BLOSSOMS IN THE WIND: HUMAN LEGACIES OF THE KAMIKAZE
by M.G. Sheftall
To my sons, that they may know a world without war.
Copyright © Mordecai G. Sheftall, 2005, renewed 2014
CONTENTS
Section One: A Time For Heroes
1 St Lo Overture
2 Yasukuni
3 The Road To Mabalacat
4 Ōnishi’s Gamble
5 Poster Boy
6 Fed Up With Losing And Ready To Die
Section Two: All Boys Dream Of Flying
7 An Old Man’s Dream
8 The Lights Of Talisay
9 Attack Orders
Section Three: The Ultimate Smart Bomb
10 The Yokaren Candidate
11 I Wanted Wings
12 Amenities
13 Looking For A Few Good War Gods
14 Flight Of The Thunder Gods
15 Echoes Of Thunder
Section Four: A Soldier’s Scrapbook
16 Bright-eyed Boys From The Provinces
17 Fighter Jock
18 Belt Of A Thousand Stitches
Section Five: Nadeshiko
19 Band of Sisters
20 The Nadeshiko Unit Is Formed
21 Fireflies
22 A Peaceful Village
Section Six: Bride Doll
23 The World Turned Upside Down
24 The Flowery Willow World
25 War Clouds
26 Visitors
Section Seven: Doctor Hiroshima
27 Setagaya Kan’non
28 Pilgrimage to Chiran
Section Eight: Torpedomen In Twilight
29 Kudan Kaikan
30 Toshiharu Konada
31 Harumi Kawasaki
32 Rearranging the Firmament
33 Metal Implement Number Six
34 Enter The Kaiten
35 A Pillar Of Smoke By Day
36 Going Home
37 Epilogue
Acknowledgments (from the original 2005 edition)
Bibliography and Suggested Reading
You and I, blossoms of the same cherry tree
That bloomed at the naval academy.
Blossoms know they must blow in the wind someday
Blossoms in the wind, fallen for their country.
- Lyrics from “Dōki no Sakura”, the Japanese naval aviators’ hymn
A mother, at least with the face she wore in public, was obliged to appear happy and grateful to the emperor and country for giving her son such a fine way to die.
- Hideo Suzuki, former Japanese naval aviator
Section One: A Time For Heroes
1 St Lo Overture
It is 1050hrs on October 25, 1944, the fifth day of the American invasion of the Philippines. The scene is the bridge of the escort carrier Fanshaw Bay (CVE-70), Rear Admiral Clifton A.F. Sprague’s flagship in Task Unit 77.4.3, a force of five small escort carriers, three destroyers and four destroyer escorts now steaming off the coast of Samar Island in the Philippine Sea on a heading of 135 degrees. TU 77.4.3 or “Taffy 3” is one of three similarly sized escort carrier forces of the U.S. Seventh Fleet charged with guarding the vulnerable Leyte Gulf invasion fleet anchorage by screening sea approaches to the area. The Taffies are also tasked with supporting the action on land. At present, Taffy 3’s five escort carriers are recovering planes from the morning’s close air support missions against targets inland of the beachhead.
Not even a year old, the “Fannie Bee”, as she is affectionately referred to by her crew, is an escort or “jeep” carrier of the type most other American sailors refer to with dissimilar sentiment as “Kaiser Coffins,” after the name of their manufacturer and for their alleged tendency to explode, disintegrate into their pre-fabricated sections and sink within minutes when taken under hostile fire. The Fannie Bee is the product of a shipyard in Vancouver, Washington, one of several on the West Coast owned by Henry J. Kaiser, an enterprising industrialist who will go on to short-lived postwar automotive industry notoriety building a series of eccentrically styled, poorly selling cars.
Kaiser is an equal opportunity employer, and the underpaid women and minorities he hires are kicking in and doing their part for Uncle Sam despite the discrimination they suffer outside the shipyard gates, setting spectacular new production records for merchant marine Liberty Ships and U.S. Navy vessels month after month. Kaiser’s workers are so industrious and hardworking that they have been featured in War Bond advertising. Slapped together deathtraps or not, the “jeep carriers” they build are playing an enormous role in the war effort.
