THE LEYTE MASSACRE 1944: 79,000 Japanese Dead in 4 Days.H

THE LEYTE MASSACRE 1944: 79,000 Japanese Dead in 4 Days

At dawn on October 20th, 1944, the beaches of Eastern Lee were wide, wet, and exposed, and Japanese garrison troops were moving to their defensive positions as 700 American ships materialized on the horizon. In 66 days, 79,000 Japanese soldiers would be dead on that island. Over 66 days of fighting, Japan would commit more than 80,000 soldiers to the defense of Lee and lose nearly all of them.

79,000 killed against 3,500 Americans dead. The ratio was 22:1. The battle produced the first kamicazi attack in history, the largest naval engagement in history, and the permanent severance of Japan’s oil supply line from the southern occupied territories. When the fighting on Lee ended in December of 1944, the Philippines were irreversibly in American hands.

Japan’s capacity to fuel its navy had been fatally compromised and the road to Manila was open. General Douglas MacArthur had waded ashore at Ley on October 20th and told the Filipino people that he had returned. He had. It cost 79,000 Japanese soldiers to prevent him from doing it, and it did not work.

But the destruction of Japan’s Laty garrison had not begun on the beaches on October 20th. It had begun in Tokyo in September when the Imperial General Headquarters decided that Lee would be the site of Sho Ichigo, Operation Victory 1, Japan’s last plan to destroy the American fleet and reverse the course of the Pacific War. General Tomayuki Yamashittita, the officer assigned to defend the Philippines, had recommended fighting the decisive battle on Luzon, the main island, where the terrain favored defense and the supply lines could be maintained. He was overruled. Every

reinforcement, every ship, every soldier that Japan could reach the Philippines with would go to Lee. The decisive battle would be fought there. It was not a defense. It was a decision to die on the wrong island made by men in Tokyo who could not afford to be wrong about which island mattered, who were wrong, and who sent 80,000 men to prove it.

The soldiers moving to their positions at dawn on October 20th had been told that the decisive battle was coming. Their commanders had told them that the fleet would arrive and destroy the American invasion force, that the emperor’s forces were committed in strength, that laty would be where Japan turned the tide.

Some of them had been fighting since China. Some of them had come from Manuria, transferred in the final months when the high command assembled everything it could for the Philippines. They were moving to positions on an island that their own commanding general had said was the wrong place to fight in the pre-dawn darkness. As 700 enemy ships came over the horizon from the east, the beaches remained wide and wet and exposed.

The ships kept coming, and Tokyo’s plan was already beginning to fail in ways that the men moving to those positions could not know yet. From that moment, the battle for Laty was not a question of whether Japan could hold the island. It was a question of how many men would die, proving that it could not. 66 days, one promise kept. I spent 8 hours writing, editing, and researching this story, paying attention to every detail to honor the soldiers on both sides who fought on this island.

If this story matters to you, the only thing I ask is that you subscribe to the channel. Just subscribe. That’s all. Thank you. To understand why Lee cost Japan 79,000 dead on an island that Yamashita had told the high command could not be held, you need to understand what Japan was trying to accomplish with operation show and why the plan required Lee specifically.

Even though Lee was the worst possible place to fight the battle the plan described. By October of 1944, Japan’s strategic situation had deteriorated to the point where most of the options that had been available in 1942 and 1943 no longer existed. The outer defensive ring in the Marshals had been breached at Quadriline.

The Turkey shoot had eliminated carrier aviation as a viable defensive instrument. The Marianas had been lost, ending any hope of keeping American bombers out of range of the home islands. The naval losses at Laty Gulf 4 months earlier had reduced the combined fleet to a collection of ships without the air cover that made surface operations viable.

Each of these losses had reduced the options available for the next decision in the compounding way that strategic deterioration works. Each blow narrowing the space in which the following blow had to be absorbed. What Japan still had in October of 1944 was the southern resource area, the oil fields of Borneo, the rubber and metals of Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies, the supplies that had been the original strategic objective of the entire Pacific War.

