The Twilight Warriors

by Robert Gandt

  The carrier’s voyage from Pearl Harbor had taken five days. Now everyone was in a hurry. The airedales of the air group and most of the ship’s crew headed off for two weeks’ leave while the workers at the shipyard labored nonstop to repair Intrepid’s battle damage.

  The Tail End Charlies scattered like Gypsies across the continent. Maurie Dubinsky headed straight for Kansas City to see his family and sweetheart. Wes Hays jumped on a train for Texas to rejoin his wife and infant son. Charlie Schlag was on his way to meet his family in West Virginia. Phil Kirkwood, the Grim Reapers’ leading ace with twelve kills, had an appointment in New Jersey to collect on the promise of $100 for every Japanese airplane he shot down. Eric Erickson headed for his home town of Lincoln, Nebraska, to become acquainted with the fiancée he still knew mainly through letters.

  In late June, while the pilots were returning to the Intrepid for the long voyage back to the war, they heard the reports. The battle for Okinawa was over. The longest and bloodiest campaign of the Pacific war had finally ground to a halt.

  To the Tail End Charlies it was good and bad news. It meant that this time they really were catching the tail end of the war. But what they were catching was going to make Okinawa look like a picnic.

  It was a now-familiar passage. Erickson, Hill, Dubinsky, and most of the rest of the squadron were lined up on Intrepid’s flight deck. Gliding past them were the gray hump of Alcatraz, the stark skyline of San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge bearing another contingent of underwear-waving girls. Then came the barely perceptible rolling motion as the great ship entered the open ocean.

  There were few hangovers this time and almost no seasickness. It occurred to Erickson that since his previous departure for the Pacific, heaving his guts out, he’d changed. Technically he was still a Tail End Charlie, but he was no longer one of the new guys. They had a fresh batch of new guys, replacements for the pilots lost during Intrepid’s previous combat cruise. Now he understood why the veterans had been cool to him and the other Tail End Charlies.

  Erickson had been tested. He’d been fired on by enemy planes, ships, and shore-based heavy guns. And he’d fired back. He’d been credited with shooting down one and a half enemy fighters, bombing and strafing bases in Japan, and helping to destroy the Yamato task force, and he had two Distinguished Flying Crosses to show for it. He’d seen half a dozen friends plummet to their deaths.

  None of this had the new guys yet experienced. Until they had, they would be segregated from the veterans by a subtle wall of formality.

  Erickson now enjoyed another privilege: he no longer had to live in Boys’ Town. The new guys would take up residence there. Though he missed the rowdy camaraderie of the bunkroom, Erickson liked the privacy of his new two-man stateroom. He had good light and a quiet place to work on his paintings and sketches.

  On July 30, 1945, Intrepid steamed out of Pearl Harbor, headed for Eniwetok, where she would prepare to join Halsey’s armada off Japan. En route the carrier and her air group would pause long enough to bombard Japanese-occupied Wake Island.

  The island itself no longer had any strategic importance. Since its capture by the Japanese in the weeks after the Pearl Harbor attack, Wake had been bypassed by American forces. Cut off by U.S. submarines from all resupply lines, the Japanese garrison had slowly starved, surviving mainly on the island’s abundant rat population.

  But shooting up Wake Island had become a rite of passage. No self-respecting task force or carrier group commander passed Wake without giving the place a token bombing, mainly for the hell of it, but also for the purpose of warming up the air group on a real enemy. Like trapped animals, the Japanese could be expected to fight back, but not with great lethality.

  Not everyone thought it was a good idea. Johnny Hyland complained that “if there is anything that sounds unreasonable to a pilot, it is the idea that he should practice encountering fire from an anti-aircraft gun.”

  They did it anyway. Both Corsair squadrons were equipped with new airplanes, the latest model of the Corsair, the F4U-4. This one had a massive four-bladed propeller, a full bubble canopy, and a more powerful Pratt & Whitney R-2800-18W, and it was nearly 30 knots faster than the F4U-1D the squadrons had taken to Okinawa.

