Inferno - Max Hastings [363]
The Americans lost one further escort carrier sunk and two seriously damaged when Philippines-based Japanese planes delivered the first suicide strikes of the campaign. Halsey’s aircraft duly attacked Ozawa’s decoy squadron, sinking all four carriers, a light cruiser and two destroyers. The Third Fleet then turned south, to face bitter recriminations about its desertion of the Leyte squadrons. Halsey’s recklessness merited his dismissal. But, given the scale of the American triumph in what became known to history as the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the largest naval clash in history, his folly was overlooked. The Japanese had committed 64 ships against 216 American and 2 Australian vessels. They lost 285,000 tons of warships, the Americans just 29,000 tons; only 2,803 Americans died, against more than 11,000 Japanese. Operation Sho-Go ended with the Imperial Navy shorn of 4 carriers, 3 battleships, 10 cruisers and 9 destroyers. The Americans lost 3 small carriers, 2 destroyers and 1 destroyer escort; several other vessels were badly hit, and would have sunk but for the energy and courage of American damage-control teams amid blazing fuel, bursting steam pipes and exploding munitions.
Leyte Gulf vividly demonstrated the collapse of Japanese naval skills: gunnery, seamanship, ship identification—and nerve. Japan’s admirals conducted Sho-Go as if they expected to lose. They seemed more ready to die than to fight, a strange transition for men who, in 1941–42, showed themselves ardent and effective warriors. In many of the earlier Pacific battles, signals intelligence gave the Americans a critical edge, which they were denied in the Leyte Gulf actions. Thanks to Halsey’s blunders, the power of the Third Fleet was never fully engaged. Yet at every turn, the U.S. Navy outfought its enemies. To be sure, technology and especially radar were deployed to American advantage; the destruction of Japan’s naval air arm enabled Halsey’s and Kinkaid’s pilots to fly almost unchallenged. But the essential message of the battle was that the Imperial Navy had suffered a moral as well as a material collapse.
Leyte Island was secured at the end of December; thereafter, on 9 January 1945 U.S. forces landed on the main Philippine island of Luzon, to begin a campaign which lasted for the rest of the war against Japanese forces directed with stubborn skill by Gen. Tomoyoki Yamashita, the 1942 “Tiger of Malaya.” Manila, the capital, was razed to the ground during weeks of fighting, in which forces of Japanese sailors fought almost to the last man. These men also committed massacres of civilians which lacked the smallest military purpose, but demonstrated Japan’s determination to impose death upon every victim within reach, often accompanied by rape and mutilation, before meeting its own fate.
Many Filipinos who escaped Japanese savagery perished under American artillery fire; Manila was reduced to rubble, making a mockery of its liberation. Up to 100,000 of its citizens died in the ruins of their capital, alongside 1,000 Americans and 16,000 Japanese. Yamashita retreated to the mountainous, densely forested centre of the island, where he sustained a shrinking perimeter until August 1945. The U.S. Eighth Army under Eichelburger continued successive amphibious operations throughout the Philippines until the end of the war, occupying islands one by one, after battles that were sometimes fierce and costly. MacArthur could claim that he had reconquered the archipelago and inflicted defeat on its Japanese occupiers. But since those soldiers could not have been transported to any battlefield where they might influence the war’s outcome, they were as much prisoners in the Philippines as was Hitler’s large, futile garrison in the German-occupied British Channel Islands.
“The Philippines campaign was a mistake,” says the present-day Japanese historian Kazutoshi