9 Days Falling, Volume I k-5

by John A. Schettler

  The incident clearly illustrated the desperately conflicted nation as they faced the prospect of final humiliation and defeat. Some men obeyed the Emperor’s order to cease hostilities when it came, and others did not, preferring death to dishonor in accordance with the Japanese code of Bushido.

  To persuade the Japanese, the Americans had secretly moved two atomic bombs to Tinian, and were fully prepared to use them in spite of what they had endured in the North Atlantic at the hands of a similar weapon—an incident the American public, and few in the military, ever knew of. The announcement of surrender prevented that horror.

  “Well if the goddamned holy highness just announced the surrender of Japan,” said Gates, “then why are they still fighting? What gives, LTC?”

  “Somebody didn’t get the message, that’s what gives. There’s a big air duel going on right now over Tokyo, because some of our boys didn’t get the order to stand down until they were already engaged.”

  “Well aren’t we going to do something about this, sir? I mean, we can’t let the Japs keep taking pot shots at our ships and subs, can we?”

  “They’ll do something about it, Gates, but that’s well above your pay grade. You just get over to that desk there and sort through the rest of those intercepts. I want everything filed in two hours. Got that?”

  Several stars above Gates on the pay grade chart, other men were considering the same situation that morning, and they didn’t like what they found out. They got word from Babe Brown’s TF.92 and started listening in on his radio traffic. It didn’t sound good, and while doing so they also heard radio traffic signaling to a vessel named Kirov. It came in and out, repeated, faded, returned.

  The incident with Brown’s task force had suddenly turned the watchful eye of US Naval Intelligence north to the lonesome and mostly deserted islands of the Kurile archipelago. A relief force was immediately dispatched to render assistance to TF.92, and inquiries were discreetly made to the Russian Pacific Fleet in Vladivostok, where it was learned that they had a pair of patrol ships off the northern Kurile islands for a security operation, one of which was named Kirov.

  It was a sublime coincidence, and it would have ramifications no one could foresee at that moment. The US informed the Russian Pacific Fleet Commander of the incident involving TF.92 and told them American fleet units would be investigating. Vladivostok said they knew nothing about the incident. Halsey wasn’t going to fool around any longer. If the Russians wanted to get pushy, he’d show them what they were up against. He was on the radio discussing it with Nimitz who was at fleet headquarters on Guam.

  “This couldn’t be a Japanese ship,” he said. “We’ve accounted for most every major combatant they have.”

  “Well it was enough to give Babe Brown one hell of a bloody nose,” Nimitz came back. “What did we miss, Bull? What’s the report say?”

  “Three ships, Admiral. One reported as a heavy cruiser or bigger. Brown says they might have been a Russians.”

  “Russians?” The surprise was evident in Nimitz voice. “MacArthur has been all up in a tizzy fit over Russian intentions up there. He thinks they’re planning to occupy Hokkaido.”

  “They don’t have the naval forces for that,” Halsey said quickly. “Word is they were barely able to support a landing in the Northern Kuriles. They try anything on Hokkaido and the Japanese will fight.”

  “Yes, and if they fight there then this cease fire and surrender agreement could go right down the tubes. That’s why we need to put the fear of the Lord into the Russians, Bull. Who do we have up there who could send them a message?”

  “I have just the man we need,” said Halsey. “My old flight instructor.”

  Task Group 38.3 had been operating in the Tokyo area, and was steaming about 150 miles off the eastern coast of Honshu on August 15, 1945. It was a fast carrier task force under distinguished fighting officer, Rear Admiral Clifton Sprague. Nicknamed “Ziggy” at the naval academy because of his wildly animated gait, Sprague had come up through the ranks from posts on lowly oilers and cargo vessels and also helped pioneer naval aviation, where he trained Admiral, Bull Halsey himself. He served on Lexington and Yorktown before the war, and eventually achieved command of the newly constructed carrier Wasp, CV-18. He fought with her at Saipan and the Philippine Sea, reaching the rank of Rear Admiral at the young age of 48 years. In October of the previous year his task force of escort carriers dubbed “Taffy 3” had fought off the main Japanese Center Force at the Battle off Samar Island.

