The first wave of incoming carrier planes showed up on the Yamato’s radar scopes at 12:20 p.m. The Yamato’s navigator shouted: “Over 100 hostile planes are headed for us!”56 An alert was flashed to the other ships in the task force. Ten minutes later, lookouts sighted the first clusters of black specks, high above and beyond the range of even the Yamato’s mammoth 460mm antiaircraft guns.
The Americans took their time, circling counterclockwise over the task force like buzzards over carrion, waiting for the trailing squadrons to fall into formation. Visibility from altitude was poor. Peering down through a layer of broken overcast between 3,000 and 5,000 feet, Ensign Harry D. Jones—an Avenger pilot with the Hornet’s Torpedo Squadron Seventeen—could not see the enemy fleet at all. Then, through a break in the clouds, he glimpsed the Yamato. Jones thought the superbattleship looked like “the Empire State Building plowing through the water. It was really big.”57
With fuel to spare, and no enemy planes to bother them, the strike leaders were patient and methodical in planning the attack. The Hellcats and Corsairs would dive on the Yamato, dropping their smaller bombs and then strafing the decks; the SB2C Curtiss dive-bombers would follow closely, dropping their 1,000-pounders, and the Avengers would time their torpedo runs to coincide with the dive-bombers. Most of the torpedoes would be aimed at the great battleship’s port side, in hopes of forcing her to capsize in that direction.
As the first attack sequence began, the Yamato’s antiaircraft guns opened fire, throwing up colorful bursts of flak. The fire was heavy but inaccurate, and the planes held steady in their dives. A Yorktown Hellcat pilot thought, “Jesus, they’ll never get through that AA! It’s murder!”58 But the attackers maintained their velocity and flew through the bursts. Lieutenant Commander Chandler W. Swanson, who led the Bunker Hill’s torpedo squadron, was most concerned about the risk of hitting other American airplanes. “Our planes were crisscrossing over the target from all directions. That was the most dangerous part of it. We had to keep from running into our own planes. There were so many of them and so little room to maneuver. It was surprising we had no collisions.”59
The Japanese ships were tearing through the sea at 27 knots. The Yamato maneuvered violently, and a “forest of geysers” sprung up around the ship as bombs dropped by the Helldivers missed narrowly. The towers of whitewater sent powerful cataracts of water down on deck, knocking men off their feet and even wrenching equipment from the rigging. Four heavy bombs struck in short order, silencing antiaircraft batteries and tossing debris and bodies into the air. Strafing fighters riddled the ship’s superstructure with .50-caliber machine-gun fire, striking and killing several men on the bridge. Fires raged aft, and a column of smoke trailed away in the Yamato’s wake. Yoshida saw “silvery streaks of torpedoes” converging on the ship from several directions.60 Captain Aruga conned his ship deftly, steering toward the tracks and evading several, but the Yamato could not avoid them all. Three hit portside amidships in quick succession, then a fourth hit farther aft. The great ship leapt and shuddered with each blow, then began listing to port.
To the Yamato’s left, the destroyer Hamakaze was hit by bombs and dropped out of formation. She began going down by the stern; in a few minutes she was gone, “leaving only a circle of swirling white foam.”61 The cruiser Yahagi vanished behind a curtain of spray, and fighter planes flew low strafing runs over the ship, Captain Hara recalled, “fanning us with bullets and propwash as they pulled out at masthead level.” Watching the TBMs boring in through heavy bursts of antiaircraft fire, he thought, “the enemy pilots certainly had guts.”62 A torpedo struck the starboard engine room, killing the engineering crew and knocking out her propulsion. Six or seven bombs rained down along her length. The 8,000-ton Yahagi could not withstand much of that kind of punishment. She was reduced to a burning, listing wreck, incapable of maneuvering against succeeding waves of planes. The destroyer Isokaze closed in from astern, apparently intending to take survivors off the stricken Yahagi, but she was hit by one or two bombs that set her afire and put her out of action. The Suzutsuki was hit and crippled, but somehow survived and limped back to Sasebo, a naval base near Nagasaki.
The Yamato’s port list was corrected through counterflooding, but fires continued to spread through the after regions of the ship. The firefighting and damage control teams had been decimated in the attacks, so the fires were never brought under control, and they were still advancing as the second wave of American planes arrived over the task force. On the bridge, Admiral Ito stood silently, his arms folded over his chest, as stretcher-bearers loaded bullet-riddled bodies onto litters and carried them away. As a result of the fires, casualties, and damage, command and control between the bridge and the various crew departments and stations was beginning to break down.
