THE Philippines campaign was lost. The Japanese admirals and generals in the field knew it and by December 15 Tokyo suspected it. But the Kamikazes had left a lasting impression on the Americans, and it was a far more serious threat than anyone outside the naval hierarchy knew.
After he had pulled the Third Fleet and its carriers out of operation at the end of November, Admiral Halsey and his staff began to work out new methods of defense with Vice Admiral John S. McCain, the new American commander of the carriers.
The problem was, as Halsey had written in his action report, that the Japanese had developed a “sound” defensive plan against carrier attack. The Kamikazes threatened the whole fleet. The answer had to come in parts. First came the psychological reply
Philippine Fadeout
to Admiral Onishi’s psychological warfare.
The story of the Kamikazes had been brewing in the notebooks of the war correspondents for weeks, but not a word of it got out to the public. Admirals Halsey and Nimitz clapped a tight veil of secrecy around carrier operations. Officers and men who went on leave or duty were warned not to say a word. The American establishment was seriously worried by the new threat. If the Japanese learned just how badly they had hurt the American naval forces, the reasoning went, the attacks would be stepped up. Perhaps that was true; Tokyo was still not giving Admiral Onishi or the Fourth Air Army the sort of support they wanted. A few good horror stories in the American press would have started something. The U.S. Navy clamped down on what had been an openhanded treatment of censorship. No lies were told at this point, but important truths were withheld from the people at home.
Until this point Task Force Thirty-eight had consisted of four carrier groups. The number was reduced to three. The result was to put more carriers together in a small area, which was bad, but to give them much more fire power, which was good.
The next part of the answer was to assign a number of destroyers and escorts as picket boats to surround the carrier force, well outside of it, and warn of the coming of the enemy planes. These ships were given the newest radar and air detection devices.
A third change was to increase the number of fighter planes aboard each carrier, nearly doubling them. The number of bombers was reduced, which might seem a step backward except for the fact that these fighters, particularly the F6F Grumman, were no ordinary fighters. They could each carry more than a thousand pounds of bombs, so the change did not cripple the strike power of the carrier fleet.
Admiral McCain offered another idea. When the fast carriers got back into action on December 14, they plastered the Luzon airfields for three days. They were preparing for the Mindoro landings. The heavy concentration of bombing on the airfields was supposed to keep the Japanese from either bringing planes into the fields or putting them in the air. It was quite successful.
The Kamikazes
Their method was to maintain an umbrella over the Luzon airfields day and night. The result was that not a single air strike could be launched against the Mindoro invasion force from Luzon. A few strikes were launched from Cebu and Davao, but the air opposition was very light.
Halsey’s pilots claimed that they had destroyed 270 planes in those three days, most of them on the ground. The figures were exaggerated, but the losses were indeed heavy. The Kamikaze force was being ground down.
On December 15, the Allies landed another amphibious force on Mindoro island, and almost immediately captured the airfields. From this point on the American land-based aircraft had easy access to Manila, and the sea lanes of Luzon were no longer even half-safe.
The Kamikazes of the Japanese army and navy had done their best, as had the conventional air forces. The suicide planes had sunk another destroyer, a PT boat and had damaged several other warships. They were effective, no doubt about it. One Kamikaze got inside the air cover and smashed into the Nashville , Admiral Struble’s flagship.
That pilot had very nearly got himself an admiral that day, and the explosions killed 133 officers and men and wounded 109. By striking in the bridge area the attacker made sure his casualties would include highly placed officers.
The Kamikaze attacks of December 15 were fiercer than usual and produced better results. They began around 8:00 A.M. The escort carrier Marcus Island was damaged, but not sunk. So were the destroyers Paul Hamilton and Howorth. LSTs 472 and 738 were sunk. But the gunners of LST472 alone shot down three Kamikazes before one crashed into the ship.
