A World at Arms (165 page)

The escort carriers were small converts from merchant ship designs which were supposed to ferry planes, escort convoys against submarines, and, as in the North African landing of November 1942 and on other occasions like this one, provide temporary air cover for landing operations. Never built, armored or armed for major fleet action, the six escort carriers and six destroyers commanded by Admiral Cliften A. F. Sprague were on October 25 the only protection of the unloading transports and supply ships for 6th Army against Kurita’s four battleships, eight cruisers, and accompanying destroyers.
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Kurita and Sprague each made a decision as their forces collided, and these decisions, it turned out, very largely determined the outcome of the wild encounter battle which ensued. Kurita was and remained fooled by faulty intelligence, hopelessly inaccurate ship identification, the total lack of Japanese air reconnaissance, and complete failure of radio communication with Admiral Ozawa. He believed that he was facing the fleet carriers which in reality were hundreds of miles away chasing Ozawa’s decoy fleet. Kurita never realized that what he was up against was a small group of vulnerable escort carriers supported by a handful of destroyers. Throughout the battle, Kurita acted on this erroneous assumption, never recognized that the decoy concept had worked, and handled his ships as if engaged in battle with a major enemy fleet.

Sprague, who knew all too accurately what he was up against, called for reinforcement but decided that, in these circumstances, attack was the best defense. He hurled his force against the approaching Japanese fleet, ordering the destroyers to charge with torpedo attacks and the escort carriers to launch and relaunch their planes in air attacks with bombs, torpedoes, and anything else they could find to drop on the Japanese warships. In a way this tactic served to reinforce Kurita’s confused assessment: with his ships constantly swerving to avoid torpedoes and dodge bombs, the admiral neither reconsidered his view of the situation nor kept a close rein on his own warships. Ironically, in some
instances the thin armor of the escort carriers helped them: armor piercing shells occasionally went clear through both sides of the ships without exploding.

In the wild melée, which went on for about two hours, three of the Japanese cruisers were severely damaged while Kurita’s flagship, the
Yamato,
turned to avoid torpedoes and thereby kept the admiral from effective control of his ships. One of the American escort carriers, the
Gambier Bay,
was sunk as were several of the destroyers which had charged the larger and more numerous Japanese warships with incredible bravery, but the continuing bombing damaged two more of Kurita’s cruisers which the Japanese had to scuttle. Confused by the bombing and the daring torpedo attacks from American destroyer escorts, Kurita decided to turn away a second time and leave the area to reorganize his forces. He had no idea that the decoy ships of Ozawa were even then being attacked by the carrier planes he imagined himself to be facing.

While Kurita reorganized his scattered naval force, Sprague’s ships were the objective of the first major coordinated kamikaze attack. The escort carrier
St.
Lo
was sunk and two others were damaged, but, as Kurita returned to the charge, he failed to take advantage of the situation. Confused by reports of still another carrier force approaching and by renewed air attacks, Kurita finally turned away from Leyte and retired through San Bernadino Strait. A few planes from Halsey’s returning carriers chased after him but scored no hits. The greatest naval battle in history was over, and the landing force was safe.

The Japanese navy, which had remained a major asset after its earlier losses and defeats, could never recover from the loss of three battleships, four carriers, and six cruisers, losses which, together with substantial damage to other ships, left her with an ill–matched assortment of survivors. Now there was not only the already very difficult problem of training naval aircraft fliers to replace hundreds lost in battle; there were only three carriers left and one ship being converted so that the role of carrier based naval aviation had practically come to an end. Whatever chance Japan’s surface fleet had ever had of slowing down the American advance was gone. It too would turn to suicide missions as a last resort. In the meantime, the defense of the Philippines against the Americans was primarily up to the Japanese army and the kamikaze. As the Americans soon discovered on Leyte, that was quite a significant barrier on the way to Tokyo.

