Storm Over Leyte: The Philippine Invasion and the Destruction of the Japanese Navy by John Prados

Author:John Prados [Prados, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-07-04T21:00:00+00:00

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That did not mean Kurita lacked an edge. He could be very competitive. Apart from his command qualities, another way Takeo impressed colleagues was as a competitor. Like Bill Halsey he played tennis. When his ships were in port Kurita went for baseball. Once Takeo became senior enough to command big ships and fleets he would have targets put out for him on the quarterdecks of his flagships. Wherever he was, the admiral practiced archery, peppering the targets with arrows. In the U.S. Navy society of his era Kurita would have played polo. Chief of staff Koyanagi considered him a great athlete. He stood out.

Kurita became a torpedoman, for the Japanese in those days the equivalent of a fighter pilot. According to Koyanagi, Takeo had very sharp reflexes and short reaction times. In the Navy that made a difference—Kurita became a good ship driver. Come the war, his record was remarkable. Admiral Kurita entered World War II holding pennant number 107 on the Navy List (Ozawa Jisaburo was at number 66, Mikawa Gunichi at number 69, Shima Kiyohide at number 154). At the time of Leyte, Kurita was a fifty-five-year-old vice admiral.

In a Navy that prized aggressiveness, Kurita Takeo still stood out. At the Battle of Sunda Strait in February 1942, Kurita’s ships had helped sink U.S. and Australian cruisers. The admiral had then led his cruiser division on a raid into the Indian Ocean, even though the British Eastern Fleet had battleships, and he had none. At Midway in June 1942, Kurita’s flotilla had been the only Japanese force other than Combined Fleet’s carriers to be bombed. Kurita had raced ahead to comply with orders to bombard Midway Island, though his request for support had been rejected, and he had made an extraordinary effort to keep the unrealistic schedule given to him by higher command—so much so that his cruisers outran their escorts. In the Solomons, Kurita’s battleships had shelled Guadalcanal. At the Battle of Santa Cruz, he had actually had the U.S. aircraft carrier Hornet (by that point a derelict) under his guns. At Rabaul in November 1943, his Second Fleet—then composed entirely of Imperial Navy cruisers—had been famously smashed by U.S. carrier planes. At the Philippine Sea battle, conversely, Kurita’s task group had been the only Japanese flotilla to lose no aircraft carriers.

In Combined Fleet Decoded, my framing of the Pacific war in light of the first intelligence revelations, I wrote that Kurita had been bombed, shelled, torpedoed, and generally harassed more than almost any other Japanese commander. And that is true—but it was because he kept putting himself in harm’s way. I used the phrase “gun-shy” to suggest that Kurita, by the time of Leyte Gulf, had developed a healthy apprehension for Allied aircraft. Historian Evan Thomas, drawing his picture of the admiral, portrays Kurita as super-gun-shy—the “Zelig of sea battle.” Overall, he casts Kurita as conservative, a man preoccupied with the “fleet-in-being,” or rather, force protection. I

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