Storm Over Leyte

by John Prados

  That’s a good story and likely true. Chief of staff Obayashi confirms that the decoy idea came from Combined Fleet. Historian Gordon Prange, whose works include a biography of Fuchida, accepts this claim as well. The degree of collaboration is suggested by Ozawa’s senior staff officer, Captain Ohmae Toshikazu, who recalls making no fewer than ten trips to Combined Fleet headquarters to coordinate parts of the plan.

  But the matter is more complicated. First of all, Captain Fuchida was fond of talking large. Moreover, Admiral Ozawa was a highly capable officer, perfectly able to intuit the decoy concept himself. Indeed, at the Philippine Sea battle, Ozawa had sent part of his force ahead of the carrier fleet in a decoy role. At the Battle of Midway, the Japanese thrust into the Aleutians had been a decoy mission, and Imperial Navy aircraft carriers had had decoy roles in carrier battles off the Solomons. In addition, Rear Admiral Takata’s August 4 operations order had already provided for the Mobile Fleet to function as a diversion. The better way to think of this is to view decoy operations as a standard of Imperial Navy tactics, and Ozawa, whether or not assisted by Fuchida, as looking for ways to incorporate deception into Sho.

  Admiral Ozawa also reviewed his involvement with the Kurita fleet, arguing that Toyoda’s Combined Fleet should control it directly. With his own tactical role, Ozawa felt he would have little attention to spare for controlling another fleet. In addition, the 2nd Battleship Division, with the old battlewagons, should be sent to Kurita. The battleships added nothing to Ozawa’s mission, but they might contribute to Kurita’s surface assault. Similarly, he argued that the Fifth Fleet would be ineffective as an advance guard for the Mobile Fleet unit. Ozawa recommended taking it away from him, as well, and employing the Fifth Fleet more usefully. In addition, the admiral felt Kurita would need directly cooperating air units for cover, but Ozawa could do nothing about that. He predicted the Sho contingency would take place in the Philippines. For mid-September this amounted to a prescient recitation.

  Admiral Toyoda took some of that advice but not all of it. He would take control of the Kurita fleet himself, and strengthen it with the additional battleships from the 2nd Battleship Division. He also removed the Fifth Fleet from Ozawa’s force, but its role remained undetermined. As for air cover over Kurita, JNAF assets were so thin that Toyoda preferred to have them attack the Allies rather than protect friendly forces.

  That air element proved especially painful for Combined Fleet’s chief of staff. Vice Admiral Kusaka had lived and breathed airplanes. When Ozawa had led a carrier division and Fuchida the air group, it was Kusaka who had been the flag captain. One of the most ardent champions of the JNAF, and one of those who argued for the primacy of the air arm and the amazing flexibility of the aircraft carrier, Kusaka had been chief of staff for Nagumo Chuichi at Pearl Harbor and right through Midway and the South Pacific. In a sense he was poacher turned enforcer—but his JNAF dog of war now lacked fangs.

  Navy Minister Yonai Mitsumasa had risen through the ranks before aviation had acquired the predominance it now possessed. But Yonai, revered for his astuteness and bravery in the face of political storms, drew the right conclusions. Rising to speak in the Diet on September 9, Admiral Yonai refused to make light of the damage Japan’s forces had suffered in the Marianas fighting. He conceded that air strikes to follow up carrier attacks had gone badly. The combination had been “truly action which would make the demons weep.” The next battle had to go better.

  In its summer-fall issue, the journal Contemporary Japan featured an article by the naval writer Ito Masanori titled “Japan’s Fleet in Being Strategy.” He, too, had words about the next battle. The Marianas had been near the “aorta” of Japan’s lifeline. While the Americans still did not dare enter the Imperial Navy’s “operational zone,” the war situation favored them and they might even be able to command the fringes of Japan’s shores. The Imperial Navy, Ito thought, would make its “decisive onslaught” soon. Ito’s logic had penetrated the obfuscations imposed by Japan’s wartime censorship. His conclusion proved correct. The long-anticipated decisive battle approached rapidly.

  CHAPTER 3

  BREAKTHROUGH AND EXPLOITATION

  Allied commanders continued puzzling over the big picture. Now in its third year, the Pacific war had nearly—perhaps neatly—reversed itself. The Japanese might have an incredible willingness to die for their emperor, and a stoic determination to fight, but the balance had shifted sharply against them.