The critical decision in the land fighting for Leyte was made in late October by Field Marshal Terauchi when, against Yamashita’s advice, he ordered massive reinforcement of the Leyte garrison. As Japanese
troops were moved into the island, the original force there grew in size instead of shrinking as had been the case in every prior island campaign. This meant on the one hand that the struggle for the island was much bitterer, harder, and longer than the Americans had ever imagined; on the other hand, it meant that the Japanese had used up a far higher proportion of their forces than they had originally intended and were therefore unable to defend the remaining Philippine islands as effectively as would otherwise have been likely.

The growing strength of the Japanese intersected with increasing problems for the Americans. Not only was Japanese resistance on the island growing rather than waning, the air situation deteriorated badly. The escort carriers had to be refitted after the battering they had taken. As for the buildup of land bases for airplanes, it soon turned out that there had been a terrible intelligence failure. The central Leyte area which 6th Army had begun to clear as it drove inland proved quite unsuitable for airfield construction. The steel mats sank in the swampy ground, and the resulting inadequate air support meant that the steadily reinforced Japanese air attacks by the 2500 planes of the Japanese 4th Air Army often dominated the sky over Leyte. Continued Japanese air raids hampered the progress of airfield construction and operations in general. Naval air support from the fleet carriers proved necessary for the Americans, but even so a slogging match ensued in which the Americans gained ground slowly and at high cost.

During November 1944 the Americans fought the steadily reinforced Japanese army on Leyte in bloody positional warfare resembling the trench fighting on the Western Front in World War I and the early fighting in Normandy. The American units were also reinforced and continued to be supported by both naval air and increasing land-based air. The latter became the target of a spectacular Japanese suicide operation in which planes crash landed on the airstrips around Tacloban and paratroopers landed nearby. This was a major effort to seize the airstrips as Japanese ground forces counter–attacked toward them.
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In bitter fighting from November 27 to December 12, the Americans succeeded in defeating this effort. By that time, an additional major American landing near Ormoc on the west coast of Leyte on December 7 had created a critical situation for the Japanese on the island.

The American Xth Corps had pushed north up the Leyte valley around the central Leyte mountains and threatened the Ormoc valley from the north even as the new American landing drove into it from the south. Ormoc itself was freed on December 10, thus depriving the Japanese of a port they had used to send in reinforcements. On December 21 American spearheads from north and south met in the
middle of Ormoc valley. The remaining Japanese had been divided into several separate groups, which fought on until April 1945 against units of the American 8th Army, which by then had taken over from 6th Army, which was scheduled to land on Luzon.

The fighting had been heavier and longer than the Americans had anticipated. As usual, MacArthur’s announcement at the end of December that the fighting was over was premature by months. United States casualties had been heavy, over 15,000. The Japanese losses had been even higher, including well over 50,000 dead.
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At the time MacArthur was declaring the operation over, Yamashita informed the Japanese commander of the 35th Army on Leyte, General Suzuki Sosaka, that no further reinforcements could be sent; he and his forces were on their own. They had already set back the scheduled attack on Luzon by about a month but had been unable to hold on to key positions on Leyte.
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The seizure of Leyte, or most of it, provided the American armed forces with a position from which Japanese communications with their southern empire, already shredded by American submarines, were effectively blocked. The campaign had led to the greatest naval battle in history and had consumed a large proportion of the land and air forces at Japan’s disposal for holding on to the Philippines.