ON Taiwan Commander Inoguchi was organizing and training the new Kamikaze units, and sending replacement planes and pilots to the Philippines. Admiral Onishi’s operations continued to chew them up.
Philippine Fadeout
In December the Allies gained momentum. The situation became so serious that Lieutenant General Shuichi Miyazaka flew from Tokyo to Manila to confer with General Yamashita. Yamashita and his staff advocated the immediate abandonment of the disastrous Leyte campaign, with concentration on the defense of Luzon. The American attack on Mindoro had proceeded so rapidly that the Luzon landing could not be far off.
Tokyo acceded and the Leyte battle came to a ragged end, with Japanese troops abandoning their organizations and running off to other islands.
At this time Commander Inoguchi brought the last of the new Kamikaze units over from Taiwan. The bombing of Manila had become so severe that Admiral Fukudome had moved Combined Air Fleet Headquarters to a house near Bamban Air Base, the most northern of the Clark-complex fields.
The Japanese were in serious trouble. Not more than 30 percent of their supplies were arriving. The growth of American land-based air power brought constant attack on the ocean convoys, and there was very little they could do about it. Manila Bay was already untenable for Japanese shipping. The navy and army air forces had virtually given up their attempts to protect the convoys. Their planes had to be reserved for attack. And, of course, Kamikazes were never designed for defensive operations.
By mid-December the trouble was apparent everywhere. The rations of the sailors and soldiers were cut from three pounds of rice a day to a pound. Meat and fish were virtually unavailable. Compared to the soldiers on Leyte, starving on grass and roots and long abandoned, the lot of the airmen of the Manila area was sheer luxury. Compared to the Americans, who were enjoying the fruits of constant victory, their lot was misery.
The Japanese were short of everything. They had nearly five thousand vehicles in the Philippines, but half of them were broken down because of a lack of spare parts. They were so short of gasoline that they were using distilled pine-root oil as a substitute. The great Southwestern Army, once invincible, was reduced to a skeleton, yet it fought on.
The Kamikazes
The First and Second Air Fleets, which were virtually indistinguishable now, were losing numerous planes and the American advance blocked the delivery of most of those that tried to come in.
Shortly after January 1, 1945, General Yamashita began preparations to abandon the Manila area and make his defensive stand north in the mountains of Baguio. The airmen balked. They said that if Manila was lost, then the air defense had nowhere to go, and General Tomonaga, the commander of the Fourth Air Army, refused to move. Vice Admiral Denshichi Okochi, the commander of the Southwest Area Fleet, agreed with him.
In the middle of this muddle a delegation from Combined Fleet Headquarters in Tokyo arrived in the Philippines to survey the situation. The advance man was Commander Okata, followed by Admiral Kusaka, the chief of staff of the Combined Fleet, and a party of Tokyo staff officers.
Upon Kusaka’s arrival at Clark Field, a meeting was called at First Air Fleet Headquarters. Admirals Fukudome and Onishi were asked to air their views. First the staff officers reviewed their general plan, which was to continue the Sho Operation. What that meant was that every Japanese resource would be strained on a constant battle footing. Everyone agreed that this was just the thing to do.
Commander Shibata of the Second Air Fleet Staff then outlined the operations of the combined Philippine naval air force. (The minutes were preserved in the diary of one of the staff officers.) He concluded by saying that the war situation was clear. The enemy was island-hopping on the way to Luzon. The victory could still be won by the Japanese, given superior fighting spirit and some resources. The First Air Fleet needed a hundred planes in the next month.
One of the Combined Fleet staff officers said that it seemed to Tokyo that they should be concentrating on carriers. This brought a pregnant silence for a moment. That had been Admiral Onishi’s feeling from the beginning, but Admiral Fukudome had responded to General Yamashita’s complaints that the navy was not giving
Philippine Fadeout
him adequate air support and had diverted planes to that purpose. The awkward moment passed. Admiral Fukudome was then asked for his assessment.
