Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945 (The Pacific War Trilogy Book 3)

by Ian W. Toll

was a trial by fire of their overwater navigation skills, and a worthwhile training exercise in itself. When flying above a cloud ceiling, the navigator peered down through gaps in the overcast and caught glimpses of the wrinkled blue seascape. Now and again he might see a coral reef, or a tendril of sand, and he tried to match those features to the chart on his desk. At night, the navigator tracked his aircraft’s position by taking star sightings with a sextant, like an ancient mariner. Mostly he relied on dead reckoning, keeping meticulous track of airspeed and compass heading, adding corrections for the wind, until he could pick up a LORAN signal or a radio homing beacon.

On many planes, the captain and oldest member of the crew was a twenty-five-year-old lieutenant who had learned to fly in a single-engine trainer about eighteen months earlier. Not even youth or peak physical condition spared them the fatigue of long flights at high altitude. After a fifteen-hour mission, one pilot wrote in a letter home, “my legs and back were stiff and I can still feel it! We took off at dawn and landed several hours after dark. That’s a point lots of folks miss. Bombing the target takes only a short time. It’s that workout going to the target and returning home to your destination that gets you.”

On October 27, Hansell personally led a tactical bombing strike against the once-formidable Truk Atoll, targeting Japanese submarine pens on Dublon Island. (The USAAF brass was normally barred from flying combat missions; to his chagrin, this was the last such flight that Hansell was cleared to lead.) Three more break-in missions against Truk followed, and two against Iwo Jima. Hundreds of tons of bombs were dropped during these raids. Those on the receiving end might have been surprised and disheartened to learn that they were only training runs.

Captain Ralph D. Steakley proposed to fly a photographic mission right away, hoping to capitalize on the rare favorable weather, and Hansell agreed. The lone F-13, sardonically named the Tokyo Rose, soared over the Japanese capital at 32,000 feet, its four cameras snapping continuously. Steakley circled in lazy figure-eight patterns around Tokyo, Tokyo Bay, Yokohama, then west over Mt. Fuji to the Tōkai region and the industrial heartland of greater Nagoya. This was the first Allied airplane to penetrate Tokyo airspace since the Doolittle Raid, two-and-a-half years earlier. Japanese army fighters scrambled to intercept, but to the air defense command’s toe-curling mortification, they were unable to catch the fast, high-flying intruder. Above 30,000 feet, the Nakajima KI-44 fighters (Allied codename “Tojo”) could climb only with a significant loss of ground speed, allowing the Tokyo Rose to sail away, serene

After a fourteen-hour flight in freakishly clear weather, the F-13 touched down on Saipan with thousands of aerial negatives covering major industrial and aviation plants in the Tokyo and Nagoya regions. A photo lab unit, housed in a Quonset hut, worked around the clock for several days to turn out 7,000 high-resolution prints. These served as the basis for future mission planning. Steakley’s pathfinding flight was of incalculable value to the entire strategic bombing enterprise.

When coastal radar stations detected the incoming flight, about 125 Japanese fighters scrambled to intercept. Among them were ten Nakajima Ki-44 Shoki aircraft of the Japanese army’s Forty-Seventh Sentai air group, all dedicated to attempting ramming attacks on the enemy bombers.

Reflecting upon it afterwards, Hansell admitted that the November 24 mission to Tokyo was risky to the point of rashness. The bombing had achieved little of value, inflicting scant damage at Musashino and no direct hits on the Tokyo docks. He considered it fortunate that only three planes were lost. (Two went down in the ocean south of Honshu; submarine lifeguards searched for them but found nothing.)

THE MYSTERIOUS FLATTOP WAS THE SHINANO, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, a 65,000-ton behemoth built on a hull originally intended as the third Yamato-class battleship. She had been built in the shipyard at Yokosuka Naval Base in Tokyo Bay, launched on October 8, and commissioned just eight days earlier.

She had about 2,475 men on board, including her crew of 2,175 officers and men and about three hundred shipyard workers. She carried no airplanes. In her hangar were fifty Oka guided suicide missiles, of the type designed to be dropped from planes, and six Shinyo suicide speed boats. It was intended that she would put the suicide crafts ashore in Kure, or perhaps deliver them to Okinawa at some point in the future.

