The Twilight Warriors

by Robert Gandt

  Yahara, for his part, had reason to be pleased. His strategy was working. Already the 32nd Army had held out longer and with greater success than in any other Pacific island campaign. From their fallback line on Urasoe-Mura escarpment General Ushijima would continue Yahara’s carefully constructed holding strategy.

  Then came the night of April 29. It was the emperor’s birthday, and General Ushijima convened his staff officers in the underground headquarters. Fueled by larger-than-usual quantities of sake, General Cho was in his most strident bushido-obsessed voice. By now the divide between the conservatives, led by Colonel Yahara, and the fire-eaters, championed by Cho, had widened to a chasm.

  Cho was again demanding a counteroffensive. It was a matter of honor, he insisted. The 32nd Army should be revered in history as an army of warriors, not failed defenders. By the next night, April 30, a majority of Ushijima’s staff officers were recommending that he launch an all-out counteroffensive against the American line.

  To American officers—and to those of most other countries—it would seem a peculiar command style, a general taking a vote of his subordinates before making a crucial decision. It was not uncommon in the Imperial Japanese Army, and it was General Ushijima’s style. Without further deliberation, Ushijima signed the order. The counteroffensive would launch on May 4. It would be coordinated with kikusui No. 5, another massed tokko attack on the American fleet.

  Col. Hiromichi Yahara had again been outvoted and overruled. Dismayed, he watched his carefully constructed strategy for a holding action come apart. Yahara was a loyal soldier. He hoped that Cho’s counteroffensive would work. In his secret heart he knew that it was doomed.

  Like most Japanese battle plans, Cho’s counteroffensive was ambitious and overly complicated. It envisioned the 24th Division seizing the eastern flank of the Maeda escarpment, taking control of the center of the line. Two engineering/shipping regiments were to make amphibious landings behind the American lines on both the east and west coasts.

  The 44th Brigade would cut off the two U.S. Marine divisions holding the western end of the line. Two Japanese regiments would dislodge the U.S. 7th Division from its positions on Conical Hill on the eastern flank while the 44th and 62nd Divisions wiped out the trapped U.S. Marine units. Tanks and heavy artillery would concentrate on the critical Maeda escarpment, where the breakthrough would take place.

  The counteroffensive began in the rainy predawn darkness of May 4. The flash and thunder of the massive artillery barrage reflected from the low overcast. For half an hour more than twelve thousand rounds of artillery exploded on the American lines.

  Then the Japanese assault troops moved out, making their way across the mud-slickened no-man’s-land to the American lines.

  They were moving too slowly. As the first rays of sunlight illuminated the battlefield, not all the units of the 24th Division had reached their jumping-off point. Caught in the open, they became targets for U.S. artillery and mortars. The advancing Japanese infantrymen ran into a wall of machine gun and mortar fire from the entrenched Americans.

  Instead of a coordinated frontal assault against the U.S. lines, the counteroffensive quickly turned into a tableau of disconnected firefights, with Japanese infantry units being cut off and decimated one after the other. The attempt by the engineering/shipping regiments to make amphibious landings behind the lines was intercepted, and a thousand troops were mowed down.

  The 27th Tank Regiment—the only Japanese armor to be employed offensively at Okinawa—ran into trouble before most had neared their objective on Maeda hill. Only two tanks managed to reach the American perimeter, and both were destroyed by a single American soldier, Private 1st Class James Poore, who took each out with a round from his bazooka.

  General Ushijima was appalled. From his vantage point at Shuri Castle, he watched the attack on the Maeda escarpment falter. The counteroffensive was turning into an even greater disaster than the failed night assault of April 12.

  But neither Ushijima nor Cho was willing to concede failure. The battle raged on for the rest of the day, with Japanese troops closing in on a sector held by the U.S. 306th Infantry Regiment. After hours of combat, the Japanese were finally beaten back with heavy losses.

  The only notable Japanese success was by the 1st Battalion of the 24th Division, led by a resourceful army captain named Koichi Ito. Concluding that a daylight attack was suicidal, Koichi came up with his own plan. After nightfall his battalion infiltrated the American lines, penetrating half a mile and seizing a stronghold on the Tanabaru escarpment.

