Storm Over Leyte

by John Prados

  Four more hours passed before the Musashi actually sank, a little after 7:30 p.m. Kato had time to assemble the crew on deck and hold a roll call. But it was without a doubt that the airplanes had doomed the superbattleship.

  • • •

  WHAT HAPPENED ON the Musashi was just a small part of a larger tapestry. Kurita’s fleet making its way across the Sibuyan Sea represented the other panel.

  The fleet continued its voyage. At 9:23 a.m., in case there was a fight at the San Bernardino Strait, Admiral Kurita ordered the torpedo crews on all ships to be ready by nightfall. Kurita and his chief of staff, Koyanagi, expected to face air attacks. Admiral Ugaki’s rough estimate of the time the Allied planes might show up turned out to be accurate. A dispatch from Kurita to Combined Fleet at 10:55 reported attack by about thirty planes.

  At the moment of the first wave, Musashi had been steaming in column behind the heavy cruiser Myoko. Rear Admiral Ishihara Itsu’s cruiser had the lead slot in the starboard wing of Admiral Kurita’s ring. When the American planes swung in for their attacks, one torpedo slammed into Ishihara’s warship. At the very moment Kurita informed Toyoda of their peril, Ishihara was recording the torpedo hit in Myoko’s aftermost starboard engine room. The engine room crew were completely wiped out—an officer, a warrant officer, and eleven seamen were killed, and three sailors injured. The ship stopped and began to list. By 11:05 a.m., salt water had contaminated the main-feed water tank serving the number four engine, forcing it to be shut down. The Myoko, which had been reduced to one working propeller, could not manage more than twelve knots—though she could pump out at a rate of a couple of hundred tons an hour—and became a clear liability. Vice Admiral Hashimoto Shintaro, commanding Cruiser Division 5, shifted his flag to its other ship, the Haguro. Kurita ordered Ishihara back to Coron Bay, radioing the news to Toyoda.

  A second strike materialized, then a third one. Many of Kurita’s sailors had gone to battle stations without breakfast, and the new raid came at lunchtime. By now, the Musashi had begun dropping back. At first Admiral Kurita ordered speed reduced from twenty-five to twenty-two knots so the superbattleship could keep up. Later, he decided to press on and left the Musashi behind. Frustration levels rose steadily. Kurita wondered what had become of Ozawa’s decoy mission and the air attacks that were supposed to support him. At 1:15 p.m., under renewed attack, Kurita sent a dispatch to Ozawa and Mikawa, with copies to Toyoda and the air fleets: “WE ARE BEING SUBJECTED TO REPEATED ENEMY CARRIER-BASED AIR ATTACKS. ADVISE IMMEDIATELY OF CONTACTS MADE BY YOU ON THE ENEMY.”

  Imperial Navy officers paid a steadily mounting personal price for their participation in this death ride. “We had expected air attacks,” chief of staff Koyanagi records, “but this day’s were almost enough to discourage us.” Admiral Ugaki, who had lived on the Musashi, known to the fleet as “the Palace,” felt that losing her “is like losing part of myself.” He went on, “Nothing I can say will justify this loss. . . . Today was Musashi’s day of misfortune, tomorrow it will be Yamato’s turn.”

  Admiral Kurita’s message demonstrates the strain.

  • • •

  NO ONE WORE the mantle of command more easily than Kurita Takeo. The Second Fleet commander bore it as if it were gossamer, despite lacking such rites as graduation from the Naval War College. From Mito town on Honshu, northeast of Tokyo, Kurita came from a family of scholars. The town had long been known as a center of support for Japan’s shoguns, the strongmen who ruled in the name of the emperor, and Takeo’s grandfather, a professor at the University of Tokyo, had authored a famous history of the Meiji Restoration. His father chose classical names—of women mostly—for six brothers, but “Takeo” meant “warrior.” Still, his father insisted Takeo read into Confucianism, poring over volumes written in classical Chinese ideographs and imparting an attitude combining charity, gentleness, and kindness. Kurita’s sailors uniformly agreed their admiral always looked out for them.

  Visit http://bit.ly/25mogAv for a larger version of this map.

  That did not mean Kurita lacked an edge. He could be very competitive. Apart from his command qualities, another way Takeo impressed colleagues was as a competitor. Like Bill Halsey he played tennis. When his ships were in port Kurita went for baseball. Once Takeo became senior enough to command big ships and fleets he would have targets put out for him on the quarterdecks of his flagships. Wherever he was, the admiral practiced archery, peppering the targets with arrows. In the U.S. Navy society of his era Kurita would have played polo. Chief of staff Koyanagi considered him a great athlete. He stood out.

