Storm Over Leyte

by John Prados

  Combined Fleet headquarters took a hand, finally, at 11:34 a.m. on the twenty-sixth. Admiral Toyoda ordered heavily damaged ships to return to the Inland Sea, ones able to be repaired at Singapore to head there, and vessels requiring emergency repairs to obtain them at Hong Kong or Keelung, on Taiwan. The former had two dry docks suitable for vessels up to 10,000 tons, and Keelung had another.

  The Nachi followed Combined Fleet’s prescription but obtained her emergency repairs at Manila, instead. That turned out to be a fatal mistake. Allied subs sat around Manila to trap the unwary, while carrier planes picked over the environs even as they avoided the city. The Nachi lay in Manila Bay on November 5 when Essex planes sent her to the bottom of the sea.

  Kumano followed the prescription too, but also stopped at Manila. The planes and subs hunted Kumano like a burglar in the night. Eventually they caught her.

  • • •

  AS HAD HAPPENED with the Taiwan air battle, the Japanese put an unreal face on the Leyte action. Broadcast on October 26, Radio Tokyo’s commentary asserted that “Japanese forces now have complete air and sea superiority on and around Leyte.”

  The details are of some interest: “The Imperial fleet, which patiently held back its desire to engage in battle in order to pile training upon training, has finally been given the chance to manifest its power. The Imperial fleet saw an opportune moment to deal a death blow upon the enemy fleet, and boldly and fearlessly sailed out to challenge a battle with the main strength of the enemy fleet.”

  The newspaper Asahi Shimbun also said this on October 26: “The fact that the United States Navy has suffered two successive defeats of the greatest magnitude in less than two weeks in the Pacific theater of war indicate either a complete lack of ability and recklessness of the enemy High Command, or some factor other than strategic is dictating the conduct of the enemy’s recent operations.”

  Navy minister Yonai would be more candid about the reality of the situation. “When you took the Philippines,” he told interrogators in November 1945, “that was the end of our resources.”

  Americans learned of these momentous events in a series of official communiqués from the U.S. Navy, CINCPAC, and General MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific theater command. General MacArthur proved quick to release news of the Allied landing in the Philippines, and Admiral Nimitz at Pearl Harbor put out a communiqué the same day announcing the Japanese advance to battle through the Sulu and Sibuyan seas. This series of CINCPAC press releases (nos. 163 to 166) gave a running account of events, which, despite the fact that these reports are often distorted, provided a surprising level of detail on the Japanese side.

  Kurita’s turnaway in the Sibuyan Sea received mention. Lavish detail would be devoted to the attack on the Ozawa fleet. Nothing whatsoever was said about the Battle of Samar. The first mention, only a vague intimation, appeared on October 27 (October 28 in the Philippines) in a Navy Department release:

  1. According to latest information received, the following U.S. Naval vessels, in addition to the USS Princeton (light carrier) have been sunk during the recent operations in the Philippines:

  2 escort carriers

  2 destroyers

  1 destroyer escort

  2. No details have been received.

  3. Next of kin of casualties aboard the above vessels will be notified as soon as possible.

  That constituted the entire release.

  Finally, on October 29, Admiral Nimitz released CINCPAC Communiqué No. 168, which contained the first explicit declaration that a battle had taken place. More than that, CINCPAC declared that “although still subject to revision as more information is received, [reports] indicate an overwhelming victory for the Third and Seventh United States Fleets. The Japanese fleet has been decisively defeated and routed. The second battle of the Philippine Sea* ranks as one of the major sea battles of World War II.”

  • • •

  IN TOKYO, AT the Diet, the foreign minister’s private secretary, Kase Toshikazu, happened to be meeting with senior politicians when the Leyte landings began. Kase announced the invasion to the assembled group. Consternation followed—along with intense anxiety about the role of the Imperial Navy. That was cleared up a few days later. Admiral Toyoda put out an order of the day for public consumption. But the Navy could not admit the truth without revealing the falsity of the spin it had put on the battle, starting with the Taiwan action. So it continued to claim a fictional victory. The real story it kept within a very tight circle. The Japanese government persisted in acting as if the armed forces were succeeding.