Captain Abe rode her into the abyss, accompanied by 1,400 other souls. That concluded the maiden voyage of the Shinano.

involving about four hundred “Takachiho” paratroopers of an Airborne Raiding Brigade based on Luzon. The Japanese troopers returned rifle fire from aloft, and threw hand grenades as they approached the ground. Several Seabee engineers were in the shower as the enemy paratroopers hit the ground, and “bolted, buck naked, for their guns.”71 Fierce firefights continued late into the night. Squads of attackers set demolition charges in parked airplanes and fuel storage dumps, and fires blazed through the area. Fighting continued for three days. The 11th Airborne Division, supported by Seabees and miscellaneous other units, took back the airfield on December 9. The attack had accomplished some material damage, but otherwise failed.

The Japanese were not fooled, however: they knew that the U.S. fleet had adopted Ulithi as its new homeport. On November 20, several kaitens—one-man suicide submarines—were released by a large “mother” submarine north of the atoll. At least two of the stealthy little boats penetrated into the lagoon by secondary entrance channels. At dawn on November 20, one struck the tanker Mississinewa. Laden with tens of thousands of tons of avgas, diesel, and bunker oil, the ship erupted in flames.

From that day to the end of the war, the Americans never felt entirely secure at Ulithi. Admiral Sherman recalled, “We felt that we were sitting on a powder keg which might go off at any time. Far from enjoying a rest, we felt we might be safer in the open sea.”76 Even so, fleet recreation at Ulithi was serious business. A new movie was screened on every ship in the fleet, every night. A destroyer designated as the “movie exchange ship” kept a library of hundreds of films and thousands of reels, which rotated around the fleet according to a published calendar.77 USO musical revues travelled from ship to ship, as the entertainers often performed four or five identical shows per day.

Capture of Mindoro’s two small airfields changed the complexion of the entire Philippines campaign, as it put nearby Manila and its environs into the crosshairs for General Kenney’s USAAF fighters and bombers. The island’s capture also left Leyte in the position of a strategic backwater. On the eighteenth, General Yamashita radioed General Suzuki to advise that Leyte would receive no further reinforcements or material support. As Yamashita had feared, the fight for that island had consumed a major portion of Japanese strength in the Philippines, darkening the outlook for the pending fight for Luzon. Based on a methodical attempt to count bodies during the last week of December, the Americans estimated that 60,809 Japanese troops had perished on the island. Just 434 had been taken prisoner.82 U.S. Sixth Army losses were just 2,888 killed and 9,858 wounded.

This was typhoon season, and the fleet was near the heart of the region known as “typhoon alley.” The navy was not yet doing any systematic long-range weather reconnaissance flights, and was thus obliged to rely on intermittent reports from aircraft, ships, and submarines. Judging whether a “disturbance” would develop into a full-scale tropical witches’ brew was as much an art as a science. So was predicting the path that a storm would travel.

Admiral Radford, sailing as an observer on the Ticonderoga, judged that “we were in for it.” The carrier’s skipper agreed and issued orders to secure for a typhoon.85 Many others throughout the fleet, including all of the task group commanders and many senior captains, reached similar conclusions. The safest move would have been to turn south. But that would have taken Task Force 38 out of position to launch the planned airstrike on Luzon two days later, and Halsey was determined to keep his promises to MacArthur. Given that his meteorologists were forecasting that the storm (if such it was) would turn right rather than left, the admiral kept the fleet on a northwesterly heading.

The sea was lumpy and disgruntled. The sky was painted in freakish colors, a dull coppery glow beneath a purple scudding murk. Gale-force gusts blew streaks of spindrift off the wave crests. At 2:37 p.m., noted the fleet diary, “the seas were getting heavy and the winds were now 40 knots from 020.” Halsey suspended fueling and fixed a new fueling rendezvous for 6:00 a.m. the next morning, 200 miles to the northwest. Many ships found it difficult to keep station, and Halsey approved Admiral McCain’s request to slow the task force from 17 to 15 knots and cease zigzagging.

