Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45. Max Hastings
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collapse. It was inspired by a decision of Japan’s admirals to vent their frustrations in a gesture of stunning futility. In October 1944 they found themselves stripped of air cover, and facing overwhelmingly superior American forces. They wished to concentrate their fleet in the home islands. Instead, however, most big ships were obliged to operate from anchorages where fuel oil was available, off Borneo and Malaya. The Imperial Navy still disposed a force which, a few years past, had awed the world. Of ten battleships in commission at the start of the war, nine remained. It seemed to Japan’s admirals intolerable—worse, dishonourable—that capital units swung idle at their moorings while on shore the army fought desperate battles. The navy thus sought to precipitate an engagement, even though every projection of its outcome promised defeat.
The Americans were unprepared for such an initiative. As so often in north-west Europe, they credited their enemies with excessive rationality. MacArthur’s headquarters thought a Japanese dash through the San Bernardino or Surigao Strait approaches to Leyte Gulf unlikely. The enemy’s ships would lack searoom, and would confront both Halsey’s Third Fleet and Kinkaid’s Seventh. Ever since the summer, however, Japan’s commanders had intended to commit most of their surviving surface units to what they called Shogo—‘Operation Victory’. When Vice-Admiral Ugaki of the battleship squadron was shown a draft, he wrote: ‘Whether the plan is adequate or not needs further study, but at a time when we have been driven into the last ditch we have no other choice…It is essential still to hope for victory…and endeavour to attain it.’ In other words, it was preferable to do anything than to do nothing. Shogo would be a thrust comparable in its desperation with Hitler’s Ardennes offensive three months later.
Even as Japan’s commanders and staffs pored over charts through September and early October, their vital air squadrons were vanishing into the ocean. Day after day off Formosa, Halsey’s planes inflicted devastating losses. ‘Our fighters were but so many eggs thrown at the stone wall of the invincible enemy formations,’ Vice-Admiral Fukudome wrote wretchedly. US radar picket destroyers enabled the Americans to mass aircraft in holding patterns a hundred miles out from Third Fleet whenever Japanese attacks threatened. Fighter direction had become a superbly sophisticated art. So too had massed attacks on Japan’s air bases and floating assets. On 10 October, 1,396 American sorties against Okinawa and the Ryukyus ravaged shipping and destroyed a hundred enemy aircraft for the loss of twenty-one. Between the twelfth and the fourteenth, the Japanese lost more than five hundred aircraft. Their combat casualties were matched by a steep decline in aircraft serviceability—to 50 per cent, even 20 per cent, compared with the Americans’ 80 per cent. Many Japanese ground crew had been lost in the Pacific atoll battles, and no trained replacements were available.
These setbacks were matched by extraordinary Japanese self-deceit about what had taken place. Vice-Admiral Ugaki rejoiced about a destroyer squadron’s ‘tremendous feat’ of sinking three aircraft carriers, a cruiser and four destroyers. In truth, in the action cited the Americans had lost one destroyer. Here was a high command forsaking that indispensable practice, honest analysis. Instead, in drafting the Shogo plan, Japan’s commanders embraced a tissue of illusions. Most of the 116 planes left to the Japanese fleet were winched rather than flown aboard carriers in their Kyushu anchorage on 17 October, because the pilots were deemed too inexperienced to make deck landings. The fleet now relied upon on land-based air cover. Japan’s forty surviving aircraft in the Philippines were reinforced tenfold by 23 October, but remained subject to relentless attrition on the ground and in the air. At sea, the Japanese assembled forces of nine battleships, four carriers, fifteen heavy and light cruisers and twenty-nine destroyers. This seemed impressive, until measured against the US Navy’s strength: nineteen task groups around the Philippines comprised nine fleet, eight light and twenty-nine escort carriers; twelve battleships, twelve heavy and sixteen light cruisers, 178 destroyers, forty destroyer escorts and ten frigates. The US now deployed more destroyers than the Japanese navy owned carrier aircraft. Third Fleet’s two hundred ships occupied an area of ocean nine miles by forty.
