The Twilight Warriors

by Robert Gandt

  Quiel pulled up to the right, then swung back in a pursuit curve on the four remaining Japanese fighters. He shot down another one. Then another. But with the Corsair’s speed advantage of nearly a hundred knots he was again overrunning the two surviving fighters.

  As Quiel bore down on them, one of the Nates abruptly rolled inverted and did a split-S—the bottom half of a loop, disappearing into the clouds. Quiel guessed that he would impact the water before pulling out.

  The single remaining Nate continued boring straight ahead, apparently fixated on one of the picket destroyers in the ocean. Quiel was overtaking him too fast to get a shot. He tried to slow the Corsair, snatching the throttle back, putting the propeller into full low pitch, extending several degrees of landing flap.

  It wasn’t enough. Seconds later, Quiel found himself alongside the Nate fighter, wing tip to wing tip. Time seemed to freeze while Quiel stared at the enemy pilot 30 feet away. The Nate’s cockpit canopy was open. Quiel could see the young man’s face, the leather helmet with white fur trim. The Japanese pilot refused to look at him. As in a trance, he had his eyes riveted on his target—the destroyer straight ahead.

  Quiel opened his canopy and yanked out his .38 revolver. There was almost no relative motion between the airplanes. He’d shoot the son of a bitch the old-fashioned way. At this range he couldn’t miss.

  Quiel was aiming the pistol, about to squeeze off a round, when an explosion erupted just ahead of him. Then another. Antiaircraft fire was erupting all around him. Damn. The gunners on the destroyer were shooting at both airplanes, not bothering to distinguish between them.

  In the next instant, the Nate was gone, diving almost straight down at the destroyer. Quiel dove after him, trying to get into firing position again. Antiaircraft fire was bursting around both airplanes.

  Quiel couldn’t get another shot. Helplessly he watched the Japanese plane crash into the destroyer’s forward gun turret. He thought it was the end of the destroyer.

  It wasn’t. To Quiel’s amazement, the tin can emerged from the smoke and debris of the crash, seemingly unfazed. Still steaming at full speed, the destroyer had shrugged off the kamikaze hit as if it were a mosquito bite.

  Phil Kirkwood, true to form, had tangled with a flock of twenty kamikazes that were bearing down on another destroyer. In less than a minute Kirkwood shot down a Val dive-bomber as it was beginning its run. Seconds later he flamed a Nate fighter, also bearing down on the destroyer.

  Kirkwood kept shooting, chasing each kamikaze down through bursts of antiaircraft fire. He splashed three more before they could reach the destroyer.

  When the enemy airplanes had finally stopped showing up, he rejoined with Quiel. They were on their way back to the CAP station when Kirkwood spotted the silhouettes of kamikazes attacking yet another destroyer. In the space of a few minutes, Kirkwood shot down yet one more Nate, exploding it into the water a hundred yards short of the destroyer.

  For Kirkwood and Quiel, the melee over the picket stations was over. Together the pair had accounted for ten enemy airplanes. The day’s action put Quiel on the roster of aces and elevated Kirkwood to double ace status. By downing six in a single mission, Phil Kirkwood had accomplished a feat almost unmatched by anyone else in his squadron.

  Almost. What he didn’t know was that twenty miles to the north, his Tail End Charlie, Al Lerch, was making history.

  The radarman in the picket destroyer Laffey stared at his scope. There were at least fifty bogeys, more than he’d ever seen in a single cluster. They looked like fast-multiplying amoebas spreading over the fluorescent screen.

  The bogeys were headed straight for Laffey.

  Escorting Laffey at the lonely radar picket station were a pair of support gunboats, LCS-51 and LCS-116. The gunboats had been on station for two days without firing a shot. There’d been several nerve-jangling late-night calls to battle stations but no kamikaze attacks. Their luck seemed to be holding.

  Laffey’s skipper, Cmdr. Julian Becton, had already seen his share of action. He’d been the executive officer of the destroyer Aaron Ward when it was sunk off Guadalcanal in April 1943. After fighting in several more surface actions in the South Pacific, he took command of a new destroyer, USS Laffey, in February 1944. The 2,200-ton Laffey was the second destroyer to bear the name. Her predecessor, DD-459, had also gone down off Guadalcanal in 1942.

