The Twilight Warriors

by Robert Gandt

  Erickson swiveled his head, glancing left, right, then up—and his heart nearly stopped. Six thousand feet above them, circling like hawks, was a cluster of dusky shapes. Even at this range, Erickson could make out the red meatballs on the wings. It was his first sight of an enemy airplane in the air.

  In an excited voice, he reported the fighters to Hyland. Hyland already knew about them. He’d been watching them for the past several minutes. The Japanese fighters didn’t seem inclined to fight. They were in a lazy tail chase, following each other in aileron rolls. Erickson wondered whether they were working up their courage or just showing off.

  Keeping an eye on the fighters overhead, Hyland led the Corsairs in a wide turn over the bay, then rolled into a dive on the oil storage tanks at Kure. Half the Corsairs were carrying 500-pound bombs, and the other half were armed with 5-inch rockets.

  After putting their bombs and rockets into the tanks, they all came back for a strafing attack. By now black puffs of antiaircraft fire were filling the sky, but without much accuracy. All over the Kure complex, strike aircraft were pummeling their targets. In their concrete-sheltered berths, the behemoth battleship Yamato and the carrier Amagi took hits, although neither warship was seriously damaged.

  Hyland was pulling out over Kure harbor when he spotted a prize—a Mitsubishi A6M2-N “Rufe” floatplane fighter flying low over the water—and dove after him. Erickson and Hill, now on their own, were climbing back to altitude. Above them, Erickson again saw the dark shapes still circling. As he watched, two of them peeled off in a dive, coming straight down at them.

  Erickson and Hill pulled into a hard vertical climb, meeting them head-on. Erickson raked the bellies of the two oncoming airplanes—Kawanishi N1K-J fighters, code-named “George”—with his machine guns as they swept past.

  But Windy Hill was in trouble. He hadn’t been able to jettison his belly fuel tank. Now the drag of the external tank was slowing him down. One of the high-performance George fighters was on Hill’s tail, closing in for the kill.

  Erickson and Hill went into a Thach weave—a mutual-defense technique of crossing each other’s path, clearing each pilot’s tail. Weaving high to the outside of the turn, Erickson swept back down on the enemy fighter behind Hill.

  He opened fire, watching the tracers of his .50-calibers arcing toward the Japanese fighter. In the next moment, the George blew apart. The aft fuselage separated from the cockpit and spun away. No parachute blossomed from the debris of the airplane.

  Meanwhile, Windy Hill, despite his still-attached belly tank, had maneuvered behind another of the Japanese fighters. He fired a long burst, and smoke belched from the George fighter. Seconds later the Japanese pilot bailed out.

  As the enemy pilot’s parachute blossomed, Erickson flashed past close enough to glimpse the pilot’s dark brown flight suit and the astonished look on his face. On an impulse, Erickson turned hard, trying for a shot at the dangling figure. He couldn’t turn tightly enough. The lucky Japanese pilot made it to the ground, still alive.

  On reflection, Erickson was glad he hadn’t killed the man in the chute—but not for humanitarian reasons. “I heard it might not be a good thing to do, as it didn’t help the treatment given to our POWs below. I had no moment to consider this, either—I was at war.”

  They were still on their own. Flying a hundred yards abeam each other for mutual protection, Hill and Erickson were passing back over Shikoku when more trouble appeared.

  Erickson spotted it first—the dark green form of a Nakajima Ki-44 “Tojo” fighter, slipping in behind Hill’s Corsair. A telltale pattern of winking orange bursts was coming from the Tojo’s wings. Bright tracers were arcing like tentacles toward Hill’s tail.

  Again the Corsairs went into a desperate Thach weave. The tracers were converging on Hill, who was turning as hard as he could, trying to escape the deadly fire. For a few seconds Erickson had a shot at the Tojo—and missed.

  Hill was desperate. He couldn’t shake the Tojo. Tracers were flashing past his canopy. “Shoot the son of a bitch, Eric!” he yelled on the radio.

  “What the hell do you think I’m trying to do?” Erickson snapped back. He swung high and wide to the far side of the weave, then returned his sights to the Japanese fighter. It was a high-angle shot, nearly 90-degree deflection. If Erickson missed this time, Hill would be in flames.

