Storm Over Leyte

by John Prados

  As late as October 16, the radio summary from Washington recorded no unusual activity around Singapore. The Allies detected high volumes of traffic on communications channels used by the Sixth Fleet, Japan’s submarine force, which corresponded to the Imperial Navy directing available subs to positions off the Philippines.

  At 8:00 the next morning, American troops first stepped ashore on Suluan Island in the entrance to Leyte Gulf. Nine minutes later the Combined Fleet issued a warning dispatch for the contingency Sho 1. At 8:30, an execute order replaced the alert. An hour later, at 9:28, Combined Fleet affirmatively ordered Admiral Kurita to Brunei.

  News of the landings naturally threw Imperial General Headquarters into an uproar. The IGHQ chieftains immediately sought an audience with Emperor Hirohito. Admiral Oikawa Koshiro, Navy chief of staff, accompanied General Umezu Yoshijiro, the Army chief, to the palace. After praising the Taiwan air battle, they asked permission to unleash Sho 1 and promised to work in complete harmony. “Since this is the important battle to decide the fate of the Empire,” Hirohito pronounced, “the Army and Navy will work as one to destroy the enemy.”

  Allied radio intelligence intercepted the message in which Combined Fleet activated its “S” operation. Though Allied spooks had no direct knowledge of Sho that day, within twenty-four hours, ONI used that name and added that it represented Japan’s overall defense plan for the Philippines.

  Japanese radio traffic volume continued to be extraordinarily high into October 18. Mikawa exchanged many messages with Fukudome on the Manila-Takao circuit. Other traffic concerned tanker assignments and showed movement not just in Singapore, but in Empire waters also. Oilers that had left for distant ports were suddenly recalled. Submarine frequencies buzzed. Intercepted messages to surface escort units, which the Ultra summary noted on October 18, indicated “that a sortie from Singapore . . . has taken place or will take place shortly.” Kurita had actually sailed just after midnight. That day every circuit lit red.

  One bit of the Ultra that must have startled Allied officers who learned of it was that the Japanese, “based on an analysis of U.S. communications,” had deduced that Allied attacks in Leyte Gulf aimed at seizing an airfield, not necessarily “a major scale occupation of the Philippines.” But the Japanese orders for air attacks also tipped their hand on what the target priorities were to be. The Ultra summary reported the Imperial Navy’s targets as transports, destroyers, landing craft, cruisers, and battleships, in that order.

  Gears had begun to move that would culminate in the greatest sea fight in history.

  • • •

  AT THE SAME time, Bull Halsey and the Third Fleet headed toward the Leyte invasion zone. The end of the Taiwan air battle left Task Force 38 off the Philippine coast, northeast of Luzon, so the Big Blue Fleet had little distance to cover. Ever aggressive, always pushing his advantage, Admiral Halsey took the opportunity to crush the Japanese air arm while he steamed ahead to support the Leyte operation. In the initial planning for the King II operation, Halsey’s fleet had been expected to make its way down to the Leyte area by the time of the landing.

  But Admiral Halsey’s laserlike focus on the Imperial Navy’s surface fleet led him to hold his Third Fleet in readiness east and north of the archipelago. His plan was to have Mitscher’s carrier groups take turns touching port and refueling at Ulithi, while he kept the bulk of the fleet at sea, clobbering the Japanese. From now familiar waters, Task Force 38 attacked the airfields around Manila on October 15. Planes from Japanese Army Air Force (JAAF) groups rose to intercept or escort counterattacks on Halsey’s fleet. Admiral Teraoka ordered dispersal of transports and medium bombers, while scrambling to assemble a JNAF interceptor unit to defend Manila. JAAF became convinced it had accounted for more than forty American warplanes. Enterprise Hellcat pilots alone claimed a dozen kills over the city plus twice that many defending the fleet. The claims were wild on both sides.

  After Japanese Navy scouts found the fast carriers, the First Air Fleet assembled a half dozen bomb-laden Zeros under Lieutenant Sashijiku, with an escort of nineteen fighters. In a bid to strike by surprise, they took off at 9:15 a.m., and an hour and a half later, they struck an American task group. Pilots claimed to have hit a cruiser and scored a near miss against a carrier, along with shooting down some planes. Just one fighter-bomber survived from the Sashijiku unit.

