The Twilight Warriors

by Robert Gandt

  Yamato’s nine 18.1-inch main guns, designed for surface warfare, were ill-suited as air defense weapons. They were mounted in three turrets, and each took an interminable 40 seconds to reload between firings. Even though the gunners were firing the vaunted san shiki antiaircraft shells, the projectiles were exploding like harmless fireworks, hitting almost nothing. Even the secondary guns—the half-dozen 6-inchers and twenty-four 5-inch guns—were designed primarily to be used against other ships.

  Yamato’s most potent antiaircraft weapons were the two dozen 5-inch guns and her 150 machine guns. The machine guns could be deflected to fire straight up. Most of the machine guns fired at a rate of 220 rounds per minute, but some up on the tower bridge could fire at twice that rate. The trouble was, the machine gun crews were being mowed down as quickly as they could be replaced.

  The worst was yet to come. Off Yamato’s port beam appeared the torpedo planes, looking dark and ominous in the gray murk. The Avengers were jinking to throw off the gunners but continuing straight through the hail of fire. Yamato’s gun directors were firing the big 18.1-inch guns directly into the water ahead of the oncoming warplanes, trying to throw up a wall of shrapnel-filled water. It didn’t stop them.

  As the Avengers bored in closer, the smaller guns on Yamato joined in the collective defense. One of the torpedo planes took a hit in the wing, pulled up in flames, then plunged into the sea.

  The others kept coming. Torpedoes began dropping from the bellies. The gray shapes slashed through the water on converging courses toward Yamato.

  Yamato’s captain ordered a violent turn toward the incoming torpedoes, trying to “comb the wakes”—paralleling their path and steering between them. As Ariga barked the orders, two junior officers on the bridge plotted the tracks of the incoming torpedoes on a maneuvering board.

  It worked, almost. The first bubbling white wake streaked past Yamato’s sides. Then another. It seemed that Ariga’s luck was holding. Another passed close abeam.

  Then one slammed into Yamato’s port bow. The impact knocked Captain Nomura, the executive officer, to the deck. Staggering back to his feet, Nomura, who also had the job of chief damage control officer, called for flooding reports. Yamato was still making 27 knots, he was told, and she wasn’t listing.

  Two more bombs exploded on the deck near the aft gunnery control tower. The explosions caused heavy casualties but didn’t penetrate to a vital place belowdecks. Yamato was damaged but still fighting. The first wave of attackers seemed to be withdrawing, leaving Yamato’s crew to wonder when the next was coming.

  They didn’t have long to wonder. The next wave was almost there.

  21 DUCKS IN A GALLERY

  EAST CHINA SEA

  APRIL 7, 1945

  Leading the last division of Intrepid’s Corsairs, Lt. (jg) Wes Hays was having trouble keeping Rawie’s flight in sight. They had launched from the carrier at 1045, two and a half hours before, flying at 1,500 feet beneath a solid overcast. Now the cloud cover was getting worse. Seeking better visibility, Rawie had led the formation up through the layers in the clouds. It was a game of blindman’s bluff, each division leader trying to keep the preceding division in sight as they groped through the murk.

  Somewhere between cloud layers, Hays lost sight of Rawie. In fact, he’d lost sight of everyone. Hays and his three wingmen—Hollister, Carlisi, and Erickson—were on their own.

  Wes Hays’s military career was typical of the wartime Navy. From newly winged naval aviator in February 1943, he’d gone through training as a photo reconnaissance pilot, then put in a tour instructing in Corsairs at Green Cove Springs, where Will Rawie handpicked him for his newly formed Grim Reaper squadron. Hays came from the western outback of Texas, a one-stop town called Novice, where his wife and baby son were living.

  Hays was listening to the babble on the radio, and it didn’t give him a good feeling. The weather was lousy and getting lousier. Everyone was having trouble finding the Jap task force, including Will Rawie. The lead Avenger in Rawie’s group had gotten a radar contact from 30 miles out. The only problem was, it wasn’t a Jap ship. It was a reef in the East China Sea.

  Now the strike group was dispersed, some low over the water and others flying between the cloud layers, dodging rain squalls, using only their eyeballs to locate an enemy fleet. Fuel was becoming critical. They had only minutes left before they’d have to turn back to the ship.

