October 20th, 1944 6 a.m. A Japanese sergeant named Kenji Mori pressed his back against a coconut palm and watched the horizon turn into steel. Not one ship, not 10 ships. 700 warships materialized from the morning fog like a wall of iron closing across the entire eastern sea. Mory had been fighting since China.
He had survived Manuria. He had seen artillery barges that turned daylight into smoke, but he had never seen anything like this. Nobody had. The guns opened simultaneously, and the sound did not arrive as separate explosions. It arrived as one continuous detonation that lasted for 3 hours and turned the beach in front of him into boiling sand.
He gripped his rifle. He had been told the fleet would come. He had been told Japan would win here. He had been told this was the decisive battle. He had 66 days left to live. Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and turn on notifications so you never miss our next video. Join us as we explore more incredible stories, historical events, and inspiring moments from the past.
This community is where history comes alive, and we want you to be part of it. 79,000 Japanese soldiers died on the island of Lee in the Philippines between October and December of 1944. Against them, the Americans lost 3,500 men. That is a kill ratio of 22:1. But here is what makes Lee one of the most devastating strategic catastrophes in military history.
Every single one of those 79,000 Japanese soldiers died on an island. Their own commanding general had told Tokyo was indefensible. Before the first American boot touched the beach, Japan’s most capable general had sent a report to Imperial headquarters in Tokyo, stating clearly in writing that Lee was the wrong island, that fighting there would be suicide, that the men sent there would die for nothing. Tokyo sent them anyway.
To understand how 79,000 soldiers walked into a battle their own leadership had already conceded was lost. You need to understand what Japan was desperately trying to protect in October of 1944 and why the men in Tokyo were so terrified of losing it that they overruled their best general and condemned an entire army to destruction.
By the autumn of 1944, Japan’s empire was bleeding from a dozen wounds simultaneously. The outer defensive ring in the Marshall Islands had been smashed. The Maranas had fallen, putting American B29 bombers within direct range of the Japanese home islands. And the Turkey shoot the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June had been an air combat catastrophe so complete that Japan lost 476 aircraft in 2 days.
Carrier aviation, the weapon that had made Japan terrifying in 1941 and 1942, was effectively gone as a strategic instrument. Pilots who had taken years to train were dying faster than replacements could be produced. But Japan still held one thing that made the entire war machine function.
The southern resource area, Borneo’s oil fields, Malaya’s rubber, the Dutch East Indies metals and fuel. These were the resources Japan had gone to war to seize in December 1941. They were still in Japanese hands, and they were pumping the blood that kept Japanese industry alive. The problem was getting that blood home. Every tanker carrying Borneo crude north toward Japan had to pass through one geographic bottleneck, the Philippines.
The island chain stretched like a 1,100m fence across the western Pacific, and every supply ship moving from the southern resource area to the Japanese home islands had to pass through the gaps in that fence. For 2 years, American submarines had been hunting those ships with steadily improving accuracy and steadily increasing lethality.
By 1944, they were sinking Japanese merchant tonnage faster than Japanese shipyards could replace it. Every tanker on the bottom of the Pacific was fuel that never reached Japan’s factories, never reached Japan’s warships, never reached the divisions fighting across Asia. If the Americans took the Philippines, the fence fell. The southern resource area would become a massive oil field that Japan [clears throat] owned but could not reach.
The home island’s industrial economy would begin its terminal decline, measured not in years, but in months, calculated against whatever fuel remained in storage. The navy could not sail. The factories could not produce. The army could not resupply its divisions across Asia. Japan would not surrender immediately. But the timeline to collapse would be set and running and nothing could stop it.
This was the strategic logic that drove Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo toward their decision. The Philippines had to be held. If the Americans were going to invade Japan, needed to destroy the invasion fleet at the moment of maximum American vulnerability when the transports and supply ships were clustered in the landing zone when the soldiers were still moving from ship to shore.
When one devastating naval strike could theoretically send the entire operation to the bottom and force Washington into a negotiated settlement, the plan was called Show Ichigo, Operation Victory 1, and it was genuinely audacious. The combined fleet would strike from three directions simultaneously. A carrier force would move from the north, acting as a decoy to draw the American fast carriers away from the invasion zone.