  Then they were stuck. Surrounded by the enemy and cut off from the rest of the division, which was stalled back at the main line, Ito and his men dug in. They held their perimeter all day and into the night against vigorous American attacks while they waited for the 24th Division to make a breakthrough.

  The breakthrough never came. Despite the agonizing lack of progress, the Japanese counteroffensive continued into another rainy day, May 5.

  By late afternoon, General Ushijima had seen enough. He gave the order for all units to withdraw, ignoring for a change the protests of his junior staff officers. Under cover of darkness, the surviving Japanese troops crept back through the mud and smoldering remains of tanks to their lines.

  Not until the next night, May 6, did Captain Ito’s battalion, still holding out behind the American lines, manage to exfiltrate with 230 surviving troops back through the enemy positions to their own lines.

  The counteroffensive was a catastrophe from which the 32nd Army would never recover. Nearly 7,000 of the unit’s original 76,000 soldiers had been lost. Almost all their tanks were destroyed. The few surviving tanks would be buried to be used as immobile pillboxes. The once-formidable Japanese artillery on Okinawa had been reduced by half.

  But the worst loss to General Ushijima’s army was its morale. The fighting spirit of the Japanese soldiers on Okinawa would never be the same. Though none yet knew it, they had just conducted the last Japanese ground offensive of the war.

  As ordered, Col. Hiromichi Yahara appeared at the commanding general’s office. Standing at attention, he rendered a silent salute. He had no idea why Ushijima had summoned him. It was the evening of May 5, and the disastrous offensive was finished. Was the general planning to sacrifice the rest of the 32nd Army in a final fight-to-the-death offensive? Was this the end?

  General Ushijima was in his usual pose, sitting cross-legged on the worn tatami floor. He wore a pensive expression. “Colonel Yahara,” the general said in a soft voice, “as you predicted, this offensive has been a total failure. Your judgment was correct.” Ushijima told Yahara that meaningless suicide would no longer be their strategy. With what strength they had left, the 32nd Army would fight for every last inch of the island. “I am ready to fight,” said the general, “but from now on I leave everything up to you.”

  Yahara was speechless. Such an admission from a high-ranking commander was unheard of in the Imperial Japanese Army. Then, thinking about it, Yahara became furious. Now that the army had been beaten to exhaustion, Ushijima was ready to do what Yahara had been advocating since the beginning.

  The trouble was, it was too late. Yahara calculated that if the army’s strength had not been squandered in the stupid offensive, they could have held out for at least a month longer. It might have made a difference in the outcome of the war. Thousands of lives might have been saved.

  There was only one possible benefit from the disaster that Yahara could see. The offensive would make the enemy more cautious about any Japanese course of action.

  As it turned out, it was just another false hope.

  34 BOTTOM OF THE BARREL

  KANOYA AIR BASE, KYUSHU

  MAY 1, 1945

  Matome Ugaki had a bad case of diarrhea. The problem only worsened the admiral’s foul mood, which was caused by the news from Europe. Mussolini had been captured and executed by his own people. The Russians were in the streets of Berlin. Hitler had committed suicide.
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  Ugaki thought the Fuehrer’s death was a tragedy. “But his spirit will remain long with the German nation,” he wrote in his diary, “while the United States and Britain will suffer from communism some day and regret that their powerful supporter, Hitler, was killed.”

  Another floating chrysanthemum operation—kikusui No. 5—was supposed to be coordinated with the counteroffensive by Ushijima’s 32nd Army on Okinawa. Ugaki was skeptical of the army’s chances. “This attempt does not have much prospect of success,” he wrote, “but better to be venturesome, hoping to put up a fight while they have enough guts, than to be knocked while idle.”

  Ugaki was sending every plane he could muster into this next kikusui. It wasn’t enough—only 125 dedicated tokko aircraft, along with an equal number of conventional warplanes—but the admiral retained his high hopes. He was sure that with improved tactics they would cause even more destruction to the Americans than in the first days when the tokkotai were at full strength. The trouble was, American B-29s were showing up almost every night, cratering runways and making it risky to assemble the waves of tokko airplanes.

  In the waning light of May 3, during a break from the bombers, Ugaki’s first wave of kikusui No. 5 rumbled into the sky.

