Was he “either a coward or a great seaman,” victim of a ruse concocted by Admiral William F. Halsey’s “Department of Dirty Tricks,” or the fall guy for a war strategy doomed from the start? Or did he simply want to save the lives of his sailors? One of Newsweek’s top journalists reports from Japan on what possessed Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita to turn away from the fighting at Leyte Gulf on the morning of 25 October 1944—60 years ago.
During the course of a three-hour interview at his small house in the southern Japanese city of Hakata, Hiroshi Yasunaga, an 83-year-old veteran of the Imperial Japanese Navy, spoke English only once. I asked him what he thought of Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita, his fleet commander in the Battle of Leyte Gulf. “I hate him!” exclaimed Yasunaga. “He was a coward!”
Now 60 years after the battle, the mere mention of Kurita’s name evokes strong reactions in Japan. Kurita was commander of the main Japanese battle fleet in October 1944. His fleet, with its two superbattleships, the Yamato and Musashi, represented Japan’s last chance to turn the tide of the war. Kurita’s orders were to attack U.S. landing ships as they unloaded at the island of Leyte during the invasion of the Philippines. He had a chance to break through when Admiral William F. “Bull” Halsey, commander of the U.S. Third Fleet with its carrier task force, fell for a Japanese fake and left the way open for Kurita’s fleet. With clear sailing into Leyte Gulf on 25 October 1944, however, Kurita turned around suddenly and steamed away. His motives have remained a source of controversy and debate ever since. In Japan, they still argue about the “mysterious retreat.”
On pages 185-86 in the final volume of his World War II trilogy, The Second World War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948–53), Winston Churchill wrote of Kurita, “It may well be that [his] mind had become confused by the pressure of events. . . . Those who have endured a similar ordeal may judge him.” A lack of experience with such an ordeal has not, however, stopped the Japanese from trying to understand Kurita’s decision. Despite deeply ingrained cultural reticence to speak ill of the dead, many veterans harshly criticize Kurita—and just as many defend him. “He is either a coward or a great seaman,” said Haruo Tohmatsu, professor of international relations at Tamagawa University and a well-known naval scholar.
I went to Japan in June 2004 to interview experts, scholars, and surviving seamen and officers of the Imperial Japanese Navy for a book I am writing about the Battle of Leyte Gulf. I am trying to unravel a number of mysteries that remain from the battle, but my overall focus is on an age-old question: When do men decide to die for their country? And when do their leaders decide to send them to their deaths? My book will revolve around four men, two Americans and two Japanese, whose lives and fates intersected exactly six decades ago: Admiral Halsey, Commander Ernest Evans (a destroyer captain who died heroically in the battle), Admiral Kurita, and Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki (Kurita’s battleship commander and later chief of all Japanese kamikaze pilots).
In two weeks of interviews in Japan, I was soon caught up in a fascinating, swirling debate. It involved conspiracy theories and a lost telegram, and my task was made more complicated by the distinction between what the Japanese refer to as honne (true talk, or honest thoughts) and tatemae (public talk, not necessarily what you think). But the conversation always came back to the most fundamental questions of duty and honor. In the end, I became convinced that, although Kurita had disregarded an order from his commander-in-chief by refusing to in effect commit mass suicide, he had done the right thing.
The Japanese “Sho” (“Victory”) plan to wreck the U.S. invasion of the Philippines did have a kind of brilliance. With its air fleets largely destroyed, its green pilots no longer any match for well-trained U.S. aviators, the Japanese decided to use their remaining six carriers—most with empty flight decks—to lure away Halsey, who was obsessed with sinking Japanese flattops. Diverting Halsey would open the way for a separate force of Japan’s battleships, cruisers, and destroyers to slip through the straits on either side of Leyte Gulf, where the Americans were landing, and attack the invasion force at its anchorage.
The plan had at least two flaws, however. First, the lack of air cover left Japan’s battleships dangerously exposed as they sailed toward the Philippines. Second, had the battleships reached the landing beach at Leyte, the transports by then would have largely unloaded and the troops gone ashore. The Japanese could have shot up some landing ships and maybe sunk an old battleship or two, but the U.S. war effort would not have slowed for long. And the Japanese battle fleet risked being trapped and destroyed in the narrow confines of Leyte Gulf. For all its intricacy and clever deceit, the Sho plan was a desperate, last-ditch effort by a once-proud but doomed navy.
