Communications in the fleet are in my opinion still not adequate for handling weather. Various attempts have been and still are being made to improve them and to provide weather with priority and OP [operational priority] classification, that is, to get weather messages from the bottom of the heap of messages in the communications center up to the top of the heap.
—TESTIMONY OF WILBUR M. LOCKHART, CAPTAIN, U.S. NAVY, AEROLOGICAL OFFICE STAFF, COMMANDER IN CHIEF, PACIFIC, TO THE COURT OF INQUIRY INVESTIGATING “HALSEY’S TYPHOON.”
When General MacArthur fled Corregidor in 1942, he’d carried with him the new title of U.S. Army Commander in the Far East as well as the new burden of defending Australia and New Zealand. “Hold Hawaii; Support Australia; Drive Northward” became the War Department’s slogan. The soldier whom William Manchester would famously dub American Caesar had set up headquarters in Melbourne’s Menzies Hotel. But with as yet no troops to lead—“A Hero on Ice” Time magazine called him—MacArthur was left with little to occupy his time. He thus took to swanning about the southern continent holding press conferences, making speeches to the Australian Parliament, and giving numerous radio broadcasts.
MacArthur was a prolix man, and in each of his famously polished communiqués he invariably portrayed himself as the last best hope standing between the United States and the yellow scourge, a virtual Leonidas at Thermopylae. It was this relentless self-promotion that inspired Congress to award him the Medal of Honor (thus making the MacArthurs the only father and son to have both received the nation’s highest military award). Gratifying as this commendation was, however, MacArthur stewed incessantly over his failure to be appointed supreme commander of the Pacific Theater.
As early as October 1941, prior to Pearl Harbor, there had been intramural skirmishing among the Joint Chiefs as to who would be promoted to Allied supreme commander when war inevitably arrived. This “Eastern Ike” would be awarded overall authority of American land, sea, and air forces in the Pacific, and Army Chief of Staff Gen. George C. Marshall recommended to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson that MacArthur be that officer.
Marshall’s proposal was rejected outright by the bluff and ornery Adm. Ernest J. King, Chief of U.S. Naval Operations. No general would dictate orders to his admirals, King argued, adding that the navy had been preparing for twenty years to fight a war against Japan. It was King’s belief that naval warfare would determine the course of the Pacific campaign, and Admiral Nimitz deserved to be in charge.
This raised an immediate concern: MacArthur outranked Nimitz. Thus, in Washington a compromise was struck. Nimitz was designated commander in chief of the Pacific Ocean Areas east of the east 160th meridian of longitude, a region that included the South Pacific, New Zealand, Samoa, Fiji, and most of Oceania. The area west of the east 160th meridian, incorporating Australia, New Guinea, and the Philippines, would be ceded to MacArthur. (Although Sumatra, Malaya, Burma, and the Indian Ocean would remain under British control.)
In military shorthand, Nimitz’s command was referred to as the Central Pacific Force, MacArthur’s as the Southwest Pacific Force. MacArthur was also vaguely promised his own small fleet, its vessels to be siphoned from various task forces. Thus, following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the war against Japan became a divided responsibility, and MacArthur never forgave the “Navy cabal” for depriving him of the unified authority he was certain he deserved.
MacArthur’s rivalry with Nimitz—and Nimitz’s subordinates such as Halsey—blossomed straightaway. The general vociferously and publicly derogated U.S. sea power, arguing that the defense of Australia as well as future offensive campaigns required an amphibious army supported by a concentration of land-based bombers and fighter aircraft. In other words, aircraft earmarked for him. He even advocated the abolishment of the Marine Corps, arguing that its troops could better serve his army—a viewpoint not forgotten, nor forgiven, by Marine Corps veterans to this day.
In turn, navy brass, specifically King, allowed it to be known that they considered MacArthur an unhinged megalomaniac with a corncob pipe. When in July 1942 MacArthur demanded that Nimitz cede him two carrier task groups for a daftly conceived invasion of Rabaul in the northern Solomons—technically in MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific Command zone—Admiral King objected so vehemently to Marshall that their boundary of authority was “adjusted” in order to transfer supervision of that island chain to Nimitz.