One major objective of the Leyte operation was not achieved because it turned out to be unattainable. The island was not appropriate for large-scale airfield development as the Southwest Pacific theater planners had hoped. The major bases for the air support needed for the Luzon landing, therefore, had to be built elsewhere. The ideal location for this as well as other purposes in the last stages of the Pacific War proved to be the island of Mindoro, about 250 miles northwest of Leyte and within a short distance of Luzon itself. Originally scheduled for December 5 but postponed because of the Leyte battle, a landing on Mindoro on December 15 quickly led to control of the airfields there, and these were soon expanded. Kamikazes killed hundreds on the escorting naval ships but could not halt the invasion. Even as the airfields were developed, their importance and the essential character of land-based planes for the Luzon invasion were underlined by the impact of a terrible typhoon which struck the 3rd Fleet with massive force on December 18, 1944. Three destroyers capsized and sank; hundreds of planes were destroyed or damaged.
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Neither the typhoon nor a Japanese navy-supported counter-attack to sink the shipping at San Jose, Mindoro’s main port, interfered substantially with the major American project on the island: the construction of airdrome facilities from which targets
on Luzon could be attacked and from which a major landing on that island could be protected and supported.
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The bitter fighting on Leyte had delayed the Americans and forced postponements of the whole Pacific timetable; the Mindoro, Luzon, Iwo Jima and Okinawa landings all had to be set back in time–and the struggle on Leyte itself continued as all those operations were underway. On the other hand, the Japanese decision to risk at Leyte their main fleet and a large proportion of their air force as well as a substantial part of the ground forces available for the defense of the Philippines meant that thereafter they could continue to contest every step on the road to Tokyo, but never again with a coordinated land-air-sea strategy. Even as General Yamashita pondered the losses his command had suffered and prepared to meet an American landing on Luzon with what was left, the American plans for that landing were completed with a new target date on December 30, subsequently postponed to January 9, 1945.
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The new year would not open auspiciously for the Japanese empire.

While the Americans and Japanese fought on, near and over Leyte, the war in Southeast Asia was continuing at an accelerated pace. The Japanese chain of victories in China was impinging on that campaign but not decisively. The deteriorating situation in China gave rise to the final clash between Chiang Kai-shek and Stilwell, as a result of which the latter was recalled. His successor, General Albert Wedemeyer developed, at least for a while, a better relationship with Chiang, but this had little effect on major operations. The beginning of long-range bombing by B-29s from Chinese bases, operation “Matterhorn,” was inefficient in terms of cost effectiveness–every bit of fuel and every bomb had to be flown in over the Hump for small raids from bases ever more distant from their targets. Wedemeyer himself recommended the transfer of the 20th Bombardment Force with its B-29s to the Marianas; and the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, who commanded this unit directly, eventually followed his advice.
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Since the plans of Wedemeyer for a really effective Nationalist Army to drive to the coast also remained just that, plans, the original hopes for basing a major portion of the assault against Japan itself on the Chinese mainland receded permanently from the view of Washington planners and President Roosevelt.
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The major concern about China in Washington shifted almost completely to the political one of attempting to bring the Chinese Nationalists and Communists together in some
form of coalition, a project which proved as elusive as a mainland base for the final offensive against Japan.
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Ironically the military concern in late 1944 and early 1945 was that of maintaining Chiang’s control of Chungking, his capital, and Kunming, the Chinese base of the Hump airlift. The Japanese seemed likely to push their own land offensives to a conquest of these key cities; and to meet this threat Chiang withdrew from Burma the only Chinese army divisions which were trained, equipped and above all willing to fight rather than loot and retreat–the new Chinese divisions which Stilwell had whipped into shape and led into battle. This diversion retarded but did not abort the Allied, primarily British, offensive in Burma, without having much effect on operations in China where the Japanese had earlier themselves decided not to strike for either Chungking or Kunmingo The inability of the Japanese leadership to devise a coherent strategy for their war against China and then stick to it remained characteristic of that theater from 1937 to 1945.

In the spring and summer months of 1944 the Allies had pushed the Japanese out of key positions in northern Burma, especially the air, road, and rail center of Myitkyina, after very heavy and costly fighting. The operations there as well as the subsequent push into central and southern Burma were not helped by endless feuding within the British command structure as well as between the British and Americans, but the key point was that the British army after the Imphal-Kohima campaign was a changed force. Under increasingly aggressive leadership it now believed it could win, instead of being almost certain it would lose, and proceeded to move forward under the leadership of Mountbatten, Slim and, newly arrived from Italy, General Sir Oliver Leese.
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