Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [91]
So practiced had become the art of amphibious operations that since 1942 the delay between a U.S. fleet’s arrival offshore and its first landings had been cut from four hours to two. The Leyte bombardment force carried heavier metal than that which supported the 6 June D-Day landings in Normandy. For soldiers aboard transports, almost any peril seemed worth enduring to escape the crippling heat belowdecks. Some units, formerly earmarked to land on the island of Yap, had been at sea since 27 August. Now they clambered clumsily down the scrambling nets into their landing craft, which circled until signal flags gave the order to head for the shore. Men of four divisions began to land in two main bodies: one at the north end of the gulf near the capital, Tacloban; the second fourteen miles southwards. Conditions were perfect. There were no mines, no surf. Fires blazed along the shoreline in the wake of the naval bombardment. Desultory Japanese artillery, mortar and machine-gun fire began to harass the invaders only after the first waves had landed, for coastal defensive positions were weakly held. American casualties were concentrated in a few unlucky units, such as two companies of the 3/32nd Infantry which lost eight killed and nineteen wounded to machine guns in a matter of seconds. Several American tanks were knocked out by a nearby 70mm gun. It was mid-afternoon before tanks and infantry demolished the strongpoint and passed on westward.
In most places, however, resistance was negligible. Only 20,000 of Yamashita’s 400,000 men were deployed on Leyte. They were deemed low-grade soldiers, mostly recruited from the commercial workers of Osaka and Kyoto. Terauchi decreed: “The navy and air force will attempt252 to annihilate the enemy on X-Day…The Area Army will at the same time annihilate the enemy on Leyte.” Yet despite these grandiose phrases, Yamashita planned to make his principal stand on Luzon. On Leyte, the Japanese intention was to inflict pain and buy time, rather than to defeat Sixth Army. Thus, as landing craft shuttled to and fro, Krueger’s four divisions were easily able to stake out positions inland. A few hundred yards behind the beach, in the deserted village of San José, men of the 7th Cavalry found several abandoned Japanese cars and crates of Japanese beer bottled in Manila. “Leyte, like most of the other islands253 we had landed on during the last three years, was better seen at a distance,” wrote Private Bill McLaughlin. “Lying offshore the perfume of the land was exotic, but on close inspection about all that could be seen was mud and rotting vegetation. The only inhabitants lived in squalid huts of grass and thatch, and looked half-starved.”
The first Filipino the Americans met was wheeling a bicycle between the tall palm trees, frantically waving his broad-brimmed hat. “As he approached, his face254 appeared to be composed entirely of smile,” wrote correspondent Robert Shaplen. “It was impossible to understand what he was saying, but it was easy to see that he was filled with an almost hysterical happiness. He grabbed the hand of every soldier he could reach and shook it ecstatically.” This “first liberated Filipino,” as he was dubbed, proved to be Isaios Budlong, a former Tacloban telegraph operator. Soon hundreds of local people were milling around the Americans, exuding holiday exuberance. One man presented a box of Japanese biscuits to the 7th Cavalry’s colonel. An elderly villager kept fingering soldiers “as a woman would fondle a piece of silk.”
The American campaign on Leyte, October–December 1944
The colonel commanding the 2/34th Infantry directed the attention of a 75mm tank gun onto a cluster of farm shacks which he feared might harbour Japanese. “The smaller building