The Twilight Warriors

by Robert Gandt

  Farewell.

  In his cabin, the commander of the task force was also writing letters. Vice Adm. Seiichi Ito had been married to his wife, Chitose, for twenty-three years. They had three daughters, two of whom were still teenagers, and a son, a twenty-one-year-old navy pilot based in Kyushu. Ito was inordinately proud of his son, but he also had a father’s gnawing trepidations about what would happen to him. As the aerial offensive shifted more and more to tokko tactics, Ito knew that his son would be a prime candidate for a one-way mission to Okinawa. Like his samurai model, the fourteenth-century general Kusunoki, who faithfully obeyed his emperor’s orders despite the overwhelming certainty of death and defeat, Ito accepted his fate. And by the same reasoning, he could also accept whatever fate awaited his son. It was the way of the warrior.

  Later that morning, the executive officer gave the order for fifty-three cadets from the Eta Jima naval academy who had boarded two days earlier to disembark. The cadets were crestfallen. Aware of Yamato’s coming mission, several begged the executive officer to be allowed to remain. Nomura shook his head. He understood their sentiments, and he would feel the same way in their position. As untrained officers, they were more hindrance than help in the coming battle. They were Japan’s future skippers, and they should remain ashore.

  Bitterly disappointed, the cadets made their way to the destroyer alongside, which would take them ashore. Along with them, Yamato’s Captain Ariga ordered another fifteen seriously ill men to disembark, as well as several over the age of forty whose large families would suffer undue hardship.

  Standing at the rail of the destroyer, the cadets, most still hung-over from the previous night’s party, rendered a long final salute to Yamato.

  They were running late. The task force was supposed to be under way at 1500, April 6, but there were delays off-loading nonessential supplies and combustibles. Not until 1524 did the captain give the order, “Unshackle from the buoy. All engines ahead slow.”

  A rumble passed through the great ship, and a gray foam boiled up from beneath her stern. Slowly she eased away from her mooring and into the channel to join the waiting formation. Yamato and her nine escorts turned their bows southeastward, toward the Bungo Strait, making a speed of 12 knots. In the lead was Yahagi, with a row of destroyers trailing on either side. The flagship Yamato was securely positioned in her place of honor in the center.

  Twilight was descending over the task force when the executive officer, Capt. Nomura, mustered the crew. The evening breeze swirled over Yamato’s bow, ruffling the uniforms of the men assembled on the deck. Against the setting sun, silhouettes of the hills on Kyushu were gliding past Yamato’s starboard rail.

  Standing atop the number two turret, Nomura read the orders from the task force commander, Vice Admiral Ito: “This task force of the Imperial Navy, in cooperation with the army, is about to stake its entire air, sea, and land might on an all-out attack against enemy ships in the vicinity of Okinawa. The fate of the empire hangs in the balance.”

  The crew faced the east, bowed to the emperor, and sang the Japanese anthem, “Kimi Ga Yo.” Then, as one, they shouted, “Banzai! Banzai! Banzai!”

  From across the water, like echoes, came the same shouts from the other ships. It was an emotional moment. The men shook hands and assured each other that the next time they met would be at Yasukuni, the sacred shrine near Tokyo where the spirits of Japanese warriors resided.

  Returning to his duty station on the top deck, Lt. Naoyoshi Ishida felt the same emotions, but he had no illusions about what lay ahead. At twenty-eight, Ishida was a decade older than most of the sailors who were cheering a fate they could only dimly imagine. Unlike many of Yamato’s junior officers who had been snatched from civilian universities and professional studies and hurriedly trained as officers, Ishida was a professional naval officer who had begun his career before the war.

  Ishida’s wife and son were back in Kure. Like most of the ship’s officers, Ishida had been given three days’ leave before Yamato’s departure. During his leave, Ishida had purposely not allowed his thoughts to dwell on what lay ahead in the sea off Okinawa. He was a product of his culture and class. A willingness to die in the service of the emperor was an integral component of his being. The prospect of death in battle had never caused him a moment’s anguish—until his visit with his family was nearly finished.