While the Americans chased the decoy, two powerful surface forces, including the battleships Yamato and Mousashi, the two largest warships ever built, would converge on the landing area and destroy the invasion fleet while it was defenseless. It was the right kind of plan for a navy that was outmatched in aircraft but still had enormous surface firepower.
It was the kind of plan that could work if the coordination was perfect. If the Americans took the bait, if the timing held across thousands of miles of ocean and Tokyo decided it had to be executed at Lati. General Tomoyuki Yamashta disagreed. Yamashta was not a cautious man.
He had conquered Malaya with a force that his opponent thought was too small to be threatening. Driving British and Commonwealth forces 600 m down the peninsula in 55 days and capturing Singapore in a campaign so fast and decisive that it had permanently altered how military historians understood modern maneuver warfare. He had been given command of the Philippines defense specifically because Tokyo recognized he was one of the most capable operational commanders in the Japanese army.
He looked at Lee and saw a trap, not a trap set by the Americans, a trap set by geography. Lee was an island with one viable port for resupply or on the western coast. The road network inland was primitive. The central mountains turned the interior into a maze of ravines and ridgeel lines where supply by vehicle became nearly impossible in heavy rain and the Philippines in late 1944 was in the middle of its wet season.
If Japan committed major forces to Ley and the supply line through Ormach Bay was interdicted by American air power and naval forces which American air power and naval forces were absolutely capable of doing. those forces would be trapped on an island with no way to feed them, no way to resupply their ammunition, no way to evacuate them.
He submitted his analysis to Imperial General Headquarters. He recommended Luzon, the main island, better roads, better infrastructure, mountain terrain in the north that allowed defense in depth supply lines that were harder to cut. If Japan was going to fight a decisive battle in the Philippines, Luzon gave Japanese forces the best chance of making that battle expensive enough to matter.
Tokyo overruled him. The decisive battle would be at Ley. Every soldier that could be moved to the island would be moved there. Every ship that could carry reinforcements would carry them through Ormok Bay. The Navy would commit everything it had left. Yamashida submitted his formal disagreement and began preparing for a battle he believed was already lost before it began.
On October 20th, 1944 at 10:00 in the morning, 174,000 American soldiers from the Sixth Army came ashore on a 20-m front on the eastern coast of Ley. The pre-landing naval bombardment had been running for 3 hours. The beach defenses built for a garrison sized for a secondary theater were overwhelmed before the first landing craft hit the sand.
General Douglas MacArthur waited ashore through the surf at Red Beach at 100 in the afternoon. He had been evacuated from the Philippines in March of 1942 under direct orders from President Roosevelt taken out by PT boat in the middle of the night while the baton garrison he was leaving behind prepared for a captivity that would kill thousands of them.
He had promised from Australia that he would return. He walked to a portable microphone and broadcast to the Filipino people across every frequency available. He had returned. He would not leave again until the Japanese were expelled. The liberation had begun. It was one of the most consequential speeches of the Pacific War.
And behind him, still forming on the beach, was the military force that would now have to make good on that promise. On an island that Japan had just decided to defend with everything it had left, the fleet was coming. The reinforcements were loading in Manila and Cebu. 80,000 Japanese soldiers were being directed toward a battle that Yamashta had said could not be won.
Sergeant Kenji Mori was already in the mountains. In part two, the largest naval battle in human history erupts across 500 miles of ocean. The Yamato turns its guns toward unprotected American escort carriers and a group of destroyer captains make a decision that should have been suicide but somehow was not.
What happens in the next 72 hours will determine whether MacArthur’s army survives its first week ashore or goes to the bottom of Le Gulf. October 23rd, 1944. 6:47 a.m. The submarine USS Darter picked up Karita’s fleet on radar in the Palawan Passage and fired six torpedoes. The first salvo sank the heavy cruiser Atago, Karita’s flagship.
The admiral commanding Japan’s entire strike force had to be pulled from the water by a destroyer. Soaking wet his flagship burning behind him, Karita transferred his flag and kept moving toward Lady Gulf because stopping was not an option Tokyo had given him. In part one, we watched 700 American ships materialize on the horizon at dawn on October 20th, 1944.
We watched 174,000 soldiers come ashore on a 20-mile front. We watched MacArthur wade through the surf and keep a promise two years in the making. And we watched General Yamashida’s worst prediction begin coming true in real time. Tokyo had overruled him. The decisive battle would be at Ley.
