The Twilight Warriors

by Robert Gandt

Though his tokko warriors hadn’t scored great successes yet against the enemy carriers, Ugaki believed they had caused significant damage to the enemy’s heavy surface ships. According to the action reports, the attacks of April 6–8—kikusui No. 1—had sunk or seriously damaged sixty-nine American ships. These supposedly included two battleships, three cruisers, and three destroyers.

  The Japanese estimates were wildly off the mark. In total, twenty-eight American ships had been hit, eight of them sunk. Two were the destroyers Bush and Colhoun, and five others—Leutze, Morris, Mullany, Newcomb, and Bennett—had taken such damage that they were out of the war. They were serious losses, but of no real consequence to the operating strength of the Fifth Fleet.

  What worried Ugaki now was a recent report from Okinawa. Spotters had counted as many as 130 enemy fighters, mostly F4U Corsairs, based at the two captured airfields, Yontan and Kadena. Being so close to the anchorages at Okinawa, the shore-based fighters posed an even more serious threat to the tokko raiders than the American carrier-based planes. Ugaki ordered that the two airfields on Okinawa receive special attention from the next wave of tokkotai.

  Kikusui No. 2 finally took to the air in the late morning of April 12. For this massed attack, Ugaki had assembled 185 tokko aircraft, 150 fighters, and 45 torpedo planes.

  First went the fighters, taking off in twenty-four-plane waves throughout the morning. Their mission would be to engage the enemy air patrols guarding the carriers and the anchorages at Okinawa. At midday, 129 more warplanes roared down the runway at Kanoya. Eight were Mitsubishi Betty bombers carrying Ohka rocket-boosted, human-guided missiles.

  As wave after wave of warplanes headed toward their targets, Ugaki again settled himself in his command post to await the reports. As usual, he entered his trancelike state while the excited voices of men in the last minutes of their lives crackled over the speaker: “Stand by for the release of Ohka.” Then, “Release—hit a battleship.” Finally, “One battleship sunk.”

  Battleship? Listening to the terse radio transmissions, Matome Ugaki could barely contain his excitement. Could the reports be true?

  The reports weren’t true. Of the three battleships under attack by kamikazes—New Mexico, Idaho, and Tennessee—none had been sunk. On Turner’s order, Rear Adm. Mort Deyo had moved his entire beach gunfire force—ten battlewagons, seven cruisers, and twelve destroyers—out to what was being called “Kamikaze Gulch,” the open triangle of ocean bounded by Ie Shima, the Kerama Retto, and the shore of Okinawa. Once on station, Deyo arranged his ships in air defense formation to await the kamikazes.

  The first wave showed up in the early afternoon. Once again, they homed in on the northern picket station, RP1. The veteran picket destroyer Cassin Young’s luck ran out when a Val dive-bomber slithered through the hail of gunfire and slammed into her, knocking out the vital radar, damaging the fire room, and causing sixty casualties.

  More kamikazes sank one of Cassin Young’s supporting gunboats, LCS-33, and knocked another out of action. Yet another kamikaze, chased by three CAP fighters, crashed alongside USS Purdy, a picket destroyer, knocking out her steering.

  In the space of a few fiery minutes, the kamikazes had put every ship on RP1 out of action. Not for long, however. Two more destroyers, Stanly and Lang, were already racing across Kamikaze Gulch to take up duty at the critical RP1.

  They, too, would be met by kamikazes. Among them were the Thunder Gods—the Ohka pilots from Kanoya’s Jinrai Butai.

  Lt. (jg) Saburo Dohi, like the other young Thunder Gods, had lived with the knowledge that he could be called to sortie at any moment. Dohi was from Osaka and was a graduate of the public school system. For the previous two weeks, the young officer had kept himself occupied improving the living quarters of his fellow Ohka pilots. They were billeted in an ancient primary school building with holes in the roof and windows broken out from air raids. Dohi and a group of junior pilots mopped floors, patched holes, and acquired straw mats and bamboo beds for the incoming airmen. Until the day came when they departed on their missions, they would have decent beds and quarters to sleep in.

  For Saburo Dohi, that day, April 12, had come. He had been assigned as one of the eight Thunder Gods making Ohka human-guided bomb attacks against the U.S. fleet.