Halsey had never met MacArthur, although in 1901 the two had stood at attention on opposite sides of Pennsylvania Avenue—Halsey as a plebe at Annapolis, MacArthur a third-class cadet at West Point—as President William McKinley delivered his second inaugural address. Now, forty-one years later, Halsey initially shared his superiors’ lack of esteem for the general, tagging him an arrogant fraud more than worthy of the “Dugout Doug” appellation. Each time Halsey, as commander of the South Pacific Theater, sent something or someone to Australia—ships for repair, combat-weary Marines for a few days of R&R—he feared that MacArthur would swallow them up. And when Halsey requested a “loan” of several bombers from MacArthur’s Australia-based army air wing in February 1943, the general first demanded to know for what use Halsey intended them.
Halsey fumed that MacArthur had insulted his competence and wrote to Nimitz, “I refuse to get into controversy with him or any other self-advertising Son of a Bitch.”
To the navy men, reasoning with MacArthur proved tougher than boning a marlin. Thus Halsey valued, and came to rely upon, the diplomatic skills of his chief of staff, Rear Adm. Robert “Mick” Carney. Carney, whose son was married to the daughter of MacArthur’s chief of staff, was the officer he dispatched to kowtow to MacArthur whenever his carrier raids crossed the demarcation line into the general’s Southwest Pacific domain. But even Carney’s golden tongue could accomplish only so much. So it was that in April 1943, three months after his famous “guarantee” of imminent victory over Japan, Halsey decided a personal introduction was in order and set off for Brisbane.
The encounter did not start well. MacArthur and several of his aides greeted Halsey’s cortege on the wharf as they climbed from their seaplane. The general and the admiral clasped hands warmly and began leading the group to parked cars. One of MacArthur’s officers fell in next to Halsey’s flag secretary, Comdr. Douglas Moulton. “Say, Doug …” he said.
MacArthur spun on his heels and leveled his patented hard stare. Even Mrs. MacArthur was forbidden to address her husband as anything other than “General.”
Back at MacArthur’s headquarters, the general immediately began lecturing Halsey and his staff on a matter that “galled” him, that is, the jurisdiction of a small island base under construction in the Admiralties. MacArthur told Halsey he had no intention of tamely submitting to CINCPAC’s every whim, reviewed in detail the reasons why his Southwest Pacific Command should control the island, and finally pointed his pipe stem at Halsey and demanded, “Am I not right, Bill?”
Halsey and his staff answered with one voice. “No, sir!”
The general’s staff gaped at the impertinence. Halsey wasn’t through. “General,” he said, “I disagree with you entirely.” Then he told him why.
Halsey thought he had won the argument over what he considered a petty, jurisdictional dispute. MacArthur would not let it go. Three times over the next three days he summoned Halsey back to his offices to restate his case, and three times Halsey told him he was wrong. When the misunderstanding was cleared up, however, Halsey found his bias toward the general dissolving. MacArthur was charismatic and solicitous, the very model of a modern major general. “Five minutes after I reported I felt as if we were lifelong friends,” he wrote. “I have seldom seen a man who makes a quicker, stronger, more favorable impression. If he had been wearing civilian clothes, I would have known at once that he was a soldier.”
The Bull, as one biographer noted, also lived up to the American Caesar’s expectations. “Blunt, outspoken, dynamic,” is how MacArthur, unsurprisingly, described Halsey. Provided the admiral did not compete with the general too vigorously for press attention and glory, MacArthur could live with that.
Nevertheless, the entire problem of a divided Pacific command could be massaged by conferences in Brisbane and concessions in Washington, but it could never be truly overcome. As the United States moved closer to retaking the Philippines, the rivalry over whether the Southwest Pacific or the Central Pacific commands would lead the offensive against Japan began to take on the form of a war within a war.
In time, however, as the general fought his way north with tactical support from Halsey’s South Pacific Fleet, his rancor toward the navy did not prohibit him from coming to regard as his own the admiral’s battleships, carriers, and cruisers. And so it was that in late November 1943, during yet another summit to hammer out a single line of attack strategy against the Imperial Empire, MacArthur approached Halsey with a discreet offer.