  No longer on the march, Japan struggled to fight on equal terms. Americans called the Philippine Sea battle the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot,” and why not? Hundreds of Japanese planes had been shot down virtually without them laying a finger on the “Big Blue Fleet,” as Yankee sailors nicknamed their carrier armada. Similarly, Japanese carriers had been sunk by American submarines without U.S. aircraft touching them. So far in 1944, Japanese combat losses totaled 240 warships, including aircraft carriers, cruisers, and much more. To put it in perspective, the Allies had lost barely 50 ships in the entire Pacific theater—only one as large as an escort carrier and just half a dozen as big as destroyers.

  Marines and GIs who slogged through the coral of Biak or the mud of the Mariana Islands, or who slugged it out with the Japanese in their caves, knew the war had changed too. With growing Japanese impotence, there were changes in combat tactics. The Imperial Army became less enamored with defending the beaches where the Allies focused their firepower so easily. Now Japanese troops fought from prepared positions in the interior—often caves in hillsides that were largely impervious to the American bombers and battleships. Only when the Japanese decided they could fight no longer did they revert to the familiar war tactics: The imperial troops would fling themselves at the enemy in fierce suicide charges.

  As a result of this transformation, Allied leaders had begun to talk of “accelerating” their offensive. Indeed, the “island hopping” that made Chester Nimitz famous owed equally to the agglomeration of American combat power and the growing ineffectualness of the Japanese. Whether a landing in the Philippines had the purpose of liberating them or of preparing the way for a leap to Taiwan, and where that landing might happen—those things were details. There would be such an invasion. To have airfields to cover such a mission, and to complete the isolation of the Carolines and New Guinea, both Nimitz and MacArthur slated fresh amphibious operations. Nimitz would invade Peleliu, an island in the Palau chain, and MacArthur would plot a move to Morotai in the Moluccas, the storied Spice Islands. A carrier raid deep into Empire waters would cover these offensives. The carrier task force, now under the command of Admiral William F. Halsey, prepared its strike. Halsey intended to assail rear positions in the Ryukyu Islands, as well as airfields in the southern Philippines from which Japanese warplanes might intervene. His carrier raid would have very fateful consequences.

  THE BIG BLUE FLEET

  This war cruise would be the first time the Americans traded off admirals and staffs for the carriers—Halsey’s Third Fleet against Spruance’s Fifth—or, in Navy bureaucratese, a “platoon” system.

  There were challenges in the transition. William Halsey, who had covered himself with glory in the Solomons, had not held a seagoing post since 1942. While directing the Third Fleet involved some of the same kinds of concerns that Halsey had had as a regional chieftain, his role now was much more involved in the care, feeding, and employment of warships and amphibious groups. In addition, the changes since Bill Halsey’s last seagoing assignment were enormous, not just in the strategic situation but also the result of technological and logistical developments. Halsey needed to refamiliarize himself with the rhythms of life aboard a warship at sea. He had never led more than a single aircraft carrier, but now there were four or five in every group, and four different “task groups” working in tandem to make the “task force.” Halsey had to accustom himself to new action patterns, as Nimitz advanced U.S. fleet bases across the Central Pacific. In the S
olomons, bases had been fixed. By contrast, during Halsey’s first month, Nimitz’s Pacific Fleet put three new anchorages into service. The fast carrier task force would sail from one base but return to another, closer to the new scene of action. Months of shoreside planning did little to prepare Halsey—nicknamed “Bull”—for this command.

  Admiral Halsey had lots of help. His staff—200 officers and seamen—outclassed what he’d had had as an area commander. Fifty were officers. Rear Admiral Robert B. Carney, chief of staff, presided over the lot. “Mick” Carney, who had already been with Halsey for a year, had seen some of the most ferocious fighting in the South Pacific, first from the deck of a light cruiser, then at headquarters. He was known for sharp staff work and jocular “dispatchese.” Captain Ralph E. “Rollo” Wilson, the operations officer, proved adept at anticipating the multifarious needs of carriers, juggling orders to the task groups, service squadrons, and amphibious forces. He had a logic the Bull found convincing. Chief for air matters was Commander Douglas Moulton. William Riley, a Marine brigadier general, doubled as the chief planner. Captain Harold E. Stassen, former governor of Minnesota, functioned as flag secretary, keeping track of Halsey’s rapid-fire decisions. The communications section absorbed a lot more of his staff manpower.