An hour after sunrise, the sun could not be seen and the sky had barely lightened. Visibility deteriorated, the seas grew mountainous, and the winds gusted higher—to 60 knots, then to 70 knots. The PPI radarscope in the Wasp, on the northern flank of Task Force 38, depicted a tightly constructed circular storm-eye passing only about 35 miles to the north.89 Halsey and his team could no longer deny it; the fleet was caught in the “dangerous semicircle” of a proper typhoon, and could do nothing but run before the wind and seas and hope for the best.

The storm mounted in strength and malevolence. The distance between the crests lengthened as the waves grew. At the top of each sea the wind howled in their ears and the rain and spray blasted them like buckshot. In the troughs between the crests, the noise and wind fell to almost bearable dimensions, but white water broke across their decks and cascaded through the scuppers. Orders were given and then countermanded by both Halsey and McCain, but it was soon clear to every skipper that he was alone, and must do whatever he could to save his ship.

The gusts grew more violent, eventually surpassing 100 knots. Barometer readings fell below 27 inches. Halsey informed Nimitz that the fleet was fighting through “heavy confused seas, ragged ceiling, heavy rains, wind west northwest, 70 knots . . . typhoon of increasing intensity.”

The storm reached its zenith at about noon, when the gusts touched 120 knots and the waves measured about 80 feet from trough to crest.93 According to the captain of the Dewey, the rain and scud was so thick that men on the bridge could not see the bow. If a man was exposed to it, “it felt like a barrage of thousands of needles against the face and hands,” and it “removed the paint from metal surfaces in many places like a sandblaster.”

the starboard wing of the Dewey’s bridge dipped under the sea and scooped up solid green water. “None of us had ever heard of a ship righting herself from such a roll,” noted the skipper, “but this one did!”

the Ticonderoga, a 27,000-ton Essex-class carrier, Arthur Radford watched the storm in awe from the flag bridge veranda. As the Ticonderoga rolled to starboard, and the slope of a great wave rose up toward the ship, he had the odd feeling that if he stretched out his arm, he might actually touch the sea. The Hancock, one of Ticonderoga’s sisters, shipped tons of green water over her flight deck, nearly 60 feet above her waterline.

With the wind increasing, the captain ordered all hands to clear the flight deck and seek shelter. But the real emergency was below, on the hangar deck, where airplanes were heaving and straining alarmingly at their mooring lines. The airedales raced to tighten and redouble the lashings, but as the rolls surpassed 34 degrees, they found it hard to keep their footing. Shortly after 9:00 a.m., a Hellcat fighter tore free and was suddenly a 5-ton combustible battering ram. It thrashed back and forth, port to starboard to port to starboard, crushing ventilation ducts, electrical lines, water pumps, and other airplanes. Though it had been drained of gasoline, the residual fuel in its tanks and engine lines burst into flames, and soon an explosion ripped through the hangar.

The Hull was not so fortunate. Shortly before noon she was knocked down onto her starboard side, pinned down at an angle of about 80 degrees, and stayed there. Water flooded into the pilot house and poured down her stack. There was no coming back from such a blow. Lieutenant Commander Marks stepped off the port wing of the bridge and swam away. Held up by his kapok life vest, he turned and caught a last glimpse of the Hull as she was swallowed by the sea. “Shortly after, I felt the concussion of the boilers exploding underwater. . . . I concentrated my efforts thereafter to trying to keep alive in the mountainous seas which pounded us.”104 A similar fate was suffered by the destroyers Spence and Monaghan

The search-and-rescue force kept up their efforts for seventy-two hours. The vessels spread out in a broad scouting line, destroyers on the flanks, and scanned the sea ahead with searchlights at night. The fleet diary noted, “numerous empty life rafts, cork rafts, and floating debris were sighted and investigated for personnel during the search.”106 Many whistles were heard. Life rafts were dropped into the ships’ wakes. On December 21, the destroyer escort Tabberer (which had suffered badly in the storm) discovered a raft with ten survivors of the Spence

The typhoon had claimed 790 American lives. Three destroyers were gone and several others severely damaged. Ninety-three castaways were rescued in the search operations after the storm. The highest mortality rate was among the crew of the Monaghan, of whom just six men survived. One hundred forty-six carrier aircraft had been destroyed or blown overboard, mostly from the CVLs. The Monterey, Cowpens, and San Jacinto were badly damaged and would require major overhauls.

