Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45. Max Hastings

AG16 paid warm tribute to the submariners: ‘If they had wheels I think they would climb right up over the beach and pick us up. We have nothing but praise for them.’ On 10 October 1944, for instance, twenty-one aircraft were shot down attacking the Ryukyu islands. Yet only eleven pilots and crewmen were lost, the remainder being rescued, six of them off Okinawa by a single submarine, Sterlet. When Lt Robert Nelson crashed in Kagoshima Bay off Kyushu, his dinghy began to drift inshore. A tiny cruiser-based Kingfisher seaplane landed alongside him, and Nelson clung to its float while it taxied several miles across the water to rendezvous with a submarine—adding a torpedo-bomber crew to its burden on the way.

      During an air battle off Iwo Jima, Japanese Zero pilot Kunio Iwashita was astonished when the surface of the sea was suddenly broken by a long black shape, as an American submarine surfaced to pick up a ditched pilot. An American flying boat, apparently bent on the same mission, was shot down by Japanese fighters. Iwashita said: ‘We were amazed to see the Americans taking so much trouble about their people. Nobody provided that sort of service for us.’ An extreme example of ‘force protection’ was displayed on 16 September 1944, when Ensign Harold Thompson ditched three hundred yards off Waisile, while strafing Japanese barges in his Hellcat. A Catalina dropped a liferaft which Thompson boarded, only to find himself drifting relentlessly towards a pier. Two other Hellcats were shot down trying to protect him by strafing the shoreline—one pilot was killed, the second rescued by ‘dumbo’. Thompson moored his raft to a chain of Japanese barges, and two American PT-boats raced in to rescue him. Their first attempt was frustrated by coastal gunfire, but after Avengers dropped smoke floats to mask their approach, a boat snatched Thompson just as the Japanese closed in on him. More than fifty aircraft were involved in the rescue, ‘which sure was a wonderful show to watch’, said Thompson, back on his carrier Santee.

      Destroyers traditionally extracted ‘ransom’ for every flier they sent back. ‘Rescued pilots were prized possessions,’ wrote a destroyer officer. ‘Before returning them, we would strip them of all their fancy clothes—silk scarf maps, survival kits with great knives, compasses and magnifying glasses, and their pistol. Then we would ask the carrier to send over all the geedunk—ice cream—they had, plus a minimum of two movies our crew hadn’t seen.’

      At sea in the Pacific, by the fall of 1944 the might of the US Navy was unchallengeable. That is to say, no rational adversary would have precipitated a headlong confrontation with such forces as Nimitz now deployed. The summer clashes, the ‘great Marianas Turkey Shoot’, had fatally crippled Japanese air power. Only the Japanese navy, in the mood of fatalism and desperation which afflicted its upper ranks, could still have sought a ‘decisive encounter’ against such odds. The struggle for the Philippines was to provide the setting not only for America’s major land campaign of the Pacific war, but also for the largest sea battle the world would ever know.

       5 America’s Return to the Philippines

      1 PELELIU

      MacArthur left Hawaii on 27 July 1944 confident that he had secured endorsement of his commitment to retake the Philippines. Nonetheless, when the American and British chiefs of staff met at Quebec on 11 September to open the Octagon strategic conference, plans were still on the table not only for landings in November on Mindanao, thereafter on Leyte and Luzon, but alternatively for seizing Formosa and the port of Amoy on the Chinese mainland. In the days that followed, however, the assembled US leaders—for the British were not consulted about this exclusively American issue—found themselves confronted by new circumstances. During planning for Third Fleet’s autumn operations, Halsey and his staff had agreed that in future, instead of merely addressing predetermined objectives, they would search for opportunities. In pursuit of this policy the fast carriers were now roaming the western Pacific, launching massive assaults on Japan’s surviving air forces. Off the southern Philippines on 12 September, 2,400 American sorties accounted for some two hundred Japanese aircraft in the sky and on the ground.

