The Twilight Warriors (50 page)

At 0857, they spotted one. It was a twin-engine bomber, still high, at the upper edge of the haze blanket. A pair of FM-2 Wildcat fighters was already after it, guns blazing. The bomber would be splashed before it came close enough to threaten
Shea
and her entourage. There was nothing to worry about.

High above, the Wildcat pilots were pouring machine gun fire into the Dinah bomber when they glimpsed something peculiar. An odd-shaped object dropped from the bomber’s belly. Not until a few seconds later, when they saw fire spit from the object’s tail, did they know what it was. Then it was too late.

The
Ohka
was accelerating like a bullet. One of the Wildcats dove after the weird-looking aircraft, but it was no contest. The rocket-boosted guided bomb was already moving at 350 knots, becoming a distant speck in the Wildcat pilot’s gun sight.

Down below, the startled gunners on the
Shea
had almost no warning. The gnatlike object came screaming out of the hazy murk, aimed like a meteor for the bridge of their ship. Gun captains were yelling commands, trying to track the object, but it was unstoppable.

The
Ohka
slammed like a battering ram into the starboard side of
Shea
’s bridge superstructure—and kept going. A millisecond later, the
Ohka
emerged on the other side, leaving a large exit hole in
Shea
’s port hull. Not until the warhead of the
Ohka
was 15 feet past the ship’s hull did it explode.

Shea
rocked from the external blast. Several frames were buckled and plates were ruptured. Twenty-seven men were killed in the attack, and 130 were wounded.
Shea
had been punctured from one side to the other, but the minelayer could still make her own way and was in no danger of sinking.

Shea
had been saved by a miracle—and by the ballistics of the
Ohka
, which was designed to penetrate heavy armor, not the thin skin of a minelayer such as USS
Shea
.

A
t Hagushi anchorage, the gunners aboard the heavy cruiser
Birmingham
were busy.
Birmingham
was the flagship of surface force commander Rear Adm. Mort Deyo, and it had been under attack most of the morning by kamikazes coming from the sea. While the gunners were preoccupied, a lone Oscar was sneaking in from over the island of Okinawa, undetected on radar.

No one spotted the kamikaze until he was just a mile out. The close-in 20-millimeter guns opened fire, but it was too late. The bomb-carrying Oscar plunged into
Birmingham
’s number two 6-inch forward turret, exploding downward into the spaces below.

For half an hour flames poured from the cruiser. Fifty-one men were killed, including most of the ship’s medical corpsmen, who were concentrated in the ship’s wardroom and main casualty center. Eighty-one more were wounded.
Birmingham
was so badly damaged she had to retire to Guam for repairs.

T
he Americans weren’t the only targets that morning. Operating off the Sakishima Gunto, the southern island group between Okinawa and Formosa, British Task Force 57 was bombarding the Japanese airfields of Nobara and Sukuma.

The Royal Navy task force had joined the U.S. Fifth Fleet in March 1945, with the responsibility of covering the southern approaches to Okinawa. Now the commander, Vice Adm. Sir Bernard Rawlings, had split off his battleships and cruisers from his carriers, sending the heavy surface ships in close to use their heavy guns.

Which, as it turned out, was a tactical mistake. The screen around the British carriers had been weakened. It was an opening the kamikazes quickly exploited.

At 1131 on May 4, a Zero wound its way through the British CAP fighters and the antiaircraft barrage and crashed into the flight deck of the carrier HMS
Formidable
. There was a fireball, a number of casualties, and damage to parked airplanes and deck equipment. The kamikaze had splattered on
Formidable
’s armored flight deck like a scrambled egg.

And that was it. No raging fires or cataclysmic explosions. The carrier shrugged off the hit and continued operating.

The incident revealed a crucial design difference between British and American aircraft carriers. All the U.S. flattops, including the newest Essex-class fast carriers such as
Intrepid
, had wooden flight decks. With deadly frequency kamikazes were punching through the wooden decks like knives through cardboard, exploding into the packed hangar bays.