In a second wave of attacks, beginning about forty minutes after the first, the Yamato took five or six more torpedo hits on her port side, and at least one to starboard. Another exploded against her stern, destroying her rudder post and depriving her of steering. SB2C dive-bombers rained heavy armor-piercing shells down along her topside works, while swarms of low-flying Hellcats and Corsairs strafed her remaining antiaircraft batteries. Yoshida recalled “incessant explosions, blinding flashes of light, thunderous noises, and crushing weights of blast pressure.”63 The destroyers Asashimo and Kasumi were badly mauled, and would either sink or be scuttled. The immobilized Yahagi caught four more torpedoes and seven or eight more bombs. Captain Hara, looking fore and aft, judged that his ship was nearly finished. Whitewater towers erupted as torpedoes exploded against the hull. Bomb blasts ejected debris and bodies into the air. Rivets begin popping out of the steel deck plates, and the bridge begin pulsating under his feet. “Our dying ship quaked with the detonations,” wrote Hara. “The explosions finally stopped but the list continued as waves washed blood pools from the deck and dismembered bodies fell rolling into the sea.”64
The Yamato rode low in the water, her lower regions flooded and her port list increasing to 18 degrees. Her upper works were a shambles—smashed, blackened, and burning. Some of the crew began to panic. The skipper came on the loudspeaker and ordered, “All hands to work to trim ship!” But the damage control parties had suffered heavy losses, and the bridge was finding it difficult to maintain contact with stations below. Fires and flooding had prevented the crew from sealing off stricken compartments on the port side. Damage to the pumps and valves had thwarted efforts to counterflood into the Yamato’s starboard “pumping-in” rooms. The executive officer told the skipper, “Correction of listing hopeless!”65
Recognizing that his ship was in imminent danger of capsize, Captain Aruga took the deliberate and cold-blooded decision to flood the starboard engine and boiler rooms. A warning buzzer was sounded, and a frantic telephone call warned the crew to evacuate, but there was not enough time. The “black gang,” hundreds of men who maintained the ship’s engines, were trapped in their compartments and drowned at their posts. Ensign Yoshida called it “a thankless end to all their days of toil in the scorching heat and deafening noise of their laborious duty.”66
When the Yorktown’s air group arrived at 1:45 p.m., the Yamato was listing visibly and her speed had fallen to under 10 knots. Her gunnery defenses had been crippled by the prior attacks; only a few of her weapons were still functioning, and it was no longer possible to move ammunition up from the magazines. Once again, with plenty of time to plan and execute their attacks, the Avengers timed their torpedo runs with the strafing and diving assaults of the Helldivers and Hellcats. The Japanese officers on the bridge watched with helpless admiration for the skill and bravery of their foes. As torpedoes tore into the stricken battleship’s hull, Captain Aruga shouted, “Hold on, men! Hold on, men!”67 But the loudspeaker system was no longer working, so only those in earshot could hear him. The Yamato’s list increased to 35 degrees, and then to 45 degrees, which exposed the bilge keel on the starboard side, leaving the unarmored and vulnerable underside of t
he ship to the mercy of the last torpedo-armed Avengers.
All power was lost, and the skipper began preparations to order abandon ship. Without internal communications, many on the lower decks probably never received the order to leave their posts. Admiral Ito shook hands with his surviving staff officers, and then retreated to his sea cabin. He was never seen again.
About a mile astern, dive-bombers plummeted down on the immobilized Yahagi. Hara gritted his teeth and muttered, “All right, you Yankee devils, finish us off!”68 At 2:06 p.m., he shouted to his crew to abandon ship. F6F Hellcats were roaring overhead as he leapt into the sea. Hara was sucked under by whirlpools, but his life vest pulled him back to the surface, where he held on to debris with a number of other oil-covered castaways.
