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On October 27, Generals MacArthur and Kenney personally watched as thirty-four P-38 Lightning fighters from the 9th Fighter Squadron landed at the still crude, incomplete Tacloban airfield, the first Army Air Forces planes to touch Philippine soil since 1942.
The high winds, the suffocating rains, and the severe limitations of Leyte’s loose, sandy soil made it nearly impossible for
“The sight
Krueger was too hard on himself and even Mother Nature, too. As a potential base for sea and air forces, nothing could really turn the Leyte plow horse into a racehorse. The limitations presented by the island’s climate, infrastructure, and prevailing conditions were simply too profound. Leyte had no major ports and could provide, at the cost of prodigious labor, only minor air and supply bases, at least by the standards of the hypermodern US military forces. Leyte’s only value lay in its location at the midsection of the archipelago, an asset of transitory usage.
If they did take heed, they might well have judged that reorienting theater grand strategy to avoid Leyte in favor of some other operation (perhaps even risking Washington’s support for MacArthur’s return to the Philippines) would likely have presented even more headaches, at least at the planning level.13
“Enemy, hidden inside of the old stone crypts, waited until American troops passed and then [pulled] back the lids and opened fire,” wrote Captain Denmark Jensen, whose company of 75-millimeter self-propelled guns provided fire support in the Dagami area. The Americans had no choice but to move from headstone to headstone, killing their adversaries point-blank with “flamethrowers and vicious hand-to-hand fighting before the area could be cleared,” the division after-action report summarized with chilling brevity.
With Japanese intentions for a showdown land battle painfully obvious now, the Americans rushed in their own reinforcements. The 32nd Infantry Division, victors of the pivotal Buna battle and other New Guinea fighting earlier in the war, arrived in mid-November to bolster X Corps, as did the 112th Cavalry Regiment, only a few months separated from its bloody debut at the Driniumor River fight on New Guinea.