  He saw his tracers bending back toward the Tojo—and connecting. Abruptly the enemy fighter burst into flame. Erickson watched the burning Tojo enter a steep death dive to the green hills below.

  They were safe, for the moment. Low on fuel and exhausted from the long mission, they steered toward Intrepid using their ZB homing receivers, which picked up signals from a transmitter aboard the carrier. The transmitter sent a different Morse code signal every 30 degrees of arc from the ship. A different sector was chosen each day as the official inbound gate to the ship, to prevent the enemy from using the code.

  Hill was still rattled by the close call with the Tojo fighter. The belly tank that he couldn’t jettison had nearly gotten him killed. Then he found that one of his .50-caliber guns wouldn’t fire. Finally, his oxygen system failed, meaning he was forced to remain at low altitude. He was having a bad day, and it only got worse. Arriving back at the ship, he botched his first landing pass and had to come back for another try.

  Finally aboard, he climbed out of his Corsair and trudged down the labyrinth of ladders to the squadron ready room. The old fighter pilot swagger was gone from Hill, at least temporarily. He flopped into a seat in the back row and stared at the bulkhead in what infantrymen called the “thousand-yard stare.” As in an endlessly looping film, Hill kept seeing flak bursts, tracer bullets, and dark green silhouettes of enemy fighters.

  It had been a grim second day of battle for Intrepid’s air group. More Tail End Charlies were missing. Ens. Bill York was killed in a noncombat accident. A Helldiver crew, Ens. Bob Brinick and his gunner, Crawford Burnette, of VB-10, had been shot down over Kure harbor and were missing. Another Helldiver crew, also hit at Kure, was luckier. They made it far enough offshore to ditch near a picket destroyer.

  Even VBF-10’s skipper, Lt. Cmdr. Will Rawie, had been forced to ditch his Corsair. Rawie was picked up by a destroyer and delivered back to the Intrepid.

  Erickson found that he had sweated off five pounds during the three-and-a-half-hour mission. His tan leather gloves had turned an evil dark brown. His flight suit was so stiff from sweat he could prop it up against the ready room bulkhead.

  In recounting the action over Japan, Erickson and Hill found that each thought he had shot down the first Japanese fighter they encountered. Unable to agree on whose bullets did the job, they split the kill. Each would get one and a half victories for the day.

  They weren’t the only ones who scored kills. CAG Hyland, whom they’d last seen pulling off the target at Kure, had gunned down the Rufe fighter he’d chased across the harbor. It was the thirty-four-year-old Hyland’s first air-to-air kill, and there was no mistaking the grin on his face in the wardroom that evening. The old man was keeping up with the kids.

  9 WE WILL SAVE THE SHIP

  TASK FORCE 58

  150 MILES EAST OF SHIKOKU, JAPAN

  MARCH 19, 1945

  Rear Adm. Gerald Bogan, standing on Franklin’s flag bridge, was one of the first to spot it. The peculiar object was silver-colored, slanting downward from a broken cloud layer.

  It was a few minutes past 0700, and Franklin had just finished launching her strike aircraft. That morning she had steamed within 50 miles of Shikoku, the closest any U.S. carrier had ventured to the Japanese homeland in the war.

  Bogan could see crewmen on the flight deck readying planes for the next launch. They were arming Corsairs with the new Tiny Tim rockets. In the next few seconds, Bogan heard Franklin’s antiaircraft guns open up.

  Gerry Bogan was no stranger to kamikaze attacks. He had been the task group commander aboard Intrepid during her three kamikaze strikes off
the Philippines. Now he was an observer aboard Franklin, which was the flagship of Rear Adm. Ralph Davison’s Task Group 58.2.

  The silver object was still diving, becoming more visible, somehow evading the hail of antiaircraft fire. Spotters had already tagged it as a Judy dive-bomber, though other observers would report it as an older fixed-gear Val.

  But everyone would later agree that the dive bomber’s pilot was not a single-mission, poorly trained kamikaze. His attack was a masterpiece of precision. While his two 250-kilogram bombs flew straight and true toward their target, the dive-bomber pulled back up and escaped into the cloud deck.

  The results were catastrophic. The first bomb punched through Franklin’s forward flight deck and exploded on the hangar deck. Fires and explosions consumed every man and plane in the forward hangar bay and two decks directly below.