  As the Ohka-carrying Betty bombers lumbered through the sky toward Okinawa, they spread out, each taking a different route to the targets. The bitter lesson from the sixteen-ship Ohka attack of March 21 had been that, in a massed formation, the overloaded Bettys were like a flock of geese: easy to find, easy to kill. Every one of the bombers had been gunned down by American fighters.

  If Dohi had any trepidation about that day’s mission, it didn’t show. While the bomber droned southward, the young pilot dozed on a makeshift cot until they were within range of American ships. Then, with great formality, Dohi tied his ceremonial white hachimaki over his forehead. He shook hands with the aircraft commander, then climbed down through the bomb bay to the cockpit of the Ohka. Over the voice tube connection to the Betty crew, he announced that he was ready.

  The explosive charge that was supposed to release the Ohka failed. The Ohka was still fastened to the mother ship. For another perilous minute, while the bomber flew into the jaws of the enemy fleet, Dohi waited in the cockpit of his rocket ship.

  Finally a crewman yanked the manual release. The Ohka dropped away from the mother ship. Suspended by its tiny wings, the craft plunged earthward from 19,000 feet.

  Peering through the flat front glass of his windshield, Saburo Dohi selected his target—a gray object four miles in the distance. The enemy warship appeared to be dead in the water. Nearing the target, Dohi ignited the three rocket boosters. The Ohka shot ahead, accelerating to nearly 600 miles per hour.

  The destroyer Mannert L. Abele was already in trouble. On station at RP14, she had just been crashed by a Zero kamikaze plane. The explosion destroyed the engine room, broke both propeller shafts, and broke the ship’s keel. Now, while Abele’s crew was struggling to save the ship, antiaircraft gunners picked up another incoming object.

  It wasn’t another Zero. This was something tiny, moving at high speed, slanting down toward the stationary destroyer. It didn’t look like anything they’d ever seen before. Before Abele’s gunners could track the kamikaze—or whatever the thing was—it was too late. The object crashed into Abele’s hull just below her number one stack.

  For the Mannert L. Abele, it was instant death. The explosion blew the destroyer in half. Within seconds both pieces of the shattered destroyer sank, taking eighty men to their deaths.

  Abele had just earned a singular distinction: she was the first warship to be sunk by the mysterious new Ohka human-guided bomb. And Saburo Dohi had also earned a place in history: he was the first of the Thunder Gods to sink a major enemy warship.

  Dohi would not be alone. In the sky over the other picket stations, his fellow Thunder Gods were making their own final flights.

  What the hell is that?

  None of the gunners on the picket destroyer USS Stanly had ever seen such a thing. The low-flying object looked like an aerial torpedo, hurtling at bullet speed across the water. Stanly’s gunners weren’t able to touch it.

  Before anyone could react, the object slammed into Stanly’s hull, hitting with such velocity that it passed completely through the destroyer’s thin steel hull, not exploding until it had exited on the other side. The destroyer’s bow was punctured and wrinkled, but the ship was still operational.

  Before Stanly’s crew had recovered from the shock of the first attack, another of the weird objects appeared. This one was coming just as fast, low on the water, and it looked as if the pilot couldn’t control it. Porpoising up and down, the craft skimmed over the destroyer’s bow without making contact. The tiny craft went into a hard left turn and was trying to set up for another pass at the destroyer when the gunners finally found the mark. The object exploded into the water slightly more than a mile off Stanly’s port side. />
  Stanly had been lucky, but the destroyer Lang, which had joined Stanly for mutual fire support, was even luckier. Lang’s gunners had been busy blazing away at incoming enemy planes, flaming a Val that had attempted a bombing run, when they saw a blur of motion 500 yards to their port. Before they could react, the sleek, fast-moving object crashed into the ocean.

  Minutes later, it happened again. Another blurry object just like the first one came zooming in. The high-speed craft went into a violent porpoising movement and crashed into the ocean off the port bow.

  The tin can crews were mystified. Whatever the strange new aircraft were, they were apparently difficult to control at such speed. Both pilots had missed their targets.

  Another lucky ship was the destroyer Jeffers, which had been ordered to RP14 to assist the stricken Abele. Unlike the previous crews, the men aboard Jeffers spotted the peculiar, stubby-winged aircraft while it was being launched from a Betty bomber high overhead. Watching the tiny craft gaining speed, they realized that Jeffers was its target.