Nonetheless, the Japanese put great faith in their “fighting spirit.” The night before Kurita’s fleet sortied from Lingaa Roads near Japanese-controlled Singapore, a hawk was spotted on the mast of the powerful battleship Yamato. Ugaki, the commander of the battleships under Kurita, was thrilled. He had a strong mystical sense of Japanese destiny and sent a signal flashing around the fleet—the Gods have sent an omen! Not everyone believed it. “We laughed,” said Ensign Yasunaga, a floatplane pilot assigned to the cruiser Chikuma. “We asked, ‘What are they thinking?’” Kosaka Koitabashi, 85, a quartermaster on board the Atago, Kurita’s flagship, said he and his mates also chuckled about the superstition. Still, Ugaki was not alone in his belief in Japanese martial superiority. Even late in the war, many sailors, including Koitabashi, still believed in Japan’s mighty battleships. “We were optimistic we could win the decisive battle,” he said.
Kurita was a taciturn figure, a sea dog who avoided navy politics on shore. He was, by and large, admired by his men, but he had a reputation among senior officers for not being very aggressive in battle. At the Battles of Midway and the Philippine Sea, he had seemed to hesitate, not pressing forward. Indeed, some Japanese naval historians wonder why he was given the honor of leading the Japanese fleet into the last sea battle—unless, suggested Tohmatsu, he was being set up. The Japanese have a tradition of accepting responsibility, sometimes in draconian ways, such as suicide. At the same time, the Japanese at times contrive to pass off failure. The top brass at navy headquarters in Tokyo may have realized the plan was likely to fail and wanted someone to blame. Kurita was known as the uncomplaining type. “I think he may have been a fall guy,” said Tohmatsu.
Some sailors and men in Kurita’s fleet in October 1944 were whispering about their commander, wanting to know why the admiral’s flag was on board the Atago, a mere heavy cruiser, rather than flying from the giant Yamato. “Was it because the Yamato was a more easily recognized target for American planes?” asked Yasunaga, still suspicious 60 years later. (The explanation given by Kurita’s chief of staff, Vice Admiral Tomiji Koyanagi, was that the Atago was supposed to lead the torpedo charge in a night action, though as it turned out, the battle was fought in broad daylight.)
The sailors who suspected Kurita of hiding on the Atago got a bitterly ironic laugh at dawn on the morning of 23 October. At 0532, as Kurita’s battle fleet steamed through the Palawan Passage west of the Philippines, the Atago took four torpedoes from the submarine USS Darter (SS-227). The flagship rolled over and sank in 18 minutes, Kurita swimming for his life. When he emerged, dripping and shaking from a persistent case of dengue fever, on the bridge of a rescuing destroyer his first question was, “Do you have any whiskey?” Kurita was a legendary hollow-leg drinker who could polish off several bottles of sake and still sit erect. After a couple of nips from the whiskey bottle, he was his old self, according to a junior officer on the bridge at the time.
Kurita needed a dose of fortitude, for his fleet was about to go through hell. The next day, 24 October, wave after wave of U.S. planes from Halsey’s Third Fleet rained down bombs and torpedoes on Kurita’s fleet as it weaved through the Sibuyan Sea. The biggest targets were the battleships Musashi and Yamato, where Kurita had transferred his flag. Koitabashi, who had followed Kurita to the Yamato and was serving as a lookout, recalled his shock at watching the U.S. pilots bore in through the torrent of fire put out by battleship’s 150 antiaircraft guns. One pilot flew between the battleship’s conning tower and her stack. “We had been told the Americans were sissies,” said Koitabashi. By 1600, the Yamato’s sister ship, the Musashi, riddled with torpedoes, was sinking. A hush fell over the bridge of the Yamato. “We had thought these battleships were unsinkable,” said Koitabashi.
Kurita’s fleet was supposed to sail through the narrow San Bernardino Strait, around the island of Samar, and burst into Leyte Gulf the next morning. But at about 1600, Kurita turned away from the approach to the strait. Kurita explained by cable to headquarters that his ships would be “meat” for the enemy if they entered the strait in daylight, and that he needed a respite from the bombing. When the air attacks subsided after 1630, Kurita reversed course again and headed for the strait. Kazutoshi Hando, perhaps the most popular naval historian in Japan, said that several captains in Kurita’s fleet had complained to him that Kurita turned back toward the battle only after being ordered to by headquarters. But Kurita’s staff always insisted he made the turn before receiving the order. And Koitabashi, who was standing at his lookout’s post on the wing of the bridge, says Kurita gave the order to press forward for the strait without even consulting his staff.
