The Twilight Warriors

by Robert Gandt

  The effect was almost as disastrous as if it had detonated inside the ship. The explosion mowed down gunners and crewmen along the carrier’s port side. Shrapnel sliced into the hangar bay, setting fueled airplanes ablaze. The inferno leaped from airplane to airplane through the hangar bay.

  Meanwhile, the wreckage of the Zero fighter glanced off the aft flight deck and skidded through the pack of airplanes waiting to be launched. Airplanes were hurled in every direction, bursting into flame, exploding like firecrackers. The blazing fuselage of the kamikaze snagged a Corsair and part of the catwalk filled with sailors and yanked them all over the side.

  With Bunker Hill’s aft flight deck ablaze and sending up a dense cloud of black smoke, a second kamikaze appeared. The Zero was flown by an ensign named Kiyoshi Ogawa, a former student and the wingman of the kamikaze who had just crashed into Bunker Hill.

  This time the gunners had warning. For nearly half a minute, every available gun on Bunker Hill and her escorts poured fire at the onrushing Zero.

  It wasn’t enough. Even as shrapnel and 20-millimeter bullets shredded Ogawa’s Zero and set it ablaze, he kept his aim straight and true. Like the first kamikaze, he released his bomb just before impact.

  The effect was even more horrific than the strike of a few minutes before. The bomb hit amidships, drilling through the wooden flight deck and exploding in the gallery deck immediately below. An entire ready room full of fighter pilots was immolated. So were almost all the spaces on the fragile gallery deck. Many on the gallery deck who weren’t killed by the blast died soon after from burns or smoke inhalation.

  The shattered kamikaze plane careened into the base of the island—the carrier’s superstructure—sending a tower of flame leaping high above the ship. Deadly smoke, laden with poison and soot, gushed through the ship. The smoke poured into Mitscher’s flag plot through the ventilators, forcing the admiral and his staff to evacuate. Standing outside, Mitscher paused to take in the scene around him. As he watched, a third kamikaze came diving toward Bunker Hill. At the last moment, gunners sent him cartwheeling into the ocean.

  Bunker Hill’s agony went on for the rest of the afternoon. As flames and smoke continued to billow from the carrier, the cruiser Wilkes-Barre and several destroyers came alongside to help fight the raging fires. Not until nightfall were most of the blazes extinguished.

  Though still under her own power, Bunker Hill was out of the war. The attack cost 396 men aboard Bunker Hill their lives, making it the single most deadly kamikaze strike of the war. Only Franklin, which lost 724 men to a Japanese dive-bomber, suffered greater damage and casualties and still remained afloat.

  At 1630 Mitscher and his staff gathered up their gear and transferred the task force commander’s flag to the carrier Enterprise. Mitscher seemed unfazed by what had happened. The fact that a kamikaze had come within 20 yards of obliterating him didn’t show in the old Bald Eagle’s piercing gaze. After three and a half years of war, it was his first close-up encounter with a kamikaze. Such a thing didn’t seem likely to happen again.

  But it did, three days later.

  Mitscher resumed tactical command of Task Force 58 the next day, May 12. The situation on Enterprise was far from ideal. His flag plot was stuck atop the captain’s bridge instead of below it, as on Bunker Hill. Enterprise had been designated a night carrier, which meant that aircraft engines and catapults roared and hammered through the hours of darkness while the ship spent much of the daytime at general quarters.

  The disaster on Bunker Hill made one thing abundantly clear: something had to be done about the kamikazes. At the urging of his staffers, Burke and Flatley, Mitscher ordered his carriers north to carry out two days of strikes on the Kyushu airfields.

  As usual, the results of the strikes were hard to measure. How many kamikaze airplanes had been destroyed on the ground? No one knew for sure. But the airfields had been shot up and the runways damaged, even if only temporarily. If nothing else, the presence of the strike planes had the effect of delaying the next kikusui offensive.

  But the strikes also put the carriers dangerously close to the kamikazes’ bases. Soon after dawn on May 14, Mitscher was in his padded chair in flag plot when CIC reported twenty-six incoming bogeys on the radar screen.

  By now it was a familiar ritual: the crew running to general quarters, anxious lookouts squinting into the sky, CAP fighters racing to intercept the raiders. Picking off the kamikazes one by one, the fighters managed to take down nineteen. Antiaircraft gunners accounted for another six.

