The Twilight Warriors

by Robert Gandt

  It was bad news. Without the collective support of its task force, a lone destroyer in the waters south of Kyushu was as good as dead. If a submarine didn’t pick it off, a flight of American warplanes would find it.

  Aboard Yamato, Admiral Ito considered the situation. Asashimo’s problem seemed to be a damaged reduction gear in her power plant. Ito decided to give them time to repair the problem. The task force would reverse course, go back to gather up Asashimo, then steam at high speed for Okinawa. If Asashimo could maintain station, she would share in the glory of the coming battle. If not, she was on her own.

  A buzz of excitement crackled in the flag plot compartment in New Mexico. Unlike similar spaces on other ships, the air on Raymond Spruance’s bridge was not clouded with cigarette smoke. Spruance, a tobacco hater, had banned smoking in his flag spaces.

  Spruance was studying the newly received reports about the Japanese task force. Seldom had his staff seen their boss’s cold, gimlet eyes flash like this. The last of Japan’s great battleships was coming out to fight.

  Spruance was a black-shoe admiral—a surface sailor who had cut his teeth on battleships. In the Navy of 1945, he was something of an oddity—a nonaviator whose command now included the greatest naval air force ever deployed. But Spruance also commanded a task force of battleships and cruisers whose only duty until now had been the bombardment of enemy shore positions on Okinawa.

  The last major engagement of surface forces had been the October 1944 night battle at Surigao Strait when a Japanese fleet of two battleships, one cruiser, and four destroyers, commanded by Adm. Shoji Nishimura, charged blindly into the waiting guns of the U.S. Seventh Fleet battleships. Nishimura himself went down with his flagship Yamashiro. For the Americans, it had been a sweet revenge. Five of the Seventh Fleet’s six old battleships had been salvaged from the wreckage of Pearl Harbor.

  Now, nearly six months later, the normally cool and analytical Raymond Spruance was hearing the siren song of a last epic sea battle. He signaled Rear Adm. Mort Deyo, who commanded Task Force 54, to prepare his battle line to meet the Yamato task force. Spruance’s own flagship, New Mexico, was one of Deyo’s six battleships. It meant that Spruance himself was going to observe the great battle from a front-row seat.

  In addition to his aging battleships, Deyo’s task force included seven cruisers and thirty-one destroyers—enough firepower to counter anything the Japanese task force could mount. The prize of sinking the world’s greatest dreadnought could go to the battleship admirals.

  Maybe. On the eastern side of Okinawa, in his own flag plot aboard the carrier Bunker Hill, another admiral was eyeing the same prize.

  19 RACE FOR GLORY

  USS BUNKER HILL

  175 MILES EAST OF OKINAWA

  APRIL 6, 1945

  One of his code names was “Bald Eagle,” and it fit him perfectly. The commander of Task Force 58, Vice Adm. Marc “Pete” Mitscher, had the gaunt, wizened face of a bird of prey. His eyes, according to one of his staffers, “could give an order with a glance.”

  Mitscher looked older than his fifty-eight years. His lifestyle was typical of his generation of flag officers, including Halsey and McCain, who disdained exercise and smoked a pack and a half of cigarettes a day. During flight operations Mitscher spent his time in a four-foot-high, specially built swivel chair on the flag bridge. The chair was invariably aimed aft, giving rise to speculation among his sailors that the old man was more interested in where he’d been than where he was going. The truth was that Mitscher didn’t like the wind in his face.

  The chair was just one of Mitscher’s foibles. Another was the long-billed baseball cap, his standard shipboard headgear. The “Mitscher cap” was so imitated that in 1946 the Navy authorized it as a work uniform accessory.

  Marc Mitscher was, above all else, a naval aviator. Unlike Halsey, McCain, and chief of naval operations Ernest King, who, at an advanced age and rank, had all undergone flight training in order to wear wings and then command aviation units, Mitscher was the real thing. He had been designated naval aviator number 33 back in 1916. While aviation was still an unwanted stepchild of the Navy, Mitscher was catapulting off battleships, flying ungainly patrol planes, and winning the Navy Cross for his role as pilot of NC-1, one of a group of four Navy Curtiss flying boats to attempt the first transatlantic flight. Mitscher’s plane was forced down in heavy seas near the Azores, but another of the flying boats, NC-4, became the first airplane to make it across the Atlantic.

