Kamikaze on the road to Luzon

At the beginning of January 1945 the first groups of a great armada sailed from Leyte Gulf to land the US Sixth Army on Luzon – the largest island of the Philippines, home to Manila and to the main Japanese army in the archipelago. For the next twelve days, until 13 January, the ships heading for Lingayen Gulf, and those already lying in it, were the target of the most violent campaign by Japanese suicide aircraft yet seen. The Japanese were turning more and more widely to kamikaze tactics – and in these days they achieved more with them, in relation to the number of aircraft used, than ever before.

Kamikaze in the Philippines

The first organised suicide attacks were carried out by airmen of Vice Admiral Takijirō Ōnishi’s First Air Fleet in October 1944, just after the Battle off Samar, in the final phase of the Battle of Leyte Gulf. In November suicide aircraft attacked the carriers of Admiral William Halsey’s fast carrier force, and in December the convoys sailing to Mindoro. From the improvised effort of a handful of volunteers, the kamikaze had become a regular method of warfare, adopted by the Japanese army air force as well.

The Japanese command no longer had the means to wage conventional air warfare. The navy and army air forces in the Philippines had lost hundreds of aircraft in the autumn, and in the last week of December Imperial General Headquarters decided that the archipelago would receive no more air reinforcements. According to the American historian Ian Toll, the 201st Air Group at Mabalacat, near the former Clark base, could field about 40 serviceable aircraft at the beginning of January, and no more than about 200 remained in the whole of the Philippines. The order was unequivocal: apart from the machines set aside for escort duties, every remaining aircraft was to be hurled against the American fleet in suicide attacks.

The long road to Lingayen

General Douglas MacArthur’s plan for the invasion provided for a landing on 9 January 1945 on the beaches at the southern end of Lingayen Gulf, from which the central Luzon plain led to Manila. Vice Admiral Thomas Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet was responsible for transport and protection, and Vice Admiral Jesse Oldendorf’s force of battleships and cruisers for the preliminary bombardment, with a group of escort carriers providing its air cover. The minesweepers of Mine Squadron 2 left the convoy at Leyte on 2 January and headed for Lingayen to clear the approaches to the gulf before the landing.

The route was long and roundabout. From Leyte Gulf the ships passed through the Surigao Strait and the Mindanao Sea into the Sulu Sea, and from there sailed north along the western coasts of Negros, Panay and Mindoro, past the entrance to Manila Bay. For almost a week the forces were within range of Japanese airfields on Luzon, Negros and in the central Philippines. The Japanese, as the naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison later established, were convinced by 6 January at the latest that the objective was Lingayen – which allowed them to concentrate the remnants of their strength in a single direction.

4 January: Ommaney Bay in the Sulu Sea

Japanese aircraft had been shadowing the forces since they left Leyte Gulf, and individual machines tried to attack them, but the first heavy blow fell on 4 January. On the afternoon of 4 January the escort carrier Ommaney Bay was sailing in the Sulu Sea in the rear group of Oldendorf’s force, astern of the battleship New Mexico. At about 5.12 p.m. a twin-engined Yokosuka P1Y “Ginga” bomber carrying two bombs slipped unseen through the destroyer screen. Radar failed to detect it in time, and the crew believed the Japanese aircraft had already gone; the ship’s captain later reported that the aircraft’s approach had been hidden by the blinding sun.

The aircraft clipped the island with its wing and crashed onto the flight deck. One bomb penetrated it and exploded in the hangar among fuelled aircraft; the other passed through the hangar deck and ruptured the water main, hampering firefighting. Fires and successive explosions engulfed the whole ship; that same evening the abandoned Ommaney Bay was finished off with a torpedo by the destroyer Burns. Ninety-three members of her crew were killed, together with two sailors from the destroyer escort Eichenberger who were helping with the rescue. Twenty-nine aircraft went to the bottom, none of which had managed to take off. It was the invasion force’s first major loss – and a foretaste of what was to come.

