Admiral's History Lesson

The World War II battle for Leyte Gulf was the "greatest naval battle of all time," according to Historian Samuel Eliot Morison* and to 16-year-old Bill Frazer the sea fight seemed a fine subject for a U.S. history-class term paper. But the skinny (5 ft. 11 in., 128 lbs.), scholarly San Fernando (Calif.) Senior High School junior was dissatisfied with the research material available--he knew of only about 250 books on the Pacific phase of World War II. So Bill who six years ago bought a set of lead models of Japanese fighting ships with his newspaper-route earnings, and began reading naval histories to trace the namesakes of his toys, decided to go to the sources.

To five men he sent letters asking: "If it would be convenient, could you possibly send me a short statement on your participation in the battle? Yours very truly, Bill Frazer." Addressees: Admiral William F. Halsey, in 1944 commander of the U.S. Third Fleet; Vice Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid, commander of the U.S. Seventh Fleet and the Central Philippines Attack Force; and three defeated Japanese sea fighters--Vice Admirals Jisaburo Ozawa, Takeo Kurita and Kiyohide Shima.

"Happy for Me." Bill wrote in English to the Japanese admirals, addressed his letters merely to "Imperial Naval Headquarters, Tokyo, Japan." But last week as he prepared to write his paper, Bill had a prize to include.

Wrote Admiral Shima, in English: "I am deeply impressed by your spirit of study in the war history, and am glad to answer your question. It is happy for me to think if my explanations written on the attached papers would be useful to you." The admiral went on testily to assert that "little information concerning actions of Shima fleet during the battle are found in the U.S., and many reports . . . were written neither with ample knowledge nor facts of actual features." He defended himself against Critic James A. Field Jr., who wrote in The Japanese at Leyte Gulf that "Shima, in a sense, is the buffoon of the tragedy."

Buffoon or not, Shima has a lot to explain. On Oct. 25, 1944, the second day of the historic sea fight, Shima steamed toward Surigao Strait, south of Leyte Gulf, with two heavy cruisers, a light cruiser and four destroyers, still distant from the main battle. He hoped to reach Leyte Gulf in time to harass U.S. landing forces there, but his entire contribution to the battle, as Historian Morison observes, was to ram his flagship into a crippled heavy cruiser of another Japanese force, after firing 16 torpedoes at two islands he mistook for U.S. ships.

"A Ready Trap." As the Japanese admiral recalls it, there was tragedy, but no buffoonery. In late 1944, he explains to Student Frazer, the imperial navy was still strong, but it had been pushed back so fast that it was badly disorganized. Just before the Leyte Gulf battle, Shima's force had wild-goose-chased after a supposedly crippled U.S. force. Shima steamed for the fringes of the vast Leyte engagement after other Japanese naval forces had set out, and the necessity for radio silence, he explains, meant that he could not coordinate his strategy or tactics with theirs. Faced with bad luck, disorganized communications and the blazing evidence that another Japanese force in Surigao Strait had been shattered, all Shima could do was withdraw. The admiral's account: "At that time, things flashed in my head were thus: ... If we continued dashing further north, it was quite clear that we should only fall into a ready trap."

Bill Frazer hopes for more letters. A reply from Admiral Kurita would be particularly valuable; he has been criticized for turning back into San Bernardino Strait, north of Samar when he might have dealt a telling blow to a U.S. force inferior in speed and firepower. But Shima offers the schoolboy historian an understandable summing up of Japanese hesitancy at Leyte: "A further defeat meant to Japan no longer incidental losses but loss of life itself."

* In History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, Volume XII, Leyte, June 1944-January 1945.

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