by John Prados
Japanese commanders worked frenetically. The Second Air Fleet reported engaging the enemy at 6:30 a.m. The First Air Fleet took over the scouting mission, mounting air searches from the Philippines. The Third Air Fleet sent some 250 aircraft to southern Japan bases on Kyushu. But Okinawa reported the weather had closed in. Orders for the T Air Attack Force changed so that it should skip landing on Okinawa and come directly to Takao after striking the U.S. fleet. Kanoya base was to launch five search planes and several intruders to harass the Americans.
At about noon Admiral Kusaka, still acting in place of Combined Fleet commander Toyoda, who was stuck on Taiwan, ordered the main air strength of the northern fleet to Kanoya. At least 250 more aircraft were involved. (Allied intelligence estimated 130 bombers and 150 fighters.) The NGS ordered JNAF air depots at Omura and Kanoya to hand over every plane that had completed repairs or been accepted from the manufacturers to active units. Two fighter groups, which constituted the bulk of JNAF strength in China, were also ordered to Taiwan.
Having done all he could to assemble strength, shortly after 12:30 p.m. Tokyo time, Admiral Kusaka ordered the First Air Fleet to attack from the Philippines and have its planes recover on Taiwan. Air fleet chief of staff Captain Odawara Toshihiko flew to Clark Field to organize the assault. With strength estimated at thirty fighters and fifty bombers, First Air Fleet had trouble putting the mission together. No strike took place that day. Late that afternoon Taiwan reported all airfields still usable.
The Supreme War Council met in Tokyo, and talk there was generally about peace feelers. Prime Minister Koiso complained of glacial movement. Gloom hung over the gathering.
T Air Attack Force launched earlier to begin its torpedo attack. Captain Kuno sent forty-one twin-engine Francis and Betty bombers from Kanoya. Fifty Army bombers were supposed to fly from Okinawa. It is not clear what happened to that group.
At 6:37 p.m. Admiral Sugimoto of Second Air Fleet informed other commands the T Force had engaged. Some attack planes flew from Taiwan. Fukudome records that 101 Sea Eagles assailed the Americans. Carriers Essex and Lexington experienced JNAF suicide tactics for the first time. A Jill dive-bomber approached first, hidden in clouds but tracked by radar, pushed over above Essex, but changed his mind midway and pulled out of the dive, only to repeat the maneuver against the Lexington.
Soon after eight in the evening, air fleet ordered its elite strike unit to hit Halsey’s fleet again the next day, recovering on Taiwan. Captain Kuno protested that the Americans would be bombing Taiwanese bases. The order stood.
“STRONG COUNTERATTACKS WERE DELIVERED”
On the first day, Task Force 38 struck airfields and rail yards. The next brought more airfield attacks, but there was a concentration on ports. The scale of the attacks diminished—just under 1,000 sorties in place of nearly 1,400 from the first day.
Admiral Fukudome’s Sea Eagles behaved like angry bees whose hive had been kicked over. You could see the Japanese energy in the intercepts. At FRUPAC, Julianne Dilley worked the telephone switchboard that day and the place hummed—there were more phone calls than during the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot. If it wasn’t Zoo officers checking for the latest scoop, it was the code breakers passing the word on new decrypts, or Nimitz’s people asking for confirmation or for more reports.
Most unusually, this air battle involved Imperial Navy shore-based commands, with Combined Fleet headquarters also ashore. Thus, radio was vital to circulating orders to the widely distributed JNAF formations. That meant Allied intelligence intercepted and decrypted numerous air unit movement instructions, many JNAF sighting reports, a number of Kusaka’s or Fukudome’s mission orders, plus some of the responses. Lags between times of origin and when FRUPAC or OP-20-G broke out messages, translated, and circulated the information were mostly under twenty-four hours. When T Force boss Kuno objected that his airplanes arriving over Taiwan would find the Americans attacking it, that intel appeared in Pearl Harbor’s Ultra summary the next day. An unidentified denizen of the Zoo wrote right into that report, referring to Captain Kuno’s protest, “Right he was!” In an afternoon dispatch Halsey proclaimed his strikes had eliminated 396 aircraft and sunk fourteen cargo ships.
Now, after two days, IGHQ officers finally decided to inform Lord Privy Seal Kido of the huge air battle. As for Admiral Toyoda, he had returned to Taiwan, to Taibei (Taihoku), and was there when the assault began. Toyoda did not attempt to fly to Japan during the time Task Force 38 rained destruction on Okinawa and the Ryukyus. He stayed in a bunker when Halsey’s fliers unleashed their terrible power at Taiwan. In his Taibei command center, Toyoda railed at the dangers that trapped him. With staff officers Takata and Fuchida, the Combined Fleet C-in-C did what he could to contribute, but the role of beekeeper stayed with Fukudome.