The wooden decks were a carryover from 1930s aircraft carrier design. Wood could be more easily repaired than steel and, in theory, the lighter wooden decks allowed the ships to carry more airplanes.

No one had foreseen the specter of suicide planes crashing through the wooden planking. Now U.S. carrier skippers, watching the kamikazes ricochet off the British steel decks, were already thinking about the future. Postwar U.S. Navy aircraft carriers would not have wooden decks.

35
GONE WITH THE SPRING

AGANA, GUAM
MAY 5, 1945

L
t. (jg) Windy Hill’s loathing of submarines had reached a new intensity. After what seemed like years but was only a few weeks, the
Sea Dog
finished her war patrol and pulled into Guam. With his flight gear in a pillowcase over his shoulder, wearing sandals and a borrowed shirt and trousers, Hill stepped ashore. It was his first time on dry land since the day in March when he flew his last combat mission from
Intrepid
.

Hill’s cruise aboard the
Sea Dog
had revealed to him the vast culture gap between airedales and submariners. Submarine officers, he discovered, didn’t gather in a stateroom at night to sip Coon Range and swap stories. As far as he could tell, they didn’t sip anything, and in any case, there were no staterooms.

Sea Dog
’s officers had invited him to join them at their rest-and-recreation camp. Hill politely declined. He’d seen enough of submarines and submariners. Thank you and goodbye.

Hill headed across the naval base, looking for the fleet aviation headquarters, where he would report his return. He didn’t make it. En route he spotted a Quonset hut atop a hill that had the unmistakable look of an officers’ club. “It took me about one-half of a second to decide where to re-direct my feet,” Hill recalled. “I figured the war could get along without me for a while.”

It
was
an officers’ club, and it had a bar. The bartender asked if he wanted a beer. No, Hill said. He wanted
six
beers, and he wanted them opened and lined up in front of him. “
When I start inhaling these, I don’t want to waste time reordering.”

He drank the beers. The bartender lined up six more. And so passed the afternoon while Hill put the weeks of submarine tedium
behind him. Finally he gathered up his pillowcase full of gear and wobbled down the hill to the fleet aviation headquarters. He marched into the headquarters office and announced that he was ready to return to the
Intrepid
.

The duty officer looked at him quizzically.
Intrepid?
Hill might as well relax and wait awhile. The
Intrepid
had taken a kamikaze hit off Okinawa. She was on her way back to Pearl Harbor.

F
urther up the hill at the naval base on Guam, in the complex of Quonset huts that served as the advance Pacific Ocean Area Headquarters, Adm. Chester Nimitz and his staff were pondering the action reports of the past two days. The Japanese had thrown 350 planes into the latest massed kamikaze attack—
kikusui
No. 5. Based on the claims of CAP pilots and air defense gunners, 249 had been shot down.

Even though
kikusui
No. 5 was on a smaller scale than most of the previous attacks, the tactics were becoming more deadly. Six U.S. ships—three destroyers and three gunboats—had been sunk. Ten more had taken extensive damage, most of them finished for the duration of the war. Nearly five hundred Navy men had lost their lives, and an equal number were wounded.

The losses only added to Nimitz’s frustration over the land battle on Okinawa. As long as the stalemate continued, Nimitz’s ships would be targets for the kamikazes.

I
n his sheltered command post at Kanoya, the man responsible for
kikusui
No. 5 mulled over the same statistics. As usual, Matome Ugaki was inclined to accept the inflated damage reports. “Explosions and the burning of two battleships, three cruisers, and five unidentified ships were seen from shore,” Ugaki wrote. “Besides the sinking of several cruisers or destroyers and the burning of a battleship were also seen off Kadena. Thus we achieved a great deal of success.”

