The January raids on Formosa

On 3 and 4 January 1945, carrier aircraft of Admiral William Halsey’s Third Fleet attacked the airfields and ports of Formosa – today’s Taiwan – and of Okinawa and the neighbouring islands of the Ryukyu archipelago. It was the first of a series of January raids on the island, which had been a Japanese colony for half a century and in 1945 was the main air base and transit hub between Japan and its conquests in South-East Asia. The strikes had one immediate aim: to prevent aircraft from Formosa attacking the invasion fleet bound for Lingayen Gulf on Luzon. Within less than three weeks Halsey’s carriers returned over Formosa three more times, and in between they broke into the South China Sea.

Formosa in American plans

Formosa had already been the target of a great strike in October 1944. Then, in the raids of 12–16 October, Halsey’s carriers had shattered Japanese air power over the island, and Tokyo had announced a fictitious victory over the American fleet. As late as the summer of 1944 some American planners, headed by Admiral Ernest King, had wanted to take Formosa itself instead of Luzon and strike China and Japan from there. In the end, in October, the Joint Chiefs of Staff adopted General Douglas MacArthur’s option – first Luzon, then Iwo Jima and Okinawa – and decided to bypass Formosa.

The island nevertheless remained dangerous. According to American intelligence estimates, some 300 aircraft were usually stationed there, and the airfields on Formosa lay within range both of Lingayen Gulf and of the routes the supply convoys to Luzon were to take. Air reinforcements from Japan to the Philippines were also staged through Formosa. Halsey’s task was therefore to neutralise this source of danger before the Sixth Army went ashore at Lingayen on 9 January.

Halsey’s fleet

In January 1945 the core of the Third Fleet was the fast carrier force – Vice Admiral John S. McCain’s Task Force 38. It consisted of three task groups, each with four carriers, battleships, cruisers and anywhere from a dozen to more than twenty destroyers, plus a night group with two carriers whose airmen were trained to fight after dark. In all there were some 900 aircraft on board. Following the fleet came a logistics group with oilers, ammunition ships and escort carriers bringing replacement aircraft.

The fleet had been through a hard time. On 18 December 1944 it had run into Typhoon Cobra in the Philippine Sea, which sank three destroyers, wrecked more than a hundred aircraft and took the lives of some 790 sailors. After repairs at Ulithi atoll, the Third Fleet put to sea on 30 December. Halsey and Admiral Chester Nimitz had agreed beforehand that as soon as the Luzon landing no longer required direct cover, the fleet would enter the South China Sea to seek out and destroy the Japanese warships believed to be lying in Cam Ranh Bay in Indochina.

3–4 January: the first strike

On the morning of 3 January the carriers were east of Formosa and launched their first waves of aircraft. The weather was bad: low cloud and rain obscured many targets, limited the number of sorties and made it hard to assess the results, but at the same time it hampered the Japanese air forces. Grumman F6F Hellcat fighters attacked the airfields, while Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo bombers and dive-bombers struck hangars, depots and shipping in the ports. Some of the strikes were directed at Okinawa and the neighbouring Ryukyu Islands, through which the route from Japan to Formosa ran.

On 4 January the raids were repeated. According to American tallies, in the two days at least three merchant ships were sunk and four Japanese escort ships damaged. The Japanese air forces were unable to mount a serious counter-attack on the carriers.

Meanwhile, several hundred miles to the south, the forces heading for Lingayen were sailing through the waters of the central Philippines. On that very 4 January, in the Sulu Sea, a kamikaze sank the escort carrier Ommaney Bay, and in the days that followed suicide aircraft flying from Luzon inflicted grievous losses on the invasion fleet. The danger thus came not from Formosa, which had been feared most, but from the airfields of Luzon itself.

Over Luzon and over Formosa again

At the request of MacArthur and Vice Admiral Thomas Kinkaid, the Third Fleet switched its strikes on 6 and 7 January to the airfields of Luzon, spreading over them a “big blue blanket” of constant fighter patrols. Kinkaid wanted Halsey to operate west of Luzon and cover Lingayen Gulf in the first days after the landing. Halsey considered such a task too passive for fast carriers and decided instead to strike again at the airfields of southern Formosa, from which attacks on Kinkaid’s forces might come. These raids were carried out on 9 January, the day of the Lingayen landing.

According to American tallies, in the operations of 3–9 January Halsey’s airmen destroyed more than 150 Japanese aircraft, but the fleet lost 86 of its own, 46 of them in accidents – the result of bad weather, take-offs and landings on pitching decks, and pilot fatigue. On the morning of 9 January Nimitz released the Third Fleet from its duty of directly covering Lingayen. During the night of 9–10 January the carriers passed through the Luzon Strait into the South China Sea, undetected by the Japanese.

