Invasion of Lingayen Gulf

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Invasion of Lingayen Gulf began on the 3rd of January 1945, and what followed over the next ten days would claim the lives of around 738 ship-based personnel and wound another 1,282. The operation was a massive Allied amphibious assault on the Philippine island of Luzon, aimed at driving out the Japanese forces that had occupied the region since 1941. But before a single American soldier set foot on the beaches, the invasion fleet had to survive a gauntlet that naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison would later describe as the worst damage the United States Navy had suffered since the Battle of Tassafaronga on the 30th of November 1942. The weapon responsible was the kamikaze. What made the kamikazes at Lingayen so devastating compared to every other battle in the Pacific? Why were the defenders so poorly equipped to stop them? And how did an operation that suffered such punishing losses at sea still succeed in landing more troops on its first day than had arrived on the beaches of Normandy?

• 2. Japanese Occupation and the Road Back

  ›

  On the 22nd of December 1941, Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma led the Japanese 14th Army ashore on the northeastern shores of Lingayen Gulf, at Agoo, Caba, Santiago, and Bauang. The defenders, a poorly equipped force of predominantly American and Filipino troops, could mount only minor skirmishes before the larger Japanese force overwhelmed them. General Douglas MacArthur ordered a retreat from Luzon and a withdrawal to Bataan. Following the defeat at the Battle of Bataan, American and Filipino prisoners of war were forced into what became known as the Bataan Death March, their destination Capas, Tarlac, not far from Manila. On the 6th of May 1942, Japanese troops forced the surrender of remaining Allied forces at the Battle of Corregidor. On the 11th of March 1942, Lieutenant John D. Bulkeley had picked up MacArthur, his family, and his immediate staff, who had been ordered to flee the Philippines. For the next three years, the gulf remained under Japanese occupation, and it would take the largest Allied amphibious force ever assembled in the Pacific to take it back.

• 3. The Long Approach

  ›

  From the 3rd through the 9th of January 1945, the ships of Admiral Jesse B. Oldendorf's invasion force followed a lengthy, circuitous route to avoid the most dangerous sea lanes. They threaded south through the Surigao Strait and the Bohol Sea, then turned north along the western coastlines of Negros, Panay, and Mindoro, finally reaching the mouth of Lingayen Gulf on Luzon's coast. The narrow base of the roughly rectangular gulf offered a landing area only 25 to 30 miles wide, but it held a strategic advantage: the overland route from the beaches to Manila was only about 100 miles. Two vertical channels were swept of mines by minesweeper units, one leading west toward the town of Lingayen and one leading east toward San Fabian. Intelligence estimates of Japanese resistance proved far off the mark. Underwater Demolition Teams found no beach obstacles and only a single mine. Lieutenant Commander W. R. Loud, who commanded the minesweeper force, reported finding around ten additional mines by the end of the 7th of January, though even that low number may have overstated what was actually there. Smith wrote that exploratory sweeps on the 7th turned up only two floating mines and none of the moored type. The minesweepers performed their tasks under constant air attack and difficult weather, including high waves on the eastern base of the gulf during the 7th of January.

• 4. Kamikaze Effectiveness

  ›

  Samuel Eliot Morison wrote that the kamikaze attacks on the 6th of January at Lingayen Gulf were "the most effective of the war in relation to the number of planes involved - 28 kamikazes and 15 fighter escorts." On that single day, around 28 kamikazes struck 15 ships, a hit rate approaching 50 percent. Across the Pacific as a whole, the average hit rate for kamikazes was 10 to 15 percent. Across the full 3rd to the 13th of January period at Lingayen, roughly 150 kamikazes completed around 54 strikes on 47 ships, a hit rate closer to 30 percent. The success stemmed from several overlapping factors. Commander Tadashi Nakajima, the Operations and Training Officer for the 201st Air Group, had carefully trained his pilots in two preferred dive profiles: a high-altitude approach descending from as high as 6,000 to 7,000 meters, and a low-altitude approach where pilots would cruise as low as 10 to 15 meters above the waterline before a sharp climb and dive. Nakajima cautioned pilots taking high-altitude approaches that "caution must be taken to insure that the final dive angle is not too steep", since gravity made aircraft harder to control in steep terminal dives. The pilots also flew with full fuel tanks to maximize the chance of fires, and carried bombs timed to penetrate ship decks before detonating. Many of the kamikaze planes were more heavily armored than those used at the Battle of Leyte Gulf, where some had been selected precisely because they were already damaged. According to Rear Admiral Calvin T. Durgin, the Allied fighter most widely used for air cover, the FM-2 Wildcat, "showed up inferior to the Japanese Zeke (Zero), not only in speed and maneuver, but in climbing ability in altitudes above 5000 feet." The terrain around the gulf was mountainous, limiting radar detection from the invasion ships; overcast conditions on the 6th and the 7th of January reduced visibility further, and pilots approached with the sun behind them to blind gunners using proximity-fused 5-inch guns. Samuel Cox, Director of the Naval History and Heritage Command, noted that on the 6th of January there was "an overcast that hampered both U.S. and Japanese operations. The U.S. ships could not see the Japanese aircraft until they broke through the overcast with very little time to react."

