Storm Over Leyte

by John Prados

  The death ride of the Nishimura unit ended with nearly total annihilation. When the news reached Hiyoshi, Combined Fleet staff chief thought of Nishimura, “It was just like him. Headstrong.” But Nishimura’s force had actually accomplished something instrumental to the Japanese mission. The Surigao Strait lay on the far side of Leyte Gulf from where Kurita would appear. Admiral Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet tarried long into the night to finish off Nishimura’s ships. As dawn approached, the mighty fleet had just begun its return. But when the sun rose, the Kurita fleet struck.

  CHAPTER 9

  TALLYHO . . . CARRIERS!

  Commander Thomas Hamilton had known Bull Halsey at Annapolis. At the time, Halsey had commanded the naval academy’s station ship, Reina Mercedes, while working as boxing coach. Tom Hamilton had admired his aggressive style. He himself was an Annapolis football star who had kicked the Navy to an undefeated 1926 season and was immortalized as the model for a stained-glass window in the chapel. Presently, Hamilton served as executive officer aboard Enterprise. When that ship’s prow turned north on the night of October 24, Commander Hamilton applauded because he knew that meant Halsey would hunt Japanese carriers.

  Though Pete Mitscher resumed tactical command of Task Force 38, when the night search confirmed Ozawa’s presence, Halsey ordered, “FORM LEO.” That short message at 2:40 a.m. had a scripted meaning—the fleet would immediately pull together the warships constituting Task Force 34, Vice Admiral Willis A. Lee’s battleship action group.

  The Third Fleet leader intended Ching Lee’s surface force as a foil against any enemy attempt to engage Halsey’s fleet with surface ships. Its formation had been rehearsed only once. Now, carried out at night, in the midst of a major naval battle, this would not be a simple evolution. It required all the aircraft carriers and their remaining escorts to slow to ten knots while the fast battleships and their screen pulled away.

  The whole story of the run north, the role of Task Force 34, and the destruction of the Ozawa fleet makes up one of the great what-ifs of the Leyte sea fight. And it’s the last piece to the puzzle of how the Japanese got to do what they did.

  THE OZAWA PLOY

  Aboard Enterprise, the routine would be very much like that on the other carriers when Commander Hamilton crafted the ship’s daily plan for October 25. His provided for crewmen to awaken at 3:30 a.m. Half the crew would breakfast ten minutes later and the rest at 4:15. The dawn general quarters—now standard in the U.S. Navy—would start at 5:29, an hour before expected sunrise. Early-morning searches would cover seven vectors out to 275 miles, each with a TBM Avenger as scout covered by a Hellcat for protection. Several night fighters would follow as radio relay planes. The search would launch shortly after six o’clock.

  Once the scouts were airborne, Big E would begin clearing the deck, putting up a strike package to be able to respond to any sighting. The group, thirteen dive-bombers, seven torpedo bombers, and sixteen fighters, would orbit fifty miles to the north. “Dog” Smith led the package. The portents so thrilled Tom Hamilton that he scribbled a note on the typewritten master for the mimeographed order of the day: “Today may be the biggest in our Navy’s history. Enterprise will set the pace.”

  Wind blew from the northeast with brisk (thirteen- to sixteen-knot) breezes. The weather would be generally clear with only a few clouds.

  Jerry Bogan’s other aircraft carriers had similar standing procedures. The Franklin put up its own strike package, the two light carriers lesser flights. Admiral Halsey was short one carrier group—Slew McCain’s 38.1, which the Bull had sent to Ulithi for rest, then recalled—which meant the overall task force numbered five fleet carriers plus an equal number of light ones. At 4:30 a.m., Pete Mitscher ordered all the carriers to prepare deckload strikes and start arming them, as well as to be ready to launch both the strike packages and combat air patrols with dawn. Ted Sherman’s 38.2 group put up packages totaling 101 airplanes with the redoubtable David McCampbell of Essex as attack coordinator.

  Despite the Japanese gains in distance during the interval required to form up Task Force 34, Task Force 38’s maneuvers in the night left the carrier fleet in an enviable situation at morning. Ozawa’s fleet was headed north, barely 150 miles from Halsey’s armada. Commander McCampbell’s ready-strike group, orbiting seventy miles from their own force, could virtually see the Japanese.