  Which left one. The lone remaining Zero was flown by a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant (jg) named Shunsuke Tomiyasu. He had been the leader of the group that took off from Kanoya at dawn, and he was the only still alive. Now Tomiyasu was dodging in and out of the cloud cover, looking for an opening.

  Down below, gunners were straining to catch a glimpse of the single kamikaze. At 0656 they spotted him, breaking out of the cloud cover. Every gun aboard Enterprise and her escorts opened up. Enterprise’s captain had the carrier heeled hard over in an emergency turn.

  Cmdr. Jimmy Flatley, Mitscher’s operations officer, was standing out on the exposed bridge wing when he saw the kamikaze diving from the clouds. Knowing what was about to happen, Flatley darted back through the steel door to flag plot and slammed it behind him. He yelled for everyone to hit the deck. Seconds later came the concussion, followed by the clatter of metal pinging into the light armor of the flag bridge.

  Then it subsided. Flatley raised his head from the deck and peered around. Mitscher was standing among the prone bodies on the deck, arms folded, a frown covering his face. “Flatley,” said the admiral, “tell my task group commanders that if the Japs keep this up they’re going to grow hair on my head yet.”

  Then came the smoke. It was a replay of the scene three days earlier aboard Bunker Hill. A cloud of noxious smoke came gushing in through the ventilators. Again the flag staff had to evacuate their compartment.

  Down on the flight deck, flames were leaping from the hole where the bomb had penetrated. The concussion of the blast had hurled Enterprise’s forward elevator 400 feet in the air. Damage control crews had the fires extinguished in half an hour, but Enterprise was too severely wounded to continue operations.

  The next day they held a burial at sea for the twelve crewmen killed in the attack. Then they held another, from the stern of the ship, for the remains of Lt. (jg) Shunsuke Tomiyasu. His name and rank they had learned from the business cards they found in his pocket. One of the cards was given to Mitscher as a parting memento.

  For the second time in four days, the Bald Eagle and his staff packed up their smoke-permeated belongings and transferred Mitscher’s flag to yet another carrier, USS Randolph. Like Bunker Hill, the “Big E” had been knocked out of the war. It was her third kamikaze hit, earning her a footnote in history: she would be the last carrier of the war to be struck by a kamikaze.

  Wearing his starched khakis and metal-rimmed spectacles, Kelly Turner exchanged salutes with his successor, Vice Adm. Harry Hill. It was May 17, and for the Alligator it was a day of mixed emotions. The job he’d begun back in March—the capture of Okinawa—was still not finished.

  It was the Navy way, this periodic rotation of commanders, even in the midst of battle. Harry Hill had already taken charge of the 5th Amphibious Force, and today’s ceremony completed the turnover, relieving Turner as commander, Task Force 51. In ten days, similar change-of-command rituals would be conducted on the flagships of the Fifth Fleet and the Fast Carrier Task Force when Raymond Spruance and Marc Mitscher turned over their commands to Bull Halsey and Slew McCain.

  The disputatious Turner wouldn’t be missed, at least by the officers who served directly under him. Turner’s subordinates would not forget the tongue-lashings, the egotism, the peremptory rudeness of the man. They would long retain the image of those bushy eyebrows descending like a hood over the icy blue eyes, the signal that another volcanic eruption of temper was on the way
.

  But even those who most disliked Turner had to acknowledge his brilliance. Working for the Alligator amounted to a graduate-level course in meticulously detailed operational planning. It was hard to imagine a massive amphibious operation without the masterful guidance of Kelly Turner.

  Which, in fact, was why Turner was on his way back to Pearl Harbor. With the invasion of Okinawa now a fait accompli, the Alligator’s specialized skills were needed for the greatest amphibious landing yet conceived—Operation Olympic, the invasion of Kyushu, the southern island of Japan, which was scheduled for November 1, 1945. Turner would be the point man in the critical landings. To go with his new duties, he was pinning on a fourth star.

  For the officers who had served under “Terrible” Turner, the change of command brought an abrupt lifestyle change. Their new boss, Harry Hill, was the opposite of Turner, a genial, mild-mannered officer who seldom raised his voice. Serving in Hill’s flag plot on the Eldorado felt almost like a vacation. For some, after the challenge of working for the Alligator, it even seemed boring.