  Mitscher served in a succession of aeronautical staff and carrier-based assignments, and in 1941 became the first skipper of the newly built USS Hornet. It was from the deck of the Hornet, under Mitscher’s command, that Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle and his sixteen B-25 bombers launched on the first strike against Japan on April 18, 1942.

  As commander of the Fast Carrier Task Force at the Battle of the Philippine Sea in 1944, Mitscher won fame—and the everlasting gratitude of his pilots. When the planes of a strike were forced to return to the carriers after nightfall, Mitscher broke with standard operating procedure and ordered the flight deck lights and ships’ searchlights turned on, exposing his carriers to Japanese subs and airplanes. The gamble paid off. Mitscher recovered most of his planes and pilots, and his precious carriers survived.

  Like most senior brown-shoe commanders, Mitscher had spent a career battling the black shoes, especially the battleship admirals who had steered the navy’s thinking for most of the current century. One of those was Raymond Spruance, and another was Chester Nimitz, both of whom were now Mitscher’s bosses.

  A decree had come down the previous year from the chief of naval operation, Ernest King, that carrier task force commanders would henceforth have surface officers assigned as chiefs of staff. The idea was that the mix of cultures would give the commander better coordination with his screening ships. Mitscher was assigned a highly decorated destroyer squadron commander, forty-three-year-old Capt. Arleigh Burke, as his chief of staff.

  Mitscher had not been happy. Having a nonaviator so closely involved with the command of his carrier task force offended him, especially when it was one like Burke, who was already a celebrity for his exploits as a hard-charging destroyer division commander. He had earned a nickname, “Thirty-one-Knot” Burke, for being a fast mover not only in a destroyer but in all things that involved guns and ordnance.

  Burke, for his part, was just as unhappy. Without warning he’d been yanked from his Destroyer Squadron 23 at the Bismarck Archipelago and exiled to the most foreign of environments, the flag spaces of a 27,000-ton aircraft carrier. The two men were like dogs in a kennel, each warily sizing up the other.

  It took a few weeks, but the crotchety Mitscher was eventually won over by Thirty-one-Knot Burke’s obvious brilliance. By the time Task Force 58 arrived off Okinawa, the Bald Eagle and his black-shoe chief of staff had bonded into a formidable team.

  Now Mitscher was seeing an opportunity he couldn’t resist. Studying the sighting reports of the Japanese task force, he felt a stirring of the old battleship-versus-aircraft-carrier rivalry. Though the great battles of the Pacific had mostly been fought by the carriers, the matter of whether airpower alone could prevail over a surface force had not been proven beyond all doubt.

  It had been Mitscher who sent carrier-based planes after Yamato and her sister ship Musashi at the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Yamato had escaped, and although Musashi eventually went down, the actual cause of her sinking was not certain. No one had ruled out the possibility that the coup de grace was delivered by a submarine. Here was a chance to end the debate forever.

  But there was a problem. Mitscher’s immediate superior, Admiral Spruance, had just transmitted an all-fleet order to allow the enemy task force to proceed southward, where it would be engaged by Admiral Deyo’s surface task force. In the meantime, Mitscher’s orders were “to concentrate the offensive effort of Task Force 58 in combat air patrols to meet enemy air attacks.”

  The battleships were going to g
et the Yamato.

  Or maybe not. Like a team of sharp-eyed contract lawyers, Mitscher, Burke, and Cmdr. James Flatley, the fighter pilot who served as Mitscher’s operations officer, pored over Spruance’s order. It was a situation as old as warfare itself, officers trying to find the tiniest amount of slack in their orders.

  Mitscher had served under Spruance long enough to know his style. Spruance believed in allowing his commanders discretion to act on opportunity, and Mitscher believed that he was looking at just such an opportunity. In any case, Spruance’s order had not specifically forbidden Mitscher to go after the enemy task force. It was as much slack as Mitscher needed.