  The first sighting came from an Intrepid plane at 7:10 a.m. Admiral Mitscher ordered immediate attack. They were after a pretty cool customer.

  The island of Kyushu had long produced some of the finest Japanese naval officers, Ozawa Jisaburo among them. During the nineteenth century, the Satsuma clan had been powerful on Kyushu, and it joined with others to fight the power of the military dictators, or shoguns, who claimed to exercise authority in the name of the emperor. Among some of the Meiji Restoration reforms were the creation of both the Japanese Army and the Imperial Navy. Where other clans sought dominance in the Army, many Satsuma clansmen joined the Navy. By 1886, when Jisaburo was born in Miyazaki prefecture, the Meiji upheavals had ended, but the navalist tradition on Kyushu was stronger than ever. So going Navy and entering Etajima were natural choices for him.

  Ozawa graduated with the class of 1909. His middle ranking (45 of 179) did not do justice to his analytical mind, his brightness, or his adaptability. Samuel Eliot Morison, the American naval historian, said of Ozawa that he would have done just fine in the U.S. Navy. Agawa Hiroyuki, biographer of the renowned Japanese commander in chief Yamamoto Isoroku, named Ozawa as one of only two officers qualified to replace Yamamoto—and the other man (Yamaguchi Tamon) had already perished. Denizens of the Zoo at JICPOA had this to say about Ozawa Jisaburo at the height of the Pacific war:

  HE IS CONSIDERED AN IDEAL FLEET COMMANDER. . . . HE KEEPS FORGING AHEAD UNTIL HIS OBJECTIVE IS GAINED. A GOOD STRATEGIST, HE IS VERY PAINSTAKING AND THOROUGH. . . . A MOST SIGNIFICANT FACT ABOUT HIM IS THAT HE IS CONSIDERED A “WIN OR LOSE” TYPE, CAREFULLY CALCULATING WHEN MAKING HIS PLANS AND THEN WILLING TO RISK ALL ON THEM.

  That is certainly what Vice Admiral Ozawa was up to in the Sho operation.

  The graduation cruise Japanese officers take after leaving Etajima found Midshipman Ozawa aboard the training ship Soya, and that experience, in fact, became his first exposure to Yamamoto, who was a ship’s officer at the time. Afterward, young Ozawa Jisaburo served aboard the Navy’s flagship, battleship Mikasa.

  But his real devotion was torpedoes. By the time Ozawa made lieutenant commander, in 1921, he had done the torpedo school’s basic and advanced courses, led a torpedo boat division, and completed both levels of study at the Naval War College. Ozawa commanded more destroyers, was an instructor at the torpedo school, and served on a destroyer squadron staff and on the Navy General Staff—all before 1930. Then he took six months off for an extensive tour of Europe and the United States.

  During that trip, Commander Ozawa made a special study of the Battle of Jutland, reading everything he could find on the subject, speaking to veterans in both Germany and England. Ozawa decided that the best histories are done by the defeated, because victors always want to keep secrets about their actions. Ozawa argued this was true for Japan’s sea battles in the Russo-Japanese War as well as for the British in World War I. That aside, he discovered that an important aspect of the fighting at Jutland had been the concentrated torpedo attacks by destroyer units, of which the Germans had made great use. The Japanese suspected that the British were designing an oxygen-powered torpedo to overcome previous deficiencies. At the Kure Torpedo Institute, engineers solved the problems of oxygen power for torpedoes and the Imperial Navy produced a high-speed tin fish it called the “Long Lance” (Type 93). U.S. intelligence believed Ozawa made his reputation in Imperial Navy circles by advocating for this weapon.

  Upon returning from his Jutland inquiry, Ozawa briefly served at the head of several destroyer units before returning to the Naval War College as
an instructor. Now a captain, he next commanded the heavy cruiser Maya, and then the battleship Haruna. It would be after that assignment that Ozawa, newly minted rear admiral, went to Combined Fleet headquarters as chief of staff. He fought in the China Incident as leader of Cruiser Division 8 before his appointment as director of the Yokosuka Torpedo School in 1938. There, he presided over the introduction of the Long Lance torpedo and its new doctrine manual.