  On the day Kelly Turner was turning over command of his task force, his fire support ships were busy doing what they’d done since the invasion began: bombarding enemy positions on southern Okinawa. One of the destroyers, USS Longshaw, spent that night firing star shells to thwart Japanese infiltrators creeping through the lines in southern Okinawa.

  It was tiring, tedious duty, and like the rest of his crew, Longshaw’s skipper, Lt. Cmdr. C. W. Becker, was exhausted. On the morning of the 18th, during a bombardment mission along the coast, Longshaw ran aground. She was stuck on Ose Reef, just off the Naha airstrip on the western shoreline.

  Becker didn’t need to be told he was in a dangerous place. He was dead in the sights of the very guns he had come to destroy. The only good news was that so far the Japanese had shown no inclination to fire their coastal defense guns at offshore targets. They didn’t want to reveal their positions, saving their big guns to use against the American ground forces.

  Now Becker just wanted to get the hell out of there. He tried backing off, churning the water to a muddy froth with his propellers. The destroyer didn’t budge. Then he ordered the crew to jettison everything that wasn’t bolted down, to lighten the ship. They were still stuck. The destroyer Picking arrived to give them a tow. The line was too light, and it parted.

  The fleet tug Arikara showed up to pass them a heavier line. Becker could see Arikara taking up strain on the line. In a few minutes, Longshaw would be out of danger.

  It was then that the first shell exploded. Geysers of water began erupting around Longshaw. A Japanese battery commander, observing the scene, had decided the destroyer was too tempting a target to pass up. Longshaw’s gunners fired back, more out of defiance than anything else. Tin can sailors knew their main defenses were speed and agility. Now they were trapped like a fox in a snare.

  A salvo landed just short of Longshaw, another a few yards long. The Japanese gunners had them bracketed. In rapid succession four shells crashed down right on target. Longshaw’s gun mounts were shattered. The superstructure was ripped apart. A round detonated on the forward deck, touching off an ammunition magazine. In the explosion, the forward half of the destroyer was blown away.

  Amid the chaos, the mortally wounded Becker shouted the order to abandon ship. Some men did, some didn’t. With shellfire exploding all around them, going into the sea seemed as bad a choice as staying with the ship.

  By the time the guns had stopped firing, eighty-six Longshaw crewmen were dead, including the captain. Ninety-seven more were wounded. The ruined Longshaw, still trapped on the reef, had to be destroyed by gunfire and torpedoes.

  The massed kamikaze attacks resumed on May 23. Instead of concentrating on the northern picket stations this time, most of the 165 planes of kikusui No. 7 tried an end run around the pickets and CAPs and went after the fire support ships.

  Most of the tokko planes arrived over their targets after dark, flying in the glow of a full moon. They managed to crash a destroyer-transport, Barry, damaging her badly enough that her abandoned hulk would be towed out to sea to serve as a decoy for further kamikazes. A minesweeper, Spectacle, was knocked out of action, as well as the destroyer Stormes and an LSM fire support ship. The destroyer-transport Bates, after taking two kamikaze strikes, made it under tow back to Hagushi, only to capsize and sink the same day.

  The tokko pilots weren’t the only night raiders. At the Japanese base at Kumamoto, in central Kyushu, a daring mission called Operation Giretsu (Operation Faith) lifted into the sky after nightfall on May 24. Each of the twelve specially equipped Mitsubishi Ki-21 twin-engine “Sally” bombers carried ten special attack commandos. Their mission was to assault the Marine bases at Kadena and Yontan.

  Admiral Ugaki, who was still convinced that the Okinawa airfields were being used for attacks on his bases in Kyushu, had ordered the Giretsu operation. The truth was, the first strikes on Japan from Kadena and Yontan weren’t flown until June 10, 1945.

  A wave of conventional bombers went ahead of the commando-carrying Giretsu aircraft, attacking Kadena and Yontan as well as the newly captured air base on Ie Shima. But like most tightly coordinated Japanese missions, this one unraveled early. Several of the Giretsu aircraft became lost in the darkness. Several more developed engine trouble.

  By 2230, when the commando-carrying Sally bombers arrived over the northern tip of Okinawa, they were down to only four airplanes. Directly ahead of them, illuminated in the pale moonlight, was the runway at Yontan.

