The Conquering Tide (79 page)

Traditions, dogmas, and cultural norms had long stood in the way of this necessary reform. Apart from the fixed ideas of the battleship adherents, it was simply not the way of the Imperial Navy to place a junior admiral over a senior admiral in the command chain. Before August 1943, when Kurita relieved Vice Admiral Nobutake Kondo in command of the Second Fleet, Ozawa (Etajima class of 1909) could not be placed above Kondo (class of 1907) without causing severe loss to the latter's “face.” It was necessary that Kondo be retired or transferred to other duties before Ozawa took command of the mixed force. Kondo was given command of the China Area Fleet, and he held that position until May 1945.

Throughout the spring of 1944, Ozawa's fleet moved between Singapore and anchorages in the southwestern part of the Sulu Sea (between the Philippines and Borneo). His movements were largely dictated by three considerations, all markers of the Japanese navy's deteriorating fortunes. First,
he needed to keep his flight decks in close proximity to terrestrial airfields, because his inexperienced pilots could not always be trusted to land safely on the carriers. Second, the fuel shortage, which had been exacerbated by the sinking of tankers, forced the fleet to operate near its sources of oil in Borneo and Sumatra. Third, the escalating threat posed by Pacific Fleet submarines kept Ozawa's fleet besieged in shallow and enclosed waters.

In early March, the Japanese carriers anchored off Singapore and their air groups dispersed to the region's various airfields for training exercises. The early results were not encouraging. Many of the new pilots had first climbed into the cockpit of a trainer aircraft less than six months earlier. The powerful new
Suisei
and
Tenzan
bombers were a bit too hot for many of the green pilots to handle, even from terrestrial airfields. They had received little or no gunnery or navigational training, and were obligated to follow a squadron or division leader who knew where he was going. “The training was intense, and almost every day there was an accident,” said maintenance officer Hiroshi Suzuki of the
Zuikaku
. “There were a lot of crashes because the pilots and mechanics were mostly rookies, and they were flying new aircraft. Besides that, the weather in Singapore was usually very bad, and we had a lot of rain.”
⁴⁷

In the second half of March, Carrier Division 1 and two divisions of the Second Fleet moved about a hundred miles south to Lingga Roads, off the coast of Sumatra. This anchorage, near the Palembang oilfields, was spacious enough for the carriers to conduct basic flight operations. Its narrow entrance channels could be policed against submarine infiltration. Here the rookie pilots would practice their carrier landings, but when the planes moved from airfields to flight decks, operational losses rose to fearsome proportions. Minoru Nomura, air officer on the
Zuikaku
, recalled watching as a
Tenzan
dropped a dummy torpedo and roared low over the carrier's bow, just clearing it. As the crew heaved a sigh of relief, “the pilot began to bank for a right turn. At that instant his right wingtip made contact with the water. Plane and crew disintegrated instantly. It was over in a moment.”
⁴⁸
The powerful new torpedo bombers and dive-bombers were unforgiving when flown at low speeds. Many dropped into the sea astern of the carriers as they made the final turn in the landing approach. Planes failed to snag an arresting wire and went careening into the island or over the side. Midair collisions occurred directly overhead. “This is self-destruction air warfare,” a
Junyo
pilot ruefully commented.
⁴⁹

Admiral Shimada issued the revised Plan A (“A-Go”) in Directive No. 373 on May 3. The plan envisioned a fleet battle in one of two “decisive battle” zones—in waters off Palau or the western Caroline Islands. The First Mobile Fleet would be supported by nearby elements of the shore-based First Air Fleet. If the Americans attacked the Marianas, Ozawa would remain in local waters in the hope of “luring” the enemy fleet south. Thus the plan depended on the Americans' accepting the proffered bait. “The decisive battle,” Shimada wrote, “will be fought as close as possible to the forward base of our mobile fleet.”
⁵⁰

The battle
must
be fought in those southern waters because the fuel situation required Ozawa to stay within easy reach of Dutch East Indian oilfields. The relentless attrition of oil tankers, chiefly credited to the American submarines and their now-reliable torpedoes, had chained the fleet to the refineries at Tarakan, Balikpapan, and Palembang. The immediate fueling situation could be alleviated by allowing the ships to take on unrefined Borneo petroleum, which was pure enough to drive the engines, but volatile and dirty. Ship's engineers detested the stuff because it left layers of filthy sediment in the boilers, and it greatly increased the risk of explosions and fires.

