The Twilight Warriors

by Robert Gandt

  Within seconds the Corsair had vanished. And so had Rob Harris.

  7 THE MOOD IN BOYS’ TOWN

  USS INTREPID

  168 MILES SOUTHEAST OF KYUSHU, JAPAN

  MARCH 18, 1945

  The men in the gun tubs couldn’t believe it. Their first damned day back in the war, and it was happening all over again. A Japanese plane was skimming the water, somehow dodging the curtain of antiaircraft fire, headed straight for Intrepid.

  It seemed like the replay of a bad dream. Most of the men on the deck had been aboard Intrepid four months earlier when two kamikazes, five minutes apart, plunged through the carrier’s flight deck, snuffing out nearly a hundred lives and taking the ship out of action.

  This one was a twin-engine bomber, and its pilot seemed to be blessed with divine protection. Oily black bursts were exploding all around him. The ocean below the bomber frothed with the splashes of spent ordnance. He kept coming.

  Japanese planes had been stalking Intrepid all morning. Fresh yellow blips kept showing up on the radar screens in CIC—the combat information center. CAP fighters from all the task group carriers were intercepting the bogeys, which were quickly tagged as bandits. As the intruders flew into range of the antiaircraft guns on the screening ships, the CAP fighters were forced to withdraw and let the gunners blaze away. Most of the attackers were shot down or chased away.

  But not all. Through the CAP screen and then through the hail of antiaircraft fire came a Yokosuka P1Y Frances bomber. Intrepid’s 5-inchers hammered away, mostly missing. As the Frances came closer, every Bofors 40-millimeter and rapid-fire Oerlikon 20-millimeter gun on Intrepid’s starboard side opened up.

  The Frances was taking hits, trailing smoke—but still flying. The men on Intrepid could see the two round cowlings with the radial engines and the distinctive long, slender wings. As the bomber bored closer, they could make out the figures of the pilots in the glass-enclosed cockpit.

  The gunners braced themselves for the inevitable. This thing was clearly not a torpedo plane or a bomber. It was another kamikaze, and he had them bore sighted. Just when it seemed that the Japanese plane would smash into Intrepid’s flight deck, a round from one of the 5-inch guns clipped the Frances’s tail.

  The bomber’s nose pitched straight down. In a scene that lasted less than two seconds but would remain fixed in their memories for the rest of their lives, the gunners had a plan view of the Japanese bomber. It was so close they felt they could reach out and touch it. The moment was captured by a combat photographer—the orange ball of the rising sun emblazoned on the starboard wing, port wing tip shattered by gunfire, Japanese crewmen hunched inside the cockpit.

  The bomber hit the water 50 feet from Intrepid’s starboard bow. The explosion showered fire and debris against Intrepid’s starboard side and into the exposed hangar bay. Flames enveloped the forward hangar bay, lighting off the fabric control surfaces of parked airplanes and scorching painted surfaces.

  By a miracle, none of the airplanes exploded. There were casualties, but not all were caused by the kamikaze crash. One of Intrepid’s escorts, the cruiser Atlanta, was also shooting at the incoming kamikaze and fired a 5-inch shell too close to Intrepid’s fantail. In the brief action, one sailor was killed and forty-four others wounded.

  Intrepid’s seasoned damage control crews had the fires extinguished in fifteen minutes. The worst damage was to the hangar deck curtain—the screen that shrouded the open hangar bay during night operations. No airplanes were destroyed, and the flame-damaged aircraft control surfaces would be quickly repaired. The hangar bay and forward starboard hull were fire-blackened and required new paint.

  The morning had just begun. While Intrepid was fighting off her attacker, a Yokosuka D4Y Judy dive-bomber put a 500-kilogram bomb into the carrier Enterprise, operating only a few thousand yards from Intrepid. Enterprise’s long string of luck held. The bomb punched a neat hole in her flight deck, then crashed into a machinery space without exploding.

  A few minutes past 1300, it was Yorktown’s turn. Three Judy dive-bombers dove on the carrier, and two missed their target. The third put its bomb through Yorktown’s signal bridge, penetrating one deck before exploding and blowing two big holes in the ship’s side. Five Yorktown crewmen were killed, and another twenty-six were wounded.

