Storm Over Leyte

by John Prados

  What is more striking, however, is what happened afterward. It shows the general in his political colors, calculating every gesture, measuring every advantage or slight. MacArthur steered the Filipino leader, President Sergio Osmeña, off the beach and into some brush, where they were conversing when it began raining. Japanese planes bombed the beach for the first time. General MacArthur noticed the rain had stopped, so he and Osmeña inspected the now captured Tacloban airfield. Then and there, MacArthur wrote a letter to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The general explained that he wrote “from the beach near Tacloban where we have just landed.” He fancied this a historic missive: “It will be the first letter from the freed Philippines.” MacArthur told Roosevelt, “I thought you might like it for your philatelic collection.”

  Imagine—a frontline general at a key moment in combat, having just invaded enemy territory, takes time out to sit down and write a letter amid the noise. Apart from a trivial reference to FDR’s stamp collection, the general goes on to advocate that the president take this opportunity to make a dramatic declaration granting independence to the Philippines ahead of the already scheduled 1946 date. More than that, General MacArthur suggests that President Roosevelt should come to the Philippines and personally make the grant himself. In a fast cruiser, MacArthur says, FDR could be out and back in less than a month. The political suggestion seems like an excuse, a presumptive reason for the note.

  MacArthur’s letter is really an invocation of Roosevelt’s decision at the Pearl Harbor conference—the confidence the president placed in the general’s judgment. Only such a purpose could justify MacArthur loosening his grip on the battle to scribble private thoughts on the government’s dime. The bit about the fast cruiser, by the way, does not appear in this letter as MacArthur published it in his 1964 memoirs. But it is in the original.

  MacArthur also dropped other key language. Referring to Japanese political ventures, specifically their so-called Co-Prosperity Sphere, the printed version of this letter states that U.S. arrival in the Philippines “severs the Japanese completely from their infamous propaganda slogan.” Awkward. In his authentic text MacArthur declares, the Allied invasion “severs completely the Japanese from their great spoils in the South Seas and completely explodes their infamous propaganda slogan.” By 1964 the war had ended and it was apparent the Philippine invasion had not fully isolated Japan. The general could not bear that his own words might show him either manipulating the president or making a questionable claim for military achievement. MacArthur passed away that April, and in the sadness no one noticed the odd text of his letter to FDR. Meanwhile, what President Roosevelt might finally think of his decision at Pearl Harbor depended on how the battle turned. The Japanese had much to do with that.

  • • •

  AS LUCK WOULD have it, Japan’s troops on Leyte were in confusion at the time of the invasion.

  First came the storm. The 16th Infantry Division, the Japanese garrison, was alert and ready for battle on October 17 as Imperial General Headquarters instructed. Lieutenant General Makino Shiro, division commander, watched as the storm tore up beach defenses and caused havoc in the Gulf. When Allied ships appeared the next day, Makino was not certain they were simply weathering the storm. He sent the 14th Area Army, the top Philippines command, ambiguous reports. Once Makino became convinced the invasion was happening, he realized his headquarters at Tacloban town lay in an exposed position. General Makino moved it to a village inland. The move occurred while the Allied fleet entered Leyte Gulf, and not only did it mean the Japanese tactical commander was out of place at a key moment, but it also put the 16th Division out of contact with higher authority for forty-eight hours at a crucial instant—not just for the Battle of Leyte but for the entire Sho operation. The defenders never quite regained their balance.

  After that, everything else went haywire too, starting with Japan’s strategy. The Army’s original plan for Sho 1 ordained that Luzon was to be the centerpiece. When IGHQ activated its plan, the Army staff responded in a yawning manner—telling the Navy it had no troops ready to reinforce that sector and advising that the naval sortie be canceled. Later on, the Army ordered that island be made the focal point. But since the order went by radio, and since Makino was out of touch with the 14th Area Army during headquarters movement, for that important moment, the frontline leader had no idea he had suddenly become the tip of the Japanese spear.