  Darkness had come to Kure when Ishida said his farewell to his family in the doorway of their tiny wood-and-paper home. He felt a pang of grief as he realized that his infant son, whom he had not seen until this visit, would soon be fatherless. He struggled for the words to say farewell to his wife. Even if he had been allowed to reveal the secret that neither he nor Yamato would return from the next sortie, he wouldn’t have been able to say it. It would simply have been too difficult for both of them.

  He’d kissed his wife, then walked away. After she closed the door, he came back. He walked around the house, taking a last look at the fragile structure. He peered through the window to fix in his memory a last image of the family he would never see again. He said a silent goodbye and made his way to the Yamato.

  Back aboard the battleship, he wrote a final letter to his parents. It wasn’t difficult. In the traditionally respectful language with which Japanese addressed their elders, he requested their forgiveness for not having said farewell. He asked that they please live long lives. He sealed the envelope, then began writing a letter to his wife. “You can marry again,” he wrote, “but whatever you do, please raise our son to be a good man.”

  Ishida laid down his pen, stared at the letter, then tore it up. He tried writing another letter, then tore it up also. He couldn’t do it. Such a letter would cause her too much pain. The image of his beloved wife weeping over the letter would make it harder for him to perform his duties when Yamato entered battle.

  Forget it, Ishida decided. There would be no farewell.

  17 DIVINE WIND

  KANOYA AIR BASE, KYUSHU, JAPAN

  APRIL 6, 1945

  The drums rolled. The tokko pilots stood in a long row awaiting their final orders. Each was dressed in a bulky flying suit and helmet, a ceremonial white hachimaki headband tied around his head. The first wave would take off at 1320.

  As he always did when dispatching young men to their deaths, Vice Adm. Matome Ugaki wore a somber expression. With him was Combined Fleet chief of staff Vice Adm. Ryunosuke Kusaka, both admirals wearing their starched whites, swords, medals, and white gloves. On long tables before them stretched the row of empty cups, the plates of rice wafers.

  Ten-Go was the first and most ambitious of the ten planned kikusui operations. It would be a mass air attack by both tokko aircraft and conventional warplanes, coordinated with the surface attack by the Yamato task force. At the same time, General Ushijima’s 32nd Army was supposed to counterattack on Okinawa and retake the airfields at Yontan and Kadena.

  Ugaki was skeptical about Ten-Go’s chances for success. Like most Japanese operations, the complex plan depended on precise timing and careful coordination. From experience Ugaki knew how poorly the army and the navy coordinated their operations. He doubted that General Ushijima would seize the moment to regain the lost ground on Okinawa. He was even more pessimistic about Yamato’s chance of success. Ugaki, an old battleship sailor, had been opposed to the mission. It was “superficial,” he declared, to regard the battleship as useless.

  Ugaki spoke to the assembled pilots. In the same low voice he always used when delivering final orders to the tokko warriors, he told them that this was the first of a series of kikusui operations. More than two thousand warplanes were being assembled for the campaign, three-quarters of them dedicated to tokko missions. In a succession of blows they would annihilate the American fleet off Okinawa. The enemy would be paralyzed and unable to proceed with their invasion. The noble young tokko airmen would be in the vanguard of saving the empire.

  They gazed back at him in respectful silence. Whether or not they actuall
y believed him didn’t matter. Questioning such an order was not an option. Nor was reneging on their pledge to die for the emperor.

  The cups were filled. Solemnly Ugaki raised his to the assembled pilots. “We shall meet at Minatogawa,” he told them.

  They had heard Ugaki make this promise several times now. The tokko volunteers who had not yet flown their missions accepted it as an article of faith that the admiral would follow them into death. They would be reunited in spirit at the shrine commemorating the legendary battle of Minatogawa.

  The pilots drank from their cups. They saluted Admiral Ugaki, then bowed respectfully. The admiral gave the order to man their planes, and in unison the pilots yelled three banzai cheers. The drums beat a steady tattoo while they trotted to the camouflaged revetments where the armed and ready airplanes were concealed.

  Minutes later, the stillness at Kanoya was split by the sound of radial engines coughing and rumbling to life. The first group of attack aircraft—fifty-six Zeroes, each laden with a 250-kilogram armor-piercing bomb—appeared from beneath the camouflage nets and lumbered over the uneven ground toward the runway.

