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To Leyte Gulf, May to October 1944

Bay City lay more than 1,400 river miles from the sea. Paul Heitkamp, a motor machinist’s mate third class on LCI(L)-1064, set down his ship’s route. She went through Lake Huron and Lake Michigan to Chicago, down the Illinois River and the Mississippi to New Orleans, and on to Galveston and Corpus Christi, Texas, between 15 May and 27 June 1944. She reached Panama on 3 July, the New Hebrides by way of Bora Bora on 4 August, and Manus, in the Admiralty Islands, on 15 August, where the flotilla was organized. From August to October she worked from Lae and Hollandia, New Guinea, and she sailed for the Philippines on 17 October. LCI(L)-1065 sailed in company with her, and a report of June 1944 places 1065 at or near Galveston. The same river route is recorded for two other LCIs of the class, 1093 and 1098.

The ship belonged to LCI Group 44, which left Humboldt Bay, New Guinea, between 16 and 21 October 1944 for Leyte with LCIs 684, 685, 977, 978, 979, 980, 981, 982, 983 and 1064. The group was one of three of about twelve ships each in LCI Flotilla 15, some thirty-six ships under a Captain Deuterman, and was led by a Lieutenant Commander Tucker. Within the group, 1065 was probably in Division 88, as 1064 was. On 22 October the flotilla entered Leyte Gulf behind the destroyer USS Morris and anchored in San Pedro Bay, the sheltered northern arm of the gulf, off Tacloban. The American landings on Leyte had gone in two days before, on 20 October.

The Battle of Leyte Gulf, fought from 23 to 26 October 1944, was the largest naval battle of the Second World War, with more than 200,000 sailors engaged across an area of open sea larger than most European countries. It was fought in four main actions. In the Palawan Passage on 23 October the submarines Darter and Dace sank the heavy cruisers Atago and Maya and crippled Takao, out of Admiral Kurita’s Center Force, and Kurita had to swim for it. In the Sibuyan Sea on the 24th, carrier planes of the Third Fleet sank the 60,000-ton battleship Musashi after at least 17 bomb and 19 torpedo hits, and the light carrier Princeton was lost to a single bomb, with 241 more dead aboard the cruiser Birmingham alongside her. In Surigao Strait on the night of the 24th, Admiral Oldendorf’s six battleships, five of them survivors of Pearl Harbor, destroyed Admiral Nishimura’s Southern Force, in the last fight between battleships in history. Off Samar and Cape Engaño on the 25th, Kurita’s battleships fell on six escort carriers and their screen, because Admiral Halsey, drawn north by Admiral Ozawa’s empty decoy carriers, had left San Bernardino Strait unguarded; Kurita then broke off and withdrew. The Americans lost about 3,000 men and eleven warships; the Japanese lost about 12,000 men and twenty-six warships, among them four carriers and three battleships. The Japanese navy never again put to sea in such strength. Anthony was in none of those actions. He was in the anchorage they were fought over. At three in the morning on 25 October Kurita’s Center Force came out of San Bernardino Strait with four battleships and nothing between them and the invasion shipping in the gulf, LCI(L)-1065 among it. By then LCI(L)-1065 had already been sunk by something else.

In San Pedro Bay the war came from the air. On 24 October some 200 Japanese aircraft attacked the beaches and the ships, and about fifty American fighters flying from land claimed between 66 and 84 of them. On LCI(L)-982, Quartermaster T. P. Kennedy wrote in his diary that his ship was at battle stations from five in the morning to nine at night, laid smoke across the harbor all day, and counted 35 Japanese planes destroyed. The supply ships suffered most. The Liberty ship David Dudley Field, the first supply ship into the gulf, had one plane miss her bow and crash alongside, and a third hit her No. 7 gun tub. The Adoniram Judson, at the Tacloban dock, took 44 bombing runs by day and eight night attacks between 24 and 28 October; one bomb fell fifteen feet away and put thirty holes in her hull. Her master counted 56 bombing and strafing passes over six days and received the Merchant Marine Distinguished Service Medal. For two months the LCIs of the flotilla laid smoke, carried supplies to the beaches and stood anti-aircraft watch, and Nemetz reckoned that his ship went through about seventy air raids.

On the morning of 24 October the old fleet tug USS Sonoma (ATO-12), built in 1912, lay alongside the Liberty ship Augustus Thomas, taking on fresh water. The Augustus Thomas carried 3,000 tons of ammunition, a thousand barrels of high-octane gasoline, steel matting for airfields, and 548 men. As the Sonoma cast off, firing at the attacking planes, a burning Japanese bomber crashed into her starboard side amidships. Two explosions followed, and she flooded fast. LCI-72, LCI-337 and the fleet tug Chickasaw came alongside, put out her fires and took off her wounded, and the Chickasaw tried and failed to beach her on Dio Island. The Augustus Thomas was hit amidships too, and was beached and written off.