  On the morning of August 6, thirty-eight of the new Corsairs, each loaded with 5-inch rockets, swept over the Wake atoll. They were followed by twenty-eight bomb-loaded Avengers and Helldivers. For most of the day, the Intrepid warplanes bombed and strafed Wake while enemy gunners obligingly fired back with their few remaining guns. There was no air opposition; the last Japanese fighter at Wake had been destroyed long ago, and the airfield once used by the U.S. Marines was now a bomb-holed moonscape.

  No Intrepid planes were shot down, and the worst threat of the day came from a towering afternoon cumulonimbus. By nightfall, all Intrepid’s airmen were safely back aboard, and the carrier was steaming at 15 knots for Eniwetok.

  What no one aboard Intrepid knew was that while their bombers were hitting the Japanese on Wake, another bomber—a solitary B-29 named Enola Gay—was releasing a single weapon over the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

  And then three days later, while Intrepid lay at anchor in the coral-reef-enclosed lagoon at Eniwetok, it happened again, this time over a place called Nagasaki.

  It was a confusing, frustrating time for the men aboard Intrepid. Atomic bomb? Few aboard the carrier had ever heard of such a thing. Most had never seen a B-29 up close. The notion that one bomb could devastate an entire city stretched the limits of their imaginations. Rumors spread like wildfire. Where were they headed? Would Japan surrender? Would there be an invasion?

  On the morning of August 15, while Intrepid was taking on fresh ammunition and provisions, the answer was crackling over the radio in Japan.

  Matome Ugaki leaned forward, straining to understand the thin, reedy voice. The static made the emperor’s words hard to understand. Hirohito was carefully avoiding the word surrender, but his meaning was clear. The war situation, he told his countrymen, “has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.” The Japanese people would have to “bear the unbearable” and “endure the unendurable.” The Japanese would have to lay down their arms.

  Listening to the broadcast, Ugaki was filled with an excruciating torment. While sending hundreds of tokko warriors to their deaths in the floating chrysanthemum attacks, he had always consoled himself with the promise that someday he would join them. Now, as a dutiful subject of the emperor, he was bound to obey a direct order to surrender. But he was also a warrior steeped in the bushido ethos. Death in battle was the only acceptable way for him to end the war.

  Ugaki would take the path of the warrior. He rationalized that because he had not yet received an official cease-fire order from navy general headquarters, he was not constrained from carrying out a final tokko mission. In his last diary entry he wrote, “I’m going to follow in the footsteps of those many loyal officers and men who devoted themselves to the country, and I want to live in the noble spirit of the special attack.”

  At 1600 that afternoon, he drank a farewell sake toast with his staff at the Fifth Air Fleet headquarters. Then he removed all badges and emblems of rank from his dark green uniform. By auto he rode to Oita airfield, carrying with him the short ceremonial sword given him by Admiral Yamamoto.

  Waiting on the ramp at Oita were eleven Asahi D4Y Judy dive-bombers—the same type he had dispatched by the hundreds on tokko missions against the Americans. Their two-man crews were waiting, all wearing the ceremonial hachimaki headband with the emblem of the rising sun.

  Ugaki protested. He had asked for only five airplanes for his mission. The commander of the detachment, Lt. Tatsuo Nakatsuru, insisted that the admiral not conduct such a mission with only five airplanes. “My unit is going to accompany him with full strength!”

  Ugaki was touched. He climbed onto a stand and addressed the pilots. “Will all of you go with me?”

  “Yes, sir!” they replied, raising their
right hands. Ugaki was at first taken aback, then his face brightened. The prospect of adding more lives to the thousands already sacrificed didn’t seem to trouble him. Nor did the pointlessness of the mission.

  The admiral shook hands with each of his staff, then he boarded Lt. Nakatsuru’s plane, taking the rearmost seat in the dive-bomber. In the gathering dusk, the flight of bombers roared off the runway at Kanoya and turned south.

  By the time the news of Ugaki’s mission reached navy general headquarters, it was too late to stop them. The commander in chief, Adm. Jisaburo Ozawa, was furious. “It was wrong of him to take his men with him as companions to the other world, knowing the Imperial mandate through the emperor’s broadcast. If he wanted to commit suicide, he should have done it alone.”

  By the time Ugaki’s flight neared Okinawa, three of the eleven dive-bombers had already turned back with “engine trouble.” At 1924, Ugaki radioed a message. He intended to “ram into the arrogant American ships, displaying the real spirit of a Japanese warrior.”