In the past month, the admiral said, they had gone to Leyte every day. And every day they had sunk or damaged ten transports and ten warships. That was six hundred enemy ships. If headquarters could maintain the status quo of the air force in the Philippines (meaning a supply of planes and pilots) than Fukudome could almost guarantee them a 250 percent increase in operational results. (Postwar figures indicated that Japanese Kamikaze results during the Philippines campaign were about 27 percent hits. At this point the Japanese were claiming almost total success. Without American confirmation and denial of losses, they had no way of knowing exactly, but their claims were hopelessly optimistic.)
Admiral Fukudome’s assessment sounded good to the Tokyo delegates and the conference ended on that note. The next day, December 24, Admiral Kusaka and his staff from Tokyo proceeded to Manila to meet with Admiral Okochi and General Yamashita and his staff.
Yamashita had some complaints. Again he mentioned the problem of air-support failure. He also complained that the navy had not given him any warning of the Mindoro landing. Admiral Kusaka was sympathetic and issued an injunction that in the future Admiral Okochi was to “negotiate” with the army more closely.
Because of violent air raids in the next few days, the Tokyo delegation was grounded; it was December 29 before they could take off for Takao, on the way back to the capital. There they had a graphic demonstration of the dangers. On December 26, Commander Okata took off to go ahead of the main party and was killed when his plane was shot down.
Admiral Fukudome’s unrealistic assessment of the situation in the Philippines may have convinced some of the staff officers, but Admiral Onishi knew better. He was well aware of his dwindling resources and the fact that his plan for victory through sacrifice had so far failed.
In fact. Admiral Onishi was feeling suicidal himself. The months
The Kamikazes
of strain were telling on him. It was hard to send young men to certain death and then to discover that their deaths seemed useless in the face of the American juggernaut. It was one thing to announce the splendid victories of the Kamikazes to Tokyo and for the squadron commanders to write the sad little letters home that accompanied the personal effects of the missing fliers. It was another to continue to believe that the Kamikaze weapon could actually succeed.
Onishi had been unable to eat properly for weeks. When he took his trip to Tokyo in mid-November he was a sick man. Commander Inoguchi, who accompanied him, noted that the admiral had to be carried to the plane on a stretcher. The events of December did nothing to quiet Onishi’s nerves or to better the war situation. More airfields in Mindoro meant more planes to attack Manila and all the other bases.
Starting on December 15, the Japanese bases were spared much of the beating they had been taking. A typhoon moved into the area and Admiral Halsey’s fleet was caught in it. The result was almost as much damage to the fleet by this Kami Kaze (Heavensent Wind) as the flying Kamikazes had managed in two weeks. A hundred and fifty planes were lost overboard. Half a dozen carriers were damaged, some badly. The destroyers Hull, Monaghan and Spence all sank, with great loss of life. After the big storm Halsey had to retire to Ulithi for repairs to many of his ships.
But on December 30 Admiral Halsey brought the fleet out again, more powerful than ever: fourteen carriers, seven escort carriers, eight battleships, fourteen cruisers, seventy-one destroyers and twenty-five destroyer escorts, plus scores of support ships. It was enough to break Admiral Onishi’s heart, had he known.
Admiral Halsey was heading for Formosa. The theory was that by hitting that island’s airfields hard, he would prevent the Japanese from sending reinforcements to Luzon on or before January 9, D-day for the American landing.
The strike was not really necessary for that purpose. The Japanese had sent their last aerial reinforcements to Clark Field on
Philippine Fadeout
December 23. The defense of the Philippines was about to enter its final stage, the retreat to the mountains.
But before that came, the Kamikazes would have their last fling. It could not be a great fling, however. Admiral Onishi’s favorite unit, the 201st Air Group at Mabalacat, was down to its last forty planes. The units at Cebu, Davao, Clark and Nichols fields had more planes, but there were not a hundred among them.
The army still had several hundred aircraft, but most of these were not organized in Kamikaze units.
