REMEMBERING LEYTE GULF

This month marks the 75th anniversary of the greatest naval battle of World War II.  From October 23 to 26, 1944, the U.S. and Imperial Japanese navies clashed in Philippine waters.  The context was General Douglas MacArthur’s promised Return to the islands when he fled the unstoppable Japanese in early 1942.  Subsequently the Joint Chiefs in Washington decided to merge the Central Pacific and Southwest Pacific offensives in the Philippines rather than Formosa (now Taiwan) thus setting huge forces in motion.

Oddly enough, the Battle of Leyte Gulf had little to do with Leyte Gulf, but it was the dominant feature of the campaign.  The scale could only be imagined today: 236 American and about 80 Japanese warships plus U.S. torpedo boats and submarines while both fleets deployed significant support vessels such as tankers and provision ships.  The Americans brought about 1,500 tailhook aircraft aboard 34 fleet and escort carriers while the Japanese Navy had approximately 300 planes in four carriers and ashore.

The U.S. Third Fleet was led by Admiral William F. Halsey, the jut-jawed seadog who had been at war against Japan since December 7, 1941.  His carrier commander in Task Force 38 was Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher, a pioneer aviator who relied heavily upon his excellent staff.  The amphibious force was led by Seventh Fleet’s Admiral Thomas Kinkaid.

Leyte Gulf has been told and retold dozens of times, and requires little expansion here.  The Imperial Navy deployed three units: two powerful surface forces transiting the islands from west to east, and a minimal carrier force well to the north, which was bound to draw attention of the aggressive “Bull” Halsey.

Leading four Japanese carriers was Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa, who had clashed with Mitscher off the Marianas in June.  “The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot” all but destroyed Tokyo’s carefully hoarded supply of trained carrier aircrews, leaving Ozawa with a small crop of rookies.

Historians still argue whether Leyte Gulf was a carrier battle.  The previous five, dating from Coral Sea in May 1942, all involved mutual exchange of carrier air strikes.  They resulted in loss of three U.S. flattops (plus one to a submarine) and nine Japanese—totaling fewer than the fast carriers Mitscher owned in October 44.  While a few of Ozawa’s planes flew within range of TF-38, none accomplished anything significant.

The battle began with U.S. submarines stalking Japan’s surface forces west of the Philippines on the 23rd.  Events peaked the next day with continuous air strikes that sank one of the two biggest ships afloat but otherwise did little to deter Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita, who continued toward his goal of attacking U.S. shipping in Leyte Gulf.  His passage through San Bernardino Strait was reported by U.S. night owls but was ignored by Halsey and Mitscher with disastrous results the next day.

Meanwhile, Japanese land-based aircraft USS Princeton on the 24th, the first American fast carrier lost since October 1942.

Hours later, Vice Admiral Shoji Nishimura’s southern force was annihilated in the last major surface action of all time, a nocturnal slugfest in Battle of Surigao Strait.  Outnumbered about six to one, he lost his life and his command, only one destroyer surviving.  

Partly due to unnecessarily complex communications, Halsey assumed that his battleships, Task Force 34, were guarding the Leyte side of San Bernardino Strait.  With word of Ozawa’s flattops to the north, he took TF-38 to destroy Ozawa, leaving Kinkaid’s amphibious command vulnerable to surface ships.  The only American force in the way was “Taffy Three,” six small carriers with their escorting destroyers.  During the Battle Off Samar, the immensely outgunned “small boys” fought back with guns, torpedoes, and whatever aircraft could be launched.  Other escort-carrier planes added to the effort, forcing Kurita to disengage.  

Throughout the day the U.S. Navy lost two escort carriers (one to the first kamikaze mission) and three destroyers.  

Halsey’s aviators and “black shoe” surface warriors sank all four of Ozawa’s carriers, but by then his flattops were almost empty shells.  The execution continued into the 26th, raising the toll to 28 Japanese warships.  The Imperial Navy never recovered.

MacArthur’s forces largely secured the Philippines in April 1945, providing another advanced fleet base for the Pacific Fleet.  

Late that year the U.S. Navy owned 6,000 ships including 90 aircraft carriers of all types.  It was two-thirds more than 12 months before and over three times the figure in 1941.  That month more than 3,000,000 men and women wore navy uniforms.