The Yamato rolled steadily, almost onto her beam ends. So much smoke was overhead that the day had darkened, as if it were twilight instead of midday. Ensign Yoshida, clinging to the bridge structure, later recorded his impressions of the terrible scene: “The horizon seemed to take on a mad new angle. Dark waves splattered and reached for us as the stricken ship healed to the incredible list of 80 degrees.” Looking aft, he saw the great 30-foot-long “Sun and Rays” battle flag dipping toward the ocean. A young sailor gripped the bottom of the staff, evidently determined to go down with the ship. From deep in the hull came rumbles, tremors, and the crash of falling machinery. On the bridge, Captain Aruga lashed himself to a binnacle. The navigator and his assistant had tied themselves tightly together, and “as the ship rolled over they merely stared at the onrushing waves.”69 Admiral Ito’s chief of staff shouted at the younger officers to save themselves, and when some of the young men were slow to leave the ship, he began physically striking and shoving them into the sea. As waves crashed against the bridge deck, many lost their grip and were swept away.
Yoshida swam through congealed bunker oil. As the great ship began sliding under, whirlpools and eddies formed in the sea around her, and he was sucked under. From beneath the surface, he saw a flash of light and “a gigantic pillar of flame shot high into the dark sky.”70 The Yamato’s main magazine had detonated. Yoshida broke the surface, then was pulled down again, and surfaced again, to find himself treading water among debris and other swimmers.
The cloud that rose above the Yamato was more than a thousand feet in diameter, and it ascended to 20,000 feet above sea level. The explosion was seen in Kagoshima, 125 miles away. When the cloud lifted, the Yamato was no longer there. Just 23 officers and 246 enlisted men survived; the ship had taken nearly 3,000 souls with her into the abyss. Three remaining undamaged Japanese destroyers circulated among the swimmers and hauled them aboard.
More than 4,000 Japanese sailors had perished in this largely symbolic expedition. The Americans had won their victory at a cost of just ten planes and twelve airmen.
While the strike was away, Task Force 58 was attacked by about one hundred kamikazes. Most were shot down, but one hit the battleship Maryland—the “Fighting Mary’s” second such ordeal of the war—and another dove through a low cloud ceiling to strike the flight deck of the Hancock. Raging fires were brought under control within forty-five minutes, and the Hancock was able to land her own planes when they returned. But the attack killed sixty-four and wounded seventy-one of her crew. Most of the casualties were trapped below decks, where they were burned, blown up, or succumbed to fatal smoke inhalation.
ACCORDING TO THE INVASION PLAN issued by General Buckner, the marines of the III Amphibious Corps would charge across Okinawa, bisecting the island and taking control of the east coast, and then turn north to occupy and pacify the middle and northern part of the island. They would take the smaller island of Ie Shima, off the Motobu Peninsula, by amphibious assault. Whatever enemy forces held out in the hilly, forested, far north of Okinawa could be sealed off and isolated. Meanwhile, the army divisions of XXIV Corps would drive into the forbidding hills and ridges to the south, seize the prefectural capital of Naha and its harbor, and overrun the enemy’s fortified lines around Mount Shuri. The entire operation was expected to take forty-five to sixty days.
With few Japanese troops standing in their way, the marines made unexpectedly speedy progress in the early days of the campaign. Advance patrols crossed to the east coast of Okinawa on the afternoon of Love Day plus one (the day after the invasion). That move bisected the island, effectively isolating Japanese troop detachments in the north from the main bulk of their army to the south. The “Old Breed” 1st Marine Division, and three regiments of the 6th Marine Division—the newest and (to this day) the highest numbered division of the Marine Corps—pushed up the eastern and western shore roads into the narrow northeast isthmus known as the “Ishikawa Neck.” Opposition was negligible, virtually nonexistent. The climate was splendid and the scenery gorgeous. According to Sterling Mace of the 5th Marines, “The ocean was a lilting shade of azur, the sandy beaches were unsullied and crystalline white, and beautiful Okinawan horses ran wild, close to the water, having been abandoned by their masters.”71 Inland, beyond the dunes, they found a quilted landscape of wheat fields, canefields, pastures, and rice paddies demarcated by narrow dirt lanes and burbling brooks. Rolling hills were terraced for cultivation, and studded with ancient stone tombs. The spring wildflowers were in bloom, and the hilltops were capped with dense stands of pine trees that gave off a sweet, pungent scent. Every half a mile or so, the marines passed through a miniature hamlet made up of squat, close-built stone houses with thatched roofs. Okinawa, wrote Private Gene Sledge, was “as pretty as a pastoral painting.”72
Much of the civilian population had either moved south with the Japanese army or been evacuated to Japan. Here and there, on the road or in villages, the Americans encountered a group of civilians. Nearly all were women and children, with a few elderly men; there were hardly any young Okinawan males to be found anywhere in the zones occupied by the invasion forces. Most appeared to be poor farmers and peasants, dressed in sackcloth trousers or plain cotton robes; many were barefoot and dirty, and all appeared malnourished. The older people were petrified. Many bowed deep at the waist, cringing as if expecting to be struck. But the children, responding to the warm smiles of the Americans, were quick to lose their fear. With wide eyes and open hands, they advanced to receive the alms offered by the conquerors—candy, chewing gum, and C-rations. “The children were nearly all cute and bright-faced,” wrote Sledge. “They had round faces and dark eyes. The little boys usually had close-cropped hair, and the little girls had their shiny jet black locks bobbed in the Japanese children’s style of the period. The children won our hearts.”73 Watching these sociable exchanges in stupefied relief, the adults lost their fear. Contrary to what the Japanese army propagandists had told them, the invaders were not ogres or demons. Okinawans were not, after all, to be raped, tortured, mutilated, and murdered. Indeed, the Americans had shipped in provisions to feed the civilian population, and intended to return them to their homes and villages as soon as it was safe to do so. Forty-eight hours after Love Day, civilian refugees were waving or saluting as American jeeps and tanks passed in column, and infantrymen were reaching out to tousle the hair of passing children.