  According to the plotting board on Hays’s lap, they had to be near where the Japanese force was last reported. A dark layer of cloud enveloped the whole area. Hays signaled his flight to come together so they wouldn’t lose sight of each other, then he took them down through the clouds until they had only one broken deck between them and the water.

  Hays was peering through the gloom, looking for something—anything—that resembled a Japanese ship, when he spotted the silhouette of an airplane off his left wing. Friend or foe? While he was still wondering, an anonymous voice crackled over the radio: “Corsairs, you’re close. Stand by for my mark.”

  It was a plane from one of the other ships, he realized, probably Yorktown. Whoever the guy was, he knew the location of the enemy fleet. Hays snapped off a quick order to his wingmen: “Arm everything. Use your .50s.” Besides dropping the 1,000-pounders, they’d be ready to strafe any target in sight.

  Hays continued on his heading, waiting for the call. A minute later he heard, “Mark!” He shoved the Corsair’s nose down through the cloud deck, praying that they were over water and not an island with a mountain on it. His wingmen stayed with him, descending through the thick cloud.

  Hays peered through his windshield, straining to see something, anything. They were in a blind dive toward the ocean.

  Abruptly they popped through the bottom of the cloud deck. To Hays’s astonishment, directly ahead of his nose sprawled a great gray object. It was a Japanese cruiser, and the pipper of his gun sight, as if positioned by some mysterious power, was superimposed on the sweet spot—precisely between the cruiser’s center stacks and fantail.

  And then he noticed something else. Black, oily puffs were erupting like mushrooms around him. Then he felt the turbulence. The bastards were shooting at him.

  Will Rawie, the strike leader, was approaching minimum fuel. He was about to turn back when he spotted a wake on the whitecapped surface below. When he dropped down to follow it, he saw the flash of gunfire. Then came more flashes, like twinkling lights in a fog.

  Ahead Rawie made out the dark silhouettes of ships—three smaller vessels and one very large one that had the profile of a battleship. A sporadic barrage of gunfire was coming from the big ship. Rawie saw that it was slightly down at the stern, listing to starboard. It had to be the Yamato.

  As strike leader, Rawie was supposed to coordinate the attacks of his warplanes. Now it seemed like a joke. His strike group was scattered, all dodging and weaving to avoid the antiaircraft fire, trying to get into position to attack. The only ones he could see besides his own flight of four Corsairs were the Torpeckers—the Avenger torpedo planes. He called for them to swing to the left, to set up for an attack from the north. Everybody else should take any target he could find.

  Through the clouds Rawie spotted what looked like a cruiser. As he led his flight in a dive through a hole in the clouds, he nearly collided with a flight of Helldiver dive-bombers. They were all plunging through the same hole. Rawie pulled up in a tight circle, his wingmen in trail, then rolled back in for another try at the cruiser.

  This time Rawie held his dive until the target filled his gun sight. He jabbed the release button, feeling the Corsair shed its thousand-pound load, and pulled out of the dive.

  Grunting against the force of the pull out, Rawie peered back over his shoulder. Explosions were erupting from below the cruiser’s decks. It looked like the cruiser was about to break up.

  From his station on Yamato’s top deck, Lt. Naoyoshi Ishida saw how wrong they had been about the weather. They had thought that the rain
squalls and low clouds would hide them. Instead, it was providing cover for the American warplanes. Yamato’s gunners were finding it almost impossible to track the blurred shapes as they came plummeting down from the cloud deck.

  Despite the hatred Ishida had for the Americans, he couldn’t help feeling a twinge of admiration. Unquestionably, they were brave. They were diving so low, firing their guns until the last moment, that Ishida could see their faces in the cockpits.

  Watching the battle go against them, Ishida wrestled with his emotions. He hadn’t expected that they would win this fight, but he also hadn’t thought the Yamato could be so quickly damaged. Ishida was a product of the Meiji generation, the older class of professional naval officers imbued with an unquestioning willingness to die in battle.

  Despite his bushido feelings, Ishida couldn’t push from his mind the image of his wife and infant son. Without him, they would be alone to face an uncertain future. It was not the way a warrior was supposed to think in the midst of battle.

