When you think of great naval engagements, the Battle of Leyte Gulf does not immediately spring to mind, despite it being the largest naval battle in modern history. Leyte Gulf, which celebrates its 80th anniversary today, took place in the Philippines in 1944. Even my well-educated American friends, the CEO of a major publishing company included, fail the vox pop test of knowledge of this epic battle.
The sea battles that we remember tend to be engagements that define the outcome of struggles between empires and civilisations. At the Battle of Salamis, Athenian triremes thwarted Persia’s conquest of Greece. Similarly at the Battle of Lepanto, Pope Pius V’s Holy League navy defeated the Ottomans who threatened Europe. Britain’s greatest sea battles of course – Trafalgar, Jutland and the Battle of the Atlantic – were instrumental in the defeat of the hegemonic ambitions of Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Hitler. But the Battle of Leyte Gulf does not belong in this canon of civilisation defining engagements. Why?
Tactically, the Japanese plan in the summer of 1944 was spot on
First a little background. Although it is sometimes thought that the Japanese navy was irrecoverably handicapped before the Battle of Leyte Gulf, this is not the whole truth. Yes, Japan did lose four of its frontline fleet carriers at the Battle of Midway in 1942. But before this fluky American victory, at the earlier Battle of the Coral Sea, the first carrier-on-carrier battle in history, it was Japan that won. In terms of training and technology, the Japanese fleet at the start of the Pacific War was significantly superior to that of the US.
There were many battles during the subsequent Guadalcanal campaign in the Solomon Islands and Japan won its fair share. Indeed, Pearl Harbor apart, the Battle of Savo Island and the Battle of Tassfaronga are considered the worst defeats in US naval history. In the two carrier-on-carrier battles at Guadalcanal, the Battle of the East Solomon Islands and the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands, victory honours were even.
Thus, 20 months later, in June 1944, as Japan sought out America’s Pacific fleet while it was protecting the US Marines’ landing on Saipan (the island from which the US would begin the carpet-bombing of Japan), Japan’s naval commanders had every reason to think that they had a fair chance of victory.
Throughout the Pacific War, the Japanese navy had sought to draw America into battle to replicate the stunning victory Admiral Togo had inflicted on the Russian navy at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905. This engagement, a Japanese Battle of Trafalgar, had brought the complete destruction of the Russian fleet, which had sailed halfway round the world from the Baltic Sea to the Sea of Japan. The Battle of Tsushima effectively ended the Russo-Japanese War and with it Tsar Nicholas II’s attempt to conquer northern China and Korea. Thus, Tsushima became the Japanese template on how to defeat a great world power like the United States.
Contrary to received opinion, the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (otherwise known as Operation Z) on 7 December 1941 was not aimed as a war-winning knockout blow. The fact that America’s carriers were not in port may have been bad luck from a Japanese point of view, but that did not significantly affect Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s strategic plan. Like at Tsushima, the plan was to draw the US navy into a decisive action in Asian waters, thousands of miles from America’s home bases. As navy Chief of Staff, Admiral Osami Nagano informed Emperor Hirohito, ‘at the appropriate time, we will endeavour by various means to lure the main fleet of the United States (toward Japan) and destroy it’.
In the interwar period, the naval limitation treaties at Washington (1922) and London (1930) were aimed at reducing the battleship arms race. The agreed ratio of warships disadvantaged Japan. The Japanese navy set out to nullify the treaties’ effects. It invested heavily in new technologies such as submarines, aircraft carriers and torpedoes – weapons that were not treaty-limited.
In 1927, an eight-man team of Japanese naval engineers visited the Whitehead Torpedo Works in Weymouth. Instead of buying British, they returned to the Kure Naval Yard, along the coast from Hiroshima, to build a compressed pure-oxygen-powered torpedo. They succeeded where the British gave up. The resulting Type-93 became known as the ‘Long Lance’; it could travel at 53 mph and had a range of nearly 23 miles – seven times the distance of American torpedoes.
By contrast, for the first two years of the war, American torpedoes did not work because of a faulty design. It did not help that the US navy’s torpedo plant was monopolistic and based in Delaware, a state famous for public corruption and racketeering. The naval factory engineers even ignored the advice of a visiting Albert Einstein who warned that their torpedoes, designed to strike below an enemy ship’s plimsoll line, would not work because of the Bernoulli Principle of fluid dynamics that explains pressure and velocity.
Range extension was also implicit in the design of enormous Japanese submarines. Their C-3 B-1 submarine was built as a global underwater cargo ship that picked up strategic Nazi supplies from the port of Lorient on France’s Atlantic Coast. Bigger still, at the suggestion of legendary commander Admiral Yamamoto, Japan built the Sentoku (literally ‘three uses’) I-400, double the size of any allied submarine; it was designed as an underwater aircraft carrier that could launch three Aichi M6A Seiran torpedo bombers.
