That the fleet movements directed by Commander THIRD Fleet after bad weather conditions set in on the forenoon of 17 December were logical in view of his war commitments and the manner in which he evaluated the meager weather data he received or had.
—GENERAL OPINION #1 IN THE REPORT ISSUED BY THE
COURT OF INQUIRY INVESTIGATING “HALSEY’S TYPHOON.”
Often overlooked in the distant fog of World War II is the fact that the Japanese attacked the northern Philippine island of Luzon five hours after Admiral Yamamoto’s strike force bombed Pearl Harbor five thousand miles to the east. The Imperial War Department’s primary goal was the capture of the country’s capital, Manila, a chocolate-box colonial city that rises from the eastern shore of Manila Bay, the most excellent natural anchorage in the Pacific. Control of Manila Bay meant control of the South China Sea and the sea-lanes to the oil-rich Dutch East Indies.
Geography is destiny, and within weeks of Manila’s fall, the banner of the Rising Sun—“the flaming red asshole” American troops called it—would be hoisted not only on flagstaffs across the Dutch East Indies, but across French Indochina and British Malaysia as well, until the Japanese were knocking on the back door to India. The “Kimigayo,” the Japanese national anthem, reverberated from Manchuria in the north to New Guinea in the south as the isles of Micronesia and Oceania fell. For a brief spell Imperial troops even garrisoned Attu and Kiska, the two most westerly of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands.
And though the Japanese invasion of the Philippines inflicted nowhere near the psychological blow of Pearl Harbor, it was, arguably, strategically more important. Because America’s aircraft carriers were at sea, the sneak attack on Pearl, for all its devastation, was in the end a debilitating hit-and-run. In the Philippines and elsewhere across the Pacific, however, the enemy would have to be dislodged. Given the Philippines’ cultural relationship with the United States, the Imperial Army’s capture of the islands was as close as Japan would come to occupying contiguous American soil.
Of all the United States’ overseas holdings, the U.S.-Filipino dynamic was the most complex. In essence, by the onset of World War II the U.S. had been the country’s colonial ruler for over four decades, since Spain ceded the territory in the Treaty of Paris following the 1898 Spanish-American War. Having acquired this sprawling archipelago halfway around the world, America didn’t quite know what to do with it, and U.S. occupation forces viciously eradicated more than 200,000 Filipinos in the Orwellian-named Philippine Insurrection. American military commanders directing this operation against the “gugus” tended, in the words of one analyst, “to see the conflict as an extension of the Indian extermination campaigns for which they had been trained.”
When the U.S. military finally subdued the rebellion and gained nominal control of the more than seven thousand islands that constituted the nation, “enlightened colonialism” became the order of the day. American bureaucrats, ministers, and teachers set out to Westernize the indigenous population of 19 million—“our little brown brothers,” as one U.S. governor of Manila, the future American president William Howard Taft, referred to the Filipinos.
Over time, Spanish influence gradually faded as a modern infrastructure of schools, roads, and bridges sprouted, and an Americanstyle market economy took root. If English was not the official lingua franca, it ran a close second to Tagalog. And urban Filipinos, regarded in some quarters as the Irish of Asia for their toughness and voracious appetite for life, gradually grew accustomed to attending movies filmed on America’s West Coast, driving cars constructed in her heartland, and listening to music recorded on her East Coast.
It was against this backdrop that Japan invaded under the pretense of its “Asia for Asiatics” campaign. Although President Roosevelt had promised the Philippines independence by 1946, the Japanese propagandized their landings as an effort “to free you from the bonds of Western colonialism.” They proceeded to plunder the islands’ natural resources, most especially its rubber plantations, and treat the Filipinos as serfs at best, slaves at worst.
Despite warnings of an imminent invasion, the grandiloquent and histrionic Gen. Douglas MacArthur, field marshal of the combined American-Filipino army, was caught unawares when the Japanese landed. (Due to the country’s location across the International Date Line, the invasion is officially listed as having occurred on December 8, 1941, east longitude date.) The son of a Civil War general who became the first military governor of the Philippines, MacArthur had amassed a sterling service record since graduating West Point in 1903 at the head of his class and was destined to become the most decorated officer in the history of the United States military.