5 January: off Corregidor

The next day the forces passed the entrance to Manila Bay. Here Ōnishi’s men had only a short way to their target: according to Morison, 16 suicide aircraft and 4 escorts took off at 3.57 p.m. from the airfield at Mabalacat, north of Manila, and in less than an hour reached ships sailing about 160 kilometres from Corregidor. Between 4.51 and 5.50 p.m. the destroyer Helm, the Australian destroyer Arunta, the heavy cruiser Louisville and the escort carriers Manila Bay and Savo Island were hit. Fourteen men were killed aboard Manila Bay, but the ship resumed limited flying operations the very next day.

At 5.35 p.m. a kamikaze struck the port side of the Australian heavy cruiser HMAS Australia, which was on her way into the gulf to support the landing at San Fabian. Between 25 and 30 men were killed – sources give different figures – mostly from the anti-aircraft gun crews. The ship stayed in formation. General MacArthur was sailing aboard the light cruiser Boise, which that day evaded two torpedoes fired by a Japanese midget submarine.

6 January: the blackest day

On the morning of 6 January Oldendorf’s ships entered Lingayen Gulf and at around noon began bombarding the coast, while the minesweepers swept the approaches to the beaches. Ships at anchor or manoeuvring slowly in the confined waters were easy targets, and the cloud over the gulf and the surrounding hills made it hard for radar to detect low-flying aircraft. According to the account of Commander Tadashi Nakajima, who was responsible for training and employing the kamikaze in the Philippines, some 27–28 suicide aircraft took off from Luzon airfields that day; MacArthur later wrote of 58 aircraft and 18 escorting fighters.

At 11.59 a.m. a kamikaze struck the port wing of the bridge of the battleship New Mexico. Thirty men were killed and 87 wounded. Among the dead were the ship’s commanding officer, Captain Robert Fleming, and Lieutenant General Herbert Lumsden – Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s personal liaison officer with MacArthur, who in 1942 had commanded X Corps at the Second Battle of El Alamein and been dismissed afterwards by Bernard Montgomery. He was one of the most senior British Army officers killed in action in the Second World War. A few metres away, on the starboard side of the bridge, stood Admiral Bruce Fraser, commander of the British Pacific Fleet then being formed, who had come to observe American operations, and Rear Admiral George Weyler; both escaped unhurt.

A quarter of an hour or so later, at about 12.15 p.m., a Mitsubishi A6M “Zero” fighter plunged into the port side of the minesweeper Long (a former destroyer) just above the waterline, below the bridge. The ship caught fire and the crew had to abandon her; hit again, she broke her back and sank on the morning of 7 January. Almost her entire crew – 149 men – was picked up by the minesweeper Hovey. At about 12.52 p.m. a kamikaze hit the fast transport Brooks, which had to be abandoned. The destroyers Walke and Allen M. Sumner and other ships were also damaged.

In the afternoon came a second wave. Five aircraft that had taken off from Mabalacat at 4.55 p.m. under Lieutenant Nakano attacked at about 5.20–5.35 p.m. A kamikaze hit the battleship California by the mainmast; in the fire, made worse by a shell from a neighbouring ship that accidentally struck one of her turrets, 44 men were killed and 155 wounded. At 5.34 p.m. a second kamikaze struck Australia between the 102 mm guns on her starboard side, killing 14 sailors; from then on the cruiser had enough trained gunners to man only one gun of that calibre on each side. Louisville was hit again: on her bridge Rear Admiral Theodore E. Chandler, commander of Cruiser Division 4, was mortally wounded and died the next day – one of five American admirals killed in action during the war. The light cruiser Columbia was also damaged.

Morison reckoned that on 6 January kamikaze damaged 15 ships, and called it the heaviest blow to the US Navy since the Battle of Tassafaronga in November 1942. He also regarded these attacks as the most effective of the whole war in relation to the number of aircraft used.

The “big blue blanket” and the landing

The losses of 6 January alarmed the command. At the request of Kinkaid and MacArthur, Halsey, whose Third Fleet had been striking Formosa in the first days of January, sent the aircraft of his fast carriers over the Luzon airfields on 6 and 7 January. This was the “big blue blanket” tactic devised by Commander John Thach: constant, strong fighter patrols over the enemy’s airfields, intended to destroy aircraft on the ground and intercept them as soon as they took off. Halsey’s airmen reported destroying at least 75 aircraft on the ground. Oldendorf’s escort carriers flew between 250 and 300 sorties over the beaches and airfields on 6–8 January.