  The Army high command’s decision to fight on Leyte also unbalanced the entire Japanese ground force in the archipelago. When IGHQ committed to enacting the Sho plans, a steady reinforcement had taken place, with Luzon holding more than half the Japanese troops in the islands (five divisions and a brigade, close to 100,000 Army troops plus another 13,500 Imperial Navy sailors). Not long before MacArthur’s invasion, General Yamashita Tomoyuki, the victor of Malaya and the Army’s most renowned field commander, arrived to take charge of the 14th Area Army. Under Yamashita, the ground commander for the southern Philippines, Lieutenant General Suzuki Sosaku, had about 78,000 men scattered over many islands, with about half his force on Mindanao.

  Little of Tokyo’s strength in the Philippines had been concentrated on Leyte. To conduct the main ground battle there required that everything beyond Makino’s 16th Division be brought in from outside. A strait about fifteen miles wide separated Leyte and Mindanao, though the separation between suitable coastal towns on each made the real distance something close to ninety miles. Suzuki also had troops at Cebu in the Visayas. There the water crossing would be about thirty miles. The necessity for water movement, and the potential that Allied naval forces could isolate Leyte, complicated fighting there. To add even more complications, Tokyo held only one division and one brigade outside the Philippines as a strategic reserve. Structurally this situation bore ominous similarities to the Guadalcanal campaign, where the Japanese also had to reinforce the main fighting from across a waterway. The Army’s decision to fight the main battle on Leyte was on a par with the Imperial Navy’s leap to a premature air battle off Taiwan.

  As far as the landing at Leyte is concerned, Makino had assessed the terrain well. His soldiers had some months to prepare defenses. On Leyte, there were half a dozen airfields. Four of them lay near the middle coast and the town of Dulag. General Makino put his largest force there, two of the three regiments in his division. The remaining infantry defended the Tacloban sector, where another airfield beckoned. The other Leyte airstrip, situated near Ormoc on the opposite side, protected the port serving as Japanese supply base.

  Nothing was particularly wrong with these dispositions. It was simply that Douglas MacArthur put four full divisions ashore on the first day, overwhelming the Japanese defenders where encountered, and pressing inland where no enemy forces were located. By nightfall, at a cost of fewer than 250 casualties, the 6th Army was solidly ashore, had captured key terrain, and had landed 107,000 tons of supplies. Only at Dulag, where the U.S. 7th Infantry Division was able to capture just part of the airfield, were the Allies seriously held back.

  The Japanese response to this action built slowly. General Yamashita ordered Suzuki’s 35th Army to conduct an offensive. But Makino’s division, already battered, had very limited capabilities, and a series of small counterattacks near Palo village failed to dislodge the U.S. 24th Infantry Division. In the predawn hours of October 24, Colonel Suzuki Tatsunosuke (no relation to the general) had the colors of his 33rd Regiment burned and took his last seventy-five men on one more desperate charge against the Palo River bridge. Their failure left the Americans free to break into Leyte’s interior.

  Since General Suzuki had first to collect small boats to move nearby forces, and to arrange shipping to transport the strategic reserves, help arrived late. Four Japanese Army battalions reached the island by October 25, but by then Allied forces were well established. On October 23, at a ceremony in Tacloban, General MacArthur ostentatiously approved President Sergio Osmeña’s reinstating of
the Philippine government. The next day General Walter Krueger’s 6th Army headquarters established itself at the village of San Jose. Allied engineers were already working on refurbishing the Leyte airfields.

  A HAWK ON THE YARDARM

  Japanese commanders refused to be distracted from the fighting on the Leyte front, as became evident the very first day of the invasion preliminaries.

  The British suddenly struck with their Eastern Fleet almost 2,000 miles to the west. Coming from the Indian Ocean, a Royal Navy task force carried out an attack on the Nicobar Islands, up the Malacca Strait from Singapore. The British, under Vice Admiral Sir Arthur Power, the deputy C-in-C, behaved as if they, too, were about to make an invasion. The aircraft carriers Victorious and Indomitable participated, and there were not one but two surface bombardments, from a fleet that included battleship Renown, four cruisers, and a dozen destroyers, two of them Australian and one Dutch.

