I had just finished a biography of John Paul Jones in the summer of 2002. A journalist and writer of popular history, newly interested in sea wars and sea warriors, I was drawn to the biggest of all naval conflicts, World War II in the Pacific. In reading around, from the novels of Herman Wouk to the official histories of the time, I became interested in the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Here was the largest naval battle ever fought, involving hundreds of ships spread over hundreds of miles. It was the last great sea battle, the culmination of thousands of years of combat between fleets. The battle had grand strategy and great heroism, and it spelled the end of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Yet it seemed to me to be quite obscure, at least to the general reading public. Most people know about Pearl Harbor and Midway, but not Leyte Gulf.
As I read on, it occurred to me that Leyte Gulf has remained little known outside the world of naval scholars and war buffs because it was, in a way, an unsatisfactory encounter, not just from the perspective of the losers, but also from the winning side. At the time of the battle, the Navy and the generally flag-waving press of the era had a hard time explaining the apparent blunder of one of the service’s great heroes, Admiral William F. Halsey, commander of the main U.S. carrier fleet. On the night of 24-25 October 1944, Halsey in effect fell for a Japanese fake. He went steaming north after a group of Japanese carriers that were acting as decoys. Halsey’s lunge allowed a Japanese fleet of heavy battleships and cruisers to slip in behind and descend on General Douglas MacArthur’s land forces arrayed in and around Leyte Gulf for the invasion of the Philippines. These ships—troop transports and small “jeep” carriers and destroyers supporting the landings—were saved from annihilation only because the Japanese fleet, on the verge of a smashing victory, surprisingly turned around and sailed for home.
Over the years, various historians, including the great Samuel Eliot Morison, have tried to sort through the complex twist and turns in this battle. Halsey fares badly in most accounts, and the Japanese high command comes off looking worse. And yet I believed that the decisions by Admiral Halsey and the Japanese commander, Admiral Takeo Kurita, had not been fully or adequately explained. The story remained, to me, a human mystery. I decided to look a little deeper.
My search took me first to Japan. My reading of histories of the Pacific war left the strong impression that the Japanese side has been neglected by Western historians, partly because of language and cultural barriers, and partly because many Japanese documents were destroyed. But I found, through the efforts and contacts of Hideko Takayama of Newsweek's Tokyo bureau, a lively debate among Japanese scholars and writers of popular history over Kurita’s “mysterious retreat.”
It is difficult to appreciate the nearly suicidal quality of Japanese culture during World War II. The ancient samurai code of bushido had been exaggerated and distorted by the ruling militarists to make Japanese warriors not only willing to die for their country, but want to die.
Americans after 11 September 2001 were shocked by suicidal Islamic jihadists. But al Qaeda is minor league compared to the Japanese military in late 1944-45. Tens of thousands of men volunteered to fly kamikaze planes, fly atop suicide bombs dropped from planes (ohka, or “cherry blossom” bombs), man suicide torpedoes launched from submarines (kaiten, or “heaven shaker”), steer suicide boats (shinyo, or “ocean shaker”), and creep along the ocean bottom as suicide frogman (fukuryus, or “crawling dragons”).
Japan’s strategy was based on an almost sickeningly fallacious assumption: If Japan could inflict enough carnage on Americans by showing its willingness to die, the weaker, softer Americans would give up. Instead, the Americans found newer, more efficient ways to kill Japanese, ultimately dropping two atomic bombs.
Today, Japan is anti-militarist, at least officially. And yet ambivalence lingers. Japanese still worship at Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, where the spirits of fallen warriors await rebirth. At the war museum there, the first exhibit on the tour explains that President Franklin D. Roosevelt started World War II to end America’s economic woes during the Great Depression.