At the moment, Admiral Sprague is perched in his Air Boss chair on the bridge of the Fanshaw Bay. He is a jowly man, raw-boned and put together a little awkwardly. He does not really look the part of a flag officer. It is much easier to imagine him as the somewhat self-important mayor of an insignificant little Southern town, or a damp-collared, seersuckered Mississippi lawyer with a glib gift of the gab, a penchant for cheap cigars and a passing resemblance to Huey Long. He could even be a Laurel and Hardy foil, destined to end up covered head to toe in house paint or baking flour at some point during the second reel. To look at him, you would never guess that, behind the spare tire and the double chin, he is all guts and backbone.
About three and a half hours ago, from this very chair, the admiral looked through powerful Bausch & Lomb lenses and saw something that would have necessitated an immediate change of underwear in a lesser man. Focusing his binoculars, he could gradually make out something horrible and unthinkable taking shape in the mist, mirage-like in the humidity, distance and heat. Still hull-down in the defilade of the curvature of the earth’s surface but just poking up over the horizon were the unmistakable giant pagoda-like masts of Japanese battleships barreling straight for Taffy 3 at flank speed. Seconds later, 14- and 18-inch colored dye marker shells bracketed Sprague’s ships with towering red, yellow, green and purple geysers as the Japanese ranged for their first salvoes. What had started as another workaday morning of routine anti-sub patrols and air support missions had suddenly become a sailor’s worst nightmare.
Over the next two and a half hours, Sprague directed a touch-and-go running sea battle which cost him one of his carriers, Gambier Bay, and three of his screening destroyers and destroyer escorts, Johnston, Hoel and Samuel B. Roberts. The losses were steep, but now that the smoke has cleared, the dead have been counted and the survivors pulled from the Pacific, it is becoming increasingly clear that with frenzied Wildcat and Avenger sorties, superhumanly courageous fighting by her destroyer screen, and a lot of smoke, bluff and divine providence, Taffy 3 has just fought off the main force of Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita’s battleship flotilla and saved the American invasion fleet at Leyte Gulf from certain disaster in one of the most dramatic upsets in naval history.
The Fannie Bee stood down from General Quarters about fifty minutes ago. Crew members are taking cat naps or coffee breaks, trying to talk themselves down from the battle rush. Others smoke Camels and Lucky Strikes and stare off at the flat gray horizon, wondering why they are still alive and if their hands will ever stop shaking. They have just endured two hours of the twentieth century naval equivalent of hand-to-hand combat with fists and club, but they have prevailed, and the Fannie Bee came through like a trouper. She took four 8-inch shells from the cruiser Chikuma but is still making speed. Not too shabby for a “Kaiser Coffin.”
*****
The year-old CVE-63 – a year and two days old, to be exact – is another jeep from Kaiser’s Vancouver yards. Christened Midway in 1943, she was renamed St. Lo just two weeks ago in order t
o clear her original moniker for a larger carrier. The decision has not sat well with her 889-man crew[1], for in addition to having to bear the unwelcome onus of a name in honor of some goddamned Army victory, it had to be the absolute worst kind of luck to have your ship’s name changed right before going into combat like this.
Ever since the shooting started this morning, however, it seems that St. Lo is the luckiest jeep in Taffy 3. She did not suffer as much as a scratch while mixing it up with Kurita’s ships, and a sizable number of her crew even had the exceedingly sublime experience of watching one of their own planes, an Avenger piloted by Lieutenant Leonard E. “Tex” Waldrop, successfully strafe and explode a torpedo from one of Kurita’s cruisers that had been heading straight for their sister ship Kalinin Bay.[2] A few seconds after that close call, another of the deadly “Long Lance” Type 93 Japanese torpedoes missed St. Lo’s bow by only a couple of yards.
Radar Technician Third Class Evan “Holly” Crawforth of McGill, Nevada is on duty in the radar plot room just below St. Lo’s flight deck. While he was unable to see LT Waldrop’s heroics and other events of this morning’s fight with the naked eye, his spot in the plot room nevertheless gave him a unique vantage point on the action.