“I’ll tell you something you may not know,” he said, and confided to Halsey that the War Department and the British planned to place a combined fleet at his disposal, and he wanted, he said, an American to lead it.
“How about you, Bill?” MacArthur said. “If you come with me, I’ll make you a greater man than Nelson ever dreamed of being.”
A flustered Halsey, who knew full well that the last thing Admiral King wanted was MacArthur in command of his own armada, replied that he was flattered, but in no position to commit himself.
But despite this newfound amity with Admiral Halsey, MacArthur continued to press his case to the War Department for a succession of Philippine landings aimed at establishing air bases that would lead to the ultimate recapture of the island of Luzon, and the prize of Manila. He had, after all, promised to return. Admiral King failed to see the advantage of this strategy. Luzon, he maintained, was too heavily fortified, the enemy too well dug in. King instead advocated bypassing Luzon, with Nimitz thrusting toward the Japanese mainland via Formosa and various ports on the Chinese coast. This meant first securing the several enemy-held island chains between Pearl Harbor and Tokyo.
MacArthur refused to give way. In a letter to General Marshall, army chief of staff, he cited the Japanese defeat at Midway as an example of the result of attempting to take enemy-held islands. He also noted the number of casualties incurred during the recent amphibious landings on Tarawa, in November 1943. King’s island-hopping strategy, he wrote, constituted “tragic and unnecessary massacres of American lives.” He complained that “the Navy fails to understand the strategy of the Pacific.” To several admirals, this argument brought to mind the old Arab proverb: Too soft and you will be squeezed; too hard and you will be broken. The navy feared that MacArthur’s forces would be broken on Luzon.
In March 1944 the Joint Chiefs negotiated yet another compromise in hopes of quelling this festering feud. Nimitz’s Central Pacific Command would begin its drive west, hopscotching from the Marianas to the Palaus while keeping Formosa in its long-range sights. MacArthur, meanwhile, would start slugging his way up the northern coast of New Guinea in preparation for a landing in the central Philippines. It was also around this time that the title U.S. Fifth Fleet, previously used to designate only ships of Nimitz’s Central Pacific Force, was changed to also include amphibious troops and land-based aircraft. The name Central Pacific Force was dropped. In essence, Nimitz now commanded the Pacific Fleet, and a smaller Seventh Fleet was cobbled together for MacArthur’s use.
In June 1944, Nimitz relieved Halsey of his South Pacific duties, summoned him to Pearl, and promoted him to co-commander, with Spruance, of the Pacific, or Big Blue, Fleet. He and Spruance would share rotating commands, the theory being that this alternating, double-echelon arrangement would speed up the war. While one admiral fought, the other and his staff would be planning the next campaign. The arrangement had the added bonus of confusing the Japanese (as well as many Americans, who marveled at their navy’s ability to field two Big Blue Fleets). When it sailed under Spruance it would continue to be called the Fifth Fleet. When it steamed under Halsey it would be known as the Third Fleet. Similarly, Spruance’s carrier Task Force 58 would become Halsey’s carrier Task Force 38. Nimitz informed Halsey that he would take fleet command when Spruance finished his Marianas campaign to secure Saipan, Tinian, and Guam. This meant Halsey had caught the Philippines invasions.
For the sequential landings on a series of Philippine islands, MacArthur would sail with his own Seventh Fleet, commanded by Vice Adm. Thomas C. Kinkaid, and receive support from Halsey’s Third Fleet. This, naturally, did not meet with the general’s satisfaction. He wanted Halsey under his outright command, not acting as a mere adjunct. And he continued to interpret almost any directive emanating from CINCPAC as an unjustifiable impugning of his “personal honor.” But at least he was returning to the Philippines.
