The Conquering Tide (85 page)

A
DMIRAL
O
ZAWA'S SECOND BIG COMPOSITE AIRSTRIKE
of the day, consisting of thirty-five dive-bombers, twenty-seven torpedo planes, and forty-eight fighters, left Carrier Division 1 shortly after 8:00 a.m. The ill-fated flight encountered setbacks and reversals from the outset. Eight planes were forced to turn back immediately, either because their engines were not performing or because they could not retract their landing gear. As the eastbound planes flew over Kurita's van force, jumpy antiaircraft gunners wrongly assumed they were enemy and opened fire. Two were shot down, and eight more were damaged and forced to turn back. As the different plane types flew at varying cruising speeds, the squadrons gradually drifted apart into smaller groups, and many planes lost contact with their leaders, whom they were attempting to follow because they lacked experience in overwater navigation.

Lieutenant Commander Zenji Abe, one of the few veterans in that wave, was flying one of the older model Aichi D3A “Val” dive-bombers. It was a long flight, and he was physically and mentally exhausted. “I was suffering from a very unusual physical condition caused by prolonged fatigue,” he recalled, “and felt I was in a plane being flown by somebody else.” Each time he looked around, he noticed that fewer planes remained in his formation. Abe assumed they had either turned back or “dived into the sea from mental confusion.”
⁴⁸

At 11:07 a.m., American radar screens picked up the first enemy planes as they approached from the southwest. A dozen
Essex
Hellcats led by Commander David McCampbell were among the first to engage the intruders. Visibility remained superb, and McCampbell could easily pick out the contrails several thousand feet below. Attacking from above in a shallow dive, the defenders tore into the attackers. The brief encounter was possibly the greatest slaughter in the history of combat aviation. About sixty Japanese aircraft went down in fifteen minutes.

Alex Vraciu of the
Lexington
, who had scrambled to intercept the first wave and whose plane was still well supplied with fuel and ammunition, followed the fighter director officer's vectors to a position about thirty-five miles west of the task force. “Spot-gazing intently, I suddenly picked out a large, rambling mass of at least fifty enemy planes 2,000 feet below, portside and closing,” he recalled. “My adrenaline flow hit ‘high C.' I remember thinking, ‘This could develop into a once-in-a-lifetime fighter pilot's dream.' ”
⁴⁹
Vraciu could see no Zeros flying cover over the bombers and torpedo planes. He banked into a high-side run on a “Judy” dive-bomber, evaded the tail-gunner's tracers, and fired a short burst. The target rolled over and dived toward the sea, flame billowing out of the wing tank. Vraciu bored in behind two more planes, trading altitude for speed to keep them in his sights, and gave each one a burst from a range of about 1,000 yards. As usual, a few rounds of .50-caliber fire were enough to take down the lightly built Japanese machines. Trailing fire and smoke, they headed down toward the blue sea below.

Flying east now, stalking the enemy bombers as they raced toward the American carriers, Vraciu destroyed two more. As he emerged over the outermost screening ships, antiaircraft fire began to rock his F6F. In seven minutes he had shot down five Japanese planes, and he could have let the antiaircraft fire take care of the remaining “bandits,” but he had a sixth plane in his sights and did not want to let it go. He overtook it, lined it up, pressed the trigger, and was amazed at the results. “Number six blew up with a tremendous explosion right in front of my face. I must have hit his bomb. I had seen planes blow up before but never like this! I yanked the stick up sharply to avoid the scattered pieces and flying hot stuff, then radioed, ‘Splash number six!' ”
⁵⁰

Zenji Abe's Aichi was one of a few Japanese planes to run the gauntlet of fighters and penetrate into the heart of the American fleet. At 13,000
feet, he saw white wakes on the sea ahead, below, and to the left of his engine cowling. He knew a swarm of Hellcats was behind and above him. His wingmen were gone. Without time to set up a proper dive-bombing attack, Abe simply lowered his nose and flew toward the nearest carrier. The plane wobbled and shuddered as it flew into a barrage of antiaircraft fire. He released his bomb over the
Wasp
. It missed, but detonated close enough to the ship to cause light damage and injure two men. Against the odds, Abe escaped and returned to the Japanese task force, where he recovered on the carrier
Junyo
. He was the only Japanese pilot to drop a bomb on an American carrier that day and live to tell the tale.

