Storm Over Leyte

by John Prados

  Ships in Leyte Gulf suffered at least two air attacks on October 24, but no ships were hit despite near misses on command ship Blue Ridge and the British cruiser Shropshire. Nothing slowed down the landings. By that day, 144,000 men and 244,000 tons of supplies had been landed. The Allies had apparently gotten the practice of amphibious landings down to a science. The supply tonnage landed at Leyte the first day had been remarkable, and the flow continued. The success was partly owed to capacity, especially that of the Landing Ship Tank, or LST. Each of these were capable of carrying dozens of loaded trucks, a smaller number of tanks, or pallets holding a couple of thousand tons of supplies, and they could push right up onto the beach. The gulf posed a particular challenge because it was shallow pretty far out. But Allied forces were relatively resourceful: Seabees overcame these difficulties by bulldozing sand into ramps that went right out to meet the LSTs and by tying together pontoon bridge sections into makeshift piers—some that were hundreds of feet long—where the supply ships could dock.

  On the Wasatch, Radioman Capron had no more reason to feel left out—instead he had a ringside seat as General MacArthur waded ashore for his return to the Philippines. Meanwhile, Kinkaid followed reports of the fighting between Allied aircraft and the approaching Japanese fleet.

  A bit after noon, the admiral warned his fleet that there could be a surface naval battle. At half past two, Admiral Kinkaid ordered his heavy unit leader, Rear Admiral Jesse Oldendorf, to prepare for a probable night action in Surigao Strait. An advance unit of thirty-nine PT (patrol torpedo) boats, which had staked out search areas inside the strait, would report in if the enemy were really approaching.

  MEAT FOR THE ENEMY

  A perfect illustration of the degree to which technical means had come to dominate the “Mark I Eyeball” in the war in the Pacific was the detection of the Kurita fleet. Both the first submarine contacts and the first air sightings began with radar contacts.

  The submarines carried the ball through the first quarter. News of the enemy armada reached Admiral Halsey in the form of a dispatch from Australia reporting the Darter-Dace submarine attacks, before dawn on October 24. Thereafter, many messages amplified the first: three battleships . . . at least nine big ships . . . then eleven ships, with a speed and a heading. Moon Chapple reported torpedoing the Aoba along with the presence of another cruiser and a destroyer. The Angler chimed in. The Guitarro followed, reporting a task force including probably three battleships. The Angler came back with a sighting, indicating the Japanese were skirting Mindoro, soon to enter the Sibuyan Sea.

  As the sub reports piled up, Admiral Bill Halsey prepared to receive a determined enemy. From the New Jersey, he ordered Third Fleet task groups to move closer to the Philippine archipelago, make dawn searches stronger, and search out to 300 miles. Communications relay planes would repeat their reports. The scout-bomber flights were strengthened, with each search aircraft accompanied by a pair of fighters. Halsey took no chances.

  So it was that, at 7:46 a.m., Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Max Adams, a Bombing 18 pilot from the Intrepid, radioed his fighter wingmen that he had a suspicious radar indication about twenty-five miles away. They altered course to investigate. Soon enough, the searchers spotted ships off the southern tip of Mindoro. From 9,000 feet in his Helldiver, Lieutenant Adams could not mistake the wakes of two large groups of warships on an easterly heading, entering the Sibuyan Sea. He carefully tabulated five battleships, nine cruisers, and thirteen destroyers. Lieutenant Adams’s contact report reached Admirals Halsey and Mitscher and his own group commander, Rear Admiral Bogan, by 8:20 a.m. It sent a shudder through the Third Fleet. Adams had spotted the biggest Japanese surface fleet ever seen.

  Bill Halsey would not have been “the Bull” had he not responded aggressively. Halsey had previously been tag-teaming Task Force 38, with two or three task groups on the line and others replenishing. Now he summoned everybody.

  Within minutes, Halsey’s flagship had rebroadcast the Adams report. Then the Bull ordered Sherman’s and Davison’s groups to join Bogan’s Task Group 38.2. At 8:37 a.m., Halsey ordered all three groups to attack. Ten minutes later, he recalled Slew McCain and Task Group 38.1. Admiral McCain missed the first part of the party, since he was refueling at sea the morning of the twenty-fourth, and he began a high-speed approach to the battle area. Regardless, the Third Fleet had most of its strength available to smash Kurita.