Admiral Nimitz had flown into Ulithi for a planned conference with Halsey and the Third Fleet staff. The CINCPAC, recently promoted to the new five-star rank of “fleet admiral,” was piped aboard the New Jersey at 1:50 p.m. For the first time in the navy’s history, a five-star flag was broken out at the masthead. After niceties, the brass convened in flag country wardrooms to review recent operations and plan for the future.

sand instead of snow and holly.”110 Though he did not admit it, either at the time or later, Halsey must have known he bore grave responsibility for the beating the fleet had just suffered. His subordinates were comparing notes and opinions, and many agreed that Halsey had erred by failing to dodge the storm when there was still time, on the afternoon of December 17. The brownshoe admirals were typically outspoken in their criticism. Admiral Gerry Bogan “felt that it was just plain goddamn stubbornness and stupidity.”111 Jocko Clark, on standby status aboard the Hornet, was similarly harsh, as was Arthur Radford. Ted Sherman attested that the appearance of sky and sea on December 17 had been a sure sign that a typhoon was brewing.

Halsey had done what he had done because he was determined to keep his promises to MacArthur. That motive was admirable, but the end result was no airstrikes on Luzon and a storm-mauled fleet. For the second time in two months, Nimitz was forced to question Halsey’s fitness for the critically important job he held.

According to Truman Hedding, a senior member of Nimitz’s staff (and a former Task Force 58 chief of staff to Mitscher), the CINCPAC found it “difficult to understand taking the task force right into the dangerous semicircle of the typhoon . . . he was very concerned about it and very upset about it, because that is a reflection on your seamanship. That is something that officers usually pride themselves on—being good seamen.”112 Hedding also heard...

The court’s formal report, issued in early January 1945, placed a “preponderance of responsibility” on Halsey for failing to dodge the storm, and faulted him for “errors of judgment under stress of war operations.” Although the court did not recommend any specific sanction, its ruling was sufficiently critical that it might have justified relieving Halsey of his command. Spruance was due to return as commander in chief of the Fifth Fleet later that month; he could simply have been recalled a few weeks early. But after conferring privately, Nimitz and King decided not to do it. Truman Hedding believed, as did many others, that Halsey’s popularity with the press and public saved his command, “because Admiral Halsey was a national hero, and in time of war you don’t do that.”

“Nothing is more dangerous than for a seaman to be grudging in taking precautions lest they turn out to have been unnecessary. Safety at sea for a thousand years has depended on exactly the opposite philosophy.”

Since the Battle of Leyte Gulf, approximately three of every ten Japanese planes sent into the Philippines from Formosa or Japan had been lost in operational accidents, or shot down by Third Fleet carrier planes.1 Now, by Tokyo’s order, all remaining aircraft were to be launched against the American fleet in suicide attacks.

When the headless, naked body of the kamikaze pilot was recovered, the Louisville’s damage control party simply heaved it over the side.

In the five days before the first amphibious landings in Lingayen Gulf, kamikazes struck or near-missed thirty Allied vessels. Three warships were destroyed, fourteen heavily damaged, and thirteen lightly damaged.

At 9:30 a.m., the first wave was away. More than 1,000 landing craft motored in toward the beaches, their long wakes carving parallel white lines. By 9:40, nearly 20,000 troops were ashore; by noon, 68,000. They stormed ashore along a 12-mile stretch of beaches at the southern end of the gulf, adjacent to the towns of Lingayen, Dugupan, and Mabilao. The beach was wide and continuous, large enough to accommodate two full army corps (four infantry divisions abreast) and the gigantic amount of heavy equipment, vehicles, weaponry, and supplies scheduled to come ashore in a matter of hours. Resistance was scant. Joyful Filipinos greeted them with handshakes and kisses.

Under these dire circumstances, Yamashita was forced to adopt a static defense. His objective was to hold out for as long as possible, to slow the tide of American conquest as it washed toward the homeland. But Luzon and Manila would sooner or later fall to the invader, no matter what he did, and he knew it.

Filipino guerillas had alerted MacArthur’s headquarters to the existence of a POW camp at Cabanatuan, about 60 miles north of Manila. Several hundred American prisoners were being held there in a barbed-wire stockade. In aerial reconnaissance photographs, the facility appeared to be only lightly guarded. MacArthur authorized a rescue operation. The mission was assigned to the 6th Army’s Ranger Battalion.