Until mid-May 1944, therefore, orders issued by Admiral Toyoda pursuant to A-Go did not admit the possibility of a fleet battle off the Marianas. If the Americans attacked Saipan and its neighbors, land-based naval air forces on the islands must attack and destroy the enemy fleet. These air units could be reinforced from the homeland, by sending planes to stage through the “Jimas” (the Bonin Islands, including Iwo and Chichi). Meanwhile, ground forces on Saipan were being strengthened and reinforced, and the local army commander, Lieutenant General Yoshitsugu Saito, had confidently pledged to repel any amphibious invasion. Still, uneasy questions remained: What if the Fifth Fleet declined to chase the enemy into the southwest? Could Japan risk the loss of territory so near the homeland without committing its fleet to make a stand?

The answer was given on May 11, when the Naval General Staff rescinded its prohibition against pumping crude oil directly into Japanese ships. In the third week of May, most of the First Mobile Fleet anchored at Tawi Tawi in the Sulu Archipelago, between Mindanao and Borneo, and shuttle tankers from Tarakan filled every ship to capacity. But Tawi Tawi was no good for flight training because there were no suitable airfields in the area. Ozawa, appalled by the deadly losses incurred during carrier flight
operations, had decided not to continue such training exercises: “I cannot bear to lose the lives of any more of my men in these accidents.”
⁵¹
Though urgently in need of more preparation, the air groups were largely idled in the last month before the Japanese fleet was compelled to give battle. According to Lieutenant Commander Zenji Abe, air group leader on the
Junyo
, the prevailing breeze was not strong enough to get the
Suisei
carrier bombers aloft even at the ship's maximum speed. “So we couldn't take off,” said Abe, “and had no training after we left Japan from early May until 19 June, when the big American task force came over to the Marianas to attack Guam and Saipan. . . . So for forty or fifty days, we had no training flights at all.”
⁵²

Admiral Matome Ugaki, the erstwhile Combined Fleet chief of staff, who had functioned as Yamamoto's right hand and had survived the aerial ambush that killed the former commander in chief in April 1943, had recovered from his wounds and was back in the fleet. He had been appointed commander of the First Battleship Division of the Second Fleet, a command that included both the
Yamato
and the
Musashi
. He was glad to be back at sea but was discouraged by the state of training, both in his own battleships and throughout the fleet. In the privacy of his diary, Ugaki wavered between despondency and mystic appeals to
bushido
, the warrior spirit. He regarded the strategic plans to be basically sound, but doubted that the First Mobile Fleet possessed the means to execute them. Meeting the enemy at sea seemed a daunting prospect because “the only possible consequence is to become easy prey to enemy planes and submarines. The further we venture out, the more we shall be beaten. It's like one can't help getting soaked if one goes out in the rain without a coat or umbrella.”
⁵³
But the fleet could not afford to procrastinate, he observed a few days later, because the Americans were gaining strength all the time.
⁵⁴
On April 27, he went aboard Ozawa's flagship, the
Taiho
, to participate in tabletop war-gaming exercises. In Ugaki's judgment, the game supervisors allowed assumptions that were unrealistically favorable to the Japanese side. He judged that the navy's fixation on a decisive battle amounted to an irrational obsession, and wondered why “they don't give enough consideration to attacking enemy elements easy to destroy.”
⁵⁵

Ugaki's entries in April and May 1944 are filled with conflicting judgments and sentiments. The tone leaves no doubt that he knows his country is defeated, but he will not say so outright, even in his diary. On April 24: “The enemy's present strength is just like a raging fire, so irresistible that a small amount of water can hardly put it out.”
⁵⁶
His pessimistic insights ring
true, while his efforts to arouse his own spirits are feeble and half-hearted: “However, at the same time the enemy, too, may not be as good as we think. It may turn out all right, if and when we fight with them.”
⁵⁷

