The Twilight Warriors

by Robert Gandt

  Nomura kept shouting. Finally Ariga nodded his understanding. Yes, Nomura could give the abandon-ship order. And Nomura should join them, the captain added. Someone had to survive in order to tell the story.

  There was no time to spare. Nomura sent messengers from the bridge to spread the word belowdecks: “Abandon ship!” Yamato was going fast.

  Still in his command chair on the sixth deck of the bridge tower, the commander in chief, Vice Adm. Seiichi Ito, received the same report. Yamato was doomed. Until now the admiral had remained stiff and silent, aloof from the blow-by-blow events of the battle. From the beginning he had been opposed to what he thought was a senseless sacrifice. Now it was coming to the very end he had predicted.

  Ito climbed out of his chair. For a moment he braced himself against the binocular stand, staring out ahead of the sinking ship. Then he issued his one and only direct command since the battle began. “Stop the operation,” the admiral ordered. “Turn back after rescuing the men.”

  With that, Ito turned to salute the surviving members of his staff. Together they had endured nearly two hours of bombings, torpedoings, and relentless machine gun fire. Ito shook each man’s hand, then descended the ladder to his sea cabin one deck below. It was the last anyone saw of Seiichi Ito.

  On the top bridge deck at the captain’s command station, a messenger was helping Ariga tie himself to the compass binnacle. Ariga intended to go with his ship, and he was taking no chances that his body would wash to the surface. He was having trouble because the linoleum deck was slippery with blood. As the ship shuddered from another internal blast, Ariga shouted that someone had to save the emperor’s portrait.

  The assistant gunnery officer, Lieutenant Hattori, carried out Ariga’s order, after a fashion. Hattori made his way down to the wardroom, where the picture was mounted on the bulkhead. Instead of retrieving the portrait, he simply locked the door. At least the enemy would not recover it.

  Yorktown air group commander Herb Houck was still on station, directing his strike group from his Hellcat fighter. He had already assigned his twelve Avenger torpedo planes, led by Lt. Cmdr. Tom Stetson, to finish off the cruiser Yahagi.

  Stetson had just gotten a good look at the Yamato. She appeared to be listing badly, showing her belly. He told Houck he wanted to split his group and go after the Yamato with six of his Avengers.

  Houck concurred, but he told Stetson to change the torpedo running depth from 10 feet to 20. The 10-foot depth had been preset to hit a cruiser’s hull. Going to 20 feet would put the fish below Yamato’s thicker armor plate and right into her exposed lower hull.

  It was easier said than done. In the back of his Avenger, tail gunner Charles Fries had the job of resetting the depth setting on their Mark 13 torpedo. It meant that he had to crawl into the bomb bay, pull wires inside the torpedo, and turn the indicator with a wrench. If Fries got it wrong, the airstream coming through the bomb bay could actually arm the torpedo.

  The Torpeckers took their time getting into position. One of the pilots, Lt. (jg) John Carter, was in the last section. He watched Stetson’s first four Avengers go in low and fast, dropping their torpedoes in a spread on Yamato’s beam. “As luck would have it,” he recalled, “the big ship was turning to port, thereby exposing the full broadside expanse of her enormous hull to the converging torpedoes.” Carter saw at least three of the torpedoes explode into Yamato’s hull from amidships to the bow. Two hit so close they looked like a single huge explosion.

  The dreadnought was still fighting back. Her gunners were putting out a sporadic barrage of antiaircraft fire, frothing the water and hammering the Avengers with the concussion of the bursts. As Carter began his own run from aft of the battleship, he could see tracers arcing toward his Avenger. He launched his torpedo across Yamato’s curving wake. Pulling away from the target, he tried to shrink into the metal frame of his seat. He could feel the ping and clatter of shrapnel hitting the Avenger’s skin. He saw that his torpedo had run true, cutting inside Yamato’s swerving turn and exploding into the battleship’s port quarter.

  Yamato’s tower bridge was leaning at a precarious angle. Mitsuru Yoshida couldn’t help thinking about the irony of the situation. It was the Imperial Japanese Navy who had taught the world how to destroy surface warships with airpower. They had done it at Pearl Harbor, and two days later they repeated the lesson off Malaya by sinking the British battleship Prince of Wales and the battle cruiser Repulse. The British commander, Admiral Sir Tom Phillips, had made the fatal mistake of taking his surface force into battle without air cover.

