As Eugene Sledge’s ship pulled away from Peleliu, with fighting still raging in the smoking canyons of the Umurbrogol, he felt the island pulling him back, as if it were some tremendous magnet. He was terrified his regiment would be ordered to return at the very last minute to stop some unexpected counterattack or some threat to the airfield. But perhaps he felt the pull of the place because he had left some part of himself there, never to be retrieved. It wasn’t innocence, but it was everything he had known as youth.
That was nothing, however, compared to the unbearable price his 1st Marine Division paid for a worthless strip of coral in one of the most remote places on earth.
*The total number of Americans killed or wounded in the Peliliu operation, 9,615, exceeds, by some counts, the total number of British, Canadian, and American losses at Normandy on June 6, 1944.
The Return
ON SEPTEMBER 15, 1944, THE MORNING the Old Breed went over the reef at Peleliu, General Douglas MacArthur’s troops landed on the strategically important island of Morotai, northwest of New Guinea, taking it easily. This gave MacArthur a forward air base to hit Leyte, the midrib of the Philippines. All the while, Bull Halsey’s Task Force 38 hammered the Philippine island of Luzon, along with Formosa and Okinawa, shattering Japanese airpower in the area.* MacArthur was now ready to strike.
The invasion plan brought together the two great Pacific offenses—MacArthur’s forces advancing from the South Pacific up the coast of New Guinea and Nimitz’s forces advancing from Tarawa across the Central Pacific. The U.S. Third Fleet, commanded by Halsey, was the most awesome naval force ever assembled. It would act as a shield, keeping the Japanese navy away from the assault force—MacArthur’s Sixth Army, 200,000 men strong under Lieutenant General Walter Krueger. Providing close support, and putting the troops ashore, would be the job of “MacArthur’s Navy,” Vice Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid’s smaller Seventh Fleet of old battleships, small escort carriers, and troop transports.
The Americans landed on Leyte on October 20, 1944. Just after the first waves hit Red Beach, General MacArthur, wearing his Philippine field marshal’s cap, sunglasses, and freshly pressed khakis, stepped into knee-deep water and walked toward the beach, two and a half years after he had left Bataan. Standing in a rainstorm, holding a microphone, he made an announcement: “People of the Philippines, I have returned…. Rally to me. Let the indomitable spirit of Bataan and Corregidor lead. … For your homes and hearths, strike! For future generations of your sons and daughters, strike! In the name of your sacred dead, strike!”
General Tomoyuki Yamashita, the Japanese commander on Leyte, said that had he known MacArthur himself was coming ashore he would have formed a suicide squad and killed him.1
THE BATTLE OF LEYTE GULF
More men went ashore on the first day of the Leyte invasion than landed in Normandy on D-Day. Although any thought of the Pacific D-Days brings up an image of assaulting Marines, the U.S. Army, under MacArthur, made more landings (some thirty of them before the Philippines), put more troops into battle, and took greater casualties than the Marine Corps in America’s epic Pacific offensive.
Meeting unexpectedly light resistance. Krueger’s troops swept inland, captured a strategic airfield, and put bulldozers to work preparing an airstrip long enough to handle the medium bombers and long-range fighters of George Kenney’s Air Force. But before this airstrip was completed, the navies of Imperial Japan and the United States met head-on in the greatest sea battle ever fought.
For Japan, the Battle of Leyte Gulf was to be the decisive engagement of a war that had turned disastrously against it. It was Japan’s last chance to protect its economic lifeline through the South China Sea to its southern resource empire. It was the Emperor, not his military leaders, who decided to make Leyte, not Luzon, the major battle for the Philippines. “Contrary to the views of the Army and the Navy General Staffs, I agreed to the showdown battle of Leyte thinking that if we attacked at Leyte and America flinched, then we would probably be able to find room to negotiate.”2
It was a horrible strategic mistake. The calamitous naval and infantry losses on Leyte and in Leyte Gulf made the later defense of Luzon almost impossible. But going into the battle, the navy was confident. It had lost most of its carrier strength, but its commanders thought its formidable battleship and cruiser forces could deliver rapid and shattering blows. When the American invasion force hit Leyte, the Japanese set in motion a huge, highly complex counteroffensive. The key to it was a diversionary move, one that counted on Admiral Halsey’s notorious aggressiveness. Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa’s carrier force, with the decks of the flattops almost empty, would lure Halsey’s fleet away from the Leyte beaches. At that point, two strike forces of battleships and cruisers would steam into Leyte Gulf, one from the north through San Bernardino Strait, the other from the south through Surigao Strait. This giant pincer movement would converge on the Leyte beachhead and annihilate the smaller American fleet that was covering the beachhead, isolating the troops that had already landed. It was a desperate gamble—an oceanic banzai charge.
Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita’s attack force, the strongest to be deployed, was the first to arrive in the Philippines. Two American submarines, Darter and Dace, sighted it heading for the San Bernardino Strait on the morning of October 23 and closed in for the kill, sinking two heavy cruisers, one of them Kurita’s flagship. But they could not stop the gigantic fleet, which included five battleships, among them the world’s two biggest warships, Musashi and Yamato. Switching his flag to Yamato, the shaken but implacable Kurita headed for San Bernardino Strait.
GENERAL DOUGLAS MACARTHUR RETURNS TO THE PHILIPPINES. VICE ADMIRAL THOMAS C. KINKAID IS STANDING TO MACARTHUR’S RIGHT (SC).
When Halsey got word of the fast-approaching Japanese fleet, he launched his Hellcat fighters against it in what turned into a furious, day-long air battle. The Japanese got the worst of it. One of their land-based bombers destroyed the light carrier Princeton, but Kurita lost the massive Musashi, which was ripped apart by nineteen torpedo and seventeen bomb hits and finally rolled over and sank, taking with her half her crew of 2,300 men. Even more damaging was the loss of 150 planes, nine of them to fighter ace David McCampbell, punishing evidence of overwhelming American air superiority in the Pacific. As night approached, Kurita broke off the engagement, not wanting to risk Yamato and his other heavy ships, all of which were pounded in the narrow San Bernardino Strait.
As Kurita steamed west to get beyond range of Halsey’s carrier planes, Halsey received a report on the afternoon of October 24 that Ozawa’s decoy fleet had been spotted 300 miles to the north. He set out after it at dawn the next day, with his entire Third Fleet, seeing the enemy carriers as his most important prey. In one of the most controversial decisions of the Pacific war, he failed to leave even a single picket destroyer to guard San Bernardino Strait. Nor did he tell Kinkaid that he was leaving the pass uncovered. Later, Halsey would say that he was confident Kurita had no more fight in him. He was almost right. Kurita had begun to withdraw, but goaded by his fellow commanders, who questioned his resolve, he reversed course and moved to strike the Leyte beachhead. As he passed through San Bernardino Strait on the night of October 24-25 to join the attack force heading up from the south through Surigao Strait, the Japanese believed they were about to win the most momentous naval victory of the war. They might have, had not the American commanders pulled off what Halsey called “one of the prettiest ambushes in naval history.”3
As darkness fell on the 24th, Admiral Kinkaid’s flotilla of PT boats took station just outside Surigao Strait, where Ferdinand Magellan had sailed into the Philippines in 1521. His destroyers lined the thirty-five miles of the strait itself. At the end of the narrow passage Kinkaid placed six old battleships in a line. Five of them had been sunk or damaged at Pearl Harbor, repaired, modernized, and sent to avenge themselves. The cruisers were with them.
About midnight, a PT boat signaled that the Japanese were approaching the
strait. In the darkness, the PTs got two hits but the Japanese steamed on, in double column, tearing through the passage at twenty knots. The destroyers held their fire; battleships and cruisers were silent, hidden by the darkness, in the dead calm sea.
About 3:00 A.M. on the 25th, Rear Admiral Jessie B. Oldendorf, commander of Kinkaid’s six battleships, ordered “Commence firing!” The destroyers steamed toward the enemy ships and fired their torpedoes. Incandescent flashes lighted Surigao Strait as the torpedoes struck home. The cruisers, ranged on opposite sides of the trap, opened fire on the Japanese caught between them. Colored recognition lights flashed as the confused Japanese, thinking their own ships were attacking them, tried to weather the storm of steel and flame. The lights gave the American cruisers splendid targets—until both the Japanese ships and the U.S. destroyers laid down smoke screens. The one U.S. destroyer crippled by Japanese fire lurched in the smoke, while the others withdrew and opened fire with their hard-hitting five-inch batteries.
