by Robert Gandt
The Ohka slammed like a battering ram into the starboard side of Shea’s bridge superstructure—and kept going. A millisecond later, the Ohka emerged on the other side, leaving a large exit hole in Shea’s port hull. Not until the warhead of the Ohka was 15 feet past the ship’s hull did it explode.
Shea rocked from the external blast. Several frames were buckled and plates were ruptured. Twenty-seven men were killed in the attack, and 130 were wounded. Shea had been punctured from one side to the other, but the minelayer could still make her own way and was in no danger of sinking.
Shea had been saved by a miracle—and by the ballistics of the Ohka, which was designed to penetrate heavy armor, not the thin skin of a minelayer such as USS Shea.
At Hagushi anchorage, the gunners aboard the heavy cruiser Birmingham were busy. Birmingham was the flagship of surface force commander Rear Adm. Mort Deyo, and it had been under attack most of the morning by kamikazes coming from the sea. While the gunners were preoccupied, a lone Oscar was sneaking in from over the island of Okinawa, undetected on radar.
No one spotted the kamikaze until he was just a mile out. The close-in 20-millimeter guns opened fire, but it was too late. The bomb-carrying Oscar plunged into Birmingham’s number two 6-inch forward turret, exploding downward into the spaces below.
For half an hour flames poured from the cruiser. Fifty-one men were killed, including most of the ship’s medical corpsmen, who were concentrated in the ship’s wardroom and main casualty center. Eighty-one more were wounded. Birmingham was so badly damaged she had to retire to Guam for repairs.
The Americans weren’t the only targets that morning. Operating off the Sakishima Gunto, the southern island group between Okinawa and Formosa, British Task Force 57 was bombarding the Japanese airfields of Nobara and Sukuma.
The Royal Navy task force had joined the U.S. Fifth Fleet in March 1945, with the responsibility of covering the southern approaches to Okinawa. Now the commander, Vice Adm. Sir Bernard Rawlings, had split off his battleships and cruisers from his carriers, sending the heavy surface ships in close to use their heavy guns.
Which, as it turned out, was a tactical mistake. The screen around the British carriers had been weakened. It was an opening the kamikazes quickly exploited.
At 1131 on May 4, a Zero wound its way through the British CAP fighters and the antiaircraft barrage and crashed into the flight deck of the carrier HMS Formidable. There was a fireball, a number of casualties, and damage to parked airplanes and deck equipment. The kamikaze had splattered on Formidable’s armored flight deck like a scrambled egg.
And that was it. No raging fires or cataclysmic explosions. The carrier shrugged off the hit and continued operating.
The incident revealed a crucial design difference between British and American aircraft carriers. All the U.S. flattops, including the newest Essex-class fast carriers such as Intrepid, had wooden flight decks. With deadly frequency kamikazes were punching through the wooden decks like knives through cardboard, exploding into the packed hangar bays.
The wooden decks were a carryover from 1930s aircraft carrier design. Wood could be more easily repaired than steel and, in theory, the lighter wooden decks allowed the ships to carry more airplanes.
No one had foreseen the specter of suicide planes crashing through the wooden planking. Now U.S. carrier skippers, watching the kamikazes ricochet off the British steel decks, were already thinking about the future. Postwar U.S. Navy aircraft carriers would not have wooden decks.
35 GONE WITH THE SPRING
AGANA, GUAM
MAY 5, 1945
Lt. (jg) Windy Hill’s loathing of submarines had reached a new intensity. After what seemed like years but was only a few weeks, the Sea Dog finished her war patrol and pulled into Guam. With his flight gear in a pillowcase over his shoulder, wearing sandals and a borrowed shirt and trousers, Hill stepped ashore. It was his first time on dry land since the day in March when he flew his last combat mission from Intrepid.
Hill’s cruise aboard the Sea Dog had revealed to him the vast culture gap between airedales and submariners. Submarine officers, he discovered, didn’t gather in a stateroom at night to sip Coon Range and swap stories. As far as he could tell, they didn’t sip anything, and in any case, there were no staterooms.
Sea Dog’s officers had invited him to join them at their rest-and-recreation camp. Hill politely declined. He’d seen enough of submarines and submariners. Thank you and goodbye.