  Kurita became a torpedoman, for the Japanese in those days the equivalent of a fighter pilot. According to Koyanagi, Takeo had very sharp reflexes and short reaction times. In the Navy that made a difference—Kurita became a good ship driver. Come the war, his record was remarkable. Admiral Kurita entered World War II holding pennant number 107 on the Navy List (Ozawa Jisaburo was at number 66, Mikawa Gunichi at number 69, Shima Kiyohide at number 154). At the time of Leyte, Kurita was a fifty-five-year-old vice admiral.

  In a Navy that prized aggressiveness, Kurita Takeo still stood out. At the Battle of Sunda Strait in February 1942, Kurita’s ships had helped sink U.S. and Australian cruisers. The admiral had then led his cruiser division on a raid into the Indian Ocean, even though the British Eastern Fleet had battleships, and he had none. At Midway in June 1942, Kurita’s flotilla had been the only Japanese force other than Combined Fleet’s carriers to be bombed. Kurita had raced ahead to comply with orders to bombard Midway Island, though his request for support had been rejected, and he had made an extraordinary effort to keep the unrealistic schedule given to him by higher command—so much so that his cruisers outran their escorts. In the Solomons, Kurita’s battleships had shelled Guadalcanal. At the Battle of Santa Cruz, he had actually had the U.S. aircraft carrier Hornet (by that point a derelict) under his guns. At Rabaul in November 1943, his Second Fleet—then composed entirely of Imperial Navy cruisers—had been famously smashed by U.S. carrier planes. At the Philippine Sea battle, conversely, Kurita’s task group had been the only Japanese flotilla to lose no aircraft carriers.

  In Combined Fleet Decoded, my framing of the Pacific war in light of the first intelligence revelations, I wrote that Kurita had been bombed, shelled, torpedoed, and generally harassed more than almost any other Japanese commander. And that is true—but it was because he kept putting himself in harm’s way. I used the phrase “gun-shy” to suggest that Kurita, by the time of Leyte Gulf, had developed a healthy apprehension for Allied aircraft. Historian Evan Thomas, drawing his picture of the admiral, portrays Kurita as super-gun-shy—the “Zelig of sea battle.” Overall, he casts Kurita as conservative, a man preoccupied with the “fleet-in-being,” or rather, force protection. I disagree with the proposition that Kurita was a Zelig—that is, someone near harm’s way, but more often at a distance than in the thick of the fight, hiding from the action. It is easy to take that analysis too far. The fact of the matter is that Kurita could not have been bombed, torpedoed, and whatnot more than other commanders without being at the center of the action.

  In early 1943, the Imperial Navy promoted Kurita to command the Second Fleet. That unit was the one that in the Japanese vision of the “decisive battle” was supposed to dash at the enemy to weaken it with gun and torpedo action so the Imperial Navy battleships could finish off the adversary. By putting Kurita in that role it appears the Japanese were not casting him as a “fleet-in-being” man either.

  The personnel officers who did that had known Kurita a very long time. Yamamoto Isoroku, still alive then—and thought to be an excellent judge of talent—shared with Kurita a taste for Johnnie Walker Black Label scotch. Kusaka Ryunosuke, now chief of staff to Toyoda, had been at Santa Cruz too, in the same role for the Japanese carrier admiral then. He knew Kurita as “an exceedingly intrepid sailor.” Mikawa Gunichi, who was renowned for his aggressiveness and als
o reprised the role he had had in the Solomons, considered Kurita his best friend, unlikely if his Etajima classmate had really been a coward.

  In deciding whether to count Kurita Takeo as gun-shy, the most important period is the interval he held the reins of the Second Fleet. The Allies had certainly administered a shock in the cruiser massacre at Rabaul. The Combined Fleet had been driven from its bases at Truk and then Palau. On the other hand, Admiral Kurita had led one of Ozawa’s major flotillas during the Philippine Sea battle, and in that action it is fair to suppose he gained confidence—a concentrated attack by the Big Blue Fleet succeeded in inflicting only minor damage on one of the carriers Kurita protected, and one of his surface ships escorting her.