The fact that the
tokko
airmen were still misidentifying
destroyers as battleships hadn’t registered with Ugaki. Nor had the hopelessness of the land battle on Okinawa. More and more, Ugaki was becoming a victim of his fantasies. In his diary he reported that the “32nd Army sent its appreciation” for the navy’s efforts. He was sure that “
when our troops can see enemy vessels sunk and set on fire in front of their very eyes and observe planes with the Rising Sun mark fly overhead, their morale will soar.”

Ugaki was undaunted by the deteriorating situation at Okinawa. He was already preparing his next floating chrysanthemum attack,
kikusui
No. 6.

O
n May 8, there was a lull in the action, as if both sides were absorbing the momentous news: Germany had surrendered. The war in Europe was over.

In the United States, jubilant Americans were in the streets, honking horns, cheering, embracing each other. In Japan, the significance of losing their main ally was minimized by government spokesmen. The new premier, Admiral Kantaro Suzuki, insisted that he was “determined to fight through this war with all I have.”

There was little jubilation on Okinawa. To the American soldiers and Marines in the mud-filled trenches of the front line, the end of the war in Europe had as much relevance as a tremor on Mars. Their own war had no foreseeable end. It was clear that the Japs on this miserable island weren’t quitting until the last one was dead. Then would come the
real
battle. They were going to have to fight for every inch of ground in Japan.

Nor did the sailors on the tin cans or the pilots on the carriers have much to celebrate. Sure, the end of the conflict in Europe meant that more military assets would eventually be sent to the Pacific. In the meantime, there seemed to be no end to the kamikazes.

Vice Adm. Kelly Turner, however, thought that this historic occasion should receive special recognition. From his flagship
Eldorado
he sent an order: precisely at noon on May 8, every big gun
ashore on Okinawa would fire one round. The barrage would be accompanied by full gun salvoes from the fire support ships offshore. It would be a dramatic, boisterous salute to the victorious troops in Europe.

And so the guns fired. The earth reverberated, and the concussion sent ripples across the mud puddles along the front lines. No one ashore or on the ships was especially impressed. When it was over and the dust and thunder had subsided, the grunts and the sailors went back to what they’d been doing—trying to get this damned island secured.

A
t age twenty-eight, 1st Lt. Robert Klingman was the old man of his group of Tail End Charlies. Klingman had already served as an enlisted man in both the Navy and the Marine Corps. Now he was a Marine Corsair pilot in the VMF-312 Checkerboard squadron at Kadena air base on Okinawa. With the two captured airfields, Yontan and Kadena, up and running, the Marines were flying a greater share of the CAP missions over the picket stations, as well as delivering close air support for Buckner’s ground forces.

On the morning of May 10, Klingman was Capt. Ken Reusser’s wingman in a four-plane CAP mission over Ie Shima. They’d gone after a high-flying Japanese reconnaissance plane, a twin-engine Kawasaki Ki-45 Nick fighter. The high-altitude planes had been making daily overflights, photographing the disposition of the fleet for the next kamikaze attacks.

The Marines dropped their belly tanks and firewalled the engines of the Corsairs, clawing their way up to the Nick’s contrails. They caught up with him at 38,000 feet, a barely sustainable altitude for the Corsairs. To lighten the Corsairs so they could climb higher, they had expended much of their heavy .50-caliber ammunition.

Reusser opened fire first, getting hits in the Nick’s left wing and engine. Then his guns ran out of ammunition. Klingman gave it a try, then his guns stopped firing. In the subzero temperature they
had frozen. He could see the Japanese tail gunner in the rear cockpit glowering at him. The gunner was banging on his own frozen machine gun.

Klingman was determined to bring down the Nick. He climbed slightly above the Nick’s slipstream, then eased back down on the aft fuselage. In full view of the horrified tail gunner, Klingman’s propeller sawed into the aft fuselage. Pieces of canopy, machine gun, and gore from the decapitated gunner spewed into the slipstream. A hunk of the rudder tore away.