By October 1944 the United States was a step closer to that goal. MacArthur’s Sixth Army, buttressed by his new Seventh Fleet under Kinkaid, prepared to make the jump from New Guinea to the small central Philippine island of Leyte, situated midway between the larger, more strategic islands of Luzon to the north and Mindanao to the south. As MacArthur’s troops arranged to secure airfields on Leyte capable of accommodating his heavy bombers “preparatory to a further advance to Formosa, either directly or via Luzon,” so it occurred that Japan was gearing up for its own Battle of the Bulge, a last-gasp attempt to smash two American fleets at once and repel MacArthur’s invaders at the flash point of Leyte Gulf.
Meanwhile, when Admiral Halsey received his orders for the Third Fleet’s Leyte Gulf operations, his eyes alighted on one subordinate clause included in Admiral Nimitz’s directives that was to hover like Banquo’s ghost over his reputation for the remainder of his life.
“In case opportunity for destruction of a major portion of the enemy fleet is offered or can be created, such destruction becomes the primary task.”
Twenty-five words. Simple. Direct. Disarmingly to the point. That sentence was, of course, part of the more comprehensive command from CINCPAC Nimitz to Halsey on the eve of MacArthur’s Leyte invasion. But to Halsey those twenty-five words carried more weight than the rest of the U.S. Navy’s Operations Plan 8-44 combined. To wit, as MacArthur’s amphibious Sixth Army, sailing north from New Guinea, was put ashore in Leyte Gulf by Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet, Halsey’s Third Fleet was ordered to:
COVER AND SUPPORT FORCES OF THE SOUTHWEST PACIFIC IN ORDER TO ASSIST IN THE SEIZURE AND OCCUPATION IN THE CENTRAL PHILIPPINES;
DESTROY ENEMY NAVAL AND AIR FORCES IN OR THREATENING THE PHILIPPINE AREA;
IN CASE OPPORTUNITY FOR DESTRUCTION OF A MAJOR PORTION OF THE ENEMY FLEET IS OFFERED OR CAN BE CREATED, SUCH DESTRUCTION BECOMES THE PRIMARY TASK.
In other words, Halsey’s Task Force 38, steaming west from recently captured Ulithi Atoll, had been ordered to stand sentry over MacArthur’s northern flank against any Japanese naval attempt to scuttle the landings. Yet, upon deeper reflection, CINCPAC’s orders were confounding, ambiguous. Which was it? Protect MacArthur, or hunt the enemy? As it happened, Halsey’s interpretation of this directive transformed what should have been an unfettered American landing on Leyte into, as Wellington said of Waterloo, “a damned close-run thing.” To this day military historians and World War II veterans debate, often acrimoniously, whether Halsey recklessly abandoned his station at Leyte Gulf and should be held responsible for the deaths of over one thousand American sailors.
Yet with that twenty-five-word proviso in Operations Plan 8-44, Nimitz had specifically directed the admiral that—MacArthur’s landings notwithstanding—his “primary task” was to annihilate the Japanese carrier fleet should he encounter it, or should he have the opportunity to “create” such an encounter. The order, a variation of the Jesuit concept of freedom within discipline, was in keeping with the general-quarters flexibility Nimitz consistently granted his on-site fleet commanders.
There is a back story. Following his friend and co-commander Adm. Raymond Spruance’s failure to engage the Japanese fleet during the Marianas Turkey Shoot, Halsey had vowed to his staff that any enemy ships venturing that close to his task force would not escape his guns. Nimitz’s contradictory Operations Plan 8-44 only buttressed his resolve. So it was that when MacArthur put his Sixth Army ashore at Leyte Gulf on October 20, 1944, Halsey, despite sending the general congratulations for his “return,” chafed at having nothing more to do than “babysit” MacArthur’s right flank.
Halsey’s three carrier task forces were charged with shielding a specific point of the eastern exit into the Philippine Sea of the San Bernardino Strait, a narrow cut separating the islands of Samar and southernmost Luzon, northeast of MacArthur’s 120,000 amphibious troops and 100,000 tons of supplies landing on Leyte. At 8:20 on the morning of October 24, American submarines and scout planes indeed observed a small Japanese fleet of battleships, cruisers, and destroyers under the command of Adm. Takeo Kurita making for the strait. But Halsey’s jubilation at having the enemy in his gun sights was tempered by his disquiet over the lack of enemy aircraft carriers sailing with Kurita.