For the marines, the first month on Okinawa was a tranquil interlude. They heard booming artillery far to the south, but for the moment that was the army’s problem. Some of the new “replacement” marines chided the veterans, suggesting that their accounts of the horrors of Pacific island combat must have been exaggerated. Making camp each evening, they dug foxholes and set up perimeters as they had been trained. The mortarmen registered their weapons on the places they deemed most likely as routes of Japanese night infiltration attacks. Okinawan soil was soft clay loam, which yielded easily before their picks and portable entrenching shovels. Compared to the rocky coral ground of Peleliu, the easy digging was a mercy. The nights were cool, and the men were grateful for their wool-lined field jackets.
Artillery and mortar platoons commandeered local horses to carry their weapon
s and ammunition. Marines were seen riding the animals, bareback. Some stripped off their uniforms and bathed in the local streams. According to the journalist Ernie Pyle, traveling with the 6th Marine Division, a “few dozen dirty and unshaved marines” scavenged pink and blue Japanese kimonos out of the wreckage of smashed houses, and wore them while washing their uniforms.74 Another adopted a little white goat as his pet. An eighteen-year-old marine told Bob Sherrod that he hoped to run into enemy troops soon, because “I’m tired of carrying all this ammunition.”75
To the south, meanwhile, the army was heavily engaged. Probing south from the Hagushi beachhead, General John Hodges’s XXIV Corps ran into entrenched Japanese positions in the hilly country north of Naha. The 96th Infantry Division was stopped by artillery, mortars, and tenacious enemy infantry counterattacks on a terrain feature they called the Kakazu Ridge. After four days of hard fighting between April 4 and 8, XXIV Corps had suffered more than 1,500 casualties. The Americans were forced to dig in, and the situation threatened to deteriorate into a protracted and bloody stalemate. The great natural fortress of the Shuri Line loomed ahead. It could not be outflanked, nor even approached except by exposed routes covered by well-aimed artillery and mortars. Those who had fought on the Western Front during the First World War felt an unnerving sense of déjà vu. The Japanese had chosen their ground well, and they had a shrewd plan to defend it. They did not launch profligate and futile banzai charges. To a greater degree than in previous battles, their infantry attacks were well synchronized with their artillery and mortar barrages. They had made clever use of reverse-slope firing positions and fortifications, putting their guns out of reach of U.S. artillery and tanks. Their artillerists were more sparing in their use of ammunition than the better-supplied Americans, but they were making every shell count.
Colonel Yahara, the Thirty-Second Army’s operations officer, had envisioned waging a battle of attrition, bleeding the American forces and buying time for their colleagues in the homeland to strengthen their defenses. But General Ushijima’s higher-ups pressured him to counterattack with all his might, with the aim of recapturing the Yontan and Kadena airfields. The Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo and the Tenth Area Army in Formosa sent a stream of radio dispatches urging him to push the invaders back to the beach. The Combined Fleet chief of staff, Admiral Kusaka, radioed his Thirty-Second Army counterpart, General Cho, asking that the two airfields be wrested back from the Americans.76 On April 2, when General Yoshijirō Umezu briefed the emperor, Hirohito expressed concern about the public repercussions of losing Okinawa, asking, “Why isn’t the army fighting back?”77
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