THE American force for the invasion of Luzon island began to assemble in Leyte Gulf on January 1. Unit after unit, depending on their speed and their part in the operation, sailed for Luzon. The minesweepers, salvage vessels and LCIs set out first, on January 2.
As they steamed along in Surigao Strait they were sighted by two Japanese search planes from Cebu. The planes attacked, but the Japanese never learned what happened; after radioing his report, neither scout returned.
The news of a major amphibious operation was what Admiral Onishi had been waiting for. He sent orders to all the navy Kamikaze bases that they were to throw everything they had into the battle.
On January 3 six Zeroes took off from Cebu accompanied by a single escort. They attacked transports and their attendant escort carriers south of Negros island. The escort pilot who returned claimed that the planes had sunk one transport and damaged a transport and a destroyer. But the closest they seem to have come was a near miss on the escort carrier Mahin Island.
That was the beginning of the last great Kamikaze operation— or operations—in the Philippines.
The army air force had a much clearer idea of the American strength than the navy. Their scout system seemed to be working better. On January 4 army scouts estimated the American force at six hundred ships with twenty-two carriers.
The Kamikazes
That word spread swiftly through the squadrons. It was apparent that the last battle for the Philippines was approaching, and that the American strength was overwhelming.
On January 4 the weather was not prepossessing, but late in the afternoon a pair of Ginga bombers from Davao took off on a Kamikaze thrust. They found part of the American force as they were coming out of the Sulu Sea. One of the Kamikaze planes got through the combat air patrol and dived into the deck of the escort carrier Ommaney Bay. The only warning the Americans had was a brief rattling of the plane’s machine guns as it came within range. Then the bomber’s wing hit the island structure and the plane cartwheeled into the flight deck.
It was carrying two bombs. One bomb and the fuselage went through the deck into the hangar deck, and the bomb exploded. The second bomb slipped down through the second deck and exploded in the forward engine room.
In moments the carrier was ablaze amidships. The explosions spread to ammunition and bombs on the hangar deck, and when they went up they knocked out the ship’s water mains. Destroyers that came by to play their hoses on the fires were driven away by the exploding ammunition.
Since the fires could not be controlled, Captain H. L. Young ordered the crew to abandon ship. After most of the men had escaped, the fires reached the torpedo stowage on the afterend of the hangar deck, and the torpedoes began to blow up. That was the end of the escort carrier. A hundred and fifty-eight men were killed or wounded.
On January 5 the Japanese army Kamikazes also attacked furiously. General Tomonaga issued an order that all Kamikazes of the Fourth Air Army were to be employed in the coming attack. He got more than he bargained for. In virtually every unit of the air force men clamored to be allowed to go as suicide pilots.
There were far more volunteers than there were planes left to man. In the end the men for the suicide missions had to be chosen by seniority.
The first army attack began early in the morning. The army sent
Philippine Fadeout
about twenty-five planes toward the American force, but they were intercepted by U.S. fighters. When nine were shot down, they turned around and moved over Cape Bolinao to attack from the west.
At noon, Admiral Fukudome ordered a general sortie of all Kamikazes at Clark Field against the transports. Two hours later he ordered all the Kamikazes on Nichols Field to sortie.
An hour later the Mabalacat planes took off. The twenty Ma- balacat planes were luckiest. Although en route one escort and one bomber had to turn back, the others found some American ships about a hundred miles off Corregidor island.
One suicide Zero dived on the cruiser Louisville , hit, and its bomb exploded. For a Kamikaze attack with a direct hit the casualties were light: only one man killed and fifty-nine wounded. But one of the wounded men was the captain of the ship. Even when a Kamikaze did “slight ’ damage, the damage was not really slight.
The Australian cruiser H.M.A.S. Australia received her second bombing of the campaign. A Kamikaze hit her, killing twenty-five men and wounding more.