The objective of Shogo, complex as most Japanese operational plans, was to enable three squadrons, two sailing from Borneo and one from Kyushu, to rendezvous off Leyte Gulf, where the Combined Fleet would fall upon MacArthur’s amphibious armada and its covering naval force, Seventh Fleet. Though the Japanese believed that their air attacks had already crippled Halsey’s Third Fleet, operating north-east of the Philippines, they sought to decoy his carriers and battleships out of range of Leyte. For this purpose, Japan’s four surviving carriers and skeletal complement of aircraft were to feint southward, making a demonstration the Americans could not fail to notice. The carriers’ inevitable loss was considered worth accepting, to remove Halsey from the path of the main striking force. Shogo was scheduled for the earliest possible date after the expected American landing.
Most senior officers and staffs opposed the plan. They perceived its slender prospects of success, and its likely calamitous losses. They saw that, by waiting until the Americans were ashore, they would have missed the decisive moment in the Philippines. Shogo reflected the Japanese navy’s chronic weakness for dividing its forces. Even the bellicose Ugaki wrote on 21 September that it seemed rash ‘to engage the full might of the enemy with our inferior force…committing ourselves to a decisive battle…There was little chance of achieving victory. Watching a Sumo wrestler taking on five men in succession, it was plain that he could not prevail if he expended too much effort grappling with each opponent in turn.’ Some officers said: ‘We do not mind death, but if the final effort of our great navy is to be an attack on a cluster of empty freighters, surely admirals Togo and Yamamoto would weep in their graves.’ Critics challenged a scheme which demanded daylight engagement. Only darkness, they believed, might offer a chance of success, of exploiting the Imperial Navy’s legendary night-fighting skills. Even the army, itself so often imprudent, thought Shogo reckless.
Vice-Admiral Takeo Kurita, designated as operational commander, made the best case he could for the operation. ‘Would it not be shameful,’ he demanded at his captains’final briefing, ‘for the fleet to remain intact while our nation perishes? There are such things as miracles.’ Yet Kurita himself, though a veteran destroyer and cruiser leader who had seen plenty of action, was notoriously cautious. He had gained his flag by virtue of seniority, not performance. He was to execute a plan entirely devised by Combined Fleet headquarters, which demanded extraordinary boldness. On the eve of sailing, only Kurita’s rhetoric matched the demands of his mission. The fleet, he told his officers, was being granted ‘the chance to bloom as flowers of death’. His audience responded as custom demanded, leaping to their feet to cry ‘Banzai!’, but there was no eagerness in their hearts. Kurita and his captains then embarked upon one of the most reckless and ill-managed operations in naval history.
The series of actions which became known as the Battle of Leyte Gulf was fought over an area the size of Britain or Nevada. Following a Japanese naval code change, American intelligence gained no hint of the enemy’s plan, but both of Kurita’s southern squadrons were detected long ahead of reaching Leyte. Before dawn on 23 October, Halsey received one of the most momentous sighting reports of the war from the submarine Darter, patrolling the Palawan Passage with its sister ship Dace: ‘MANY SHIPS INCLUDING 3 PROBABLE BBS 08-28N 116-30E COURSE 040 SPEED 18 X CHASING.’ This was Kurita’s 1st Striking Force, en route from Brunei Bay. What a spectacle it must have been. No one has bettered Winston Churchill’s imagery of twentieth-century dreadnoughts at sea: ‘gigantic castles of steel’, prows dipping as they advanced in stately procession, ‘like giants bowed in anxious thought’.
Five battleships and ten heavy cruisers steamed in three columns at sixteen knots, without an anti-submarine screen. This was all the more astonishing since the Japanese intercepted the American radio transmission, and thus knew submarines were at hand. At 0632, Darter fired six torpedoes at the cruiser Atago, Kurita’s flagship, from point-blank range—980 yards—then loosed her stern tubes at the cruiser Takao from 1,550 yards. Atago was hit four times, Takao twice. Dace’s skipper, Bladen Claggett, whipped up his periscope to see ‘the sight of a lifetime’: Atago billowing black smoke and orange flame, sinking fast by the bow. Takao, though hit hard in the stern, remained afloat. Claggett heard two huge explosions. ‘I have never heard anything like it,’ wrote the submarine