by Perry, Mark
At a few minutes before 1:00 p.m., MacArthur left the bridge of the Nashville, went below for a time, and then gathered members of his staff, including George Kenney. The commander was going ashore. He, Kenney, and a trailing group of aides descended a ladder into a mobile launch and headed for the transport John Land, where Osmeña and his staff waited. After Osmeña and others boarded the launch, it then plowed on toward Red Beach. But MacArthur’s dignified arrival was short-circuited when the beach master refused to clear a space for the launch—and remained unimpressed when he was told MacArthur was aboard it. “Let ’em walk,” he said, and so MacArthur did. His jaw set, and irritated that he would be arriving at his second home soaked to the knees, MacArthur descended his launch’s ramp and led the way forward through the rolling Pacific surf and onto Red Beach. The film of his arrival would be shown in America, again and again, in the years ahead. More than any other event, MacArthur’s walk to Red Beach became his signature moment. Soldiers standing nearby turned to watch, surprised by his sudden appearance. After conferring with his commanders, he stood behind a set of microphones. “People of the Philippines,” he said, “I have returned!”
By the grace of Almighty God our forces stand again on Philippine soil—soil consecrated in the blood of our two peoples. . . .
Rally to me. Let the indomitable spirit of Bataan and Corregidor lead on. As the lines of battle roll forward to bring you within the zone of operations, rise and strike. Strike at every favorable opportunity. For your homes and hearths, strike! For future generations of your sons and daughters, strike! In the name of your sacred dead, strike! Let no heart be faint. Let every arm be steeled. The guidance of divine God points the way. Follow in His Name to the Holy Grail of righteous victory!
Years later, after MacArthur’s speech had been picked over by his critics, Kenney defended it. The speech wasn’t meant for Americans, he said, but for Filipinos. For MacArthur, on the other hand, the address was personal. “We made a promise,” he had told Roosevelt. Now, he had kept it. The cynics weighed in, hooting. The speech was too religious, as if MacArthur were the deity. These critics weren’t alone: His staff was painfully blunt when MacArthur first read his remarks to them. All this stuff about God. “Boys,” he had answered, “I want you to know when I mention the Deity I do it with the utmost reverence in my heart.” But he had toned it down, and then, aboard the Nashville, he had excised even more, including a passage about “the tinkle of laughter of little children” returning home to a free Manila. Roger Egeberg, MacArthur’s personal physician, shook his head. “You can’t say that,” he had snorted. “It stinks. It’s a cliché.” MacArthur had taken out the passage, but had refused to trim any more. “By the grace of Almighty God, our forces stand on Philippine soil,” he declared. “. . . . Rally to me. Let the indomitable spirit of Bataan and Corregidor lead on.”
Douglas MacArthur strolled the beach at Leyte, soaked to his knees, stood hands on hips, then walked forward to a log and sat down on it to write a letter to Franklin Roosevelt. “This is what I dreamed about,” he muttered to himself, and he thought for a moment before composing. “This note is written from the beach near Tacloban where we have just landed,” he wrote. It was an act of unusual friendship: Roosevelt had supported his Leyte plan, and MacArthur was gracious. “It will be the first letter from the freed Philippines. I thought you might like it for your philatelic collection.” He then urged that the United States grant the Philippines its independence and that Roosevelt come to Manila to preside over the ceremony. Rifle fire crackled nearby. He was ecstatic.
George Kenney was not. Over the next days, Kenney roiled his staff with tours of the front lines, everywhere inspecting the terrain for airfield sites, his constant, irritable orders spurred by his fears that Halsey would soon be gone. He had reason to worry: When he was returning with MacArthur to the Nashville, a Japanese fighter screamed overhead, then plunged into the cruiser Honolulu. Within four days of the landings, Kenney was ready to snap. His patience at an end, his staff followed him to Tacloban, where he gave peremptory orders to clear a Japanese airstrip (the same one that, months before, Shigenori Kuroda deemed a gift to the Americans), while Japanese fighters rolled into deadly strafing missions over Red Beach. As Kenney later recalled, he told a commander that beginning the next morning, the commander was to use his bulldozers “to push back into the water anything still left . . . that interfered with getting the airdrome built.” Kenney then “mobilized every soldier and Filipino we could get our hands on and started clearing the strip.” Back aboard the Nashville after his first night ashore, Kenney felt better but was sobered when he heard that a Japanese fleet was headed for Leyte to contest the invasion.