Confusion failed to alter the enemy’s determination: the ships plunged on through Surigao Strait, firing wildly and inaccurately. This gave Admiral Oldendorf an opportunity presented to few naval commanders. He “crossed the T” of the Japanese battle line—an action where one fleet advancing in a column forms a vertical bar and thus can fire only its forward-pointing guns, while the attackers form a horizontal bar (the top of the T) and bring their broadsides to bear, annihilating the opposition.
One after the other the Japanese ships reached a narrow part of the strait and turned, presenting perfect targets. The six American battleships, only twelve miles away, did not even have to shift the range of their radar-controlled guns. Ship after Japanese ship became a torch in the night. The cruisers and destroyers sank the remainder as they fled, leaving only wreckage and long streaks of flaming oil. The southern half of the Japanese pincer was broken. “Silence followed,” wrote Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison, “to honor the passing of the tactics which had so long been foremost in naval warfare.” All the great naval actions of the past three centuries, including Trafalgar and Jutland, “had been fought by classic line-of-battle tactics. In the unearthly silence that followed the roar of Oldendorf’s 14-inch and 16-inch guns in Surigao Strait, one could imagine the ghosts of all great admirals, from Raleigh and De Ruyter to Togo and Jellicoe, standing at attention to salute the passing of the kind of naval warfare that they all understood. For in those opening minutes of the morning watch of 25 October 1944, Battle Line became as obsolete as the row-galley tactics of Salamis and Syracuse.”4
Early the next morning, Rear Admiral Clifton Sprague, in charge of a flotilla of small escort carriers and destroyers, sighted the tall masts of Kurita’s battleships coming over the western horizon, heading for Leyte Gulf, where the beaches were stacked with ammunition, food, and military hardware. Sprague’s escort carriers—lightly armed, converted merchant ships carrying only eighteen to twenty-six planes—were directly in Kurita’s path, but were no match for the four battleships and seven cruisers that hove into view.
Kinkaid, and later Nimitz, at Pearl Harbor, sent urgent messages to Halsey asking for help, but Halsey broke off action with Ozawa too late to help Sprague. Realizing he was on his own, Sprague launched every plane he had against the steel Goliaths boring in on him. The Japanese fleet steamed straight on, paying little attention to the four destroyer escorts and three destroyers that laid down smoke screens, darting in and out, matching their small fire against the thunderous volleys of the battleships, in what Admiral Kinkaid called the “most daring and most effective action” of the entire war.5 Heavy Japanese cruisers sank one American escort carrier and hit others with crushing fire, while battleships put down two destroyers and one destroyer escort. But just as Kurita seemed on the brink of a great victory he turned and headed back toward San Bernardino Strait after losing his third heavy cruiser from air and destroyer attacks.
“At 0925 my mind was occupied with dodging torpedoes,” Sprague recalls, “when near the bridge I heard one of the signalmen yell, ‘Goddamit, boys, they’re getting away!’ I could not believe my eyes, but it looked as if the whole Japanese Fleet was indeed retiring. However, it took a whole series of reports from circling planes to convince me. And still I could not get the fact to soak into my battle-numbed brain. At best, I had expected to be swimming by this time.”6
In the smoke and chaos of battle, Kurita believed, not unreasonably, that he was facing carriers from Halsey’s fleet, for he was engaging over 400 fighters and torpedo planes, the dauntless airmen making dry runs after running out of ammunition. Kurita was also convinced, after intercepting and misreading Kinkaid’s messages to Halsey, that Halsey was fast approaching with more heavy carriers, and that he would block San Bernardino Strait. Sprague’s escort carriers, their destroyer screens, and their brave aviators had stopped what Admiral Morison describes as “the most powerful gunfire force which Japan had sent to sea since the Battle of Midway.”7
After mauling the Japanese carrier fleet, Halsey steamed back to the waters off Leyte. His vanguard arrived at 1:30 P.M. on the 25th, and his planes joined those of the Seventh Fleet in harrying the fleeing enemy. One more carrier was sunk, and on that evening a submarine made a final kill, a heavy cruiser, completing the destruction of almost the entire Japanese naval force. The official score stood: four carriers, three battleships, ten cruisers, and eleven destroyers sunk—in actual tonnage, more than a quarter of all Japanese losses since Pearl Harbor. After the three-day Battle of Leyte Gulf, the Japanese navy was finished.