Minutes later it was LCI(L)-1065’s turn. The war diary of her group records her struck at 8:50 a.m. on the starboard side forward, at the No. 3 gun, and sunk at 9:30, in 6¾ fathoms, about forty feet of water, at 11°11′22″ north, 125°03′08″ east. PT boats and small landing craft picked up the survivors. Kennedy’s diary on LCI(L)-982 records why it was the 1065 and not his own ship: “LCI 1065 took our place landing supplies that morning.” She was sunk in the third wave of ships to land that day. Nemetz remembered that a tug was hit first and beached itself on a small island off Tacloban, and that then “one of our sisters” was struck. The 982 raced to her at flank speed, her fastest, and arrived too late, and survivors told the crew she had sunk in less than a minute. Lieutenant (j.g.) Robert Clark, executive officer of the rocket ship LCI(R)-74, whose second duty was fighting fires, answered the fire call for both vessels. In October 1995 he told the Santa Rosa Press Democrat that his men fought for the tug, which burned out and was towed aground on Dio Island, and then for the LCI, which went down. A photograph taken from LCI(L)-227 shows the 1065 burning heavily but still afloat, just before she sank. The war diary gives forty minutes between the hit and the sinking. Most likely the survivors meant the final plunge, and a memory written down some fifty years later shortened the rest, but no record says so.

Where Anthony was when the plane struck is not recorded. The accounts of the toll do not agree. The group’s war diary lists one officer and six men missing and three officers and twelve men wounded. A diary kept aboard the attack transport USS Fremont (APA-44), which took in nine badly burned survivors, one of whom later died, counts one officer and six men killed and five missing. The Fremont was hit that day herself, by a shell that burst on her bridge and wounded seven men. Other accounts give five killed or about thirteen dead, and Nemetz said only that “several of her crew” went down with her. No single death toll can be given, and no account names a single sailor.

What struck the ship is not settled. The war diary names no aircraft. NavSource calls it a Japanese navy bomber, a Mitsubishi G4M “Betty,” in a deliberate suicide dive. The kamikaze historian Bill Gordon names a Japanese army Ki-21 “Sally,” already damaged by gunfire before it crashed. Pacific Wrecks, citing the U.S. Army’s official history of the Leyte campaign, names Ki-51 “Sonia” attack planes of the 65th Air Regiment (65th Sentai), which scored near misses that morning on the destroyer Leutze, LST-552 and LCI(L)-1065. Researchers of Japanese aircraft have also suggested the Sonia, from a Japanese claim of a hit on a “destroyer’s” conning tower, since an LCI was narrow with a tall superstructure. No Navy record of the time names any of the three. The records also disagree on where she was hit. The war diary, written at the time, puts it on the starboard bow, but Warner’s history of 1982, as Gordon quotes it, puts it on the fantail, the deck at the stern.

Whether the attack was a kamikaze is partly a matter of definition. The Japanese navy’s first official suicide mission flew the next day, 25 October, against the American carriers off Samar, so some lists of ships sunk by kamikazes leave out both the 1065 and the Sonoma. The naval historian Robert Stern calls both crashes jibaku: a plane already doomed and deliberately flown into a target, not a mission launched to die. Accounts of the Sonoma add that the plane was not of a type flown by the four original suicide squadrons. The Navy itself never used the word. Its combat summary of May 1945 listed three losses in the landing phase at Leyte: the minesweeper YMS-70, lost to a storm, and the Sonoma and LCI(L)-1065, both “sunk by enemy action,” its casualty list says “sunk off Leyte, Philippine Islands, 24 October 1944,” and its chronology of 1944 calls the 1065 “damaged” by a crashing plane, an odd word for a ship that sank. NavSource, writing much later, says she was “lost at sea due to enemy Kamikaze attack”. None of this changes what the crew lived through: a plane struck the ship, she burned, and within the hour she sank.

LCI(L)-1065 had been in commission for five months and eight days. She was credited with the Leyte landings of 16 to 24 October 1944 and one battle star. Her awards were the Combat Action Ribbon for 24 October 1944, the American Campaign Medal, the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal with one star, the World War II Victory Medal, the Philippine Presidential Unit Citation and the Philippine Liberation Medal, and five Purple Hearts were awarded for that day. She was struck from the Navy’s list of ships on a date the records do not give. There is no record that her wreck, in about forty feet of water in San Pedro Bay, was ever surveyed, salvaged or dived on.

Of Group 44’s twelve ships, two more were lost or put out of action in Leyte Gulf within a month. On 12 November a kamikaze struck LCI(L)-684, tied up beside a repair LST in San Pedro Bay, and blew off her stern. She was towed in, beached at Anibong Point and condemned by a survey board of three officers as not worth repairing, and her crew was scattered among other LCIs. On 24 November a bomb fell between LCI(L)-979 and a patrol craft, killing three men aboard her, among them her captain, wounding fourteen, and punching about 150 holes in her side. The crew of LCI(L)-982 plugged the holes with pillows, pumped fuel to her starboard side to raise the damage above the waterline, and beached her near Tacloban. LCI(L)-1064 came through the war. She landed troops at Ormoc on 7 December 1944, Mindoro on 15 December, Luzon on 3 January 1945, Panay on 18 March and Negros on 29 March, served at Okinawa, Shanghai and Formosa, and was decommissioned on 6 June 1946 with four battle stars.