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By Root 894 0

they found themselves stripped of air cover, and facing overwhelmingly superior American forces. They wished to concentrate their fleet in the home islands. Instead, however, most big ships were obliged to operate from anchorages where fuel oil was available, off Borneo and Malaya. The Imperial Navy still disposed a force which, a few years past, had awed the world. Of ten battleships in commission at the start of the war, nine remained. It seemed to Japan’s admirals intolerable—worse, dishonourable—that capital units swung idle at their moorings while on shore the army fought desperate battles. The navy thus sought to precipitate an engagement, even though every projection of its outcome promised defeat.

The Americans were unprepared for such an initiative. As so often in north-west Europe, they credited their enemies with excessive rationality. MacArthur’s headquarters thought a Japanese dash through the San Bernardino or Surigao strait approaches to Leyte Gulf unlikely. The enemy’s ships would lack searoom, and would confront both Halsey’s Third Fleet and Kinkaid’s Seventh. Ever since the summer, however, Japan’s commanders had intended to commit most of their surviving surface units to what they called Shogo—“Operation Victory.” When Vice-Admiral Ugaki of the battleship squadron was shown a draft, he wrote: “Whether the plan is adequate264 or not needs further study, but at a time when we have been driven into the last ditch we have no other choice…It is essential still to hope for victory…and endeavour to attain it.” In other words, it was preferable to do anything than to do nothing. Shogo would be a thrust comparable in its desperation with Hitler’s Ardennes offensive three months later.

Even as Japan’s commanders and staffs pored over charts through September and early October, their vital air squadrons were vanishing into the ocean. Day after day off Formosa, Halsey’s planes inflicted devastating losses. “Our fighters were but so many eggs thrown at the stone wall of the invincible enemy formations,” Vice-Admiral Fukudome wrote wretchedly. U.S. radar picket destroyers enabled the Americans to mass aircraft in holding patterns a hundred miles out from Third Fleet whenever Japanese attacks threatened. Fighter direction had become a superbly sophisticated art. So too had massed attacks on Japan’s air bases and floating assets. On 10 October, 1,396 American sorties against Okinawa and the Ryukyus ravaged shipping and destroyed a hundred enemy aircraft for the loss of twenty-one. Between the twelfth and the fourteenth, the Japanese lost more than five hundred aircraft. Their combat casualties were matched by a steep decline in aircraft serviceability—to 50 percent, even 20 percent, compared with the Americans’ 80 percent. Many Japanese ground crews had been lost in the Pacific atoll battles, and no trained replacements were available.

These setbacks were matched by extraordinary Japanese self-deceit about what had taken place. Vice-Admiral Ugaki rejoiced about a destroyer squadron’s “tremendous feat” of sinking three aircraft carriers, a cruiser and four destroyers. In truth, in the action cited the Americans had lost one destroyer. Here was a high command forsaking that indispensable practice, honest analysis. Instead, in drafting the Shogo plan, Japan’s commanders embraced a tissue of illusions. Most of the 116 planes left to the Japanese fleet were winched rather than flown aboard carriers in their Kyushu anchorage on 17 October, because the pilots were deemed too inexperienced to make deck landings. The fleet now relied upon land-based air cover. Japan’s forty surviving aircraft in the Philippines were reinforced tenfold by 23 October, but remained subject to relentless attrition on the ground and in the air. At sea, the Japanese assembled forces of 9 battleships, 4 carriers, 15 heavy and light cruisers and 29 destroyers. This seemed impressive, until measured against the U.S. Navy’s strength: 19 task groups around the Philippines comprised 9 fleet, 8 light and 29 escort carriers; 12 battleships; 12 heavy and