  One of the largest engagements in naval history, Sprague’s gallant destroyers and “jeep carriers” confronted a powerful Japanese naval force under Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita including six heavy cruisers and four battleships, one of which was the venerable Yamato. That ship had not participated in a naval engagement in anger since she tangled with a mysterious raider off the southern tip of Papua New Guinea three years earlier, but she lived to fight this one last time before joining her sister ship Musashi at the bottom of the sea.

  So as big as the Pacific Ocean was, the lines of fate crossed and tangled with one another, and the battlecruiser Kirov was somehow at the heart of it all. Two men would soon meet on the high seas, and both had faced and fought Yamato in the only two engagements that battleship fought during the war.

  It was Sprague’s gallantry in the battle off Samar that earned him the Navy Cross, and installed him as one of the US Navy’s true fighting Admirals. He would go on to see action at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and then take command of the fast Carrier Division 2 with his flag set on VC-14, the Ticonderoga. That ship, along with the carriers Wasp, Monterey, and Bataan, formed the heart of TG.38.3, which had just finished pounding Hokkaido as the war ended. With news of unfinished business up north and the Russians on maneuver, Halsey ordered Sprague to “get up there and have a look around.”

  The fighting Admiral was eager to oblige. He steered his carrier group north with the battleships South Dakota, North Carolina, four cruisers and sixteen destroyers in escort, and a couple of radar pickets out in front, the Benner and Southerland. It seemed overkill in many ways. Third Fleet Commander Halsey knew that Japan was beaten and had already surrendered. Yet being a little edgy over Soviet intentions for Northern Japan, the relief force he would sent north would be substantial this time.

  “I’ll send Ziggy Sprague,” said Halsey. “He’ll get the job done, and then some.”

  Nimitz agreed with Halsey that a brief show of force up north would discourage Russian ambitions in the region easily enough. After all, what could a small Russian force in the Kuriles led by a patrol boat named Kirov do in the face of such overwhelming American naval power? He would show the Soviets what a real navy looked like, and Sprague was just the man for the job.

  Yet Halsey had not reckoned on the presence of another ship named Kirov that day, nor on the ambitions of one Russian officer commanding a small flotilla of three ships cruising in the Sea of Okhotsk.

  ~ ~ ~

  They had called it the “Month of Fire,” when the carriers swarmed around the Japanese home islands and relentlessly dismantled the last of Japan’s war fighting capacity for air/sea operations. At long last it was over, though a few cinders were still burning hot, or so it seemed.

  Admiral Fraser, Commander of the Royal Navy Pacific Fleet, got word of an incident late on the 15th of August, 1945, and something in the reports raised his hackles. He was a recent arrival, setting his flag on Duke of York on August 6th and taking her up to join the British TF.37 that was one of four allied fast carrier task forces operating off Honshu and Hokkaido late in the war. TF.37 had recently cooperated with the Americans in those raids, including Sprague’s group. It was now in the Sea of Japan and preparing to send a good number of its ships back to the British base at Manus Island due to fuel shortages in the British replenishment tankers, but something in these reports gave Fraser pause, and he countermanded those orders.

  “Are you sure?” he asked his warrant officer looking over the
message. “They used the word rockets?”

  “Plain as day, sir. Shouted it out just before they went down. We just got word a few minutes ago in this wire.”

  Fraser’s eyes had a distant look in them now. “Very well. Signal Captain Schofield on King George V and tell him I’d like his ship to remain on station. The same for all carrier commanders. That will be all.”

  “Sir.” The messenger saluted and started back for the telegraph room, stopping quickly when the Admiral called after him. “One more thing. Send to the Yanks Admiral Halsey,” he said. “Tell him I’d like to have a chat with him again as soon as possible…And make sure it’s well coded.”

  “At once, sir.”

