The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur (41 page)

The men of the 24th hit Red Beach on schedule, right at H-Hour. “The Japanese allowed the first five waves to land,” the official army history notes, “but when the other waves were 3,000 to 2,000 yards offshore, they opened strong artillery and mortar fire against them.” The Japanese hit four incoming LSTs and drove away two more. An arriving officer, Colonel Aubrey Newman, moved among his men. “Get the hell off the beach,” he shouted at them. “Get up and get moving.”

To the south, the 96th and 7th Infantry Divisions came ashore near Dulag. LCIs preceded the landing, firing rockets onto suspected Japanese emplacements before moving aside for the assault waves. The Japanese responded with mortar and artillery fire as two regiments of the 96th landed on Orange and Blue Beaches. The 96th sprinted inland, fighting off several platoons of Japanese defenders. Further south, the 7th Division landed. Tanks were brought ashore at midday to destroy a set of pillboxes, along with a heavy-weapons company dug in along a hedge overlooking the beach. So far, at least, all of the landings had been a success. “By nightfall of A-day,” Walter Krueger later wrote, “it was apparent that the initial landings had been completely successful and had been accomplished more easily than we had anticipated.”

At a few minutes before 1:00 p.m., MacArthur left the bridge of the
Nashville
, went below for a time, and then gathered members of his staff, including George Kenney. The commander was going ashore. He, Kenney, and a trailing group of aides descended a ladder into a mobile launch and headed for the transport
John Land
, where Osmeña and his staff waited. After Osmeña and others boarded the launch, it then plowed on toward Red Beach. But MacArthur’s dignified arrival was short-circuited when the beach master refused to clear a space for the launch—and remained unimpressed when he was told MacArthur
was aboard it. “Let ’em walk,” he said, and so MacArthur did. His jaw set, and irritated that he would be arriving at his second home soaked to the knees, MacArthur descended his launch’s ramp and led the way forward through the rolling Pacific surf and onto Red Beach. The film of his arrival would be shown in America, again and again, in the years ahead. More than any other event, MacArthur’s walk to Red Beach became his signature moment. Soldiers standing nearby turned to watch, surprised by his sudden appearance. After conferring with his commanders, he stood behind a set of microphones. “People of the Philippines,” he said, “I have returned!”

    
By the grace of Almighty God our forces stand again on Philippine soil—soil consecrated in the blood of our two peoples. . . .

         
Rally to me. Let the indomitable spirit of Bataan and Corregidor lead on. As the lines of battle roll forward to bring you within the zone of operations, rise and strike. Strike at every favorable opportunity. For your homes and hearths, strike! For future generations of your sons and daughters, strike! In the name of your sacred dead, strike! Let no heart be faint. Let every arm be steeled. The guidance of divine God points the way. Follow in His Name to the Holy Grail of righteous victory!

Years later, after MacArthur’s speech had been picked over by his critics, Kenney defended it. The speech wasn’t meant for Americans, he said, but for Filipinos. For MacArthur, on the other hand, the address was personal. “We made a promise,” he had told Roosevelt. Now, he had kept it. The cynics weighed in, hooting. The speech was
too
religious, as if MacArthur were the deity. These critics weren’t alone: His staff was painfully blunt when MacArthur first read his remarks to them. All this stuff about God. “Boys,” he had answered, “I want you to know when I mention the Deity I do it with the utmost reverence in my heart.” But he had toned it down, and then, aboard the
Nashville
, he had excised even more, including a passage about “the tinkle of laughter of little children” returning home to a free Manila. Roger Egeberg, MacArthur’s personal physician, shook his head. “You can’t say that,” he had snorted. “It stinks. It’s a cliché.” MacArthur had taken out the passage, but had refused
to trim any more. “By the grace of Almighty God, our forces stand on Philippine soil,” he declared. “
. . . .
Rally to me. Let the indomitable spirit of Bataan and Corregidor lead on.”

Douglas MacArthur strolled the beach at Leyte, soaked to his knees, stood hands on hips, then walked forward to a log and sat down on it to write a letter to Franklin Roosevelt. “This is what I dreamed about,” he muttered to himself, and he thought for a moment before composing. “This note is written from the beach near Tacloban where we have just landed,” he wrote. It was an act of unusual friendship: Roosevelt had supported his Leyte plan, and MacArthur was gracious. “It will be the first letter from the freed Philippines. I thought you might like it for your philatelic collection.” He then urged that the United States grant the Philippines its independence and that Roosevelt come to Manila to preside over the ceremony. Rifle fire crackled nearby. He was ecstatic.

