The Twilight Warriors (30 page)

There was no time to think about it. With the airspeed building up, the target filling his gun sight, Erickson punched the release
button. He felt the hard lurch of the half-ton bomb departing his airplane, and he saw the bombs dropping away from the other Corsairs.

Four thousand pounds of high explosives were plunging down on the enemy ship. Still in their dives, all four Corsairs opened fire with their .50-caliber machine guns. Erickson could see crewmen scurrying on the deck, their bodies being riddled by the hail of machine gun fire.

Pulling out of the dive, the Corsairs jinked and weaved, desperately trying to avoid the storm of fire coming at them. Erickson glimpsed the massive bow of
Yamato
swelling in front of him. The battleship seemed to be moving slowly, less than 10 knots, in a left turn. The ships of her screen were in a protective circle around her.

As he flashed past the battleship, Erickson saw what looked like brass wires extending upward from the ship. It took him a moment to realize what they were: tracers. For every tracer, there were five or more invisible bullets coming at him. More than 150 Japanese guns were shooting at him.

Black flak bursts were erupting on either side and directly ahead. Erickson felt the Corsair being slammed by the concussions. He could smell the sickly odor of the explosives. There seemed to be no chance he could avoid being hit.

An unwanted thought inserted itself in his mind. Aboard
Intrepid
he had watched the task force antiaircraft guns knocking kamikazes out of the sky like ducks in a gallery. Now the roles were reversed. He was one of the ducks.

S
omething caught Mitsuru Yoshida’s eye as he stood on the bridge. Something red. One of
Yamato
’s screening destroyers on the port outer edge of the formation,
Hamakaze
, had just showed her crimson-painted belly. In the next moment her stern seemed to levitate straight out of the water.

Yoshida stared at the stricken destroyer. As in slow motion,
Hamakaze
dropped back into the sea and rolled over. In less than
half a minute the destroyer was gone, leaving in her place a sheet of white foam.

It took Yoshida’s brain several seconds to process what he had just seen. A torpedo had struck
Hamakaze’s
stern, blowing away the rudder. At almost the same time, a string of bombs landed one after the other on her deck. The combined effect was like smashing a beetle with a hammer.

A few of
Hamakaze’s
crew had been blown into the sea before the shattered hulk sank. Now Yoshida could see their heads bobbing in the bubbling foam where the destroyer had been. No one was stopping to pick them up.

A
similar fate had already befallen the unlucky
Asashimo
. Just as Admiral Ito had feared, the straggling destroyer was an easy target. After falling behind the task force when it turned south,
Asashimo
was bringing up the rear. She was 5 miles behind the main force when the strike group from the carrier
San Jacinto
found her.

First went the fighters—six Hellcats and one older F4F Wildcat. All dropped 500-pound bombs, then came back to strafe with their machine guns.
Asashimo
fought back, putting up a stream of defensive fire and causing damage to some of the fighters. After several passes her deck was aflame and her hull was ruptured from bomb near misses. An ominous black oil slick surrounded the destroyer as she went nearly dead in the water.

Eight Avenger torpedo bombers swept in to finish the kill. As the torpedoes hit the water and headed in a perfect spread for the destroyer, her captain, Lt. Cmdr. Yoshiro Sugihara, turned the slow-moving destroyer to starboard, trying to parallel the wakes of the torpedoes. He dodged the first two, and several others swept by the stern.

Then a torpedo took her amidships, directly below the bridge. Seconds later, another exploded into the engine room.

It was the end of
Asashimo
. Her bow pitched upward, and she
slid stern first into the sea. Another explosion under the surface blew the bow back above water, and it disintegrated. When the pieces had finished falling back onto the sea, nothing was left but an oil slick. None of
Asashimo
’s 326 crewmen survived the attack.