  As recorded by the Essex, the weather remained cloudy (scattered high clouds and broken cumulus ones nearer the ceiling), but the visibility was twelve miles. The sea was moderate, from the northeast with a slight swell. Over the Sibuyan Sea flying conditions were fine, with scattered cumulus at 1,500 feet but ceiling and visibility unlimited.

  Carriers Intrepid and Cabot began to launch their initial strike package shortly after nine o’clock.

  • • •

  REAR ADMIRAL INOGUCHI Toshihei stood on the bridge of his behemoth Musashi. The superbattleship steamed on the starboard quarter of Yamato, about a mile away. Inoguchi had sent the crew to eat early. He also assigned Maya survivors now aboard his ship to help his own sailors. Like others in the fleet, Inoguchi expected action. As early as 5:30 a.m., he had executive officer Captain Kato Kenkichi dispatch Ensign Shimoyama Fukujiro with a contingent of radiomen down to the number two radio room. Normally the radiomen worked in a communications center just under the bridge, but the other compartment was protected by the ship’s armored deck and a hatch nearly a foot thick.

  Inoguchi learned from the flagship of an American contact message. At 8:10 a.m., the skipper ordered battle stations. A bugler called the crew to their posts. The ship tried to jam radio signals from the Allied scout. Then came a message from Admiral Kurita: “ENEMY ATTACKERS ARE APPROACHING. TRUST IN THE GODS AND GIVE IT YOUR BEST.” Admiral Inoguchi went on the public address system and passed the information to his sailors. About 9:30 a.m. Petty Officer Hosoya Shiro saw three planes together, which he believed to be the scouts.

  They began waiting. It would not be long. Aboard the Yamato, staff had calculated roughly when Halsey’s fleet might respond. Admiral Kurita sent Mikawa an appeal for air cover. Records indicate that the First Air Fleet sent nine fighters to his defense, but no one in the fleet ever saw them. It was the Americans they saw instead. Musashi’s radar picked up the first wave of incoming raiders at 10:00 a.m. Radarmen estimated forty planes, and Admiral Kurita increased formation speed to twenty-two knots.

  At 10:18 a.m. lookouts first put eyes on the attackers. With careful selection of sailors for this duty, long training, special vitamins, and very good binoculars, the lookouts spotted incoming raiders more than twenty-five miles away. Though the Japanese did not know it, Intrepid and Cabot had sent a standard strike package—a dozen each of dive-bombers and torpedo planes covered by twenty-one fighters, under the air group boss, Commander William E. Ellis. The planes closed in steadily, hiding among the cumulus clouds off the starboard beam. Petty Officer Hosoya saw the Yamato surrounded by tall geysers of water, but the flagship sailed through them. At 10:25, Musashi’s flak batteries went into action. There were simultaneous dive-bombing attacks from starboard at both stem and stern. Moments later torpedo planes launched from starboard. One bomb hit atop the number one main battery turret, causing no damage. A torpedo hit amidships, and there were four near misses, resulting in leaks below the waterline. Ensign Hoshi Shuzo, leader of one of the flak groups, died in strafing. Medium-caliber guns expended forty-eight 6-inch and sixty 5-inch rounds against the attacking planes.

  The torpedo hit and leaks caused the huge vessel to list about five and a half degrees to starboard. As exec, Captain Kato took charge of the damage-control efforts. Kato had the longest service on the ship, with four successive skippers. Under him, Lieutenant Kudo Hakari led the unit responsible for balancing the ship, with junior lieutenant Naito Masanao as his action officer. They operated a complex network of pumps, pipes, and compar
tments that could be flooded or emptied. Kudo’s unit had fifty sailors in several control rooms. They were able to return the vessel to near-normal aspect, with a mere one degree of incline.

  Of course, the counterflooding system depended on the ship not having taken on too much water, and having empty compartments available to fill along with electric power for the pump system. Musashi had also been designed with independent electrical systems fore and aft. Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Asami Wahei, the electrical engineer who supervised the forward system, had forty sailors and eight 800-kilowatt generators at his disposal. Each system also had an emergency team of six men who could be sent where needed to reconnect electrical cables. Asami was busily supplying power to counterflooding efforts when the situation began deteriorating. Vibrations from the near misses jarred cables and disrupted power to the flak batteries. The fans cut out. Asami rushed to compensate. Without fans the heat spiked. With herculean efforts, Lieutenant Asami kept the generators going.