  Admiral Ozawa’s other big contribution to Navy tactics came little more than a year later, when he led carriers for the first time. The Imperial Navy was rapidly increasing its stake in air forces, with new aircraft designs (the Zero was a brand-new airplane then) and big fleet carriers. Ozawa’s Carrier Division 1 would be the first to achieve sinking scores against multiple battleships in fleet exercises. The idea of concentrating carrier divisions into a single striking force is one that Admiral Ozawa formally proposed. That the Navy thought highly of Ozawa can be seen in his promotion to vice admiral in November 1940 and his assignment to lead its most prestigious cruiser unit, and also in its selection of Vice Admiral Ozawa as director of the Naval War College in September 1941.

  What happened next also demonstrates the importance of Admiral Ozawa. The Navy Ministry yanked him from the newly appointed position almost immediately. By then, Japan stood on the brink of war and its plans for offensives were far advanced. After barely a month at the head of the War College, the Navy tapped Ozawa to lead its Southern Expeditionary Fleet, the important covering force for all the Japanese offensives into Southeast Asia and the Philippines.

  In this capacity, Ozawa would be in on the destruction of the British battleships Prince of Wales and Repulse; he would lead the Japanese invasions of Borneo, Java, Sumatra, and the Andaman Islands; and he would conduct raids into the Indian Ocean. After a break of just a few months in the summer and fall of 1942, the Navy brought Ozawa back to replace Nagumo Chuichi in command of the kido butai, the carrier force also known as the Third Fleet, which would be the aviation component of the Mobile Fleet that Ozawa also headed.

  As he had done before, Vice Admiral Ozawa devised tactics and techniques suitable for Japan to fight. With the Mobile Fleet before the Philippine Sea, it was Ozawa who had advocated taking advantage of the longer range of JNAF carrier aircraft by attacking with them while Allied fleets were still too far away to use their own planes. It had not been the admiral’s fault that the JNAF proved too weak to lay a glove on the Allied fleet.

  Before Sho, Ozawa had intended to restore the carrier force, then sail to Lingga and reunite the Mobile Fleet, operating as it had at the Battle of the Philippine Sea. Preparations for that voyage were under way when the Allies moved against Taiwan and the Philippines. Ozawa had plumped for his role as a lure, a reduced mission to make the surface attack forces that much stronger. When Combined Fleet activated the air-only Sho for the Battle of Taiwan, Ozawa had prepared his air groups in a timely fashion while hating every bit of it.

  • • •

  ONE KEY MISTAKE took place even before the guns began shooting. Admiral Ozawa took his flagship, light cruiser Oyodo, to fuel at Tokuyama on October 15. He then brought the Mobile Fleet together at Yashima anchorage, where Ozawa moved his flag from Oyodo to the fleet aircraft carrier Zuikaku. The admiral probably did this to free up the light cruiser and strengthen his slim surface strength. But the Oyodo had been designed with service as a flagship in mind, and the cruiser had facilities for staff and extra communications gear for a fleet commander that Zuikaku did not have. And Ozawa did not realize, as he worked within cramped quarters on the carrier, that Zuikaku had something wrong with her radio transmitters. The carrier admiral reckoned—and later told his U.S. Navy interrogators—that Imperial Navy communications were bad onshore, due to poor technical ability, equipment, and other reasons.

  When word came that the Americans had started landing at the mouth of Leyte Gulf, Ozawa sent senior staff officer Ohmae Toshikazu to Kure to confer once again with Combined Fleet higher-ups. The high command agreed the Mobile Fleet needed some sort of air arm to be credible, even as a decoy. As a result, Combined Fleet recalled the carrier air groups that had been flying under Admiral Fukudome’s command, and the remaining planes came to Oita, where Ozawa had sent the vessels of his Carrier Division 3. In inclement weather, cranes loaded them aboard the ship, finishing the morning of October 20. There were no aircraft for the battleship-carriers Ise and Hyuga.

  The fleet left base via the Bungo Strait late that afternoon, with the Oyodo now in the role of leading Rear Admiral Edo Heitaro’s 31st Escort Squadron. Admiral Ozawa set a five-minute interval between zigzags and, when day dawned, began to use floatplanes for antisub scouting, starting with those from Oyodo. There were submarine alerts every day. Somehow in waters saturated with U.S. submarines, it did not translate into what Ozawa wanted: sighting reports sent to Allied commanders.

