Codebreakers Victory (46 page)

Spruance subsequently drew some criticism for not being more aggressive in seeking out the Japanese fleet and sinking more of Ozawa's capital ships. He preferred to protect the invaders of Saipan and let Ozawa come to him.

The island of Tinian fell within a week. Guam was another matter. Even though the navy tried to do a better job than on Saipan, bombarding the island mercilessly for thirteen days before the troops went ashore, the battle was long and lethal. Partly this was due to geography. The largest of the islands, Guam has a mountainous core into which the defenders had burrowed with molelike energy. Also partly responsible was one of the two Japanese generals in command. Takashima Takeshi had seen the folly of suicidal charges, and he instructed his men to conduct cool, calculated forays. One of these efforts infiltrated the combat line and finally had to be stopped by an impromptu assembly of truck drivers, Seabee construction crews, headquarters troops and wounded men firing from their hospital beds. U.S. casualties in the Marianas campaign ran into the thousands, and those for the Japanese into the multithousands. The U.S. Navy added to the mayhem by sinking three more Japanese aircraft carriers and destroying seventeen submarines—losses that were confirmed by decrypts.

The mass of documents captured on the islands soon enabled Allied commanders to know almost as much about the enemy's fleet organization and order of battle as their own admirals did.

While the fighting was still going on, work was started on airfields from which the Superforts could fly. They made their first raid against Japan on November 24.

Japan's defeat in the Marianas and the initial U.S. attacks on the homeland had another important consequence. Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, architect of the empire's war effort, resigned and was replaced by the more moderate Kuniaki Koiso. It was the beginning of a rift in war attitudes that would divide Japan's leaders until the end of hostilities.

With Nimitz closing in from the east and MacArthur driving up from the south and west, the Philippines were now gripped in a giant pincers. At this point in the war the Americans under Nimitz had evolved a resourceful approach to command. For a couple of months, as in the Marianas, Admiral Spruance would head the huge Task Force 58. During this period Admiral Halsey would be preparing for the next phase, when the Allied fleet would become Task Force 38. Invasion of the island of Leyte, in the Philippines, came on Halsey's watch.

The original plan was for him to first take the islands of Peleliu and An-gaur, in the Palaus, while MacArthur invaded the Philippines' southernmost island of Mindanao. When Halsey's carrier-based planes struck at the midarchipelago island of Leyte, however, they found the defenses there surprisingly weak. He advocated leapfrogging the Palaus and Mindanao and landing directly on Leyte. The change, he argued, would advance the timetable by at least two months.

The new plan was approved—except for one detail. Nimitz was concerned about having the untamed Palaus on his flank. Over Halsey's objections he held out for subduing Peleliu and Angaur. For once Halsey was right and Nimitz was wrong. In hindsight it can be seen that the Palaus could have been left to wither as Rabaul and Truk were now withering. The cost of nearly two thousand Americans killed and more than eight thousand wounded for these conquests was too high a price to pay for the islands' limited strategic value.

Eugene B. Sledge in his memoir,
With the Old Breed,
has left an indelible impression of what it was like to be a raw young marine fighting for thirty days on Peleliu's chunk of coral rock so hard the soldiers couldn't protect themselves by digging holes. To have come through without being killed or wounded made him feel he "hadn't been just lucky but was a survivor of a major tragedy."

When the Palaus were overcome, even Nimitz was ready to reclaim the Philippines.

 

 

A Close Call on Leyte

 

By October 1944, Douglas MacArthur had taken Morotai, the northernmost island of the Molucca chain, only three hundred miles from the Philippines, without losing a man. His bypass strategy had left two hundred thousand Japanese uselessly guarding islands not chosen for assault. It was time for The General to redeem his pledge.

He had first to win out over Admiral King, who argued that the next step in the Pacific war should be against not the Philippines but the island of Taiwan. MacArthur presented his case in masterly fashion before FDR, the Joint Chiefs and operational commanders and won their authorization to capture Leyte as the opening wedge in his Philippines campaign.