  Every antiaircraft gun on the destroyer opened as the guided bomb came at them, trailing a plume of smoke. Some of the gunfire appeared to hit the rocket ship, but it kept coming. At the last moment, Jeffers’s skipper gave the tin can hard left rudder.

  It was enough to throw off the Ohka pilot’s aim. The missile smacked the water fifty yards off Jeffers’s port rail, then ricocheted into the destroyer’s starboard quarter without exploding. By a miracle Jeffers escaped with only slight damage.

  It was the Americans’ first close encounter with the Ohka. Stanly’s skipper, Cmdr. R. S. Harlan, reported, “From the scraps of the jet-propelled plane that were left on board, we observed that they are constructed largely of plywood and balsa, with a very small amount of metal, most of that being extremely light aluminum.”

  Intelligence officers were already piecing together the parts of the puzzle. An example of the piloted bomb had been captured intact a few days ago at Yontan airfield on Okinawa, with a cherry blossom emblem on its nose. Intercepted Japanese message traffic referred to an operation involving bombers “equipped for cherry blossom attacks.”

  The Ohka quickly received an American code name—baka. In Japanese it meant “idiot.”

  Late that afternoon, April 12, the Betty bomber that had carried Saburo Dohi’s Ohka thumped back down on the runway at Kanoya after a nearly six-hour round trip. The Betty was the only survivor of the eight Ohka-carrying mother ships that had departed at midday. One never made it to the target area. The other six were shot down after launching their Ohka rocket planes.

  The crew of the lone Betty bomber brought with them the electrifying news of Dohi’s success. They had watched his Ohka streak downward toward a battleship, six miles in the distance. Minutes later, a column of black smoke belched 500 meters from the ocean where the enemy battleship had been. It was glorious!

  What the bomber crew identified as a battleship was, in fact, the destroyer Mannert L. Abele. But it didn’t matter. After all the discouraging failures, Dohi’s success was a hugely symbolic victory. The Thunder Gods had sunk their first ship.

  What none of them knew was that it was also their last.

  Saburo Dohi’s place was quickly taken by a new arrival. Since the beginning of the kikusui operations, there was a constant flow of new faces at Kanoya. Those who had departed on one-way tokko missions now numbered in the hundreds.

  The mood among the pilots waiting for their final flights was a mixture of melancholy and pride. With the arrival of spring, some volunteered to help the local population, who were mostly farmers, with their harvesting. The villagers reciprocated by bringing them gifts—eggs, chickens, even a cow.

  One day a mother and daughter came to Kanoya to visit the young woman’s fiancé. They hadn’t heard from him recently and they were concerned. What they didn’t know was that he was a tokko volunteer. He had made his last flight a few days before. The pilot’s best friend was at a loss what to tell the two women, so he sought the advice of Cmdr. Tadashi Nakajima.

  The senior officer thought it would be too cruel to tell the truth. The women were informed that the young man had left a few days before to go to an advance island base. They were showed the room that had recently been occupied by the departed pilot. The young woman touched the bamboo bed on which her fiancé had recently slept. “No further questions were asked,” recalled Commander Nakajima, “but they seemed instinctively to understand what had happened.”

  26 GUNSLINGERS

  TASK FORCE 58

  130 MILES NORTHEAST OF OKINAWA

  APRIL 11, 1945

  Lt. Mark Orr peered into the blackness beyond the Hellcat’s nose, trying to pick up the bogey. It was like staring into an inkwell. The visibility was down to four miles, the sea and the night sky blending into a horizonless void. Orr and his wingman, Ens. Tom Stixrud, had been on station over the carrier task force when the FIDO sent them on a hot vector after the bogey.

  It was nerve-wracking. Even with precise radar vectoring to within close range of the bogey, the night fighter pilots still had to get close enough to actually see the target before they could shoot him. Night air-to-air intercepts were a dangerous and demanding form of combat, wholly different from the swirling dogfights of the daytime. Night fighter pilots trusted their lives to their instruments, constantly fighting the vertigo induced by the lack of visual references. Every pinpoint of light—star, gunfire, ship’s light, aircraft engine exhaust—provided a false clue that could lure them into the black ocean.