Another Kamikaze dropped directly in front of the H.M.A.S. Arunta. The force of the explosion was so great that the ship stopped dead in the water, although her engines were going.
There were many other near misses. The fliers from Mabalacat were men of the 201st Air Group, veterans who knew what they were doing. A pair of the Zeroes moved in on the carrier Manila Bay , using Admiral Onishi’s low approach. They came in doing aerobatics, which threw the American gunners’ aim off. Suddenly they climbed to about eight hundred feet, and dived.
One of the suicide planes hit squarely on the flight deck at the base of the island, a bull’s eye. The gunners then got their aim and splashed the second plane. It was a close call. The pilot had made it to within thirty feet of the Manila Bay.
The carrier was lucky. The first plane’s bomb exploded inside the hangar deck, in an area where there were only two planes. The damage was slight, and the damage-control party managed to isolate
The Kamikazes
the fires and extinguish them before they got to other planes or the ammunition.
By Admiral Onishi’s calculations, the Manila Bay ought to have been knocked out of action for at least several weeks. But the Americans responded to the crisis and had the carrier back in operation a day later.
The general army Kamikaze attack was ordered for the evening of January 5. The army planes came in and smashed the destroyer Stafford ; she had to be towed, with two men killed and twelve wounded. Many other ships took slight damage from near misses and caroming hits. The David W. Taylor and the Helm were both damaged. LCI 70 took a Kamikaze aboard which did much more damage.
On the morning of January 6 the army took the initiative, since Admiral Onishi’s Kamikaze air fleet was exhausted. Around 11:30 A.M. about a dozen army planes moved in on the American bombardment force. One near-missed the destroyer Richard P. Leary. One crashed into the bridge of the battleship New Mexico , killing a number of officers and men—including an aide to Prime Minister Winston Churchill—and just missing two admirals.
At about the same time the U.S. destroyer Walke was attacked by four Kamikazes. The gunners shot down two of them, while a third crashed into the bridge. Commander George F. Davis, the captain of the ship, was standing on the bridge directly in the path of the Kamikaze. He was drenched by gasoline and his clothing began to burn until he became a human torch. Officers and men tried desperately to beat out the flames and finally did, but not before the captain was horribly burned. He was calling on his men to save the ship as they shot down the last Kamikaze. They carried him below and tried to treat his burns, but it was no use. He died a few hours later.
There was the full horror of the Kamikaze attack: the planes came in fast as lightning, struck, and what had been a happy ship suddenly became a raging inferno. There was no warning of a bomb screaming down, nor of shells whistling in; none of the recognizable features of honest battle.
Philippine Fadeout
Small wonder that Admiral Onishi had believed the psychological horror of the Kamikazes would get to the Americans. And great wonder that it did not. By and large the officers and the sailors gritted their teeth, cursed, and bore the terror with strength and courage.
The next attack came on a cluster of ships, carried out by five determined Japanese suicide pilots ranging from lieutenant to corporal, from four different units (one with the exotic name The Emperor’s Flowers). The fliers were Chi Iwahira, Bushi Shogawa, Tadaki Okasho, Sukomi Nakamura and Koichiro Takawa. Each man was a volunteer for this final scene in the air battle for the Philippines.
They had taken off together that morning from the Clark Field complex, a part of the volunteer group that now rushed to man the suicide planes. Above the American fleet they began to peel off, one by one. One plane came in on the destroyer A lien M. Sumner , and the pilot steered the plane into the upper structure. The plane cut off two torpedo heads, then crashed into the deckhouse. Forty- three men were killed or injured, and the destroyer was out of the battle. She would spend weeks in the repair yard.
Two more attacking fighters came in low, one of which went after the minesweeper Long . The gunners opened up on the Japanese plane, but the pilot flew through the flak and struck the ship in the side just above the waterline. When she began to flood the captain ordered the men to abandon ship, or the crew thought he did, and in the confusion she was abandoned. Lying helpless, she was fair game for another Kamikaze later in the day and was sunk.
