The Twilight Warriors (42 page)

In the middle of the line, the advance of the 96th Division
ground to a halt. The only success came from the much-maligned 27th Division, which succeeded in making an end run around the deadly Kakazu Ridge and reaching the next objective, the Urasoe-Mura escarpment. But the simultaneous frontal attack on Kakazu Ridge was again repulsed, and the entire division’s gains were lost.

A force of armored vehicles—thirty M4A3 Sherman tanks, flame-throwing tanks, and self-propelled howitzers—was hurled into the fray. Rumbling through Kakazu Gorge and onto the reverse slope of the ridge, they ran into a firestorm. Japanese popped out of spider holes to blind the tank crews with smoke charges and fling satchel charges under the vehicles. Others ran up to attach magnetic demolition charges. Antitank guns blasted them from concealed positions.

It was a disaster. Separated from their protecting infantry units, the armored vehicles were picked off one by one. Only eight tanks escaped the massacre, making it the worst loss of armored vehicles in the entire campaign.

By afternoon, heavy thunderstorms were drenching the battle zone, making the barren ground slippery and adding to the difficulties of the assault.

Grim-faced, Simon Buckner received the reports. Each of his divisions had run into a wall of resistance. By evening the American line had advanced only about 1,000 yards on either end, with a heavily fortified enemy salient in the center of the line.

With darkness falling, it was apparent to Buckner that the assault had failed. “
Progress not quite satisfactory,” he wrote that night in his diary.

F
rom inside his fortified shelter at Kanoya, Admiral Ugaki listened to the explosions on the airfield. The American fighter-bombers were back. About eighty of them had slipped in through the cloud cover without being detected. The air raid alert hadn’t sounded until a few minutes before the enemy bombers arrived.

Now they were bombing the base at Kanoya.

Ugaki felt a deepening sense of frustration. The next “floating chrysanthemum” operation—
kikusui
No. 3—was supposed to have begun that morning, but the operation was delayed by the weather. Clouds and rain again covered the East China Sea. This afternoon, just as the cloud cover was opening, the enemy warplanes appeared.

Ugaki was perplexed. Why did the enemy always seem to anticipate his next move? Where had the American planes come from? Most still had long-range belly tanks attached, reinforcing Ugaki’s belief that they must be coming from Kadena and Yontan, the recently captured airfields on Okinawa. The air raids went on for an hour. The American warplanes swarmed over the airfields on Kyushu, seeming to devote special attention to Ugaki’s headquarters at Kanoya.

When the raiders finally withdrew to the south, a few Japanese Zero and George fighters took off to nip at their heels. It was mostly a symbolic gesture. The damage had already been done.

Darkness was falling when Ugaki emerged from his shelter. In all, fifty-one aircraft had been destroyed on the ground, and another twenty-nine shot down. Despite the setback, he gave the order to proceed with
kikusui
No. 3. As an afterthought, he included the enemy-occupied airfields of Kadena and Yontan in their list of targets.

In the waning daylight, Admiral Ugaki watched the first wave of
kikusui
No. 3 finally rumble into the sky. The next day at dawn, the attacks would resume.

28
KEEP MOVING AND KEEP SHOOTING

NORTHERN RADAR PICKET STATIONS
APRIL 16, 1945

O
ne thing they would all agree on later: April 16 was a hell of a day. For the tin can sailors as well as the fighter pilots sent to protect them, it was the wildest day of combat most of them would ever experience.

The day began with another massed kamikaze attack, the second phase of
kikusui
No. 3. Three divisions of Grim Reaper Corsairs were on CAP stations over the radar picket ships.

One of the divisions was led by Lt. (jg) Phil Kirkwood. Still on his wing was Ens. Dick Quiel, who knew that staying close to Kirkwood meant you had a good chance of seeing action. Their second two-plane section was led by Ens. Horace “Tuck” Heath, whose wingman was a baby-faced ensign named Alfred Lerch.

Photographs of Al Lerch showed a skinny, grinning kid who looked barely old enough to borrow his father’s roadster. Lerch was from Coopersburg, Pennsylvania, and he had become a Grim Reaper by accident. He was supposed to have joined VF-87 aboard USS
Ticonderoga
, but a broken leg caused him to miss their deployment. In January 1945 he was reassigned to the re-formed VF-10 on
Intrepid
.

Al Lerch was still looking for his first air-to-air victory. As he had already discovered, being the Tail End Charlie in a division meant that you got the leftovers. Two days earlier he had flown on Tuck Heath’s wing while Heath methodically shot up an incoming Betty bomber and sent it smoking into the ocean. Lerch, the Tail End Charlie, never got to fire his guns.

But this was another day, and things were looking up for Lerch. En route to the CAP station, Heath developed radio trouble. It
meant that Lerch was now the section leader. It also meant that
he
would get first crack at the bogeys.

T
he action started twenty minutes after they reached the CAP station. Bogeys were reported inbound, passing the island of Amami Oshima. Lerch and Heath headed north, while Kirkwood and Quiel took a station a few miles behind them. Kirkwood stayed low, beneath the cloud deck, where he could pick off any wave-skimming kamikazes, and sent Quiel to a high perch at 8,000 feet. The assignment suited Dick Quiel, who was happy to be on his own. Any target he spotted was all his—if he was lucky.

Minutes later, Quiel got lucky. He spotted the bogeys. They were high, heading south, and Quiel could tell by the fixed landing gear and the peculiar straight leading edges of the wings that they were Nakajima Ki-27 Nate fighters. The Nate was an obsolete warplane that had seen its heyday in the China battles of the 1930s. Now they were relegated to kamikaze missions.