Japan had gone to war in December of 1941 to secure those resources. They remained in Japanese hands. What had changed was the supply chain connecting them to the home islands, the shipping lanes that ran through the Philippines, carrying oil north, carrying weapons and equipment south. American submarines had been attacking that shipping for 2 years with steadily improving effectiveness.

Every tanker sunk was fuel that did not reach the home islands. Every cargo ship sunk was steel and rubber and food that did not reach Japan’s factories and population. The Philippines was the bottleneck through which everything moved. Whoever held the Philippines controlled the supply chain. If the Americans took the Philippines, the southern resource area became irrelevant.

Japan would hold the oil fields but could not get the oil home. The home islands industrial economy would begin its final decline. The Imperial Navy could no longer fuel its ships. The army could no longer equip its divisions. Japan would continue to fight, but on a timeline determined by what it had in storage, not what it was producing.

This was the operational logic behind show Ichigo. The Philippines had to be defended. If it could not be defended everywhere, it had to be defended at the decisive point. The island where the American landing would give the fleet the opportunity to strike, and the fleet’s remaining strength, committed at the right moment, could theoretically destroy the American invasion force.

and buy time for Japan to stabilize the strategic situation. General Yamashita disagreed with the identification of Lee as that decisive point. He had commanded in Malaya and the Philippines before and understood the terrain of the archipelago with the specific knowledge of a commander who had fought across it. Lee, he argued, was an island with poor roads, difficult interior terrain, and a supply situation that would make reinforcement under American air and naval pressure extremely costly.

Luzon had better terrain for defense, better infrastructure, and was defensible in depth against an attack that would be coming from the sea on multiple sides. If Japan was going to fight a decisive battle in the Philippines, Luzon gave it a better chance of making that battle expensive enough to matter. The Imperial General Headquarters rejected his analysis.

The decisive battle would be at Ley. The army would commit whatever it could reach Lee with. The Navy would commit everything it had. What the Navy had was four carriers with almost no aircraft, the battleships Yamato and Mousashi, and the surface fleet that had been assembled for the last time. The plan it developed. Three forces approaching from three directions using the carriers as a decoy to draw the American fast carriers north while the battleship force came through the San Bernardino straight to destroy the invasion fleet in Laty Gulf was

operationally coherent and tactically audacious. Its execution required perfect coordination across thousands of miles of ocean between forces that could not communicate reliably. time to converge simultaneously against an enemy that had already demonstrated at the Turkey shoot and at Palawan that it could break up coordinated Japanese operations before they reached their objectives.

The execution across four days of battle from October 23rd to 26th produced the largest naval engagement in history. Four carriers were sunk, three battleships were sunk, 10 cruisers were sunk. The surface force that had come through San Bernardino Strait came within range of the invasion fleet and then turned back.

The decision that historians have debated for eight decades. The moment when the battle for Ley was arguably decided not on land but at sea. When the fleet that Tokyo had committed to the decisive battle chose not to complete the decisive battle it had been sent to fight. The Imperial Japanese Navy as a strategic offensive force had effectively ceased to exist by October 26th, 1944.

It did not save Laty. Subscribe now. Drop your city in the comments. If your family was connected to this campaign in any ship, on any beach, in any aircraft, this story belongs to them. Tell us you are here. On October 20th, MacArthur came ashore. The general who had left the Philippines in March of 1942 under orders from Roosevelt, who had promised from Australia that he would return, waded through the surf at Laty’s Red Beach and walked to a portable microphone and told the Filipino people in a broadcast carried across the

islands that he had returned. The speech was brief and specific. He had returned. He would not leave again until the Japanese were expelled. The Philippines would be free. The practical consequence of the landings was immediate and severe for the Japanese. The American 6th Army put 174,000 men ashore on October 20th in the largest amphibious operation the Pacific had yet seen.