  The Leyte battle had effectively ended the first round of Tokyo’s search for a diplomatic solution to the war. Prime Minister Koiso had pursued opening up dialogue through the Soviet Union, with which Japan had a nonaggression pact. Koiso had not been very serious, and he achieved nothing before Leyte. The battle results were evident to others, even if they were kept from the Japanese people. On November 7, Joseph Stalin took the occasion of the anniversary of the Russian Revolution to denounce Japan as an aggressor. The road through Moscow, at least for the moment, had been blocked.

  The following day Koiso declared that the Battle of Leyte would decide the outcome of the war and that Japan had determined to hold the island. Resorting to hyperbolic rhetoric, Koiso invoked the classic Japanese hero Hideyoshi and the decisive battle that had led to the Tokugawa era to dramatize Leyte. Military leaders who doubted their ability to win this fight were not pleased.

  Private secretary Kase meanwhile consulted with jushin figures in his effort to bring realistic information to Foreign Minister Shigemitsu. Kase met with Admiral Okada Keisuke. The admiral replied quite frankly: The fleet would be entirely at the mercy of the Allies. Japan could not replace its losses in pilots and planes. Even if aircraft carriers could be built—and Kase appears to have been unaware of Japan’s alarming steel shortage—the trained pilots were missing, stockpiles were largely exhausted, and essential war matériel was running out. Kase notes, “It was clearly no longer possible to continue the struggle, let alone mount another offensive on the high seas.”

  • • •

  WAS LEYTE GULF a “decisive battle”? Official historian Samuel Eliot Morison punts on that question, arguing that “decisive” is a relative term, concluding that Midway had been more decisive. But he also argues that Leyte “did decide” the fact that the Allies would rule the Pacific through the end of the war. Admiral Chester Nimitz, on the other hand, had no doubts, even just a few days after the battle.

  There are at least two ways in which conditions that existed prior to this battle were transformed. First, before Leyte the Imperial Navy had been a potent weapon waiting to be used. Every Allied commander in every theater of war had to consider the possibility that weapon could be aimed at him. After Leyte the Japanese fleet was expended, a collection of units to be repaired, retrained, and reconstituted, and which would return at a lesser level of power. It would be a weapon suited to a different kind of war. That change was decisive.

  Second, the ultimate failure of the Imperial Navy to exact a price from its adversary using conventional methods brought to a head the tactical/technological/strategic dispute that had been building on the Japanese side. This was the effort to find a way around the virtual attrition that increasingly hampered Tokyo’s war effort. The need to find ways to make inferior weapons count, against a technologically advanced enemy, received a great impetus from the fleet’s failure at Leyte. Failure enshrined the “special attack,” the kamikaze. Paradoxically, the huge victory at Leyte put a new kind of enemy in the face of Allied forces, making for one of the great challenges of the war. That too was a decisive development.

  A collateral point is that the Imperial Navy had explicitly aimed for a decisive battle through its Sho plan. In important ways the battle disarmed the Japanese fleet. That result displayed the bankruptcy of the long-standing Japanese doctrine. Ev
en those officers inclined to resist the special attack methods had to be chastened by the failure of their forces in a conventional role. That, too, softened the way for kamikaze tactics.

  There were a number of ways, some major, some not, in which Leyte had effects that nevertheless fell short of being decisive. The most obvious is the huge loss of Japanese combat ships. For a military balance in which the Allies had already attained significant superiority, and were adding to their forces at a faster rate, for the Japanese to incur an instantaneous loss of more than 300,000 tons of warships in exchange for barely 40,000 tons of Allied ones meant an acceleration of Allied superiority. Along with that huge loss went shrinkage in the pool of experienced sailors on whom the Japanese depended. The Imperial Navy suffered more than 118,000 dead in 1944, the largest number of them at Leyte Gulf, followed by the Marianas battle. That represents more than 43 percent of all Japanese Navy battle deaths for the war. Put another way, Navy casualties in 1944 equate to roughly two and a half times Japanese naval casualties for the entire period since Pearl Harbor, including very costly campaigns in the South Pacific.

