The Eelfish slid downward. Brannon walked to the hatch and stood, looking down through the circular opening at the plotting crew at work on the gyro table.
“We’ve got their speed, sir,” Olsen said. “They’re making twenty-four knots.”
“Very well, Brannon said. “I’m going to stay on this course. There might be more ships coming. We can’t risk not being sure of that.” He turned to Perry Arbuckle.
“That’s the first time I ever saw a Jap battleship, and when I do I see two of them and I don’t dare shoot!” He looked at his wrist watch and turned to the hatch.
“Sixty-five feet, Control. I’m going to raise the ‘scope now so watch your angle.” He nodded his head at Brosmer, who raised the periscope. The Eelfish took a slightly sharper up angle as the periscope went up. Brannon searched astern and on both flanks and saw empty ocean. Far ahead, on his starboard bow, he could see the smoke of the task force.
“Booth, get down below and give your information on the task force to Mr. Michaels. Tell him that I want a message encoded at once. As soon as he’s ready we’ll come to forty feet and get the message off.”
Fifteen minutes later Eelfish planed upward to forty feet and the radio mast was run up. The radioman began to pound out the groups of five numbers in the coded message. He stopped sending and his fingers delicately adjusted his receiver dial.
“Message received and receipted for,” he said to Jim Michaels.
“I’ve got fast screws bearing one seven zero, sir,” Paul Blake called out. “Pretty far away but getting a little stronger.”
“Three hundred feet,” Brannon ordered. “Down radio mast. Bastards probably zeroed in on the radio signal.” He walked to the Control Room hatch.
“Stand easy on Battle Stations. Smoking lamp is lighted for ten minutes only. Maintain silence about the decks.”
The Japanese battle fleet sighted by Eelfish was called, officially, the Southern Force. It was commanded by Vice Admiral Nishimura, and it was one of three task forces that were under way to smash the invasion at Tacloban. In Tacloban there were 28 big Liberty ships, hundreds of landing craft, and a vast armada of Navy supply and support ships, all concentrated around the port city. The cruiser U.S.S. Nashville, with General Douglas MacArthur aboard, was anchored in the midst of the invasion fleet, the command center for the vast amphibious operation that was striking both at Tacloban and a little farther south, along the shoreline.
Ashore the initial reaction to the American landing was light. As the hours wore on the resistance solidified and grew stronger as the Japanese began to close in on the landing areas. The call went out to units farther inland to come with all possible speed to reinforce the garrison at Tacloban. Those units could not reach the invasion area; the main roads had been cut.
While Vice Admiral Nishimura’s force was sailing across the Sulu Sea toward Leyte Gulf, another battle force, this one commanded by Vice Admiral Kurita, moved to the north along the west side of Palawan Island. The Darter spotted the battle force and sent off a contact message, and then moved to the attack, calling on Dace to help.
Darter fired all six torpedo tubes forward at a heavy cruiser leading the battle force and then swung and fired four torpedoes from the after tubes at another cruiser. Five of the six torpedoes fired out of Darter’s forward tubes hit the heavy cruiser, and Vice Admiral Kurita’s flagship, the heavy cruiser, Atago, blew up with spectacular explosions. Vice Admiral Kurita decided to go down with his ship, but his junior officers persuaded him to swim for it, and he was rescued by a destroyer.
The salvo from the Darter’s after torpedo tubes smashed into the heavy cruiser Takao, damaging it severely. Dace, racing to get into the fight, set upon the heavy cruiser Maya and fired six torpedoes at it. Four of the torpedoes hit, and the Maya rolled over and sank in four minutes.
The task force moved north, undeterred by the attack by the two submarines. Vice Admiral Kurita’s orders were to go north and east and exit through the San Bernardino Strait to the Pacific and then run south down the length of Samar Island, turn west and north, and rendezvous with Vice Admiral Nishimura at 0430 on the morning of October 25, 1944. To make sure that the American aircraft carriers could not get into the fight at Tacloban or harass the two Japanese battle fleets racing toward Tacloban, Vice Admiral Ozawa’s Northern Force was successfully decoying Admiral Bull Halsey’s main carrier fleet away from the invasion area and to the north.
Farther to the southwest was yet another and smaller battle force, the Second Southern Force under the command of Vice Admiral Shima. This was a mop-up force to trap and sink any American ships that might escape the double sledgehammer blow administered by Nishimura and Kurita. The Second Southern Force consisted of two heavy and one light cruiser and nine destroyers.
The scene was being set for what historians would later call the greatest naval battle of all time between capital warships. Eelfish, far behind Vice Admiral Nishimura’s battle force, was running on the surface at top speed in the hope that somehow, in some way, it could take part in the battle that Mike Brannon was sure was going to be joined.
CHAPTER 22
Sunset came at 1815 hours on October 24, 1944, at Tacloban. Ashore the American invasion troops were locked in an increasingly stubborn battle with the Japanese defensive forces. Before Leyte Island was declared to be secured and safely in U.S. hands, on Saint Patrick’s Day of 1945, the U.S. forces would suffer more than 15,000 casualties. The Japanese would pay a much stiffer price. More than 49,000 of their troops would die in the five-month-long battle.
In the crowded reaches of San Pedro Bay, just across from the port of Tacloban, hundreds of tons of supplies were being shuttled to the shore where the beach captains supervised the moving and storage of the vast quantity of materiel coming in from the ships.
Thousands of fighting men were being ferried from the ships that had brought them to this desolate area to the various beach staging areas from which they were moved into the battles raging all around Tacloban. On board the ships in San Pedro Bay there was fear, open naked fear. The movements of the Japanese battle fleets, reported first by the Ultra code breakers and confirmed by submarines, left no doubt that the Japanese intended to strike from the sea at the invasion force.
As the sun set, Vice Admiral Nishimura, his flag flying in the battleship Yamashiro, steamed toward the invasion area. Ahead of him, four destroyers of the Japanese Destroyer Division Four were ranged: the Michishio, the Yamagumo, the Asagumo, and the Shigure. A kilometer astern of Nishimura’s flagship the battleship Fuso steamed, followed by the heavy cruiser Mogami. The navigators on the bridge of the battleship Yamashiro worked at their charts, estimating the overall speed of the task force, and assured the Vice Admiral that they would rendezvous with Vice Admiral Kurita at 0430 on October 25 — providing Vice Admiral Kurita was on time. Once the rendezvous was accomplished the combined battle fleets would steam up the length of Leyte Gulf and administer a smashing attack on the American invasion force.
At 2300 hours of the night of October 24 the Peter Tare boats — the PT boats — sighted the Japanese force in the eastern area of the Sea of Mindanao and hurled themselves into the attack against an enemy force so much more powerful than all the PT boats combined that the very fact of the attack was madness — mosquitoes attacking a herd of elephants.