If left to his own devices, Halsey would have steamed west into the San Bernardino Strait to meet the Japanese ships head-on. But Nimitz feared the channel might be mined, so Halsey instead ordered air strikes. By the end of the day the Third Fleet’s Helldiver dive bombers, Avenger torpedo bombers, and Hellcat fighters would fly over 259 sorties, and what was left of Kurita’s ravaged vessels were retreating at flank speed back through the strait.
Halsey was overjoyed, for this left him free to concentrate on the Japanese carriers. His gut told him that they were somewhere in the area. But where? Lurking west of Luzon? Steaming south from Japan? No one could find them.
That afternoon, as his Hellcats were still strafing Kurita’s fleeing ships, Halsey drew up a contingency order carving up pieces of his Task Force 38 carrier groups to create a separate Task Force 34, to be anchored by four fast, new battleships. If Kurita’s undamaged ships should attempt another breakout—however unlikely that scenario—his battlewagons would eviscerate them while his carriers hunted the Japanese flattops.
In a radio message monitored by Kinkaid in Leyte Gulf, CINCPAC Nimitz at Pearl, and Admiral King in Washington, D.C., Halsey specifically maintained, “If enemy sorties, Task Force 34 will be formed when directed by me.” The three admirals all took this to mean the battleship-led Task Force 34 had already been established and dispatched. It was to prove a crucial misunderstanding. For Admiral Kurita, with prodding from Tokyo, was already experiencing second thoughts about his withdrawal.
Two hours after sending his radio message, Halsey’s reconnaissance pilots finally sighted the Japanese carrier force—the Imperial Navy’s last four attack flattops and their supporting vessels—maneuvering some one hundred miles north of his task groups. This was the grail Halsey had been hunting since missing the Battle of Midway. To a fighting admiral like Halsey, “it seemed childish,” he wrote, to idly stand guard over MacArthur when such big game was afoot. Further, by devastating Kurita’s fleet, hadn’t he already fulfilled Nimitz’s orders to “Destroy enemy naval and air forces in or threatening the Philippine area”?
As the naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison was to observe, “Halsey was no man to watch a rathole from which the rat might never emerge.”
Sensing the opportunity to knock the last of the Japanese carriers out of the war, the same chance Spruance had passed up in the Marianas, he directed each of the Third Fleet’s three task groups, 16 carriers and 78 combat vessels in all, to give chase. In his van were the battleships ostensibly set aside to guard the San Bernardino Strait. Never divide your strength in a combat zone. It is one of the first precepts taught at the Naval War College. Halsey knew it well, and was not about to tempt fate.
His design on the Japanese was elegant in its simplicity. He would find the Japanese vessels in the night and slaughter them at first light.
Halsey fired off a message to Kinkaid giving the last known coordinates of what was left of Kurita’s battered force in the Sibuyan Sea. It concluded, “Strike reports indicate enemy heavily damaged. Am proceeding north with three groups to attack enemy carrier force at dawn.” By the time Kinkaid read the communiqué, Halsey was asleep in his bunk. Kinkaid, preparing to attack a second Japanese force approaching from the south, assumed that Halsey had left his battleships—the newly formed Task Force 34—to guard the exit of the strait. He saw no need to send his own scout planes north to make certain.
Halsey had no way of knowing that the enemy carriers, commanded by Adm. Jisaburo Ozawa, were a magnificent decoy embarked on a suicide mission to lure him away. Once Ozawa’s scout planes confirmed that Halsey had taken his bait, he reversed course. Halsey, still under the impression that Kurita’s strike force was mortally wounded, chased Ozawa all night. Dawn found the Third Fleet three hundred miles from the San Bernardino Strait, through which Kurita’s remaining vessels were now steaming un-molested. MacArthur’s flank had been left wide open, with only three of Kinkaid’s small, backup task groups standing between the Japanese and MacArthur’s certain destruction.