The Japanese plan, hatched by Admiral Soemu Toyoda, was Japan’s last chance to confront the Americans at sea. Sho-Go, as Toyoda called the plan, led to one of the most decisive naval battles in history. Toyoda knew where Halsey and Kinkaid’s ships were, and he designed a three-pronged offensive whose complexity rivaled Halsey’s and Kinkaid’s preparations for the Leyte invasion. One fleet, sailing from Singapore under the command of Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita, was aimed at San Bernardino Strait but, just after leaving Borneo, would divide into two probes. One of the two probes would break off from Kurita and, under the command of Admiral Shoji Nishimura, enter Philippine waters through Surigao Strait before heading north toward Leyte. This dual attack was aimed at Kinkaid, whose Seventh Fleet lacked Halsey’s firepower. Toyoda calculated that if all went as planned, the two prongs would approach Kinkaid in a seaborne envelopment. The problem, of course, was to lure Halsey’s Third Fleet north. Toyoda would do this by sending a flotilla of four undermanned carriers and two battleships under Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa down the eastern coast of Luzon past Samar and toward Leyte. When Halsey steamed north to meet Ozawa, the two prongs to the south would pounce on Kinkaid’s smaller fleet—and destroy it.
Toyoda’s plan resulted from his study of Halsey, whom he pegged as an egotistical glory seeker. Unusually outspoken for a senior Japanese naval officer, Toyoda regularly expressed his belief that the war against the United States was unwinnable. This belief kept him from a senior position, at least for a time, as did his incessant lobbying for more funding for naval aviation. At one point, he argued for an end to Japan’s conflict in China and the subsequent transfer of army divisions to face MacArthur. Had this strategy been followed, it would have changed the course of the war. Toyoda was also one of the few senior officers in Japan’s military who understood the need for a unified command. In many respects, while wearing the uniform of an admiral, Toyoda was a Japanese MacArthur—egotistical, outspoken, sensitive to criticism, a defender of his service, and brilliant. Inevitably, if reluctantly, he was appointed chief of the navy general staff. Now, with Kinkaid and Halsey’s fleets crammed together in and near Leyte Gulf, he shaped a strategy to defeat them. Toyoda believed that if Halsey took his bait, Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet would be no match for Kurita and Nishimura, who, with Kinkaid out of the way, could turn their guns on Krueger’s infantry. The plan was complicated, but it nearly worked.
Late on the evening of October 23, as Kurita was spotted sailing toward Leyte, Kinkaid deployed his fleet to meet him. MacArthur, aboard the Nashville, was as excited as a little boy. He wanted to be a part of the battle, he told Kinkaid, as he had been “studying naval combat, and the glamour of sea battle.” Kinkaid, who had seen more glamour than he cared to mention, turned him down, then insisted that MacArthur be transferred to the USS Wasatch, where he would be out of danger. On the morning of October 24, two U.S. submarines torpedoed three of Kurita’s cruisers, sending two of them to the bottom of the Pacific—one of which, the Atago, carried Kurita. Kurita swam to a nearby cruiser and continued his command, pushing his fleet toward San Bernardino Strait. On the other side of Samar, Ozawa desperately tried to get Halsey’s attention. Events now conspired to help the Japanese: After Kurita’s flotilla was spotted and attacked (with aircraft sinking the Musashi, a Japanese “super batt
leship”), Halsey’s fliers spotted Ozawa. Meanwhile, Kurita, assailed by American aircraft, turned back west and out of Kinkaid’s reach, waiting for darkness to mask his maneuvers. Meanwhile Nishimura, further south, plowed ahead. Convinced that Kurita was in retreat, Halsey took Toyoda’s bait and sailed north to catch Ozawa. Kinkaid was on his own.
The Battle of Leyte Gulf has entered naval history as a blemish on William Halsey’s dazzling reputation. But the battle was also Japan’s last chance, and it was squandered. When Nishimura’s fleet entered the Surigao Strait, it was met by Admiral Jesse “Oley” Oldendorf’s group of six aged battleships, three heavy and two light cruisers, twenty-six destroyers, and thirty-nine PT boats. This battle, waged on the night of October 24, is often overlooked in the controversy of Halsey’s decision to follow Ozawa, but it was a textbook engagement, as Oldendorf crossed Nishimura’s T, firing broadsides at Nishimura’s onrushing force. The night engagement was lopsided, with Nishimura losing two battleships and two destroyers. But further north, Kinkaid was in trouble. Just north of Leyte, off the shores of Samar, Kinkaid remained under the impression that at least a part of Halsey’s fleet, Task Force 34, remained on station guarding the San Bernardino Strait. It wasn’t. Just before sunrise on the morning of October 25, Kinkaid asked his staff if there was anything they had overlooked. There was one thing, said Captain R. H. Cruzen, Kinkaid’s operations officer: “We’ve never asked Halsey directly if Task Force 34 is guarding the San Bernardino Strait.” Kinkaid shrugged off Cruzen’s warning, ordered his staff to send Halsey a dispatch, and then retired to his cabin to read a detective novel.