  Several flights also launched from Taiwan and the Ryukyus. One left with ten Bettys and nine fighters. Only three returned. Losses included the chief of a JNAF fighter group. In another unit, thirteen of sixteen escorting Zeros all suffered engine trouble and aborted the mission—a testament to JNAF’s increasingly poor maintenance. Task Force 38 recorded no damage.

  The main JNAF strike went out at midafternoon, after a fresh sighting of Halsey’s fleet. At Manila, Admiral Teraoka, calling on General Tominaga at his 4th Air Army headquarters, obtained the help of more than seventy Army fighter planes from Lieutenant Colonel Shindo Tsuneo. With ten more Zeros, Shindo escorted another half dozen Zero fighter-bombers, a dozen Jill bombers, and several twin-engine Betty torpedo planes. Two-thirds of the Jills and all of the Bettys perished.

  Rear Admiral Arima Masafumi, who headed the 26th Air Flotilla, sat in one of those cockpits as the Navy’s mission leader. Tired of sending crews out to no effect, Arima had advocated crash-diving tactics for months to no avail. The NGS, Combined Fleet, and First Air Fleet had all opposed the idea. With desperation born of despair, Admiral Arima, in full uniform, ripped off his rank insignia before launching. He had decided not to come back. As luck would have it, Arima’s target that afternoon would be Joe Shoemaker’s carrier Franklin, which had been through its fair share of trials during the recent Taiwan battle. The fast carrier indeed sustained a hit—the bomb broke through a corner of the deck-edge elevator and burst just beneath the flight deck, inflicting fragment damage and igniting a gasoline fire. But Captain Shoemaker’s damage-control parties were highly efficient, and the following morning, the Franklin was back in business, launching aircraft as usual.

  Aboard the Essex, Seaman John Yeager felt that the Japanese were really out for blood this time around. The ship had to dodge several torpedoes and one plane that crash-dived the stern and missed by only a few feet. In addition, sailors were wounded when JNAF warbirds strafed the carrier.

  A Japanese Army scout plane monitoring the engagement radioed that a fast carrier had instantly blown up. That night General Yamashita Tomoyuki, leading Army forces in the Philippines, sent some sake to Teraoka to celebrate the victory. American records note no ships sunk and no damage other than that to the Franklin. Radio Tokyo announced Arima’s demise on October 20. Counted a hero, in death he would be elevated to the rank of vice admiral. In Tokyo Captain Genda Minoru of the NGS awaited final approval of orders approving creation of the “special attack” (kamikaze) force of which Arima dreamed.

  Despite the celebrations in Tokyo, every day there were fresh strikes at the Japanese. And every day they exacted a heavy toll. Admiral Mikawa tabulated the First Air Fleet’s entire strength on October 18 as amounting to fewer than three dozen warplanes, nearly a third of which were Jill bombers just arrived from Taiwan. General Tominaga’s 4th Air Army was only a little better off and had about seventy aircraft. Bomber types were scarce. Here can be seen the real impact of the Japanese rush to air battle. With the surface fleet in motion, the Japanese needed their umbrella, or at least the challenge their air force could have posed. But the depleted air arm left the Imperial Navy’s surface fleet naked before the enemy.

  Naval air commander Teraoka felt the terrible weight of the situation. Though he’d been at the front for just a couple of months, the experience had been so charged, and the Allied attacks so fierce, the admiral was spent. He had lost the equivalent of two air fleets to Bull Halsey, one in September and now again. With no viable solution to American superiority, his time expired.

  Admiral Teraok
a would be given leave and reemployed. His replacement, already en route, was Vice Admiral Onishi Takijiro. Onishi had left Tokyo on October 9, stayed at home for a night, then headed for Kanoya and the flight south. But when Halsey struck Okinawa, that itinerary became impossible. Onishi reached Taiwan on October 11 by diverting through Shanghai, but of course, Halsey followed, striking the big island the next morning. The Japanese officer awoke to the U.S. assault, and he joined Toyoda, who was also stranded on Taiwan, as they both were forced to seek safety in cellars. It was not until Halsey turned his attention back to the Philippines that Onishi was able to resume his travel. It proved to be just in time for MacArthur’s return. Onishi reached Manila on the afternoon of October 17. He burned with the determination to fight.