A force that landed on a 20-mile front and established beach heads deep enough to support sustained operations before the Japanese garrison could organize a coherent response. The Japanese had known the landing was coming. They had not been able to prevent it. The coastal defenses they had built were overwhelmed by the weight of the pre-landing naval and air bombardment and by the scale of the assault force.

The first days went quickly. The beach head expanded inland across the flat terrain of Lee Valley. The Sixth Army’s divisions pushed west toward the mountains that formed the island’s spine, north toward the city of Tacloan, south toward the port of Ormok on the island’s western coast. The Japanese garrison was not large enough and not concentrated enough to stop the advance in the first days.

It had been sized for what Yamashita had expected to be a secondary theater, not for the decisive battle that Tokyo had decided to fight there. Then the reinforcements began arriving. The Imperial General Headquarters committed to its decision to fight the decisive battle at Laty began moving troops to the island through Ormok Bay on the western coast.

the supply port that was the only viable route for reinforcement under American control of the eastern approaches. Convoys of transports, destroyers, and cargo vessels ran down through the Visayian Sea from Manila and Cibbu and the other Philippine islands, carrying divisions that had been stationed elsewhere in the archipelago, carrying artillery and ammunition and the supplies that an army needs to sustain a battle.

By November, Japan had sent more than 45,000 additional soldiers to Ley. By December, the total had reached approximately 65,000 reinforcements on top of the original garrison. The American fifth air force and naval aviation were waiting for them. The convoys that came down Ormach Bay ran into air attack, naval surface attack, and submarine attack simultaneously.

Some made it through, many did not. The supply ships that were sunk carried not only the troops aboard, but the ammunition and food those troops would have needed to fight. The divisions that landed through Ormok were arriving under strength, undere equipped, and in some cases without the weapons their organization called for because the weapons were on ships that had been sunk before reaching the island.

They arrived into a battle that was already going against Japan, commanded by officers who had been told they were part of a decisive counteroffensive and who found instead a defensive battle that was losing ground faster than reinforcements could stabilize it. Yamashita watched the convoys running to Laty from Manila and said nothing publicly that was not the correct thing for a commander to say.

What he had told Tokyo before the campaign began was on record. Each ship lost carrying reinforcements to Ley was a ship not carrying supplies to Luz on. Each division committed to Ley was a division not available for the defense that he had argued was the one that mattered. The men being sent to Ley were not going to a battle that could be won.

They were going to a battle that had been decided in Tokyo before it began. The kamicazi attacks began on October 25th. The first organized kamicazi strike in history was directed at the escort carriers of Taffy 3. The same small carriers and destroyers that had faced Karita’s battleships off Samar that morning and survived through a combination of desperate courage and Japanese confusion.

The kamicazis were the specific answer to a specific problem. Conventional air attacks on American carrier groups had become impossibly costly because the fighter direction and anti-aircraft systems had improved to the point where attacking aircraft were destroyed before they reached their targets. A pilot flying a conventional attack had almost no chance of surviving against a fleet with radar directed combat air patrol.

A pilot flying his aircraft directly into the ship, accepting death as the operational premise rather than the risk, removed the problem of survival from the equation entirely. The USS St. Low was struck by a kamicazi on October 25th, the first escort carrier sunk by suicide attack in the war. She went down in 30 minutes. 114 of her crew died with her.

The tactic that had been conceived as a response to American defensive superiority would be used throughout the remainder of the Philippines campaign and at Okinawa and in the defense of the home islands and it would kill thousands of American sailors before the war ended. The first one died on St.

Low on October 25th, 1944 off the coast of an island that Japan’s most capable general had said was the wrong place to fight. The ground campaign on Laty lasted through November and into December. The Japanese forces that had been reinforced through Ormok Bay occupied the mountainous interior of the island, the Ormock corridor that ran through the central highlands, the ridges and ravines of Breakneck Ridge and Keel Ridge, and the other terrain features that gave the defenders the advantage of elevation and cover that made every American advance

costly. The fighting in the mountains was different from the fighting on the beaches and in the valley. Closer, more dependent on artillery and infantry small unit action. Slower, the American divisions that fought into those mountains in November were fighting in rain that turned the trails to mud and made air support unreliable and made resupply by vehicle nearly impossible.