Every Japanese soldier, every ship, every aircraft that could reach the Philippines would be committed here. What Tokyo had not told the men moving into those positions was how badly the fleet they were counting on had already been hurt before the battle even started. And what was about to happen in the next 72 hours would produce the largest naval engagement in the history of human warfare.
Four separate battles, 500 m of ocean, and one decision that historians are still arguing about 80 years later. The Japanese naval plan for Shichigo required three forces to converge simultaneously on Lee Gulf from three different directions. Center force. The main strike element under Admiral Karita would come through the San Bernardino Strait from the northwest carrying the Yamato, the Mousashi, and the most powerful surface fleet Japan could assemble.
Southern Force split into two groups under Admirals Nishimura and Shima would approach from the southwest through the Suriga Strait. And northern force under Admiral Ozawa would approach from the north carrying Japan’s remaining carriers as a deliberate decoy practically empty of aircraft designed to draw the American fast carriers away from the invasion zone while Karita came through the unguarded straight.
The plan was elegant. It was also being executed by a navy that had lost most of its experienced air crew, could not communicate reliably across the distances involved, and was operating without air cover over its surface ships in waters where American submarines had complete freedom of action. On October 23rd, before a single surface engagement had been fought, the submarines hit first.
USS Darter and USS Dace caught Karita’s center force moving through the Paloan Passage in the pre-dawn hours. Darter put four torpedoes into the Itago and two more into the Takao. D sank the Maya with four torpedoes. Three heavy cruisers destroyed or crippled in 12 minutes. Karita transferred his flag and pressed on toward the Cibuan Sea. October 24th.
The Americans found him there. What followed was not a naval engagement in the traditional sense. It was an air assault. Wave after wave of American carrier aircraft from Task Force 38 came down on Karita’s fleet as it crossed the Sabuan Sea in daylight exposed moving slowly without fighter cover because Japan had almost no fighters left to provide it.
The Mousashi, the largest battleship ever built alongside her sister ship Yamato, displacing 73,000 tons, protected by armor plate that was supposed to be impervious to anything short of a direct bomb hit from the largest weapons in existence, absorbed 19 torpedo hits and 17 bomb hits over the course of 6 hours. She rolled over and sank at 7:35 p.m.
on October 24th, taking over a thousand men down with her. Karita reversed course. He turned center force west away from San Bernardino Strait and the American pilots who reported this back to Task Force 38 believed the battle was over. They were wrong. Kurita reversed again after dark and resumed his approach. He had lost the Mousashi and three cruisers. He still had the Yamato.
He still had orders from Tokyo. He pushed through San Bernardino Strait in the darkness of October 24th to 25th and emerged into the Philippine Sea on the other side. The straight was unguarded. Admiral Hally, commanding the American fast carriers of third fleet had taken the bait. Ozawa’s northern force. The decoy carriers practically empty of aircraft had been spotted and Holly had turned his entire force north to destroy them.
He took every fast carrier, every fast battleship, every ship capable of stopping Karita with him. He sent a message indicating his intentions that was interpreted at multiple command levels as meaning he had left a guard force at San Bernardino Strait. He had not. At 6:47 a.m. on October 25th, Kurita’s center force four battleships, including the Yamato, six heavy cruisers and 11 destroyers came over the horizon above a group of small American escort carriers known as Taffy 3.
The men aboard those ships could not believe what they were seeing. Taffy 3 was not a combat force. It was a collection of six escort carriers, converted merchant halls with flight decks welded on top carrying aircraft designed for anti-ubmarine patrol and close air support of troops on the beach. Their escorts were three destroyers and four destroyer escorts against Karita’s surface fleet.
They were not a fighting force. They were targets. Rear Admiral Clifton Sprag, commanding Taffy 3, made his decision in approximately 30 seconds. He turned his carriers into the wind to launch aircraft. He ordered his destroyers to attack. He called for help on every frequency available and drove his ships into a rain squall for cover.
Then he watched his three destroyers charge directly into the guns of the largest surface fleet Japan had put to sea since midway. The destroyer USS Johnston under commander Ernest Evans made the first run. Evans had told his crew when he took command that he intended to fight to the last bullet and then use the ship itself as a weapon if necessary.