  Fraser watched the man go, getting up from his desk in the Flag Command Room aboard the battleship Duke of York. He walked slowly to the window, staring out to sea to watch the other ships in his task force riding smartly in formation.

  Nimitz and Halsey will think I’m keen to make arrangements to attend the surrender ceremony planned for next week, he thought. But there was something about this incident report that struck a nerve. More information was filtering in on the wires. Apparently a small American task force under Admiral Brown had a scrap with a hostile force up in the Kuriles and lost ships and men there. That alone was surprising enough, given the fact that the allied navies had pounded virtually every Japanese ship known to oblivion. Now details of that engagement were starting to touch on a black memory.

  Rockets… The American Admiral Brown had finally filed his report and claimed his ships were hit by fast moving rockets. Fraser knew the Japanese had been experimenting with a rocket assisted suicide glider, and every other navy was also toying with one prototype or another. The Germans certainly had a number of rocket weapons, and the Royal Navy was also using rocket powered munitions against U-boats. Similar weapons had blasted the invasion beaches from Sicily to Normandy. Late in the war Britain also deployed a new weapon they called the ‘Stooge,’ a radio-guided missile with a range of about nine miles. It reached a top speed of 500 mph and carried a 220lb warhead to attack incoming Japanese Kamikaze flights. He still had several of the weapons here with his carriers, and the Americans had something even more advanced called the “Bat.” The British had learned many hard lessons, the legacy of harrowing experience from earlier in the war that was still highly classified.

  Rockets guided by radar…What was the world coming to, thought Fraser? If he hadn’t seen the damn things himself flashing in on Rodney and Nelson that night in the Mediterranean he would find it all too much to believe. Now he saw something darker in this report than appeared on the surface. The American Admiral Brown’s scouting force on patrol in the Kuriles had run into trouble and several of his ships were hit and sunk. The word ‘rockets’ was on their lips when they died.

  Not again, he thought. Not now, when we’ve finally won this thing and are ready to put this insanity to rest. He had the quiet distinction of being the last carrier force in the Pacific to fly combat sorties when Seafires off the Implacable shot down 8 Japanese planes on August 15. But what if his darkest misgivings were true? Now they were saying the hostile ships in this latest incident had been reported as Russian! That little piece of the puzzle completed a picture for him that the Americans might not yet see. The British had shared some of what they learned with the Americans after that first disastrous engagement in the North Atlantic, but they didn’t know everything. They didn’t know about Tovey’s little chat with this rogue Admiral, or anything of what happened off St. Helena soon after. And they didn’t know about the Watch just yet, though they would have to be brought in on the matter soon.

  The damn ship keeps coming back, he thought. It found us in the Med in ’42 and then gave us the slip and wound up in the Pacific! That was, in part, why he had been given the assignment here, for he was one of the very few in the Royal Navy who was now fully briefed on ‘the ship,’ as it was simply called. The code word to be used upon confirmation of an actual sighting of this mysterious vessel was something else, and he hoped he would never have to hear it again—Geronimo.

  Now he looked out the side port and saw the fast carriers riding the waves: Indefatigable, Formidable, Implacable, and a ship all too familiar with the Geronimo raider, Victorious. Just off his port side another proud veteran of those engagements steamed close by, King George V. Tovey had her in the thick of it on more than one occasion. It’s a pity, he thought quietly. Old Rodney and Nelson were too damn slow that night and the monster slipped west to Gibraltar. But then Tovey had four new battleships at hand in the Western Approaches, surely enough raw steel and firepower to settle the matter once and for all, and instead he decided to parley with the Admiral of this strange nemesis.

  And the man was Russian… The ship and crew were Russian! Russians and rockets at sea…rockets shooting down aircraft. He could feel it, sense it, a growing sense of presentiment and dire warning setting off a thrum of anxiety in his chest. Could it be happening again?

  Here I thought it was all over but the pomp and circumstance. I was out here to invest Fleet Admiral Nimitz with the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, and award Halsey the Order of the Knight of the British Empire. Always proper to express our appreciation to the Yanks after all they’ve done for the Crown. Then it was on to the surrender ceremony—now this.