The angry bees of the First Air Fleet also swarmed. Vice Admiral Teraoka went to Clark Field to see off a strike—thirty attack planes covered by seventy Zero fighters plus an equal number from the Japanese Army. Their mission proved futile. The aircraft were supposed to refuel at a base in northern Luzon before pressing on, but the operation fell apart there. Problems refueling the Army aircraft took most of them off the board. Then weather closed in over the Taiwan Strait, with a northwest-bound low-pressure system tracking right across the strait, and the naval aircraft found nothing. To compound the sorrow, the Sea Eagle leading the escort fighters, Lieutenant Suzuki Usaburo, suffered an engine failure and had to ditch, lost at sea. Teraoka lamented, “I am sorry to say the ‘escape of the big fish’ is to be an undying regret.” The Washington Ultra summary commented drily on the fourteenth, “These planes failed to find our fleet.”
But in flag plot on the New Jersey, frustration grew. The first night as it sailed with Bogan’s Task Group 38.2, the flagship had been in the thick of the fighting as Japanese bombers hovered in the dark, suddenly attacking from different points of the compass. No damage was sustained, but JNAF would be back.
The day’s big discovery, though, came from the strike waves: Fukudome had many more airfields than believed. Ted Sherman’s pilots, briefed to expect four JNAF bases in their sector, found fifteen. Admiral Mitscher made some quick back-of-the-envelope calculations and told Halsey he could not neutralize all those fields. Mitscher sent no strike waves after noontime in order to avoid being caught landing returning aircraft at dusk, when everyone expected the Japanese attack. Halsey suddenly realized this was Friday the thirteenth.
American intelligence might have minimized the Sea Eagles, but no one told the fliers of the T Air Attack Force. As dusk approached, a constant series of “bogeys” appeared on Ted Sherman’s radar screens. The fighter direction officers went into emergency mode. A fighter CAP from Slew McCain’s light carrier Belleau Wood was vectored to initiate contact. Group 38.3 sent interceptors from three of Sherman’s four carriers. The Japanese went down one after another. But more hid in the clouds until dark forced most defending fighters to land. Smaller numbers of CAP night fighters kept up a cat-and-mouse game against the intruders for nearly four hours.
Nothing stopped several Sea Eagles from aiming torpedoes at the Essex, and only Captain Carlos W. Wieber’s radical turns kept the ship from harm. A flight of Bettys at low altitude went against McCain’s 38.1, which knew nothing until the planes were so close a lookout on cruiser Wichita spotted them. A journalist aboard the Lexington thought the torpedoes were everywhere, and he cringed in fear as a bomber lined up astern of the next carrier. It was destroyed at only the very last moment. The admiral immediately ordered an emergency turn to port. One bomber, shot out of the sky, splashed so close to flagship Wasp’s starboard bow that fire scorched the ship’s exterior paint. The plane’s wingtip damaged a radio antenna. Another Betty on its attack run lost the Wasp and went instead for the carrier Hornet. With the torpedo launched and churning through the water, that ship cleared—but instead the tin fish plowed into the stern of Captain Alexander R. Early’s h
eavy cruiser Canberra. She suffered grievous damage.
Rear Admiral Davison’s 38.4 group also had a hard time. It began well, with Enterprise fighters still aloft after dusk splashing some attackers, and others brought down by antiaircraft fire. But a Betty braved the flak curtain to dive at the carrier. By luck the bomber went down in between two other ships.
A group of Bettys sought Captain Joseph M. Shoemaker’s carrier, Franklin. They popped out of low clouds at one-minute intervals. Lieutenant A. J. Pope, flying in the queue of airplanes waiting to land on the ship, found one in front of him and blew it away. Another fell to screening warships. Its torpedo went right under the big carrier—the tin fish had been set to run too deep. One Sea Eagle got a torpedo in the water, hot for Franklin’s bow. Captain Shoemaker evaded that by ordering the helmsman to full right rudder and personally ringing up “back, full” on the engine repeater for the starboard engine. The combination swung and slowed the ship just enough for the torpedo to pass ahead. It continued on through Davison’s flotilla. The Betty that had launched the torpedo, already aflame, came in from the port bow of “Big Ben,” the Franklin. The bomber crashed just behind Big Ben’s island superstructure, slid across the deck, and tumbled into the sea.