  • • •

  PERSONAL CHARACTER IS one thing, but experience is another, and Kurita Takeo in the Sibuyan Sea that day had been through thirty-six hours of sheer hell. He had had to escape from his sinking flagship—drenched and ruining a very good pair of shoes. One of his two strongest gunnery ships, the Musashi, had dropped out of formation. Celebrated as unsinkable, she was on the verge of foundering. The damage to heavy cruiser Myoko made her the fourth vessel of her type to be lost—and all of this before any contact with the enemy fleet. The air attacks of early afternoon brought bomb damage to battleships Yamato, Nagato, and Haruna plus one of Kurita’s scarce destroyers. And on top of that, the admiral still faced the mystery of what the Imperial Navy was doing to support him—the air attacks and the Mobile Fleet’s decoy sortie lay beyond the event horizon so far as Kurita was concerned.

  Kurita’s situation in the Sibuyan Sea bore a marked resemblance to his forlorn cruiser mission off Midway. There, Admiral Kurita had been put on a limb in the face of the Allied air armada. Here, too, Admiral Kurita had to make a very concrete decision regarding tactics. In his original plan, his own force and that of Vice Admiral Nishimura were to break into Leyte Gulf at the same time—before dawn the next morning—from different directions. The Second Fleet could no longer make that schedule, slowed by submarine and air attacks plus efforts to conserve fuel; delays only mounted. By now the fleet was running six hours late. Giving up the advantage from the simultaneous storming of Leyte, Kurita now pondered how to maximize his weight acting alone.

  The air assault after one o’clock inflicted decisive damage on Musashi. The Yamato also endured a bomb hit. Two more waves of carrier planes hit during the three o’clock hour, crippling Musashi, inflicting more bomb damage to Yamato, and wounding battleship Nagato enough to reduce her to twenty-one knots. Light cruiser Yahagi also lost speed due to a few near misses.

  Staff chief Koyanagi records that Admiral Kurita had, from an early point in the Sho preparations, spoken of historical precedents, among them the great Battle of Jutland in World War I. A feature of that 1916 action had been the German fleet’s use of turning away in midbattle to rob the adversary of targets and perhaps confuse them. An old sea dog like Kurita had to be attentive to what had been the most remarkable torpedo work of the world war—it was hard also not to be impressed by their use of the battle turnaway. It is likely that Kurita intended, in advance, to use a similar tactic under air attack en route to Leyte.

  In the Sibuyan Sea on October 24, 1944, a turn to the west, away from the San Bernardino Strait, would permit Kurita to regroup and hopefully allow his damaged warships to lick their wounds. The last American attackers flew away by about 3:30 p.m. One scout plane remained, watching. At four o’clock, Admiral Kurita ordered a westward turn. Commander Ishida Tsuneo, the Yamato paymaster, who had been seconded to act as deputy to Koyanagi Tomiji, thought the turnaway brilliant. Others were less impressed.

  Kurita intended from the beginning to reverse course again once the coast was clear. Given that intention, it might have been best to say nothing, but senior staff officer Yamamoto and operations staffer Otani advised him to inform the high command. Kurita then sent a radio dispatch to the Combined Fleet:

  OUR DAMAGES ARE NOT LIGHT. THE FREQUENCY AND NUMERICAL STRENGTH OF THESE ENEMY ATTACKS ARE INCREASING. IF WE CONTINUE OUR PRESENT COURSE OUR LOSSES WILL INCREASE INCALCULABLY, WITH LITTLE HOPE OF SUCCESS FOR OUR MISSION.

  Another version of this message makes more colorful reading: “UNDER THESE CIRCUMSTANCES, WE WOULD MERELY MAKE OF OURSELVES MEAT FOR THE ENEMY.” Either way Kurita Takeo reached the same conclusion:

  THEREFORE, HAVE DECIDED TO WITHDRAW OUTSIDE THE RANGE OF ENEMY AIR ATTACK FOR THE TIME BEING, AND TO RESUME OUR SORTIE IN COORDINATION WITH SUCCESSFUL ATTACKS ON THE ENEMY BY OUR AIR FORCES.

  The description of this measure as temporary, and even more, the prompt return to the base course when Halsey’s air attacks ended, both suggest the employment of a premeditated tactic.

  Consternation prevailed when Hiyoshi learned what Kurita had done. Chief of staff Kusaka records that Combined Fleet headquarters was at a complete loss. Events that day had already afflicted command staff with deep foreboding. The operations room went silent when word came that Musashi had been damaged. Then even more so when the Yamato was hit by bombs and torpedoes, when Musashi fell out of formation, and with the reports of damage to other vessels. Then the operations staffer Captain Mikami Sakuo showed him a draft he had hurriedly scribbled on a message form. Addressed to Kurita, the message ordered him to attack.