  But the Musashi’s ordeal had barely begun. Roughly an hour later, there was another attack. Radar spotted incoming aircraft at 11:54 a.m. This assault had major consequences. The two bomb hits accomplished little, but three torpedoes all struck portside. Launching at little more than 450 yards, the Avengers were at point-blank range. Only fish that were set too deep missed. This time, Musashi developed a five-degree list to port and lost a key machinery room. Main battery turrets had to switch to an alternate hydraulic power system. Captain Kato hastened to establish a flooding boundary. The most serious damage came from a bomb on the aft port quarter that severed steam pipes from the number two engine room and cut off one of the boiler rooms. The battleship’s inner port shaft had to be locked down.

  On the bridge, the skipper had his hands full. With a stopped propeller, maneuvering became tougher as Musashi filled with water and became sluggish. In addition, he faced arguments from chief gunner Commander Koshino Kimitake. Koshino wanted to unleash the ship’s big guns—he had a supply of special “beehive” antiaircraft shells for the 18.1-inch guns, which might blow attacking planes from the sky many miles away.

  At first, Admiral Inoguchi—a gunner himself—resisted using his main armament in a flak role. He wanted to save the guns for cannonades in a surface battle. Inoguchi knew from experience that a chance of malfunction exists with every discharge of a big gun, and there would certainly be wear on the rifling in the barrels.

  But Commander Koshino was persistent and focused on the air threat. Until then, Inoguchi’s experience with air threats had been limited. In 1942, he had escorted convoys in East Indian and Burmese waters, where no enemy air existed, and the next year he drove heavy cruiser Takao in the Central Pacific under Admiral Kurita—again a safe sector. He had relinquished command in the autumn of 1943, only days before Takao had steamed into Rabaul to be blasted by that American carrier raid. Inoguchi must have pondered his fate in avoiding the slaughter at Rabaul, but it was really only at the Philippine Sea battle that he first faced an air threat.

  (Historians Robert Hackett and Sander Kingsepp argue that Rear Admiral Inoguchi himself prepared detailed plans for air defense of the ship based on the beehive antiaircraft shells. Perhaps they refer to a contingency plan. At his lookout post, Petty Officer Hosoya overheard his superiors’ argument over the voice tube. In view of Inoguchi’s gunnery expertise and knowledge that the fleet was headed for a gun battle with himself in command of one of its two strongest ships, it seems unlikely that he intended from the outset to employ the special ammunition.)

  Koshino returned to reargue his case. As the Musashi fell behind, she lost the protection of the fleet’s powerful antiaircraft array. Koshino’s associate, the ship’s flak boss, Lieutenant Commander Hirose Eisuke, agreed they needed everything they could muster. Strafing American planes were taking a toll on his gun crews. Ammunition supplies were dwindling. A torpedo from the second attack knocked out the main battery’s forward fire director. The guns might not be all that great in a surface battle anyway.

  Admiral Inoguchi finally relented. The main battery loaded 18.1-inch sanshiki-dan shells, as the beehive rounds were known, and fired a nine-gun salvo at the third-wave assailants. The middle gun of the number one turret failed. One account attributes this to a hot fragment from a bomb flying down the barrel and detonating the round, another to the shell itself sticking in the barrel. That turret fell silent.

  At the third strike, a torpedo hit starboard sent smoke and fumes surging into the forward sick bay, which had to be evacuated. Several sailors were overcome by carbon monoxide poisoning, including Ensign Suzuki Yakaku, leader of the forward damage-control party. Concussion from a bomb that missed close on the aft quarter blew two men from posts in the aft flak-control station to the aircraft hangar. A sailor suffered an injury and later died, but Ensign Kanechika Hisao miraculously emerged unscathed. Counterflooding efforts failed, and Musashi’s bow began drooping.

  The next American strikers, launched at 10:45 a.m., attacked at 12:45 p.m. The Japanese estimated twenty planes. The beehive rounds seemed to bother no one—and Musashi used up seventy-nine in all that day. Among the attackers in this wave were four TBMs with torpedoes; every one of them hit. With the latest strikes, the superbattleship flooded up to the middle deck forward, now down four degrees. A torpedo hit to starboard and collapsed shoring put up to counter previous damage. A pair of bomb hits to port, meanwhile, wiped out almost all the damage-control men in the forward part of the ship.

