’s task in the morning was to land with the third wave on “Red Beach,” near Tacloban, and make sure the quartermasters properly set up a mobile broadcasting connection to the Armed Forces Radio Network. Later, when it was safe, the general, his staff, Philippine president Sergio Osmeña, and Resident Commissioner Carlos Romulo were to come ashore and gather around to listen as MacArthur delivered his speech. “All set, General.”

  MacArthur waved a finger under Reynolds’s nose. “Don’t forget to wear your helmet and to pack plenty of “Atabrine tablets.” MacArthur’s tone was like that of a drill instructor admonishing recruits to use condoms when going into town on furlough.

  “On my bunk, General.”


  “Very good, Owen. See you tomorrow at Red Beach.” The general turned and walked back inside.

  CHAPTER THIRTY SIX

  20 October, 1944

  USS Nashville (CL 43)

  Northern Transport Area

  San Pedro Bay, Leyte Gulf, Philippines

  Admiral Thomas Kinkaid, commander of the seventh fleet, wrestled with the decision of when to enter the gulf. Finally he picked 0200 and so, by the hundreds, ships began slipping into Leyte Gulf. Hours later, they were in the green waters of San Pedro Bay, the gulf’s northern extremity, where they anchored according to a masterfully choreographed plan. The amphibious ships inshore, combatants further out; the latter included three old battleships, Mississippi, Maryland and West Virginia, along with countless cruisers and destroyers.

  The landing force consisted of two groups. The Northern Transport Group was ready to land at an area designated Red Beach and White Beach just two miles south of Tacloban City. Seven miles south, troops of the Southern Transport Group were poised to assault Orange, Blue, Violet, and Yellow beaches.

  The navy crews had been up all night at battle stations. For the troops, reveille was at 0430, chow was served at 0500.

  A-Day dawned hazy and muggy, the sun’s first rays heralding a massive shore bombardment. The battleships, cruisers, and destroyers opened up as navy TBFs and SB2Cs swooped down with engines screaming, bombing enemy positions. Several columns of smoke soon rose along the beach, the coastal plain, and around Tacloban, Leyte’s capital. Dozens of assault boats swarmed about, crammed with troops, their diesel engines growling: LCVPs, LCMs, and the bigger LCIs. At 0800, the bombardment was walked five hundred yards inland, and the first of sixteen waves swarmed ashore. Resistance was light, and by 1000, when the second wave came in, the first wave had fought their way three hundred yards inland.