It was then that Kurita swung his fleet of four battleships, six cruisers, and eleven destroyers back toward Leyte. At 6:45, twenty minutes after sunrise, an American reconnaissance pilot spotted a Japanese ship and then, diving lower for a closer inspection, counted the battleships, cruisers, and destroyers below him. A little later, on the escort carrier Fanshaw Bay, a radar operator reported a ship contact “where there should be no ship.” At the same time, a pilot aboard the Gambier Bay looked north, through the fog off Samar, and turned to a shipmate. “Christ,” he said. “Look at those pagodas.” Aware now that the Japanese had slipped through San Bernardino Strait, the commander of the escort carriers, Admiral Clifton Sprague, sent out a breathless dispatch to Kinkaid, then ordered his small carriers to take on Kurita. The Fanshaw Bay, St. Lo, White Plains, Kalinin Bay, Kitkun Bay, and Gambier Bay then formed a circle, protected by a line of three destroyers and four destroyer escorts. By 7 a.m., Sprague’s aircraft were in the air and heading toward Kurita, while Kurita’s battleships and cruisers responded with furious salvos. By 7:30, the battle was fully under way. Back on his command ship, Kinkaid feared the worst. “Situation very serious,” he radioed to Halsey. “Escort-carriers again threatened by enemy surface forces. Your assistance badly needed. Escort-carriers retiring to Leyte Gulf.”
While Kurita was being blanketed by plunging American aircraft, three American destroyers steamed toward him out of the morning mist. The attack was suicidal: The Johnston was crushed by three fourteen-inch shells from Kurita’s battleships, then three more from his cruisers. Blazing now, the Johnston barely stayed in the battle. Nearby, the destroyer Hoel took on the Japanese battleship Kongo, was hit by a stream of shells, but stayed afloat until 8:30, when the crew abandoned ship. The third destroyer, the Heermann, gamely fired torpedoes at a distant Japanese cruiser, then took on Kurita’s four battleships—a single David facing off against four Goliaths. The Heermann was checked by broadsides from the cruiser Chikuma and limped away. By midmorning Sprague had lost the Johnston and the Hoel, with the Heermann badly damaged. Small destroyer escorts, fighting in a second stream, were also either damaged or sunk: The Samuel B. Roberts went down with eighty sailors, the survivors clinging to its wreckage for fifty hours before being rescued. Sprague’s heroic attack gave Kurita pause, but not enough to save the Gambier Bay, which was hit at a little after 8:10 a.m. Nearly defenseless, the carrier capsized shortly before 9:00 a.m., and the St. Lo (a victim of a kamikaze strike) sank just over two hours later. Two other escort carriers, the Fanshaw Bay and White Plains, were struck by a stream of Japanese shells and put out of action.
Kurita could have pressed his attack, but with the ocean ablaze with American and Japanese ships, he decided that his offensive could not succeed. He veered westward, zigging and zagging as more of Sprague’s aircraft followed him away from the battle. Sprague saved Krueger’s army, but over the next week, questions were raised about Halsey’s decision to move north—questions that have been raised ever since. Back in Honolulu, Nimitz radioed Halsey: “The whole world wants to know where is Task Force 34.” In fact, although Japanese warships had sunk a light carrier, two escort carriers, and three destroyers, Kurita’s losses were far more severe. After taking Toyoda’s bait, Halsey had created havoc among Ozawa’s fleet, sinking three aircraft carriers and a destroyer. The Japanese suffered a major defeat, with one fleet carrier, three light carriers, three battleships, six heavy and four light cruisers, and nine destroyers sunk or otherwise out of action. In the battle’s wake, MacArthur’s senior commanders questioned Halsey’s actions. He had been gulled, they said, and he had followed the promise of glory in yet another show of navy arrogance. Hearing this during a dinner at his headquarters on Leyte, MacArthur pointedly silenced Halsey’s critics. “Leave the Bull alone,” he said gruffly. “He’s still a fighting admiral in my book.”