Here the Japanese desperation to make a stand was redoubled. To surrender the Philippines would completely block access to their pockets of troops farther south. Defeat there would also be a stunning blow to civilian morale in the homeland. Most important, losing the Philippines would sever the Japanese pipeline to Indonesian oil and immobilize their war machine. To prevent the Americans from taking over, the military leaders were ready to commit much of their remaining ships, their aircraft and their veteran troops.

On the Allied side there was a great deal more to the plan than to stroke the ego of a vainglorious general. The Philippines were seen as an essential stepping-stone to the conquest of Japan itself. Air and naval bases there would supplement those under Nimitz's control. In the war of attrition the land and naval battles would give the vastly superior Allied forces the opportunity to eliminate more Japanese ships, planes and soldiers that would otherwise be available to defend the home islands.

Aboard his flagship, the cruiser
Nashville,
MacArthur headed a seven-hundred-ship, hundred-mile-long flotilla bearing two hundred thousand troops ready to carry out his carefully devised battle plan. At daybreak on October 20, the U.S. warships began their bombardment of the Leyte beaches. Heedless of the Japanese planes buzzing overhead, The General stood on the bridge observing the Higgins boats ferrying the assault troops to the landing site. In his memoir MacArthur says he went in with the third wave, but in truth the invasion was four hours old before he, his staff, the soon-to-be-restored Filipino leaders and the necessary gaggle of war correspondents and photographers descended into a barge and made for the shore. MacArthur was dressed immaculately, expecting a dry landing. Instead, a harried beachmaster was too busy directing vitally needed traffic to honor Mac's small boat's request for pier space. "Let 'em walk," he said, not knowing who " 'em" was. Trying to reach the beach, the overloaded barge grounded fifty yards from shore. Waiting only for the cameramen to precede him, MacArthur leaped into the knee-deep surf and waded in, setting up one of the war's most renowned photographs.

On the beach, with combat guns blazing in the background, he spoke into microphones and recording devices, delivering the speech he had been preparing for years: "People of the Philippines, I have returned," he said. "Rally to me."

Meanwhile the intelligence blindness of the Japanese was leading them to two calamitous blunders. The first involved Japan's diminishing supply of aircraft. Not knowing when the invasion would come, the admiral directing the defense of the Philippines ordered hundreds of land-based and naval aircraft to the islands prematurely. The planes of Halsey's fleet enjoyed another turkey shoot, destroying some five hundred aircraft before the battle for Leyte began.

Second was a grave mistake at sea. The miscalculation was triggered when Japanese land-based planes broke through the protective screens of Halsey's Third Fleet and hurled torpedoes at the U.S. ships. The returning Japanese pilots exultantly claimed great successes: the sinking of two battleships and no less than eleven carriers, with other ships severely damaged. The triumph was trumpeted on Tokyo radio, which inflated the number of carrier sinkings to nineteen. Unlike the Americans, whose Hawaii-based Estimate Section used decrypts to reduce overoptimistic reports to hard facts, the Japanese had no way to verify the actual results of the raid. Consequently, Japanese navy chiefs were convinced that the American fleet had been seriously weakened and could be defeated by an all-out attack. Assessing the Philippine seas as perhaps their last chance to win the Decisive Battle, they committed still more of their warships.

In actuality, the Japanese fliers had grossly overestimated their results. Halsey's fleet had suffered damage only to two cruisers, hardly a dent in so huge a force.

The American plan was for Halsey's Third Fleet to coordinate with Admiral Thomas Kinkaid's Seventh Fleet to protect the Leyte landings and perhaps to engage in a showdown if the Japanese contested them at sea. Decrypted messages assured the U.S. admirals that a showdown was exactly what their opponents had in mind.

Although the Japanese were, as ever, surprised by the Allies' choice of an island to invade, they responded quickly in two ways. One was to shift reinforcements from other islands to Leyte. The other, deriving from their belief in a severely damaged Allied naval task force, was to mount a complex series of offensive sea maneuvers meant to hammer the remaining U.S. ships from all sides.

Two straits in the Philippines gave ready access to Leyte Gulf: San Bernardino in the north and Surigao to the south. The Japanese plan was to have four different fleets converge on Leyte. Two would link up as the Southern Force and attack through Surigao. The main formation, the Center Force, under Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita, was to descend on Leyte through San Bernardino. The fourth unit, the Northern Force, made up largely of the aircraft carriers and the handful of planes Admiral Ozawa had been able to salvage from the Marianas defeat, was to sail down from Japan and offer itself as a sacrifice to lure Allied ships away from Leyte.