At 0650 this morning, he and the other crewmen in the room were about to secure from their customary early morning General Quarters alert[3] when an unsettling report from one of St. Lo’s patrol pilots came in over the radio.
“Head’s up,” the pilot had said. “It looks like you’ve got the whole Jap fleet behind you.”
Crawforth immediately looked at his screen and saw that it was filled with flickering green spikes – each one representing an enemy warship barreling down hard on Taffy 3. The larger spikes – and there were four distinct ones – meant battleships, and one of these was so big it could only mean one thing – the superbattleship Yamato, which could take out the unarmored St. Lo or any other ship in Taffy 3 with a single round from her main battery of 18-inch guns. Realizing how badly Taffy 3 is outnumbered and outgunned, Crawforth and his mates in the plot room also realized that their own prospects for survival were minimal at best. Just as they were entertaining these happy thoughts, the first deafening Japanese salvo began landing around the St. Lo.
Some two hours and fifty minutes of thunder and fury later, the men in the plot room were completely mystified when the range between Kurita’s force and Taffy 3 began opening up. The Japanese – having sent Gambier Bay to the bottom and fairly well decimated the American destroyer escort – had victory firmly within their grasp. Then, for some inexplicable reason, they appeared to be turning around. When a St. Lo pilot radioed in visual confirmation of this development, the radarmen in the plot room broke out in cheers. They were going to live after all!
Now going on an hour and ten minutes after their deliverance from near-certain death, Crawforth and his shipmates are still on a high. But their jubilation will be short-lived. The man on the air search radar – who already has a screen full of friendly blips from the Taffy planes overhead coming in for landings from the morning’s missions – is reporting unidentified contacts on his screen. The plot room springs into action again as the men begin hurriedly checking IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) on the bogies. Suddenly, the busy dialogue in the room is ripped in half by the General Quarters gong, followed a beat or two later by the ship’s anti-aircraft batteries opening up.
“My God,” Crawforth mutters. “They’re coming back…”
*****
Back on the bridge of Fannie Bee, a loud chorus of “Ohh”s and “Oh my God”s rings out, followed by an explosive whap a few seconds later – more wallop of air than sound – that rattles the portholes on the bulkheads and the big plate glass windows in front of the Air Boss chair.
“It’s Kitkun Bay!” someone shouts.
Admiral Sprague instinctively snaps a look due south just in time to see a cascade of flaming aviation fuel and debris pouring off Kitkun Bay’s flight deck and into a large geyser of water on the port side of the stricken ship.
Before anyone has time for an emotional reaction, black smudges of exploding AA rounds are darkening the sky between Kitkun Bay and the Fannie Bee and lookouts are frantically shouting out Japanese Zero fighters as they see them.
Whap, whap. Two Zeros have just slammed into Kalinin Bay, which is already walking wounded from this morning’s battle with Kurita. There’s no way she can survive a pounding like this.
A lookout is calling out a Zero due south, headed for White Plains.
Whap. White Plains is sprouting an orange and soot fireball near her fantail the size of a Manhattan office building.
Admiral Sprague is frozen for a moment, watching in stunned silence as his heroic little task force appears to be in the process of being decimated before his eyes. But he quickly throws off his initial shock and begins shouting orders. In another few seconds, reports start coming in over the radio from the other jeeps. The damage is bad, but not as bad as it had looked from the bridge of the Fannie Bee.
*****
When all hell begins breaking loose at 1052, St. Lo has a flight deck full of glossy dark blue planes that have just landed from the morning’s missions. There are more being loaded out and gassed up for new sorties forward of the crash gate and down below on the hangar deck. St. Lo has been lucky this morning – incredibly lucky – and now, two minutes into the Japanese fire and brimstone show over the rest of Task Unit 77.4.3, it seems that she has also been rendered invisible. “Suiciders” are hitting every other flattop in the force but her.