They were fighting Japanese soldiers who had been told this was the decisive battle and who had trained and been prepared for precisely this kind of defensive fighting in terrain that favored the defender. The 79,000 Japanese who died on Lee did not die quickly or without cost. They died fighting one ridge and one ravine and one fortified position at a time against an American force that had the weight of numbers and the weight of firepower and the weight of a supply system that kept working while the Japanese supply system

through Bay was being destroyed convoy by convoy. On December 7th, 1944, 3 years to the day after Pearl Harbor, American forces of the 77th Infantry Division conducted an amphibious landing directly at Ormok, cutting the Japanese supply line at its source and trapping the defending force on the island without the ability to receive reinforcements or resupply.

The landing at Ormok was one of the more elegant tactical decisions of the Philippines campaign. Rather than continuing to push through the mountains toward Ormock from the east, the Americans came from the sea and took the port from the Japanese rear while the Japanese defenders were facing the other direction.

The port that had sustained the Japanese reinforcement effort fell in 2 days. The last supply route to the Laty garrison closed. By December 26th, Lee was declared secured. The soldiers who had received Tokyo’s decisive battle orders and had survived to the end of December were fighting in small groups in the interior mountains, cut off from supply, increasingly without ammunition, in country that had been fought over for 2 months.

They would continue fighting into 1945 as isolated holdouts always do in Pacific Island campaigns. The organized battle was over. The organized battle had cost Japan 79,000 men. Subscribe to the channel right now because what you’re about to hear is how Yamashita chose to fight the battle he had said was impossible. And what that choice looked like for the men who carried it out.

How Japan’s decision to reinforce Lee which Yamashita had opposed directly weakened the defense of Luzon in ways that shaped the entire remainder of the Philippines campaign. How the kamicazi program that began over Lee Gulf became Japan’s primary naval weapon for the rest of the war. And why the 79,000 men who died on Lee died on the island their own commanding general had told Tokyo was the wrong place to die. Do not miss this.

They were still there in January, still fighting in the central highlands, still organized in some cases into units with officers and ammunition occupying terrain that the American divisions had not yet cleared because clearing every ravine and every ridge line in Lees Mountains would have taken longer than the strategic timetable permitted.

still costing Americans their lives in the specific expensive way that Pacific Island fighting cost lives. One position at a time at close range against men who would not stop until they were dead. The organized battle for Ley had been declared over on December 26th. The men still fighting in the mountains had not received the declaration.

Subscribe to the channel right now because what you are about to hear is how General Yamashita fought the battle. he had told Tokyo was impossible and what he chose to preserve instead of winning it. How the kamicazi program that began over Late Gulf became Japan’s answer to American naval superiority for the rest of the war.

how the loss of Lee directly weakened the defense of Luzon in the ways Yamashita had predicted and what that meant for the men who defended Manila and why the 79,000 men who died on Lee died on an island their own commanding general had tried to save them from. Do not miss this. The ghosts that moved through Yamashita’s headquarters in Manila after Lee were not the faces of the men dying on that island, though he knew they were dying and at what rate and for what purpose.

They were the ghosts of the September arguments, the staff papers submitted and rejected the operational logic that the Imperial General Headquarters had found inadequate and overridden. Each convoy sunk running to Lee was a convoy that had not run to Luzon. Each division committed to the Laty garrison was a division not available for the defense that Yamashita had said was the one that mattered.

The battle of Ley was costing Japan its capacity to defend the Philippines at the island that would actually decide the campaign and Yamashita was watching it happen from Manila with the specific powerlessness of a commander who had been right and had been ignored. He adjusted what he could adjust. He pulled back from the Manila Bay area the supplies and equipment that could be moved.