  Rear Admiral Davison’s task group refueled while the Franklin fought off the enemy. Fliers with Intrepid’s Air Group 18 got only a few hours’ rest. Intramural basketball went ahead in the forward elevator well, a Ping-Pong tournament in the junior officers’ wardroom. Later, as the task group began a high-speed run toward Luzon, the air intelligence officer called a briefing, apprising aircrews of expected battle conditions. Once he finished, airmen began a spontaneous jazz improv. Off of Leyte the invasion had begun.

  LEYTE LANDINGS

  Around 8:00 a.m. on October 17, the American light cruiser Denver fired the first shots of the Philippine campaign.

  Captain Albert M. Bledsoe of the Denver would win the Navy Cross for his actions over the next week, and he began at the entrance to Leyte Gulf—6,500 yards off the islet of Suluan. In company with sister ship Columbia and four destroyers, Bledsoe’s warship would shoot in support of an important preliminary to the Leyte invasion. Eight destroyer transports steamed in column behind, preceded by several minesweepers. They were the Dinagat Attack Group, carrying Lieutenant Colonel Henry A. Mucci’s 6th Ranger Battalion, and reinforced by a company of the 21st Infantry Regiment. The force was to seize Dinagat Island, on the eastern side of Surigao Strait, and the islets of Suluan and Homonhon, which lay astride the entrance to Leyte Gulf, locations of a lighthouse, and a Japanese radar station.

  The ground troops, who were the first to report the invasion and effectively triggered the Combined Fleet’s alert order, were located on Suluan Island. They resisted briefly, most notably catching the Rangers in an ambush. Private Darwin C. Zufall, killed, and Private Donald J. Cannon, wounded, became the first American casualties of the Philippine campaign. Afterward, the Japanese fled into the jungle.

  On Dinagat, Rangers found a unit of Filipino partisans led by an Army Air Force captain named Hemingway already controlling the place. Colonel Ruperto Kangeleon headed a Leyte area command of several thousand partisan fighters, mostly on Leyte itself but also throughout the sector. The partisans on Dinagat did away with the Japanese pickets who had held an outpost there. They’d even captured papers, including hydrographic charts, which they gave to the Rangers, who passed them on to the U.S. Navy. The Filipinos sailed the waters often and assured Americans there were no minefields, but the Allies ignored their advice, taking three days to troll for Japanese mines.

  Arthur McCollum’s Seventh Fleet Intelligence Center also had reported a minimal enemy setup. The SEFIC experts believed there were no minefields, while the ground intelligence thought Dinagat was defended by about 500 Japanese troops of the 30th Division. (Minesweepers verified a lack of explosive devices inside the gulf but destroyed some 227 mines seeding the approaches to Leyte waters.) Once the Rangers had cleared the islets, the invasion fleet began entering the gulf. Ahead of them lay Leyte’s beaches.

  There was some confusion about Allied intentions. The oceanic storm had muddled Japanese communications. Tokyo’s troops on Leyte scrambled to clear away the storm damage. General Tominaga, the Army air boss, decided by the evening of October 17 that the goings-on signaled the invasion and ordered a full strike by his warplanes. But the next morning, bad weather grounded the 4th Air Army.

  That afternoon the battleship Pennsylvania—one of the recovered victims of Pearl Harbor, back to exact her revenge—opened fire on landing beaches. Two cruisers and several tin cans joined in, and frogmen swam in to do beach reconnaissance. The frogmen, grouped into recently perfected Underwater Demolition Teams (UDTs), would scout the beaches for obstacles or land mines. Although some of the UDTs complained later of the inadequacy of fire support, nevertheless the reconnaissance discovered firm beach and Japanese obstacles were nonexistent.

  Mounting air strikes proved harder than the Japanese had supposed. Limited flight envelopes of JAAF flying machines required them to reposition to airfields in the Visayas before they could hit Leyte Gulf. Lieutenant General Terada Seichi’s 2nd Air Division, which was supposed to take the lead, found his path blocked, first by the storm, then by muddy airfields, and finally by suppressive actions from Rear Admiral Thomas L. Sprague’s Seventh Fleet. The “Little Giants” spent the days before the invasion countering the Japanese air network. Airstrips on Leyte were deserted. The JAAF concentrated at Bacolod on Negros Island. In the end they had hardly done so when American troops set foot on land.