The determined heroism and reckless gallantry Kinkaid’s outnumbered and outgunned sailors subsequently displayed during the victorious Battle of Samar stands in the American pantheon with Crockett at the Alamo, Chamberlain at Little Round Top, and York at Argonne. Every single one of the ships battling Kurita suffered devastating hits, over one thousand sailors were killed, and an escort carrier, two destroyers, and one destroyer escort were sent to the bottom of the Philippine Sea.
But the Americans had managed to make Kurita turn and run once again. Kinkaid, MacArthur, and Nimitz gave rapt attention to real-time radio reports from the running fight, and the sea battle also attracted the notice in Washington, D.C., of Admiral King, Navy Secretary James Forrestal (who had replaced Frank Knox, recently dead from a heart attack), and even the White House. Roosevelt himself requested hourly updates.
Meanwhile, as Halsey’s fliers engaged the Japanese carriers, he received a message from Nimitz demanding to know his whereabouts. In a bitter misunderstanding, the communiqué from the usually laconic CINCPAC contained an encryption snafu that enraged the exhausted Halsey. The original dispatch Nimitz had dictated to Halsey—“Where is Task Force 34?”—had for some reason been encrypted to read, “Where is rept where is Task Force 34 RR The world wonders.”
Double letters in encrypted navy dispatches, called “nulls,” were signals to the intelligence officer decoding a message that all the letters following these nulls were mere padding to confound any enemy intercepts. Normally this padding was a gibberish string of letters. But for reasons never determined, perhaps out of sheer whimsy, after the “RR” nulls, the dispatcher at Pearl had appended that morning’s front-page headline from the Honolulu Advertiser as the padding. To compound the error, the New Jersey’s decoding officer delivered the entire message to Halsey.
The admiral, believing that Nimitz was chiding him with the sarcastic “The world wonders,” was enraged. His gnarled face turned red with fury. He whipped off his baseball cap and stomped the message tape into the deck. “What right has Chester to send me a goddamn message like that?” he shouted. Then he broke into sobs and stormed off to his flag quarters. Although his strike force had managed to decimate Ozawa’s Japanese carriers, his vaunted battleship line had never fired a shot.
The American victory in the Battle for Leyte Gulf was, and remains to this day, the largest naval engagement in the history of the world. Yet despite the outcome, feelings were mixed and criticism was sharp. Had Kurita, who came within forty miles of MacArthur’s landing force, managed to reach and attack the American beachhead, the result could well have signaled not only the deferment of the Philippines campaign but, as Nimitz estimated, a six-month setback for America’s long-range war plans. Halsey’s actions left such a bitter taste that his mad dash north was soon etched in navy lore as the “Battle of Bull’s Run,” a play off the humiliating rout of the Union Army in the opening days of the Civil War.
Yet the one soldier whose opinion may have carried the most weight refused to condemn the admiral. Shortly after securing the Leyte beachhead, MacArthur sat down to dinner with his staff and overheard an officer criticizing Halsey for “abandoning us while he went after the Jap decoy fleet.” Another was said to have made an allusion to Churchill’s scathing remark about Admiral Jellicoe’s performance at the 1916 Battle of Jutland—“He was the only man who could have lost the war in an afternoon.”
MacArthur slammed his fist on the table. “That’s enough!” he roared. “Leave the Bull alone. He’s still a fighting admiral in my book.”
In late November, following the successful landings on Leyte, MacArthur’s personal staff, prodded by back-channel pressure from Nimitz, persuaded the general to push back the next step of his Philippine island hop—the invasion of Mindoro—by ten days, to December 15. The navy’s high command breathed a sigh of relief. Despite the overwhelming victory at Leyte, like Pyrrhus surveying the victorious field at Asculum, Nimitz was uneasy. The Battle for Leyte Gulf had introduced something new and macabre into the war’s equation, a tactic that CINCPAC realized Halsey needed time to countermand. After seven hundred years, swirling kamikazes had once again blackened the skies.
Over the last year America’s grinding war machine had so depleted the Japanese naval and air forces that the Philippine Sea had come to be referred to as an “American lake.” The destruction of Adm. Jisaburo Ozawa’s carrier fleet during the three-day Battle for Leyte Gulf appeared to apply the coup de grace. But the Allies’ undisputed mastery of the Pacific suffered a serious psychological setback during the Leyte campaign. The inauguration of the Kamikaze Special Attack Corps caught Halsey and the United States military completely by surprise.