  To the tin can sailors on RP10, 73 miles west of Okinawa, it was the same old story—blips on the radar, klaxons blaring, bullhorns ordering the crews to battle stations. CAP fighters roared overhead, heading northward to intercept incoming bogeys. Nervous gunners aboard the tin cans peered into the pale gray sky.

  A sailor with a dark sense of humor put up a sign on his destroyer with an arrow pointing eastward: “Carriers That Way.”

  Radarmen aboard the destroyer-minelayer Aaron Ward and destroyer Little were tracking a swarm of incoming bogeys. The fighter CAP—four F6F Hellcats—had already engaged the attackers, but they were overwhelmed by sheer numbers. Two dozen kamikazes swept over the destroyers and their four accompanying gunboats.

  Within minutes, the picket ships were fighting for their lives. Ward’s gunners splashed the first two attackers, both Vals. Then came a faster-moving Zero fighter on the port side. Just before impact, the Zero released its 550-pound bomb. The explosion killed more than a dozen crewmen, jamming her rudder to port and slowing the ship to a crawl.

  It seemed a replay of the Laffey ordeal two weeks ago. Sensing blood, more kamikazes appeared, but Ward’s gunners turned them away. She was out of danger, but only for the moment.

  The nearby Little was in just as much trouble. Her gunners downed one kamikaze, then another, but it wasn’t enough. Four more, one after another, crashed into Little, wrecking the destroyer’s superstructure and breaking her keel. With the ship listing severely to starboard, her rails nearly submerged, Little’s skipper, Cmdr. Madison Hall, gave the order to abandon ship.

  The order didn’t come too soon. Four minutes later, Little sank in 850 fathoms of water, taking thirty of her crew with her.

  The carnage on RP10 continued. LSM(R)-195, a rocket-firing amphibious support craft, was at full speed to assist the destroyers when she came under attack by a pair of kamikazes. The 203-foot-long gunboat lacked both the firepower and the speed to fight off the kamikazes. One crashed into her port side, exploding her rocket magazines, flinging fire and shrapnel around the decks. In fifteen minutes, the amphibious craft was gone.

  Meanwhile, more kamikazes were pouncing on the damaged and smoking Aaron Ward. Ward’s gunners fought back, shooting down three attackers. Then, in quick succession, the destroyer took five more kamikaze strikes and bombs on her main deck, her hull on the port side, her superstructure aft, and her number two stack. Her engines were dead. Ward lay adrift, burning in the gathering darkness.

  Incredibly, the destroyer stayed afloat. Through the long night Ward’s crew, aided by the destroyer Shannon and two gunboats, fought to save the ship. Early the next morning, the shattered but still defiant Aaron Ward arrived under tow in Kerama Retto.

  For its opening day, kikusui No. 5 had been impressive. Two U.S. ships had gone to the bottom of the East China Sea. Several others were damaged, including Aaron Ward, so badly mangled she was out of the war. In the brief action of May 3, the picket ships had suffered 248 casualties. To the sailors on the tin cans, it didn’t seem that it could get much worse.

  They were wrong.

  Biplanes? The gunners on the destroyer Morrison the next morning couldn’t believe what they were seeing. They peered through the pall of smoke at the apparitions coming toward them. There were seven of them—old-fashioned biplanes, equipped with floats. They were lumbering toward Morrison at the approximate speed of a Jeep. Each of the ancient floatplanes had a 250-kilogram bomb strapped beneath it.

  It was the latest twist in the battle at RP1. Since dawn Morrison, her accompanying destroyer, Ingraham, and their four gunboats had been under siege by a continuous wave of kamikazes. CAP Corsairs had already taken down four at close range to Morrison, and two more were splashed by the destroyer’s guns. One of the bogeys, chased by a Corsair, glanced off Morrison’s bridge and crashed close astern. Another sheared a wing on the destroyer’s bridge.

  Then Morrison’s luck had run out. Two Zeroes, pursued by Corsairs and hammered with antiaircraft fire, exploded into the destroyer’s topside, opening her hull and setting the ship ablaze. It was then, while the crew was battling the fire, straining to pick out the next wave of kamikazes through the smoke, that they saw the biplanes.