On the morning of October 25th with Karita’s battleships at point blank range, he got his chance. Johnston fired her torpedoes at the heavy cruiser Kumano and blew her bow off. Japanese shells tore through Johnston repeatedly. Evans lost two fingers on his left hand and kept commanding from the bridge.
Johnston kept firing until she had nothing left to fire and then she went down with Evans still aboard. The other destroyers followed her in. Hoel and Samuel B. Roberts made their attacks under fire that should have sunk them in the first minutes and both were eventually destroyed. Samuel B.
Roberts took so many large caliber hits that her crew described it afterward as a destroyer being sunk by a battleship’s guns at close range, which is exactly what happened. But something extraordinary was also happening around Karita. The smoke from the burning destroyers, the squalls of rain, the torpedo attacks coming from multiple directions, the aircraft now diving continuously on his fleet with every bomb and torpedo.
Taffy 3’s aviators could carry. Some of them making dry runs with empty bomb bays just to keep the Japanese gunners looking up had created a picture of chaos that Karita’s command could not accurately interpret. His cruisers were being repeatedly torpedoed and bombed. Ships were being sunk around him. The radio traffic he was intercepting suggested major American forces were converging on his position. At 9:20 a.m.
Kurita ordered center force to break off the engagement and assemble to the north. He was 40 miles from Le Gulf. The transports and supply ships of the American invasion force were inside that gulf loaded with fuel and ammunition and the entire logistical apparatus of the sixth army’s landing operation. One hour of surface action against unprotected ships would have been catastrophic.
Karita turned away. Historians have spent eight decades examining why the exhaustion of three days of continuous attack, the loss of his flagship at Palawan, the deaths of officers he had worked with for years, the uncertain communications, the overestimation of American strength around him, the psychological weight of watching the Mousashi sink.
Whatever the combination of factors, the decision was made. Center Force withdrew through San Bernardino Straight and did not return. Taffy 3 had lost two destroyers. One destroyer escort and one escort carrier. The Japanese surface force that had come within range of the invasion fleet turned back. The invasion fleet survived to the south in Suriga Strait.
Southern force had been completely destroyed in a night surface engagement. Nishimura’s battleships ran into an American battle line waiting in the dark. Every Japanese battleship and destroyer in the strait was sunk or forced to retreat. It was the last battleship versus battleship engagement in naval history.
To the north, Hollyy’s carriers found Ozawa’s decoy force and sank all four Japanese carriers. The decoy had worked. Ozawa had succeeded in drawing Holly north, but Karita had not completed his mission while the door was open. And by the time Hollyy turned south, it was too late to matter in either direction.
By October 26th, the battle of Laty Gulf was over. Japan had lost four carriers, three battleships, 10 cruisers, and 11 destroyers. The Imperial Japanese Navy as a strategic offensive force had ceased to exist. And on October 25th, something else had happened above Taffy 3 that nobody fully understood yet. A single Japanese aircraft had deliberately flown into the escort carrier Staint Low and detonated its bomb load inside the ship.
She sank in 30 minutes. 114 of her crew died with her. It was not an accident. It was not a mechanical failure. The pilot had chosen it. The impact had been intentional. In part three, the kamicazi program that began above Laty Gulf goes from a single desperate attack to an organized weapon of war.
The convoys running to Ormach Bay start arriving with soldiers who have no food and no ammunition. And Yamashida watching from Manila begins making the decisions that will determine how many men die on an island he had tried to save. The ground war for Ley was just beginning and it was going to be fought by men whose fleet was already at the bottom of the Pacific.
October 25th, 1944. 9:20 a.m. Karita turned his fleet away from Ley Gulf. The largest surface strike force Japan had assembled since midway. Four battleships, including the Yamato, six heavy cruisers destroyers, was 40 mi from an undefended invasion fleet. He turned north, then he turned west, then he went home through San Bernardino Straight and never came back.
In part one, we watched Tokyo override Yamashta and commit everything to Lee. In part two, we watched Japan’s Navy destroy itself across four simultaneous battles covering 500 m of ocean. And we watched three American destroyers charge battleships to buy time for escort carriers that should have been indefensible.
The Imperial Japanese Navy as a strategic offensive force was gone by October 26th. But 80,000 Japanese soldiers were still on Lee or moving toward it, and the man commanding them had known from the beginning that the fleet they were counting on would not be enough. Now Yamashita’s nightmare was becoming reality, and the weapon that would define the rest of the Pacific War had just been used for the first time.
