Twilight of the Gods

by Twilight of the Gods (retail) (epub)

  “I will outrank you then, Commander,” he said, “because you will have to send out many more pilots before you can go yourself.”

  “Say,” said another, “what shall we do with the Commander when he reports in at Yasukuni?”

  “Let’s make him the mess sergeant!”

  The remark elicited a lusty roar of laughter.

  Inoguchi, playing along, beseeched his subordinates: “Can’t you do better by me than that?”

  “Well, then,” one replied, “perhaps mess officer.” More laughter.30

  New kamikaze flyers arriving in the Philippines underwent a seven-day indoctrination program, including classroom instruction and basic flying drills. A typical outgoing flight consisted of a small formation, generally four to six planes, including one or two escort-observer planes. (The escorts, piloted by experienced aviators of superior skill, were not to attack. Their role was to lead the kamikazes to the target, observe the results, and return safely to base.) Two approach and attack methods were employed: one at high altitude and one at sea level. In the former, the planes approached the enemy fleet at 25,000 feet or higher. Closing to forty miles, they dropped copious amounts of “window”—aluminum strips—to confuse the U.S. radar systems. When the ubiquitous F6F Hellcats swarmed up to intercept, the escorts tried to lure them away with showy defensive maneuvers, while the kamikazes dove for speed and sought cloud cover, hoping to get to within attack range of the U.S. fleet. The low-altitude approach involved skimming 20 or 30 feet above the wavetops. U.S. radar systems generally did not detect low-altitude attackers beyond a range of about ten miles, owing to the curvature of the earth and interference caused by ocean swell. Drawing to within five or six miles of the enemy fleet, the low-altitude kamikazes suddenly pulled up and climbed to about 2,000 feet. If there was a cloud ceiling, they attempted to hide in it while selecting a target.31

  For the final attack—this applied to both high- and low-altitude approaches—the kamikazes were told to bear down on the target at a steep angle, like a dive-bomber. They were to aim for the enemy’s topside deck. The steeper their angle of attack, the greater their penetrating power. When attacking an aircraft carrier, they were to aim at one of the elevator pits on the flight deck. That was believed to offer the best hope of smashing through into the hangar, where the potential for secondary fires and explosions was greatest. (At the very least, putting an elevator out of action would impair a carrier’s flight operations.) If a steep-diving impact on the flight deck was not possible, the kamikazes were told to aim for the carrier’s island superstructure, with hopes of killing the senior officers and destroying the ship’s brain center.32

  On the first day of November, waves of suicide planes descended on Admiral Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet in Leyte Gulf. Attacks started up in late morning and continued through the early evening. Many ships narrowly avoided direct hits with aggressive maneuvering; antiaircraft guns destroyed perhaps twenty planes. One attacker struck a glancing blow on the main stack of the destroyer Ammen. At about 1:30, radar scopes revealed a small formation of inbound attackers, gliding down from altitude at high speed. No American fighters were in the air to intercept them. The destroyer Abner Read maneuvered violently as an Aichi dive-bomber broke through the cloud ceiling. The Abner’s 40mm and 20mm antiaircraft guns blazed fiercely, actually tearing the attacker’s port wing cleanly away, but the wrecked plane’s momentum carried it down to strike the destroyer starboard amidships.

  Fires raged throughout the forward part of the Abner Read, threatening to engulf the depth-charge racks and torpedo mounts. Sailors raced to jettison the depth charges and launch the torpedoes before they cooked off. A witness on the destroyer Claxton, patrolling near the stricken ship, watched in astonishment as a nameless torpedoman charged directly into the flames to reach the torpedo tubes. “The power apparently was knocked out; so, with his whole body engulfed in flames, he manually cranked the tube mount out to starboard and, with a hammer, manually fired all five of the torpedoes.”33 That saved the ship from its own torpedoes, but the fires soon spread to the ammunition lockers and magazines, setting off a chain of devastating explosions. As the Abner Read’s crew began to abandon ship, the Claxton moved in to pick up survivors. At that moment another kamikaze descended in a steep trajectory. It missed the Claxton narrowly, but its bomb detonated as it struck the sea close aboard, killing five men and flooding the lower regions of the ship. The Claxton nonetheless managed to pick up 187 survivors of the Abner Read.