  The second bomb struck further aft, just behind the island, exploding as it penetrated the wooden flight deck. The number three elevator, in the center of the aft flight deck, was flung to the side by the explosion. Armed aircraft on the flight deck, preparing to launch, were caught in the conflagration and exploded one after the other. Tiny Tim rockets on the wings of the Corsairs were lighting off and sizzling across the flight deck, adding to the carnage.

  Franklin’s executive officer, Cmdr. Joe Taylor, remembered the deadly missiles. “Some screamed by to starboard, some to port, some straight up the flight deck. Some went straight up and some tumbled end over end. Each time one went off, the firefighting crews forward would instantly hit the deck.”

  On the navigation bridge, Franklin’s skipper, Capt. Leslie Gehres, was slammed to the deck by the impact of the first bomb. Stunned, Gehres staggered to his feet to find the starboard bow of his ship engulfed in flame and smoke. He ordered full right rudder to bring the wind to the port side and deflect the flames from the airplanes parked aft. Then, to his shock, he realized that the aft part of the ship was also ablaze. He countermanded his order, swinging Franklin back to port, putting the wind on her starboard side.

  Nothing seemed to help. Explosions were racking the ship. “In a very few minutes,” recalled Admiral Bogan, still on the flag bridge, “the forward part of the ship was an inferno.” Firefighting crews were thwarted by exploding ordnance. All the ammunition in lockers and gun mounts behind the island structure exploded.

  From 20 miles away the men of Intrepid could see the smoke and flames. Radarman Ray Stone, watching from Intrepid’s flight deck, was shocked. “Hearing the numerous, repeated explosions from the fully-armed, about-to-be-launched airplanes was sickening,” he wrote. “You could virtually feel and smell the fire.”

  Franklin was dead in the water. All communications on the ship were lost. The cruiser Santa Fe was already gathering up survivors who’d jumped into the sea to escape the flames. Admiral Davison advised Captain Gehres he should consider abandoning ship. Gehres declined. After transferring more than eight hundred men, mostly wounded, to Santa Fe, he kept seven hundred officers and men with him to try to save Franklin.

  For the rest of the day and the following night they fought the fires that raged inside the carrier. By morning, the skeleton crew had most of the fires under control. Towed by the cruiser Pittsburgh, the shattered carrier began a slow withdrawal to the south. Most of her unexploded ammunition had been heaved overboard.

  At midday, Santa Fe blinkered Admiral Mitscher’s flagship Bunker Hill: “Franklin says fire practically under control, skeleton crew aboard, list stabilized at 13 degrees. If you save us from the Japanese, we will save the ship.”

  By early afternoon Franklin had four boilers back on line and her steering control back. Still spewing smoke, her flight deck now a shredded wreck, the wounded carrier limped under her own power toward Ulithi. From there Franklin proceeded to Pearl Harbor, and then all the way to New York for major repairs. She would never see combat again.

  Franklin had suffered the greatest damage inflicted on any aircraft carrier without being sunk. Her losses—724 killed and 265 wounded—were among the most on any single U.S. warship. The carrier owed her survival to a combination of human courage and skilled firefighting. Much had been learned about shipboard damage control since the battles in which the carriers Lexington, Yorktown, Wasp, and Hornet were lost. Improved techniques, special firefighting schools, and new equipment including fog nozzles, foam generators, and independent fire mains were saving ships that otherwise would have gone to the bottom. Each carrier’s damage control crew received intensive training before going into combat.

  Franklin wasn’t the only victim that day. Soon after sunrise on March 19, the fast carrier Wasp was launching strikes when a dive-bomber appeared directly overhead. No one had picked up the intruder either visually or on radar. The bomber, probably another Judy, put its bomb through Wasp’s flight deck, but it penetrated to the hangar deck, then passed through the number three and number two decks before exploding in the crew galley. Despite the slaughter in the mess compartment and fires that spread to five decks, the blazes were quickly extinguished.

  But it wasn’t over for Wasp. Fifteen minutes later, while she was recovering aircraft, yet another bomber dove on the carrier. This one, a bona fide kamikaze, narrowly missed the deck edge and exploded in the water alongside the ship. Wasp’s losses from the attacks amounted to 101 killed and 269 wounded, but she stayed on line for several more days before withdrawing to Ulithi for repairs.