  No service could sustain such losses without deterioration of skills and capabilities. One can debate how decisive this impact was, but clearly it needs to be seen as major.

  • • •

  THE LEYTE INVASION crystallized the strategic dilemma President Roosevelt had mulled over at Pearl Harbor. The question had been how to isolate Japan, and the choices the Philippines versus Taiwan. Now there would be a campaign for Leyte, then landings on other Philippine islands, principally Luzon, but Leyte meant commitment. The Allies would still be fighting, on Luzon if not Leyte, when the war ended. The strategic aim decided at Pearl Harbor had been to blockade Japan by cutting its overseas supply routes. The Philippine campaign accomplished that, but merely in a haphazard fashion.

  Douglas MacArthur’s pitch had been misleading. Overselling the Philippines as the base for a blockade came easily to MacArthur—as easy as pretending to be interested in FDR’s stamp collection. What MacArthur had really been after were his political preferences. That was something Franklin Roosevelt understood—and accepted. But what is so tragic is that one person’s preferences had global consequences. The Japanese did not fall like a house of cards. In spite of the friendship the Filipinos had for Americans, an awful lot of hard fighting still remained. Every new target (or rather, island) would have to be invaded, adding up to multiple amphibious assaults. As a single contiguous landmass, Taiwan would have required only one invasion, reducing the complexity of the overall mission.

  MacArthur had been deceptive on another level too: The Philippines were not the superior position from which to complete the blockade and encirclement of Japan. As Admiral Ernest J. King had argued, Taiwan would have been better for that purpose. Standard planning templates the Joint Chiefs of Staff employed show that control of Taiwan would have positively corked the bottle of the supply routes to Japan, whereas against a blockade applied from the Philippines a resourceful adversary could contrive an infiltration route—which is eventually what happened when imperial commanders began developing a seaborne infiltration route. In January 1945, Admiral Halsey would take his Third Fleet on a raid into the South China Sea precisely to interdict that coastal traffic. His mission demonstrated, among other things, that the blockade from the Philippines had to be enforced. A blockade from Taiwan simply could have existed. Standard search-and-strike tactics would have sufficed to choke off the Japanese supplies, with no special fleet action required to choke off Tokyo’s supplies. While it is true that Japanese figures also understood the fall of the Philippines as cutting the Empire off from the south, it is also the case that imperial commanders actually began developing the seaborne infiltration route as time stretched from weeks into months. Hence the Halsey carrier raid.

  Visit http://bit.ly/1TEIDjI for a larger version of this map.

  The imperfect blockade had a marked impact. War termination in the Pacific could have resulted if a successful blockade had made it plain to Japanese leaders and commanders that further military operations were simply not possible. Instead Tokyo received the impression that it could continue a broken-backed war. This point should not be taken too far, since even with the imperfect blockade, at a certain point Japanese resources were going to give out. However, Washington did not have time for that. War-weariness on the Allied side, the end of the war in Europe, and the impatience of leaders led to demands for near-term results, and thus pressures for action.

  Writing of the Pearl Harbor conference, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Admiral William D. Leahy said that the strategic decisions made were aimed primarily at avoiding an unnecessary invasion of Japan. By overselling the Philippines as an objective, however, Douglas MacArthur actually pushed American leaders in the exact opposite direction. Japan would have to be invaded if it could not be subdued.

  Douglas MacArthur’s preferred strategic option led ultimately to a Hobson’s choice among horrific pathways. The general seems to have been discomfited by the consequences of his actions, at least to judge from how he falsified his letter to FDR. The burdens of the Hobson’s choice were awful. The Philippine strategy led to the need for direct action, and the options included a strategic bombing campaign against Japan for massive death and destruction, invading the Home Islands, or employing the atomic bomb against the Japanese. Predictably this caused a lot of existential dread—invasion versus the A-bomb? A million casualties versus introducing a horrific, unthinkable weapon and actually using it against innocents? A course that led to the horns of that dilemma has to be ranked a decisive choice.

