Thomas McKelvey Cleaver - Tidal Wave: From Leyte Gulf to Tokyo Bay

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

My friend Tom Cleaver is very good at putting a lot of detail into a very readable book as is the case in Tidal Wave, the story of World War II from Leyte Gulf until the signing of the peace treaty aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

I would like to add just a few lines to his account of the kamikaze attack on USS St Louis (Cl-49) on November 27, 1944, at 1000 hours.

One of the four kamikazes that hit us went down the hangar spaces aft causing a number of explosions and AvGas fires. The good thing was that the fire mains were ruptured and put out the fires almost as soon as occurring. The bad thing was that the Shore Party beer was stored there a complete loss.

As Tom points out, the kamikaze that hit us port side at the waterline was the most dangerous. It put us dead in the water, no power, we could not shoot. The bulk heads between No. 1 and No. 2 boiler operating spaces flexed. We were lucky that when the kamikazes returned in the afternoon they inexplicably left us alone.

Our damage control parties did a miraculous job in shoring up the flexing bulkheads and at 2200 hours, we got under way at 4 knots for the dry dock at Manus Island, 1,500 miles away. There we made sufficient repairs to steam back to the Long Beach, California shipyard for complete repairs, after which we returned in time for Okinawa, and our participation as part of the Third Fleet task force off Southern Japan prior to the anticipated landings on mainland Japan. Through my No. 2 turret periscope, I had a close up view of the Franklin when it was hit.

We were anchored in Buckner Bay, Okinawa when the first atom bomb was dropped. I breathed a sigh of relief we would not face the kamikaze off Kyushu.

Tidal Wave is fascinating reading. Read it and be informed.

Doniphan P. Shelton RADM USN (Ret)

Delmar, California, 2017

The Allied Counteroffensive, September 1944 to August 1945

PROLOGUE

This volume, Tidal Wave, tells of a much different war than that in my previous book, Pacific Thunder. Tidal Wave takes up the story at the moment the US Navy had achieved the goal for which it had planned and worked for 20 years: the destruction of the Imperial Japanese Navy, a victory that immediately rang hollow when the admirals and crews discovered they were now facing an enemy willing to see itself totally destroyed in a fight to the death. The kamikaze was the most terrifying phenomenon any Westerner faced, since it flew against every Western philosophical belief about the conduct of war and the sanctity of life. Men came to hate the enemy in a deep, personal way they had not before, even after taking an oath of personal vengeance on seeing the destruction wrought at Pearl Harbor. The captain of the battleship Missouri faced a near-mutiny for his decision to give the remains of the Japanese pilot who crashed his airplane into the ship the honorable burial accorded to an honorable enemy. The final ten months of the war saw more death and destruction than had been inflicted since the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the end of the war saw the most terrible weapon in human history unleashed on Japan, the necessity of which is debated to this day. This is the story of how a bloody war became bloodier and barely escaped turning into a cataclysmic apocalypse.

I first visited Japan 19 years after the end of the war. The war was recent enough that its reminders were still easy to find, both in Japan and the other countries I visited that had experienced the bloodiest war in human history.

I was fortunate that my sister had a pen pal in Japan. Yoshiko Tsuruta was my astral twin, born at the same time as me, who was now a student at Tokyo University of Education (now known as the University of Tsukuba). She was eager to meet a real American, and I was privileged to get an insight into the country and its people that most gaijin (foreigners) rarely experience, since her family shared her curiosity. The Japanese are intensely private people they could not be otherwise in a country so densely populated and even good friends rarely visit each others homes before they have been friends for many years. I was invited to stay with Yoshiko and her family from the first time I arrived in the country, and during the 18 months I spent in the Far East, I used up most of my leave time making other such visits. While in their home, I followed the rule when in Rome, do as the Romans do. I lived in the Japanese manner, sleeping on a tatami mat with a wooden block for a pillow, learning to use chopsticks, and even by the end successfully managing to adapt myself to the Japanese toilet, something few Westerners ever manage. By the time I returned home, I felt I had an understanding of the country and its people that was foreign to most of my fellow sailors.

Over the course of these visits, the subject of the war came up early. On my first visit, I was taken to see the Mikasa, Admiral Togos flagship at the Battle of Tsushima Strait that established Japan as a major power, there in her concrete drydock outside the Yokosuka Naval Base. The ship is a monument to Imperial Japan, and more specifically to its navy. To say I felt a bit strange visiting while wearing the uniform of the navy that had defeated that navy, a lone American among a throng of Japanese, would be an understatement. As I looked at the models of Imperial Navy warships that lined the bulkhead, I thought to myself: ... sunk at Guadalcanal... sunk at Midway... sunk at Philippine Sea... sunk at Leyte... (I was even then a serious student of the Pacific War and had been for as long as I can remember). Afterwards, over lunch, Yoshiko asked me why we had fought the war. She proceeded to tell me the Japanese version of the history of the Pacific War. The two stories American and Japanese could not be more different if they had taken place on different planets.

We ended up spending the afternoon in that teahouse as I told her the American history of the war, including the history of the JapanChina war that preceded Pearl Harbor. She was shocked at what she heard, but to her credit she wanted to learn more. At her school, she eventually met Professor Sabur Ienaga, perhaps the most interesting Japanese academic historian of the war, author of The Pacific War 19311945. Professor Ienaga first wrote about the war in 1947 in a work titled New Japanese History, which was the first to deal with Japanese war crimes. The work was censored in 1953 by the Japanese Ministry of Education for what was called factual errors and matters of opinion regarding those crimes. Ienaga sued the Ministry for violation of his freedom of speech, with the result that The Pacific War was published in 1961 (it was only translated into English and published in the United States to little notice in the 1980s). Ienaga was later nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999 and 2001 by Noam Chomsky, among others, for his work.

Yoshiko read the book, and the war became a topic she and I discussed honestly, attempting to reconcile Japanese and American memory. She did not share that with her family or friends, since the topic was so shocking to Japanese sensibilities. To this day, unfortunately, Japan has yet to come to terms with this history in the way Germany has come to terms with Hitler and the Nazis. The current government, which has as its goal changing the postwar pacifist constitution is even less interested in historical truth than its predecessors.