Neither did Japan abandon the battleship. Again, the design concept emphasised range. After the expiry of the naval limitation treaties, the Japanese Navy built the two largest battleships in history, IJN Yamato and IJN Musashi; their 18-inch guns could fire a 1.5-ton shell 26 miles. By comparison, the largest American battleships had 16-inch guns which could fire a 1.35-ton shell for 20 miles – giving Japan a more than useful 6-mile advantage in the epic future naval encounter envisaged by Yamamoto.
Given these technological advances it has to be asked why the Japanese navy performed so badly at the Battle of the Philippine Sea some 20 months after their successes in the naval engagements at the Coral Sea and in the Solomons?
Tactically, the Japanese plan in the summer of 1944 was spot on. Admiral Toyoda, who had become Commander-in-Chief of the navy after the assassination of Yamato, aimed to attack the US fleet as it supported the US marine landings on Saipan. Here Toyoda could use land-based aircraft on Saipan to supplement its by now outnumbered carrier fleet air arm. The US navy had 15 fleet and light carriers compared to the nine that Japan could muster. The ensuing Battle of the Philippine Sea would be the largest carrier-on-carrier battle in history.
In the event, the Battle of the Philippine Sea was a crushing defeat for the Japanese navy. It lost three of its carriers with three more damaged. By comparison, just one US battleship sustained some damage. The real damage however was to Japanese navy’s aerial assets; some 650 of its 750 planes were shot down. Such was the aerial massacre that the battle is more often referred to as ‘The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot’. Almost all the Japanese pilots along with thousands of carrier technicians, both scarce resources, were killed. Toyoda’s ‘decisive battle with full strength’ turned into a catastrophic defeat.
The Battle of Leyte Gulf was an overwhelming victory for the United States
Why did the Japanese navy, that had such a technical advantage at the start of war, perform so poorly? The answer is that the US navy had not stood still. Apart from bringing new Essex class aircraft carriers on stream, the US had raced ahead of Japan in areas such as carrier-to-air communication, radar and analogue computer anti-aircraft guns.
By the summer of 1944, the US navy had replaced its pre-war Grumman F4F Wildcat fighter with the F6F Hellcat which had upgraded armament, speed and range. Captain David McCampbell, the US navy’s top Second World War ace, who scored all of his 34 victories in a Hellcat, described it as ‘easy to fly, and was a stable gun platform, but what I really remember most was that it was rugged and easy to maintain’. Similarly, the Douglas Devastator torpedo plane, a deathtrap at the Battle of Midway, had been replaced by the faster Grumman Avenger.
At the beginning of the Pacific War, Japan’s outstandingly manoeuvrable Mitsubishi Zero fighter, enjoyed a 12 to one kill ratio. By 1944, those statistics had reversed to one to nine. But there was another factor at play – one that was not technological. Japan was running out of pilots. In anticipation of a single overwhelming victory like Tsushima, Japan had only a shallow pool of carrier pilots. They were brilliantly trained and far from the feeble, pebble-spectacled pilots so arrogantly imagined by the British and Americans. The problem for the Japanese navy was that by 1944 their elite prewar carrier pilots were nearly all dead – as were their supporting technicians. They could not be replaced. The Japanese navy had neither the time nor the aviation fuel to train new recruits.
So, after the ‘Marianas Turkey Shoot’ what were the Japanese navy’s options? They still had a lot of capital warships and some aircraft carriers, but not enough pilots. In these straitened circumstances, the they devised an all-in high-risk strategy aimed at destroying the armada that was bringing General MacArthur’s sixth army to a landing at Leyte Gulf in the Philippines. Despite the intricacy of the plan concocted by Admiral Soemu Toyoda, his naval attack at Leyte Gulf had more than a touch of ‘suicide mission’ about it. As Admiral Takeo Kurita noted before the battle, ‘Would it not be a shame to have the fleet remain intact while our nation perishes?’
In chess, a queen sacrifice (sometimes known as the ‘Aleppo gambit’) is a high risk and rarely successful ploy. Admiral Toyoda’s strategy at the Battle of Leyte Gulf was the naval equivalent. At Leyte Gulf, Toyoda planned a complex three-pronged naval engagement in which he would offer four prized aircraft carriers as a sacrificial decoy; without carrier pilots they were in any case a worthless asset.
Japan’s intel had convinced its naval hierarchy that the US Fleet Commander Admiral William ‘Bull’ Halsey was an inspirational leader but also a monomaniacal hothead who bridled at the thought that he had, through illness, missed out on command at the Battle of Midway. His heart’s desire was to sink a Japanese flat-top. As Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa recalled after the war, ‘we always tried the operation plan according to the characteristics of the United States commander’.