  It was an emotional moment. Well-wishers, ground crew, and pilots awaiting their own tokko missions watched and cheered. One after the other the warplanes throttled up and roared down the patched runway. With them went ten Zero fighter escorts. It was insufficient fighter cover, Ugaki knew, but it was a sign of the times. The ten fighters and their pilots were all that could be spared. Experienced fighter pilots were in such short supply that their commanders were refusing to send them into hopeless duels with the superior enemy air forces.

  When the last of the tokko planes had disappeared in the cloudy southern sky, Ugaki returned to his bunker. He settled himself into his command chair and assumed the position that he had adopted since the first tokko operations—sitting upright, hands folded in his lap, eyes fixed straight ahead as if he were in a trance. He would remain there until the first reports came back from the battle.

  The kamikazes were coming. That much U.S. intelligence officers had gleaned from the intercepted Japanese communications. April 6 was supposed to be the day of the greatest massed attack yet staged by the kamikazes.

  Admiral Spruance put the entire Fifth Fleet on alert. From the radar picket stations to the beaches at Hagushi to the anchorage at Kerama Retto, guns were loaded and pointed skyward. Radarmen in every red-lighted CIC compartment peered into their yellowish green scopes. Lookouts on every ship gazed upward at the scudding clouds. Flights of Corsair and Hellcat CAP fighters droned over each carrier task group.

  Early morning—a favorite time for the kamikazes—passed and nothing happened. Afternoon came and the weather worsened. Visibility went down and a northwest wind whipped the surface. A high broken cloud layer obscured the sun, bathing the sea in dark splotches of shadow. Still nothing happened.

  Then, a few minutes before 1500, it began. First came the sudden, frenetic radio calls. Radarmen had picked up a wave of incoming bogeys. CAP fighters on the northern stations roared northward to intercept them.

  More raiders were showing up behind the first wave. All seemed to be headed southwestward for the Hagushi beachhead and the fleet of transport ships. Their course would take them directly over the northern radar picket stations, called RP1 and RP2.

  To Cmdr. R. E. Westholm, skipper of the destroyer Bush, the radar picket station designated RP1 had just become the most dangerous place on earth. Westholm could see them coming, a swarm of dark-colored bandits swinging into an orbit around his ship. They looked like raptors swooping down on an easy kill.

  During the predawn hours Bush and her sister ship USS Colhoun had fended off sporadic night raiders. Those were hecklers, mostly feeling out the defenses of the U.S. fleet. These kamikazes swarming around Bush were the real thing.

  First came the Aichi dive-bombers, code-named “Val.” The Val was an obsolete, fixed-gear warplane, easy to identify with its big, flowing wheel fairings. The slow-flying bomber was relatively easy to hit, too, and Bush’s gunners flamed two of them. A few minutes later a Nakajima B6N “Jill” torpedo bomber, a tougher target, came skimming in low on the water, somehow penetrating Bush’s wall of antiaircraft fire. Westholm swung his ship broadside to give his main battery a clear shot. Every gun on the destroyer was hurling fire at the incoming kamikaze.

  Nothing could stop it. The Jill kept coming, weaving and dodging, finally crashing with deadly precision between Bush’s twin stacks. The high-explosive bomb penetrated to the forward engine room, killing every man in the compartment and most of those in the two fire rooms. Dead in the water, Bush listed to port, seawater flooding her lower compartments.

  From 10 miles away, the destroyer Colhoun came racing at 35 knots to help while her skipper, Cmdr. G. R. Wilson, frantically called for more CAP fighters. The fighters assigned to cover them were already engaged with incoming bandits. Now they were running out of fuel and ammunition.

  The stricken Bush was easy to spot. An oily black smoke column marked the position where she drifted, drawing more kamikazes. As Colhoun closed with Bush, a swarm of fifteen kamikazes bore down on both ships.

  Bush’s big guns—her 5-inchers—were jammed. Her gunners blazed away with the Bofors 40-millimeters, and Colhoun joined in with her own batteries. It was like swatting hornets. Kill one, and another would appear in its place. The kamikazes were attacking from all directions. Colhoun’s 5-inchers scored a hit on a diving Zero, splashing it midway between the two destroyers. “One down, eleven to go,” Colhoun’s skipper remarked.