  The Japanese had just made the same mistake.

  Watching the American warplanes, Yoshida wondered about the men in the cockpits. They seemed undaunted by the wall of flak thrown up by the task force. Several had been hit, bursting into flame and crashing into the sea.

  But none were emulating the Japanese tokko airmen. Not one American pilot had crashed his airplane into an enemy ship. To Yoshida, this single fact more than anything else revealed the chasm between their cultures.

  The abandon-ship order was being yelled by messengers throughout the ship. It was time for Yoshida to leave the bridge. Yamato’s list was now 80 degrees. The ship was capsizing.

  Kazuhiro Fukumoto heard the crash of the bombs and the booming of the guns. The sounds were coming from directly above him. He and the rest of his damage control unit beneath the middle section of the starboard weather deck were waiting to be sent to a stricken area of the ship. The suspense was nerve-wracking. Fukumoto envied the men up there shooting the guns. They were so busy they had no time to think about where the next bomb would hit.

  At about 1400 Fukumoto’s unit finally received orders. They were needed down on the lowest and second-lowest decks. They split up, with Fukumoto and three others going to the second-lowest deck, while two officers were to inspect damage on the lowest deck.

  Just as they closed the hatch behind them, a torpedo exploded into the starboard hull. Within seconds every man on the lowest deck was killed by the avalanche of seawater. The lights extinguished in the space where Fukumoto stood, and water came surging up from below. In the pitch blackness, feeling the water closing around him, the young sailor fought against the panic that swelled up in him.

  The air pressure in the rapidly filling compartment built up, blowing open an overhead hatch. A tiny stream of light burst into the flooded compartment, and the terrified sailors swam toward it. They were barely able to enter the compartment above before the flood of water came surging up behind them. They battened down the hatch, but the relentless pressure kept seawater gushing up through the cracks, threatening to blow the hatch.

  More torpedoes slammed into Yamato. The battleship was listing severely to port. Fukumoto and his stranded shipmates swam through one compartment after another, making their way toward the stern. They finally arrived at a small hatch that opened to the aft deck.

  Fukumoto was so exhausted from the effort he had to be pulled through the hatch by his division officer. Standing on the stern, he got his first look at the carnage topside. Dead gunners were sprawled across the deck next to their gun mounts. Fukumoto recognized one of his friends, a sailor named Yoshifuji who was no more than sixteen years old. Yoshifuji’s head was split open, and blood pumped out each time he took a breath. The dying sailor moaned, “Long live the emperor.”

  The battle was almost over for Yamato. The ship was nearly capsized, listing so steeply that one of the main gun turrets was already submerged. The crew’s bushido spirit had been replaced with the survival instinct. Fukumoto’s division officer gave the order to toss into the sea everything that would float—wooden timbers, logs, judo mats, hammocks.

  The sailors crawled up the nearly vertical deck to the starboard hull. It was wet and slick. With nothing to cling to, sailors were sliding and jumping into the sea.

  Yoshida wriggled up through the lookout port and clung to the starboard bulkhead of the bridge tower, which was nearly submerged. Rear A
dmiral Ariga, lashed to his compass binnacle, had already vanished beneath the water. So had the navigation officer and his assistant, who also had tied themselves to their stations. Yoshida could see dozens of crewmen perched like stranded rats on the rust-colored belly of the battleship.

  The sea rose from beneath them. As water engulfed the ship, men disappeared into the yawning eddies and whirlpools around the sinking hull. Yoshida drew a deep breath and rolled himself up in a ball. For what seemed an eternity, he churned inside the snarling whirlpool, unable to escape, feeling that each of his limbs was being torn from his body.

  It was then that the Yamato exploded.

  There she blows!” someone yelled over the tactical frequency. Every pilot saw it, including Herb Houck, who had positioned his Hellcat so that his aerial camera could record the battleship’s last minutes. He’d been watching Yamato capsize, settling beneath the waves, with crewmen still clinging like ants to her red-bottomed hull. In the water around her he saw rafts, flotsam, floating bodies, and the heads of swimmers.