The raid into the South China Sea

The ships Halsey was hunting – two hybrid battleship-carriers of the Ise class – were not at Cam Ranh but in the Singapore area, and the Japanese used the bay only as an anchorage for escort vessels. The raid, which the Americans named Operation Gratitude, nevertheless produced a different result, and a painful one for Japan. On 12 January carrier aircraft attacked convoys and ports along the coast of French Indochina – off Quy Nhơn, Cape Padaran and Cape Saint-Jacques, and at Saigon. According to American tallies, 46 vessels were sunk that day, including 33 merchant ships totalling more than 140,000 tons – among them 12 tankers – as well as the light cruiser Kashii and a dozen or so escort vessels. At Saigon the disarmed French cruiser Lamotte-Picquet was sunk by mistake, although she was flying the French flag. The French colonial authorities refused to hand over downed American airmen to the Japanese and escorted them to the Chinese border.

After refuelling in heavy seas the fleet returned north. On 15 January, despite bad weather and McCain’s suggestion that the raids be called off, Halsey struck Formosa again – the ports of Kaohsiung (then Takao) and Toshien – as well as airfields on the Chinese coast. Cloud and heavy anti-aircraft fire frustrated most of the attacks; the destroyer Hatakaze and a landing ship were sunk, and aircraft sent over the Pescadores, where the weather was better, sank the destroyer Tsuga. The fleet lost 12 aircraft.

On 16 January several hundred aircraft attacked Hong Kong, occupied by the Japanese since December 1941 – after the Battle of Hong Kong – as well as Canton and Hainan. In Hong Kong several tankers were sunk and aircraft destroyed at Kai Tak airfield, but bombs also fell on the Hung Hom district by the Kowloon docks, where according to sources hundreds of civilians were killed or wounded, and on the Stanley internment camp, where 14 Allied civilians were killed. Neutral Portuguese Macau was also attacked, the target being stocks of aviation fuel; the US government apologised to Portugal for this on 20 January. Hong Kong’s Japanese anti-aircraft defences proved exceptionally effective: on 16 January the fleet lost 22 aircraft shot down in action and 27 in accidents.

21 January: kamikaze over Formosa

Japanese radio propaganda announced that the American fleet had been “bottled up” and would be destroyed when it tried to leave the South China Sea. Halsey, on Nimitz’s advice, took it out eastwards on 20 January through the Balintang Channel, north of Luzon; on the way his fighters shot down 15 aircraft evacuating Japanese army air force personnel from Luzon. The next day, 21 January, the carriers struck Formosa for the fourth time that month, this time in good weather. Ten merchant ships were sunk in the harbour at Takao.

But the good weather favoured the Japanese too. A Japanese aircraft hit the light carrier Langley with two small bombs, and shortly afterwards a kamikaze plunged out of the clouds onto the carrier Ticonderoga, starting a fire among the fuelled aircraft on the hangar deck. A second suicide aircraft struck the island; among the wounded was the ship’s commanding officer, Captain Dixie Kiefer. According to American figures, more than 140 men were killed aboard Ticonderoga. A kamikaze also hit the destroyer Maddox, and aboard McCain’s flagship, the carrier Hancock, a bomb that broke loose from an Avenger as it landed exploded, killing several dozen sailors. Ticonderoga and Hancock left for repairs.

On 22 January the remaining carriers struck the Ryukyu Islands, chiefly in order to photograph Okinawa for the planned invasion. On 25 January the Third Fleet returned to Ulithi, and the next day Halsey handed over command to Admiral Raymond Spruance; the fast carrier force was redesignated Task Force 58.

The balance sheet

The January strikes on Formosa did not destroy Japanese air power on the island as the October ones had, but they fulfilled their main task: no organised attack threatening the Lingayen landing came from Formosa. The aircraft based on Luzon itself proved the greater danger. The whole sortie – from leaving Ulithi on 30 December to returning on 25 January – cost Halsey’s fleet, according to incomplete tallies, at least 170 aircraft in the period of 3–16 January alone, many of them in accidents and bad weather, and in its last days the damage to two heavy carriers as well.

The losses to Japanese shipping were far more serious. Nimitz judged the raid into the South China Sea to have been “well conceived and brilliantly executed”, although he regretted that the Japanese capital ships had not been found. The American historian Mark Parillo concluded that the destruction of 25 tankers during the raid sealed the fate of sustained Japanese resistance: oil from the Dutch East Indies was reaching Japan less and less often.

Place in the war

The Japanese command took the raid as a prelude to an American landing in southern China or Indochina and sent five additional divisions to defend southern China. In Indochina, General Yūitsu Tsuchihashi regarded it as the opening of an invasion, which contributed to the decision to disarm the French – on 9 March 1945 the Japanese overthrew the French colonial administration, ending the joint rule with Admiral Jean Decoux’s administration that had lasted since 1940. In reality the Americans planned no landing either on Formosa or in Indochina. Formosa, bypassed by the invasion, remained a base for Japanese air power until the end of the war, from which suicide aircraft took off in the spring of 1945 against the fleet off Okinawa; Japan lost the island only after its surrender in September 1945.