That night, the fleet, minus the Musashi and the three cruisers sunk by U.S. subs in the Palawan Passage, made its way through the strait, a hazardous channel with eight-knot tides, in the fog and rain. As the ships maintained radio silence, the battleship Kongo nearly rammed the Yamato in the stern. Men of the fleet fully expected to be greeted by U.S. submarines and other warships when they emerged from the strait after midnight. Miraculously, however, the ocean was empty. Halsey had found the decoy fleet of Japanese carriers, under Vice Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa, far to the north—where they were sending signals, hoping to be discovered. Halsey gave chase, leaving the San Bernardino Strait unguarded. He did not know Ozawa’s fleet had only a few remaining planes and mistakenly assumed Kurita’s fleet had been largely wiped out by the prior day’s bombardment. And he thought that, in any case, the battleships of Admiral Thomas Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet would guard the invasion force. Because of poor communications, he did not know that Kinkaid’s battle line was engaged to the south, annihilating the other prong of the Sho plan, a smaller Japanese fleet coming through the Surigao Strait on the south side of Leyte Gulf.
Just before 0700, Koitabashi and the other lookouts on the Yamato, peering through the breaking mist, saw an incredible sight: U.S. carriers. They were the small escort or “jeep” carriers used to support the landing force at Leyte. To the lookouts, however, they appeared to be the fleet carriers of Halsey’s task force. The U.S. destroyers, forming a screen, appeared to the excited lookouts to be cruisers. Here was an unbelievable opportunity, the prayed-for miracle, a chance to rain 18-inch shells on the decks of U.S. carriers from a range of ten miles and closing. On the bridge of the Yamato, Kurita ordered “general attack.” Koitabashi recalled the thrill of seeing the battleships Kongo and Haruna charge past at 30 knots, great guns blazing. “I am ashamed now, because it was war, but to me it seemed like a movie,” Koitabashi recalled.
Closing in for the kill did not prove so easy. Skillfully using smoke screens, passing squalls, and the torpedo attacks of the outgunned but brave destroyers and destroyer escorts, the small U.S. carrier fleet stayed a step ahead of the faster, bigger Japanese battle fleet for the next two hours. The Japanese did fatally wound a jeep carrier, the Gambier Bay (CVE-73). The Yamato passed so close, her sailors could see their U.S. counterparts battling fires with hoses. Koitabashi was surprised when Kurita declined the chance to finish off the carrier, presumably because the carrier obviously was sinking. When the Yamato steamed past U.S. Navy sailors from a sunken destroyer, some of the Americans waved. “I was astonished,” said Koitabashi. “Japanese would have drowned themselves or tried to swim away.” When a Japanese gunner opened up on the swimmers with a machine gun, the normally quiet Kurita shouted, “Stop firing!” He did not want to “shoot drowning dogs,” said Koitabashi.
Low on fuel and unable to cut off the retreating carriers, Kurita ordered his fleet to reassemble shortly after 0900 and make for its assigned target—the anchorage at Leyte Gulf. The fleet was under constant air attack by then from the bold pilots of the small escort carriers. The attacks were not quite on the same scale as the air assault of the day before, but they were far more than a nuisance. Kurita’s battered fleet by this time had lost seven of ten heavy cruisers, in addition to the battleship Musashi. The rest were trailing oil.
At about 1230, as they neared the mouth of Leyte Gulf, Kurita suddenly gave the order to turn around and sail north. Word passed through the Yamato that the main U.S. battle fleet had been sighted to the north and Kurita’s fleet was turning to engage the enemy. A cheer went up on the Yamato. Not everyone was pleased, however. Kurita’s battleship commander, Ugaki, had not been consulted. Ugaki was a formidable, dour figure to his men. He was so expressionless that the sailors had nicknamed him “the Golden Mask” after a famous Japanese comic book hero. Infatuated with the do-or-die samurai tradition, he wrote often in his diary of his desire to die gloriously in battle. When the Yamato swung her bow away from Leyte, Ugaki was heard to exclaim, “Why? Why?” He pointed his thumb to the south. “The enemy is that way,” he said. Kurita and his staff ignored him.