Four Japanese torpedo planes made runs on the
Enterprise
and the
Princ
eton
. All were taken down by antiaircraft fire. “On at least one occasion,” wrote a lieutenant stationed on the bridge of one of the big carriers, “so many Japanese planes were being shot down—great balls of fire, which, in spite of intense sunlight showed brilliantly red against the sky, or long plummets of black smoke plunging to the sea—that it was impossible to make an accurate count of them. For minutes on end there were beautiful vapor streams forming crisscrossing white arcs against the azure sky as planes dived and climbed.”
⁵¹

Running low on gas, Alex Vraciu entered the
Lexington
's landing circle and made a clean recovery. As his Hellcat came abeam of the island, he looked up at the Flag Bridge and held up both gloved hands with six fingers extended. Several war correspondents (stationed on the
Lexington
because she was Mitscher's flagship) witnessed the gesture and described it in their newspapers, making Vraciu's six gloved fingers one of the enduring iconic images of the Battle of the Philippine Sea.

W
HILE LAUNCHING THE LAST OF HIS SECOND WAVE,
Ozawa's flagship had come under attack by an American submarine, the
Albacore
. From a range of 5,300 yards, Skipper J. W. Blanchard had fired a six-fish spread at the
Taiho
. Warrant Officer Sakio Komatsu, piloting one of the just-launched planes, caught sight of an incoming wake and reacted with extraordinary dexterity and valor. He banked hard and dived into its path. The aircraft, pilot, and torpedo were consumed in the explosion. Four more torpedoes missed astern, but the sixth struck a particularly vulnerable part of the
Taiho
's
hull, near her aviation gasoline tanks.
Albacore
went deep and endured a long period of depth-charging, but the crew heard the explosion and correctly reckoned that they had scored at least one hit.

The
Taiho
's crew was initially confident of containing the damage, and Ozawa appeared to be in high spirits after the attack. The carrier, Japan's newest, had been engineered to absorb one torpedo hit and more, so there was no reason to believe she was in danger. But when the damaged avgas tanks spread combustible fumes throughout the lower deck, a damage-control officer made the fatal decision to attempt to ventilate the ship. The
Taiho
's air ducts and blowers spread the gases through her interior, and a chain of spectacular explosions tore through the ship. Her armored flight deck heaved and finally ruptured. Flames roared up from the hangar. Shortly after 11:00 a.m., Ozawa removed the emperor's portrait from his stateroom and transferred his flag from the stricken ship. He descended first into the destroyer
Wakatsuki
, then moved to the cruiser
Haguro
, and finally to the
Zuikaku
.

The
Taiho
was obviously finished, but her captain hesitated to order the crew off the ship. That evening, shortly after six, the blazing wreck finally went down, taking more than 1,500 men with her. That concluded the maiden combat cruise of the
Taiho
.

Albacore
's sister
Cavalla
had been stalking the Japanese fleet and faithfully reporting its movements for a week. Skipper Herman Kossler's persistence was rewarded with a prime opportunity to attack the
Shokaku
at point-blank range. Raising his periscope a few minutes before noon, he saw the ship looming on the near horizon. He could make out a fantastic degree of detail, including her “bedspring” radar, her enormous “sun and rays” ensign, and even the faces of individual crewmen on the flight deck. The
Cavalla
fired six torpedoes at a range of 1,200 yards. Three of the six connected, and the ship immediately began settling by the head.

The
Cavalla
went deep to evade the inevitable depth-charge treatment. Her main induction system was flooded, rendering her dangerously heavy. She went more than a hundred feet below test depth. The crew counted 106 depth charges in a three-hour ordeal. Half were uncomfortably close, but the
Cavalla
escaped with only superficial damage.

Shokaku
's engine rooms quickly flooded, cutting all power to the ship. Dead in the water, she burned helplessly. Without power the firefighters
could not get water pressure to the hoses. Bucket brigades threw water on the flames, but that did little good. Explosions in the lower decks and hangar began to tear the carrier apart. The captain ordered the crew off the ship. At 2:10 p.m., her magazine detonated in a mighty thunderclap. The big ship rolled onto her starboard beam ends, her bow lifted from the sea, and she slid under.