But it is too soon to feel safe. Something is wrong. Past the aft end of the crowded flight deck, black AA blossoms appear around a green plane about 500 yards out coming in low, almost as if it’s lining up for a landing. There are orange flashes on its wings, pieces falling off of it as it gets too big way too fast. A bomb is seen falling from under its fuselage as the plane inverts in a slow roll. The bomb penetrates the wood planking of the St. Lo’s flight deck a split second before the plane itself plows into the ship, smashing men and machine alike, spraying everything in its path with flaming aviation fuel.
The impact of this crash is the loudest sound Holly Crawforth has ever heard, and for a second or two of sheer terror, he expects that it will be the last. But as he shakes off the shock, the receding echoes of the initial explosion are slowly replaced with a sound that is even worse – the screams of mangled St. Lo crewmen being burned to death. Smoke is billowing everywhere, some of it a sickly yellowish color, but mostly a sooty, impenetrable black.
St. Lo is a brave ship; veteran of the Marianas Turkey Shoot and Molotai air strikes. Her sailors pray that she can pull through this, and swear that the bad guys cannot be allowed to do her in. Not like this. Perhaps there is still hope. Burning planes can be pushed off into the sea, the fires can be stopped through well-coordinated teamwork, ordnance can be secured, and that gaping hole in the flight deck can be patched over in an hour or two. In the meantime, the dead, dying and wounded can be tended to as best as possible.
But all of these hopes are put on hold when a sudden, sickening lurch from the first round of secondary explosions rocks the ship. Orange flames and smoke pour through and out from under the flight deck, which has been lifted up and knocked crooked by the force of the blast. In addition to the mangled, flaming Wildcats and Avengers on the flight deck, fires have reached more planes being gassed up underneath on the hangar deck.
A few seconds later, an even more violent explosion pulverizes the section of flight deck aft of the initial impact. Yet another blast yet seconds after this tears a chunk out of the forward section in a shower of wood planking and metal railings. Then, to the incredulity of all who witness the scene, another blast blows the entire forward elevator out of its shaft like a rocket, high into the air on a column of smoke and flames.
Now the explosions come with heartbreaking regularity as ordnance and fuel is set off by flames reaching ever deeper into the bowels of the s
hip, fingering and worming toward the aviation fuel tanks and the main bomb magazine. Firefighting efforts will be meaningless. One of Henry J. Kaiser’s cost-cutting measures was to use cast iron instead of steel for the St. Lo’s fire mains. When the “suicider” hit, the impact shattered the pipes like so many terra cotta flowerpots. Now there is no water for fighting the spreading fires.[4] Despite the best efforts of her crew, her fire hoses are limp and useless. The fate of the St. Lo is sealed.
Seven minutes after the initial hit, Captain Francis J. McKenna gives the painful but necessary order to abandon ship. Explosions are blowing off structural, load-bearing sections of the ship by now, shaking her like a child’s bathtub toy as officers and men go over the sides, some clambering down lines with wounded shipmates over their shoulders, others jumping into the water to save themselves. At 1115, after a quick, final sweep of the ship with Lieutenant Commander Richard L. Centner and Buglemaster Stuart A. Neale to look for survivors, the Captain is the last living man over the side.
At 1120, the bomb magazine goes for the eighth and fatal explosion. Five minutes after that, what remains of St. Lo slips beneath the waves, still rumbling with underwater secondaries as she takes 114 Americans with her.[5]
Back on Fanshaw Bay, the panic and confusion of the last half hour has subsided into a painful reality of grieving losses, cleaning up the wreckage, and trying to come to rational and emotional terms with the horror the suiciders have wrought. There are no doubts in the minds of the men still standing that they are at war with the most determined and fanatical foe the nation has ever faced – the Marines on Tarawa a year earlier could have told them that much – but what they have no way of knowing as the reeking smoke of the suicide attack still lingers in the air, and the groans of the dying and wounded still echo in their ears, is that what they have just witnessed is only a prelude to the horrors the United States Navy will have to endure over the next ten months.
Blossoms In The Wind: Human Legacies Of The Kamikaze Page 1