  No one saw Matome Ugaki again. None of his planes made it through the U.S. air defense screen, and no U.S. ships were struck by kamikazes. The mission of the last kamikaze had ended in failure.

  The war is over. The news spread at the speed of sound through the passageways, compartments, and decks of USS Intrepid. The chorus of yelling and cheering swelled over the ship, spilling across the surface of the Eniwetok anchorage, becoming a collective din of sirens and horns and cheering men. The sound was an echo of the same jubilation going on in every city and town of America.

  It was 1100 on August 15 in Eniwetok. The new president, Harry Truman, had announced the surrender of Japan. Minutes later the order from Admiral Nimitz’s headquarters flashed to all units of the U.S. Navy in the Pacific: “Cease offensive operations against Japanese forces.”

  For the young men on the ships, it was too soon to comprehend the full meaning of what had happened. Fifty million human beings had perished in the costliest war in history. The political geography of the planet had been changed forever. Weapons of unthinkable destructive power had been unleashed. Their own lives had been transformed in ways that would not be apparent until years from now.

  None of this was clear to them on this August day in the sweltering heat of the South Pacific. But the Tail End Charlies knew that they had the best reason in the world to celebrate. The war they’d almost missed had ended. The enemy they had hated with a cold, unreasoning fury was defeated, and they had helped win the victory. Now it was time to go home. At least for some of them.

  Erickson sprawled in the leather-padded ready room chair, waiting for his name to be called. The squadron skipper, Will Rawie, was reading the list of the pilots who were eligible to leave the Navy immediately.

  Erickson fidgeted in the chair, agonizing over his decision. Stay in or get out? He had come to love the Navy. He especially loved flying fighters like the Corsair. He knew in his gut that he would never again be bonded as strongly to any group as he was to his squadronmates here in this ready room.

  Rawie was going down the list, stopping at each name to see if the pilot raised his hand. He came to Erickson’s name. After a moment’s hesitation, the young pilot’s hand, as if disconnected from his body, shot straight into the air.

  And that was it. Decision made. Erickson would return to civilian life to pursue his dream of becoming an artist.

  That evening he packed his seabag, then stopped off to have a farewell martini with Windy Hill, who had restocked his private booze stash after his absence on the submarine Sea Dog. The next morning Erickson and eight of his squadronmates rode a boat to Okinawa, where they would await transportation to the United States.

  For most of them, it was the first time they had ever actually set foot on the island. They gazed around the rocky landscape with almost reverential awe. Looking at the rutted, pockmarked terrain, it was impossible not to reflect on the battle that had changed their lives.

  The human cost for capturing Okinawa had been staggeringly high—12,520 Americans killed or missing, another 36,631 wounded. Among the dead were 4,907 Navy men, with nearly as many wounded, 4,824. Thirty-four Allied ships and other craft had been sunk and 368 damaged, with 763 aircraft lost, making Okinawa the costliest naval engagement in U.S. history.

  For the Japanese who defended Okinawa, the price had been exponentially higher, with 110,000 sons of Nippon killed and 7,400 taken prisoner. In the air and sea fighting for Okinawa, Japan lost 16 ships and more than 4,000 airplanes. But the greatest suffering had been among Okinawa’s civilian population. Most studies estimated that more than 100,000 noncombatants died in the fighting.

  The rationale for seizing Okinawa—that the island would be a springboard for the Allied invasion of Japan—had been obviated by the surrender in August. The objective of Admiral Ugaki’s massed tokko attacks and General Ushijima’s defense of the island was to prove that the Japanese would fight to the death not just for an outpost such as Okinawa but for their homeland. Faced with such resistance, the Japanese believed, American commanders would decide not to invade Japan’s home islands.

  And so they did—but not for the reason the Japanese expected. Appalled at the casualties suffered at Okinawa, the new president, Harry Truman, concluded that invading Japan would be “an Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other.”

  To Truman and his commanders, the lesson of Okinawa was that the use of any weapon, even one as horrendous as the atomic bomb, was preferable to an invasion.