But just as naval history’s last great surface conflict was concluding, the enemy pulled a wildly unexpected move. After Kurita retreated, several wounded U.S. escort carriers were hit by a new and terrifying weapon: the kamikaze corps. Kamikaze, which means “divine wind,” refers to the typhoons that twice destroyed the fleets of Mongol invaders of Japan in the thirteenth century. The new suicide planes, armed with heavy bombs, damaged three vessels and sank one.
“Then in succeeding weeks they attacked our ships in Leyte Gulf,” Admiral Kinkaid recalls. “Every day I could see the faces from the skippers down to the lowest seamen, getting longer and longer because they just couldn’t stop the kamikazes. … As they approached, one plane would drop behind, as though there was something wrong with the engine; as the larger group went over the ships, all the antiaircraft would be trained on them, and then the plane that had dropped behind would come in in a dive. The kamikazes had a lot of tricks like that…. They did a great deal of … damage.”8
After the Battle of Leyte Gulf both King and Nimitz were convinced that Halsey had made an unforgivable mistake in leaving open San Bernardino Strait. Another commander might have been removed, but Halsey was too important to the cause, and he had MacArthur’s complete support. Overhearing a group of Navy men take Halsey to task at an officer’s dinner for “abandoning us” while he went after the decoy fleet, MacArthur slammed his fist on the table and roared, “That’s enough! Leave the Bull alone! He’s still a fighting admiral in my book.”9
THE FIGHT FOR LEYTE
On Leyte, MacArthur’s troops made slow progress against enemy forces in the vast and wild interior. Yamashita had planned to meet the Americans in force on Luzon, not here. But bowing to the Emperor’s decision, he improvised and fought a masterful defensive battle.10 He pulled in reinforcements from neighboring islands, increasing his garrison from 23,000 to almost 70,000 troops. And these ferociously dedicated soldiers contested nearly every inch of ground in the lakelike rice paddies and precipitous mountains of Leyte. The battle was waged in the most wretched natural conditions imaginable. During the fighting, Leyte was hit by three typhoons and an earthquake.
Artillery officer Linwood Crider, twenty-three years old at the time, describes the nearly two-month-long battle for Leyte—like Peleliu, one of the largely forgotten struggles of the Pacific war:
I WAS A YOUNG ARTILLERY OFFICER and, although I had been in the South Pacific for a while, I h
ad not participated in an operation of this magnitude. The artillery group that I was assigned to was part of the XXIV Corps Artillery. For the Leyte operation we were to provide support to the 96th and 7th Infantry Divisions….
Leyte is a little over 100 miles in length and forty-five miles at its widest point…. We entered Leyte Gulf during the night of October 19 and … landed on the eastern side of the island just north of the little town of Dulag.
We landed almost unopposed and secured a beachhead…. Our landing had been so easy I thought perhaps we were being lured into some kind of trap….
For the next three days we moved south and then I started to earn my money. First of all, the rains came. It rained between thirty and forty inches the first month we were there. Later on the rains increased. It rained over sixteen inches in one day. With the water came lots of mud. It was a special kind of mud. On the surface it was very slick, but once you sank in, it seemed to have an unusual adhesive quality. This mud also did not smell good, probably because it contained a large amount of rotting organic matter.
The worst part came at night. That’s when you had to dig a hole to sleep in. Even though you quickly covered the hole with a poncho the water seeped in. And with the water came the leeches. It wasn’t unusual to find a dozen of these little bloodsuckers on you in the morning….
D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC Page 22
