The Twilight Warriors (44 page)

Clarke’s Tail End Charlie, Ens. Ray James, saw the distinctive shapes of three Tony fighters swooping down toward him in a perfect pursuit curve. The Tony was unique, the only Japanese fighter powered by an in-line, liquid-cooled engine. When the Tony made its first appearance in the Pacific, it was mistaken for a German Messerschmitt Bf 109.

James winced as he saw the tracers of the first Tony’s 12.7-millimeter machine guns searing past him. But the Japanese pilot had been too eager. The bullets missed James’s Corsair, and now Wally Clarke was whipping in behind the Tony. Seconds later, Clarke had him in his sights, gunning the Japanese fighter out of the air.

Behind the Tonys came four Zeroes. One made the mistake of overshooting his high-side run on Tail End Charlie Ray James. James took advantage of the mistake, maneuvering behind the Zero’s tail. He stayed there, all six machine guns firing, until the Japanese fighter went into the water.

Up above, the other three Corsair pilots were mixing it up with the remaining Japanese fighters. Bo Farmer was having a field day,
splashing three Zeroes and a Tony fighter. Clarke climbed up after an escaping Zero, catching the fighter and blowing it to pieces.

The fight was over as quickly as it had begun. The surviving Japanese fighters scattered like quail. Clarke’s flight was returning to the orbit point when another call for help crackled on the tactical frequency. A destroyer—USS
Laffey
—was in trouble.

When they arrived over the radar picket ship, they found a swirling tableau of antiaircraft fire, swarming kamikazes, and friendly fighters, including Wildcats and Hellcats from other carriers and a contingent of Marine Corsairs from the Okinawa airfields.

Clarke and his wingman, Ens. Jack Ehrhard, went after a pair of Vals that were positioning for a run on the
Laffey
. Clarke flamed one, and Ehrhard put enough rounds into the second to send it smoking toward the water.

Minutes later, they spotted a Japanese Betty bomber low on the water, racing at top speed from a pair of pursuing F6F Hellcats. Sportsmanship between fighter pilots, especially those from different carriers, was virtually nonexistent. Clarke and Ehrhard rolled in on the Betty, neatly cutting out the Hellcats.

In his eagerness to nail the Betty, however, Clarke overran the bomber before he could get it in his sights. That left his wingman, Ehrhard, to claim the prize, while the disgruntled Hellcat pilots watched from astern.

But the Betty didn’t crash, even after Ehrhard poured a hail of lead into it. The bomber skipped off the water, pulled up, then splashed down in a semicontrolled ditching. As the Corsair pilots swept overhead, they saw three figures clamber out of the wreck of the bomber. The Japanese crewmen were bobbing like otters in the water, within paddling distance of a nearby enemy-occupied island.

This was not a day—nor an era—for compassion. None of the American pilots had charitable feelings for the enemy who had been killing American sailors all morning. One after the other, .50-calibers firing, they strafed the water around the downed Betty until nothing was left but a dark froth.

L
affey’s
gunners were being killed or wounded as fast as they could be replaced. Even though the CAP fighters were engaging the kamikazes, shooting down or chasing away most of them,
Laffey
was still a target.

A bomb struck her just below the bridge, wiping out the two 20-millimeter mounts and killing both gun crews as well as several already wounded men being treated below in the main-deck-level wardroom being used as a dressing station.

Then came a Judy dive-bomber, hurtling in from the port quarter.
Laffey
’s gunners blazed away with their remaining 40-millimeter and 20-millimeter guns, but the blunt-nosed shape of the Judy continued to swell in size. At the last moment before impact, a Corsair caught the kamikaze from behind. The Judy crashed into the water close aboard. The blazing hulk skidded into the destroyer’s hull, causing a dent but no serious damage.

For the moment, no more enemy planes seemed to be targeting
Laffey
. Peering into the sky, Ari Phoutrides had the feeling that it was over. He could see more than a dozen fighters—Corsairs and Hellcats—chasing the few remaining kamikazes.

For the wounded
Laffey
, it was almost too late. Fires in the aft half of the ship were still burning out of control. The destroyer was slowly flooding. Her shattered fantail was nearly submerged. Though her engines were running, the rudder was still jammed hard to port. Captain Becton was trying every combination of engine thrust to steer the destroyer southward, away from the kamikaze hunting ground. Nothing worked.

The destroyer-minesweeper
Macomb
steamed up to assist with the frantic damage control efforts and to take the destroyer under tow. With her flooded stern and jammed rudder,
Laffey
was untowable by a single vessel. In the early afternoon, a pair of fleet tugs arrived. After using pumps to control the flooding, they managed to haul the destroyer back to the Hagushi anchorage at Okinawa.

Laffey
wasn’t the only casualty that day on RP1. Both her gunboat escorts had taken heavy damage. LCS-116 was struck topside, suffering seventeen dead and twelve wounded. LCS-51 had a gaping hole in her hull, with three men wounded.

In the fading light at the anchorage that evening, sailors from other ships gawked at the mangled USS
Laffey
. It was hard to believe any ship could take that much punishment and keep fighting. Several ships of
Laffey
’s size had been sunk from a single kamikaze.