Hill headed across the naval base, looking for the fleet aviation headquarters, where he would report his return. He didn’t make it. En route he spotted a Quonset hut atop a hill that had the unmistakable look of an officers’ club. “It took me about one-half of a second to decide where to re-direct my feet,” Hill recalled. “I figured the war could get along without me for a while.”
It was an officers’ club, and it had a bar. The bartender asked if he wanted a beer. No, Hill said. He wanted six beers, and he wanted them opened and lined up in front of him. “When I start inhaling these, I don’t want to waste time reordering.”
He drank the beers. The bartender lined up six more. And so passed the afternoon while Hill put the weeks of submarine tedium behind him. Finally he gathered up his pillowcase full of gear and wobbled down the hill to the fleet aviation headquarters. He marched into the headquarters office and announced that he was ready to return to the Intrepid.
The duty officer looked at him quizzically. Intrepid? Hill might as well relax and wait awhile. The Intrepid had taken a kamikaze hit off Okinawa. She was on her way back to Pearl Harbor.
Further up the hill at the naval base on Guam, in the complex of Quonset huts that served as the advance Pacific Ocean Area Headquarters, Adm. Chester Nimitz and his staff were pondering the action reports of the past two days. The Japanese had thrown 350 planes into the latest massed kamikaze attack—kikusui No. 5. Based on the claims of CAP pilots and air defense gunners, 249 had been shot down.
Even though kikusui No. 5 was on a smaller scale than most of the previous attacks, the tactics were becoming more deadly. Six U.S. ships—three destroyers and three gunboats—had been sunk. Ten more had taken extensive damage, most of them finished for the duration of the war. Nearly five hundred Navy men had lost their lives, and an equal number were wounded.
The losses only added to Nimitz’s frustration over the land battle on Okinawa. As long as the stalemate continued, Nimitz’s ships would be targets for the kamikazes.
In his sheltered command post at Kanoya, the man responsible for kikusui No. 5 mulled over the same statistics. As usual, Matome Ugaki was inclined to accept the inflated damage reports. “Explosions and the burning of two battleships, three cruisers, and five unidentified ships were seen from shore,” Ugaki wrote. “Besides the sinking of several cruisers or destroyers and the burning of a battleship were also seen off Kadena. Thus we achieved a great deal of success.”
The fact that the tokko airmen were still misidentifying destroyers as battleships hadn’t registered with Ugaki. Nor had the hopelessness of the land battle on Okinawa. More and more, Ugaki was becoming a victim of his fantasies. In his diary he reported that the “32nd Army sent its appreciation” for the navy’s efforts. He was sure that “when our troops can see enemy vessels sunk and set on fire in front of their very eyes and observe planes with the Rising Sun mark fly overhead, their morale will soar.”
Ugaki was undaunted by the deteriorating situation at Okinawa. He was already preparing his next floating chrysanthemum attack, kikusui No. 6.
On May 8, there was a lull in the action, as if both sides were absorbing the momentous news: Germany had surrendered. The war in Europe was over.
In the United States, jubilant Americans were in the streets, honking horns, cheering, embracing each other. In Japan, the significance of losing their main ally was minimized by government spokesmen. The new premier, Admiral Kantaro Suzuki, insisted that he was “determined to fight through this war with all I hav
e.”
There was little jubilation on Okinawa. To the American soldiers and Marines in the mud-filled trenches of the front line, the end of the war in Europe had as much relevance as a tremor on Mars. Their own war had no foreseeable end. It was clear that the Japs on this miserable island weren’t quitting until the last one was dead. Then would come the real battle. They were going to have to fight for every inch of ground in Japan.
Nor did the sailors on the tin cans or the pilots on the carriers have much to celebrate. Sure, the end of the conflict in Europe meant that more military assets would eventually be sent to the Pacific. In the meantime, there seemed to be no end to the kamikazes.
Vice Adm. Kelly Turner, however, thought that this historic occasion should receive special recognition. From his flagship Eldorado he sent an order: precisely at noon on May 8, every big gun ashore on Okinawa would fire one round. The barrage would be accompanied by full gun salvoes from the fire support ships offshore. It would be a dramatic, boisterous salute to the victorious troops in Europe.
And so the guns fired. The earth reverberated, and the concussion sent ripples across the mud puddles along the front lines. No one ashore or on the ships was especially impressed. When it was over and the dust and thunder had subsided, the grunts and the sailors went back to what they’d been doing—trying to get this damned island secured.