  Returning from the strike on Kyushu, Intrepid’s Tail End Charlies were learning another lesson the hard way: a wingman used more fuel than his leader. This was because wingmen were forced to make constant throttle changes to keep their position in the flight. Each throttle movement consumed precious gasoline. After four and a half hours in the air, Hyland’s wingmen were almost out of fuel.

  But the Intrepid wasn’t ready to take them aboard. The flight deck was still packed with airplanes waiting to be launched. Watching his fuel quantity gauge, Erickson wished he’d leaned out his fuel mixture and been more prudent with the throttle. It was too late. His tanks were almost empty. So were those of Ens. George Tessier, the young North Carolinian who was flying on Hyland’s left wing.

  Hyland put his flight into a low-power, fuel-conserving orbit, waiting for a clear deck on Intrepid. While they were still in the orbit, Tessier’s engine abruptly quit. Dropping like a rock from the formation, Tessier’s Corsair splashed down next to one of the screening destroyers. Minutes later the pilot was plucked out of the water by the destroyer crew.

  Erickson knew he’d be next. Close to Intrepid was Enterprise, which had already launched her own strike planes and had a clear deck. Erickson received immediate clearance to land aboard.

  After he’d safely made it down on Enterprise’s deck and checked his fuel, he found that he had five gallons left. If he hadn’t made it aboard on his first pass, he would have been in the water with Tessier.

  Erickson spent the rest of the morning aboard Enterprise. By comparison to Intrepid, the older Enterprise seemed smaller, her flight deck shorter and more narrow. Even her spaces belowdecks seemed cramped. Famished after his four-and-a-half-hour mission, he gobbled down peanut butter sandwiches and cocoa while the deck crew refueled his Corsair. Catapulted back into the air, he was assigned to a CAP station for another hour and a half before finally landing back aboard Intrepid.

  The kamikazes kept coming. Following the first bomb strike on Enterprise, two more raiders were picked off by Enterprise’s gunners. One was a Judy dive-bomber whose crew, obviously not kamikazes, bailed out of the shattered airplane.

  As the two Japanese parachutes floated down through the smoke and gunfire, one of Enterprise’s destroyer escorts came racing up with the apparent intention of capturing the enemy airmen.

  They didn’t. While the parachutes were still descending, the destroyer escort’s gunners opened fire with their battery of 20-millimeters. The shredded bodies of the Japanese airmen hit the water, floated briefly, then disappeared beneath the waves.

  None of the commanders who witnessed the incident expressed any outrage. To a man, each was filled with the same boiling fury at this maniacal enemy who was crashing into their ships. They were Japs, and you exterminated them wherever you found them.

  At 1045, Intrepid launched its fourth strike of the morning. It was Country Landreth’s second mission, and this time he was leading a strike against the Japanese airfield complex at Uwa Jima, on the home island of Shikoku.

  Arriving at the target, Landreth swept across the airfield, his .50-calibers rattling the fighter’s airframe as he strafed buildings and parked airplanes. As he skimmed over the field at low altitude, he spotted something in the estuary ahead of him. It was a speedboat, racing across the water at high speed, leaving behind it a rooster tail of white water. Guessing that it must be a target of value, he went for it.

  Then he noticed something else—a small island in the estuary. Protruding from the vegetation were a few round tanks and tile-roofed buildings. “I decided to give them a squirt on the way to the speedboat,” he recalled.

  It was a decision Landreth would r
egret for the rest of his life. He fired a burst into the tile roof, then shifted his attention back to the boat. In the next second, the innocent-looking building, which happened to be an ammunition storage facility, erupted in a cataclysmic explosion. Flame and debris shot hundreds of feet into the sky. As Landreth’s Corsair flew through the fireball, the G-forces hit him like a giant sledgehammer. His spine compressed, and the airframe of the Corsair shuddered from the impact.

  When his vision cleared, Landreth knew he was in trouble. “I looked at the oil pressure dial,” he remembered, “and it read zero.” Thirty seconds later, right on schedule, the big twin-row Pratt & Whitney engine, now out of oil, chuffed once and then stopped. A ghostly silence filled Landreth’s cockpit.