G
eorge Kenney was not. Over the next days, Kenney roiled his staff with tours of the front lines, everywhere inspecting the terrain for airfield sites, his constant, irritable orders spurred by his fears that Halsey would soon be gone. He had reason to worry: When he was returning with MacArthur to the
Nashville
, a Japanese fighter screamed overhead, then plunged into the cruiser
Honolulu
. Within four days of the landings, Kenney was ready to snap. His patience at an end, his staff followed him to Tacloban, where he gave peremptory orders to clear a Japanese airstrip (the same one that, months before, Shigenori Kuroda deemed a gift to the Americans), while Japanese fighters rolled into deadly strafing missions over Red Beach. As Kenney later recalled, he told a commander that beginning the next morning, the commander was to use his bulldozers “to push back into the water anything still left . . . that interfered with getting the airdrome built.” Kenney then “mobilized every soldier and Filipino we could get our hands on and started clearing the strip.” Back aboard the
Nashville
after his first night ashore, Kenney felt better but was sobered when he heard that a Japanese fleet was headed for Leyte to contest the invasion.

The Japanese plan, hatched by Admiral Soemu Toyoda, was Japan’s last chance to confront the Americans at sea. Sho-Go, as Toyoda called the plan, led to one of the most decisive naval battles in history. Toyoda
knew where Halsey and Kinkaid’s ships were, and he designed a three-pronged offensive whose complexity rivaled Halsey’s and Kinkaid’s preparations for the Leyte invasion. One fleet, sailing from Singapore under the command of Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita, was aimed at San Bernardino Strait but, just after leaving Borneo, would divide into two probes. One of the two probes would break off from Kurita and, under the command of Admiral Shoji Nishimura, enter Philippine waters through Surigao Strait before heading north toward Leyte. This dual attack was aimed at Kinkaid, whose Seventh Fleet lacked Halsey’s firepower. Toyoda calculated that if all went as planned, the two prongs would approach Kinkaid in a seaborne envelopment. The problem, of course, was to lure Halsey’s Third Fleet north. Toyoda would do this by sending a flotilla of four undermanned carriers and two battleships under Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa down the eastern coast of Luzon past Samar and toward Leyte. When Halsey steamed north to meet Ozawa, the two prongs to the south would pounce on Kinkaid’s smaller fleet—and destroy it.

Toyoda’s plan resulted from his study of Halsey, whom he pegged as an egotistical glory seeker. Unusually outspoken for a senior Japanese naval officer, Toyoda regularly expressed his belief that the war against the United States was unwinnable. This belief kept him from a senior position, at least for a time, as did his incessant lobbying for more funding for naval aviation. At one point, he argued for an end to Japan’s conflict in China and the subsequent transfer of army divisions to face MacArthur. Had this strategy been followed, it would have changed the course of the war. Toyoda was also one of the few senior officers in Japan’s military who understood the need for a unified command. In many respects, while wearing the uniform of an admiral, Toyoda was a Japanese MacArthur—egotistical, outspoken, sensitive to criticism, a defender of his service, and brilliant. Inevitably, if reluctantly, he was appointed chief of the navy general staff. Now, with Kinkaid and Halsey’s fleets crammed together in and near Leyte Gulf, he shaped a strategy to defeat them. Toyoda believed that if Halsey took his bait, Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet would be no match for Kurita and Nishimura, who, with Kinkaid out of the way, could turn their guns on Krueger’s infantry. The plan was complicated, but it nearly worked.

Late on the evening of October 23, as Kurita was spotted sailing toward Leyte, Kinkaid deployed his fleet to meet him. MacArthur, aboard the
Nashville
, was as excited as a little boy. He wanted to be a part of the battle, he told Kinkaid, as he had been “studying naval combat, and the glamour of sea battle.” Kinkaid, who had seen more glamour than he cared to mention, turned him down, then insisted that MacArthur be transferred to the USS
Wasatch
, where he would be out of danger. On the morning of October 24, two U.S. submarines torpedoed three of Kurita’s cruisers, sending two of them to the bottom of the Pacific—one of which, the
Atago
, carried Kurita. Kurita swam to a nearby cruiser and continued his command, pushing his fleet toward San Bernardino Strait. On the other side of Samar, Ozawa desperately tried to get Halsey’s attention. Events now conspired to help the Japanese: After Kurita’s flotilla was spotted and attacked (with aircraft sinking the
Musashi
, a Japanese “super battleship”), Halsey’s fliers spotted Ozawa. Meanwhile, Kurita, assailed by American aircraft, turned back west and out of Kinkaid’s reach, waiting for darkness to mask his maneuvers. Meanwhile Nishimura, further south, plowed ahead. Convinced that Kurita was in retreat, Halsey took Toyoda’s bait and sailed north to catch Ozawa. Kinkaid was on his own.