  The problem, in Mitscher’s mind, wasn’t in complying with Spruance’s order to maintain combat air patrols. With twenty-four carriers and air groups in his task force, he could provide plenty of combat air patrol coverage and still deploy a knockout blow against the enemy fleet. The trick was in knowing where the enemy fleet was headed and what their objective was.

  Then came another order from Spruance. Deyo was to form his two battleship divisions, two cruiser divisions, and twenty destroyers into line of battle and head north. In his flag plot, Mitscher read his copy of the dispatch, then sent his own order to each of his carrier task groups. They were to steam northwestward, shortening the distance between them and the next day’s likely position of the Japanese force. If Spruance had any objection, he would have to countermand Mitscher’s order.

  The race to get Yamato was on.

  By now both Mitscher and Flatley were bleary-eyed after the arduous day. Each left to hit his bunk, leaving Burke to ruminate about the Japanese task force. Long ago Burke had learned how to ration his rest periods, catnapping during lulls in the action, seeming never to run out of alertness.

  Alone in flag plot, Burke sucked on his pipe and thought about the Japanese task force. Spread out before him were charts of the seas off southern Japan and the Ryukyus. In his mind, he tried to insert himself into the Japanese commander’s position. Where would he go? In which direction? After what objective?

  The more he pondered the situation, the clearer it became to him. The Japanese commander intended to attack the amphibious force off the western shore of Okinawa. He wouldn’t telegraph his intention by proceeding on a direct course, which would bring them into range of the carrier task force on the east side of Okinawa. He would ease westward, perhaps northward, feinting in the direction of Sasebo on the far coast of Kyushu, staying out of range of the carrier-based warplanes.

  Burke was sure of it. Sometime the next morning, the Japanese commander would make his charge toward Okinawa.

  In his flag bridge aboard Yamato, Ito ordered the task force into a turn to the southwest. They were at the spot where he had planned to pick up the lagging Asashimo and reintegrate her into the force. But Asashimo still couldn’t keep up. She hadn’t sorted out the reduction gear problem that had caused her to fall behind.

  There was no time to wait. Ito gave the order to abandon the destroyer and proceed with only nine ships. As the fleet charged through the squally seas at a speed of 22 knots, the hapless destroyer disappeared from view.

  There was only one prudent choice for Asashimo’s captain, Lt. Cmdr. Yoshiro Sugihara: to reverse course and return to Kyushu. The destroyer was no longer under the protective umbrella of the task force’s air defense guns.

  But this was not a day for prudence. Sugihara had no intention of missing what was surely the last stand of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Asashimo continued limping behind the task force, following the wake of the Yamato.

  In the early hours of April 7, Mitscher became sick. Though the admiral’s physician didn’t have a diagnosis, he came to flag plot to inform Burke that Mitscher would have to stay in bed. The gaunt, heavy-smoking admiral was already in frail condition, and the doctor was worried that he might become incapacitated.

  With Mitscher indisposed, the black-shoe chief of staff, Burke, became the de facto task force commander, with fighter pilot Cmdr. Jimmy Flatley as his air warfare expert. They ordered eight Hellcat fighters launched at dawn to comb a fan-shaped 90-degree sector from northeast to northwest. A division of four Marine Corsairs was stationed at 60-mile intervals to relay the message back to the task force flagship.

  At 0830, a Hellcat pilot from Essex spotted the Japanese task force through the broken cloud deck. The ships were steaming on a northwest course of 300 degrees.

  Northwest course? Receiving this information, Admiral Spruance ordered Deyo to go after the Japanese task force. Now he was worried that they might be slipping northward toward Sasebo. If so, they’d soon be out of range of both battleships and warplanes.

  Aboard Bunker Hill, Burke reached a different conclusion. It was a head fake, he believed. The Yamato task force was making a zigzag turn, feinting northwestward. Sticking to his hunch, he deployed another sixteen-plane search group to a point south of the reported position. If he was right, the Japanese force would soon make a hard turn to port and be picked up by the search group.

  And they did. Another Essex Hellcat radioed that the task force was now heading southwesterly, on a course of 240 degrees. Burke’s hunch was right: the Japanese commander was making the course changes to confuse the trackers.