At age twenty-eight, 1st Lt. Robert Klingman was the old man of his group of Tail End Charlies. Klingman had already served as an enlisted man in both the Navy and the Marine Corps. Now he was a Marine Corsair pilot in the VMF-312 Checkerboard squadron at Kadena air base on Okinawa. With the two captured airfields, Yontan and Kadena, up and running, the Marines were flying a greater share of the CAP missions over the picket stations, as well as delivering close air support for Buckner’s ground forces.
On the morning of May 10, Klingman was Capt. Ken Reusser’s wingman in a four-plane CAP mission over Ie Shima. They’d gone after a high-flying Japanese reconnaissance plane, a twin-engine Kawasaki Ki-45 Nick fighter. The high-altitude planes had been making daily overflights, photographing the disposition of the fleet for the next kamikaze attacks.
The Marines dropped their belly tanks and firewalled the engines of the Corsairs, clawing their way up to the Nick’s contrails. They caught up with him at 38,000 feet, a barely sustainable altitude for the Corsairs. To lighten the Corsairs so they could climb higher, they had expended much of their heavy .50-caliber ammunition.
Reusser opened fire first, getting hits in the Nick’s left wing and engine. Then his guns ran out of ammunition. Klingman gave it a try, then his guns stopped firing. In the subzero temperature they had frozen. He could see the Japanese tail gunner in the rear cockpit glowering at him. The gunner was banging on his own frozen machine gun.
Klingman was determined to bring down the Nick. He climbed slightly above the Nick’s slipstream, then eased back down on the aft fuselage. In full view of the horrified tail gunner, Klingman’s propeller sawed into the aft fuselage. Pieces of canopy, machine gun, and gore from the decapitated gunner spewed into the slipstream. A hunk of the rudder tore away.
It wasn’t enough. Somehow the Nick kept flying. Ignoring the ominous vibration from his damaged propeller, Klingman took another whack at the Nick. This time he chopped off the Nick’s rudder and part of the horizontal stabilizer.
Still, as if defying all laws of aerodynamics, the Nick kept flying.
The chase had taken them out to sea, north of Okinawa. The thought crossed Klingman’s mind that he might not have enough fuel to make it back to Kadena. He pushed the thought away as he went for a third chopping session on the Nick’s tail. This time he lopped off most of the right elevator.
The Nick was finished. Streaming debris, the Japanese fighter fell away in a spin. And so did Klingman, his Corsair having stalled out in the thin air. When he recovered a few thousand feet below, he could see the Nick still spinning. The Japanese fighter shed both its wings and dove like a stiletto straight into the ocean.
Now Klingman was in trouble. His Corsair was rattling like a farm tractor from its shattered propeller. At 10,000 feet, still well north of Kadena, the engine coughed and quit, out of fuel. With no power and the propeller slowly windmilling, the Corsair descended like a brick toward the airfield.
He almost made it. Klingman landed in the dirt overrun short of the runway, then bounced up to the hard surface and rolled to a stop. The Corsair was a mess. Six inches were missing from each of the three propeller blades. Shrapnel from the chopped-up Nick was embedded in the wings, cowling, and propeller.
Two days later, on another mission, Klingman ran into trouble again. His hydraulic system failed, and he elected to bail out instead of making a crash landing on one wheel. He was picked up by a destroyer escort, which deposited him on Admiral Turner’s flagship Eldorado.
Klingman didn’t know that he was a celebrity. Admiral Turner had heard about Klingman and insisted that he stay aboard and have dinner. The Alligator loved a good war story, and he wanted to hear the one about the Marine who had chopped off a Jap’s tail.
Erickson couldn’t believe his eyes. He was standing on the flight deck of Intrepid as the carrier slid up to her berth in Pearl Harbor on May 11. There on the dock to greet them were a twenty-piece band, hula girls, and a women’s glee club.
And something else. Erickson thought he recognized a face in the crowd, not one of the musicians or singers, but a guy in a gaudy Hawaiian shirt. He was grinning like a baboon, mixing it up with the hula dancers, waving at the men on the flight deck. Erickson stared at the apparition. The guy looked exactly like Windy Hill, whom he’d last seen floating without a life raft off the coast of Kyushu.