  Things were happening too fast for Erickson. He’d barely had time to arm his bomb and guns. Now he was desperately trying to stay with Hays, who was diving on a cruiser beneath his nose. Erickson was hugging Hays’s left wing while the second section—Hollister and Carlisi—hung on to Hays’s right wing. Wherever Hays was going, they were going with him.

  Erickson picked out the gray shape of the target. And he saw something else, a few hundred yards beyond the cruiser they were attacking—an even bigger ship, probably the Yamato. Every gun on every warship seemed to be firing at him. It didn’t seem possible that they could all miss.

  There was no time to think about it. With the airspeed building up, the target filling his gun sight, Erickson punched the release button. He felt the hard lurch of the half-ton bomb departing his airplane, and he saw the bombs dropping away from the other Corsairs.

  Four thousand pounds of high explosives were plunging down on the enemy ship. Still in their dives, all four Corsairs opened fire with their .50-caliber machine guns. Erickson could see crewmen scurrying on the deck, their bodies being riddled by the hail of machine gun fire.

  Pulling out of the dive, the Corsairs jinked and weaved, desperately trying to avoid the storm of fire coming at them. Erickson glimpsed the massive bow of Yamato swelling in front of him. The battleship seemed to be moving slowly, less than 10 knots, in a left turn. The ships of her screen were in a protective circle around her.

  As he flashed past the battleship, Erickson saw what looked like brass wires extending upward from the ship. It took him a moment to realize what they were: tracers. For every tracer, there were five or more invisible bullets coming at him. More than 150 Japanese guns were shooting at him.

  Black flak bursts were erupting on either side and directly ahead. Erickson felt the Corsair being slammed by the concussions. He could smell the sickly odor of the explosives. There seemed to be no chance he could avoid being hit.

  An unwanted thought inserted itself in his mind. Aboard Intrepid he had watched the task force antiaircraft guns knocking kamikazes out of the sky like ducks in a gallery. Now the roles were reversed. He was one of the ducks.

  Something caught Mitsuru Yoshida’s eye as he stood on the bridge. Something red. One of Yamato’s screening destroyers on the port outer edge of the formation, Hamakaze, had just showed her crimson-painted belly. In the next moment her stern seemed to levitate straight out of the water.

  Yoshida stared at the stricken destroyer. As in slow motion, Hamakaze dropped back into the sea and rolled over. In less than half a minute the destroyer was gone, leaving in her place a sheet of white foam.

  It took Yoshida’s brain several seconds to process what he had just seen. A torpedo had struck Hamakaze’s stern, blowing away the rudder. At almost the same time, a string of bombs landed one after the other on her deck. The combined effect was like smashing a beetle with a hammer.

  A few of Hamakaze’s crew had been blown into the sea before the shattered hulk sank. Now Yoshida could see their heads bobbing in the bubbling foam where the destroyer had been. No one was stopping to pick them up.

  A similar fate had already befallen the unlucky Asashimo. Just as Admiral Ito had feared, the straggling destroyer was an easy target. After falling behind the task force when it turned south, Asashimo was bringing up the rear. She was 5 miles behind the main force when the strike group from the carrier San Jacinto found her.

  First went the fighters—six Hellcats and one older F4F Wildcat. All dropped 500-pound bombs, then came back to strafe with their machine guns. Asashimo fought back, putting up a stream of defensive fire and causing damage to some of the fighters. After several passes her deck was aflame and her hull was ruptured from bomb near misses. An ominous black oil slick surrounded the destroyer as she went nearly dead in the water.

  Eight Avenger torpedo bombers swept in to finish the kill. As the torpedoes hit the water and headed in a perfect spread for the destroyer, her captain, Lt. Cmdr. Yoshiro Sugihara, turned the slow-moving destroyer to starboard, trying to parallel the wakes of the torpedoes. He dodged the first two, and several others swept by the stern.

  Then a torpedo took her amidships, directly below the bridge. Seconds later, another exploded into the engine room.

  It was the end of Asashimo. Her bow pitched upward, and she slid stern first into the sea. Another explosion under the surface blew the bow back above water, and it disintegrated. When the pieces had finished falling back onto the sea, nothing was left but an oil slick. None of Asashimo’s 326 crewmen survived the attack.