  He pointed the Corsair toward the open sea. Landreth’s back was broken, and he had no feeling in his legs. Unable to use rudder pedals, he managed to turn the Corsair into the wind. He blew the canopy off just before the fighter splashed down in the gray sea off Shikoku.

  And then, a miracle. Despite his injuries, he was able to haul himself out of the cockpit, dragging the life raft with him. Somehow he clambered into the raft. He pulled his tarpaulin up over him, blue side out to be less visible to the Japanese.

  He waited. It was a long shot, but there was a chance that a U.S. submarine or a “Dumbo”—a seagoing rescue plane—would pick him up. His squadronmates had seen him go down and would have passed on his position via the search-and-rescue frequency. For the rest of the day he bobbed in his raft, in agony from his damaged spine.

  Night came, and with it a freezing drizzle. Landreth hunkered down in the exposed raft, tarpaulin up to his chin, and waited. His mission had shrunk down to one overriding objective: stay alive until morning.

  The strikes and fighter sweeps continued for the rest of the day. Twelve more Corsairs bombed and rocketed the airfield at Usa, on the north shore of Kyushu, then turned down the coast to make strafing attacks on the parked airplanes at Oita, which had been spared the earlier strikes because of weather. Escorted by the fighters, SB2C Helldivers and bomb-carrying TBM Avengers then swept in to hammer the buildings and hangars at Oita with 500-pound bombs, returning to finish the job with their machine guns.

  By the end of their first day of war, Intrepid’s newly formed air group had logged more than 120 combat missions.

  That evening the officers’ wardroom was segregated along the usual lines: black shoes and brown shoes. By long tradition, surface navy officers wore black uniform shoes, while the airedales—officers of the flying branch—wore brown shoes with their khakis or aviation green uniforms. But the culture gap between them extended far beyond the color of their shoes.

  The black shoes had something to celebrate. There weren’t many days when surface officers on an aircraft carrier could cover themselves with glory, but this was one of them. During the near-death encounter with the kamikaze that morning, the gunnery department and the damage control crews had risen to heroic status. Now the black shoes were in an animated discussion, reliving the incident.

  Jabbering at the opposite end of the room were the brown shoes, gesturing with their hands, rehashing the action over Kyushu and Shikoku. Most had flown two combat missions that day. Images of flak bursts and targets viewed through gun sights and the dry-mouthed anxiety of nearly empty fuel tanks were still fresh in their minds.

  Even in normal times, the two groups maintained a cordial distance. Black shoes made no secret of their belief that they were the only real Navy men aboard the ship. They alone understood the crafts of ship handling, gunnery, navigation, damage control. Without them, the carrier was nothing more than an immobile barge.

  The brown shoes, for their part, couldn’t care less about arcane nautical lore. Most of them, especially the Tail End Charlies, kept saying things like “left” instead of “port,” “floor” for “deck,” “wall” when they meant “bulkhead.” Mainly to annoy the black shoes, they insisted on calling the 27,000-ton aircraft carrier a “boat.”

  But what galled the black-shoe officers most about the airedales was their attitude. They were like spoiled frat boys. They sequestered themselves in their private berthing spaces, where they played cards, partied, and, if reports were to be believed, actually consumed booze. One of Intrepid’s black shoes came up with an analogy: the brown shoes were just like seagulls. Except for flying, all they did was eat, sleep, and crap.

  There was no party that night in Boys’ Town. The mood had changed. Gone were the horseplay, the banter, the wiseass jokes. There were two empty bunks. “All the ensigns were in quiet conversations, just above a whisper,” remembered Erickson. “Except for a few standby pilots who would now be replacing our losses, we were no longer virgins.”

  Until that day, flying Navy airplanes had been a lark. Even losing friends in training hadn’t dulled the sense that the war was a great adventure.

  Now all that had changed. The best buddies of Loren Isley and Rob Harris were removing the personal effects from their lockers. What happened to them could have happened to any of the Tail End Charlies. “Some were seriously writing letters,” Erickson recalled, “and it didn’t take much to guess what the messages contained. One day of combat had changed boys into men.”