The attacks did not stop. Before dawn on 7 January the minesweeper Hovey, carrying survivors from Long and Brooks, was sunk by an aerial torpedo; 24 members of her crew and 24 of the survivors were killed. That evening bombs from a Japanese bomber sank the minesweeper Palmer. On 8 January Australia was hit twice within twenty minutes – one of the aircraft tore a hole about 4 by 2.5 metres in her side at the waterline – and despite a list she carried on with her scheduled bombardment. The same day the escort carrier Kadashan Bay and several transports were damaged.

On the morning of 9 January troops of Lieutenant General Walter Krueger’s Sixth Army landed on the beaches of Lingayen Gulf almost unopposed – General Tomoyuki Yamashita had no intention of defending the coast and had pulled his main forces back into the mountains. The kamikaze, however, went on attacking the ships. At 1.02 p.m. on 9 January a suicide aircraft hit the battleship Mississippi, killing 23 men, and at 1.11 p.m. the fifth kamikaze to strike Australia destroyed her funnel, radar and wireless office. The cruiser, which had lost 44 men killed and 72 wounded since 5 January, was withdrawn for repairs. On 10 January the transport DuPage and the destroyer escort Leray Wilson were hit, and on 11 January the old destroyer Belknap, on which 38 men were killed.

The last aircraft

After 10 January the attacks began to tail off – not because the Japanese had abandoned the tactic, but because they had run out of aircraft. Vice Admiral Ōnishi moved the headquarters of the First Air Fleet to Formosa, and the ground personnel of the 201st Air Group left behind on Luzon were drafted into infantry units that were to fight on in the mountains west of Clark. In mid-January the commander of the Japanese army’s Fourth Air Army, Lieutenant General Kyōji Tominaga, who had organised the army’s suicide attacks over the Philippines, also flew off to Formosa – without his superiors’ permission.

The last attacks fell on the most weakly defended vessels. On 12 January a kamikaze struck the transport Kyle V. Johnson, killing about 120 men, and further aircraft damaged other ships and destroyer escorts. On the morning of 13 January an aircraft dived almost vertically onto the deck of the escort carrier Salamaua, killing 15 sailors. She was the last ship hit by a kamikaze in Lingayen Gulf. Japanese air power on Luzon had virtually ceased to exist.

The balance sheet

The exact figures vary according to the source and the period counted. According to tallies based on Morison’s work, between 3 and 13 January kamikaze and other Japanese aircraft hit about 47 Allied warships and merchant vessels, four of which sank; about 740 sailors and soldiers were killed and nearly 1,300 wounded. Counting from mid-December and the Mindoro operation to 13 January, suicide attacks sank 24 vessels and damaged 67, according to the same tallies. Morison estimated that on 6 January almost every second aircraft that reached the force scored a hit – far more than in other phases of the Pacific War – and over the whole period one in three. The Japanese paid for this with some hundred, perhaps two hundred aircraft and the lives of their pilots, many of them young, barely trained airmen.

The Americans drew lessons from these days. Fighter patrols over the fleet were strengthened and radar picket destroyers were stationed far ahead of the forces, the number of anti-aircraft guns aboard ships was increased, and carrier aircraft were to destroy enemy airfields systematically before amphibious operations. Commanders admitted, however, that a determined pilot who got through the curtain of fire almost always hit his target, whatever the ship’s manoeuvres.

Place in the war

The kamikaze did not stop the invasion: the Sixth Army landed in Lingayen Gulf as planned, and the Philippines campaign entered the phase of fighting for Luzon, Manila and the mountains of the island’s north, which went on until the end of the war. But the suicide attacks cost the fleet more men than the landing itself, and showed that resistance would grow fiercer with every step towards Japan. After the loss of Luzon, the Japanese air forces moved their suicide attacks to Formosa and the Japanese home islands: as early as 21 January kamikaze flying from Formosa badly damaged the carrier Ticonderoga, in February they struck off Iwo Jima, and in the spring of 1945, off Okinawa, mass suicide attacks inflicted on the US Navy the heaviest losses in men in its history. The experience of Lingayen Gulf and Okinawa weighed heavily on American estimates of the cost of invading the Japanese home islands themselves.