The Nates were spread out in a loose gaggle, two flights of three each. In a wide pursuit curve, Quiel swung in on their tails. He selected the furthest aft Nate fighter and opened fire. The unarmored Japanese fighter burned almost instantly.

Quiel nudged the Corsair’s nose over to the next Nate and repeated the process. That Nate burned almost as quickly as the first. Both were leaving blazing trails down to the sea.

But now Quiel was overtaking the rest of the slow-flying Nates. The Japanese pilots were all flying straight ahead, seemingly unaware that two of them had just been shot down.

Quiel pulled up to the right, then swung back in a pursuit curve on the four remaining Japanese fighters. He shot down another one. Then another. But with the Corsair’s speed advantage of nearly a hundred knots he was again overrunning the two surviving fighters.

As Quiel bore down on them, one of the Nates abruptly rolled inverted and did a split-S—the bottom half of a loop, disappearing
into the clouds. Quiel guessed that he would impact the water before pulling out.

The single remaining Nate continued boring straight ahead, apparently fixated on one of the picket destroyers in the ocean. Quiel was overtaking him too fast to get a shot. He tried to slow the Corsair, snatching the throttle back, putting the propeller into full low pitch, extending several degrees of landing flap.

It wasn’t enough. Seconds later, Quiel found himself alongside the Nate fighter, wing tip to wing tip. Time seemed to freeze while Quiel stared at the enemy pilot 30 feet away. The Nate’s cockpit canopy was open. Quiel could see the young man’s face, the leather helmet with white fur trim. The Japanese pilot refused to look at him. As in a trance, he had his eyes riveted on his target—the destroyer straight ahead.

Quiel opened his canopy and yanked out his .38 revolver. There was almost no relative motion between the airplanes. He’d shoot the son of a bitch the old-fashioned way. At this range he couldn’t miss.

Quiel was aiming the pistol, about to squeeze off a round, when an explosion erupted just ahead of him. Then another. Antiaircraft fire was erupting all around him.
Damn
. The gunners on the destroyer were shooting at both airplanes, not bothering to distinguish between them.

In the next instant, the Nate was gone, diving almost straight down at the destroyer. Quiel dove after him, trying to get into firing position again. Antiaircraft fire was bursting around both airplanes.

Quiel couldn’t get another shot. Helplessly he watched the Japanese plane crash into the destroyer’s forward gun turret. He thought it was the end of the destroyer.

It wasn’t. To Quiel’s amazement, the tin can emerged from the smoke and debris of the crash, seemingly unfazed. Still steaming at full speed, the destroyer had shrugged off the kamikaze hit as if it were a mosquito bite.

P
hil Kirkwood, true to form, had tangled with a flock of twenty kamikazes that were bearing down on another destroyer. In less than a minute Kirkwood shot down a Val dive-bomber as it was beginning its run. Seconds later he flamed a Nate fighter, also bearing down on the destroyer.

Kirkwood kept shooting, chasing each kamikaze down through bursts of antiaircraft fire. He splashed three more before they could reach the destroyer.

When the enemy airplanes had finally stopped showing up, he rejoined with Quiel. They were on their way back to the CAP station when Kirkwood spotted the silhouettes of kamikazes attacking yet another destroyer. In the space of a few minutes, Kirkwood shot down yet one more Nate, exploding it into the water a hundred yards short of the destroyer.

For Kirkwood and Quiel, the melee over the picket stations was over. Together the pair had accounted for ten enemy airplanes. The day’s action put Quiel on the roster of aces and elevated Kirkwood to double ace status. By downing six in a single mission, Phil Kirkwood had accomplished a feat almost unmatched by anyone else in his squadron.

Almost. What he didn’t know was that twenty miles to the north, his Tail End Charlie, Al Lerch, was making history.

T
he radarman in the picket destroyer
Laffey
stared at his scope. There were at least fifty bogeys, more than he’d ever seen in a single cluster. They looked like fast-multiplying amoebas spreading over the fluorescent screen.

The bogeys were headed straight for
Laffey
.

Escorting
Laffey
at the lonely radar picket station were a pair of support gunboats, LCS-51 and LCS-116. The gunboats had been on station for two days without firing a shot. There’d been several
nerve-jangling late-night calls to battle stations but no kamikaze attacks. Their luck seemed to be holding.

Laffey
’s skipper, Cmdr. Julian Becton, had already seen his share of action. He’d been the executive officer of the destroyer
Aaron Ward
when it was sunk off Guadalcanal in April 1943. After fighting in several more surface actions in the South Pacific, he took command of a new destroyer, USS
Laffey
, in February 1944. The 2,200-ton
Laffey
was the second destroyer to bear the name. Her predecessor, DD-459, had also gone down off Guadalcanal in 1942.

Becton and his new ship joined the bombardment force at the D-day landings at Normandy, firing more shells than any other destroyer in the invasion. By the end of 1944,
Laffey
had transferred to the Pacific, joining the fight in the Philippines, then at Iwo Jima, and now at Okinawa.

Two days ago
Laffey
had been in the Kerama Retto anchorage taking on ammunition and supplies. As they were leaving, Becton exchanged greetings with the skipper of the destroyer
Cassin Young
, which had taken a kamikaze hit a few days earlier.
Young
’s captain was a friend and Naval Academy classmate of Becton’s. “Keep moving and keep shooting,” yelled out
Cassin Young
’s skipper. “Steam as fast as you can, and shoot as fast as you can.”