Book Review: Leyte 1944: The Soldier's Battle, by Nathan N. Prefer
The Battle of Leyte that happened on land.
Casemate, 2012, 394 pages
When General Douglas MacArthur arrived in Australia in March 1942, having successfully left the Philippines to organize a new American army, he vowed, "I shall return!" More than two years later he did return, at the head of a large U.S. army to retake the Philippines from the Japanese. The place of his re-invasion was the central Philippine Island of Leyte. Much has been written about the naval Battle of Leyte Gulf that his return provoked, but almost nothing has been written about the three-month long battle to seize Leyte itself.
Originally intending to delay the advancing Americans, the Japanese high command decided to make Leyte the "Decisive Battle" for the western Pacific and rushed crack Imperial Army units from Manchuria, Korea, and Japan itself to halt and then overwhelm the Americans on Leyte. As were most battles in the Pacific, it was a long, bloody, and brutal fight. As did the Japanese, the Americans were forced to rush in reinforcements to compensate for the rapid increase in Japanese forces on Leyte.
This unique battle also saw a major Japanese counterattack - not a banzai charge, but a carefully thought-out counteroffensive designed to push the Americans off the island and capture the elusive General MacArthur. Both American and Japanese battalions spent days surrounded by the enemy, often until relieved or overwhelmed. Under General Yamashita’s guidance it also saw a rare deployment of Japanese paratroopers in conjunction with the ground assault offensive.
Finally there were more naval and air battles, all designed to protect or cover landing operations of friendly forces. Leyte was a three-dimensional battle, fought with the best both sides had to offer, and did indeed decide the fate of the Philippines in World War II.
In World War II history, the Battle of Leyte usually refers to the naval battle, specifically the Battle of Leyte Gulf, which took place in October 1944. This was the Imperial Japanese Navy's last and final attempt at a "great decisive battle" which had been part of Japanese military doctrine for the entire war, in which they would throw everything they had into one big battle to destroy the enemy's forces.
By this stage in the war, Japan was running out of literally everything, from ships to oil to men. The Battle of Leyte Gulf was their last hurrah, an all-or-nothing roll of the dice. They were crushed.
If Midway is widely regarded as the turning point in the Pacific theater, Leyte Gulf was the knockout blow. After Leyte, there were still brutal months of fighting ahead, but it was just an inevitable grinding away of the stubborn remnants of Japan's forces.
But this book is not about Leyte Gulf. It's about the Battle of Leyte itself, the amphibious assault on the Philippine island of Leyte. This was General MacArthur's promised return to the Philippines, and the first stage in cutting off Japan's access to the Pacific and laying the literal groundwork for an eventual Allied assault on the Japanese home islands. While not as famous as the naval battle (which was the largest naval battle in history), the ground battle echoed the sea battle. As at sea, the Japanese decided that stopping the Americans at Leyte was worth an all-or-nothing effort, and poured their best remaining troops into Leyte. The resulting three months of combat, from October to December of 1944, were as harsh as any seen during the Pacific campaign. While the Japanese, inevitably, were outmanned and outsupplied, they fought ferociously and without surrender. The first American units into Leyte were often poorly supplied themselves, and soldiers on both sides spent weeks foraging for coconuts and roots and hiking through jungles practically naked at times.
By the end of the campaign, this changed: the Japanese were still starving, naked, and without any supplies or relief in sight, while the U.S. was landing fresh troops every day with plentiful supplies and vast stores of ammo. But the Japanese still didn't surrender, and as the author relates, American GIs became used to General MacArthur or other higher-ups publicly declaring that a battle was "over" or in the "mopping up" stage even while they were still digging Japanese fighters out of the jungles at considerable cost in American lives.
Leyte: The Soldier's Battle, as described by Nathan Prefer, is really many soldiers' battles. This book is a painstaking blow-by-blow, battle-by-battle account of the taking of Leyte, with some of the more famous ones being the Battle of Breakneck Ridge and the Battle of Shoestring Ridge. We get accounts of many, many individual encounters, and the names of men who engaged in acts of heroism, often at the cost of their own lives. Unfortunately, while often thrilling individually, the entire narrative at times felt like the author basically collected all the Silver Crosses and Medals of Honor awarded during the campaign and pasted their descriptions into the narrative one by one, so we get a seemingly endless list of men who fought and died and did valorous things to take a hill or destroy a Japanese machine gun or save a platoon from ambush or cross a river or defend a position, etc. Prefer claims that many larger battles came down to the actions of one man. It seems that many encounters were turned by the initiative of one decisive leader, or by a single hero/lunatic who charged Japanese positions by himself, jumped into their trenches, and started killing people.
