The raids on Formosa

Before dawn on 12 October 1944 the first Grumman F6F Hellcat fighters took off from the decks of more than a dozen American aircraft carriers. Their target was Formosa – Taiwan – a Japanese colony for half a century and, in 1944, a great air and naval base on the route between Japan and the Philippines. So began the series of engagements, lasting until 16 October, which the Japanese called the Taiwan Air Battle (台湾沖航空戦, Taiwan-oki kōkūsen) and the Americans the Formosa Air Battle. By day carrier aircraft destroyed airfields, hangars and depots on the island; at night and at dusk Japanese land-based aircraft attacked the American ships.

War chronologies note briefly that US Navy carriers attacked Formosa. That is correct. It is worth adding, however, that the raids on Formosa itself were part of a longer operation: on 10 October the carriers struck Okinawa, on 11 October northern Luzon, and from 12 to 14 October Formosa. What proved most important, though, was not the raid itself but the Japanese response to it and its consequences.

Before the invasion of the Philippines

At the beginning of October 1944 the American Joint Chiefs of Staff finally settled the dispute over the road to Japan. The invasion of Formosa was postponed and the Philippines given priority: on 20 October the forces of General Douglas MacArthur were to land on the island of Leyte. The task of Admiral William Halsey’s Third Fleet, under the command of Admiral Chester Nimitz, was to cover the landing and, beforehand, to destroy Japanese air power on the airfields from which it could threaten the invasion fleet – on Okinawa, Formosa and Luzon.

The fleet’s striking force was Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher’s Task Force 38. It consisted of four task groups, commanded by Vice Admiral John S. McCain and Rear Admirals Gerald Bogan, Frederick Sherman and Ralph Davison. According to tallies cited in the literature, the force comprised 17 carriers (9 fleet and 8 light) with more than a thousand aircraft, 6 battleships, over a dozen cruisers and more than 50 destroyers. It was then the most powerful naval force in the world. Since the occupation of Ulithi the fleet had a large sheltered anchorage in the western Carolines from which it could operate without returning to distant bases.

The Japanese were expecting an American offensive. Since the summer they had been preparing Plan Shō-Gō (“Victory”) in four variants, depending on where the landing came: Shō 1 covered the Philippines, Shō 2 Formosa, the Ryukyus and southern Japan, Shō 3 the Japanese home islands, and Shō 4 Hokkaido and the Kurils. After the defeat in the Battle of the Philippine Sea the Japanese carriers had almost no trained aircrew, so the plan gave land-based aviation the main role in the air battle. Vice Admiral Shigeru Fukudome’s Second Air Fleet was stationed on Formosa and on Kyushu; it included the special T Force (from the word “typhoon”), trained for torpedo attacks at night and in bad weather.

The blow caught the Japanese command at an awkward moment. The commander of the Combined Fleet, Admiral Soemu Toyoda, was then touring units in the south and on 10 October was on Formosa. Unwilling to risk a flight to Japan through an area where American carriers were operating, he was stranded on the island, and operations were directed from headquarters in Japan by his chief of staff, Vice Admiral Ryūnosuke Kusaka. Kusaka took the raids as the prelude to a landing and decided to throw into battle the air units earmarked for Shō – without waiting for the ships to arrive. On 10 October an alert was issued for Shō 1 and Shō 2, and on the morning of 12 October the air component of Shō 2 was activated.

Three days over the island

On the morning of 12 October Mitscher’s four groups divided their targets: Bogan’s group attacked the north of Formosa, Sherman’s the centre of the island, and McCain’s and Davison’s the south, including the area around the port of Takao (today Kaohsiung). The Japanese were on alert and scrambled fighters, many of them army aircraft. By the accounts of both sides the fight was one-sided: most of the Japanese pilots were poorly trained, unable to fight in pairs and flights, and their machines caught fire easily. The American groups claimed more than a hundred kills on the first day alone, losing, according to the same tallies, a dozen or so aircraft. Fukudome, who watched the battle from his command post, wrote after the war that his fighters were “like so many eggs thrown at a stone wall”.

Behind the fighters came Curtiss SB2C Helldiver dive-bombers and Avenger torpedo bombers. All day successive waves bombed airfields, hangars, workshops, barracks, warehouses and ships in the harbours. On 13 October, in worse weather, the raids were extended to the Pescadores and northern Luzon; on 14 October the carriers flew only a single morning strike before beginning to withdraw. Over the following days Formosa was bombed by American B-29s of XX Bomber Command, flying from airfields near Chengdu in China, from which they had carried out raids on Kyushu in the summer; among their targets was the large aircraft repair works at Okayama airfield near Takao.

The most dangerous threat to the Americans proved to be the Japanese attacks at dusk and at night. The aircraft of T Force – Mitsubishi G4M and Yokosuka P1Y bombers armed with torpedoes – came in low over the water, lit their targets with flares and pressed on through the anti-aircraft fire. Most were shot down before they could attack. On the evening of 13 October, however, a P1Y put a torpedo into the heavy cruiser USS Canberra. Twenty-three sailors were killed, both engine rooms flooded and the ship lost all way. Instead of scuttling her, the Americans took her in tow – a task that fell to the cruiser USS Wichita. The following evening, 14 October, a torpedo struck the light cruiser USS Houston (CL-81), the second ship of that name in this war. She took on a heavy list and some of the crew ended up in the water, but she too was saved, towed by the cruiser USS Boston. On 16 October Houston was hit by a second torpedo and still stayed afloat. The carriers Franklin and Hancock, among others, suffered lighter damage from bombs and crashing aircraft.