  Also among the missing was Lt. (jg) Country Landreth, who by virtue of seniority hadn’t been a resident of Boys’ Town. One of the Tail End Charlies had seen Landreth’s Corsair go into the water offshore. Another pilot reported seeing a Japanese submarine a mile and a half from where he went down.

  It meant that Landreth was screwed. By now he was either dead or captured.

  8 SHOOT THE SON OF A BITCH

  OFF SHIKOKU, JAPAN

  MARCH 19, 1945

  Landreth was alive. Still adrift in his tiny raft, he clung to the hope that a submarine might pick him up. He had already stopped believing that a rescue plane was coming. Even if the crew was willing to risk coming this close to the Japanese shore, they’d never spot him in the murk. The weather was lousy. Freezing rain continued to pelt him.

  The second day passed. No submarine showed up. Nor did a rescue plane, even though the weather had cleared a bit. By the time darkness fell again, Landreth was in bad shape. His lower body was numb, and hypothermia was sapping the last of his energy. He had what seemed like pneumonia. He knew he couldn’t last much longer.

  On the morning of the third day, he was dimly aware of voices coming to him across the water. They weren’t speaking English. Out of the gloom appeared a rowboat. The two young Japanese men in the boat stared at him, keeping their guns ready while they warily circled Landreth’s raft. Finally, deciding that the bedraggled figure was not a threat, they hauled him into their rowboat and took him ashore.

  It was the first day of Country Landreth’s ordeal as a prisoner of war.

  The morning of March 19, 1945, was a replay of the day before—same predawn wake-up, same breakfast on tin trays, same briefing in the ready room. Wearing their red-lensed glasses to protect their night vision, the pilots again listened to Will Rawie tell them that they were going to Japan. He said it in the same matter-of-fact style as the day before, as if he were giving them directions to the wardroom.

  This time the ante was going up. The target was a big one—the Kure naval base. Kure was on the southern shore of Honshu, the main island of Japan, 12 miles from the city of Hiroshima. Kure was the Japanese equivalent of the United States’s Norfolk naval base. It was where the greatest ships of the Imperial Japanese Navy were constructed and repaired, and where one, the greatest of them all, Yamato, was still home-ported. The complex contained airfields, oil depots, foundries, docks, workshops, slipways, and administrative buildings. Towering over the harbor was Mt. Yasumi, which was covered with antiaircraft gun emplacements. Across the bay was the island of Eta Jima, site of the Imperial Naval Academy, with its own concentration of antiaircraft batteries. Kure was one of the most heavily defended targets outside of Tokyo.

  Erickson was again CAG Hyland’s number
four. The downside of flying with the air group commander, of course, was that any mistake he made would result in a monumental ass chewing back on the ship. The big plus was that the CAG’s division was always the first into the air and the first to land back aboard. Everything revolved around Hyland, who was responsible for coordinating the strike. His wingmen were responsible for covering his tail.

  For Erickson, another plus was his section leader, Lt. (jg) Windy Hill. For all his faults—a tendency toward mouthiness and a streak of narcissism—Hill was a good fighter pilot. He’d made it through the Solomons and had the enemy aircraft kills to prove it. Erickson trusted Hill to make the right calls when the shooting started.

  The ten Intrepid Corsairs would be joined by a trio of four-plane divisions of Hellcats from Yorktown. As the flights joined up, Erickson was suddenly aware of the number of airplanes in the strike. “The sky was full of planes as far as the eye could see, all making their way toward the home islands of Japan.”

  But somehow the Intrepid strike group and Yorktown’s group became separated. By the time Hyland’s ten Corsairs were crossing the island of Shikoku, bound for Kure, they were alone. Directly in their path lay the Japanese airfield of Matsuyama. What they didn’t yet know was that Matsuyama was the home base of the 343rd Kokutai (air group), the Imperial Japanese Navy’s most elite fighter unit. The Japanese fighters were already airborne, waiting for them.

  Dawn was breaking as the Corsairs crossed the inland sea between Shikoku and the main island of Honshu. Beneath their noses sprawled the Kure naval base. Still at 12,000 feet, they dropped their belly tanks—jettisonable auxiliary fuel tanks—and armed their .50-calibers. The antiaircraft gunners had already spotted them. The sky over the Kure harbor was filling with bursts of fire.