MacArthur had been sent to the Philippines by Roosevelt in 1935 to organize the country’s defense and stayed on after retiring in 1937 to become military adviser to President Manuel Quezon. Recalled to active duty just months before the war, he felt betrayed by Washington, and Roosevelt in particular, when no American reinforcements arrived to stave off the invading Japanese.
Within three days of Japan’s initial strike, Imperial Navy bombers and fighter planes destroyed most of the U.S. aircraft stationed on Luzon, the country’s largest island. As forty-three thousand troops from the Fourteenth Imperial Army rolled south, American and Filipino soldiers fought a rearguard action, awaiting the arrival of the U.S. Fleet at Pearl Harbor. This, needless to say, would not occur. MacArthur despaired as he holed up in his Manila hotel, the shock of events leaving him unable or unwilling to react. He fled finally to a bunker on Corregidor, “The Rock,” at the mouth of Manila Bay.
Issuing directives from his bombproof stronghold deep beneath the earth, “Dashing Doug” became “Dugout Doug,” complete with mocking limericks composed by embittered American troops. Notwithstanding his much-publicized vow to return, MacArthur’s vaunted “swaggerstick style” was nowhere in evidence when, in March 1942, he was evacuated by PT boat and submarine to Australia. One month later, their backs to the sea at the southern tip of Luzon’s Bataan Peninsula, the largest surrender in American history occurred. Seventy-six thousand soldiers, including close to 12,000 Americans, laid down their arms.
The Philippines was merely the first of the domino tiles to fall before the advancing forces of Dai Nippon. Years of complacency strewn with contempt by the Western powers for Japanese fighting men—thought to be stunted, nearsighted, and generally frail—now brought a cruel reckoning of defeat after defeat. Hong Kong. Singapore. Kuala Lumpur. Rangoon. Port Moresby. Rabaul. All felt the lash of the whip from a nation no larger than the state of California. With the U.S. Pacific Fleet crippled at Pearl Harbor, Japan ruled the seas.
Worse, to their horror, Allied military commanders realized that the Mitsubishi A6M1 fighter plane, the fearsome, agile Zero, was faster and more maneuverable than anything the United States could throw into the sky. With bitter irony, U.S. Army Air Force pilots noted that the Zero’s design had largely followed specs first developed by the American pioneer aviator Howard Hughes.
On December 8, 1941, President Roosevelt addressed the nation in a radio broadcast, vowing, “No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.” Considering the speed and ease with which the Japanese empire was expanding, this struck Roosevelt’s staggered countrymen as an overly optimistic assessment. More citizens tended to agree when he added, “There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger.”
Yet despite Japan’s seeming invincibility, as early as October 1942, while U.S. Marines and Japanese soldiers were still fighting to exterminate one another on Guadalcanal, CINCPAC Nimitz sensed that the U.S. was already winning a grinding war of attrition across the Pacific. Japan had a robust, if limited, manufacturing capability, and its capture of the resource-rich territories enveloping the South China Sea certainly upgraded that facility. But within a year of the attack on Pearl Harbor the United States was simply outproducing the rest of the combined world in ships, planes, weapons—and martial ideas.
A writer once observed that war is God’s way of teaching Americans geography, and certainly the ensuing rolling D-days on unpronounceable specks of coral and sand from Tarawa to Kwajalein to Eniwetok to Tinian to Peleliu left every U.S. sailor, soldier, and airman fighting across these alien shores with a map of the Pacific embossed in his psyche. At bottom, however, the island-hopping raids and landings had one common goal: the retaking of the Philippines as a springboard from which to launch the invasion of Japan.
Moreover, unlike the great land battles being fought against the Nazis in Africa and Europe, the Pacific Theater was and would remain primarily a naval and air campaign. The Japanese may have occupied far-flung islands, but they still needed to supply them. Without realizing it, the enemy had disastrously exceeded its bite/chew ratio. As such, Nimitz exhorted his admirals never to shy from taking the “calculated risks” that would decimate the enemy’s land, sea, and air forces.
These daring forays had already resulted in stunning victories at the Battles of the Coral Sea and Midway as well as a humiliating American defeat at the Battle of Savo Island. One fact was clear: The age of the dreadnought had given way to the epoch of the aircraft carrier, and the era when battleships were cheaper than battles was over. The continuing, if bloody, U.S. advances across the Pacific were thus marked by recurring carrier attacks in conjunction with amphibious Marine Corps landings on an ever-widening range of targets.
To that end, a two-pronged series of U.S. land, sea, and air attacks inexorably began to sap both Imperial manpower and material. In the south, MacArthur was planning to jump from Australia to New Guinea, and send his Sixth Army through dense jungle over the Owen Stanley Mountains to the island’s northern coast, thus freeing Australia from the threat of invasion. In the Central Pacific, Nimitz had already successfully landed his Marines on Tarawa in the Gilberts chain, providing—despite the carnage that horrified an American public—valuable lessons for future amphibious landings.
Moreover, as America scrambled to get its armaments factories up and running, it instinctively drew upon its own pioneering military history, increasingly utilizing a hit-and-run strategy that had worked splendidly a century and a half earlier, when a ragtag collection of eastern seaboard colonials had overthrown the professional armies of a monolithic British crown. These bold strokes ranged from Burma—where Brig. Gen. Frank Merrill’s aptly named Marauders emulated the guerrilla tactics of the Revolutionary War’s Rogers’ Rangers—to New Guinea, where MacArthur’s army commanders transformed a rough-hewn battalion of mule skinners made redundant by mechanized warfare into the 6th Ranger Battalion, the first American Rangers in the Pacific Theater.
This concept of guerrilla warfare was not limited to land. On the high seas, Nimitz’s agenda of “calculated risks” resulted in the formation of fast, stealthy destroyer squadrons that were designed to not only surprise and confuse the enemy, but overburden the Imperial Navy’s ability to protect its supply lines and shipping lanes. And no group was to transform the concept of destroyer tactics in a more dramatic fashion than the notorious “Little Beavers” of Destroyer Squadron 23, placed under Halsey’s command in June 1943.
Within six months of arriving at Halsey’s headquarters at Noumea, on New Caledonia, the eight destroyers of DesRon 23—consisting of the newer and faster Fletcher-class vessels—delighted Halsey with their ability to “Kill more Japs.” Sailing under the command of the innovative naval strategist and tactician Capt. Arleigh “31-Knot” Burke, the Little Beavers were the only destroyer squadron in World War II awarded a group Presidential Unit Citation for “extraordinary heroism.”
Burke managed to fuse the individual vessels and their crews into an offensive unit that took the preconceived notions of destroyer capability—patrol, escort, and submarine screening—beyond the ken of most navy brass. (Burke personally adopted the insignia of the bow and arrow–wielding Little Beaver, sidekick to the popular comic strip character Red Ryder, after noticing a torpedo man’s artwork decorating his tin fish tubes aboard the destroyer USS Claxton.)
As their ghostly attacks mounted—off the Carolines, off Truk, off Guam—to the Japanese it must have appeared that the aggressive Little Beavers were everywhere and nowhere. Typical was their encounter with a Japanese troop transport squadron, a Tokyo Express out of Rabaul delivering soldiers to defend Buka Island in the Solomons.
“Thirty-One-Knot Burke, get athwart the Buka-Rabaul evacuation line,” came Halsey’s orders. “If enemy contacted, you know what to do.” He did. The Little Beavers sank three destroyers, including a troop transport, in a battle Halsey deemed “the Trafalgar of the Pacific.” The engagement is studied to this day at the U.S. Naval War College.
The forty-three-year-old Burke—whose nickname indicated his desire and ability to lead his ships in spectacular dashes at boiler-bursting speed—was an Academy graduate whose doctrine of independent destroyer actions not only baffled the enemy, but laid foundation to the idea of the “Tin Can Navy,” a “destroyer service” physically and metaphorically distinct from the U.S. Navy. This notion was captured in the esprit de corps depicted in a letter written by Ens. Vincent McClelland, a twenty-three-year-old assistant gunnery officer aboard the DD USS Spence, a member of DesRon 23. Admiral Nimitz had personally awarded the square-jawed McClelland, recently the captain of the Yale football team, a citation for “meritorious and efficient” actions off Kavieng in February 1944. But the tribute seemed to embarrass the officer.
“I am enclosing the commendation,” McClelland wrote his parents matter-of-factly at the end of the letter. “I feel badly about it because it was not deserved. If I rated one, everybody on board did, too.”
If McClelland was the kind of fighting man the United States was turning out to throw against the Japanese, then typical of the new machines America was also producing was his ship, the destroyer Spence, a vessel destined to play a major role in the most devastating natural disaster the United States Navy was ever to suffer.
Commissioned in early 1943 and named after a nineteenth-century master commandant from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, who had chased pirates from the Caribbean Sea to the Barbary Coast, the 2,050-ton Spence had been attached early in the war to the Atlantic Fleet to run convoys to Casablanca. In July she was reassigned to the Pacific, where she joined the Little Beavers. Her service record was striking. Awarded eight battle stars in addition to the Presidential Unit Citation, she was the flagship of a destroyer division that sank twenty Japanese landing barges during the invasion of the Solomons; a month later with the rest of the Little Beavers she’d covered the landings on the Treasury Islands and at Bougainville.
It was during the Bougainville invasion that a case of mistaken identity on a starless night provided one of the classic ripostes of the war. After being sideswiped by fellow DesRon 23 member USS Thatcher during the heat of the Battle of Empress Augusta Bay, the Spence was limping home under blackout conditions when her crew was rattled by a shower of shells falling about her from the direction of her own picket lines. Her skipper, Comdr. Bernard L. Austin, raced for the TBS phone and shouted frantically to Arleigh Burke, “We’ve just had a close miss! Hope you are not shooting at us!”
“Sorry,” came Burke’s reply. “But you’ll have to excuse the next four salvos already on their way.”
Burke’s second bombardment narrowly missed the Spence, and in her haste to take evasive action she happened upon the wounded Japanese destroyer Hatsukaze. Her gunners ran out of ammunition pouring shells and torpedoes into the flaming wreck. Several days later her battle-hardened crew bore witness to one of the more grisly acts of the war, a telling indication of the lengths to which the Japanese were willing to go in the furtherance of their samurai cause.
Sighting a makeshift raft that appeared to have several dead men strewn across it, the Spence closed to investigate. Her lookouts counted seven enemy soldiers, and as the destroyer neared, suddenly they all stood and began shouting in Japanese. One, apparently an officer, produced a machine pistol. He passed it in quick succession to each man, who put the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger. One man seemed reluctant, and two others held him down while the officer shot him. Now only the officer remained. After a brief, passionate speech directed toward the Americans, he, too, blew his brains out of the back of his skull and tumbled into the now-shark-infested waters. The entire event took five minutes.
In March 1944 the gallant Little Beavers of DesRon 23, the only destroyers granted the honor of flying the swallow-tailed blue, yellow, and red burgee signifying their Presidential Unit Citation, were disbanded and reassigned to Halsey’s carrier fleet. Although Commodore Burke was appointed chief of staff to Vice Adm. Marc Mitscher’s carrier division, a step along the path that would eventually lead him to his postwar position as America’s chief of naval operations, he complained bitterly that “somebody was trying to railroad me out of these lovely destroyers.”
Not long after the Little Beavers were reassigned, the near-simultaneous U.S. invasions of Saipan, Tinian, and Guam in the Marianas chain—dubbed Operation Forager—opened a new phase in American warfighting. The island chain lay just twelve hundred miles southeast of Tokyo, and as one U.S. infantry general predicted prior to the assaults, “We are through with flat atolls. … Now we’re up against mountains and caves where Japs can dig in. A week from now there will be a lot of dead Marines.”
His words proved prescient. Such was the slaughter on both sides—22,000 Japanese civilians on Saipan committed suicide after the island’s fall—that Japan’s prime minister Hideki Tojo was replaced by Kuniaki Koiso, considered a “moderate” politician. It did not go unnoticed in Tokyo that in addition to landing 127,000 Americans in the Marianas, the United States possessed the manpower to fight on concurrent fronts ranging from Italy to China to France to New Guinea.
More important, the Marianas were close enough to the Japanese mainland to draw out a probing Imperial Fleet. The subsequent engagement—known in history books as the Battle of the Philippine Sea but remembered by the American sailors and airmen who fought it as the “Marianas Turkey Shoot”—resulted in a stupendous U.S. victory as well as one of the great controversies to this point in the war. When American sailors took Admiral Halsey’s side in the ongoing, intramural Halsey-Spruance debate, it was often Spruance’s actions during the Marianas Turkey Shoot to which they pointed. (Months later, of course, Spruance’s defenders would only have to mention the Battle for Leyte Gulf to impugn Halsey.)
On June 17 scout planes from Spruance’s Fifth Fleet spotted the Japanese Mobile Fleet of five separate flotillas, each anchored by an aircraft carrier, 350 miles west of the Marianas chain. Spruance’s carrier commander, Vice Admiral Mitscher, argued that to attack was the only reasonable recourse. The enemy’s Mobile Fleet accounted for 90 percent of Japan’s combined naval forces. America could put the Japanese navy out of commission then and there. But Spruance demurred, citing his orders from Nimitz to protect the men and vessels taking part in the landings on Saipan.
The next day the Japanese commander, Adm. Jisaburo Ozawa, sent four waves of assault planes against Spruance’s task force. In perhaps the most lopsided victory of the war, American pilots destroyed 243 of the 373 bogeys, and U.S. submarines sank two Japanese carriers. Two days later Mitscher finally prevailed upon Spruance to be allowed to hunt down what was left of the enemy’s ships. His four carrier groups launched 216 planes in eleven minutes, which destroyed another 150 enemy aircraft and sank a third Japanese carrier.
Though a stunning tactical victory—despite the fact that eighty of Mitscher’s returning planes crashed during a risky night carrier landing—in strategic terms the Battle of the Philippine Sea proved alarming. Though Imperial naval power had suffered irreparable damage, most especially to its experienced carrier pilots, the bulk of Ozawa’s vessels, including six crucial carriers, managed to escape Mitscher’s airmen. In addition, Japan now realized that the noose was tightening and that its conventional air strength would never recover. Its leaders began to contemplate far more desperate measures of defense. To this point in the war, few if any Americans were familiar with the word kamikaze.
Meanwhile, one of the ships taking part in the Marianas Turkey Shoot had been the destroyer Spence, whose crew by now was as well traveled as any of Cook’s or Magellan’s. For her actions during the battle the Spence received her eighth battle star and subsequently sailed on to bombard the Mariana Islands themselves. In August she was sent to San Francisco’s Hunters Point Naval Shipyard for overhaul, from which she returned to the Pacific Theater with a new captain and an almost completely remanned crew to spend the next ten weeks screening Halsey’s carriers.
Just prior to her brief dry dock, one of the holdover crewmen, Assistant Gunnery Officer Ens. Vincent McClelland, again took pen in hand, this time to write to his brother, a U.S. Army Air Force officer.
“We have seen every kind of action there is and come through unscathed,” he wrote. “The machine guns have a couple of planes to their credit now. The past two weeks are sort of a long blur to me. We have stood so many nights at General Quarters that we are about done in. To start it off—in the space of 24 hours we made two shore bombardments, took part in the longest night surface action of the war, and underwent an all-out air attack. Oh—I forgot—we also had a collision during the same spell and had a five-inch shell hit us just below the water line. I guess it all sounds unbelievable, and it certainly seems so to me. All in all life isn’t too bad. Bird men such as you really have the life. … Still I wouldn’t swap. The fightin’ Spence is plenty good enough for me. I really think she is one of the best cans afloat.”
With sailors such as Vincent McClelland under his command, Halsey’s confidence in America’s ultimate victory comes into sharper focus. The invasion of the Philippine Island of Luzon, and the recapture of Manila, loomed. For that success to be realized, however, the United States would not only need to overcome a fanatical human enemy, but also face the voracious natural phenomena of the Pacific’s vast, uncharted seas.
This was not lost on Ensign McClelland’s family, who noted that the poignant remarks in the final letter they would ever receive from him were postmarked November 15, 1944—one month before he would drown off the coast of Mindoro during what was soon to become known as “Halsey’s Typhoon.”