• 5. Ships and Lives Lost

  ›

  USS Ommaney Bay was the first major loss. On the 3rd of January 1945 at 17:12, a Yokosuka P1Y kamikaze carrying two bombs penetrated a destroyer screen undetected, concealed by the glare of the sun. Captain Young of the Ommaney Bay later reported that a lack of radar signals had led the task group to believe Japanese planes had withdrawn, so the attack took lookouts completely by surprise. The plane sliced across the superstructure and released two bombs, one of which set off a chain of explosions among fully fueled aircraft on the hangar deck. The second bomb passed through the hangar deck, destroying water pressure and making firefighting nearly impossible. With 93 killed and 65 wounded, Ommaney Bay suffered the greatest loss of life of any single ship in the battle; 19 Grumman FM-2 Wildcat fighters and 10 Grumman TBM Avenger torpedo bombers went down with her. At 11:59 on the 6th of January, a kamikaze struck the battleship New Mexico's bridge, killing Lieutenant General Herbert Lumsden, who was British Prime Minister Winston Churchill's personal liaison to MacArthur. Lumsden was the most senior British Army combat fatality of World War II. The strike also killed the ship's commanding officer, Captain Robert Fleming, leaving 30 dead and 87 wounded. Two admirals on the bridge's starboard side, Rear Admiral George Weyler and British Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser, were unharmed, separated from death by only a few yards. Rear Admiral Theodore E. Chandler, Commander of Cruiser Division 4, died on the 7th of January from wounds suffered when a kamikaze struck the bridge of the heavy cruiser Louisville the previous day. He was the highest-ranking U.S. Navy flag officer killed in action in World War II; he received a posthumous Navy Cross. The escort carrier Salamaua was the last vessel struck by a kamikaze in the entire Lingayen operation, hit on the 13th of January at 08:58 by an unidentified plane carrying two 250-kilogram bombs. After that strike, the Japanese had expended every aircraft they had in the Philippines. Only 47 Japanese planes escaped from the islands, and after the 15th of January it was believed only ten remained on all of Luzon.

• 6. The Destroyers' Ordeal

  ›

  Nakajima's training manual was explicit about targets: against destroyers and smaller warships, "a hit any place between the bridge and the center of the ship is usually fatal". At Lingayen Gulf, the evidence bore this out with grim precision. USS Long was struck by a low-flying kamikaze Mitsubishi Zero on her portside, about one foot above the waterline, setting her entire bridge and well deck ablaze. Captain Stanley Caplan ordered abandon ship for men trapped forward of the forward mast. The minesweeper Hovey spent over an hour picking up 149 of Long's survivors from the burning water while under continued air attack. Hovey herself sank at 04:55 on the 7th of January after an aerial torpedo slammed into her aft engine room, buckling her keel and snapping her in half within seconds. She took 24 of her own crew and 24 men from Long and Brooks to the bottom. She sank roughly 20 miles north of the base of the gulf at a depth of 54 fathoms. The ship Chandler subsequently rescued 229 survivors from the water. Of the 47 ships damaged by enemy aircraft at Lingayen, more than 30 percent were destroyers, destroyer escorts, and destroyer/minesweepers. Of the ships sunk or irreparably damaged, four of five were older Clemson or Wickes-class destroyers, all built in 1918. Morison noted that at least on the 6th of January, "the minecraft themselves bore the brunt of the attack this day owing to their distance from supporting ships," and that the Japanese "seemed to pick on Minecraft because they were usually isolated and had no good antiaircraft support." According to data compiled by Nakajima himself, of the 34 ships sunk by kamikazes across the entire Pacific war, at least sixteen were destroyers.

• 7. Landing Day and Its Aftermath

  ›

  At 09:30 on the 9th of January 1945 - S-Day - about 68,000 soldiers under General Walter Krueger of the U.S. 6th Army landed on the coast of Lingayen Gulf and met no opposition. Over the following days, a total of 203,608 soldiers came ashore, establishing a 20-mile beachhead stretching from Sual and San Fabian in the east to the town of Dagupan at the center and the town of Lingayen to the west. On the first day alone, more U.S. troops came ashore at Lingayen than had arrived on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. The total number of troops under MacArthur's command reportedly exceeded the number Dwight D. Eisenhower controlled in Europe. Task Force 78, the San Fabian Attack Force, was commanded by Vice Admiral Daniel E. Barbey; Task Force 79, the Lingayen Attack Force, was commanded by Vice Admiral Theodore Wilkinson. Pre-landing bombardment had shifted away from the town of Lingayen on the 8th of January after observers noted that Filipino civilians had begun forming a parade in the streets, flying American and Philippine flags in celebration. Within a few days, assault forces had captured the coastal towns and penetrated up to 5 miles inland. The subsequent Battle for Luzon became the highest net casualty battle U.S. forces fought in World War II: between 192,000 and 217,000 Japanese combatants died, with some sources placing total Japanese losses as high as 380,000 when non-combat casualties are included. Around 8,000 American combatants were killed, with total non-combat American casualty estimates reaching as high as 93,400 in the Sixth Army alone. Over 150,000 Filipinos perished, many during the Battle of Manila and in what became known as the Manila massacre of February 1945. Following the landings, Lingayen Gulf was converted into a vast supply depot for the remainder of the war to support the Battle of Luzon.

• 8. A Novel Born From the Gulf

  ›

  One of the Clemson-class destroyer/minesweepers struck by a kamikaze on the 6th of January 1945 in Lingayen Gulf sustained only moderate deck damage after fires were extinguished. The ship went on to survive the battle, but later that year it was caught in Typhoon Louise at Okinawa and scuttled. At the time, serving aboard as a lieutenant, was the author Herman Wouk. Wouk was not aboard during the Lingayen strike, but he made a brief reference to that kamikaze attack in his 1951 novel The Caine Mutiny. He drew on his actual experience aboard the ship during the post-surrender typhoon at Okinawa as the basis for the mutiny at the center of the story. The Caine Mutiny won the Pulitzer Prize in 1951. That the most decorated American war novel of its generation traces a direct line back to a ship that barely survived the kamikazes of Lingayen Gulf is a detail the source preserves almost in passing.