Today the Navy has about 490 ships and submarines with 438,000 uniformed personnel.  Congress mandates eleven carriers but at this writing only two are deployed. The new USS Ford (CVN-78), an enduring boondoggle, was delivered incomplete and may not deploy for another four or five years.  Her primary aircraft, the F-35C stealth fighter, is perennially troubled, and in fact took over two years just to qualify in carrier landings.  The Lightning II remains in low-rate production until it meets required mileposts for operational capability.

There’s still a great deal of misty-eyed sentimentality about “the greatest generation,” though none of the hundreds of WW II vets I’ve known, met or interviewed bought into Tom Brokaw’s unsupportable assertion.  But one thing seems certain: the aircrews and sailors who fought Leyte Gulf represented the greatest assembly of naval talent and capability of the era.  

SEPTEMBER REMEMBER

On this anniversary of 9-11 I'm stepping aside in favor of Cdr. R.R. "Boom" Powell, former naval aviator, former airline captain and active historic aircraft pilot.  With our unindicted co-conspirator Cdr. Jack Woodul, we wrote a WW I epic called "Duel Over Douai," but this heartfelt contribution from Boom commends its attention to all...yesterday, today and tomorrow.

A flight to New York, late September, 2001:

I saw Ground Zero last evening. Marie told me to look for the hole. I said I did not think anything would be visible. Weather was poor, flight path not close. I was wrong.

After flying mostly above the clouds from Norfolk while the sun set and a gray and turbulent descent, visibility underneath was crystal clear with urban lights glowing off the cloud base. The Verazzano Bridge was a positive fix. To the west, the Statue of Liberty was lighted with her torch and crown shining gold even at a distance. Up New York Harbor the buildings of lower Manhattan rose like dark cliffs from the water. Emanating from the ground in their midst was a bright light, volcanic in intensity. The source of the light hidden by the dark sided buildings. Unearthly. Strange. An apocalyptic radiance of catastrophe. Its brightness made starker by the dark shadows of the standing structures. Ground Zero indeed. An opening to hell… except for the light’s color.

The light was pure, clear, white. White; all colors, but no color. White; the color of heaven, the color of snow, of summer cloud, the color of hope.

I stayed with my face against the airplane window until the vision was well past. There were glimpses of the arc lamps illuminating rescue and reclamation efforts – almost blinding in the night, but then the source was shielded again and only the fountain of light flooded up and out making the clouds as white as day. The rain had restarted when we got off at La Guardia and the wind was cold, biting, from the north. The summer of 2001 is gone. And there is a lighted hole in Manhattan and our country’s soul.

HISTORIC AUGUST

There are historic dates in every month, from January 1 (George Washington displayed the Grand Union Flag, 1776) to December 31 (Thomas Edison demonstrated his incandescent lamp, 1879).  But August (named for Augustus Caesar) has a wide variety of notable anniversaries, and besides, I’ve waited til the last minute for this month’s blog.

For starters, the eighth month originally was named Sextilis as the sixth month in ancient Rome. But following chronological realignment, it became August in 8 B.C. to honor Emperor Augustus Caesar (63 BC to 14 AD).

Three Roman cities were destroyed on August 24, 79 A.D. (the date is often debated) when Mount Vesuvius erupted in southern Italy.  The death toll at Pompei, Herculaneum and other places remains unknown but certainly ran into thousands.

(Skipping forward, in August 1883 catastrophic eruptions on the Indonesian island of Krakatoa spurred tidal waves 120 feet high, killing as many as 36,000 people. Scientists later calculated the five cubic miles of earth were blasted perhaps 50 miles into the mesosphere.)

“In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”  Remember that from grade school?  Me too. Actually, on August 3 the future Admiral of the Ocean Sea set sail from Spain with his three-ship “fleet” bound for a short cut to the Far East.  Three months later he fetched up somewhere in the Bahamas, and the rest, as they say, is politically incorrect history.

Ninety-one years later—August 5, 1583--Sir Humphrey Gilbert established the first British colony in North America.  On the Newfoundland coast he claimed St. John’s Harbor in the name of Queen Elizabeth. The noted explorer was not so fortunate on the return leg, sunk in a storm near the Azores.

