During the Leyte surface-air battles, however, many of the Japanese were dedicated, with great ceremony, to making deliberate suicide dives into American ships, as a kind of human bomb. The toll was already frightening to American naval men, and threatened to get worse.
In mid-December two kamikaze planes crashed into the 323 in Surigao Strait, and destroyed it utterly so that the PTs crews were served notice that they were not too small a prize to merit attention from the sinister new air fleet.
MacArthur had returned, all right, when he went ashore at Leyte, but it was only a kind of tentative return—a one-foot-in-the-door return. Until he landed on Corregidor in Luzon, he wouldn’t really be back where he started. Luzon was the goal.
Just across the narrow Verde Island Passage from Luzon is the island of Mindoro, and MacArthur’s air commanders sorely coveted that piece of real estate for airstrips so that they could bring Luzon under the gunsights of their fighters before the Luzon landings began.
On December 12th MTB Squadrons Thirteen and Sixteen, plus PTs 227 and 230, left Leyte Gulf in a convoy with the Eighth Army’s Visayan Task Force to invade Mindoro Bay, 300 miles to the northwest. Because of the sharply mounting kamikaze attacks, the Navy did not want to risk a tender in Mindoro waters, so the squadrons, with the help of the ingenious Seabees, planned to set up a base of sorts on an LST.
During the afternoon of December 13th, a kamikaze slipped through the air cover and crashed into the portside of the invasion force flagship, the cruiser Nashville. The pilot carried two bombs, and their explosion touched off five-inch and 40-mm. ammunition in the ready lockers topside. The shattering blast killed 133 officers and men, including both the Army and Navy chiefs of staff and the colonel commanding the bombardment wing. The Nashville had to return to Leyte Gulf.
Later, ten more Japanese planes attacked and one got through to the destroyer Haraden. The explosion killed 14 sailors and the destroyer had to go back to Leyte. The PTs huddled close to the rest of the convoy, to add their batteries to the curtain of fire.
Troops went ashore on Mindoro at 7 A.M. on December 15th, and met little opposition. Half an hour later, PTs were operating in the harbor. The infantry quickly set up a perimeter defense, pushing back the small Japanese garrison to make room for an airfield at San Jose. As they had at Bougainville, American planners wanted only enough room on Mindoro to establish and protect a fighter base. It was not Mindoro but Luzon that was the basic goal.
The Japanese didn’t intend to let the Americans have even that much land, however, without lashing back furiously at the invaders of this island almost within sight of the city of Manila.
Just after 8 A.M. the kamikazes arrived. Three of the planes dove on destroyers and were shot down by the combined fire of all ships. The fourth flew over the stern of Ensign J. P. Rafferty’s PT 221, caught the full blast of the PT battery, and cartwheeled along the surface of the bay, spraying water and flames until it sank from sight.