      At noon on the thirteenth the admiral signalled a report to Nimitz, who speedily forwarded it to Quebec, that Japanese resistance was feeble. Halsey, unaware that the enemy was deliberately husbanding resources for a ‘decisive battle’ on the Philippines, urged fast-forwarding the strategic programme. He proposed cancelling all preliminary island landings, and staging a speedy assault on Leyte. This was Halsey’s most influential intervention of the war. Such a change of plans was complex, but perfectly feasible in a theatre where every man and ton of supplies earmarked for shipment to one objective could be redirected to beaches elsewhere, by a nation which now possessed mastery of the ocean and the sky above.

       MacArthur was at sea and observing wireless silence, but his staff immediately accepted Halsey’s proposal as a means of foreclosing the Formosa-Philippines debate. The general, once back in communication, hastened to add his endorsement. He said nothing of his intelligence staff’s well-justified belief that the Japanese defenders of Leyte were stronger than Halsey recognised. Much more serious, he made no mention of his engineers’ opinion that it would be hard to build good airfields on the island, and almost impossible in the imminent monsoon months. Over the thirty months since he himself had escaped from Bataan, MacArthur’s personal interrogations of every American who escaped from the Philippines ‘revealed the concern of a man whose yearning to get back to his beloved “second homeland” had become virtually an obsession’, in the words of a biographer. The general had no intention of advertising any impediment to its fulfilment.

      In Quebec, after hasty consultation the American chiefs of staff set a target date of 20 October for a landing on Leyte. Admiral King’s persistent arguments against following this with a move to Luzon, the main Philippine island, were overruled. The navy withdrew its support for attacking Formosa when it became plain that a landing there was logistically impossible before March 1945, and would require much larger ground forces than were available. The Philippines, by contrast, were immediately accessible. Planning for Leyte began at MacArthur’s new headquarters on the banks of Lake Sentani, in the Cyclops Mountains above Hollandia, New Guinea. Once the decision was made to retake the Philippines, there was neither logic in nor resources for an early assault on Formosa. Since the seizure of Formosa was essential to any landing on the China coast that too was now ruled out. As the US Navy’s great historian Samuel Eliot Morison wrote, ‘The two rival roads were…converging on Leyte.’ All intervening operations were cancelled, save two. First, on 15 September almost 20,000 men landed on the island of Morotai, south-east of the Philippines, and secured its airfield against negligible opposition. By late October, Morotai was crowded with US aircraft waiting to rebase on Leyte. Second, Nimitz and MacArthur shared a conviction that it was important to seize the tiny Palau Islands, of which Peleliu was the key, and to secure their airfields, before assaulting Leyte.

      The Palau invasion convoys were already several days at sea, carrying Maj.-Gen. William Rupertus’s 1st Marine Division 2,100 miles from Guadalcanal. The lumbering landing ships averaged a speed of only 7.7 knots, even slower than the 12.1 knots of the transports. Brig.-Gen. O.P. Smith, assistant commander of the division, passed the voyage reading a couple of novels from his ship’s library: A Yankee From Mount Olympus and The Late George Apley. Tranquillity aboard was marred by the skipper’s insistence on issuing orders and admonishments by loudhailer from the bridge. Smith failed to make friends with the ship’s dog, ‘an aloof cocker spaniel who refused to notice anyone except the captain’. Approaching the Palaus, even veterans of Pacific landings were awed by the size of the force assembled—some 868 ships, 129 in the assault element. Submarine chasers guided the fleet, destroyers guarded it, sweepers cleared mines in its path. Behind these came a great flock of command, survey, repair and hospital ships, anti-submarine net-layers, oilers, salvage vessels, tugs, floating dry docks, a dredger, PT-boats, a floating derrick, LSTs, DUKWs, LSDs, cargo ships and 770 small landing craft for 1st Marine Division, together with as many again for the army’s 81st Division, joining the Marines from Pearl Harbor. Such was the scale on which the United States launched even a modest Pacific amphibious landing in the autumn of 1944.

      On the morning of 15 September, amid a calm sea, a glittering array