Admiral Takajiro Onishi had organized the first kamicazi unit in the Philippines on October 19th, one day before the American landings began. He understood the mathematics with brutal clarity. Conventional Japanese air attacks on American carrier groups were achieving hit rates below 15% and losing aircraft at catastrophic rates because American radar directed combat air patrol and anti-aircraft systems had become so effective that attacking pilots had almost no chance of reaching their targets. Onishi’s calculation was
simple and terrible. A pilot accepting death as the operational premise, not the risk, removed the survival problem entirely. One aircraft, one ship. The exchange rate was acceptable if the target was large enough on October 25th above Taffy. Three, the first organized kamicazi strike in history put five aircraft into American escort carriers.
The Saint Low took a direct hit amid ships. Her bomb load detonated internally and she went down in 30 minutes with 114 of her crew. Four other carriers were damaged. The Americans watching it happen could not initially process what they were seeing. Pilots did not fly into ships deliberately. It took several attacks before the pattern became undeniable.
By November, the kamicazi program had expanded from a single unit to an organized strategic weapon. Onishi was recruiting pilots across the Philippines, framing the missions in terms of bushidto and sacrifice for the emperor, drawing on cultural frameworks that made the logic feel less like suicide and more like the highest form of service.
Young men were volunteering. The aircraft being used were often obsolete models, trainers, fighters too slow to survive conventional combat, now repurposed as guided munitions with a human targeting system. The Americans began calling them divine wind, the literal translation of kamicazi, and they feared them in a way that conventional air attack had not produced for 2 years.
Between October and December 1944, kamicazi attacks sank or damaged 57 American ships off Lee alone. The psychological effect on American sailors exceeded the physical damage. A weapon you could shoot down was manageable. A weapon that wanted to die was something different. But the kamicazi program could not solve the ground problem on Lee.
And the ground problem was getting worse in ways that confirmed everything Yamashida had predicted. The convoys running through Ormach Bay were being hit continuously. American fifth air force and naval aviation had identified Ormach as the single viable supply route and were treating every convoy as a priority target.
Of the approximately 65,000 reinforcement troops Tokyo sent to Lee after the initial landings, a significant portion arrived without their heavy weapons because the ships carrying those weapons had been sunk before reaching the island. Divisions landing through Ormach found themselves on the beach with rifles and minimal ammunition told they were joining a decisive counteroffensive finding.
Instead, a defensive battle that was already losing ground. By mid- November, Japanese units in the central highlands were reporting supply shortages that were degrading their combat effectiveness below sustainable levels. Artillery ammunition was being rationed at rates that made counterb fire impossible.
Food was being supplemented by whatever the mountains could provide. Unit commanders were submitting reports that described soldiers fighting at reduced effectiveness due to malnutrition while simultaneously being asked to hold terrain against American divisions that were resupplied by air and sea daily. Yamashta read these reports in Manila and said nothing publicly that was not appropriate for a commander to say.
What he had written in September was on record. Each ship sunk in Ormach Bay was exactly the ship he had warned Tokyo would be sunk. November 27th, break neck ridge. The terrain feature that would define the Lee ground campaign for three weeks of the most brutal fighting the Pacific had yet produced. The ridge ran north to south across the Ormach corridor.
The mountain passage connecting the eastern valley to the western port. Whoever held breakneck ridge controlled the corridor. Whoever controlled the corridor controlled the only viable route for Japanese reinforcement and American advance simultaneously. The first cavalry division and the 32nd infantry division were given the mission of taking it.
The Japanese defenders were the first division transferred from Manuria, one of the Imperial Army’s elite formations. They had built their positions into the ridge line itself. Bunkers cut into rock. Interconnected fighting positions covering every approach. Fields of fire that turned the jungle trails below into killing grounds.
They had been told this was the decisive battle. They intended to make it one. The Americans came up the ridge in rain. Constant tropical monsoon rain that turned every trail to mud, grounded air support for days at a time, made vehicle resupply impossible above the first 100 meters of elevation, and reduced the fighting to what infantry combat reduces to when technology stops working.