Five months earlier, following their loss of the Marianas, the Japanese high command had secretly devised the kamikaze strategy to ratchet its homeland defense to another level. Now, in October, with their territorial holdings shrinking daily, MacArthur gaining a toehold in the Philippines, and down to a handful of experienced pilots, the Imperial War Ministry put its plan into effect. The kamikazes were, one historian notes, the world’s first guided missiles, “with human pilots as the guidance system.”
The airmen who volunteered for these missions of no return thought of themselves as modern-day samurais. They were, on average, between eighteen and twenty years old, and pitifully undertrained. When they launched, they were accompanied, when possible, by trailing wingmen to bear witness in order that their warriors’ sacrifice could be reported personally to the emperor. “We were bubbling with eagerness,” wrote one pilot prior to his final mission. “I thought of my age, nineteen, and of the saying, ‘To die while people still lament your death, to die while you are pure and fresh, this is truly Bushido.’ Yes, I was following the way of the Samurai.”
But it was not ancient Japanese Bushido—the “way of the warrior” code of conduct and moral principles—that concerned Halsey. It was this bomb-laden steel hurtling from the skies and sending his vessels to the bottom of the sea. The depth of the kamikazes’ desperation countered everything that American soldiers and sailors held “fair.” The concept of pilots standing at attention in their ritual silk scarves, drinking in both the “Kimigayo” and ceremonial cups of sake before taking to the air to immolate themselves, was alien to American sensibilities. Even the Marines charging into the meat grinders at Guadalcanal and Tarawa believed they had a fighting chance to come out alive.
Yet despite the American contempt for their means, the kamikazes briefly achieved their ends. They had succeeded in virtually stopping in its tracks the Allied advance across the Pacific. Halsey realized that his navy’s complete mastery of the air was seriously threatened for the first time since the deadly night battles in the Solomons two years before. On October 29, during mop-up operations at Leyte, the admiral got his first, personal taste of the “divine wind,” watching from the flag bridge of the New Jersey as a suicide bomber glided at a 45-degree angle through a chiaroscuro of antiaircraft fire and dived into the USS Intrepid, a thousand yards away. The bandit struck only a glancing blow to the carrier’s aft gun emplacements, but killed ten seamen and wounded six others.
Halsey was staggered. He had been on the bridge of the Enterprise during the raid on the Marshalls in February 1942 when a Japanese pilot, his plane mortally wounded, crashed into the carrier and skidded across its flight deck. The Zero’s fuel tanks had ruptured, causing only minor damage. But that plane had been on fire, its pilot’s fate already sealed. The idea of this new combat-by-suicide sat in his gut like a broken bottle.
“We could not believe that even the Japanese, for all their harakiri traditions, could muster enough recruits to make such a corps really effective,” he wrote. He was wrong. The day after the attack on the Intrepid, her sister carriers USS Franklin and USS Belleau Wood were struck; 148 Americans were killed, another 68 seriously wounded. Both vessels were put out of commission by what U.S. sailors quickly took to calling the “Green Hornets,” after the Sunday funny-papers character.
In the month after the kamikaze strike on the Intrepid, suicide planes slamming into the Third Fleet killed 328 men, sank 8 ships, destroyed over 90 planes, and sent numerous vessels—including the three aircraft carriers—limping back to Pearl for major repairs. Before the war concluded, over 2,550 kamikaze attacks would take more than 12,000 American lives, wound another 36,000, and sink or damage 74 ships. The Intrepid, on its way to acquiring the black-humored nickname “Decrepit,” was hit again on November 25, with the loss of another 69 men.
Halsey had seen enough. That very day, as MacArthur’s Sixth Army continued to grind across Leyte, he ordered Third Fleet’s withdrawal to Ulithi Atoll in order to refuel, reprovision, and—of paramount importance—pursue a plan to scrub the skies of the “kami boys.” The suicide attacks had inflicted an unacceptable level of damage, to both ships and morale. He was determined to find a way to stop them.