  Becton and his new ship joined the bombardment force at the D-day landings at Normandy, firing more shells than any other destroyer in the invasion. By the end of 1944, Laffey had transferred to the Pacific, joining the fight in the Philippines, then at Iwo Jima, and now at Okinawa.

  Two days ago Laffey had been in the Kerama Retto anchorage taking on ammunition and supplies. As they were leaving, Becton exchanged greetings with the skipper of the destroyer Cassin Young, which had taken a kamikaze hit a few days earlier. Young’s captain was a friend and Naval Academy classmate of Becton’s. “Keep moving and keep shooting,” yelled out Cassin Young’s skipper. “Steam as fast as you can, and shoot as fast as you can.”

  It was good advice, Becton thought. So were the parting words from a gun captain on another destroyer, Purdy: “You guys have a fighting chance, but they’ll keep on coming till they get you. You’ll knock a lot of them down, and you’ll think you’re doing fine. But in the end there’ll be this one bastard with your name on his ticket.”

  Now it was the morning of April 16, and Laffey was on station at RP1, which had become the kamikazes’ favorite hunting ground. The crew’s chow line had been interrupted once already by a call to general quarters. A snooper had come close enough for the forward 5-inch gun batteries to open fire. The snooper fled, but in his place came the swarm of bogeys. Now they were circling overhead, staying just out of range of the antiaircraft guns.

  The first to peel off were four fixed-gear D3A Val dive bombers. Swooping down like vultures, they split into pairs, two on the starboard bow, the other pair coming from astern.

  Becton ordered Laffey into a hard turn to port. The destroyer’s forward 5-inchers opened up, splashing both Vals attacking at the bow. The pair from astern were coming in low—so low that one inadvertently caught his landing gear in the wave tops and pitched over into the sea. The second disintegrated in the torrent of combined gunfire from Laffey and one of her escorting gunboats.

  Four up, four down, but there was no break in the action. Two D4Y Judy dive-bombers were coming in from either side. The Judys were sleeker and faster than the obsolescent Vals—and harder to hit. The 40-millimeter and 20-millimeter gunners chopped up the Judy attacking on the starboard side, but the one from the port side slipped through the fire. As he drew closer, the pilot opened up with his machine guns. Bullets raked the deck, killing gunners and pinging into Laffey’s superstructure.

  Just as the antiaircraft fire converged on the Judy, the pilot released his bomb. The bomb detonated on the water, but the explosion sent shrapnel slashing across Laffey’s deck, mowing down more crewmen and knocking out the critical surface search radar.

  Keep moving and keep shooting. The words from Cassin Young’s skipper were fresh in Becton’s mind. He was swinging Laffey’s bow in vicious turns from port to starboard and back again, keeping her guns broadside to the attackers.

  Another pair of kamikazes, a Val and a Judy dive-bomber, came swooping in from opposite sides in a coordinated attack. Laffey’s gunners splashed them both, but the shattered Val grazed the destroyer’s aft 5-inch mount, killing one of the gunners, before crashing into the sea on the far side of the ship.

  Laffey had been under attack for twelve minutes, but it seemed like a year. The destroyer had fought off eight kamikazes without taking a single direct hit. The combined firepower of the destroyer and her two LCS gunboat escorts had taken down every attacking plane. Laffey’s luck seemed to be holding.

  For three minutes there was a break in the attacks. Then another Val came roaring in from the port bow. Even as the streams of gunfire from the destro
yer and the gunboats poured into the kamikaze, it somehow held its course. The Val slammed into Laffey’s port side, exploding into the amidships 20-millimeter gun station before caroming off the starboard side into the sea.

  Three more gunners were killed instantly, and the entire aft half of the destroyer was torched in flaming gasoline. Laffey’s streak of luck had ended.

  A few miles to the north, Tail End Charlie Al Lerch was making the most of his new role—section leader. On his wing was Tuck Heath, whose dead radio, at least according to standard procedure, should have excluded him from the mission. But Heath’s guns still worked, and he was sticking with Lerch.

  Then Lerch spotted the most tantalizing sight he’d ever seen—a flock of thirty Nate fighters, droning toward them like ducks to a blind. The Nates were in loose three-plane formations. Each was carrying an external bomb intended for a U.S. ship.

  With Heath in trail, Lerch swept down on the Nates. On the first pass, each pilot gunned down one Nate. The panicky survivors scattered, diving for the water, with Lerch and Heath hard on their tails. The inept Japanese pilots were clearly untrained in air-to-air combat, milling around close to the water, making themselves easy targets for the Corsairs.