Toyoda guessed right. Halsey, who was meant to be protecting General Douglas MacArther’s landing on Leyte Island, took the bait and chased the empty carriers to the northeast of the Philippines. Halsey bagged the four Japanese decoy flattops, but it was a hollow victory. Meanwhile to the south of the Philippines, another Japanese decoy squadron was ambushed and annihilated in the Surigao Strait that separates Leyte Island from the Philippines’ southernmost major island, Mindanao.
This was the start of the Japanese navy’s use of kamikaze as a weapon of war
With the San Bernardino Strait above Leyte Island unguarded, the route to annihilating the landing of General MacArthur’s 6th army on the island was now open to a force led by Admiral Kurita aboard the behemoth battleship IJN Musashi. However, before it could slip through the San Bernardino Strait, a US carrier aircraft found Musashi in the Sibuyan Sea. The 72,000-ton battleship was hit with 19 torpedoes and 17 bombs before it turned turtle and sank. Its captain and 1,022 men, almost half Musashi’s crew, went down with their ship. Kurita switched flagships.
With his remaining squadron, Kurita transited the San Bernardino Strait and fell on the unprotected escort carriers and destroyers which had been abandoned by Halsey in his pursuit of the empty Japanese carriers. MacArthur’s 6th army, in the process of invading Leyte Island, was at Kurita’s mercy. At this moment, with victory in sight, Kurita inexplicably turned back and slipped back through the San Bernardino Strait, before Admiral John McCain Sr., (grandfather of the Republican party presidential candidate for 2000) scurrying back from Halsey’s forces, could bring his carriers to bear on the battle. After the war Kurita confessed, not altogether convincingly, that he ‘did not realise how close I was to victory’.
Fake news filtered back to Tokyo: it was reported that 16 American carriers had been sunk. Hirohito ordered victory celebrations. General Suzuki declared ‘we must demand the capitulation of MacArthur’s entire forces’.
In fact, the Battle of Leyte Gulf was an overwhelming victory for the United States – in terms of matériel destruction, by far the greatest ever in US naval victory. The Japanese navy lost 12,500 men, a fleet carrier, three light carriers, three battleships, ten cruisers and 11 destroyers – 28 ships out of Japan’s 80 serviceable warships. Meanwhile, the US suffered 2,800 casualties and lost six ships. 265 American planes were downed compared to an estimated 550 or more Japanese planes; the difference was that most of the downed US pilots were rescued before they were captured or attacked by sharks.
Despite the unique scale of the victory, it has to be judged that the Battle of Leyte Gulf was not a war-defining engagement. Even if the US navy had been defeated and MacArthur’s landing disrupted by the end of 1944, the US could have replaced its losses within months.
The American industrial juggernaut was in full flow. By mid-1945, America had 28 fleet and light carriers, as well as more than 71 escort carriers, 23 battleships, 73 cruisers, 377 destroyers, and 232 submarines. If auxiliaries are included, the US navy comprised more than 7,500 ships. Often forgotten is that to sustain supply chains supporting 1.5 million US personnel in Asia, America had built 2,751 Liberty cargo ships. By contrast, after Leyte Gulf, the Japanese navy consisted of just 72 ships of all types, while their merchant fleet had already been decimated.
If the Battle of Leyte Gulf left an immediate legacy, it was the start of the Japanese navy’s use of kamikaze (‘divine wind’) as a weapon of war – the tactic that came to define the death cult that imbued Japanese forces during the Pacific War as they fought for their godhead, Emperor Hirohito. Nevertheless, there was a perverted logic to this tactic of mass suicide. As Japan’s fighter ace, Saburo Sakai, explained after the war:
Putting a kid with only about 20 hours flight time into a plane and telling him to take on US pilots in Hellcats and Corsairs is just as much a suicidal tactic as being a kamikaze. We figured that if they’re going to die anyway, the kamikaze attack will probably cause more damage to the enemy for the same price in lives.
The Battle of Leyte Gulf deserves a larger place in history than it is usually accorded. It was the largest naval battle in history in terms of the number of ships involved – 375 (not including auxiliaries such as troop ships, supply boats, launches, landing craft patrol boats etc.). In geographical scale, the battle was similarly unique. Leaving aside the Battle of the Atlantic, more a war-long campaign than a battle, the engagement at Leyte Gulf took place across four days over the largest naval battlefield in history; it covered the entire 115,000 square mile Philippine Archipelago, an area 20 per cent larger than the United Kingdom. The Battle of Leyte Gulf was the sixth and last of the carrier-on-carrier naval battles in history. It is very unlikely that there will ever be another.
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