  Eric Erickson would finish art school and become a successful artist and interior designer in California. Wes Hays would return to Novice, Texas, and start a thriving hardware business. Grim Reapers top ace Phil Kirkwood would leave the Navy to become a dentist, and so would his Tail End Charlie, Ray James. Ziggy South would go back to Kansas to become a chiropractor.

  Not all the Tail End Charlies would leave the Navy. Some, such as Dick Quiel and Windy Hill and Bill Ecker, had found their calling. They would stay in uniform, fight another war in Korea, and eventually rise to senior rank.

  Another was Country Landreth, who had languished in a Japanese prison since his first mission over Japan in March. On September 2, 1945, the newly repatriated Landreth had a splendid view from his hospital ship of the great gray battleship Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay, while Japanese emissaries formally surrendered to the United States. The next time Landreth came to Japan, it would be as skipper of his own carrier-based squadron.

  Air Group 10 commander John Hyland would also stay in the Navy. During the years of the Cold War, Hyland would rise steadily in rank, eventually wearing four stars and commanding all U.S. naval forces in the Pacific.

  Few of the Japanese combatants at Okinawa would return to their homeland. The architects of the tokko attacks, Admiral Ohnishi and Admiral Ugaki, as well as the two senior army officers on Okinawa, General Ushijima and General Cho, chose a samurai’s death. An exception was Col. Hiromichi Yahara, chief strategist of the battle of attrition on Okinawa, who ended the war as a prisoner. In the postwar years Yahara’s bitterness at what he considered the ineptitude of Japan’s wartime leadership would spill out in his 1972 book, The Battle for Okinawa.

  Another survivor was Ens. Mitsuru Yoshida, the young radar officer on the battleship Yamato. In later life Yoshida would become a successful banker in Japan, retiring in 1979. Like many of his countrymen, he would never stop questioning his actions in the last battle of the war. In the closing pages of his book Requiem for Battleship Yamato, he would ask:

  Did I really do my part? Did I look death in the face in the line of duty?

  No.

  Didn’t I submit to death quite willingly? Didn’t I cloak myself in the proud name of special attack and find rapture in the hollow of death’s hand?

  Yes.

  For the rest of his life Erickson would be able to close his eyes and summon with perfect clarity the events of that first day. It was March 18, 1945, and his Corsair had been poised on In
trepid’s No. 1 catapult. He was peering out into the blackness of the predawn Pacific, hearing only the deep-throated rumble of his Pratt & Whitney radial engine.

  Seconds later Erickson had been hurled into the night sky. For the next hour he and his squadronmates flew northwestward toward Japan. Their target—the naval base at Saeki—finally appeared through the morning mist on the coast of Kyushu. At the first angry black puffs of antiaircraft fire, Erickson had felt a jolt of adrenaline coursing through him.

  One after another they had dived on the row of enemy airplanes parked on the airfield below. Through his gun sight Erickson had seen the distinctive red meatballs on their wings. He had squeezed the trigger, feeling the hard rattle of the six .50-caliber machine guns. He saw one of the enemy airplanes explode. Then another.

  And that’s when it happened. In the space of a few seconds—two bursts of machine gun fire—Erickson understood that his life—and the lives of his fellow Tail End Charlies—had changed forever. Nearly two years of waiting and training and worrying that the war would end before they got there were behind them. The moment would remain fixed in their memories for the next half century.

  It had been the first day of the ninety-five-day-long air, sea, and land battle for Okinawa. For the Tail End Charlies, it was the day they became warriors.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  At the heart of this story are the real-life heroes of Carrier Air Group 10. Their generosity in sharing with me their recollections, mementoes, letters, and photographs helped bridge the sixty-five-year chasm between the events at Okinawa and today. Special thanks are owed to pilots Wesley Hays, William “Country” Landreth, Charles Schlag, Ray James, James South, Les Gray, Dick Quiel, Maurie Dubinsky, Jack Anderson, Orlo Wilmeth, Ed Deutschman, Jim Hollister, Don Oglevee, Frank Stolfa, Jim Clifford, and Dave Anderson, who gave me their perspective of the air and sea battle for Okinawa and whose friendship I will always cherish. Hanging in a place of honor on my office wall is the plaque they presented making me an honorary member of their illustrious air group.