  Code-named “Dave,” the antiquated aircraft were, in fact, highly effective kamikazes. Their wood-and-fabric structure made them nearly invisible on search radars. The proximity fuses of antiaircraft shells failed to detonate when they whizzed past the flimsy craft. Pilots of high-speed CAP fighters were having a devilishly hard time shooting the twisting, slow-moving biplanes.

  On they came. Looming out of the smoke, one of the biplanes crashed into Morrison’s aft 5-inch mount, lighting off the magazine and causing a cataclysmic explosion. A second biplane, in no hurry, landed in the water behind the destroyer long enough to elude a pursuing Corsair, then took off again. The kamikaze continued straight into Morrison’s stern, touching off another magazine explosion.

  It was the final blow for Morrison. Ripped apart, the destroyer rolled to starboard and sank stern first. One hundred fifty-two men—nearly half Morrison’s crew—went down with her.

  The battle wasn’t going any better for Morrison’s escorts. One of the gunboats, LSM(R)-194, was caught in the stern by a diving Val. Within minutes her bow tilted up and she joined Morrison at the bottom of the sea. Thirteen men aboard the rocket-firing LSM went down with her.

  It was a sobering sight for the crew of the nearby destroyer Ingraham, who had watched Morrison’s death throes while they fought off their own attackers. Now the kamikazes were turning their full attention to Ingraham. Ingraham’s gunners and the CAP fighters shot down a succession of attackers, but it wasn’t enough. Ingraham had two near misses before a Zero crashed near her number two 5-inch mount, flooding the forward fire room and killing fourteen men.

  The CAP fighter pilots overhead were astonished at the variety of kamikaze warplanes—everything from Betty bombers and Zero fighters to training planes and museum-piece biplanes. The Japanese were scraping the bottom of the barrel. Did they have anything left to throw at the Americans?

  They did. In the murky sky over RP14, Sub-Lt. Susumu Ohashi was lowering himself through the bomb bay of the twin-engine Mitsubishi Ki-46 “Dinah” bomber, settling into the cockpit of his Ohka guided bomb. Ohashi was one of seven Thunder Gods of the 7th Cherry Blossom Unit who had launched that morning from Kanoya airfield.

  The Dinah bombers were an improvement over the slower G4M Bettys that carried the first Ohka guided bombs. Originally designed as reconnaissance aircraft, the Dinah was faster than the Betty, but it was more lightly armored. Now the pilot of Ohashi’s Dinah was becoming anxious. Enemy fighters had just spotted them. They were already swooping in a pursuit curve onto the bomber
’s tail. Machine gun tracers were converging on the Dinah.

  The Dinah pilot wasn’t waiting any longer. He gave the signal to Susumu Ohashi, who had just strapped himself into the cockpit of the Ohka: ready or not, he was going to be released now.

  The gunners on the minelayer Shea were cursing the smoke. The visibility around them and their escorts was now less than three miles, and it was because of the damned smoke screen someone had laid down back at the Hagushi anchorage. The smoke had drifted northward until it covered Shea and her escorts on their picket station. Shea’s nervous gunners were squinting through the murk, trying to pick out the first ominous silhouettes of incoming bogeys.

  At 0857, they spotted one. It was a twin-engine bomber, still high, at the upper edge of the haze blanket. A pair of FM-2 Wildcat fighters was already after it, guns blazing. The bomber would be splashed before it came close enough to threaten Shea and her entourage. There was nothing to worry about.

  High above, the Wildcat pilots were pouring machine gun fire into the Dinah bomber when they glimpsed something peculiar. An odd-shaped object dropped from the bomber’s belly. Not until a few seconds later, when they saw fire spit from the object’s tail, did they know what it was. Then it was too late.

  The Ohka was accelerating like a bullet. One of the Wildcats dove after the weird-looking aircraft, but it was no contest. The rocket-boosted guided bomb was already moving at 350 knots, becoming a distant speck in the Wildcat pilot’s gun sight.

  Down below, the startled gunners on the Shea had almost no warning. The gnatlike object came screaming out of the hazy murk, aimed like a meteor for the bridge of their ship. Gun captains were yelling commands, trying to track the object, but it was unstoppable.