The Battle of Leyte Gulf has entered naval history as a blemish on William Halsey’s dazzling reputation. But the battle was also Japan’s last chance, and it was squandered. When Nishimura’s fleet entered the Surigao Strait, it was met by Admiral Jesse “Oley” Oldendorf’s group of six aged battleships, three heavy and two light cruisers, twenty-six destroyers, and thirty-nine PT boats. This battle, waged on the night of October 24, is often overlooked in the controversy of Halsey’s decision to follow Ozawa, but it was a textbook engagement, as Oldendorf crossed Nishimura’s
T
, firing broadsides at Nishimura’s onrushing force. The night engagement was lopsided, with Nishimura losing two battleships and two destroyers. But further north, Kinkaid was in trouble. Just north of Leyte, off the shores of Samar, Kinkaid remained under the impression that at least a part of Halsey’s fleet, Task Force 34, remained on station guarding the San Bernardino Strait. It wasn’t. Just before sunrise on the morning of October 25, Kinkaid asked his staff if there was anything they had overlooked. There was one thing, said
Captain R. H. Cruzen, Kinkaid’s operations officer: “We’ve never asked Halsey directly if Task Force 34 is guarding the San Bernardino Strait.” Kinkaid shrugged off Cruzen’s warning, ordered his staff to send Halsey a dispatch, and then retired to his cabin to read a detective novel.

It was then that Kurita swung his fleet of four battleships, six cruisers, and eleven destroyers back toward Leyte. At 6:45, twenty minutes after sunrise, an American reconnaissance pilot spotted a Japanese ship and then, diving lower for a closer inspection, counted the battleships, cruisers, and destroyers below him. A little later, on the escort carrier
Fanshaw Bay
, a radar operator reported a ship contact “where there should be no ship.” At the same time, a pilot aboard the
Gambier Bay
looked north, through the fog off Samar, and turned to a shipmate. “Christ,” he said. “Look at those pagodas.” Aware now that the Japanese had slipped through San Bernardino Strait, the commander of the escort carriers, Admiral Clifton Sprague, sent out a breathless dispatch to Kinkaid, then ordered his small carriers to take on Kurita. The
Fanshaw Bay
,
St. Lo
,
White Plains
,
Kalinin Bay
,
Kitkun Bay
, and
Gambier Bay
then formed a circle, protected by a line of three destroyers and four destroyer escorts. By 7 a.m., Sprague’s aircraft were in the air and heading toward Kurita, while Kurita’s battleships and cruisers responded with furious salvos. By 7:30, the battle was fully under way. Back on his command ship, Kinkaid feared the worst. “Situation very serious,” he radioed to Halsey. “Escort-carriers again threatened by enemy surface forces. Your assistance badly needed. Escort-carriers retiring to Leyte Gulf.”

While Kurita was being blanketed by plunging American aircraft, three American destroyers steamed toward him out of the morning mist. The attack was suicidal: The
Johnston
was crushed by three fourteen-inch shells from Kurita’s battleships, then three more from his cruisers. Blazing now, the
Johnston
barely stayed in the battle. Nearby, the destroyer
Hoel
took on the Japanese battleship
Kongo
, was hit by a stream of shells, but stayed afloat until 8:30, when the crew abandoned ship. The third destroyer, the
Heermann
, gamely fired torpedoes at a distant Japanese cruiser, then took on Kurita’s four battleships—a single David facing off against four Goliaths. The
Heermann
was checked by broadsides from the cruiser
Chikuma
and limped away. By midmorning Sprague had lost
the
Johnston
and the
Hoel
, with the
Heermann
badly damaged. Small destroyer escorts, fighting in a second stream, were also either damaged or sunk: The
Samuel B. Roberts
went down with eighty sailors, the survivors clinging to its wreckage for fifty hours before being rescued. Sprague’s heroic attack gave Kurita pause, but not enough to save the
Gambier Bay
, which was hit at a little after 8:10 a.m. Nearly defenseless, the carrier capsized shortly before 9:00 a.m., and the
St. Lo
(a victim of a kamikaze strike) sank just over two hours later. Two other escort carriers, the
Fanshaw Bay
and
White Plains
, were struck by a stream of Japanese shells and put out of action.