  While Will Rawie was darting in and out of clouds, trying to pull his strike group together, the leader of Yorktown’s forty-three-plane strike group, Lt. Cmdr. Herb Houck, had a better view of the action. Houck was a thirty-year-old Minnesotan who had joined the Navy in 1936. He had already shot down six Japanese airplanes and won two Navy Crosses. That day he would add another.

  Technically, Houck shouldn’t have been there. The engine in his F6F-5 Hellcat had been cutting out during the long flight from Yorktown because of an air leak in the line from the fighter’s auxiliary belly tank. Unwilling to turn back, Houck kept nursing the engine, switching the fuel feed from tank to tank, running his fuel boost pump to keep gas flowing to the big radial engine. He’d made it, finally managing to suck most of the fuel from the troublesome belly tank.

  Now Houck was over the task group at 1,000 feet. His twenty Hellcat fighters each carried a single 500-pound bomb, which he knew would make hardly a dent in Yamato’s thick armor. He ordered the Hellcats to go in ahead of the torpedo planes, strafing with their six .50-calibers to deflect the Japanese guns from the vulnerable torpedo planes.

  Houck still had his own 500-pound bomb, and he was saving it for the right target. He spotted it while the Torpeckers were still setting up their attack on Yamato. Ahead, trailing smoke but still very much alive, was a destroyer, the Isokaze. The Japanese tin can had just blown a Yorktown Helldiver out of the sky, killing Lt. Harry Worley and his gunner, Earl Ward.

  Houck went after the destroyer. Placing the pipper of his gun sight on the midsection of the destroyer, he released the 500-pounder. As he pulled out of his dive, he saw over his shoulder a pillar of flame leaping from the destroyer’s mid-deck. Within minutes she was sinking.

  Houck wasn’t finished. He could see Isokaze’s survivors flailing in the oil-slickened water. He dove again, this time blazing away with his .50-calibers. The other Hellcat pilots, bombs now expended, followed him, strafing the bobbing heads in the water.

  It was the compassionless rationale of the Pacific war, and it was applied by both sides. The enemy deserved no mercy. The more you killed, the sooner the war would be over.

  The Hellcats kept strafing, frothing the water with machine gun fire, until their ammunition was gone.

  22 THERE SHE BLOWS

  EAST CHINA SEA

  30°22′N; 128°04′E

  APRIL 7, 1945

  Yamato was listing to por
t. The system of pumps and valves that flooded the stabilizing compartments and had corrected the earlier list was no longer working. The all-important aft water control center had taken a torpedo strike and a direct bomb hit.

  Watching the inclinometer go from 15 degrees to 20 degrees, Rear Admiral Ariga reached an agonizing decision. He would have to flood the starboard outer engine room. Flooding the space would help correct the list, but it would reduce Yamato’s available power. It would also mean certain death for the three hundred men in the starboard engine compartments.

  In a choking voice, Ariga gave the order. The valves were opened. Seconds later the violent implosion of seawater snuffed out the life of every man in the flooded engineering rooms.

  The desperate tactic worked, but only for a while. At 1410 Ariga felt another torpedo slam into Yamato’s stern, jamming her big main rudder hard to port.

  Yamato’s death was now certain. The ship was uncontrollable. The list to port worsened quickly, rolling toward 35 degrees. With her port rail nearly submerged, the ship was locked in a counterclockwise turn. The lofty bridge tower was leaning so steeply over the water that the men in the uppermost decks had to cling to rails and stanchions for support.

  Captain Nomura, the executive officer, clambered up the ladder to Ariga’s command station. There was no chance of correcting Yamato’s list, he told the captain. Ariga seemed to be detached from what was happening. He appeared not to notice that the ship’s public address system had already been destroyed. He kept repeating, as if his crew could hear him, “Don’t lose heart!”

  Nomura shouted at him, “The ship is sinking!” Nomura wanted Ariga’s permission to give the abandon-ship order. Ariga stared back at him, seeming not to comprehend. Most of Yamato’s guns were silent now. There was only the isolated chatter of a few surviving machine guns.