  Fresh waves of kamikazes arrived over Leyte Gulf throughout the afternoon, often diving and missing by frightfully small margins. That evening a third destroyer, the Anderson, took another direct hit. Kinkaid was forced to send six warships back to Manus for drydock repairs.

  Multiple threats seemed to be converging on the Leyte beachhead that day. A Fifth Air Force patrol plane reported a powerful Japanese naval task force in the Mindanao Sea, headed east. This might herald a second Battle of Leyte Gulf, only now the Allied naval presence in the area was much weaker. Halsey doubted the accuracy of the report, but he could not afford to ignore it. He detached a force of battleships and cruisers to guard Surigao Strait.34 (By the next morning it was clear that the sighting report had been in error.) Meanwhile, relentless Japanese airstrikes fell upon the landing beaches. The attackers came in at low altitude, their approach concealed by the surrounding hills. They bombed and strafed the supply dumps, the beached LSTs, the airfield at Tacloban, and the various embryonic military headquarters established in tents and huts along the beach. P-38 Lightning fighter planes of the 308th Bombardment Wing of the Fifth Air Force had begun operating from Tacloban on October 27, but not yet in great numbers because of “difficult field conditions.”35 Many USAAF fighters were destroyed on the ground, including twenty-seven in a single raid. During the first week of November, conventional (non-kamikaze) air attacks on the Leyte beachhead destroyed 2,000 deadweight tons of gasoline and 1,700 tons of ammunition.36

  Kinkaid was at his wit’s end. He sent a dispatch to MacArthur that evening (November 1) warning that the situation in Leyte Gulf was critical. The enemy’s air strength had rebounded alarmingly. Air attacks on the beachhead were virtually unchecked and threatened to throttle the army’s supply lifeline, and the kamikaze attacks on the fleet offshore were an intensifying nightmare. He warned that the delay in establishing a strong USAAF presence at Tacloban and Dulag threw the entire campaign into jeopardy.37

  At the same time, the Seventh Fleet chief renewed his entreaties for more carrier air support over Leyte Gulf. Halsey replied that he preferred to meet the air threat at its source, by hitting Japanese airfields on Luzon. On November 5 and 6, Task Force 38 airplanes pummeled the enemy’s big air bases north of Manila. They also attacked shipping in Manila Bay, where their victims included the heavy cruiser Nachi, Admiral Shima’s flagship that had survived the Battle of Surigao Strait. On the fifth, however, several small formations of kamikazes and their escorts tracked the returning American planes back to the task force, east of Samar. They broke away as they encountered the patrolling American fighters, then sought cloud cover and skulked around the fringes of the task force. At 1:39 p.m., seven or eight planes penetrated into the heart of Task Group 38.3. Most were shot down by short-range antiaircraft fire while diving on carriers at the hub of the circular formation. One missed the Ticonderoga by about 30 feet to starboard, exploding on the sea in a ball of fire. Another dove determinedly through a wall of antiaircraft bursts and crashed the Lexington’s signal bridge. Fires raced through the island superstructure, gutting the bridge and destroying much of its communications and radar technology. Flight operations were not interrupted, but casualties were heavy—42 killed and 126 wounded. Among the wounded was a large proportion of the carrier’s gunnery department and signal force, many of whom suffered grievous burns. The Lexington was sent back to Ulithi for repairs, where she would be seventeen days at anchor. She buried her dead at sea on the sixth, during which time her co
lors (and those of Task Group 38.3) stood at half-mast.38

  Among officers and crewmen of the American fleet, the kamikazes inspired dread, horror, loathing, and (not least) fascination. They seemed to confirm a prior suspicion that the Japanese were fundamentally different from other “races”—that they were weirdly fanatical and not quite human in their zeal for guaranteed death. This impression of exotic, dehumanizing “otherness” inspired fanciful rumors about the kamikazes—that they wore green and white religious robes, or black hoods, or were manacled into their cockpits. Some called them “green hornets.” They inspired a new kind of terror. A destroyer sailor wrote his wife: “I have never in my life seen such a vicious scene as a wicked monster driving a plane straight at me at 200 miles an hour with six wing guns going full blast. It looked as if he was after me personally.”39 Bob Sherrod, a Time magazine correspondent, noted that American sailors in the Pacific were obsessed with kamikazes and spoke of almost nothing else. “Nothing could have been more awesome than to see a human being diving himself and his machine into the enemy,” wrote Sherrod. “Nobody except the Japanese could have combined such medieval religious fervor with a machine as modern as the airplane.”40