The rangers and 512 liberated POWs returned to American lines on January 31. The former prisoners were placed in care of a 1st Cavalry field hospital that had been set up in a Filipino schoolhouse. Many seemed timid or self-conscious, and flinched when doctors, nurses, or war correspondents tried to engage them in conversation. They ate heartily and gained weight quickly. But their full recovery, physical and psychological, would take time.

During those same weeks, U.S. intelligence analysts in Guam and Pearl Harbor marveled at the Japanese garrison’s apparent disappearing act. Iwo Jima had been bombed, strafed, and blasted for eight months; it had been shelled from offshore, bombed by B-24s and B-29s based in the nearby Marianas, and visited a dozen times by carrier task forces. Craters upon craters had been punched into the island’s soft volcanic ash. The B-24s alone had hit the island for the past seventy consecutive days, dropping thousands of tons of bombs. But during this same period, Iwo Jima’s underground fortifications and artillery encasements had only grown stronger and more extensive.

Captain Thomas Fields of the 26th Marines put it succinctly: “The Japanese weren’t on Iwo Jima. They were in Iwo Jima.”12 On the eve of the invasion, Iwo Jima was well prepared to receive the enemy. Suribachi and the Motoyama Plateau had been converted into natural fortresses. Implanted in the rocks were a variety of weapons, from big coastal defense guns in sunken casements, to mortars, light artillery, antitank guns, and machine guns.

Although General Kuribayashi had encountered stubborn resistance in his ranks, he had finally imposed his will on the garrison, and indoctrinated all of his subordinate commanders into his plan. There would be no massed counterattacks over open ground. Banzai charges were strictly forbidden. The Japanese would blanket the landing beaches with artillery and mortar fire when the attackers were most vulnerable, but they would not stage an all-out fight to hold the airfields.

General Kuribayashi did not hold out hope that his men could win the battle for Iwo Jima. They were to fight a delaying action, to inflict maximum casualties on the Americans, and (eventually) to die to the last man.

Kuribayashi wrote out a list of six “courageous battle vows.” These were mimeographed and distributed to every unit on the island, and every soldier was compelled to memorize and recite them. The vows were posted on the walls of bunkers, pasted to the barrels of weapons, neatly copied into notebooks, and kept on folded pages in soldiers’ pockets: 1. We shall defend this place with all our strength to the end. 2. We shall fling ourselves against the enemy tanks clutching explosives to destroy them. 3. We shall slaughter the enemy, dashing in among them to kill them. 4. Every one of our shots shall be on target and kill the enemy. 5. We shall not die until we have killed ten of the enemy. 6. We shall continue to harass the enemy with guerilla tactics even if only one of us remains alive.

On February 15, the electrifying news was announced on every ship: Task Force 58 was headed for Tokyo, where it would raid airbases and aircraft manufacturing plants before turning south to support an amphibious landing on Iwo Jima. No U.S. carrier task force had attempted to hit Japan since the Doolittle Raid, nearly three years earlier. Attacking the enemy’s capital would be like kicking over a hornet’s nest: hundreds of Japanese fighters would likely challenge them, and antiaircraft fire would be heavy. One young Hellcat pilot began applauding, then stopped, turned to his squadron mates, and asked, “My god, why am I clapping?”

On the eve of the strike, Admiral Mitscher distributed a memorandum to all air groups. “The large majority of the VF [fighter] pilots in Task Force 58 will engage in air combat for the first time over Tokyo. This fact will not be too great a handicap if pilots will remember the fundamentals and keep calm. . . . Try not to get too excited.

Among the top-priority targets were two important factories that the B-29s of the Twentieth Air Force had tried to destroy, without success, for the past ten weeks: a Tachikawa aircraft engine plant in Tama, west of the city, and a Nakajima airframe plant in Ota, southern Tokyo, near the bay.

At dawn on the sixteenth, the task force was 60 miles off the coast of Honshu and about 125 miles southwest of Tokyo. A freezing wind gusted out of the north at 30 knots. Hard rain lashed the carrier flight decks.

Task Force 58 launched 1,100 warplanes from seventeen aircraft carriers.