  On the morning of October 22, Rear Admiral Nomura Tomekichi’s hybrid battleship Hyuga intercepted what he understood to be Task Force 38’s voice radio. From Manila, Admiral Mikawa’s radio operators got a bead on the same transmissions. Plotting the bearings gave Ozawa his first inkling of where Halsey might be. In preparation, Ozawa had his own ships refuel under way, and in keeping with the Japanese experience at this stage of the war, fuel proved a headache for the Ozawa fleet. All went without incident until about one in the afternoon, when Commander Kawabata Makoto’s Kiri, a small destroyer of the latest type, refueled alongside Oyodo. A swell took Kawabata’s ship at the beam and pushed her over, severing the fuel hose and the lines connecting the two ships.

  Kiri got just twenty tons of precious oil. High seas also frustrated Captain Mudaguchi Kokuro of the Oyodo when he tried again later that day. The fleet received just a third of the oil it expected. Ozawa was operating with two replenishment units, each with a big tanker. He was forced to cancel the entire refueling effort when a submarine contact developed toward evening. Zuikaku and light cruiser Tama cast off and made emergency turns. A destroyer counterattacked. The next refueling now loomed even more important.

  On his mission, Admiral Ozawa kept to character. Stubborn, silent, strong-willed, Ozawa paced the bridge of flagship Zuikaku. Hour upon hour, nothing happened. So he innovated. The radio deception plan would be especially elaborate. Several lengthy dispatches, from different radios, using different call signs, were involved. Ten or more signals typical of aircraft transmissions were to suggest carriers. Cruiser Oyodo, assigned to participate because Allied intelligence would know she had been the Combined Fleet’s flagship, would send a series of messages to Admiral Matsuda’s hybrid battleships. In the evening of October 22, Ozawa had another lengthy dispatch transmitted specifically so Allied intelligence might intercept it and establish his position. Breaking radio silence failed. The Allies’ vaunted Ultra network completely missed the deception. The Zoo’s Ultra summary for October 23 noted the Imperial Navy’s carriers at sea, but hedged the judgment with qualifiers such as “apparently” and “unknown,” which made clear its deduction had no basis in evidence. The first appearance in the Ultra of any element associated with the Ozawa fleet came on October 24, and at the time, it concerned only its refueling groups.

  By then, it was the very day of battle. Commander Yamazaki Jintaro led destroyer Akikaze, fresh from refitting, to the replenishment group escort. He continued to steam south as submarine Sterlet (Commander Orme C. “Butch” Robbins) caught the oiler Jinei Maru. Some 69 sailors drowned. Ultra intercepted Yamazaki’s dispatch reporting the rescue of Jinei Maru’s captain and 113 other crew. Akikaze and another escort took them to Oshima.

  Admiral Ozawa put his worries about fuel on hold while feeling his way southward. A full set of searches went to a distance of 300 miles, ending with a 40-mile dogleg. The ships were alerted for battle from 6:18 a.m. onward, and antiaircraft positions were fully manned. The admiral, whose nickname in the fleet was “Gargoyle” for his stony countenance, showed n
o reaction when they received a sighting report of Task Force 38 carriers from the First Air Fleet in the Philippines, or when his own scouts confirmed the information with better location data. Then, and only when Ozawa had become confident his fleet had been spotted, did he send his own planes to add to the hell of the Princeton.

  Here is a mystery of Leyte Gulf: Early this day Halsey had only suspicions about Ozawa’s presence. Yet the Japanese admiral acted based upon a belief that his lure had worked—that a scout had spotted him. But no U.S. aircraft filed any sighting of Ozawa before late afternoon. Oyodo noticed that scout at 4:42 p.m. Captain Mudaguchi added that it was an SB-2C Helldiver that made a strafing run on his ship from thirty degrees to port, giving the report a concrete character. U.S. Navy interrogators pressed Ozawa about the morning sighting and the admiral insisted he had it right. Ozawa said he had seen the scout planes himself.

  “I expected complete destruction of my fleet,” Ozawa told U.S. interrogators, “but if Kurita’s mission was carried out that was all I wished.” He lacked confidence in the success of his decoy mission but knew it was the only thing they could do. That, too, was characteristic of Ozawa. His only sign of agitation was a slight shaking in his hands. The JNAF scout confirmed the Halsey fleet at 11:15 a.m. Half an hour later, Ozawa’s carriers turned into the wind to launch. Shortly after noon, the cool Ozawa came around to a northwest course, but no Allied attack materialized.