After a while, these stories do just seem like reading out a list of medal winners, and there is more of this than analysis of the larger campaign. The reality is that regardless of how well any individual unit or soldier fought, the Japanese on Leyte were doomed from the beginning, as they simply had no more supplies or reinforcements coming, while the Americans had effectively unlimited resources to bring in.
Interestingly, this was predicted in the beginning by General Shigenori Kuroda, who was military governor of the Japanese-occupied Philippines. When told of the plan to fight off the approaching Americans, his (accurate) assessment of the situation was that Japan couldn't win, the Americans would inevitably prevail by sheer weight of numbers, and that therefore they should dig in and fight a delaying action while trying to negotiate peace. He was removed from his post for being "defeatist" and recalled to Japan in disgrace.
After the war, he fared better than his replacement, General Tomoyuki Yamashita. Both men were arrested and tried for war crimes, but Kuroda, after spending several years in a Philippine prison, was pardoned by the President of the Philippines and allowed to return to Japan. General Yamashita, who had overseen the real fighting in Leyte, was sentenced to death for the atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers, under what is now called the "Yamashita standard," which basically established that a commander is responsible for war crimes committed by his troops, even if he didn't order them or even necessarily know about them.
Prefer does not write very much about the commanders on either side until the end. He talks a bit about MacArther and his gloryhounding, and about General Walter Krueger, whom he considers underrated. Krueger was born in Prussia to a military family and but for an accident of fate - his family emigrating to America when he was a child - he likely would have wound up serving in the Wehrmacht. Instead, he became an American officer in charge of the Sixth Army. MacArther spoke very highly of him, even though he was regarded as "plodding" and cautious by his peers. He had a high regard for his troops, and was known to inspect the feet of solders in the field, and demote or remove from command any COs who'd allowed their men to have inadequate footwear.
After the war, Krueger suffered one tragedy after another. He was poor and in debt, his wife died of cancer, his son was kicked out of the Army for alcoholism, and his daughter became a mentally ill drug addict who stabbed her officer husband to death.
He did get a middle school in Texas named after him, though.
Leyte: The Soldier's Battle was a thorough but sometimes repetitive account of an often overlooked aspect of the Pacific campaign, the doughboys fighting in the jungles while the ships and planes got all the glory. It didn't really add much to my knowledge of the Pacific campaign, though the accounts of hard fighting in horrific conditions reinforced just how miserable and ugly the war was for all participants.
My complete list of book reviews.
Casemate, 2012, 394 pages
When General Douglas MacArthur arrived in Australia in March 1942, having successfully left the Philippines to organize a new American army, he vowed, "I shall return!" More than two years later he did return, at the head of a large U.S. army to retake the Philippines from the Japanese. The place of his re-invasion was the central Philippine Island of Leyte. Much has been written about the naval Battle of Leyte Gulf that his return provoked, but almost nothing has been written about the three-month long battle to seize Leyte itself.
Originally intending to delay the advancing Americans, the Japanese high command decided to make Leyte the "Decisive Battle" for the western Pacific and rushed crack Imperial Army units from Manchuria, Korea, and Japan itself to halt and then overwhelm the Americans on Leyte. As were most battles in the Pacific, it was a long, bloody, and brutal fight. As did the Japanese, the Americans were forced to rush in reinforcements to compensate for the rapid increase in Japanese forces on Leyte.
This unique battle also saw a major Japanese counterattack - not a banzai charge, but a carefully thought-out counteroffensive designed to push the Americans off the island and capture the elusive General MacArthur. Both American and Japanese battalions spent days surrounded by the enemy, often until relieved or overwhelmed. Under General Yamashita’s guidance it also saw a rare deployment of Japanese paratroopers in conjunction with the ground assault offensive.
Finally there were more naval and air battles, all designed to protect or cover landing operations of friendly forces. Leyte was a three-dimensional battle, fought with the best both sides had to offer, and did indeed decide the fate of the Philippines in World War II.
In World War II history, the Battle of Leyte usually refers to the naval battle, specifically the Battle of Leyte Gulf, which took place in October 1944. This was the Imperial Japanese Navy's last and final attempt at a "great decisive battle" which had been part of Japanese military doctrine for the entire war, in which they would throw everything they had into one big battle to destroy the enemy's forces.
By this stage in the war, Japan was running out of literally everything, from ships to oil to men. The Battle of Leyte Gulf was their last hurrah, an all-or-nothing roll of the dice. They were crushed.
If Midway is widely regarded as the turning point in the Pacific theater, Leyte Gulf was the knockout blow. After Leyte, there were still brutal months of fighting ahead, but it was just an inevitable grinding away of the stubborn remnants of Japan's forces.