  Operation “Millet” went on for three days, so the Japanese had plenty of time to react. The Japanese had no idea the move was a diversion, and the Kurita fleet, closer to the British than they were to the Philippines, could have responded. Instead, they did nothing.

  The first sighting reports arrived shortly before 10:00 a.m. on October 17 and were soon amplified. But the Combined Fleet’s standby order for Sho had reached Lingga an hour and a half earlier, and its instruction to proceed to Brunei occurred only minutes before the sighting report. Admiral Kurita Takeo did not ask Combined Fleet if he should do anything differently, and when fresh reports arrived of the British bombarding Nicobar again, the Japanese were already at sea, heading for their rendezvous with destiny.

  • • •

  THE KURITA FLEET remained the key. When the initial alert message arrived from Combined Fleet, the admiral instructed his ships to raise steam. Vessels were to power up sufficiently for a cruising speed of twenty knots while maintaining twenty minutes’ notice for twenty-four. That meant battle speed—an early indication that Admiral Kurita expected nothing less. Kurita had time to get cruisers Aoba and Noshiro ready to join the sortie. Floatplanes from Cruiser Division 5 scouted waters off Lingga. He also recalled a pair of destroyers that had been sent to Manila. A nighttime departure was preferable, frustrating any Allied submarines that might be lurking offshore. Japanese intelligence estimated that half a dozen Allied submarines were located in Philippine waters. In reality there were seventeen, a dozen of them based in MacArthur’s zone, the rest sent from Pearl Harbor.

  The distances involved in this operation—1,750 nautical miles—were daunting, especially for a Navy whose fuel and oiler situations were critical. If Kurita had sallied as early as the sixteenth—when Allied intentions remained unclear—he could not have reached the battle area until at least October 20, not taking into account the need to refuel, plus any zigzagging or other evasive maneuvers that slow progress. The Second Fleet did not actually depart Lingga until 1:00 a.m. on October 18, which made the Japanese arrival date October 21 or later, and as a result, Admiral Toyoda had trouble selecting X-Day, the moment for Japanese battle action.

  A destroyer unit, the “Red Force,” exited first and conducted an antisubmarine sweep as more ships steamed from the roads. Following them were the battleships Kongo and Haruna, cruisers, and other warships. Japanese preparations had been so thorough that officers had even rehearsed a fleet sortie by means of tabletop war games, for example, aboard heavy cruiser Tone. The behemoths of Ugaki Matome’s battleship division brought up the rear, clearing their anchorage a full hour behind the lead vessels. Admiral Kurita set an east-southeast course to transit the Tempa Channel, came about to almost due north to pass along the west coast of Borneo, then traveled east-northeast following that coast. The Kurita fleet passed between Borneo and Natuna Besar, assuming a formation for defense against subs at 6:50 a.m. Delays passing navigational reference points indicate that the force had already fallen more than an hour behind schedule.

  The day dawned sunny but quickly turned cloudy. With the fleet under way, Admiral Kurita permitted captains to tell crews that, this time, he intended no exercise. This would be Sho. There were both good and bad portents to this announcement. On the Yamato, almost immediately after the public address system fell silent, a hawk perched on the main battery range finder. Crewmen felt the bird was a symbol of victory. On the other hand, that day brought a submarine scare when the Noshiro saw a periscope at midafternoon. Antisubmarine experts evaluated the contact as real, but it was not so. The U.S. submarine Gurnard actually held position between Malaya and Borneo at that time. She even had a mission of heading for Brunei to lay mines, but she had stopped to attack a convoy and the Kurita fleet skirted past her.

  At 11:10 a.m., a Combined Fleet dispatch, among Kusaka’s last before Admiral Toyoda’s return, informed Japanese commanders of the overall plan. The message observed a strong possibility of an Allied landing in the Tacloban area. The Kurita fleet “WILL ADVANCE THROUGH SAN BERNARDINO STRAIT AND ANNIHILATE THE ENEMY INVASION FORCE.” That penetration of the “ENEMY LANDING POINT” would happen on X-Day. In support of this maneuver, the Mobile Fleet “WILL LURE THE ENEMY TO THE NORTH AND DESTROY REMNANTS OF HIS FORCES IF THE OPPORTUNITY ARISES.” This was Ozawa and he would act on X-1. Vice Admiral Shima’s 2nd Diversion Attack Force, along with Cruiser Division 16 of the Kurita fleet, would be attached to Mikawa’s Southwest Area Fleet “AS THE BACKBONE OF MOBILE OVER-WATER COUNTER-ATTACK OPERATIONS” (in essence, the Tokyo Express). Land-based air forces “WILL COMPLETELY WIPE OUT THE ENEMY CARRIERS.” The submarine fleet “WILL DESTROY DAMAGED ENEMY VESSELS AND TROOP CONVOYS.”