  Captain Michael Cheek served as fleet intelligence officer. Cheek, his cragged face calling attention to his name, usually worked out of his cabin, even though the intelligence staff had a table in flag plot, situated in the conning tower of the New Jersey. Cheek had been a Navy pro but left the service to be a businessman in the Far East. He returned to the service before Pearl Harbor and signed on with the ONI. Uncomfortable among the wild bunch of Halsey’s staff, the straitlaced captain had a more outgoing lieutenant, Harris Cox, to front for him.

  Commander Gilven M. Slonim led the mobile radio detachment that fed Halsey Ultra intelligence as well as the results of their own radio interceptions. Slonim and Halsey had virtually invented the “mobile radio unit,” as those entities were known in the Pacific. Or more accurately, the code breakers of the Zoo (then Station Hypo), led by Joe Rochefort and including Slonim, had had a vague initial idea; then Slonim went to sea with Halsey and made it practical. Gil Slonim had been a budding language officer. He went to Japan for training in the fall of 1939 but never quite finished—his study of kanji was curtailed as the war clouds gathered in the summer of 1941, when the Navy pulled out all its trainees. Lieutenant Slonim went to Pearl Harbor to work at Station Hypo with the fabulous Commander Rochefort. The mobile unit was to have been a temporary assignment while Halsey conducted some carrier raids, but his radiomen became so invaluable that Slonim spent the entire war at sea, alternately serving with Bull Halsey and Raymond Spruance, and finished his career as an admiral.

  All these people helped Bull Halsey refashion himself as a fighting sailor. The Navy even had a word for that, “makee-learnee.”

  The focus for much of their activity would be flag plot on the New Jersey. One deck up from Halsey’s quarters—and beneath the captain’s bridge—flag plot was a veritable command post, complete with communications stations for direct links with the fleet, chart tables to plot navigational data and record positions, a stand-up desk for the intelligence staff to assemble their material, voice tubes to pass orders, and a built-in chair for the admiral to sit in while he stared at the sea. On a routine shift there were twenty or more staffers and seamen in the space. One of the senior staff—Mick Carney, Rollo Wilson, Bill Riley, or Mike Cheek—took turns heading the watch when they were not out on deck playing doubles tennis with the admiral. Bill Halsey liked to step out onto the bridge wing first thing every day, before heading to flag plot, check in, then exercise with tennis. The admiral’s partner, Carnes “Piggy” Weeks, staff doctor, very importantly controlled the liquor supply.

  What was true for the chief held for his Indians. Like Halsey, many top admirals lacked sea legs as leaders of aircraft carrier formations. The Navy had sent Vice Admiral John S. “Slew” McCain to take the reins as the officer directly in charge of Task Force 38, the Big Blue Fleet, with its four carrier task groups. But he needed to apprentice too. Slew McCain, as a captain, had skippered the carrier Ranger before the war, but he had never led a multiship carrier force, much less a multigroup one. McCain’s wartime posts had been with land-based air, including a brief stint in the South Pacific, but he returned to the fleet from a slot at the Navy Department. Before he could function effectively at the head of Task Force 38, McCain needed to makee-learnee both modern carriers and fleets of them.

  One thing McCain was aware of was the mobile radio detachment. He wanted someone like Gil Slonim with him—Slew had been aboard Spruance’s flagship during the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot and had seen radio interception in action. But the Navy had only a certain number of detachments and, often enough, none available. The code-breaking organization typically provided mobile detachments only for fleet commanders like Spruance or Halsey. Admiral McCain and Commander Slonim made a private arrangement under which Slonim sent McCain special messages for his eyes only containing Ultra or radio intercept information and tagged “Polecat.”

  Vice Admiral Marc A. “Pete” Mitscher, who had had McCain’s job under Spruance, had just seven months with the task force and didn’t want to leave. Mitscher, too, had been in the South Pacific, where he had worked closely with Halsey as land-based air chief. Mitscher’s chief of staff, Commodore Arleigh A. Burke, had been there too, as a destroyer leader. Both were formidable men whom Halsey esteemed. McCain had left the Solomons just as Halsey arrived, and he could not escape the apprenticeship.