W
hile Will Rawie was darting in and out of clouds, trying to pull his strike group together, the leader of
Yorktown
’s forty-three-plane strike group, Lt. Cmdr. Herb Houck, had a better view of the action. Houck was a thirty-year-old Minnesotan who had joined the Navy in 1936. He had already shot down six Japanese airplanes and won two Navy Crosses. That day he would add another.

Technically, Houck shouldn’t have been there. The engine in his F6F-5 Hellcat had been cutting out during the long flight from
Yorktown
because of an air leak in the line from the fighter’s auxiliary belly tank. Unwilling to turn back, Houck kept nursing the engine, switching the fuel feed from tank to tank, running his fuel boost pump to keep gas flowing to the big radial engine. He’d made it, finally managing to suck most of the fuel from the troublesome belly tank.

Now Houck was over the task group at 1,000 feet. His twenty Hellcat fighters each carried a single 500-pound bomb, which he knew would make hardly a dent in
Yamato
’s thick armor. He ordered the Hellcats to go in ahead of the torpedo planes, strafing with their six .50-calibers to deflect the Japanese guns from the vulnerable torpedo planes.

Houck still had his own 500-pound bomb, and he was saving it for the right target. He spotted it while the Torpeckers were still setting up their attack on
Yamato
. Ahead, trailing smoke but still very much alive, was a destroyer, the
Isokaze
. The Japanese tin can had just blown a
Yorktown
Helldiver out of the sky, killing Lt. Harry Worley and his gunner, Earl Ward.

Houck went after the destroyer. Placing the pipper of his gun sight on the midsection of the destroyer, he released the
500-pounder. As he pulled out of his dive, he saw over his shoulder a pillar of flame leaping from the destroyer’s mid-deck. Within minutes she was sinking.

Houck wasn’t finished. He could see
Isokaze
’s survivors flailing in the oil-slickened water. He dove again, this time blazing away with his .50-calibers. The other Hellcat pilots, bombs now expended, followed him, strafing the bobbing heads in the water.

It was the compassionless rationale of the Pacific war, and it was applied by both sides. The enemy deserved no mercy. The more you killed, the sooner the war would be over.

The Hellcats kept strafing, frothing the water with machine gun fire, until their ammunition was gone.

22
THERE SHE BLOWS

EAST CHINA SEA
30°22′N; 128°04′E
APRIL 7, 1945

Y
amato
was listing to port. The system of pumps and valves that flooded the stabilizing compartments and had corrected the earlier list was no longer working. The all-important aft water control center had taken a torpedo strike and a direct bomb hit.

Watching the inclinometer go from 15 degrees to 20 degrees, Rear Admiral Ariga reached an agonizing decision. He would have to flood the starboard outer engine room. Flooding the space would help correct the list, but it would reduce
Yamato
’s available power. It would also mean certain death for the three hundred men in the starboard engine compartments.

In a choking voice, Ariga gave the order. The valves were opened. Seconds later the violent implosion of seawater snuffed out the life of every man in the flooded engineering rooms.

The desperate tactic worked, but only for a while. At 1410 Ariga felt another torpedo slam into
Yamato
’s stern, jamming her big main rudder hard to port.

Yamato
’s death was now certain. The ship was uncontrollable. The list to port worsened quickly, rolling toward 35 degrees. With her port rail nearly submerged, the ship was locked in a counterclockwise turn. The lofty bridge tower was leaning so steeply over the water that the men in the uppermost decks had to cling to rails and stanchions for support.

Captain Nomura, the executive officer, clambered up the ladder to Ariga’s command station. There was no chance of correcting
Yamato
’s list, he told the captain. Ariga seemed to be detached from what was happening. He appeared not to notice that the ship’s
public address system had already been destroyed. He kept repeating, as if his crew could hear him, “Don’t lose heart!”

Nomura shouted at him, “The ship is sinking!” Nomura wanted Ariga’s permission to give the abandon-ship order. Ariga stared back at him, seeming not to comprehend. Most of
Yamato
’s guns were silent now. There was only the isolated chatter of a few surviving machine guns.