For a week in Philadelphia during 1787 The Great Debate occurred in the Constitutional Convention.  The upshot was confirming a four-year term for president, ceding Congress the right to regulate foreign and interstate trade, and naming a committee to finalize a draft of the Constitution.  Some 232 years later, members of Congress who have sworn to Preserve and Protect that blessed document are trying hard to destroy it.  And there’s no penalty for Violation of Oath.

On August 21, 1863, during the American Civil War, Confederate leader William Quantrill led 450 mounted guerrillas in a predawn raid in Lawrence, Kansas.  The riders left about 150 residents dead, dozens wounded, and much of the town in ruin.  “Bloody Bill” had been denied a regular commission by the Confederate war cabinet, describing his attitude as barbaric.  He removed any doubt of that assessment. 

On August 19, 1934 German voters overwhelmingly granted additional powers to Chancellor Adolf Hitler, including the office of president.  Thus, one-man rule was codified, paving the sanguinary road to the Second World War.

On August 2, 1939 German expatriate Albert Einstein wrote President Franklin Roosevelt about the prospect for nuclear weapons, noting “A single bomb of this type carried by boat (The B-29 was barely in the drafting stage) and exploded in a port might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory.”

The rest, as they, say is radioactive history.

Actually, it’s short-term history because six years later almost to the day a B-29 Superfortress flew from Tinian in the Marianas to Hiroshima in Japan and dropped a 9,700-pound “gadget” that destroyed the city.  Optimists hoped that the 1945 shock and awe would force Tokyo’s doom-laden war cabinet to surrender but it took another A-bomb three days later, August 9, to obliterate most of Nagasaki.  Emperor Hirohito over-rode his war ministers on the 15th, effectively ending the world’s most destructive war.

(Other WW II August events included the first U.S. offensive of the war at Guadalcanal in 1942 and the Anglo-American conquest of Sicily in 1943.)

The true nature of Communism became evident on August 13,1961, with the first phase of the Berlin Wall.  Eventually the East German regime built more than 100 miles of wall around West Berlin, occupied by the Allies and the Soviets since 1945.  In 1987 President Ronald Reagan famously called, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”  It lasted until 1990, yet today addled American liberals insist that a border fence to keep foreigners out is equivalent to a Communist barrier to keep people in.                                  

In 1964 the “Tonkin Gulf Incident” sent America spinning uncontrollably into a decade-long Crazy Asian War.  Thing is: the first incident on August 2 did occur with North Vietnamese PT boats engaging an American destroyer.  The next “incident” two nights later never occurred—a fact evident to then-Commander James B. Stockdale, an aviator and the only witness to both events.  Some military and political leaders in DC suspected that panic-stricken U.S. sailors misinterpreted radar data but it didn’t matter to the vile Lyndon B. Johnson.  Only 90 days from a tough presidential election, he used the incident as proving he was  Tough On Commanism (he was from Texas, after all), and ordered retaliatory air strikes. 

The rest, as they say, is grief-stricken history to the tune of 58,000 dead Americans, the loss of much of Indochina to Commanism, and political-cultural fault lines that remain today.

In 1969 the three-day Woodstock music and hedonistic revel began in a farm field near Bethel, New York.  Reportedly between 300,000 and 400,000 youngsters grooved to a couple of dozen rock and roll bands, representing the growing 1960s counter-culture movement.  Among the groups performing were Santana; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; Jefferson Airplane; and my favorite, Creedence Clearwater Revival.  Despite the mixture of drugs and a boisterous good-times atmosphere, apparently only two deaths ensued.  The first (predictably) was an overdose but the second (surprisingly) involved a celebrant who fell asleep or passed out under a tractor, unknown to the driver.

The iconic American of the postwar era died in a Memphis hospital on August 16, 1977. Elvis Aaron Presley succumbed to heart failure at age forty-two.  The King was dead after a twenty-one-year reign.  And no other Music Monarch has come close to matching him.  

The half-century Cold War effectively ended (see 1961) on August 29, 1991 with a failed coup to preserve the tottering Soviet Communist Party.  Thus passed the Evil Empire. Yet some Russians—and others including Americans—still bemoan the passing of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.