Lieutenant Albert J. Roper led flak crews in the gun tubs right where that plane blazed over them. Roper leaped from his chair. The plane’s wing ripped the seat of his pants. A steeper angle on this crash, a shallower depth setting on that other torpedo, and the damage would have been extensive. Ralph Davison’s group had superb luck that night. The Japanese Sea Eagles were unrelenting, if outmatched.
The plight of cruiser Canberra forced Bull Halsey into a command decision. Captain Early’s vessel, dead in the water with flooded engine rooms, could not move. She wallowed less than 100 miles from Japan’s stronghold of Taiwan, and only a few hundreds of miles from an entire arc of enemy bastions. The closest place Canberra could get even temporary repairs—Ulithi—lay 1,300 miles distant. Early’s cruiser could get there only by towing—and that would be at the glacial pace of just a few knots. Meanwhile, covering the cruiser’s withdrawal would oblige Halsey to tarry within range of all those enemy bases, with Japanese reinforcements surging in. His original plan had been to spend just two days near Taiwan anyway. Halsey knew from Ultra that the JNAF were being reinforced and that the C-in-C of the Combined Fleet actively opposed him. As the Bull recounted, “We were squarely in the dragon’s jaws, and the dragon knew it.”
A logical solution would have been to take off Canberra’s crew, scuttle the ship, and get the hell out of there. But the Third Fleet commander lived up to his bulldog image. Admiral Halsey ordered cruiser Wichita to take the Canberra under tow, beginning to move her slowly out of the area. Halsey informed Nimitz by dispatch late in the day on the thirteenth. The Third Fleet commander had Mitscher mount a dawn fighter sweep the next morning to keep Japanese air down for as long as possible. Fukudome’s response would also be hampered because CINCPAC had previously arranged for heavy B-29s to raid Taiwan from China. The original idea had been to cover the withdrawal of Task Force 38. Now the mission became even more important. Again there would be no surprise for Admiral Fukudome. Both the Yangtze Base Force and a local command sent warnings that the big bombers were in the air and headed toward Taiwan.
The fights of the past few days had led Bull Halsey to conclude that, strong as it was, the Big Blue Fleet needed even more fighter protection. Flag plot on the New Jersey hummed with activity as planners concocted a new scheme under which air groups henceforth would comprise at least half fighters, while the aircraft carrier Bunker Hill sported a unit composed entirely of fighters. Because the Hellcat worked well in a fighter-bomber configuration, this change could be made without much loss of striking power. Nimitz approved and CINCPAC began to arrange shipment of the additional F-6Fs required to effect the change.
By now, the Combined Fleet had concentrated all its air forces under Admiral Fukudome, setting the stage for a major aerial confrontation. Halsey tried to head this off with his early-morning fighter sweep—with enough success to double down with a 100-plane bombing raid. But Fukudome Shigeru attained his dream of mass air attack on the Americans—daylight strikes and night missions too, by up to 400 aircraft. Pearl Harbor sent a dispatch outlining JICPOA’s analysis of the form and composition of a likely Japanese attack. But the state of JNAF training, diminished quality of aircraft manufacture, and reduced flying practice combined to stymie the air fleet. The abject failure of Teraoka’s attack on the thirteenth pointed up the true conditions. It happened again now.
Events proved so confusing that even JICPOA had trouble reconstructing them. In a special review it later produced on the Japanese in the Taiwan air battle, analysts estimated roughly 437 JNAF aircraft had participated. Many came from the carrier air groups that Combined Fleet had seconded to Fukudome. Large numbers of fighters escorted single-engine attack planes or dive-bombers and a small number of medium bombers. Fukudome issued attack orders shortly before 8:00 a.m. Within an hour, the T Air Attack Force reported it would have some of its Japanese Army bombers up and flying soon.
The biggest attack waves formed from planes moved down from the Tokyo region, that is, JNAF groups 653 and 654, the carrier air groups. One formation, picking up its fighter escort over Okinawa, found nothing and turned back. As it flew away from Task Force 38, the Americans pounced.
More typical was a midmorning crack at Admiral McCain’s carriers. Here were eight to twelve dive-bombers screened by somewhere between twenty and forty fighters. A Hornet CAP of eight intercepted them, still many miles from Task Group 38.1. The Navy fighters turned back the Japanese, destroying thirteen aircraft with five more probables, against a loss of four. Lieutenant Charles R. Stimpson, awarded the Navy Cross, chalked up five of the aerial victories by himself. Rear Admiral Obayashi Sueo, who had led a unit of Imperial Navy carriers at the Battle of the Philippine Sea and now moved up to be Ozawa’s chief of staff, lamented the slaughter of the neophyte carrier groups. Taiwanese waters, he decided, were “a graveyard.”