Halsey’s “bait”

The two crippled cruisers, towed at a few knots, lay within range of aircraft from Formosa and Luzon. Halsey could have scuttled them and withdrawn. He chose otherwise: the group of damaged ships and their escort, nicknamed by the sailors “Cripple Division” (CripDiv 1) and then “Bait Division” (BaitDiv 1), was to lure out the Japanese fleet. McCain’s group covered the cruisers, Davison’s attacked airfields on Luzon, and the other two groups moved east, out of reach of Japanese reconnaissance, ready to strike at any force that set out to “finish off” the Americans.

The plan almost worked. On news of the air arm’s successes, Vice Admiral Kiyohide Shima’s Fifth Fleet – two heavy cruisers, a light cruiser and destroyers – sailed from Japan on 15 October to destroy the remnants of the supposedly shattered task force. Japanese reconnaissance aircraft, however, spotted the intact American carriers and Shima turned back. Japanese aircraft kept attacking throughout 15 and 16 October, suffering further heavy losses. Both cruisers were eventually towed to Ulithi and, after temporary repairs, sent back to shipyards in the United States. Neither saw action again.

A victory that never was

Japanese airmen returning from the night attacks reported carriers burning and sinking. In the darkness, amid explosions, the streaks of anti-aircraft fire and the wrecks of their own aircraft blazing on the water, it was easy to take every flash for a hit. Most of the crews who might have corrected anything did not return. The reports were added up without critical verification. On 19 October Imperial General Headquarters announced that since 12 October 11 carriers, 2 battleships and 3 cruisers, as well as a cruiser or destroyer, had been sunk, and a further 8 carriers, 2 battleships and over a dozen other ships damaged; its own losses were given as 312 aircraft that had failed to return. In reality not a single American ship had been sunk, and two cruisers had been seriously damaged.

In Japan a great victory was proclaimed. The press and radio wrote of the rout of the American fleet, and on 21 October Emperor Hirohito issued a rescript expressing his appreciation to the army and navy. Halsey, on learning of the communiqués from Tokyo, reportedly signalled Nimitz that the ships “sunk” by Radio Tokyo had been salvaged and were “retiring at high speed toward the enemy”. The message passed into American legend of the war.

Within the navy itself it was quickly understood that the results had been far more modest. According to Japanese studies, by 18 October the Combined Fleet staff had concluded that at most a few carriers had been damaged and that most of the American fleet was intact. Doubts were also held by Major Eizō Hori of army intelligence, who questioned the airmen at Kanoya air base and cabled Tokyo that at most two or three ships had been sunk, and not necessarily carriers. According to his memoirs, the cable had no influence on the staff’s decisions. The army, it is generally accepted, did not learn the true results from the navy in time.

The balance sheet

American losses were relatively light. According to tallies cited in the literature, the Americans lost 89 aircraft between 12 and 16 October (some to non-combat causes), and about a hundred men were killed in the air groups and aboard ship. Two cruisers were out of the line for many months. Japanese losses are harder to establish. Imperial General Headquarters itself admitted 312 aircraft that had failed to return; according to studies based on Japanese data, more than 300 aircraft in all were lost over Formosa and in the attacks on the ships, while the Americans estimated far more. To these must be added aircraft destroyed on the ground, bombed factories and ships sunk in harbour. Most painful was the loss of experienced airmen, including the crews of T Force and the air groups withdrawn from Vice Admiral Jisaburō Ozawa’s carriers and thrown into the fight from land.

Consequences before Leyte

The air battle over Formosa largely decided how the struggle for the Philippines would unfold. In it the Japanese fleet lost the air cover on which it had counted for Operation Shō. Ozawa’s carriers still had their flight decks, but almost no aircraft or aircrew, so that in the coming battle they could serve only as bait. The British historian H. P. Willmott wrote that the Japanese defeat in the Philippines had largely been accomplished even before the landings of 17 and 20 October – precisely as a result of the victory won by American carrier aviation after 10 October. After the war Toyoda named weakness in the air as the main reason for the failure of Shō.

The false reports also had strategic consequences. Convinced that the American fleet had been shattered, Tokyo concluded that the landing on Leyte offered the chance of a decisive battle. Contrary to the existing plans, which envisaged a defence centred above all on Luzon, General Tomoyuki Yamashita, commander of the Fourteenth Area Army, was ordered to transfer large forces to Leyte. The convoys sailing there under constant air attack suffered heavy losses, and Luzon was weakened ahead of the fighting that was to come there.

Finally, after the defeat over Formosa, an idea that had still been rejected in September prevailed in the Japanese navy: organised suicide attacks. Vice Admiral Takijirō Ōnishi, who in October took command of the First Air Fleet in Manila, concluded that with such poorly trained airmen the only way to hit American carriers was to crash an aircraft carrying a bomb into them. A few days later the first kamikaze unit was formed; it went into action in the Battle of Leyte Gulf at the end of October.

Its place in the war

The raids on Formosa were the last great preparation for the Americans’ return to the Philippines. On 17 October the Americans seized the islets at the entrance to Leyte Gulf, on 20 October MacArthur’s forces landed on the island, and on 23–26 October, in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the largest naval battle in history, the Japanese fleet was shattered. Formosa, though so close, remained in Japanese hands until the end of the war: the Americans bypassed it, taking Iwo Jima and Okinawa in the spring of 1945, and the island was bombed right up to Japan’s surrender. After the war, in October 1945, it was taken over by the authorities of the Republic of China. Japan’s propaganda “victory” before Leyte, meanwhile, remains one of the most glaring examples of how overrating one’s own successes can drive a high command to decisions based on fiction.