It was Windy Hill, alive and apparently in the pink of health. In fact, judging by the suntan and relaxed expression, Hill appeared to be in better shape than most of the pasty-faced men staring at him from the deck of the Intrepid. Hill was eager to get back aboard Intrepid, he told his buddies, because he needed a rest from all this tiresome shore duty.
But when Hill returned to the stateroom he had shared with Lt. Hal Jackson, he received a shock. Most of his stuff was gone from his locker. Jackson had given away most of his clothes, thinking that Hill was dead.
That wasn’t the worst part. He had also disposed of Hill’s stash of whisky. It had been for a good cause, Jackson explained, because when they heard that Hill had been rescued by a submarine, they decided to celebrate. It had been a terrific party, Jackson told him. Windy should feel honored that he had so many friends.
As he did for every floating chrysanthemum operation, Admiral Ugaki stood on the tarmac watching the tokko planes and the Thunder Gods of the Jinrai Butai take off. It was May 11, the day of the sixth massed kikusui attack.
With his dwindling inventory of airplanes, Ugaki could muster less than half the number he’d launched on the first kikusui. Kikusui No. 6 totaled only 150 warplanes.
When the last of the tokko planes had lifted from the runway at Kanoya, the admiral returned to his shelter, where he was moved to write a melancholy poem.
Flowers of the special attack are falling,
When the spring is leaving.
Gone with the spring
Are young boys like cherry blossoms.
Gone are the blossoms,
Leaving cherry trees only with leaves.
Most of the tokko warriors would attack the usual targets—the picket station destroyers and the gunboats to the north of Okinawa.
But not all. Some were hunting bigger game. They were headed for the eastern side of the Ryukyus, where the American carrier force had last been sighted.
36 CHANGE OF COMMAND
TASK FORCE 58
MAY 11, 1945
Mitscher hated the steel battle helmet. Almost as much as he despised wearing the helmet, he hated the kapok life preserver. The bulky life preserver and the tublike helmet made the skinny admiral look even more emaciated. It had taken the nagging of Arleigh Bur
ke, Mitscher’s chief of staff, to finally get him to wear the battle gear when he stood out on the exposed bridge wing of the carrier Bunker Hill. Burke was concerned not only about Mitscher’s safety but also about the example the admiral set for Bunker Hill’s crewmen.
The Bald Eagle had a routine. During combat operations, he would exchange his baseball cap for the helmet and life preserver and observe the action from the exposed bridge wing. If the kamikazes were getting uncomfortably close, he’d duck back into the heavily shielded flag plot, one level below the captain’s bridge, and watch the battle through the bulletproof glass windows.
Mitscher looked wrung out these days. So did Burke, the rest of the flag staff, and, for that matter, most of the men on Bunker Hill. May 11 was their fifty-ninth straight day at sea. They’d been in almost daily action since two weeks before the invasion of Okinawa.
Mitscher and Burke were both called into flag plot a few minutes after 1000. CIC had picked up incoming bogeys. An enemy formation appeared to have sneaked in behind a returning flight of Bunker Hill’s strike planes. A broken cloud layer was helping to hide them from the CAP fighters.
In the next two minutes, the radio speaker on the fighter frequency confirmed it: “Alert! Alert! Two planes diving on the Bunker Hill!” Mitscher recognized the voice. It was Maj. Jim Swett, whom Mitscher knew from the Guadalcanal campaign, where the Marine had shot down seven enemy planes on one sortie and was recommended by Mitscher for the Medal of Honor.
Swett’s warning came just as the antiaircraft guns in Bunker Hill’s task group opened up. For many of the crew on deck—plane handlers, ordnancemen, pilots still in their cockpits—there was no other warning, just the sound of the guns, then the blurred glimpse of a dusky shape hurtling toward them from astern. A trail of machine gun fire spattered across the deck, chewing up wood and pinging into airplanes.
Still in his dive, the Zero pilot, a Japanese navy ensign named Yasunori Seizo, released his bomb. The bomb hit a millisecond before the Zero, plunging through the wooden deck, through the gallery deck directly below, then into the hangar deck and piercing a hole in the portside bulkhead. With its delayed fuse, the 250-kilogram bomb didn’t explode until it was 20 feet outside the carrier’s hull.