  And then at 1423, she blew up. The fireball looked like a volcanic eruption, soaring a thousand feet above the surface. As the fireball dissipated, a black, mushroom-shaped cloud took its place, billowing a mile into the sky. The smoke column was seen by coast watchers more than a hundred miles away on the shore of Kyushu.

  Later it would be theorized that Yamato’s 90-degree list caused the shells for her main batteries to slide in their magazine, hitting their fuses and exploding. The explosion sent thousands of pieces of shrapnel into the air, and the rain of debris killed most of the unlucky sailors swimming on the surface. The underwater concussion killed those near the submerged main deck. The swimmers unlucky enough to be near Yamato’s raked smokestack were caught in the massive suction created by the huge open funnel as the ship went under.

  Kazuhiro Fukumoto’s timing was perfect. Yamato exploded precisely in the tiny sliver of time while he was dropping to the sea. Many who had just splashed into the water were killed, their internal organs crushed by the concussion. Those close to the side of the ship died in the blast. Fukumoto hit the water, stunned but alive.

  He had no time to rejoice. The sunken ship was moving slowly forward, and he was sucked into the whirlpool created by the still-revolving 16-foot-long bronze propeller blades.

  Fukumoto couldn’t free himself from the tug of the whirlpool. For the second time in ten minutes, he was about to drown. He tried to take a breath, but sucked in a lungful of seawater. With darkness closing around him, Fukumoto knew he was doomed.

  Mitsuru Yoshida was clawing his way up from the depths. Because he’d gone into the water from the bridge, he had been shielded from the worst of the blast. The bodies of the men on the surface absorbed most of the falling debris, but Yoshida received a gash in his head from underwater shrapnel. In shock, his lungs nearly bursting, he clawed his way to the surface.

  Naoyoshi Ishida leaped from the starboard rails as Yamato was capsizing. He was sucked into one of the whirlpools, struggling to breathe, unable to claw his way to the surface. As he was suffocating, knowing that he was being dragged to the bottom along with the battleship, he had a vision. He saw the face of his newborn son, whom he had cradled for the first and last time during his visit before the Yamato left Kure. Ishida had been unable to say farewell to his wife and child. Now it was too late.

  The vision gave him new strength. Clawing madly, he fought his way up through the debris and gushing whirlpool and popped to the surface. The underwater explosion had burst an eardrum, and a piece of shrapnel had snapped a tendon in Ishida’s hip. Floating in the oil slick, he dodged machine gun bullets and clung to floating objects, all the while keeping the image of his newborn son firmly fixed in his mind.

  Another one still alive was Kazuhiro Fukumoto. Somehow the eighteen-year-old sailor had been spat out of the whirlpool around Yamato’s giant propeller blade. Submerged and barely conscious, he had sensed light and air above him and thrashed his way to the surface. In a daze, he found that he could breathe and still swim. He spotted a wooden timber floating nearby, and he clung to it while he gathered his senses.

  The Yamato was gone. There was nothing in sight except an immense column of smoke. As far as Fukumoto could tell, he was the only one still alive in the tossing sea. Then a wave raised him up, and he saw other heads bobbing on the surface. For nearly two more hours Fukumoto clung to his timber until he heard an officer calling for the survivors to come together. Fukumoto was able to climb onto an emergency raft with a couple dozen others. With the overloaded raft nearly submerged, the exhausted survivors had to turn away other struggling swimmers.

  As an officer, Mitsuru Yoshida took charge of a party of ten swimmers, ordering them to gather pieces of flotsam to fashion a raft. The oil-slicked water stung their eyes and clogged their throats and windpipes. Many had used all their strength to escape the whirlpools and explosions. Now they were unable to hang on to the floating objects. They gave up and slipped beneath the waves.

  The Yamato might be gone, but the enemy was still there. The sprawling oil slick served as a marker on the ocean for where the ship had sunk—and where her surviving crewmen were floating. The warplanes came swooping back down, one after the other, leaving long white tracks of .50-caliber machine gun fire spurting across the water. For twenty minutes they raked the survivors of Yamato and Yahagi and the sunken destroyers.