  Others offered more cold-blooded evaluations. Raymond Spruance, still on leave in the United States, immediately grasped that suicide attacks were a “very sound and economical” use of Japan’s diminishing air power, and that the Allied fleets would be dealing with them until the end of the war.41 Jimmy Thach, a legendary fighter pilot now serving as Task Force 38 operations officer, regarded the kamikaze as a weapon “far ahead of its time.” A pilot in a terminal suicide dive could make last-minute adjustments to hit the target, like a man-guided missile. The kamikaze was especially deadly against aircraft carriers, because he could aim right at a carrier’s exposed bridge, and strike it; or he could aim for penetration into the hangar, where explosions and fires would feed upon fuel, explosives, and other combustible material. “It was actually a guided missile before we had any such things as guided missiles,” said Thach. “It was guided by a human brain, human eyes and hands, and even better than a guided missile, it could look, digest the information, change course, avoid damage, and get to the target.”42

  Throughout Task Force 38, a cry arose for more fighters. The argument had been brewing for months; now it rose to a new pitch. With most of the Japanese navy sunk, the U.S. fleet had limited use for traditional carrier bombers. The brownshoes wanted a radical rebalancing of the standard air group complement in favor of Hellcats and F4U Corsairs. “In this kind of war,” argued Gerry Bogan in a strongly worded dispatch addressed directly to Nimitz and King, the SB2C Helldiver “complicates plane handling, and occupies vital space which should go to invaluable VF [fighters].” The training pipeline was not an obstacle, he added, because current dive-bomber pilots, and those in training, could simply be transferred into fighters. Bogan said he knew that the planes were available, and that they could be shifted to the western Pacific immediately: “Our preparations have had in mind hitting the enemy at his source of power. The time is not in the future.”43

  This dispatch flouted established communications protocols, and its tone was borderline mutinous. As Bogan certainly knew, a task group commander had no business addressing himself directly to the CINCPAC, let alone the chief of naval operations. Nimitz reproved Bogan for submitting a message “improperly addressed direct to higher authority,” and told him to resubmit his views in a letter to Halsey.44 But the tense exchange underscored the sense of urgency in the fleet. For months the carrier bosses had been begging for more fighters; the sudden threat posed by kamikazes only exacerbated the shortfall.

  Naval leaders were doing all they could to send more Hellcats and Hellcat pilots out to the Pacific, but they were also wary of disrupting future plans. If they accelerated the deployment of fresh F6F squadrons in late 1944, they risked a shortage in 1945, when the fleet was needed at full strength for the planned assaults on Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and Japan itself. The brownshoes countered that bomber pilots could be placed directly into fighter cockpits. They would not become fighter aces overnight—but under current conditions in the Pacific, even middling F6F pilots were more valuable than SB2C pilots. Bogan maintained that a two-hour checkout flight was sufficient, given the emergency.

  Furthermore, the F6F Hellcat made a fine bomber in its own right, even if it had not been designed for that purpose. It had the horsepower to carry a 1,000-pound bomb, and it remained stable in a steep dive. Equipped with rockets, as it often was, it could hit ground targets with better accuracy than a dive-bomber. “This is one of those rare miracles where you get something for nothing,” said Thach, “you drop your bomb, then you’ve got the world’s best fighter.”45 Thach also wanted to bring in Marine Corps aviators and their F4U Corsairs, which had recently begun operating from escort carriers in support of amphibious operations. If they had learned to recover aboard a small jeep carrier, they should have no trouble landing on the much larger flight deck of an Essex carrier.