Nomura kept shouting. Finally Ariga nodded his understanding. Yes, Nomura could give the abandon-ship order. And Nomura should join them, the captain added. Someone had to survive in order to tell the story.

There was no time to spare. Nomura sent messengers from the bridge to spread the word belowdecks: “Abandon ship!”
Yamato
was going fast.

Still in his command chair on the sixth deck of the bridge tower, the commander in chief, Vice Adm. Seiichi Ito, received the same report.
Yamato
was doomed. Until now the admiral had remained stiff and silent, aloof from the blow-by-blow events of the battle. From the beginning he had been opposed to what he thought was a senseless sacrifice. Now it was coming to the very end he had predicted.

Ito climbed out of his chair. For a moment he braced himself against the binocular stand, staring out ahead of the sinking ship. Then he issued his one and only direct command since the battle began. “
Stop the operation,” the admiral ordered. “Turn back after rescuing the men.”

With that, Ito turned to salute the surviving members of his staff. Together they had endured nearly two hours of bombings, torpedoings, and relentless machine gun fire. Ito shook each man’s hand, then descended the ladder to his sea cabin one deck below. It was the last anyone saw of Seiichi Ito.

On the top bridge deck at the captain’s command station, a messenger was helping Ariga tie himself to the compass binnacle. Ariga intended to go with his ship, and he was taking no chances
that his body would wash to the surface. He was having trouble because the linoleum deck was slippery with blood. As the ship shuddered from another internal blast, Ariga shouted that someone had to save the emperor’s portrait.

The assistant gunnery officer, Lieutenant Hattori, carried out Ariga’s order, after a fashion. Hattori made his way down to the wardroom, where the picture was mounted on the bulkhead. Instead of retrieving the portrait, he simply locked the door. At least the enemy would not recover it.

Y
orktown
air group commander Herb Houck was still on station, directing his strike group from his Hellcat fighter. He had already assigned his twelve Avenger torpedo planes, led by Lt. Cmdr. Tom Stetson, to finish off the cruiser
Yahagi
.

Stetson had just gotten a good look at the
Yamato
. She appeared to be listing badly, showing her belly. He told Houck he wanted to split his group and go after the
Yamato
with six of his Avengers.

Houck concurred, but he told Stetson to change the torpedo running depth from 10 feet to 20. The 10-foot depth had been preset to hit a cruiser’s hull. Going to 20 feet would put the fish below
Yamato
’s thicker armor plate and right into her exposed lower hull.

It was easier said than done. In the back of his Avenger, tail gunner Charles Fries had the job of resetting the depth setting on their Mark 13 torpedo. It meant that he had to crawl into the bomb bay, pull wires inside the torpedo, and turn the indicator with a wrench. If Fries got it wrong, the airstream coming through the bomb bay could actually arm the torpedo.

The Torpeckers took their time getting into position. One of the pilots, Lt. (jg) John Carter, was in the last section. He watched Stetson’s first four Avengers go in low and fast, dropping their torpedoes in a spread on
Yamato
’s beam. “As luck would have it,” he recalled, “the big ship was turning to port, thereby exposing the full broadside expanse of her enormous hull to the converging torpedoes.” Carter saw at least three of the torpedoes explode into
Yamato
’s hull from amidships to the bow. Two hit so close they looked like a single huge explosion.

The dreadnought was still fighting back. Her gunners were putting out a sporadic barrage of antiaircraft fire, frothing the water and hammering the Avengers with the concussion of the bursts. As Carter began his own run from aft of the battleship, he could see tracers arcing toward his Avenger. He launched his torpedo across
Yamato
’s curving wake. Pulling away from the target, he tried to shrink into the metal frame of his seat. He could feel the ping and clatter of shrapnel hitting the Avenger’s skin. He saw that his torpedo had run true, cutting inside
Yamato
’s swerving turn and exploding into the battleship’s port quarter.