Of the six carriers that had attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the
Shokaku
was the fifth to go into the abyss. Now only the
Zuikaku
remained.

While the two stricken carriers were still fighting their losing battles for survival, Ozawa committed most of his remaining airpower to a third strike: thirty fighters, forty-six Zero fighter-bombers, and six torpedo planes from Carrier Division 2. The admiral had not yet learned that his first two strikes had been obliterated in air combat without seriously damaging any American ship. Had he known of those results, he might have hesitated to commit everything he had to another attempt on the American fleet.

The outbound formation cleaved into three widely separated elements soon after departing the Japanese carriers. The largest group diverted off course to the north, then course-corrected to the south and approached the American fleet from the northwest. At a few minutes before one, American fighter director officers directed Hellcats to intercept bogeys on a bearing of 338 degrees at a distance of seventy miles. All the intruders, numbering about forty-seven planes, were either driven away or downed in a nine-minute melee. Several of the attackers were seen to veer off, evidently not eager to risk flying into antiaircraft fire. Another group of bogeys was picked up on radar a few minutes after 2:00 p.m., on a bearing of 205 degrees at a distance of a hundred miles. Outbound search planes skirmished with the newcomers, until the ubiquitous radar-guided F6Fs arrived in force. As in the earlier waves, a few Japanese planes got through the Hellcats and made spirited runs into the heart of the American task force, where they were incinerated in a storm of antiaircraft fire.

Other elements of the last waves took a southerly heading and failed to find the American fleet at all (or perhaps evaded battle) and flew toward airfields on Guam or Rota. They were tracked on radar. Fighter director officers began vectoring Hellcats toward the islands, setting up the day's climactic aerial massacre. A dozen F6Fs from the carrier
Cowpens
arrived over Orote Airfield as a group of about forty Japanese planes were in landing
approach. Another seven F6Fs from the
Essex
and eight from the
Hornet
converged on the same location and joined the attack.

The Americans enjoyed insuperable tactical advantages over Orote Peninsula. The Japanese planes were in a low-altitude, low-speed landing approach. With their fuel tanks running dry, they had no alternative but to land. Most of the Japanese antiaircraft batteries around Orote had been silenced by a week of bombing and strafing attacks. The runway was pockmarked and cratered. F6Fs stalked the approaching Japanese planes down to treetop altitude. Ensign W. B. “Spider” Webb of VF-2 slipped into the traffic circle as if he were intending to land, positioning his Hellcat directly behind a division of three Japanese planes. Holding his thumb down on the trigger, he swept them with .50-caliber fire. All three went down. Webb banked port and shot down another; the Japanese pilot managed to get free of his cockpit and pull his chute. Webb had lost altitude in the turn. When he pulled up, he found another Japanese plane in his sights, blew it apart with another short burst, and then flew through the debris. That brought his score to five. Webb now found himself in a head-on run with an aggressive Zero. When it closed to 1,000 yards, optimal range for the F6F's guns, he fired and cut the plane in half. Running low on ammunition, he destroyed two more bombers with short bursts and then pulled away to return to his carrier. Webb's remarkable run of kills was confirmed by his gun camera.

The afternoon slaughter at Orote Airfield wiped out approximately thirty of the forty-nine planes that attempted to land. About nineteen managed to put down on the badly pockmarked airfield, but most of these would never fly again.

Throughout the day, as the air groups made their reports to Mitscher, the number of claimed kills climbed to extravagant proportions. Even accounting for the usual exaggerations and double counting, it was evident that Task Force 58 had scored a victory on a magnitude that no one had expected or foreseen. Of the 373 aircraft launched by Ozawa's carrier force, only 130 had returned intact. Approximately 50 more had been destroyed after taking off from Guam or Rota. The Americans had lost just twenty-five Hellcats, four by operational accidents.
⁵²
The ratio of kills had been about eleven to one. In the Task Force 58 ready rooms, the pilots were celebrating as if they had won the war. “Medicinal” brandy was served and glasses were raised in
toasts. On the
Lexington
, a euphoric fighter pilot remarked, “Hell, this is like an old time turkey-shoot.”
⁵³
The remark was often repeated, and the name stuck. Historians would call it the first day of the Battle of the Philippine Sea, but to the aviators it was always the “Marianas Turkey Shoot.”