There was no enemy to the north, at least nowhere close by. Halsey was still 200 miles away, racing back—too late—to try to catch the Japanese. Shortly before dusk, Kurita turned his fleet to the west and passed back through the San Bernardino Strait. The fleet was attacked again the next day (at his post on the bridge wing, Koitabashi was badly wounded by shrapnel; during our interview, he took off his shoe and sock so I could feel the hard piece of metal, a memento of the Yamato, still under his skin.) Kurita’s fleet, halved in size, limped back to Lingaa. The Japanese Imperial Navy was effectively finished as a sea-fighting force.
Second-guessing started right away. In his battle report, Kurita justified his turn away from Leyte to the north on the morning of 25 October, writing he had received a telegram from an airbase at Manila that said a U.S. fleet had been sighted at 0945, 110 miles north of the lighthouse at the entrance to Leyte Gulf. That was the enemy fleet Kurita had turned to attack—but there was no U.S. fleet. Naval experts later guessed that a reconnaissance plane from Manila had spotted stragglers from Kurita’s own fleet at 0945, which would mean that by circling back to attack, Kurita had in effect been chasing his own tail. No one in Japan has been able to find any record of the actual telegram. Some critics of Kurita suspect he and his staff concocted the telegram as an excuse. Others wonder if it was a clever ruse by the Americans, who had broken the Japanese code and were capable of sending a false message. Had Halsey, who liked gambits (and whose staff was proudly nicknamed “the Department of Dirty Tricks”), tried to cover his mistake in leaving the San Bernardino Strait unguarded by sending a false signal to confuse the Japanese? If so, one would think that Halsey’s men would have bragged about it after the war; this is a mystery that warrants further investigation.
Kurita himself tried to be stoical and closed-mouth after the war. Living in burned-out Tokyo, the once-powerful fleet admiral had to sell his family kimonos and work as a scrivener and a masseur just to survive. He generally rejected interview requests and drank prodigiously. When books and magazine articles accused him of cowardice, “he suffered,” his daughter, Shigeko Terada, said over tea one morning in Tokyo. But he never complained—except once, when he said cryptically, “I want to go somewhere else.” In the 1950s, he consented to an interview with a friendly journalist, Masanori Ito. Kurita told Ito that he had made a “mistake of exhaustion” (he had not slept for three days) by turning away from the sure target—Leyte Gulf—to chase after an enemy fleet he could not find.
In his later years, Kurita told a young naval officer that the mysterious telegram had been sent by an old naval academy classmate, Vice Admiral Gunichi Mikawa, the commander of Southwest Fleet stationed in Manila. By telling him about the enemy carrier fleet to the north, Mikawa was giving Kurita a last “glorious chance to die” against a worthy foe, Kurita explained. Then, just before he died in 1978, he told an old schoolmate from his home town of Mito that he had turned around for a less glorious but more common-sense reason: because he did not think it was worth sacrificing the lives of his men.
This could be the real explanation for the “Mysterious Retreat.” The Japanese have a strong sense of obligation. The highest duty (cho) is supposed to be to the Emperor. But in this case, Kurita felt a higher obligation to his men. He chose not to sacrifice tens of thousands of sailors in a futile suicide mission. It was a humane choice, though unthinkable to the hard-line militarists who got Japan into the war.
One of those men was Ugaki. At the beginning of the war, he had been chief of staff to Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander-in-chief of the Japanese Combined Fleet. Even before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Ugaki was obsessed with death, writing often in his diary about joining the spirits of other dead warriors. He did not die, however, and survived even when Americans ambushed the two planes carrying Yamamoto and his staff in the South Pacific in 1943. After Leyte Gulf, Ugaki was put in charge of the Japanese “special attack” (kamikaze) forces, sending thousands of men to their deaths. On 15 August 1945, the Emperor announced the war was over, that Japan was surrendering. All Japanese were instructed to lay down arms; at least 500 military commanders killed themselves. Ugaki decided to lead one last kamikaze mission. He took 11 planes—22 men—with him to attack the U.S. fleet off Okinawa (three planes returned with engine trouble; Ugaki and the others perished without doing damage). All the Imperial Japanese Navy veterans I spoke to were scornful of this waste of life. Yasunaga actually saw Ugaki at the airfield when he took off on his last mission. As he stood on the wing of his plane, Ugaki saluted the watching fliers and mechanics. Disgusted by his commander’s selfish contempt for life, Yasunaga did not salute back.