  Ducking bullets, watching the heads of their comrades splattering like melons, the swimmers felt a mixture of terror and hatred. It was not a surprise that the enemy would shoot them in the water. Given the chance, they would do the same. For some, the hail of bullets had an energizing effect. Hating the Americans gave them the spark to stay alive.

  The destroyer Fuyutsuki hove into view, signaling with a flag that the men in the water should hold out just a little while longer. The enemy airplanes were still in the area. Finally the destroyer slid up to them and put down rope ladders. The men in the water were black with oil, barely able to maintain a grip on the ropes. Several made it to the top, only to lose consciousness, fall back into the water, and drown.

  Mitsuru Yoshida was one of the last to climb aboard Fuyutsuki. Smeared with blood and oil, he summoned his last ounce of strength to haul himself up the rope ladder.

  With darkness coming, another still-intact destroyer, Yukikaze, joined the search for survivors. One of those hauled aboard was Lt. Naoyoshi Ishida, nearly delirious from his injuries. Another was the young sailor Kazuhiro Fukumoto. Faltering at the top of the rope ladder, Fukumoto was slapped on both cheeks by an officer to keep him conscious long enough to climb over the side. The sailor stumbled belowdecks, where the crew gave him blankets and warm wine.

  Four hours had passed since Yamato blew up. Nearly 4,000 men who had sailed aboard the battleship and her escorts were dead. Of Yamato’s crew, only 269 had been saved, and Kazuhiro Fukumoto was one of them. He would spend the rest of his life wondering why.

  Of the ten warships that had set out with the Second Fleet task force, six were still afloat, but barely. The destroyers Isokaze and Kasumi were shattered hulks, dead in the water and awash with blood.

  At 1655, after removing 15 officers and 270 men from Kasumi, Fuyutsuki put two torpedoes into the destroyer and sent her to the bottom. Later that evening, Yukikaze came alongside the wreck of Isokaze. After off-loading the still-living crew members, she tried to scuttle the destroyer with a torpedo, but it passed beneath the hull without exploding. Isokaze finally pumped shells at point-blank range, leaving the derelict with her dead crewmen blazing like a torch on the darkened ocean.

  Meanwhile, another destroyer, Suzutsuki, had gone missing during the aerial attack and was presumed sunk. Not until the next morning did the shattered destroyer appear off the coast of Kyushu, laboriously steaming backward to protect her destroyed bow.

  The search for survivors ended, and the remaining warships of the task force threaded their way back through the picket line of American
submarines to the base at Sasebo. Yukikaze suffered the indignity of two more torpedo hits from lurking American submarines. Neither torpedo exploded, but the thunk of the weapons slamming into the ship only further twanged the nerves of the traumatized survivors.

  That night the message reached the Combined Fleet Headquarters: Operation Ten-Go was officially ended.

  23 DUMBO AND MIGHTY MOUSE

  EAST CHINA SEA

  APRIL 7, 1945

  Their call signs were “Dog Eight” and “Dog Ten.” Lieutenants Dick Simms and Jim Young were the pilots of the two Martin PBM Mariners of VPB-21 that had been shadowing the Japanese task force. Since early morning the big flying boats had flitted in and out of the clouds, radioing position reports, staying just out of range of the antiaircraft guns on the ships below. When the strike planes showed up to hit the task force, the PBMs remained on station as “Dumbos”—search and rescue aircraft—so named from the Walt Disney cartoon featuring a baby flying elephant.

  The Mariner was a gull-winged, two-engine flying boat with a crew of seven and an on-station time of fourteen hours. It was both a lethal weapons platform—it could carry 8,000 pounds of bombs and torpedoes and had eight .50-caliber guns—and a sitting duck. Like all flying boats, the lumbering PBM was slow and easy to hit.

  In the hierarchy of military aviation, being a Dumbo pilot didn’t carry the same cachet as flying a fighter. Dumbo duty was tedious and often dangerous. When the PBM crew located an air-crewman in the water, they would keep a vigil overhead, dropping a float light or a raft, flying cover until a destroyer or submarine showed up. When necessary, they made an open ocean landing, a high-risk maneuver in heavy seas. After hauling the airman aboard, the Dumbo pilot would coax the flying boat back into the air, slamming through waves and troughs, praying that the hull didn’t split apart.