No other vessel in the war would take as many kamikaze hits and remain afloat. In twenty-two separate attacks
Laffey
endured six kamikaze crashes and two bomb strikes. Thirty-two of her crew were dead, and seventy-one were wounded. In exchange, her gunners took down nine kamikazes. In seventy-nine minutes of hellish combat, USS
Laffey
had earned herself a niche in naval history.

30
GLORY DAY

NORTHERN RYUKYU ISLANDS
APRIL 16, 1945

L
t. George “Bee” Weems gazed into the morning sky, trying to spot the dark specks coming from the north. The bogeys were reported flying at low altitude, not in their usual loose formation but singly, strung out in a line. Weems guessed that they were coming from an island in the northern Ryukyus.

Like many fighter pilots, Bee Weems had a quirk. His was the pair of binoculars he carried in the cockpit, earning him the moniker “Eyes of the Fleet,” though no one had actually seen him use the glasses in flight. The binoculars were a carryover from his days as a destroyer man. Weems was a Naval Academy grad and the son of a naval officer, Capt. Philip Weems, who was a renowned pioneer of sea and air navigation.

Weems’s wingman, Ens. Charlie Schlag, nicknamed “Curly,” was a balding young man from West Virginia who had trained in dive-bombers before being switched to fighters. Schlag had his own quirk. He carried two canteens in his emergency equipment. One was aluminum, for water. The other was plastic, and it contained whisky. Schlag had heard somewhere that whisky had enough nutritional value to keep you alive for a week in your life raft. He had no idea whether it was true or not, but what the hell—he was willing to give it a try.

They spotted the first bogey a few minutes before 0900. It was a Zero at low altitude and climbing, confirming Weems’s suspicion that the kamikazes had begun staging from one of the nearby islands, probably Kikai. Weems and Schlag rolled in on the Zero, coordinating their firing passes, each getting solid hits, sending
the Zero down in flames. It was a coldly efficient team attack, for which the pilots would share the credit.

Seconds later, they spotted another Zero, also low and climbing. This one Weems promptly shot down. Then a third showed up, and Schlag took his turn. He was still putting bullets into the Zero, making it smoke, when the Japanese fighter abruptly rolled inverted and dove for the ocean. Weems was there, guns firing, and the Zero joined its two predecessors in the ocean. Another shared kill.

The action wasn’t over. Five minutes later, yet another solo Zero showed up. Like the others, it was in a climb, and Weems wasted no time blasting it out of the sky.

The sky was cleared of enemy planes, at least for the moment. The Zeroes had all carried external bombs, which meant to Weems that they were kamikazes and not fighters. He requested permission to reconnoiter the enemy island of Kikai, only 10 miles away.

Minutes later, permission received, Weems and Schlag, now joined by their second two-plane section, were sweeping over the Japanese airfield. They caught one Betty bomber out in the open, which they exploded with their guns. They found a Zero in a revetment and set it afire.

And that was it. If there were more kamikazes based on Kikai, they were well concealed. Or, as Bee Weems suspected, they were already airborne and attacking American ships.

W
eems was right. On the northern picket stations, the kamikazes were again pouncing on the tin cans. The destroyer
Bryant
, which had been steaming to
Laffey
’s assistance from nearby RP2, came under attack by six kamikazes. One crashed into the base of her bridge, wiping out the CIC compartment and the plotting rooms, killing thirty-four sailors.

At the same time on RP14, three more picket ships, the destroyer
Pringle
, the destroyer/minesweeper
Hobson
, and their escorting gunboat, LCS-191, were all slugging it out with kamikazes.
Pringle
’s gunners had already splashed one attacking Zero and were now fighting off three Vals.

Pringle
’s skipper, Lt. Cmdr. John Kelley, was following the “keep moving, keep shooting” doctrine, turning hard in each direction to give his main batteries a full field of fire. It wasn’t enough. A Val wove its way through the smoke and flak, smashing into
Pringle
just behind her forward stack.
Pringle
didn’t have
Laffey
’s toughness—or her luck. The impact of the kamikaze buckled the destroyer’s keel.
Pringle
broke in half, and in less than five minutes she went to the bottom, taking sixty-two men with her.

April 16 was turning into one of the deadliest days ever for kamikaze attacks. In
kikusui
No. 3 the Japanese had sent fewer airplanes than in the two previous massed attacks—only 165 airplanes instead of the initial wave of 355—but the tactics had become more deadly. The kamikazes had learned to coordinate their attacks and hit from opposite sides, relentlessly stalking ships that were already wounded and smoking.

But a question still puzzled American commanders: why were the kamikazes throwing themselves at the picket destroyers instead of at the higher-value warships farther south? One explanation was that the Japanese considered the radar picket ships to be vital targets. Another was that the picket ships were birds in hand—the first targets the anxious kamikaze pilots spotted on the route to Okinawa.

And then there was an even simpler possibility: the kamikaze pilots didn’t know the difference between warships. Several had been heard excitedly transmitting that they were “diving on a battleship” when their target was a destroyer.

But on the afternoon of April 16, the
tokko
pilots stalking the ships of Task Force 58 northeast of Okinawa knew exactly what class of warship they were hunting. Their targets were big, fast, and unmistakable. One of them was the aircraft carrier
Intrepid
.