  The next day, March 20, it was Enterprise’s turn again. A swarm of fifteen to twenty Japanese warplanes bore down on the veteran carrier. One managed to get close enough to score a near miss with its bomb and rake the flight deck with its machine guns.

  At the same time, yet another carrier, the Hancock, was fighting off an incoming Zero. At the last moment, Hancock’s gunners managed to pick off the incoming kamikaze. The flaming wreckage skimmed past the carrier’s flight deck edge, crashing into the main deck of the destroyer Halsey Powell, which had just completed refueling from Hancock.

  What happened next was a classic example of why Navy men called destroyers “tin cans.” The kamikaze’s bomb penetrated Powell’s thinly armored deck, punching completely through the destroyer’s hull without exploding. Still, ten of the tin can’s sailors perished in the attack, and twenty-nine more were wounded. Powell’s steering gear was wrecked, and the destroyer was out of the fight.

  That night Vice Adm. Marc Mitscher pulled his carrier task force southward from their dangerous stations close to Japan. The strikes had been effective but costly. The operation they were here to support, the amphibious invasion of Okinawa, was still a week away, and already four fleet carriers—Franklin, Enterprise, Yorktown, and Wasp—would have to retire for damage repair.

  To Mitscher, the past three days had been an ominous preview of the coming battle. The Japanese could hurl hundreds of kamikazes at the U.S. fleet and lose almost all of them. If only one slipped through, it could mean the loss of a ship.

  Pilots on the strikes against the Japanese bases claimed a total of 528 enemy aircraft destroyed on the ground and in the air. It was an inflated number, mostly derived from the claims of multiple pilots hitting the same targets. The Japanese reported that they’d lost 161 out of 193 aircraft in addition to an undetermined number of unflyable airplanes destroyed on the ground.

  The truth lay somewhere in between. Exaggerated action reports were not unique to either side. Both the Japanese and the United States overestimated the numbers of ships and planes destroyed and troops killed by their side. Airmen were like prizefighters who, after landing a punch, believed they’d scored a knockout. A Helldiver pilot would swear his bomb sank a battleship. A torpedo plane pilot refused to believe that after he’d penetrated a wall of flak to deliver his weapon, the enemy vessel could still be afloat. A fighter pilot, seeing his tracers hitting an enemy plane, knew that he’d shot the bandit down.

  And not just pilots. Intelligence officers, squadron skippers, even fleet commanders were biased toward swollen d
amage estimates. This sometimes resulted in dangerously flawed decisions. At the Battle of Leyte Gulf, when dive-bomber and torpedo plane pilots, full of hubris and adrenaline, reported fatal hits on the battleships and cruisers of Admiral Kurita’s striking force, Adm. William Halsey concluded that the Japanese force was no longer a serious threat.

  It was a nearly fatal mistake. Hell-bent on pursuing the Japanese carrier force, Halsey left the San Bernardino Strait unguarded while he chased after a decoy Japanese carrier force. Kurita’s still-formidable striking force slipped through the strait and by dawn were firing point-blank into the unprotected ships of the Taffy group.

  However, the Japanese were even more susceptible to believing their own exaggerations. One of the most willing believers was Adm. Matome Ugaki, who concluded that after the tokko attacks of March 18–19 on the U.S. fleet, his pilots had sunk five carriers, two battleships, and three cruisers. Whether or not Ugaki actually believed such nonsense, it reflected the Japanese high command’s detachment from reality.

  Because of the finality of the tokko missions, results were difficult to assess. When it could be confirmed that a kamikaze pilot did, in fact, crash into a ship, the vessel was usually declared sunk. The Japanese public was fed a steady stream of lies about the successes of the tokko warriors. During the battle for Okinawa, tokko airmen would be credited with sinking half a dozen U.S. aircraft carriers when, in fact, not one was actually sunk. The carrier Lexington received the distinction of being reported sunk four times.

  One purpose of the misinformation was to divert attention from the rain of incendiary bombs falling nightly on Japanese cities from American B-29s. Bad news was glossed over or not reported at all. The truth about the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944, in which most of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s airpower was lost, was kept from the public. So was the fall of Iwo Jima in February and March of 1945, when almost all of the twenty-one thousand defenders of the island perished.