  Aft, Lieutenant Kudo Hakari’s damage-control party held their position with difficulty. Kudo mustered sailors to help put up cofferdams and hold back the sea. Desperate pumping reduced starboard list to just one degree. But Lieutenant Naito had run out of tanks to fill. He had reached the point where counterflooding could continue only by sending water into spaces meant to stay dry. With Kudo preoccupied by his frontline actions, Lieutenant Naito headed for the bridge to explain their predicament to Admiral Inoguchi and obtain his decision.

  Musashi gradually lost speed. Lookout Hosoya estimated the distance to her formation at the time of the second attack at more than six miles. By early afternoon, it had doubled. Heavy cruiser Tone stood by the stricken behemoth. After the third attack, Inoguchi’s unit commander, Admiral Ugaki, ordered the battleship to make for Coron Bay. A little later Vice Admiral Suzuki Yoshio, commanding the second of Kurita’s two ring formations, the one built around battleships Kongo and Haruna, instructed Musashi to approach it for cover from his defensive umbrella. But that, too, became impractical as the fleet pressed ahead and Musashi lost headway. Finally Ugaki ordered Inoguchi to make for the nearest port if he could proceed under power or be towed—either that, or to beach the ship.

  Early afternoon brought the moment of decision. A huge attack wave—the Japanese counted seventy-five planes—came into sight. Commander Theodore H. Winters Jr. of the Lexington coordinated the strike initially. Planes from that ship and the Essex were joined in midaction by another formation from Admiral Davison’s Task Group 38.4. Accounts are confusing in terms of the numbers of aircraft, times of launch, attack, and so on. Together there were 259 sorties against the Kurita fleet that day. By Samuel Eliot Morison’s account, there were at least 39 torpedo planes, 26 dive-bombers, and 34 fighters in this strike overall.

  On the Japanese side, the majority of Commander Hirose’s flak guns now lacked either crews or ready ammunition—or both. Ammunition expended against this wave included thirty-five beehive rounds and seventy-nine 6-inch shells. Inoguchi progressively reduced the ship’s speed—from twenty-four knots to twenty-two to sixteen, and now twelve knots. A higher speed would flood the ship even faster, and Musashi’s stem was already nearly awash because of the trim forward. Water in the hull that could have been pumped to restore buoyancy was not—Captain Kato may have been unable to keep up with the string of emergencies, or the ship’s power supplies (several firerooms were no longer operating) were no longer adequate. Whateve
r the case, it was a major setback.

  The new attack proved decisive. In a matter of minutes, ten bombs and eleven torpedoes blasted the Musashi. One bomb from an Intrepid plane hit the top of the conning tower and demolished the bridge (and another hit portside, further down the tower), seriously wounding Admiral Inoguchi in the right shoulder and starting a fire there and in flag plot. Sailors put that out immediately, using water from an emergency barrel on the bridge. But Commander Hirose, the ship’s navigator, Commander Kariya Minoru, five other officers, and thirty-two men were killed and more injured. Lieutenant Commander Nagai Teizo, a survivor and former executive officer of the Maya, perished on the flag deck. They were only some of the casualties. Bombs inflicted extensive damage on aviation facilities; others destroyed radio rooms. A couple of the torpedoes were duds, but those that weren’t inflicted grievous damage. Firerooms were out, another engine room was lost, magazine compartments of two lower decks had to be flooded, the starboard list increased ten to twelve degrees, and speed declined to just six knots, which was not enough for the ship to steer.

  Rear Admiral Inoguchi scribbled in a notebook he handed to Kato Kenkichi. He had been deeply shaken by the air attacks. The gunner wrote that he regretted having put too much faith in big guns and big ships. At that moment, Inoguchi must have thought his brother, with the First Air Fleet, and his son—a young JNAF pilot then in Japan—had found the path of the future. He instructed Captain Kato to make sure the notebook reached Admiral Toyoda, and also put him in charge of making sure the crewmen were saved and the Maya survivors rescued for the second time. Inoguchi shut himself in his cabin, never to be seen again.