“Back at the base we discussed our strange paralysis. Everybody agreed he had first thought it was a Jap barge when the flare burst, and nobody could give a reason for not shooting instantly. If even one gunner had fired, the whole weight of our broadside would have come down on that canoe.
“We’ll never understand it, but we are all grateful to Whoever or Whatever it was that held our hands that night and spared those poor natives. And what woolly stories those Halmaherans must be telling their children about that night. I’ll bet by now we are part of the sacred tribal legends of the whole Moluccan Archipelago.”
Almost from the beginning of the return trip to the Philippines two years before, General MacArthur had had his eye on Mindanao, the southernmost large island of the group and hence the closest to Morotai. It was on Mindanao that he planned to land first, and from there he could advance up the island chain.
Before daring to venture into the Philippines, however, the Allied High Command wanted to make more landings—one at Yap Island, northeast of Palau (where Marines had landed the same day as the Morotai invasion), and another at Talaud Island, another steppingstone, about halfway between Morotai and Mindanao.
While the Palau and Morotai landings were going on—indeed a few days before they started, but too late to stop them—Admiral Halsey made a bold proposal to cancel all intermediate landings and take the biggest jump of all, completely over Talaud, over Yap, even over Mindanao itself, all the way to Leyte in the Central Philippines.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff of all the Allies, then at a conference in Quebec, swiftly accepted the recommendation and set October 20th as target date, chopping two months (and nobody will ever know how many casualties) off the life of the Pacific war.
In a wild flurry of activity, planners concentrated the preparations of three months into a month, diverted the forces for the other landings into Leyte force, and made bold carrier strikes at Formosa, in preparation for the landings in the Central Philippines.
An example of the incurable tendency of high-level Japanese officers to believe in their own foolish propaganda is the fact that on the very eve of the Leyte landings the Japanese defenders of the Philippines relaxed their guard, because they thought the Third Fleet had been wiped out.
American carriers had been roving the waters off Formosa during the week before the landings, and carrier planes had chewed up enemy airpower. Japanese Intelligence officers, however, believed the fantasies told them by their pilots returning from attacks on the American fleet. Radio Tokyo solemnly announced that the Third Fleet had been annihilated with the loss of 11 carriers, two battleships, three cruisers, and one destroyer.
The Japanese public went wild with enthusiasm. The Emperor made a special announcement of felicitation to his people, and victory celebrations were held at army and navy headquarters in the Philippines.