Except for Ozawa's decoy operation, the plan was poorly carried out. Half the Southern Force never did meet with the other half, which alone tried to run through the Surigao Strait. It was ambushed there by Kinkaid's lurking ships and was all but wiped out. Informed by decrypts, U.S. subs shadowed the approach of Kurita's Center Force and sank two of his heavy cruisers, including his flagship, and damaged a third. The next day Halsey's carrier-based planes sank the superbattleship
Musashi
and damaged other vessels. Kurita turned back to regroup his battered fleet.

Then Halsey made a mistake—one that brought the Leyte landings to the brink of disaster. Thinking that Kurita had been defeated and was withdrawing, and not wanting to chance the kind of criticism directed at Spruance, the impetuous admiral resolved to attack Ozawa's carriers. In doing so, he overlooked an earlier captured document outlining Ozawa's plan to use his ships as a diversionary force to draw the American carriers away from their coverage of the landings. He also ignored the warnings of his own radio intelligence unit that he was proceeding into a trap. Saddest of all, he failed to heed instructions from Nimitz that, in effect, no matter what else he did, a part of his fleet, Task Force 34, must guard San Bernardino Strait against a possible Japanese assault on the Leyte landings. In his obsession with the carriers, Halsey swept all the main ships of Task Force 34 along with him. The consequence was that the only warships left to guard the San Bernardino Strait were a handful of small, light, slow escort carriers, a few destroyers and some PT boats from Kinkaid's Seventh Fleet.

While Halsey chased Ozawa's dangled bait, Kurita reorganized his formation, turned about, entered San Bernardino and made for Leyte. All that stood in the way of his wreaking havoc was that thin screen of hopelessly overmatched American "jeep" carriers and their escorts.

They proved to be a game lot. For two and a half hours, while their radio crews filled the airwaves with appeals for aid, these lesser craft managed a kind of naval fan dance, using smoke instead of Sally Rand's plumes to fool the eyes of Kurita's gunners.

The Japanese, never good at ship identification, persisted in thinking that the gray ships darting in and out of their smoke screens were not destroyers and light carriers but cruisers and big fleet carriers. The U.S. ships survived longer than they should have because they were so thinly armored that many of the Japanese shells passed through them without detonating. Still, the plucky Americans lost two of their carriers, three destroyers and more than one hundred planes. In exchange, however, they sank three of Kurita's cruisers and damaged other ships in his fleet.

On the morning of October 25, just at the point when Kurita's gunners had pounded the U.S. minifleet into near helplessness and when Halsey's fleet and Kinkaid's main warships were still too far away to be of help, just when the Japanese might have won if not the Decisive Battle then at least a devastating victory, Kurita checked his advance: he ordered his ships to withdraw. Why? One explanation is that he lost his nerve, but the more probable answer is cryptologic. He had no reliable intelligence to call on, so he didn't realize his true advantage. He had to guess. His guess, conditioned by the earlier ravaging of his ships, was that every minute he waited, he courted increasing danger. He ordered a retreat, and the last serious Imperial Navy threat of World War II retreated with him.

As Churchill wrote, Kurita "had been under constant attack for three days, he had suffered heavy losses, and his flagship had been sunk soon after starting out from Borneo. Those who have endured a similar ordeal may judge him."

The Battle of Leyte Gulf produced a celebrated bit of cryptologic mischief. While the light American ships were making their gallant stand against Kurita, Nimitz fired off a message to Halsey: "Where is Task Force 34?" The U.S. cryptographic system specified, as a security measure, that to the beginning and ending of a message meaningless padding must be added and set off from the real contents by double letters. Nimitz's message, as transmitted, read, "Turkey trots to water—FF—Where is, repeat, where is, Task Force 34—JJ—the world wonders." Responding too quickly, the decoders on Halsey's flagship tore off the front part of the padding but failed to remove the end part, so that the message Halsey received read, "Where is, repeat where is, Task Force 34 the world wonders."