By dint of the mass attacks, carriers Hancock and Hornet and the light cruiser Reno sustained minor damage. The Reno’s flak batteries were so effectively controlled by her gunnery officer, Commander Arthur R. Gralla, that they splashed eleven Japanese attackers.
The T Air Attack Force accomplished the most. Assailing McCain’s Task Group 38.1 near dusk, a Francis of the JNAF 762nd Air Group put a torpedo into Captain William W. Behrens’s light cruiser, Houston. The torpedo struck amidships and flooded the engine rooms with 4,500 tons of water, nearly breaking the ship’s keel. That afternoon a T Force dispatch indicated its planes had sunk three to five American aircraft carriers, adding to between six and eight already sent to the bottom. These claims were fiction, but they thrilled Combined Fleet chief of staff Kusaka, who issued a special operations order sending the Shima fleet to sea so it could mop up the supposedly dazed remnants of a crippled U.S. strike force. Allied code breakers in Australia (FRUMEL), confirmed by OP-20-G in Washington, deciphered the message. Fukudome and the land-based air forces were to support the surface naval attack. Japanese radio direction finders located Task Force 38 at 5:30 a.m. the next morning, followed by repeated aircraft sightings. Here came a moment the Imperial Navy suffered badly from Admiral Toyoda’s absence at the head of the fleet command.
Meanwhile on the New Jersey the wounding of the Houston rekindled all the issues first raised with the torpedoed Canberra. Fleet Admiral Halsey at first wanted to get out of harm’s way, removing the danger by scuttling both ships. Halsey credits Mick Carney and his operations officer, Rollo Wilson, with convincing him these damaged ships could serve a useful function, bringing Japanese, hopeful of sinking them, in like lambs to the slaughter. Halsey’s basic orders provided that if he had a chance to engage the Japanese fleet, that mission could take precedence over his assignment to support the Leyte invasion.
While three task groups covered the crippled cruiser, Halsey sent Ralph Davison’s 38.4 group ahead to blast Luzon. The fleet commander informed Pearl Harbor that he was disposing his forces for an engagement and until further notice would be unable to cooperate with the Leyte invasion forces. Submarine Besugo saw an Imperial Navy surface force sally forth from the Bungo Strait in Empire waters. The description of several cruisers plus a light cruiser was close to the actual strength of Vice Admiral Shima Kiyohide’s Fifth Fleet.
More to the point, after the war we learned that Shima’s force actually lay in the Bungo Strait and sortied at that time. But something happened with Combined Fleet’s orders. Admiral Shima aborted that mission on October 16, when Kusaka came to his senses and sent out a further dispatch noting that “REMAINING ENEMY STRENGTH IS COMPARATIVELY LARGE” and probably would strike, making necessary several more days of JNAF softening-up attacks. Shima turned west and north for Amami Oshima, where he anchored later. Allied search planes from China saw two “battleships” (Shima had a pair of heavy cruisers). Shima did not leave until October 18.
Halsey’s notice that he was configuring for a fleet engagement brought a swift rejoinder from Seventh Fleet commander Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid, who warned that the landing was proceeding and required carrier support. Halsey relented and brought the rest of his groups in behind 38.4 to add weight to the Luzon attack, assuming position to back the invasion forces.
A seed planted off Taiwan would affect a huge fleet battle just ten days hence.
Meanwhile, both the damaged cruisers were under tow, and they and their close escort were dubbed “Cripple Division 1” or “Bait Division 1,” with Rear Admiral Lloyd J. Wiltse tagged to lead them. Halsey instructed Wiltse to stream out phony distress messages. On October 15, JNAF aerial scouts dutifully reported a unit of almost a dozen vessels that looked like destroyers but were practically immobile, discharging fuel oil into northwest Pacific waters. Japanese attacks proved fruitless. Two of three strike waves on October 15 returned without finding the Americans. The last received a shellacking from Slew McCain’s airmen. On October 16 one attack wave came up empty-handed, but another, with more than 100 carrier-type aircraft, found the “CripDiv.” The Houston suffered another torpedo hit. Combat air patrols claimed more than forty JNAF aircraft. By October 19 Halsey could report to Nimitz that he expected the damaged warships to arrive at Ulithi, where they could receive preliminary repairs, about a week later.