He positioned forces in the mountain terrain of northern Luzon in the Cordillera ranges where the ground favored defense in depth and where an American advance would be slowed by terrain that artillery and air power could not fully neutralize. He accepted that Manila itself could not be held. The city was flat, surrounded, supplied from the sea, and defending it would require forces that Ley had consumed.

He ordered Manila evacuated of Japanese army units. The naval forces in Manila did not receive the same order or received it and did not comply or received it and decided that the order did not apply to them. The result was one of the most destructive battles of the Pacific War, the Battle of Manila, February of 1945, in which Japanese naval forces and army stragglers fought street by street through a city of 1 million civilians and reduced it to rubble in a month of fighting that killed more than a 100,000 Filipino civilians. Yamashita was not in

Manila when it happened. He was in the mountains fighting the defensive war he had designed. The Manila battle was a consequence of the command fragmentation and the tactical decisions made below his level of authority. But it happened in the Philippines he commanded and its cost was borne by the people he had been assigned to occupy.

The liquidation of the Lee garrison proceeded in its three components. The original garrison, the forces that had been on Ley when the landings began on October 20th, had been the first to absorb the American assault. These were the troops defending the coastal areas and the valley floor. The soldiers who had been in prepared positions facing the beaches and who had been overwhelmed by the weight of the landing on the first day.

The survivors had retreated into the mountains and into the towns of the interior as the American beach head expanded. By November, they were integrated with the reinforcements that had been arriving through Ormok and were fighting as part of the larger Japanese force that Tokyo had assembled for the decisive battle. The specific terrain they occupied, Breakneck Ridge, Kil Ridge, the Ormok corridor highlands, gave them the defensive advantages that Yamashitta had wanted to use on Luzon.

Elevation, cover, difficult approach routes that channeled American advances into prepared fires. The difference was scale. Lee’s mountain terrain was finite. Luzon’s was vast. The reinforcement divisions that had survived the Ormock Bay convoys had arrived to find a tactical situation that bore almost no relationship to the decisive counteroffensive they had been told they were joining.

They were told the fleet had struck at Laty Gulf. The fleet had struck and been destroyed. They were told air support would be available. The airfields on Lady had been lost in the first week of the campaign, and the fifth air force had been working them over ever since. They were told supplies would continue to arrive through Ormok.

The convoys running to Ormock were being intercepted and sunk at rates that left the arriving troops chronically under supplied, arriving without the artillery their organizations called for, without the ammunition reserves that sustained combat required, without the logistical base that makes an army an army rather than a collection of armed men.

They fought in the mountains with what they had, which by December was diminishing to the point where unit commanders were reporting that their men were eating roots and bark to supplement what the mountains could provide. The holdouts, the soldiers who were still in the mountains after December 26th and who continued fighting into 1945 were the most isolated component.

Their supplies were gone. Their command structure had fractured. They were operating in small groups. Sometimes individual soldiers, sometimes groups of a few dozen, surviving off the land in terrain where the Filipino population was hostile to them and where American patrols were moving through systematically.

Some of them would be found in the mountains of Ley for months and years after the war ended. The last Japanese soldier on Lee surrendered in 1956, 12 years after the battle had been declared over. Having lived in the jungle since October of 1944, fighting a war that had ended before he knew it ended.

The final accounting of the battle of Lee confirmed what the casualty ratios during the fighting had been indicating. The strategic decision to fight at Lee had cost Japan its capacity to fight in the Philippines at a sustainable rate. The 79,000 killed at Laty represented divisions and core that were no longer available for Luzon.

The ships sunk running the Ormock convoys represented tonnage that was no longer available for the supply chain that kept the home islands connected to the southern resources. The aircraft destroyed over Lady Gulf and in the ground campaign represented a continuing reduction in Japan’s air strength that accelerated the timeline toward the point where air defense of the home islands would become impossible.