  • • •

  IN ADDITION, THERE are a number of questions, remarkable insights, gaps in vision, mistakes, and miscalculations that affected the actual fighting at Leyte Gulf that demand comment. The bottom-line question is this: Could the outcome at Leyte have been anything other than it was?

  Imperial Navy planners have to be given credit for remarkable insight. That is, the NGS and Combined Fleet realized that a properly conducted operation could potentially reverse the numerous Allied advantages in terms of raw strength, technological superiority, intelligence, and command function. The Japanese understood the keys to attaining that position were an asymmetrical approach, compelling the Allies to pay attention to multiple threats simultaneously; accepting the high potential for losses; and mounting decoy missions. Naval leaders believed this a onetime opportunity and the high command attached it to a suitably important objective, the Philippines. In some sense a victory lay in the very fact that with the dawn of October 25, there would be an Allied carrier force under the guns of an Imperial Navy surface fleet. Every measure of the existing war situation thus turned inside out. That the Kurita fleet did not fully profit from that circumstance does not detract from its achievement.

  Having said that, it is also necessary to observe that Imperial Navy commanders failed critically in setting goals for the Sho plan—or more accurately, they failed to mount an active effort to build a consensus among officers on their recast of naval targets. The NGS and Combined Fleet were within their prerogative to enshrine different objectives, but having done so, it became incumbent upon them to push officers to accept the new objectives. “Admiral Kurita’s mission was complete destruction of the transports in Leyte Bay,” Combined Fleet C-in-C Toyoda told interrogators. “In the orders there was no restriction as to the damage he might take.” To leave the old understanding and new objectives on the table simultaneously inserted a source of uncertainty, which meant officers needed to be unflinchingly dedicated to the goal. Toyoda’s trip to the Philippines in early October marked an effort to deal with that problem, but it ended up as a disaster that trapped the C-in-C away from headquarters at the critical moment.

  Perhaps the uncertainty of the Sho objectives can be taken as evidence of the continued dysfunction of the Japanese high command. There were Army officers who firmly believed in th
e enemy fleet was the target, though invasion flotillas posed the greatest threat to Army troops. On the Navy side, there were officers who believed the opposite—that flotillas were the threat, not the fleets. But cooperation fell short of the unity of effort the top commanders promised Emperor Hirohito when he approved the execution of Sho. The Army’s sudden switch of strategy to make the peripheral island (Leyte) rather than the prepared bastion (Luzon) the central front automatically created a Tokyo Express–type demand that was sure to increase its losses. In addition, the Army’s procrastination in providing troops to reinforce Leyte, and its sudden aversion to a naval battle, call into question its entire purpose in the enterprise.

  The Navy leaders made great progress in preparing their forces for Sho. They understood clearly that they lacked a unitary force, instead possessing the distinct, limited weapons of an air attack force, a submarine force, and a surface unit. But it was a major mistake, starting with Admiral Kusaka, to activate Sho only for the airplanes. The only way to obtain synergistic effects from the disparate arrows in the Japanese quiver was to employ the separate forces in a related space and together in time. An arrangement like that might have spared Kurita Takeo and other commanders some of their losses on their way to Leyte Gulf. The day of October 25, when the Allied escort carriers perished to surface gunfire and an air attack, and had another jeep narrowly evade a submarine torpedo attack, hints at the potential here.

  Navy leaders were also responsible for the general weakness of antisubmarine warfare (ASW) tactics and forces in the fleet. The Japanese reluctance to devote serious forces and technological effort to ASW afforded Allied subs much greater freedom of action than they would otherwise have had. One of the impacts of this would be the loss of tankers, which essentially crippled all Japanese operations. Another was virtual attrition—the diversion of Japanese destroyers, submarines, and even big ships to transport duties rather than combat patrols. Allied submarines began specifically targeting Japanese destroyers, magnifying virtual with real attrition. That not only cut back ASW forces; it reduced the offensive torpedo capability of the destroyer flotillas at Leyte.