  Burke sent the order to each of the carrier task groups: prepare their bombers, fighters, and torpedo planes for action.

  Later that morning, Mitscher returned to the flag plot. Looking gaunter and more birdlike than ever, he settled himself into his chair and resumed command. “He looked like hell,” Burke recalled. Later he surmised that Mitscher had suffered a small heart attack during the night.

  The success of the attack would depend on the search planes keeping track of the Japanese task force and directing the warplanes toward it. The strike planes would be at the extreme end of their range, some nearly 300 miles from their carriers. They would have only minutes to locate the enemy and make the attack. Mitscher had no intention of running his airplanes out of gas before they made it home. He’d already had that experience the previous June in the Philippine Sea when nearly a hundred of his warplanes, returning from a maximum-range strike, were forced down in the ocean.

  Another problem was communications. At this distance the planes would be out of contact with the task force command. Mitscher ordered more fighters to be stationed between the carriers and the estimated Japanese position to relay reports.

  At 1000, the strike took off. The first to go were the planes from Belleau Wood, Hornet, Bennington, and San Jacinto. They were quickly followed by the warplanes from Bunker Hill, Essex, Bataan, Cabot, and Hancock—283 airplanes of every type in the inventory, including Corsairs, Hellcats, Avengers, Helldivers, and even a few plodding Wildcat fighters.

  Fifteen minutes later, Hancock’s fifty-three-plane group took off. At 1045, 106 warplanes from Intrepid, Langley, and Yorktown—the carriers farthest from the target—headed off in search of the enemy task force.

  From his swivel chair on Bunker Hill’s bridge, Mitscher watched the warplanes depart, then he settled back to await the results. Either the Japanese would be where Burke had estimated, or they wouldn’t be.

  Not everyone in flag plot shared Burke’s conviction. A Royal Navy observer, Cmdr. Charlie Owen, asked Burke if he actually knew where Yamato was going to be in two hours.

  Burke shrugged off the question. “No.”

  “But you have launched before you can possibly be sure of their location.”

  “We are taking a chance,” said Burke. He put his finger on a point on the chart. It was well south of Yamato’s most recent position. “We are launching against the spot where we would be if we were the Yamato.”

  Mitscher, for his part, seemed to have no doubts. He had gotten over his misgivings about having a destroyer sailor as his chief of staff. In fact, he’d become sufficiently impressed with Burke that he tried to have him promoted to rear admiral. Burke resisted, not wanting to be promoted over the heads of many senior captains, a
nd settled for the rank of commodore, a wartime quasi-flag status with a one-star insignia.

  Now that they had played their hand, it was time to open up with Spruance. But the Bald Eagle could still be disingenuous. He told Burke, “Inform Admiral Spruance that I propose to strike the Yamato sortie group at 1200 unless otherwise directed.”

  Unless otherwise directed. The words hung in the air while Mitscher, still feeling out of sorts, slumped in his padded chair. Fixed in his memory was the night during the Battle of the Philippine Sea when he had proposed to Spruance that his task force race toward the enemy carrier fleet in order to be in position for a dawn strike. After an agonizing delay, the cautious Spruance had denied Mitscher’s request to attack.

  Now Mitscher worried that Spruance might again hold back. It would take two hours for the strike groups to reach Yamato. If Spruance countermanded the air strike order, it would be at best a huge embarrassment for Mitscher. At worst it could be the end of his command.

  The minutes ticked past without a reply. As noon approached, it began to make less and less sense to recall the warplanes. In any case, no gasoline would be saved and the bombs would have to be dumped, if not on the enemy, then into the sea.

  Then came a relayed report from the search planes. The Yamato task force had been sighted. Burke’s hunch was correct. The first wave of warplanes was about to engage the enemy task force.

  Mitscher still hadn’t heard from Spruance. He sent a follow-up message: “Will you take them or shall I?”

  More minutes ticked away. Then Mitscher received the reply he had been praying for. It was probably the shortest operational order of the war: “You take them.”

  20 FIRST WAVE

  USS INTREPID

  WESTERN PACIFIC, 120 MILES SOUTHEAST OF MAMI OSHIMA