  Mikami took his draft to C-in-C Toyoda, who had the ultimate authority. Admiral Toyoda understood how Kurita might find the air attacks unbearable and be tempted to turn back. But Allied air could pursue the fleet just as easily. Toyoda reasoned the losses would not differ much no matter what Kurita did. Commander Mikami’s message struck Toyoda as the right thing to say. But his decision to send the dispatch, Toyoda reflected, seemed as difficult as choosing to swallow molten iron.

  The message went out as Operations Order No. 372: “WITH CONFIDENCE IN HEAVENLY GUIDANCE, THE ENTIRE FORCE WILL ATTACK!” Kurita thought this was idiotic—something out of a play. Instead of information on the situation, he was given homilies.

  As Admiral Toyoda put it to interrogators after the war, “The meaning of that order was, while it does not appear in the wording . . . that damage could not be limited or reduced by turning back, so advance even though the fleet should be completely lost.” Toyoda here freed Kurita from any concern over the extent of his losses, and the C-in-C felt confident his Second Fleet commander would not turn back after getting such a message.

  In retrospect, Kusaka decided it had been an impossible mission. C-in-C Toyoda and Kusaka and their subordinates were completely aware the Kurita fleet had become an exposed force with no fighter escort. On the other hand, a successful defense of Leyte meant holding all the Philippines. They supported Kurita’s appeals to Japanese air commanders for fighter cover. Admiral Onishi replied with a dispatch asking if X-Day could be pushed back a few days for him to bring up additional fighters. Kusaka knew that limited oil supplies rendered delay impossible. Toyoda knew how difficult preparations had been. If it was called off, there could be no revival.

  The story of the “divine guidance” message created controversy. Admiral Toyoda sent off his message, only to receive the Kurita dispatch quoted previously not long afterward. The C-in-C could not believe his field commander would spurn an order like that. He had the message repeated. Communications officers checked and determined that Admiral Kurita’s 4:00 p.m. dispatch definitely had followed Toyoda’s battle order. But the report Kurita filed after the battle records the “divine guidance” message at 6:15. The dispatch had been delayed for several hours (as was the repeat transmission). Japanese communications were fouled up throughout the Sho operation, and that would be a serious weak point.

  In the meantime, no more Task Force 38 strike waves appeared over the Kurita fleet. Admiral Kurita, quick to take advantage, ordered a resumption of the original course at 5:15 p.m. The Imperial Navy armada aimed again at the San Bernardino Strait, and it would arrive there around midnight. Kurita Takeo would have his day
of battle after all.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE FIRST TEAM VERSUS THE RISING SUN

  It’s hard to imagine today, when the U.S. military is entirely professional and widely regarded as the most skilled on the planet, that World War II was a time when the nation called its citizens to arms, blended them with a small professional force, and created a military that was the equal of any in the world. But it happened. And the events surrounding this climax of the Pacific campaign display this expert citizen military. Task Force 38 alone, dominant over the Japanese at every stage since Bull Halsey’s first Philippine sally weeks before, convincingly demonstrates U.S. proficiency. Carrier air over the Sibuyan Sea had sent the unsinkable Musashi, the best the Imperial Navy had, to the bottom of the ocean.

  During the next twelve hours the Allies would show their prowess again—but the Japanese would face the dawn in a breathtakingly superior strategic position. Allied might. Japanese stratagem. A tale for the ages.

  OPPORTUNITY OFFERED OR CREATED

  All this began with Admiral William F. Halsey. Days away from his sixty-first birthday, Bill Halsey found himself immersed in the biggest aero-naval battle to date. The decisions required were commensurately huge. Halsey had previously expressed himself regarding Pacific war strategy and not only had played a role in Roosevelt’s selection of the Philippines over Taiwan as a goal, but also had been instrumental in accelerating the plan and in making the invasion possible by lending his own ground forces to General MacArthur. Now it became a matter of proving the validity of that choice in reality—against a Japanese reaction that can only be described as monumental. Bull Halsey had made a fine start, tearing across the archipelago with his carrier raids and hitting at the Inner Empire. In the Sibuyan Sea on October 24, Task Force 38 warplanes had seemed invincible, the Kurita fleet merely prey.