  Nimitz and King gradually gave way to these persistent entreaties from the frontline aviators. They had already revised the standard carrier complement from eighteen torpedo bombers (VT), thirty-six dive-bombers (VB), and thirty-six fighters (VF) to eighteen VT and twenty-four VB, “with VF to capacity.”46 On November 29, King approved a new standard Essex-class complement of seventy-three Hellcats, fifteen Helldivers, and fifteen Avengers. Executing the change was another question, however. Carrier fighters were in high demand, but the supply was tight.47 Nimitz told Halsey that he intended to retain a replenishment pool of F6Fs in Guam, but the CINCPAC was moved by Halsey’s beseeching reply: “Urgently request [that] you reconsider. Time is short and things are already moving. . . . The suicide attack is a grave menace to our carriers and to your future operations if not countered. More fighters are needed to counter it, and they cannot be found except by reducing number over target or adding to complement.”48 The next day Nimitz reversed his decision, releasing the entire existing pool of replacements for immediate deployment to Task Force 38. But he remained gravely concerned that a shortfall in carrier fighters loomed in early 1945.

  In the fleet, air staffs cooked up creative new tactics to deal with the kamikaze threat. Task Force 38’s four task groups were consolidated into three, so that each could operate at full strength. More carriers at the center of a formation meant more defending fighters overhead; it also meant a bigger screening force and a greater concentration of antiaircraft fire. A defensive measure called the “Moose Trap” was devised to counter the Japanese tactic of sending kamikaze formations to track U.S. planes returning to their carriers. Two picket destroyers (“watchdogs”) were stationed about 60 miles from the carrier task force, on the direct flight line to the strike objective. As the U.S. airstrikes returned, they were to head directly for these “watchdogs,” and take a full 360-degree turn over them before returning to the carriers. Fighters (“tomcats”) patrolled overhead, and examined the returning planes closely as they made their turns. They shot down any Japanese planes they discovered. This process was called “delousing.”49 American pilots were instructed to steer clear of the zone between the picket destroyers, which was designated “fair game.” Any radar contacts appearing in that area were presumed enemy, and attacked right away. The picket destroyers also provided early radar detection of low-flying kamikazes, and a low-altitude CAP (called “jacks”) was vectored out to intercept them. “We told the pilots that they were just likely to get shot if they didn’t come back and delouse themselves over the picket,” said Thach. “Just leave the area clear, and if any attack was coming straight out, like they usually did, we picked him up very much quicker. So that worked.”50

  To these defensive tactics they added an offensive, air-striking system called the “Big Blue Blanket.” On strike days, the carriers sent big formations of F6F Hellcats to patrol over enemy airfields on Luzon, and rotated replacements into the area all day long, thereby mai
ntaining a continuous daylight presence directly over the enemy’s bases. Enemy planes taking off or attempting to land were shot down. Thach arranged a three-strike rotation, with launch and recovery times carefully staggered to keep the “blanket” in place, and “we rolled up quite an impressive total of aircraft destroyed, some in the air but mostly on the ground.”51

  At first, the new tactics seemed to pay off. On November 19, a round of airstrikes on Luzon encountered little opposition. As the final strike returned to the task force, about twenty “bogeys” were intercepted and shot down outside the strike pickets, about 70 miles from the task force. None got through the screen.

  After withdrawing to the east to refuel, Task Groups 2 and 3 made another high-speed predawn approach to Luzon five days later, and launched a strike shortly after sunrise. A few minutes after noon, bogeys appeared on the Task Group 2 radar screens. A layer of broken cumulus clouds at about 6,000 feet gave cover to the attackers. At 12:52 p.m., a swarm of Zeros dropped through the cloud ceiling and dove on the Intrepid, the Cabot, and the Hancock. One crashed the ill-fated Intrepid’s port gun tubs, killing ten and wounding six of her crew. The damage was severe but containable, and the Intrepid surged on with undiminished speed. Six minutes later, however, another Zero bore in from astern, machine guns blazing, and crashed the port side of her flight deck. Wreckage skidded all the way to the bow, but the bomb smashed through the flight deck and exploded in the hangar. Admiral Halsey, who witnessed the attack from the nearby New Jersey, wrote that the Intrepid “went through hell. An instant after she was hit, she was wrapped in flames; blazing gasoline cascaded down her sides; explosions rocked her; oily black smoke, rising thousands of feet, hid everything but her bow.”52 The Intrepid lost sixty-nine men killed and seventeen planes destroyed. Once again, this proud but unlucky ship was obliged to pull out of the war zone and head back to Pearl Harbor for repairs.