  Lerch slid in behind three slow-moving Nates. Firing from dead astern, he poured .50-caliber bullets into each of the hapless Nates. In the space of three minutes, Lerch had sent all three flaming into the ocean.

  Climbing back to altitude, Lerch looked around for Heath, who had gone missing. Then Lerch spotted three more Nates cutting across the northern tip of Okinawa, a few miles away. He was sweeping in behind one of them, about to squeeze his trigger, when he sensed a dark blue object swelling in his peripheral vision.

  It was Heath. He was still radioless, but he was fixated on the same target that Lerch had in his sights. At the last instant, Lerch swerved out of the way, barely avoiding a collision, while Heath blazed away at the hapless Nate fighter.

  There was no shortage of targets. Minutes later, Lerch was behind another Nate. At close range, he opened fire from directly astern.

  The next thing Al Lerch saw was a fireball in front of his nose. Instinctively he ducked in the cockpit, feeling pieces of the exploding Nate thunking into his wings and cowling.

  Emerging from the cloud of debris, he peered around. There was nothing left of the Nate. Lerch’s Corsair was damaged—he could see dents and rips in the leading edges—but the engine was still running.

  And his guns still worked. Minutes later, Lerch found himself in yet another nose-to-nose contest with Heath, both of them chasing another Nate. This time Lerch got to it first, setting it afire, with Heath delivering the coup de grace.

  It was another day for the record books. Phil Kirkwood’s four-plane division had gunned down twenty enemy airplanes, with Kirkwood and Quiel accounting for half the total. The second pair, Tail End Charlies Heath and Lerch, did just as well. Tuck Heath, who by strict interpretation of the rules shouldn’t have been in the fight, was credited with three kills.

  But it was Al Lerch who won the greatest share of the glory. In a single mission, the baby-faced ensign shot down seven enemy airplanes, a feat of arms matched by only four other Americans in history.

  29 AS LONG AS A GUN WILL FIRE

  RADAR PICKET STATION 1

  APRIL 16, 1945

  The fires on the Laffey weren’t going out. Skipper Julian Becton was forced to slow the destroyer’s speed to keep from fanning the flames. An ominous column of black smoke was billowing into the sky, a beacon for more kamikazes.

  In quick succession, two more Val dive-bombers swept down on Laffey. The first attacked from astern, close to the water and partly obscured by the cloud of smoke trailing the destroyer. Despite taking repeated hits, the Val plowed into Laffey’s aft gun mounts. Gun captain Larry Delewski was blown over the side by the explosion. Amazingly, Delewski was unhurt, and so were two other crewmen who went into the water and were later picked up by one of the gunboats.

  Flames were leaping from Laffey’s fantail, and the black smoke thickened over the ship. Firefighters worked desperately to keep the fires from reaching the ammunition magazines. Just when it seemed that Laffey’s condition could get no worse, an eleventh attacker crashed into the stern in almost the same spot as the one before. Another gun crew was killed instantly.

  Yet another Val came diving from astern. Unlike the committed kamikazes, this one planted his bomb directly into Laffey’s stern, then pulled up and soared back into the sky. The explosion of the bomb severed the cables and hydraulic lines to the destroyer’s steering gear, jamming the rudder at 26 degrees to port.

  Keep moving and keep shooting. The advice Becton had received now seemed like a bad joke. He had no choice except to steam in a leftward circle. He couldn’t straighten the ship’s rudder, and he had only a few remaining guns.

  For the kamikazes still circling, the crippled destroyer was an easy target. Two more Vals came boring in from the port quarter. The first exploded into the aft deckhouse, sending up a cascade of fire and shrapnel. Right behind it came the second, crashing in almost the same spot. Flaming gasoline covered the aft half of the destroyer.

  Belowdecks, the crew was fighting to save the ship—and their lives. Two machinist’s mates, George Logan and Stephen Waite, were trapped in the emergency diesel room. With no light and no ventilation, they signaled the engine room of their predicament. Their fellow machinist’s mates John Michel and Buford Thompson managed to chisel a hole in the bulkhead large enough to thread an air hose into the compartment. Two more machinist’s mates, Art Hogan and Elton Peeler, went to work with cutting torches, finally opening a hole large enough to haul the trapped men to safety.