  Another look at his carriers gave him heart. Beyond the four fleet carriers and two battleships here, he also had six cruisers and sixteen destroyers with him in TF.37, and this was only one of several similarly sized formations in the region. The Americans had four such task forces at sea now, all eager to gather at Sagami Bay near Tokyo next week and put an end to this madness.

  Put an end to it all….

  Well, he thought. If the worst comes about, and this is another ‘incident,’ we bloody well have the ships and planes to do exactly that. If this damn ship appears again we’ll make scrap metal of it soon enough.

  Then he remembered what Admiral Tovey had told him about that first engagement in late 1941, and what had really sent the American battleship Mississippi to the bottom of the sea—an atomic bomb. A flicker of doubt crossed his eyes, then resolve renewed there like hidden fire.

  I’d better get over and see Halsey again as soon as possible, he thought. Forewarned is forearmed. The Yanks had a good fighting Admiral going up to have a look at this business and confirm these reports. Sprague was as good as they came, but he was not in the inner circle—he didn’t know about the rockets, let alone the atomics. Fraser realized that things would be quite different now if it came down to a real fight. We’ve got the damn things too, he thought, and I’ve seen enough of this war to know one thing if it comes down to real trouble here—we’ll use them.

  Chapter 36

  Ticonderoga was a very tough ship. An Essex class carrier, she was commissioned in May of 1944, and would see a brief but violent tour of duty in the Pacific before the war ended. The ship fought bravely in the Philippines Campaign, fending off kamikaze attacks on the fleet, launching fighter sweeps over Luzon and pounding enemy positions wherever they were found. She also rode out two punishing typhoons before fighting her way into the South China Sea where her task force sunk an amazing enemy 44 ships. On the 21st of January she was struck by two bomb laden kamikaze planes, just as Hayashi had struck Kirov, and was forced to limp home to Puget Sound for repairs. But by May she was back in the Pacific and running with the fast fleet carriers that had broken the back of the Japanese navy and inexorably rolled towards the Japanese homelands with unstoppable power.

  Airmen off the Ticonderoga had found and sunk the last remnants of the once proud Japanese navy, sending battleships Ise, Hyuga and Haruna to watery graves along with the escort carrier Kaiyo as the United States systematically destroyed what was left of Japanese air and sea power. TF.38.3 had worked its way up Kyushu to pound Hokkaido by mid August, destroying a massed air division that was marshalling to plan a major suicide raid on the US B-29 bases in
the Marianas. The ship had planes in the air over Tokyo when the word came in that Japan had finally capitulated. At the same time CV Wasp’s alert combat air patrol stopped a pair of Japanese planes from attacking the task force. The last sputtering embers of the war were still hot, but that evening the flyers celebrated in the air briefing room with several bottles of champagne that Ziggy Sprague had produced from his haversacks.

  Then news came of the attack on Babe Brown’s cruisers and the loss of two destroyers in the Kuriles. Halsey was quick to tag his fighting Admiral to go and have a look, and Sprague was on the bridge that day, his eyes gazing at the sea.

  While still a young man, his features were lined and weathered by the long war, and looking much older than his 49 years. And Ex-navy airman who trained in the days before the seat harness was installed, he had been thrown into more windshields and instrument panels than he could count over the years. Now he had the nose of a fighter that had seen one or two more rounds than he needed, and hound dog eyes that seemed to hold a cup of yearning in them. He wore a Navy garrison cap, eschewing the billed officer’s cap as he found it more comfortable and easier to use with field glasses, particularly in combat.

  When it came to fighting at sea Sprague was tough as nails, cool under fire and determined. His actions off Samar with the escort carriers and destroyers of Taffy 3 won him long lasting fame, but also haunted him with the memory of the ships and men lost that day. 1130 men went into the sea and died off Samar, many taken by the sharks. Another 913 were wounded and bore the scars of that action. The rest lived with the memory of it all, as Sprague did. Now he was about to be put to the test yet again.