Inferno - Max Hastings [361]
On 20 October 1944, four army divisions began to land on Leyte Island, in the midst of the Philippines. They met light opposition, and by afternoon the beachhead was sufficiently secure for MacArthur to stride ashore and deliver a grandiloquent liberation broadcast. Thereafter, however, increasingly vigorous Japanese resistance turned the campaign into an ordeal by rain, mud and blood for tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers. MacArthur’s staff had ignored engineers’ warnings that Leyte was unsuitable for airfield building, and American troops found themselves overwhelmingly dependent on carrier planes for air support. MacArthur’s chief of public relations, Col. Bonner Fellers, had made his reputation in 1942 by dispatching daily signals from Cairo reporting British operations and intentions, which were intercepted by Rommel. Now, Fellers sustained his sorry record by repeatedly announcing victory on Leyte while MacArthur’s soldiers were fighting for their lives.
Week after week and then month after month, weather and mountains, insects and enemy fire, exhaustion and swamps imposed their toll of misery upon every infantryman on the island. “They lost all account of the distance they had covered,” wrote Norman Mailer, who served in the Philippines, in his fictional account of a patrol which marched in painful step with his own experience. “Everything beneath them had blurred, and the individual torments of each kind of terrain were forgotten … They wavered like a file of drunks, plodding along with their heads bent down, their arms slapping spasmodically at their sides … Their shoulders were blistered from their packbands, their waists were bruised from the bouncing of their cartridge belts, and their rifles clanked abrasively against their sides, raising blisters on their hips … Like litter-bearers, they had forgotten everything; they did not think of themselves as individual men any longer. They were merely envelopes of suffering.”
Even as the Americans hacked a painful path across Leyte Island, at sea their foes launched an ambitious and desperate attempt to wreck the campaign. The Imperial Japanese Navy dispatched four carriers scantily provided with aircraft to make a feint from the north, designed to lure away Halsey’s Third Fleet at the almost inevitable cost of their own destruction. Meanwhile, Japanese heavy units set forth to converge on Leyte Gulf, where they planned to attack the American amphibious armada and its relatively weak naval support force—Adm. Thomas Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet. Operation Sho-Go was never likely to succeed: whatever havoc the attackers contrived, American strategic superiority was overwhelming. But a change of Japanese codes and wireless silence imposed on their fleet at sea denied Halsey and Kinkaid foreknowledge of what was afoot. Only on 24 October was a powerful Japanese battle squadron, commanded by Vice Adm. Takeo Kurita, spotted entering the Sibuyan Sea between Leyte, Panay and Luzon. American submarines promptly dispatched two of its cruisers, and the Third Fleet launched carrier aircraft which sank the huge battleship Musashi and damaged other vessels. Kurita turned away, apparently conceding defeat. The impulsive Halsey, convinced he had seen off the Japanese, then disappeared north with his entire force of sixty-five ships in pursuit of Ozawa’s carrier decoy force, which had been located by reconnaissance aircraft.
That night of 24 October, as Halsey raced away towards a far horizon, the Seventh Fleet fought a notable battle of its own. A second Japanese battle squadron was sighted closing on Leyte Gulf from the south, up the Surigao Strait. To meet this, Kinkaid deployed his old