  Colhoun’s gunners killed another off the starboard bow, splashing him 50 yards abeam. Then another. But a fourth Zero, diving toward the port bow, plunged into Colhoun’s main deck, wiping out both 40-millimeter gun mounts and their crews. The bomb exploded in the aft fire room, killing every man inside and rupturing the main steam line.

  Colhoun was wounded, but she was still making 15 knots, most of her guns still firing. Her damage control crews were getting the blazes under control when three more kamikazes—two Val dive-bombers and a Zero—bored in from opposite sides.

  The two Vals went down in a hail of fire, but the Zero didn’t. The kamikaze penetrated the hail of fire and crashed into Colhoun’s forward fire room. The exploding bomb blew out both boilers, ripping a 4-by-20-foot hole in the hull below the waterline.

  Now Colhoun was as badly crippled as Bush. Each of the stricken destroyers was sending up a tall, unmistakable pillar of roiling black smoke, and the kamikazes seemed bent on finishing them off instead of going after fresh targets.

  At 1725, Colhoun downed a Zero 150 yards abeam, but at the same time two Vals came swooping through the defensive fire. One clipped Colhoun’s after stack with a wing tip, showering the deck with flaming gasoline. The kamikaze’s bomb exploded in the water alongside, ripping a hole in the destroyer’s hull at the waterline. The explosion and cascade of seawater blew every man off Colhoun’s fantail.

  The second Val was still boring down, but it missed Colhoun. Pulling up, the kamikaze pointed its nose at the nearby Bush. Gutted by fire, her main batteries no longer firing, Bush was almost defenseless. The Val hit the destroyer amidships between the stacks, nearly cleaving the vessel in half.

  Bush was doomed, but the kamikazes weren’t finished. At 1745, yet another Zero smashed into the destroyer’s forward port side, killing all the wounded men and medics in the wardroom.

  It was Bush’s death blow. Engulfed in flames and settling at the bow, the destroyer abruptly broke in half and sank.

  Meanwhile in the gathering darkness, Colhoun was fighting for her life. Another Zero, attacking the dying Bush, switched targets at the last moment and went for Colhoun. Despite withering 40-millimeter fire, the flaming kamikaze exploded into Colhoun’s port side.

  Colhoun was finished. With night coming fast, Commander Wilson ordered his crew to abandon ship. Colhoun was still blazing in the darkness, a beacon for more Japanese attackers. She received her coup
de grace by gunfire from the destroyer Cassin Young, which had come to rescue survivors.

  The ordeal for the crews of the sunken destroyers wasn’t over. Many who survived the attacks were terribly burned. In the darkened ocean they clung to the few rafts and flotsam remaining from their lost ships. Because enemy airplanes were still overhead, search vessels couldn’t use floodlights to illuminate the area. By the time the rescue operation ended the next morning, a total of 129 officers and men, most of them from Bush, were dead or missing.

  The radar picket stations weren’t the only scenes of action. From the catwalk outside the bridge of New Mexico, Admiral Spruance had a front-row view of the drama off the western shore of Okinawa. CAP fighters had chased four bandits southward from the island of Ie Shima. Almost directly over Spruance’s flagship they caught up with them. While Spruance watched, all four kamikazes, one after the other, were shot down in flames.

  But more were on the way. Rear Adm. Mort Deyo had already begun moving his fire support ships away from their exposed stations near the Hagushi beachhead. As the force of battleships and cruisers, surrounded by a screen of seven destroyers, moved northward toward Ie Shima, lookouts on the lead destroyer, Leutze, spotted bogeys eight miles out. Within seconds, the graying sky turned red with the fire of every antiaircraft gun in the force.

  The raiders were Nakajima B5N “Kate” torpedo bombers and Ki-43 “Oscar” fighters. They were coming in so low that the lookouts had spotted them before they appeared on radar. Like the first wave, they were going for the destroyers instead of the higher-value targets behind them.

  The destroyers in the fore—Leutze and Newcomb—took the brunt of the attack. In the space of a few minutes, a kamikaze crashed into Newcomb’s after stack. Another fell to the destroyer’s guns, but a third, carrying a larger weapon than the standard 250-kilogram bomb, struck amidships. The explosion blew up both engine rooms and turned the after fire room into a mass of rubble. Every man in the three spaces was killed instantly.