  For Admiral Halsey the choice between Mitscher and McCain was clear. Instead of the full fast carrier force, McCain got temporary duty—makee-learnee as chief of Task Group 38.1. Admiral Mitscher stayed on as boss of Task Force 38, perched uncomfortably over a group leader who felt he should be in charge.

  In the meantime the former group commander, Rear Admiral J. J. “Jocko” Clark, stayed in the Hornet as the instructor to educate Slew McCain.

  • • •

  PETE MITSCHER SPLIT up the force. Task Force 38 sailed on August 28 and 29. Task Group 38.4 left first, and the next day, Admiral Mitscher’s main fleet followed.

  Staying behind in Eniwetok were the supply ships of Service Squadron 10, now the mainstay of Pacific Fleet logistics. They were probably relieved to see Mitscher’s fleet go. Mitscher’s hungry ships had exhausted all its stocks of fresh and frozen food, and emergency rations were all ServRon 10 had left. Thirsty ships drank its fuel oil as well. Admiral Halsey, the fleet commander, anticipated a return to Manus, in the Admiralties, not Eniwetok. More than 4.1 million barrels of fuel oil were required for that maneuver. Only a quarter of that could be found at Eniwetok, where supply officers had to organize a shuttle to the Admiralty Islands base.

  All that had been in slow motion now sped past in overdrive. The aircraft carrier Enterprise, a stalwart of the fleet, had been at Pearl Harbor to celebrate Franklin Roosevelt’s visit. Now the “Big E,” as she was known, went with Task Group 38.4, Rear Admiral Ralph E. Davison’s unit, to bomb the Bonin and Volcano Islands, mainly Chichi Jima and Iwo Jima. Starting on August 31, the carrier planes spent several days socking them. Davison had a cruiser-destroyer force bombard them too. Fighter Squadron VF-20 of the Enterprise kicked off with a sweep over Chichi Jima. Commander Fred Bakutis led twenty-eight F-6F Hellcat fighters on the mission. A dozen SB-2C Helldiver bombers from Commander Emmet Riera’s Bombing 20 followed. The Bonins strike would be Air Group 20’s first combat action. No Japanese planes opposed them, and shipping proved so scarce, the strikes hit harbor installations instead, strafing and using rockets. Then they went for other Bonins.

  For Commander C. L. Moore’s Air Group 51 of the light carrier San Jacinto the story proved the same. But fierce Japanese flak challenged the Americans. Lieutenant (Junior Grade) George H. W. Bush, piloting a TBM Avenger of Torpedo 51, w
as swinging in on his attack run over Chichi Jima when flak riddled his plane, setting the engine on fire. Lieutenant (Junior Grade) William White, the carrier’s air intelligence officer, had wanted to see Chichi Jima for himself and sat in the tailgunner position. Lieutenant Commander D. J. Melvin, the squadron commander, did not object. The other man aboard the Avenger, Radioman 2nd Class Jack Delaney, regularly flew with Bush, who kept control long enough to drop his bombs and put the plane on a trajectory for a water landing.

  Lieutenant Bush bailed out, followed by one other—but nobody knows who he was, for this sailor’s parachute did not open properly. Lieutenant Bush himself hit the plane’s tail on his way out, slicing open his scalp and tearing the parachute. He made it to the water, though, and some hours later the submarine Finback rescued Bush. Commander Robert R. Williams Jr., of the Finback, had been assigned to recover downed aviators, and on this cruise returned not only Bush but also a Franklin Avenger crew downed over Iwo Jima, and an Enterprise fighter pilot. George Herbert Walker Bush would be awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his mission; he went on to become the forty-first president of the United States.

  Admiral Mitscher had kept the other carriers with him. Rear Admiral Frederick C. “Ted” Sherman with Task Group 38.3 in the Essex crossed the equator on September 1. Captain Carlos W. Wieber permitted his sailors to convene King Neptune’s Court and initiate those who had never made the passage, a long-standing nautical tradition. From September 6 to 8, Mitscher blasted Palau, a little over a week before the scheduled landing. Commander David McCampbell, boss of Air Group 15 on the Essex, led nearly 100 fighters from his carrier and three more ships on the first sweep. Air strikes followed. By this point in the war, the U.S. carriers had evolved a more or less standard strike “package,” typically consisting of a dozen SB-2C dive-bombers, eight or ten TBM Avenger torpedo bombers, and a dozen more F-6F fighters.