  Combined Fleet’s operational plan specified that X-Day would be fixed by special order but, recognizing Kurita’s fuel problem, tentatively set it to be October 24. That timing meant that many Allied transports and supply ships at Leyte would have unloaded and left. With the Kurita fleet barely at sea, the Sho plan had already been overtaken by current events. Other factors were also in play. The high command assigned some of Kurita’s ships to Admiral Mikawa for a Tokyo Express. Naturally they were physically located with Kurita. Mikawa ordered them to Brunei, the same as the Kurita fleet, to await orders. General Yamashita had no troops ready to be carried on a Tokyo Express. Mikawa turned around and argued to Toyoda that units assigned to him—Shima’s 2nd Diversion Attack Force and Cruiser Division 16—should be used instead in the main raiding operation.

  During the predawn hours, with Kurita’s fleet more than 400 miles from Brunei and a convoy of tankers following about seventy miles behind, the horizon to the north and east showed an odd luminescence. Another portent.

  The portents for October 19, however, were not so good. During the forenoon the destroyers Akishimo and Hayashimo, the two warships recalled from Manila, sighted a surfaced submarine and gave chase. They evaded its torpedoes but the boat got away. That was the submarine Darter, which would very shortly inflict grievous harm on Kurita Takeo and his sailors. The encounter had been a fateful one.

  For the moment, though, all remained well. From early afternoon onward, the Kurita fleet enjoyed antisubmarine warfare (ASW) protection from land-based aircraft, though its battleships kept floatplanes on the catapult ready to reinforce them. After midnight, the task force altered toward its final course for Brunei and changed its zigzag pattern. Kurita’s destination was now only 165 miles away. By morning, the fleet neared its goal. Reefs and shallows lay as far as 40 miles offshore, so Admiral Kurita hastened to instruct ships to proceed independently to their planned anchorages, which he did at 9:18 a.m. on the twentieth. Most ships reached their berths at noon or soon afterward.

  At this critical time, Allied scouts detected the Imperial Navy task force. This had to do with Arthur McCollum of Seventh Fleet intelligence, who worried about a Japanese sortie from Singapore and had asked for a special watch on Brunei. That morning a B-24 search plane saw what it identified as a battleship, three light cruisers, three destroyers, an
d half a dozen other warships off the north coast of Borneo. This important sighting seems to have been lost in the confusion. Though Pearl Harbor radio repeated the Seventh Fleet message, and someone denigrated it with an “open to doubt” notation, the sighting was real. The Japanese picked up the plane’s signal. Admiral Ugaki noted that radio operators on Yamato overheard a nearby transmission that took the form of a sighting report. Destroyer Flotilla 10 recorded no less than nine sighting-type messages from before noon until late in the day. Most likely on the basis of the aerial sighting, at 11:29 p.m. on October 20 the Owada Group warned of a high probability the Kurita fleet had been discovered. After the war, Captain Arthur McCollum would reflect that the whole Japanese fleet had passed under the Allied search umbrella without anyone noticing anything. He would be wrong.

  Though the ball was dropped on the sighting, the Allies never yielded advantage to Japan because Ultra continually updated Allied commanders. The radio intelligence summary for October 19—with Kurita on his way to Brunei and the invaders at Leyte poised to land—accurately related the composition of the Kurita fleet and observed that it had already or would soon sortie from the Singapore area. The code breakers were wrong only in continuing to place Nishimura’s battleships and Shima’s 2nd Diversion Attack Force with the Ozawa fleet.

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