Men with rifles moving uphill against men with rifles who do not want to give ground. The first assault went in on November 7th. It was stopped. The second assault went in on November 8th. it was stopped. Artillery preparation that should have suppressed the Japanese positions found that the bunkers had been built to survive everything smaller than a direct hit from a heavy artillery shell and heavy artillery could not be moved up the trails fast enough to support the infantry tempo.
The tactical situation demanded the pattern that emerged over the following 3 weeks was brutal in its consistency. American infantry would advance under fire, take casualties, reach the first line of Japanese positions, clear them at close range with grenades and flamethrowers, and find another prepared position 15 m behind the first.
The Japanese defenders were not retreating. They were dying in position and forcing the Americans to pay for every meter of ridge with blood that neither side could afford to waste. But both sides were spending. By November 20th, American casualties in the break neck ridge fighting had reached levels that were drawing attention at Sixth Army headquarters.
The advance was measured in hundreds of meters per day against defenders who were by every metric under supplied, outnumbered, and fighting without air support or artillery coordination. They were fighting with what they had, which was the ridge itself, and it was costing the Americans dearly. The 32nd Infantry Division committed additional battalions on November 22nd and began flanking movements that the direct frontal assaults had made necessary.
The flanking forces moved through terrain that the Japanese had assessed as impassible for organized units and was nearly correct in that assessment. The movement took 4 days through jungle and rock that tore through equipment and exhausted the men attempting it. On November 24th, the flanking force reached positions that threatened the Japanese rear on breakneck ridge.
The first division commanders recognized the threat and began a withdrawal that they did not have the logistics to sustain. Falling back meant moving through terrain with no supply and no resupply coming. Standing meant being encircled. They fell back. Breakneck Ridge fell on November 26th after 19 days of continuous fighting.
American casualties for the ridge alone exceeded 1,500. The Japanese defenders who had held it had done so with soldiers who were by the final days eating roots and fighting with ammunition counts measured in single digits per man. The ridge had bought time. It had not changed the outcome.
After break neck, the pattern accelerated. The 77th Infantry Division landing directly at Ormok on December 7th, three years to the day after Pearl Harbor closed the last supply route to the Ley garrison from the sea. Japanese units in the mountains received no more organized resupply after that date. What they had was what they would fight with until they had nothing.
The organized resistance that had cost so much to break on Break Neck Ridge and Keel Ridge and through the Ormock corridor had been built on a foundation of soldiers who believed the fleet was coming, that supplies were coming, that Tokyo’s decisive battle was still being fought. By December, the soldiers still in the mountains knew none of those things were true.
They fought anyway because stopping was not a choice that their training or their orders or the terrain had given them. December 26th, Ley declared secured 79,000 Japanese dead confirmed in the accounting that followed. 3,500 Americans dead. The ratio that Yamashida had known was coming from the moment Tokyo overruled him in September.
The men still in the mountains on December 27th had not received the declaration. They were still there in January, still there in February. One of them was still there in 1956. In part four, we follow Yamashitta into the mountains of Luzon where he fights the battle he had designed all along with the forces that Lee had left him.
We examine what the kamicazi program became after Lee Gulf and what it cost at Okinawa. And we ask the question that Yamashida’s trial in 1946 made permanent in military law when a commander is right and is overruled and men die because of that overruling. who bears the responsibility. The story has one chapter left and it is the one that changed military law for the 80 years that followed.
December 26th, 1944, Lee declared secured. 79,000 Japanese soldiers dead, 3,500 Americans dead. The largest naval battle in history fought and decided the first kamicazi attacks in history launched and recorded. Japan’s oil supply line from the southern resource area permanently severed and one general who had predicted every single outcome sitting in Manila preparing to fight the battle he had been trying to fight since September.
In parts 1 through three, we watched Tokyo override Yamashta and send 80,000 men to an island their own commander called Indensible. We watched Japan’s navy destroy itself across four simultaneous engagements covering 500 m of ocean. We watched 19 days of fighting on Breakneck Ridge an elite Japanese division to men eating roots and counting ammunition in single digits.
We watched the kamicazi program go from one aircraft into the street low to an organized strategic weapon that would define the remainder of the Pacific War. The battle is over. The accounting is done. But the story has one chapter remaining, and it belongs to the man who was right, who was ignored, and who lived long enough to explain exactly what happened and why.
Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and turn on notifications so you never miss our next video. This community is where history comes alive, and we want you to be part of it. Tommoyuki Yamashida spent the final months of the war in the Cordiiera mountains of northern Luzon, fighting precisely the battle he had designed before Lee consumed the forces he had planned to fight it with.
He had positioned his remaining strength in the mountain terrain he had argued for since September in the Shobu group in the north using elevation and jungle and narrow approach routes to slow American advances that his depleted forces could not stop but could make enormously expensive.
He had approximately 152,000 men on Luzon when the Americans landed in January 1945. He should have had more. The divisions Tokyo had sent to Lee instead of Luzon, represented the difference between a defense that could inflict maximum casualties over maximum time and the defense he actually fought, which was still costly for the Americans, but was fought by an army that had been stripped of its best formations before the decisive campaign began.
The Americans advancing into northern Luzon found exactly what Yamashida had promised Tokyo they would find if the battle was fought there. Terrain that artillery could not fully neutralize. Mountain positions that required infantry to clear at close range. A defending force that did not have the logistics to counterattack but had everything it needed to make every ridge expensive.
American casualties in the Luzon campaign would ultimately exceed those of any other operation in the Pacific theater. Yamashta was still in the mountains when Japan surrendered on August 15th, 1945. He came down on September 2nd, the same day the formal surrender was signed aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay and surrendered to American forces at Baguio.
He was 59 years old. He had been fighting for 14 years across China, Malaya, Singapore, and the Philippines. He was the last significant Japanese commander to surrender in the Pacific. The Americans who accepted his surrender described him as composed military in bearing precise in his responses. He asked about the welfare of his soldiers still in the mountains.
He was told they would be treated according to the Geneva Convention. He acknowledged the response and submitted to custody. His trial began in Manila in October 1945. The charges were war crimes related to the conduct of Japanese forces in the Philippines. Specifically, the Battle of Manila in February 1945 in which Japanese naval forces and army stragglers fighting street by street through the Philippine capital killed more than 100,000 Filipino civilians and reduced one of Asia’s great cities to rubble comparable to Warsaw. Yamashta’s
defense was straightforward and in a different legal environment might have been compelling. He had ordered Manila evacuated of Japanese army forces. He had been fighting in the Cordillera mountains when the atrocities occurred. The naval forces responsible for the worst violence were under a separate command structure that did not report to him. He had not ordered the killings.
He had not known about them in real time. He could not have stopped them from where he was. The military tribunal found him guilty under a principle that his trial would make permanent in international law. Command responsibility. A commander is responsible for the actions of forces under his command regardless of his specific knowledge of or involvement in particular acts.
The standard was not whether Yamashida had ordered the Manila atrocities. The standard was whether he had taken adequate measures to prevent crimes by forces he commanded. He was sentenced to death. He appealed to the United States Supreme Court. The court declined to review the sentence on its merits.
He was hanged at Los Bonos on February 23rd, 1946. He was the first general officer executed under command responsibility doctrine in modern legal history. The standard established at his trial has shaped the law of armed conflict for every conflict fought in the 80 years since. Every military officer in every nation that has adopted the laws of war operates under a legal framework that includes command responsibility as Yamashida’s trial defined it.
His name is not famous in the way that MacArthur’s name is famous, but the legal doctrine that his execution established is present in every military court marshal, every war crimes tribunal, every international criminal proceeding that has addressed the conduct of commanders since 1946. The kamicazi program that began above Taffy 3 on October 25th, 1944 grew from the single strike that sank the Saint Low into the primary Japanese naval offensive weapon for the remainder of the war.
By the time of the Okinawa campaign in the spring of 1945, the Japanese had organized kamicazi operations involving thousands of aircraft in coordinated mass attacks called Kikusui floating crosanthemums that sent waves of 50 to 300 aircraft simultaneously against the American fleet at Okinawa kamicazi. Attacks sank 36 American ships and damaged 368 others.
They killed 4,900 American sailors, the highest naval casualty figure of any single campaign in the Pacific War. The psychological effect on American fleet operations was measurable. Destroyer crews assigned to radar picket duty around Okinawa, the ships that absorbed the first wave of every kamicazi attack because they were positioned to give early warning, suffered casualty rates that commanders described as unsustainable.
men requested transfer. Some could not continue. The weapon that Onishi had designed as a solution to American defensive superiority was working in the specific way he had intended, not by sinking aircraft carriers, but by making the human cost of continued naval operations almost unbearable. American planners incorporating kamicazi effectiveness into the casualty projections for operation downfall.