  And then they were spotted. The antiaircraft guns opened up, and within a minute three of the Sallys had gone down in flames. The lone survivor made it through the gunfire unscathed, lined up on a runway at Yontan, and belly-landed. While the twin-engine bomber was still scraping along the concrete surface, sending up a shower of sparks, pieces, and propeller blades, the hatch flew open and ten Giretsu commandos tumbled out.

  For several minutes they had the advantage of surprise. Sprinting down the darkened flight line, the Giretsu commandos threw hand grenades and phosphorous bombs into the rows of parked warplanes. Flames from burning Corsairs and transports billowed into the night sky. The surprised Marines on the base’s perimeter defense reacted quickly, chasing down the raiders one by one.

  It took most of the night. As dawn came to Yontan, the charred remains of seven warplanes were still smoking. Twenty-six other airplanes had been damaged, some irreparably. Two fuel dumps had gone up in flames, torching 70,000 gallons of precious aviation gasoline. The body of each Giretsu commando lay on the tarmac where he had been shot.

  Two Americans had been killed in the action and eighteen wounded. Fifty-six Japanese commandos and bomber crewmen had been sacrificed. The audacious Giretsu raid, if nothing else, was a graphic reminder that the spirit of bushido was still very much alive.

  Admiral Ugaki was running out of airplanes. For his next tokko attack, kikusui No. 8 on May 27, Ugaki could muster only 110 aircraft. It was the smallest number of airplanes so far in any of the floating chrysanthemum attacks.

  Some of the tokko aircraft were antiques, including flimsy Kyushu KIIW Shiragiku trainers, with a top speed of only 100 mph. Even in a dive, they reached a maximum speed of no more than about 200 mph.

  Ugaki had no illusions about their chances. “Apart from their use at night,” wrote Ugaki in his diary, “they couldn’t stand even one second against enemy fighter attacks.”

  Despite the decrepitude of the airplanes and their small numbers, kikusui No. 8 was deadly. Two Val dive bombers set the destroyer Braine afire, killing 67 men and wounding 103. Many of the tin can sailors died gruesome deaths in the water, devoured by sharks after they abandoned the burning ship.

  The next dawn, May 28, a twin-engine bomber, probably a Nick, managed to slip past two Corsair CAP planes and a wall of flak from the destroyer Drexler. The Nick was carrying a larger-than-normal kamikaze payload. When the kamikaze crashed the Drexler amidships, the catacl
ysmic explosion blew the sides of the destroyer out. She was gone in less than a minute, taking 158 crewmen with her.

  The bloody month of May was drawing to a close. Ninety U.S. ships had been sunk or damaged to the extent that they were out of the war. More than a thousand Navy men were dead, with hundreds more injured, many from horrible burns. The Battle of Okinawa had become the costliest naval engagement in U.S. history. And it wasn’t over.

  These grim facts were hanging like a pall over the deck of the cruiser USS New Mexico on the cloudy morning of May 27. Raymond Spruance, wearing his standard expressionless countenance, greeted his old friend Bill Halsey. In the space of a salute and brief verbal exchange, Spruance turned over command of the world’s mightiest naval armada. Once again the Fifth Fleet was the Third Fleet. Task Force 58 became Task Force 38, and every task group and unit changed its prefix accordingly.

  Spruance had been a pillar of tenacity throughout the ordeal of Okinawa. Historian Samuel Eliot Morison observed, “A less serene and courageous man might, before reaching this point, have asked, ‘Is this island worth the cost? Is there no better way to defeat Japan?’ But no such doubts or questions ever even occurred to Raymond A. Spruance.”

  On the same day that Spruance was relieved by Halsey, Marc Mitscher handed over Task Force 58—the Fast Carrier Task Force—to his counterpart, Vice Adm. John “Slew” McCain. As the two grizzled admirals met on the deck of Randolph, the years of nonstop combat operations showed in their haggard looks. Mitscher was fifty-eight, McCain not yet sixty-one, but each had the face of a man two decades older. Though McCain was just beginning another tour of duty, he looked as beat-up as Mitscher. Neither man weighed much over a hundred pounds, their khaki uniforms hanging like shrouds over their skinny frames.