  Someone had to do it. More and more the Japanese were turning to night attacks. Under cover of darkness, raiders slipped past CAP pilots and destroyer lookouts. Radar was the only means of detection, and shipboard fighter directors vectored the night CAP airplanes to intercept the incoming bogeys. The night fighters used their own onboard radar for the final intercept of the mostly invisible enemy. On most nights the system worked splendidly. Sometimes it didn’t work at all.

  The men who flew the night fighters were segregated from the air group by the clock and by culture. The other pilots—the day fliers—viewed them with awe and suspicion. Anyone who actually volunteered for night carrier duty was, by definition, certifiably weird. The night fighters went by various names—“Gloomies,” “Bat-CAPs,” and “red goggle gang,” so called because of the goggles they wore to protect their night vision.

  The Gloomies aboard Intrepid were led by Orr, a thirty-year-old Texan who formerly had been an instrument instructor in the training command. Orr and his pilots lived like nocturnal animals, sleeping by day, hunting bogeys by night.

  Orr and Stixrud were 40 miles east of the task force, closing on the bogey, when Orr picked him up on his onboard radar. The shadowy silhouette of a Betty bomber loomed out of the darkness ahead of them. Like a pair of disciplined hunting dogs, the Hellcat pilots went after him, alternating firing passes. Stixrud attacked from behind, then pulled away as Orr came in on a 45-degree flat run from the starboard side. When Orr broke off, Stixrud came back in to blaze away at the Betty’s left side.

  It was a cold and efficient exercise, lasting less than three minutes. Stixrud delivered the final burst of machine gun fire. An orange ball of fire punctuated the night sky. Sheathed in flame, the Betty rolled onto its left side and plunged into the ocean.

  Twenty-five minutes later, Orr was chasing another bogey while Stixrud remained at the CAP station. Orr again slid in close behind the bogey—another low-flying Betty bomber—and opened fire. He could see his bullets converging like tentacles on the Betty, but the Japanese plane somehow kept flying.

  As Orr kept shooting, his .50-caliber gun barrels overheated. Now half of them were no longer firing. Exasperated, he kicked the Hellcat’s rudder left and right, trying to spray the reduced machine gun fire across the Japanese bomber.

  Then came a warning from the FIDO. The two airplanes—Orr’s Hellcat and the Japanese Betty—were flying directly into the fleet’s antiaircraft screen. Or
r had to break it off before he was hit by the ships’ gunners.

  In the next second, as if on signal, gunfire from the fleet escort ships erupted around both airplanes.

  By now Mark Orr was a driven man. Ignoring the flak, he pulled in close enough to the Japanese bomber to see the orange flickers from the engine exhausts. Before he could fire again, a destroyer fired an antiaircraft burst directly in front of him. Orr zoomed over the top of the destroyer, still chasing the Betty, which was now headed directly for the carrier Yorktown.

  Orr stayed on the Betty’s tail, spraying bullets with his three still-firing guns. By now both the bomber’s engines were ablaze. Just as it seemed inevitable that it would crash into Yorktown, the Betty abruptly nosed over and hit the ocean.

  Now Orr was the only target left, and the ships’ gunners kept blazing away. Flying at 50 feet off the water, Orr zoomed through the hail of antiaircraft fire, somehow exiting the area without taking a hit.

  It had been a hell of a mission, but it wasn’t over. The climax of a night fighter mission was the night carrier landing. With his eyes fixed on the tiny illuminated stick figure of the landing signal officer on the edge of the flight deck, Orr landed the Hellcat back down on the darkened Intrepid. With adrenaline still surging in his veins, he made his way down to the Grim Reapers’ ready room, eager to tell someone what it was like out there.

  Nobody cared. The day fighter pilots were busy watching a movie in the ready room. They weren’t interested in the exploits of the weird Gloomies.

  As much as any man on the Grim Reaper roster, Lt. Wally Schub flew, talked, and looked like the Hollywood version of a fighter pilot. He had a dark mustache and wore the practiced gaze of a hard-eyed gunslinger. As one of Tommy Blackburn’s “irregulars” in the VF-17 days in the Solomons, Schub had gunned down two Japanese aircraft. Since then, he had been waiting for the day when he could add three more and be an official “ace”—a fighter pilot with five enemy kills to his credit.