The Imperial Japanese Army’s capacity to defend the Philippines as a strategic force capable of sustained resistance had been fatally compromised at Ley. But they also agreed on something that the casualty ratios and the division counts could not capture directly. The historians who have studied laty for eight decades return consistently to the same point.

The battle’s decisive significance was not the killing of 79,000 Japanese soldiers. Though that killing was immense, it was the strategic consequence of Tokyo’s decision to reinforce Lee rather than Luzon. a decision that Yamashita had opposed that the execution of the campaign confirmed as wrong and that shaped every subsequent engagement in the Philippines.

General Yamashita himself provided the clearest analysis of what had happened in the interrogations he gave to American officers after his surrender in September of 1945. He was asked about the decision to fight at Ley. He confirmed that he had recommended against it, that he had argued for Luzon as the sight of the decisive battle, that the imperial general headquarters had overruled him and committed the forces to Ley.

He was asked whether Leaty could have been held if Tokyo had made different choices. He said no. The American naval and air superiority made the island indefensible over time, regardless of the ground forces committed. What could have been different, he said, was how much Luzon’s defense was weakened by the commitment to Lee.

Each division sent to Lee was a division not available for the mountain defenses of northern Luzon. Each ship sunk in Orchok Bay was a ship not supplying the Luzon garrison. The battle of Lee had been decided before it began by the conditions that American submarines and carrier aviation had created. The only question had been how many men would die there.

He was tried for war crimes related to the conduct of Japanese forces in Manila and in Luzon. He was convicted and executed in February of 1946. The Manila battle, the 100,000 civilian deaths, the destruction of one of Asia’s great cities, the specific atrocities committed by Japanese naval forces who had not received or had not complied with Yamashita’s evacuation orders had happened under his command.

He maintained throughout his trial that he had not ordered the naval forces responsible for the worst violence and that he had been fighting in the Cordillera mountains when Manila burned engaged in the battle he had told Tokyo was the one that mattered. The military tribunal applying the doctrine of command responsibility found him responsible regardless of his knowledge of or involvement in the specific acts.

He was hanged at Los Banos on February 23rd, 1946. The first general officer executed under command responsibility doctrine. The legal standard established at his trial has shaped the law of armed conflict for the 80 years since. Japan had built its defense of the Philippines on a theory that one massive coordinated naval assault at the moment of American vulnerability could destroy the invasion fleet and force a negotiated settlement.

The theory was not irrational in its premises. The American fleet concentrated in Laty Gulf with its transports and supply ships and the entire logistical apparatus of the sixth army’s landing was genuinely vulnerable if the naval plan had succeeded. The battleship force that came through San Bernardino Strait was within range of the invasion fleet. It turned back.

The theory required things to go right. Nothing went right. The submarines found Karita’s fleet at Palawan and sank his flagship before the battle began. The carriers used as decoys were sunk as planned, but failed to lure Hollyy away long enough to matter. The surface force that reached its objective turned back for reasons that Karita described in postwar interrogations in terms that Yamashita would have recognized.

The exhaustion and the losses and the psychological weight of three days of continuous action against superior forces had produced a commander who saw a trap where there was an opportunity. The decisive battle that show Ichigo had been designed to produce did not happen because the men and the machines that were supposed to produce it had been worn down to the point where the plan’s requirements exceeded what they could deliver.

The island of Ley today is one of the larger islands of the Philippine archipelago with a population of more than 2 million people. Tacloan, the provincial capital that the American forces captured in the first days of the battle, is a city of 300,000, rebuilt and expanded from the devastation of the campaign, now a functioning regional center connected to the rest of the Philippines by sea and air.

The beaches where the Sixth Army landed on October 20th, Red Beach, White Beach, the shoreline below the coconut palms, are accessible today. There is a memorial at Palo where a series of bronze statues recreates MacArthur’s famous wade ashore. The general and his staff moving through the surf toward the microphone and the speech.

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