I visited the old Japanese naval academy on the island of Eta Jima, near Hiroshima. The cadets there are told that they are not joining a navy; it’s the “Maritime Self-Defense Force.” Yet they are required, during their first week at school, to visit a museum that is a monument to warrior self-sacrifice. It reminds the cadets that three out of four Eta Jima graduates died for their country during the school’s first century. The last two giant galleries are filled with the letters home, some written in blood on Japanese flags, from kamikaze pilots saying farewell to their parents.
Through an Imperial Japanese Navy old-boy network, I was able to find veterans of Leyte Gulf, including one who took off his shoe and sock so I could feel the fragments of the battleship Yamato still under his skin. Feelings remained strong. Some warriors had still not forgiven Admiral Kurita for turning the fleet around and heading home on the verge of a glorious victory. During a two-hour interview, Hiroshi Yasunaga, a float plane pilot, spoke English only once—to blurt out his opinion of Kurita: “I hate him. He was a coward.”
And yet, if Kurita had continued, his men—more than 15,000 in the 15 warships still under his command—would have been sacrificed. To be sure, those were his orders. Kurita’s fleet was a suicide fleet. He had been commanded to enter Leyte Gulf even if it meant the destruction of his entire fleet.
More scholars in Japan and the United States have attributed Kurita’s decision to fatigue. He had not slept for three days; his ships had been bombed again and again. Hiroyuki Agawa, a great Japanese naval historian, told me that Kurita had been “seeing white,” an expression Japanese use to express mental paralysis under extreme stress (to experience a white-out, as if in a blizzard). Kurita himself gave different accounts over the years—that he was exhausted, or that he had turned around his fleet because he had received a signal that a bigger American fleet was just to the _ north. The suggestion was that Kurita swung around to go after bigger game. But no record of the telegram has ever been found, and there is some skepticism among students of the battle that it ever existed.
While I was in Japan, I met Kurita’s daughter and granddaughter. It became clear to me, as I listened to his family history, that Kurita was not the sort to be manipulated by militarist hysteria over bushido. He came from a family of Confucian scholars. He was regarded as a great seaman, but not a zealot. He cared for his sailors, and they for him. At the end of his life, I learned from an old hometown friend of Kurita’s, he admitted that he had turned around to save thousands of men from dying uselessly. He knew the war was over and that Japan had lost. In effect, Kurita made a humane, rational decision, though not one he could readily admit in the feverish atmosphere of the time or even later.
Admiral Halsey was, curiously, in some ways more “Japanese” than Kurita. He had a stronger warrior spirit. After Pearl Harbor, he scoffed at the hand-wringing of defeatists and pressed to hit back at the Japanese. At a time America desperately needed a hero, he fit the bill—salty, profane, bold, irrepressible. His firmness and resolve helped to save the day at Guadalcanal when he was installed as overall commander in October 1942. He was a natural to lead the “Big Blue Fleet,” the main carrier force, as it rolled across the Pacific in the fall of 1944-
But Halsey was not a warrior god. He was susceptible to stress; he may have felt too much for his men. He missed the Battle of Midway because of a skin condition that was, his own staff believed, psychosomatic. His staff was a rowdy, confident bunch, a self-described ’’Department of Dirty Tricks.” They adored Halsey. But they also worried about him.
Only one of those staffers was still alive when I began my research. John Lawrence, into his 90s but still lucid and courtly, received me in his elegant house north of Boston. He was able to describe what it was like in flag plot on board the USS New Jersey (BB-63) during the crowded hours of the evening of October 24 when the Japanese carriers were sighted, and Halsey and his staff had to make a fateful decision. All day, planes from Halsey’s carriers had been bombing Kurita’s warships as they approached the San Bernardino Strait. Lawrence and his fellow air combat intelligence officers reckoned from the excited reports of the American pilots that Kurita’s fleet had been largely destroyed. That meant Halsey was free to go north after the carriers—and leave San Bernardino Strait unguarded. As it turned out, Kurita still had four battleships and eight cruisers—enough to smash the smaller vessels of “MacArthur’s Navy” sailing, unaware of their danger, to the south. Recalling the miscalculation some six decades later, Lawrence held his head in his hands and exclaimed, “Mea culpa, mea culpa.”
