Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45. Max Hastings
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to the great battleship Yamato. Some 360 of Atago’s crew drowned, including almost all the admiral’s communications staff. If Kurita’s conduct thereafter was clumsy, no fifty-five-year-old could have found it easy to exercise command after suffering such a personal trauma. Darter’s sister boat Dace launched four torpedoes at the cruiser Maya and heard huge explosions, signalling her end. Belated Japanese destroyer attacks prevented either submarine from firing again. Kurita’s ships increased speed to twenty-four knots to escape the killing ground. The first action of Leyte Gulf had inflicted substantial damage on the Japanese before they fired a shot. Some officers of ‘Centre Force’, as Kurita’s squadron was designated, expressed rueful admiration for the American submarines’ achievement: ‘Why can’t our people pull off a stunt like that?’ Why not, indeed? This first American success was made possible by a tactical carelessness amounting to recklessness, which would characterise almost every Japanese action in those days. However gloomy were Kurita and his officers about the operation they had undertaken, it is extraordinary that they spurned elementary precautions. Japanese behaviour suggested a resignation to death much stronger than the will to fight. In this titanic clash, a once-great navy was to conduct itself in a fashion that would have invited ridicule, were not such great issues and so many lives at stake.
It was now plain to the Americans that Kurita’s ships were headed for the San Bernardino Strait, at the north end of Samar island. On reaching its eastern exit, they intended to turn south for the seven-hour run to Leyte Gulf, and MacArthur’s invasion anchorage. The second Japanese squadron under Admiral Shoji Nishimura had also been spotted, steaming towards the same objective from the south, past Mindanao. Halsey dared not lead his own battleships into San Bernardino, which had been heavily mined by the Japanese. Instead, he ordered three fast carrier groups to close the range and launch air strikes. The Japanese, however, moved first. Three groups of fifty aircraft apiece, flying from Luzon, attacked the carriers of Sherman’s Task Group 3. A long, bitter battle ensued. One Hellcat pilot, the famous Cmdr David McCampbell, shot down nine Japanese planes, his wingman six, five other pilots claimed two each. McCampbell had initially been rejected for flight training back in 1933, because of poor eyesight. Yet the aggression indispensable to all successful fighter pilots made him one of the most successful of the navy’s war. ‘It’s competitive all the way through,’ he said wryly. On 24 October 1944, nearly all the prizes were won by the Americans. The Japanese attacking force was almost wiped out.
Just one Judy dive-bomber penetrated the American screen and landed a 550-pound bomb on the light carrier Princeton, crowded with planes preparing for take-off. Fuel caught fire, torpedoes exploded, hundreds
of desperate men crowded the flightdeck. At 1010, half an hour after the initial explosion, all crewmen save damage-control parties abandoned ship. The cruiser Birmingham steamed close alongside to help fight Princeton’s fires, sending thirty-eight volunteers aboard the stricken carrier. A Jeep and a tractor slid from Princeton’s lofty deck onto the destroyer Morrison, which was taking off men while using machine guns to ward off sharks from survivors in the water. Princeton’s agony continued for 21/2 hours, until a new Japanese air raid was signalled. Birmingham temporarily stood off. After Lexington’s Hellcats broke up the attackers, however, the heroic cruiser closed in once more, and tried to take Princeton in tow.
A huge explosion in the carrier’s torpedo stowage put an end to the salvage attempt, and inflicted shocking damage on Birmingham. The ship’s war diary recorded: ‘Dead, dying and wounded, many of them bloody and horrible, covered the decks…Blood ran freely down the waterways.’ The hulk of Princeton was sunk by American torpedoes. Birmingham retired from the fleet, ‘a dockyard case’. Amazingly, thanks to the courage and skill displayed aboard all the ships involved, only 108 men died and 190 were wounded. If this was a bitter morning for Halsey’s TG3, it was also a time for pride.
Third Fleet’s first air strike fell upon Kurita’s ships at 1026, followed by a second wave at 1245, another at 1550. Aboard a nearby American submarine, sailors eavesdropped on the airmen’s radio chatter. One pilot interrupted his controller’s instructions impatiently: ‘Let’s get this over with.’ Then there was a clamour of yells: ‘Yippee! I’ve got a battleship!’ followed by: ‘All right, let the battleship alone. Line up on the cruiser.’ Kurita was now flying his flag in Yamato, in uneasy concourse with Ugaki, who commanded the battleship element from the same ship, and despised his superior. The admiral pleaded in vain with shore command for air support. This was refused, on the absurd grounds that fighters were more profitably engaged in attacking US carriers. Here, once again, was the Japanese obsession with the inherent virtue of offensive action, matched by impatience with the humdrum requirements of defence. Kurita was obliged to watch, almost impotent, as American aircraft struck his ships again and again.
Avenger gunner Sherwin Goodman was quietly contemplating the sky amidst a huge formation of American aircraft when his thoughts were interrupted: ‘It was a beautiful day…My goodness, what have we got here?’ It was the Yamato group, far below them. The torpedo-carriers dropped and circled, to reach firing positions. Goodman rotated his turret forward, and could see only gunflashes from the enemy ships: ‘It looked like a tunnel of fire.’ At a thousand yards, they released their torpedo, the plane lifted, and Goodman cried at his pilot, ‘Break left! Break left!’ Gazing down as they swung away, he exclaimed triumphantly: ‘We hit him!’ Their victim was the light cruiser Noshiro, which sank almost immediately. Two American bombs caused slight damage to Yamato, giving Kurita another bad fright. His chief of staff was wounded by splinters.
Every gun in the Japanese fleet fired on the incoming Americans, yet achieved small success. Since 1942, US ships had made great strides in countering air attack by radio fighter direction, radar-controlled gunnery and radio-guided proximity shell fuses. The Japanese had not begun to match such advances. Their anti-aircraft defences were woefully inadequate. ‘Our captain was a great gunnery enthusiast,’ said Petty Officer Kisao Ebisawa, who served on a warship through many US air attacks. ‘He was always telling us that we could shoot the Americans out of the sky. After innumerable raids in which our guns did not even scratch their wings, he was left looking pretty silly. When air attacks came in, there was nothing much we could do but pray.’
On 24 October, huge ‘beehive’ shells from the battleships’ main armament did more damage to their own gunbarrels than to American planes, but pilots were shaken by the spectacle. ‘It’s nerve-racking,’ said one, ‘because you see the guns on the ships go off. And then you wonder what in hell you are going to do for the next ten or fifteen seconds while the shell gets there.’ Amid the erupting black puffballs in the sky, again and again American torpedo-and bomb-carrying aircraft got through unscathed.
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