Walter Krueger never doubted that Kinkaid would turn back the Japanese; he was far more concerned with the increasingly desperate Japanese air attacks. Krueger’s men had fought under the guns of Japanese aircraft before, but this was different: Because of a lack of usable airstrips, few of Kenney’s fliers could get into the air, which meant that Yamashita was able to successfully reinforce Leyte, sending thousands of infantrymen on barges into Ormoc, on Leyte’s western coast. The Japanese were aided by the sudden appearance of two successive typhoons, which allowed them to reinforce their defenses with the 41st Infantry Regiment, the 169th and 171st Independent Infantry Battalions, and the elite 1st Japanese Division. From October 25 to November 1, the Japanese pushed their units north, where they dug in along the spur of Leyte’s central spine on a series of interlocking, pockmarked ridgelines. To their front and down the mountain was the town of Pinamopoan on Carigara Bay; to their rear was the town of Limon. To get to Limon, Krueger’s infantrymen would have to fight uphill through thick jungle, then storm over the ridgeline and then down the rear slope, which was interlaced with Japanese single-soldier spider holes. Limon, at the bottom of the ridgeline, would have to be taken house by house.
The typhoons slowed the advance of Krueger’s divisions, forcing army engineers to lay a new road for the use of the 24th Division, which was supplied by miles of trucks mired in mud. The deluge was far more vicious than anything the Americans had faced at Buna. Three days out from its landing zones, the 24th ran into tough Japanese resistance, engaging in increasingly intensive firefights with the Japanese 19th and 34th Infantry Regiments. Despite the resistance, Krueger cleared the Leyte Valley by early November, then moved north and west up Leyte’s eastern coast before hooking south toward Limon. On November 7, elements of the 24th Division ran into the Japanese 1st Division laid out along Breakneck Ridge and mounted a full assault. The Japanese response was murderous. The Battle of Breakneck Ridge went on for the next three weeks, the Japanese taking advantage of the tangled jungle on the forward slopes of their position to pin the 24th into position. American infantrymen were tied down among the ridge’s gullies, their ammunition and rations having to be hustled forward by hand. Progress was slow, with a promised breakthrough toward Limon stopped by a second typhoon that swept over the island on November 8. “The trickle of supplies was at a standstill,” one soldier recalled. “On Carigara Bay the obscured headlands moaned under the onslaught of the seas. Planes were grounded and ships became haunted things looking for refuge. Massed artillery
barrages to the summit of Breakneck Ridge sounded dim and hollow in the tempest. Trails were obliterated by the rain. The sky was black.”
Back on the beaches, MacArthur paced his office, railing against the rain and constant Japanese air attacks and fulminating at Krueger. The fight for Breakneck Ridge seemed to go on and on, with Japanese defenses speckled with mines, single-soldier murder and spider holes, pillboxes, strongpoints, booby-trapped pits, and reinforced firing positions, backed by mortars and artillery. Japanese artillery was open-sighted: the muzzles down, firing at American soldiers at point-blank range. Into this maelstrom Krueger’s soldiers threw themselves again and again, as MacArthur’s commanders fought the gelatinous muck and endless rains. Krueger did his own pacing, though his phlegmatic personality served him well. The going was so tough that at least for a time, Krueger left off inspecting the feet of his men. Then too, as a squad of his soldiers later recounted, the Japanese defenses and tropical deluges got the best of him: One bleak night, he found himself in a foxhole with a lone infantry squad. No one recognized him; he was wearing his helmet and underwear, and nothing else.
As the torrent subsided, on November 9 Krueger pressed his attack along Breakneck Ridge, while the Japanese countered by landing more reinforcements at Ormoc Bay. Finally able to fly, Kenney’s airmen hit the transports before the ships finished unloading, but the Japanese put enough men ashore to strengthen their teetering lines in the north. It was now clear to Krueger that the Japanese intended to make their stand on Leyte among its northern mountains, so he ordered his southern divisions to move west, seizing the rest of the island. By November 11, after a series of bloody attacks, Krueger’s forward commanders brought tanks into the battle—they moved up Breakneck Ridge and down its reverse slope, destroying twenty-five enemy pillboxes. Exhausted and with his casualties mounting, Krueger reinforced the 24th with the 32nd Division on November 14.