But this book is not about Leyte Gulf. It's about the Battle of Leyte itself, the amphibious assault on the Philippine island of Leyte. This was General MacArthur's promised return to the Philippines, and the first stage in cutting off Japan's access to the Pacific and laying the literal groundwork for an eventual Allied assault on the Japanese home islands. While not as famous as the naval battle (which was the largest naval battle in history), the ground battle echoed the sea battle. As at sea, the Japanese decided that stopping the Americans at Leyte was worth an all-or-nothing effort, and poured their best remaining troops into Leyte. The resulting three months of combat, from October to December of 1944, were as harsh as any seen during the Pacific campaign. While the Japanese, inevitably, were outmanned and outsupplied, they fought ferociously and without surrender. The first American units into Leyte were often poorly supplied themselves, and soldiers on both sides spent weeks foraging for coconuts and roots and hiking through jungles practically naked at times.
By the end of the campaign, this changed: the Japanese were still starving, naked, and without any supplies or relief in sight, while the U.S. was landing fresh troops every day with plentiful supplies and vast stores of ammo. But the Japanese still didn't surrender, and as the author relates, American GIs became used to General MacArthur or other higher-ups publicly declaring that a battle was "over" or in the "mopping up" stage even while they were still digging Japanese fighters out of the jungles at considerable cost in American lives.
Leyte: The Soldier's Battle, as described by Nathan Prefer, is really many soldiers' battles. This book is a painstaking blow-by-blow, battle-by-battle account of the taking of Leyte, with some of the more famous ones being the Battle of Breakneck Ridge and the Battle of Shoestring Ridge. We get accounts of many, many individual encounters, and the names of men who engaged in acts of heroism, often at the cost of their own lives. Unfortunately, while often thrilling individually, the entire narrative at times felt like the author basically collected all the Silver Crosses and Medals of Honor awarded during the campaign and pasted their descriptions into the narrative one by one, so we get a seemingly endless list of men who fought and died and did valorous things to take a hill or destroy a Japanese machine gun or save a platoon from ambush or cross a river or defend a position, etc. Prefer claims that many larger battles came down to the actions of one man. It seems that many encounters were turned by the initiative of one decisive leader, or by a single hero/lunatic who charged Japanese positions by himself, jumped into their trenches, and started killing people.
After a while, these stories do just seem like reading out a list of medal winners, and there is more of this than analysis of the larger campaign. The reality is that regardless of how well any individual unit or soldier fought, the Japanese on Leyte were doomed from the beginning, as they simply had no more supplies or reinforcements coming, while the Americans had effectively unlimited resources to bring in.
Interestingly, this was predicted in the beginning by General Shigenori Kuroda, who was military governor of the Japanese-occupied Philippines. When told of the plan to fight off the approaching Americans, his (accurate) assessment of the situation was that Japan couldn't win, the Americans would inevitably prevail by sheer weight of numbers, and that therefore they should dig in and fight a delaying action while trying to negotiate peace. He was removed from his post for being "defeatist" and recalled to Japan in disgrace.
After the war, he fared better than his replacement, General Tomoyuki Yamashita. Both men were arrested and tried for war crimes, but Kuroda, after spending several years in a Philippine prison, was pardoned by the President of the Philippines and allowed to return to Japan. General Yamashita, who had overseen the real fighting in Leyte, was sentenced to death for the atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers, under what is now called the "Yamashita standard," which basically established that a commander is responsible for war crimes committed by his troops, even if he didn't order them or even necessarily know about them.
Prefer does not write very much about the commanders on either side until the end. He talks a bit about MacArther and his gloryhounding, and about General Walter Krueger, whom he considers underrated. Krueger was born in Prussia to a military family and but for an accident of fate - his family emigrating to America when he was a child - he likely would have wound up serving in the Wehrmacht. Instead, he became an American officer in charge of the Sixth Army. MacArther spoke very highly of him, even though he was regarded as "plodding" and cautious by his peers. He had a high regard for his troops, and was known to inspect the feet of solders in the field, and demote or remove from command any COs who'd allowed their men to have inadequate footwear.
After the war, Krueger suffered one tragedy after another. He was poor and in debt, his wife died of cancer, his son was kicked out of the Army for alcoholism, and his daughter became a mentally ill drug addict who stabbed her officer husband to death.
He did get a middle school in Texas named after him, though.
Leyte: The Soldier's Battle was a thorough but sometimes repetitive account of an often overlooked aspect of the Pacific campaign, the doughboys fighting in the jungles while the ships and planes got all the glory. It didn't really add much to my knowledge of the Pacific campaign, though the accounts of hard fighting in horrific conditions reinforced just how miserable and ugly the war was for all participants.
My complete list of book reviews.