  The initial Japanese air attack into Leyte Gulf—the preordained target of the Sho plan—was comprised of several JNAF Zeros on the evening of October 19. They were but a pinprick. The First Air Fleet had a handful of warplanes with Onishi, its new commander, scheduled to take over the following day. The high command had not yet ordered Fukudome’s air fleet to move forward. Japanese Army troops were thin on the ground too. Only one large unit held Leyte—Lieutenant General Makino Shiro’s 16th Infantry Division—and only a fraction of its force occupied the sector where the Americans landed. If there were to be a decisive battle for Leyte, the Japanese would have to feed reinforcements in by sea. It could be Guadalcanal all over again.

  General MacArthur took no chances. He entrusted the invasion to his 6th Army under Lieutenant General Walter Krueger. The latter had a corps of his own plus the XXIV Corps that Admiral Halsey had given MacArthur. Those two corps possessed seven divisions between them and Krueger planned to land four on the first day. There would be two full divisions in reserve afloat, and the last one, still en route, would be a reinforcement. Allied ground forces enjoyed a marked superiority.

  The fleet began entering the gulf an hour before midnight on October 19. The bulky transports slowly made their way to anchorage areas off two coastal towns—Tacloban in the north and Dulag in the south. The next morning, A-Day, when the landings would be made, dawned clear and crisp. The core gunnery ships of Seventh Fleet—destroyers, cruisers, and half a dozen battleships—began a preparatory barrage. One hundred forty aircraft from Rear Admiral Sprague’s escort carrier force threw their weight into the scales. At 9:45 a.m., shortly before landing craft were scheduled to hit the beach, gunners redirected their fire to the flanks and rear of the positions.

  The experience of destroyer Bennion on the gun line was typical of the naval support effort. The ship’s first casualties were her assistant gunnery officer and the controller of the Mark-37 director that aimed the ship’s main battery. Both died when a Japanese gun scored a direct hit on the Mark-37. Next to Bennion was the destroyer Ross. She hit a mine while providing support fire and subsequently hit another, becoming the only American destroyer in the war to survive successive mine detonations.

  The Bennion was of the classic Fletcher class and an example of America’s productive strength—U.S. shipyards produced seventy-seven destroyers of this single type during 1943 alone, 50 percent more destroyers than Japan commissioned during the entire war. Bennion convoyed transports across the Pacific, then joined Kinkaid’s fleet. She helped defend Leyte Gulf against the Japanese air raids. Even with the troops ashore there were rich targets in the gulf, for MacArthur rotated Liberty ships through the Tacloban anchorage. At any given time, thirty or more merchantmen were unloading ammunition, weapons, food, and the other appurtenances of modern warfare. While this was not the
target-rich environment the Japanese imagined, one that could stymie the Allied cross-Pacific offensive, it was a substantial objective. Still, Bennion and plenty more like her stood between the Japanese and their goal.

  Officers in Bennion’s Combat Information Center (CIC) commented that there were rarely fewer than fifteen or twenty bogeys on the radars. They believed the Japanese weren’t very serious. Raids of as many as fifty or sixty aircraft often seemed to turn away just a few minutes from the gulf. But at other times, the enemy was determined. Despite help from Tom Sprague’s “Little Giants,” Japanese fighter sweeps crossed the gulf repeatedly. Recognizing the continuing aerial opposition, the Navy relaxed its regulations on ammunition transfer, permitting unloading even during alerts. Even so, not much seemed to be getting ashore. Bennion officers observed Japanese planes almost always overhead. On October 24, there were between 150 and 200 attackers, mostly twin-engine bombers of General Terada’s JAAF 2nd Air Division.

  This moment held multiple meanings for Douglas MacArthur. He could see the sandy beaches, the waves breaking upon this hostile coast. They were clear even aboard flagship Nashville two miles away. The general stood on the bridge with the cruiser’s skipper, Captain C. E. Coney. They were off “Red Beach”—Tacloban town—where as a lieutenant fresh from West Point the young Douglas MacArthur had come on his first duty assignment, to survey for new docks. Now Tacloban, which was the location of an airfield MacArthur was anxious to convert to Allied use, would be the place where he returned. More than that, he would reinstate the Philippine government that had gone into exile. The invasion would be a war event, political development, and personal achievement all rolled into one. One may forgive General MacArthur his histrionic exclamation, “I have returned!” when stepping ashore, and his breathless follow-up, addressed to all Filipinos: “The hour of your redemption is here.”