The planned invasion of the Japanese home islands estimated that Japan had approximately 5,000 to 10,000 aircraft available for kamicazi operations and that the American fleet would sustain casualties in the hundreds of thousands before reaching the Japanese coast. These projections were among the factors that informed the decision to use atomic weapons in August 1945.
The connection is direct and traceable. The first kamicazi strike in history above Laty Gulf on October 25th, 1944 was a link in a chain of decisions and consequences that ran through Okinawa’s casualty figures and into the calculations that ended the war with weapons that made conventional invasion unnecessary. The Lee campaign changed military logistics doctrine in ways that are still taught in staff colleges.
The vulnerability of a single supply port demonstrated at Ormach became a foundational case study in the dangers of logistics choke points. The December 7th landing directly at Ormach, cutting the Japanese supply line at its source rather than fighting through the mountains toward it became a model for operational envelopment at the logistical level.
You do not always have to defeat the army in the field. You can defeat the system that sustains it. The casualty ratio at le 22 Japanese dead for every American killed reflected not superior American fighting ability alone but superior American logistics. The Japanese soldiers who held Breakneck Ridge for 19 days and extracted the cost they did from American infantry had done so while eating roots and rationing ammunition.
The American soldiers fighting up that ridge had been resupplied by air when the trails were impassible. The outcome was not inevitable in the abstract. It was inevitable given the specific conditions that American submarine warfare and carrier aviation had created in the Philippine Sea before the first soldier set foot on the beach.
Here is the detail that most accounts of Lee do not include the connection that closes the story. In September 1945, American officers conducting postwar interrogations of senior Japanese commanders asked Yamashida directly about the September 1944 decision to fight at Ley. They asked whether given perfect information about American capabilities and Japanese limitations, there was any decision Tokyo could have made that would have changed the outcome of the Philippines campaign.
He considered the question carefully and gave an answer that his interrogators recorded verbatim. He said no. The American submarine campaign had by September 1944 already reduced Japanese shipping to the point where the logistics of defending the Philippines at any island were critically compromised. The oil supply from the southern resource area was already being interdicted faster than the home islands industry could compensate.
The decisive moment had passed before Shichigo was conceived. The battle for the Philippines was not lost in October 1944 when MacArthur came ashore. It was lost incrementally across 2 years of submarine warfare that the Imperial General Staff had never found an adequate answer to. What Lee decided, he said, was not whether Japan would lose the Philippines.
It was how many men would die proving it. He was right in September 1944. He was right in September 1945. The record confirms both. Sergeant Kenji my man we watched press his back against a coconut palm at dawn on October 20th as 700 ships materialized on the horizon died on Breakneck Ridge in November 1944. He had been fighting since China.
He died in a fortified position on a mountain on an island his commanding general had tried to save him from in a battle that had been decided in Tokyo before it began. He is among the 79,000. They are mostly still on laty in the ground where they fell in the mountains and the valleys and the coastal plains unreovered and uncounted except as a number.
The island today has a population of over 2 million people. The beaches where 174,000 Americans came ashore on October 20th, 1944 are accessible. The bronze statues of MacArthur and his staff stand in the water at Red Beach. At high tide, the surf comes around their ankles. The mountains where Kenji died are still mountains.
The jungle has had 80 years to cover what happened there. from a decision made in Tokyo in September 1944 that one general tried to prevent 79,000 men proved that the wrong battle fought on the wrong island for the wrong reasons still costs exactly what battle always costs. The last Japanese soldier on Ley surrendered in 1956 12 years after the battle ended having lived in those mountains since October 1944 fighting a war that the world had finished without him.
Some stories end with victory. Some end with justice. This one ends with a man coming down from a mountain 11 years after everyone else blinking into a piece he had not known existed on an island where 79,000 of his countrymen never came down at all. That is the price of the wrong decision made by men who could not afford to be wrong.
And the reason this story is worth 90 minutes of your life is simple. The men who paid that price had no say in the decision. They never do. If that matters to you, share this with someone who should understand it. Subscribe because next week we bring you another story from the Pacific War that most people have never heard about men on both sides who fought and died in the absolute conviction that what they were doing mattered. It did.
So does knowing it.