The real responsibility, of course, was Halsey’s. Flag plot on board the New Jersey was warned by several top Third Fleet commanders on other ships that night that the Japanese were coming through, and that it was a mistake to leave the strait unguarded. But these warnings were ignored or rebuffed with an odd indifference.
Halsey, it appeared, had gone to bed just before the warnings came that night. He was resting for the battle that dawn would bring. Still, it seems odd that he was not told of the warnings or notified that search planes had seen the Japanese fleet—which earlier had appeared to retreat—coming through the strait around midnight.
Halsey’s inattention may remain a mystery. But I found at least a hint of an explanation in the private correspondence of Halsey’s shipboard doctor, Carnes Weeks. Two days after the battle, Weeks wrote his wife, Margaret, that Halsey had been quite sick with the flu on the eve of battle. Weeks’ son, Carnes Jr., told me that after the war his father had related how he had made the admiral “comfortable” with a drink or two of whiskey at night to help him sleep. (Although alcohol was banned on Navy ships, Halsey’s records show that he kept and routinely drew from a large supply of liquor.) Given what Lawrence had told me—that the staff was acutely sensitive to the need to allow Halsey to rest—it is perhaps not so hard to understand why the admiral was left undisturbed.
No matter how grand the strategies or how awesome the fleets, the human element always looms large. I became interested in the fate of one of the destroyers whose men had to face Kurita’s mighty fleet when it came steaming through the morning mist, its heavy-caliber guns flashing, on the morning of 25 October 1944.
The USS Johnston (DD-557) weighed less than 3,000 tons—about as much as an 18-inch gun turret on board Kurita’s flagship, the Yamato. She survived for almost three hours in part because the armor-piercing rounds used by the Japanese battleships and cruisers went right through the Johnston's thin metal skin. The ship had a crew of some 330 men when the battle began. Roughly 60 were killed by the Japanese; half the rest were killed by sharks and exposure when they were left to float in the Pacific for two days after the Johnston was finally sunk. When I began interviewing them, about 50 of her crew members still survived.
Their stories include great profiles in courage, but none more compelling than that of their captain, Commander Ernest Evans, who went down with his ship. Toward the end of the battle, Evans, with most of his clothes and two fingers blown off, was conning the ship from the fantail of the Johnston. The bridge had been destroyed, and crewmen were steering by pulling on rudder cables. Evans was awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor.
He was a Cherokee Indian. My travels took me to his hometown of Muscogee, Oklahoma, known as the capital of the Five Civilized Tribes when Oklahoma became a state at the turn of the 20th century. The town’s population was heavily native American. But oil had been discovered in Oklahoma, and the natives were being systematically robbed of their lands. In the Muscogee Central High School yearbook of 1926 is but a single Indian face—that of Ernest Evans. Central High was considered the “white” high school. Indians were supposed to go a trade school, if they went to school at all. Somehow, Evans overcame the odds against an Indian boy.
Evans applied to the U.S. Naval Academy, another school that rarely saw a non-white face in that era. On his multiple-choice aptitude test, Evans missed only 2 of 20 questions. His first mistake suggests the economic and social barriers he had to overcome just to get to the Naval Academy. Question number 15 asked: “A meal always involves ... 1. a table, 2. dishes, 3. hunger, 4. food., 5. water.” The correct answer was, “4. food.” Evans, whose answer was no doubt shaped by personal experience, chose “3. hunger.” The second suggests the fierce warrior spirit that faced down Japanese battleships in the Philippine Sea on the morning of 25 October 1944- The question asked, A contest always has ... 1. umpires, 2. opponents, 3. spectators, 4- applause, 5. victory.” The correct answer was “2. opponents.” Evans chose the last answer: Victory.