  Overhead, a dozen Corsairs had showed up to engage the attacking kamikazes. As Becton watched from his bridge, a Nakajima Ki-43 Oscar fighter came streaking toward Laffey’s port bow, flying through a hail of 40-millimeter and 20-millimeter fire. Directly behind it, flying through the same fire, came a Marine Corsair, blazing away at the Oscar that was aimed at Laffey’s bridge.

  The Oscar missed the bridge, but his wing ripped through the port yardarm of the mast. With a spectacular crash, the yardarm crashed to the deck, carrying the American flag with it. A half second later, the pursuing Corsair hit the same mast, tearing off the air-search radar antenna.

  Astonished, Becton watched the crippled planes flounder back over the water. Each was struggling to stay airborne. The fatally damaged Oscar wobbled, then dropped its nose and crashed into the sea. The Corsair clawed its way up for a few hundred feet more, then a tiny figure tumbled from the cockpit. Moments later, Becton saw a parachute canopy blossom, and the pilot descended to the water.

  On Laffey’s bridge, nineteen-year-old Ari Phoutrides, the quartermaster of the watch, was supposed to be writing down everything that happened. “I couldn’t even hold a pencil,” Phoutrides recalled, “let alone write.”

  With all other communications lines severed, Phoutrides was the captain’s lookout and messenger. Phoutrides spotted a kamikaze coming in low on the port beam. “I had to practically beat the OOD [officer of the deck] over the head with my fist before he paid any attention to me. This was the only time I’ve hit an officer and gotten away with it.” Alerted to the danger, the gunners splashed the kamikaze just in time.

  The Corsairs were taking down some of the kamikazes, but not all. A Judy dive-bomber came roaring in on the port beam with a Corsair nipping at his tail. Laffey’s gunners opened up on the Judy, trying to keep from hitting the American fighter, finally exploding the kamikaze 50 yards short of Laffey. The shrapnel slammed into the destroyer, slicing the communications lines to the 5-inch guns and wounding most of the gunners.

  That made seventeen attackers so far, and there seemed to be no end in sight. With the electrical controls of their gun mounts gone, Laffey’s gunners were down to old-fashioned manual control.

  Two more kamikazes, both Oscar fighters, were converging from the starboard side.
The first exploded from a direct hit in the nose by a manually controlled 5-inch gun mount. The second, boring in on the starboard bow, also went down from 5-inch fire.

  Laffey was almost finished. The assistant communications officer, Lt. Frank Manson, asked Becton if he thought they’d have to abandon ship. “No,” snapped the captain. “I’ll never abandon ship as long as a gun will fire.”

  Luckily, Becton didn’t hear the lookout next to him, who added in a low voice, “And if I can find one man to fire it.”

  On his CAP station over the northern picket ships, Grim Reapers skipper Lt. Cmdr. Wally Clarke was finally getting into the action. He had just received a vector to intercept bogeys coming from the northwest.

  Clarke’s number three, Lt. (jg) Charles “Bo” Farmer, was the first to spot them: twelve o’clock high, at 20,000 feet. Bo Farmer had the same score as Clarke—four kills—from his earlier combat tour. Like Clarke, he was one tantalizing number away from being an ace.

  Climbing through 16,000 feet, they got a good look at the bogeys. These weren’t the sitting-duck Nates and Val kamikazes like Kirkwood’s flight had just finished blowing out of the sky. These were Tony and Zero fighters—real fighters—and they were there to cover the kamikazes.

  As the Corsairs approached, the Japanese fighters peeled off, swooping down to meet them. Instead of a turkey shoot, this was going to be a classic, no-holds-barred dogfight.

  Clarke’s Tail End Charlie, Ens. Ray James, saw the distinctive shapes of three Tony fighters swooping down toward him in a perfect pursuit curve. The Tony was unique, the only Japanese fighter powered by an in-line, liquid-cooled engine. When the Tony made its first appearance in the Pacific, it was mistaken for a German Messerschmitt Bf 109.

  James winced as he saw the tracers of the first Tony’s 12.7-millimeter machine guns searing past him. But the Japanese pilot had been too eager. The bullets missed James’s Corsair, and now Wally Clarke was whipping in behind the Tony. Seconds later, Clarke had him in his sights, gunning the Japanese fighter out of the air.