Leyte was declared secure. Now the job in the Philippines was to build up Allied forces, especially in the advanced outpost of Mindoro, for the big push on Luzon. The Japs knew it, and reacted in familiar fashion: they sent down a task force of surface ships to blast the soft-shelled beachhead with heavy guns.
It was late afternoon when the enemy task force was sighted, steaming in from the South China Sea, by a Navy search Liberator piloted by Lieut. P. F. Stevens of Joplin, Mo. Stevens reported his find: a battleship, a cruiser and six destroyers. Then he made a beeline back to Mindoro, gassed up and had his plane armed with four 500-lb. bombs. While other strikes were being set up, he flew back to the Jap task force’s course, picked out the battleship as his target. A low-level run with his flying boxcar in the face of concentrated ack-ack resulted in two misses, two direct hits. But the 500-pounders were as flea bites to the armored monster, and the enemy force drove on.
Unnerved Gunnery. Stevens retired beyond ack-ack range and hung around to plot the Japs’ course for the Mitchell medium bombers and Thunderbolt fighters then taking off from Mindoro. At 7 p.m. the air-sea battle was on. U.S. air attacks spoiled the Japs’ gunnery and left them with no stomach for slow bombardment runs which might have inflicted serious damage on Mindoro installations. Instead, while being chivvied from the air, the Japs steamed up & down the coast, taking pot shots as they went, doing negligible damage ashore.
PT boats darted out from Mindoro to join the battle, but had to be recalled because U.S. planes were attacking them, mistaking them for Japs in the fitful moonlight. The Mitchells sank the lead Jap destroyer, then the next, finally a third. The cruiser had been damaged. By 1:30 a.m. the enemy ships made a 180° turn and ran back, trailing oil, to the South China Sea.
Night after night, Jap planes came down from Luzon to pock the airfields around San Jose; night after night U.S. ack-ack and Black Widow night fighters took a heavy toll. Day after day U.S. bombers roared over enemy-occupied bases on Luzon, destroying 144 planes in three days. It was an aerial war of attrition, before the next push could begin.
Last week, a big U.S. convoy (the Jap said 30 transports and 20 escorting cruisers and destroyers) ploughed through three days of enemy air attacks in the Mindanao and Sulu Seas. At first the jittery Japs feared it might be headed for Luzon, but the convoy put in at Mindoro. The buildup was proceeding along with the attrition. Soon enough Luzon would be the target for other convoys.
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