If the decisive battle was to be fought off the Marianas, a scenario made feasible by the Tarakan crude, Ozawa would launch his strike at very long range, 300 miles or more to the westward of the enemy. The Japanese planes would attack the American fleet and then land on airfields in Guam. There they would replenish fuel and ammunition and continue flying sorties until the enemy fleet was annihilated. This use of “shuttle-bombing” from shore bases was at the heart of A-Go. Successive aerial hammer blows would fall on the American fleet from Ozawa's carriers and the Marianas airfields. Ozawa would then unleash all his forces, including the battleships and other surface warships, to pursue the cripples and wipe them out. Shimada's directive put across Tokyo's absolute conviction in the plan: “Complete success is anticipated.”
⁵⁸

Keeping the First Mobile Fleet out of the enemy's reach appealed to the logic of “outranging,” a guiding tactical principle in Japanese planning and weapons systems. Outranging was a theme found in the design of the Imperial Navy's many long-ranged aircraft, including the Zero and the G3M and G4M medium bombers. For all the problems and challenges of the Japanese aircraft industry in wartime, the new-generation carrier dive-bombers and torpedo bombers had significantly greater range than their American counterparts. (The
Suisei
flew so far that it was often configured as a reconnaissance plane, and had been employed on ultra-long-range missions since 1942.) Outranging had been employed to good effect in surface naval actions by the Type 93 (Long Lance) torpedo. The superbattleships, with their 18.1-inch guns, were designed to strike an enemy from beyond his effective range. Outranging and shuttle-bombing offered some theoretical promise of rectifying the disparity in force between the two opposing fleets. The Japanese were well aware that they were outnumbered. A May 9 intelligence estimate distributed by the Naval General Staff predicted that the U.S. fleet would sail with sixteen battleships, including eight of the fast new types. As for carriers, the estimate was eight large fleet types, ten light carriers, and approximately twenty jeep carriers.
⁵⁹
Those figures were close enough to the mark.

The shuttle-bombing tactic embodied in A-Go was sound in theory, but it was an expediency chosen to spare the pilots the ordeal of landing on the carrier flight decks. It was a tactical concept selected, in part, to mitigate
the deficiencies in the carrier pilots' skills, and therefore pointed to the larger problem that would inevitably decide the outcome of the impending battle. The Japanese aviators were simply not ready to meet their adversaries on anything approaching equal terms.

The officers and pilots told one another that A-Go was a good plan that would deliver a badly needed victory for Japan. By some reports, the Japanese officers and crews were confident in the week before sailing for battle. High hopes were invested in the land-based First Air Fleet, also called the Base Air Force, commanded by Vice Admiral Kakuji Kakuta and headquartered on Tinian. Shore-based naval air had always been closely integrated into the Imperial Navy's fleet command structure. Naval leaders had retained a lingering belief, despite plenty of contrary evidence, that their land-based bombers could deal devastating blows to enemy fleets at sea.

On paper, the First Air Fleet had a huge complement of about 1,750 planes, but that figure overstated Kakuta's actual strength in the Marianas by more than threefold. His command suffered from poor ground support facilities, a shortage of qualified mechanics and aircrews, and scarcities of spare parts, ammunition, and fuel. The submarine threat in waters between the home islands and the Marianas had rendered it impractical to crate the planes and send them by sea. Most were flown in from Japan by unseasoned and undertrained pilots through airfields in the Bonin and Volcano archipelagoes. Operational accidents, including crashes and navigation failures, accounted for crippling losses of both aircraft and aviators. On the eve of the American attacks, Kakuta was thought to have about 435 aircraft in flyable condition.

Quite apart from the amphibious campaign and the ubiquitous depredations of the fast carriers, American submarines were cutting the internal tendons of the Japanese war effort. The undersea campaign had grown steadily more potent since mid-1943. On June 7, the Naval General Staff announced that 210,000 tons of shipping had been lost in May. Since the beginning of April, the Japanese had lost five destroyers, six tankers, four troopships, and fourteen freighters. The Japanese fleet was constantly stalked, reconnoitered, harassed, and hunted by submarines operating from Pearl Harbor and Australia. Each of Japan's superbattleships had caught a torpedo fired from an American submarine. The
Yamato
had taken a hit from the
Skate
on Christmas Day, 1943; the
Musashi
was torpedoed by the
Tunny
while departing Palau on March 29. Though the huge ships could easily withstand single torpedo hits, the damage had to be repaired in Japanese home
waters, requiring long voyages and absences that consumed scarce fuel and deranged the formations and plans of the Japanese commanders.