The destroyer transport Brooks was the next target of the Japanese pilots. One of them crashed into her, and she was badly damaged and had to be towed out of the gulf.
Five brave Japanese army pilots died, but they took plenty of company with them. They gave the Americans a day in Lingayen Gulf that U.S. Navy historian Samuel Eliot Morison referred to as “gruesome.”
That same afternoon another flight of Kamikazes lined up on the Clark Field runway. Just as the four planes of the Kuwahara
The Kamikazes
flight were ready to take off in came an air strike from Task Force 38. Three of the planes burned on the runway and their pilots were killed. The fourth plane, piloted by Sergeant Genki Haruhi, managed to fly through a hail of bullets and get into the air safely. The sergeant then made his way alone to Lingayen Gulf, where he crashed into a ship, according to the Japanese record.
The ship might have been the battleship California , which took a Kamikaze aboard that day. The casualties were forty-five men killed and wounded.
WITH the dispatch of the last of the Mabalacat Kamikazes on January 5, Admiral Onishi had shot his bolt. All his units had used up their last planes. Yet, almost as if by magic, the 201st mechanics at Mabalacat field overnight produced five more Zeroes made up from spare parts.
The appearance of five more planes created a problem. First Air Fleet still had pilots aplenty. There was competition and even argument but finally all was sorted out and five grateful pilots took the planes off the ground. When they were gone, Admiral Onishi’s First Air Fleet was truly finished.
The five Kamikazes took off from Mabalacat late on the afternoon of January 6. At about that time Admiral Onishi’s planes began coming in. The cruiser Columbia was near missed by one Kamikaze and hit by a second, which fell through three decks before the bomb exploded. The Kamikaze very nearly got the magazine, which would have meant the end of a fine battleship. As it was, nine compartments were flooded and the ship settled five feet at the stern.
The poor Australia took another Kamikaze that day to become the most picked-on ship in the Allied flotilla (also the staunchest).
The Louisville took another. This time the Japanese did get an admiral. He was Rear Admiral Theodore H. Chandler, who was hit on his flag bridge and so badly burned that he died a few hours later. The Louisville was severely damaged and had to drop out of the fight.
Philippine Fadeout
The destroyer O'Brien was also struck by a Kamikaze. So was the destroyer Southard.
At the end of the day, the American high command had something to worry about. The battle for Luzon had not yet started. The troops still had to land. The U.S. Navy had just suffered the greatest casualties since the bad days of the Guadalcanal campaign. In a single day one ship had been sunk and eleven damaged, some of them desperately.
Admiral Oldendorf, commander of the battle force, warned Admiral Kinkaid, commander of the Seventh Fleet, that when the landings came the Japanese might make life hell for the troops. He called for even heavier air attacks on all Japanese airfields in the Philippines and Formosa and for help from Task Force Thirty- eight to protect the ships.
There was even talk about abandoning the whole expedition and steaming back to Leyte, so great was the shock the Kamikazes gave the Americans that day. And when one added it to the damage of the previous three days, the Kamikaze threat loomed large. Yet, except for whatever the army and Admiral Fukudome had left, there were no more Japanese airplanes in the Philippines. How ironic that just as Admiral Onishi was on the brink of the success he had sought for two months, time ran out on him.
Onishi felt that he, too, was finished. His Kamikazes had not done what he hoped—turn the tide of the Sho Operation. Nor, as far as he could see, had they demoralized the American fleet as he had expected.
He was tired, he was depressed, and he had strong feelings of guilt about all the young men he had sent out to die. He was prepared to follow them, but there was still work to be done. The First Air Fleet still consisted of several thousand men: pilots without planes, staff officers, ground personnel, mechanics, radio operators, weathermen and all the others it took to keep an organization running.
The planes gone, these warriors had no recourse but to fight alongside the army as infantry. Admiral Onishi proposed to stand and fight with them to the death.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN