No matter their level of competence, most great commanders are blessed with a certain amount of luck. In 1944, one needed to look no further than recent experiences in the current conflict to support that. Commanders make educated decisions based on facts, experience, and gut-level instinct, but at some point, a willingness to roll the dice takes over. Dwight Eisenhower faced such a moment weighing the weather odds before Normandy. Chester Nimitz had a similar moment before Midway, trusting American intelligence and dispatching Fletcher and Spruance to Point Luck. If luck seems too casual a term, if serendipity too flighty, then call it the vagaries of war. Those vagaries were about to descend on Bill Halsey.
Having spent twenty months in command of the South Pacific Area, Halsey was reassigned to command the Third Fleet. This force was essentially Spruance’s Fifth Fleet. As the Central Pacific drive gained steam, King and Nimitz devised a command rotation between Spruance and Halsey so that while one admiral and his staff were at sea executing current operations—as Spruance did that summer in the Marianas—the other was at Pearl Harbor planning the next operation. It didn’t hurt matters that the use of different fleet numbers for essentially the same forces added a level of confusion for Japanese intelligence. As Halsey put it, “Instead of the stagecoach system of keeping the drivers and changing the horses, we changed drivers and kept the horses.”1
As Halsey left the South Pacific command on June 15, 1944, he bade his officers and men an emotional farewell. Halsey told them that if a shoulder patch was ever designed for those who had served with him during those lean months, he wanted it to show three things: “a piece of string, a can of beans and a rusty nail.”2 Sending Halsey his own farewell, Douglas MacArthur assured him that it was “with deepest regret we see you and your splendid staff go” and called him “a great sailor, a determined commander, and a loyal comrade.”3
After an official transmittal of the command change, Halsey replied to MacArthur on a personal level. “You and I have had tough sledding with the enemy,” Halsey acknowledged, but “my own personal dealings with you have been so completely satisfactory that I will always feel a personal regard and warmth over and above my professional admiration.”4 A few months later, MacArthur, loyal to a fault, would stand by Halsey when Halsey’s luck was sorely tested.
In the interim, the time had finally come for the ruler to summon the pretender. Franklin D. Roosevelt, as commander in chief, ordered MacArthur, who had not seen Roosevelt or been in the United States since 1937, to meet with him in Honolulu. MacArthur had successfully avoided other top-level conferences by sending minions and pleading the impossibility of an absence from his headquarters. But he could not ignore this direct order from the president.
Besides, this might well be MacArthur’s best chance to force the issue of Pacific strategy beyond the Marianas. King and Nimitz were promoting a stab directly westward to Formosa and an eventual linkup with mainland China, bypassing the Philippines in the process. MacArthur, who had vowed in 1942 that he would return to the Philippines, was still as determined as ever to do just that—and not via Formosa.
On the evening of July 13, 1944, Roosevelt and Leahy left Washington by train for Hyde Park. As always, their itinerary and final destination were well-kept secrets. The presidential train arrived on the west bank of the Hudson opposite FDR’s beloved Springwood in time for breakfast the next morning, followed by an inspection of progress on the adjacent Roosevelt Presidential Library.
“After a pleasant day,” the presidential party reboarded the Ferdinand Magellan at 6:30 p.m., bound for California. Along with FDR, Eleanor Roosevelt, Leahy, and “the usual communication and Secret Service personnel” were military aide Pa Watson, naval aide Wilson Brown, the indispensable Grace Tully, and both Rear Admiral Ross McIntire, the president’s physician, and Commander Howard G. Bruenn, a young cardiologist who had also been attending the president in recent months.5
But there was to be an intermediate stop before reaching California. The presidential special roared west from Albany on New York Central tracks and shortly after noon on July 15 pulled into Chicago, where the party faithful were gathering for the upcoming Democratic National Convention. Only four days before, after what seemed an interminable period of either indifference or shrewdness that had frozen out any serious challengers, Roosevelt had finally acknowledged at a press conference that he would accept his party’s nomination for a fourth term.6
He would not be denied, of course, and that left open only the question of a vice presidential candidate. The current vice president, Henry Wallace, had fallen out of favor with Roosevelt and the Democratic Party establishment for his increasingly eccentric views. Contenders as replacements included Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas and James F. Byrnes, the former South Carolina congressman and senator who had become FDR’s domestic policy guru and, some said, almost an “assistant president” for the home front.
Leahy seems to have heavily favored Byrnes at that time, and in various conversations with Roosevelt, “he frequently slipped in a strong recommendation for his favorable consideration of Byrnes.” On the trip from Hyde Park to Chicago there was certainly no shortage of speculation, and the president’s party “talked frequently about our preferences for the second highest post—that is, all of us except the President himself.”
The stay in Chicago was short, and even before the convention convened the president’s special was westbound from Chicago. FDR announced to his fellow travelers the “surprising information that he had recommended Senator Harry Truman” for the vice presidential nomination. Except for Truman’s work investigating national defense issues, Leahy confessed he “knew almost nothing about him.”7
Arriving in San Diego, Roosevelt and his party spent two days watching amphibious landing exercises while the Chicago convention convened and went about the process of renominating him. On July 21, after Truman’s nomination for vice president was also in place, Roosevelt boarded the cruiser Baltimore. The president settled into the captain’s cabin, and Leahy occupied the flag officer’s cabin. Then, because it was a Friday, the Baltimore “waited after midnight to sail from San Diego.”8
Five days later, at 3:00 p.m. on July 26, after a voyage Leahy termed “without incident” and accompanied by generally pleasant weather, the Baltimore docked alongside a seawall within the confines of Pearl Harbor. Nimitz and the hierarchy of the Pacific Fleet immediately went aboard to pay their respects. But where was Douglas MacArthur?
The general had left Brisbane the day before in his personal B-17, named Bataan, and made a twenty-six-hour flight from Brisbane across the Pacific to land at Hickam Field on Oahu about an hour before the Baltimore docked. Upcoming strategy session aside, MacArthur spent most of the flight pacing the aisle and grumbling about the “humiliation of forcing me to leave my command to fly to Honolulu for a political picture-taking junket.” There was certainly to be some of that, but as usual MacArthur proceeded to top all comers when it came to the theatrical.
Just as Roosevelt, Leahy, Nimitz, and their entourage were disembarking from the Baltimore for shore accommodations, the terrific wail of a siren filled the dockside. A long open car with a motorcycle escort swept into view, did a circling lap around the dock, and came to a stop at the foot of the Baltimore’s gangplank. In the car were a chauffeur in khakis and one lone figure in the backseat in a battered cap and leather flying jacket, despite the summer heat of Hawaii. There was no mistaking Douglas MacArthur.
He had taken the opportunity to stop by his guest quarters to take a bath—understandable after a full day in the air—but by lingering there, he had clearly picked the perfect moment of entrance for the maximum attention. MacArthur stepped smartly from the automobile and strode up the gangplank to a thunderous ovation.
Never one to be upstaged, Roosevelt greeted MacArthur warmly. Leahy, whose relationship with MacArthur went back nearly forty years to “when as young officers we had good times together in San Francisco,” remarked dryly, “Douglas, why don’t you wear the right kind of clothes when you come up here to see us?” Disregarding his time in the bath, MacArthur gestured to the heavens and replied, “Well, you haven’t been where I came from, and it’s cold up there in the sky.”9
In the morning, MacArthur’s suspicions about a political motive for the trip were confirmed when Roosevelt squeezed the general and Nimitz into the back of the same open car that MacArthur had just used and, with Leahy in front with the chauffeur, set off on a whirlwind tour of Oahu military installations. Nimitz later maintained that there were only two open cars in all of Honolulu: one belonged to a well-known madam and the other was the fire chief’s bright red vehicle. The chief’s was chosen because riding in the madam’s vehicle might have serious repercussions.10
MacArthur was long past being a viable presidential candidate—in 1944, at least—but he still held considerable sway in Republican circles, as well as being genuinely popular with the American public at large. Shrewd Roosevelt had weighed the political benefits of either appearing before a partisan crowd at his nominating convention or being seen in the field as commander in chief in the company of two of the most popular military heroes of the day—MacArthur and Nimitz. It was an easy choice.
Political cartoonist Jim Berryman caught the mood when he depicted MacArthur, Nimitz, and a vibrant-looking FDR with “Commander-in-Chief” on his sleeve seated at a table labeled “Pacific War Council.” MacArthur and Nimitz are looking over their shoulders at another FDR leaning jauntily against a palm tree, cigarette holder in hand and lei around his neck, while his hat reads “Democratic Nominee.” “Oh, don’t mind him, gentlemen,” FDR’s commander in chief character says. “He just came along to get away from politics!”11
As usual, the press paid Leahy little mind during these tours, but Halsey added additional star power when he joined the group for dinner. Only after that did the serious discussions begin, with only Roosevelt, Leahy, MacArthur, and Nimitz in the living room of a Waikiki residence that was bedecked with maps. FDR addressed MacArthur first: “Well, Douglas, where do we go from here?” With pointer in hand, MacArthur jabbed at a huge map of the Pacific and replied, “Mindanao, Mr. President, then Leyte—and then Luzon.”12
With MacArthur arguing the Philippines alternative, it was left to Nimitz to put forward the case for Formosa. In a session that lasted until midnight and then continued the following morning, Nimitz and MacArthur took turns congenially debating the pros and cons of each plan.
King had long favored an invasion of Formosa as the most effective means of severing the flow of natural resources between the East Indies and Japan. American submarines had certainly choked that supply line, but King wanted it cut completely with a fleet presence in Formosa. Having leaped to the Marianas, Nimitz was convinced that he could make the jump to Formosa, although his lines of communication and supply would be squeezed between Okinawa to the north and Luzon to the south. Somewhere along that line, such a thrust was bound to precipitate a final pitched battle with the Japanese fleet.
King, by the way, had just departed Hawaii after his visit to Saipan with Nimitz, and in fact flew over the Baltimore on his way east. He was not invited to attend the conference, nor were the other members of the Joint Chiefs, Marshall and Arnold, who had accompanied the president to all the other important strategy conferences. With the breakout from the Normandy beachhead just under way, it might be said that Marshall, Arnold, and King were busy winning the war, while the president was indeed indulging in political posturing with his two high-profile field commanders.
King’s views on the Honolulu conference were summed up by the subtitle of the corresponding section in his autobiography: “President Roosevelt Intervenes in Pacific Strategy.” King also recounted that a few weeks before the Pearl Harbor conference, Leahy came into his office and asked that the navy stop using the long-held title “Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet” (or Atlantic Fleet) and simply say “Commander, Pacific Fleet.” King asked if this was an order, and the deft Leahy replied that it was not, nor was it even a request, but he knew the president “would like to have it done.” King said he would gladly follow a direct order but otherwise would take it under advisement. He did, and did nothing, but there was at least the inference in the discussion that FDR was determined that any reference to “commander in chief” be only to him.13
There is some evidence that the final decision between the Philippines and Formosa was more political than military. Supposedly, MacArthur managed to corner FDR alone for ten minutes and chastise him that bypassing the Philippines, with its millions of friendly inhabitants, under American protection since the Spanish-American War, would foster a “most complete resentment against you at the polls this fall.” In any event, Roosevelt went to bed that evening demanding an aspirin and grumbling, “In all my life nobody has ever talked to me the way MacArthur did.”14
By the time MacArthur departed after the morning conference on the third day, FDR, on the issue of Formosa versus the Philippines, was leaning toward the latter. King later felt that Nimitz let him down in his arguments for Formosa. In reality, Roosevelt may well have already decided to placate MacArthur before Nimitz spoke. In either event, the Joint Chiefs continued to debate the issue for another month before a final decision was made in favor of the Philippines. When it was, Leahy strongly supported that route because he thought it was “of a more conservative nature at a lesser cost of lives” than an attack against Formosa or Kyushu.15
As usual, it was Leahy who painted a serene picture of the Honolulu scene: “After so much loose talk in Washington, where the mention of the name of MacArthur seemed to generate more heat than light,” Leahy recalled, “it was both pleasant and very informative to have these two men [MacArthur and Nimitz] who had been pictured as antagonists calmly present their differing views to the Commander-in-Chief.”16
On Saturday, July 29, the day after MacArthur departed, Roosevelt again toured military facilities and then lunched at Nimitz’s quarters—hastily revamped to accommodate the president’s wheelchair. After lunch, they made a tour of the five-thousand-bed Aiea Naval Hospital and returned to the president’s temporary residence so that Roosevelt could hold a late afternoon press conference.
Roosevelt expressed satisfaction at seeing his commanders and noted that whenever and however the invasion of the Philippines came about, General MacArthur would “take a part in it.” As for Leahy, he recorded in his diary that evening perhaps an even greater strategy issue than the Formosa versus Philippines debate.
“Their agreement on the fundamental strategy that should be employed in bringing defeat to Japan,” wrote Leahy of MacArthur and Nimitz, “and the President’s familiarity therewith acquired at this conference, will be of the greatest value to me in preventing an unnecessary invasion of Japan.” The planning staffs of the Joint Chiefs and the War Department had been advocating just such a preparation, “regardless of the loss of life,” and Leahy was decidedly opposed to a ground invasion.
While Leahy admitted that General MacArthur “seems to be chiefly interested in retaking the Philippines,” he was convinced that both MacArthur and Nimitz “are in agreement with me… that Japan can be forced to accept our terms of surrender by the use of sea and air power without an invasion of the Japanese homeland.”
With that, the president’s party reboarded the Baltimore and sailed east. “I look forward to little of value in the remainder of our scheduled cruise on the Baltimore,” Leahy noted, “but the entire journey has already been fully justified by our conferences with MacArthur and Nimitz in Honolulu.” Just where the Baltimore was headed was once again a closely guarded secret.17
Meanwhile, despite his public pronouncements of support for Spruance after the Battle of the Philippine Sea, Admiral King was personally “disappointed in the results” and reiterated to Nimitz, “If an opportunity arises or can be contrived to destroy a major part of the main Japanese fleet, this becomes the primary objective.”18
This emphasis on engaging ships was hardly new. In May 1943, Nimitz had bemoaned that a Japanese cruiser had been damaged but left on a reef and permitted to escape despite Nimitz’s request to MacArthur for his planes to finish it off. “As you well know,” Nimitz told Halsey then, “ships, combatant and merchant type, are still our prime objective for all kinds of strikes.”19
The Japanese were about to oblige such an opportunity, and making the most of it was certainly Bill Halsey’s priority as he sailed west from Pearl Harbor on August 24 in the battleship New Jersey, ultimately to cover MacArthur’s landings in the Philippines. Two days later, command of the fleet officially passed from Spruance to Halsey.
Halsey’s choice of the New Jersey as his flagship is interesting, particularly in light of later events. His “first inclination” had been to pick a carrier because, he said, “I had spent so many years in them that I would have felt more at home there than in anything but a destroyer, which was now too rough for my old age [emphasis added].” But, Halsey worried, the carriers would be particularly vulnerable to attack, and “we could not afford to risk having flag functions interrupted by battle damage.”
That left the new Iowa-class battleships, the only big ships that could match the speed of the 32-knot carriers. During the Marianas campaign, Halsey had dispatched observers to Spruance’s flag plot on Indianapolis, Marc Mitscher’s flag carrier, and several battleships, and the result of this review of efficiency was that his staff was able to craft a flag plot on the New Jersey that Halsey called “the best in the fleet.”20
By the time Halsey rendezvoused with Mitscher’s fast carrier task force—now numbered Task Force 38, instead of 58, to account for the Fifth Fleet becoming the Third Fleet—Mitscher’s planes had been blanketing the Palau Islands and Mindanao in the Philippines. Running out of enemy resistance, Halsey ordered strikes in the central Philippines as well. Over the course of three days in early September, the sixteen carriers of Task Force 38 launched more than 3,000 sorties that shot down 173 Japanese planes, destroyed another 305 on the ground, and caused havoc to shipping—all with minimal losses. This set Halsey to thinking.
MacArthur’s invasion of the Philippines via Mindanao was scheduled for November 15, with landings at Leyte in the central Philippines to follow by December 20. In the meantime, Nimitz’s Central Pacific forces were to seize the intermediary islands of Peleliu and Angaur in the Palaus on the same day that MacArthur landed on Morotai, halfway between New Guinea and Mindanao. But if these outer defenses were protecting a largely empty shell in the central Philippines, why not strike directly to the heart of the matter and invade Leyte instead of Mindanao, expediting the timetable and bypassing the outlying resistance in the process?
Halsey sat in the corner of the flag bridge of the New Jersey chain-smoking cigarettes and mulling it over. Dare he recommend such a move to Nimitz? Finally, the admiral summoned his chief of staff and told him, “I’m going to stick my neck out. Send an urgent dispatch to CINCPAC.”21
The invasion of Peleliu was only forty-eight hours away and intended to coincide with MacArthur’s strike at Morotai. Nimitz agreed with Halsey about striking Leyte directly, but the tightness of the Peleliu invasion was vexing. Eighteen thousand men of the veteran First Marine Division and another eleven thousand from the Eighty-first Infantry Division were on board transports headed for the island. They might have been recalled, but such an action would have clogged the endless supply lines that were by now pouring men and materiel into the Pacific. Nimitz fretted but decided to go ahead with the landings. After Peleliu proved to be heavily fortified with a system of limestone caves, the operation turned into another bloody Tarawa for the First Marines and became one of Nimitz’s more controversial decisions.
But meanwhile, Nimitz flashed Halsey’s suggestion about Leyte to King, who was in Quebec with his fellow Joint Chiefs attending yet another strategy session with Roosevelt and Churchill. General Marshall was reluctant to make such a momentous decision without input from MacArthur, but MacArthur was on board the cruiser Nashville under radio silence en route to the invasion of Morotai. His alter ego and chief of staff, Richard Sutherland, made the decision in MacArthur’s absence and wired a hearty concurrence in MacArthur’s name.
This message reached the Joint Chiefs in Quebec while they were attending a formal dinner given by Canadian officers in their honor. When a staff officer interrupted, Leahy, Marshall, King, and Arnold excused themselves and “left the table for a conference.” Ninety minutes after the message was received, orders were en route to MacArthur and Nimitz to execute the Leyte operations on October 20. “Having the utmost confidence in General MacArthur, Admiral Nimitz, and Admiral Halsey,” Marshall later wrote, “it was not a difficult decision to make.”22
With the invasion of Leyte moved up, Halsey led the Third Fleet northwest toward Formosa—not for purposes of an invasion, but to neutralize airfields there and prevent reinforcements from reaching the Philippines. The American carrier pilots were becoming so proficient—and Japan was running out of top-line fliers—that the Formosa raid achieved great success. But then Halsey’s dreaded Friday the thirteenth jinx struck at sea.
Since young Bill’s rescue, Halsey’s phobia had been dormant, but on the evening of October 13, as the Third Fleet was retiring eastward from Formosa, the American heavy cruiser Canberra (CA-70) was hit by an aerial torpedo and went dead in the water. Halsey faced the decision to abandon the ship and either sink it, or take it under tow. He chose the latter and prepared “to fight our way out” at the agonizingly slow speed of four knots.
This was not all bad, because although the Canberra became an easy target for the remaining Japanese aircraft, the combat air patrols from Halsey’s carriers shot down many of them. But late on the evening of October 14, another aerial torpedo found its mark in the light cruiser Houston (CL-81). Now Halsey had two cripples on his hands. Both of these cruisers were namesakes of other ships sunk earlier in the war, in 1942—the Australian heavy cruiser HMAS Canberra (D-33) in the Battle of Savo Island, and the American heavy cruiser Houston (CA-30) near Java.
Halsey was now faced with abandoning two ships or continuing to tow the cruisers eastward. At first, he was inclined “to sink them and run beyond the range of the Japs’ shore-based air before a worse disaster struck us.” But then his chief of staff and operations officer suggested using the crippled cruisers as bait to lure out a heavier concentration of Japanese ships. If they could do so, it would provide them with an opportunity to destroy “a major portion of the enemy fleet” per their orders.
Halsey dispatched two of his carrier groups to lurk just outside of the range of enemy patrol planes and the other two to pound airfields on Luzon. Meanwhile, the Canberra and Houston and their escorts were designated “the Bait Division” and told to keep up a steady stream of distress messages.
Japanese planes continued to attack the cruisers with detrimental results because of the combat air patrols, but no major concentration of Japanese warships appeared. By the time the Bait Division was safely out of range and bound for the navy’s new forward base at Ulithi, Halsey’s attention was focused on MacArthur’s landings on Leyte. It would soon become clear that part of the reason the Japanese did not take Halsey’s proffered bait was that they were baiting a trap of their own.23
After two years of a steady erosion of its position across the Pacific, the Imperial Japanese Navy was desperately seeking another Tsushima-type victory. For a brief time, wildly inflated Japanese propaganda reports suggested they had achieved it by destroying a major portion of Halsey’s fleet off Formosa. Save for the damage to Canberra and Houston, this was largely nonsense. So many Japanese planes had in fact dropped burning into the sea that it was difficult for attacking pilots to realize that the American ships themselves were not afire.
Admiral Soemu Toyoda, commander in chief of the Combined Fleet, was not swayed either way. He had already committed his remaining forces to a do-or-die defense of the Philippines. Toyoda later testified that “questions were beginning to be asked at home as to what the navy was doing after loss of one point after another down south,” but the loss of the Philippines—or Formosa, if King had had his way—would cut the Japanese jugular.
If Toyoda’s fleet stayed in its home waters, it could not obtain fuel from the East Indies. If it remained south of the Formosa–Philippine choke hold, it could not be resupplied with men and ammunition from Japan. “There would be no sense,” Toyoda acknowledged, “in saving the fleet at the expense of the loss of the Philippines.”24 Thus, the Japanese navy’s imperative was to repulse MacArthur’s landings at Leyte and hope for a Tsushima-like surface engagement with the American fleet.
To do so, Toyoda devised a massive four-pronged offensive that was much more concentrated and complex than any prior thrusts at Pearl Harbor, Coral Sea, or even Midway. It is interesting to speculate what such an assemblage of Japanese naval power might have done toward subjugating the Hawaiian Islands immediately after Pearl Harbor or parading up and down the West Coast of the United States early in 1942. But instead, Japan had stabbed here and there and then been content to wage a holding action. It had not mounted another major operation with its Combined Fleet until the Battle of the Philippine Sea, and even then the confrontation had not resulted in the long-awaited surface duel between battleships that some strategists on both sides still thought must inevitably occur.
On the American side, there would later be many questions about divided command during the Battle of Leyte Gulf, but the Japanese also had their own command and control issues from the start. While Toyoda gave overall strategic direction from southern Formosa, four semi-independent fleets sailed toward Leyte. The Main Force (which the Americans called the Northern Force) assembled in Japan’s Inland Sea under Vice Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa. It consisted of one large carrier, three light carriers, two cruisers, and a dozen destroyers.
But far from being the main attack force, Ozawa’s command was charged with drawing Halsey and the Third Fleet away from the Leyte beachhead, something Ozawa had been unable to do against Spruance in the Marianas four months before. If successful, this would open the way for an attack on the beachhead but likely cost Japan these carriers. Two years before, such a sacrifice would have been unthinkable, but now the bulk of these carriers’ aircraft and pilots had either been lost in the Philippine Sea and off Formosa or sent to land-based fields, from which the less experienced pilots were presumed to stand a better chance of survival.