The Twilight Warriors (52 page)

Cmdr. Jimmy Flatley, Mitscher’s operations officer, was standing out on the exposed bridge wing when he saw the kamikaze diving from the clouds. Knowing what was about to happen, Flatley darted back through the steel door to flag plot and slammed it behind him. He yelled for everyone to hit the deck. Seconds later came the concussion, followed by the clatter of metal pinging into the light armor of the flag bridge.

Then it subsided. Flatley raised his head from the deck and peered around. Mitscher was standing among the prone bodies on the deck, arms folded, a frown covering his face. “
Flatley,” said the admiral, “tell my task group commanders that if the Japs keep this up they’re going to grow hair on my head yet.”

Then came the smoke. It was a replay of the scene three days earlier aboard
Bunker Hill
. A cloud of noxious smoke came gushing in through the ventilators. Again the flag staff had to evacuate their compartment.

Down on the flight deck, flames were leaping from the hole where the bomb had penetrated. The concussion of the blast had hurled
Enterprise
’s forward elevator 400 feet in the air. Damage control crews had the fires extinguished in half an hour, but
Enterprise
was too severely wounded to continue operations.

The next day they held a burial at sea for the twelve crewmen killed in the attack. Then they held another, from the stern of the ship, for the remains of Lt. (jg) Shunsuke Tomiyasu. His name and rank they had learned from the business cards they found in
his pocket. One of the cards was given to Mitscher as a parting memento.

For the second time in four days, the Bald Eagle and his staff packed up their smoke-permeated belongings and transferred Mitscher’s flag to yet another carrier, USS
Randolph
. Like
Bunker Hill
, the “Big E” had been knocked out of the war. It was her third kamikaze hit, earning her a footnote in history: she would be the last carrier of the war to be struck by a kamikaze.

W
earing his starched khakis and metal-rimmed spectacles, Kelly Turner exchanged salutes with his successor, Vice Adm. Harry Hill. It was May 17, and for the Alligator it was a day of mixed emotions. The job he’d begun back in March—the capture of Okinawa—was still not finished.

It was the Navy way, this periodic rotation of commanders, even in the midst of battle. Harry Hill had already taken charge of the 5th Amphibious Force, and today’s ceremony completed the turnover, relieving Turner as commander, Task Force 51. In ten days, similar change-of-command rituals would be conducted on the flagships of the Fifth Fleet and the Fast Carrier Task Force when Raymond Spruance and Marc Mitscher turned over their commands to Bull Halsey and Slew McCain.

The disputatious Turner wouldn’t be missed, at least by the officers who served directly under him. Turner’s subordinates would not forget the tongue-lashings, the egotism, the peremptory rudeness of the man. They would long retain the image of those bushy eyebrows descending like a hood over the icy blue eyes, the signal that another volcanic eruption of temper was on the way.

But even those who most disliked Turner had to acknowledge his brilliance. Working for the Alligator amounted to a graduate-level course in meticulously detailed operational planning. It was hard to imagine a massive amphibious operation without the masterful guidance of Kelly Turner.

Which, in fact, was why Turner was on his way back to Pearl
Harbor. With the invasion of Okinawa now a fait accompli, the Alligator’s specialized skills were needed for the greatest amphibious landing yet conceived—Operation Olympic, the invasion of Kyushu, the southern island of Japan, which was scheduled for November 1, 1945. Turner would be the point man in the critical landings. To go with his new duties, he was pinning on a fourth star.

For the officers who had served under “Terrible” Turner, the change of command brought an abrupt lifestyle change. Their new boss, Harry Hill, was the opposite of Turner, a genial, mild-mannered officer who seldom raised his voice. Serving in Hill’s flag plot on the
Eldorado
felt almost like a vacation. For some, after the challenge of working for the Alligator, it even seemed boring.

O
n the day Kelly Turner was turning over command of his task force, his fire support ships were busy doing what they’d done since the invasion began: bombarding enemy positions on southern Okinawa. One of the destroyers, USS
Longshaw
, spent that night firing star shells to thwart Japanese infiltrators creeping through the lines in southern Okinawa.

It was tiring, tedious duty, and like the rest of his crew,
Longshaw
’s skipper, Lt. Cmdr. C. W. Becker, was exhausted. On the morning of the 18th, during a bombardment mission along the coast,
Longshaw
ran aground. She was stuck on Ose Reef, just off the Naha airstrip on the western shoreline.

Becker didn’t need to be told he was in a dangerous place. He was dead in the sights of the very guns he had come to destroy. The only good news was that so far the Japanese had shown no inclination to fire their coastal defense guns at offshore targets. They didn’t want to reveal their positions, saving their big guns to use against the American ground forces.

Now Becker just wanted to get the hell out of there. He tried backing off, churning the water to a muddy froth with his propellers. The destroyer didn’t budge. Then he ordered the crew to
jettison everything that wasn’t bolted down, to lighten the ship. They were still stuck. The destroyer
Picking
arrived to give them a tow. The line was too light, and it parted.

The fleet tug
Arikara
showed up to pass them a heavier line. Becker could see
Arikara
taking up strain on the line. In a few minutes,
Longshaw
would be out of danger.

It was then that the first shell exploded. Geysers of water began erupting around
Longshaw
. A Japanese battery commander, observing the scene, had decided the destroyer was too tempting a target to pass up.
Longshaw
’s gunners fired back, more out of defiance than anything else. Tin can sailors knew their main defenses were speed and agility. Now they were trapped like a fox in a snare.

A salvo landed just short of
Longshaw
, another a few yards long. The Japanese gunners had them bracketed. In rapid succession four shells crashed down right on target.
Longshaw
’s gun mounts were shattered. The superstructure was ripped apart. A round detonated on the forward deck, touching off an ammunition magazine. In the explosion, the forward half of the destroyer was blown away.

Amid the chaos, the mortally wounded Becker shouted the order to abandon ship. Some men did, some didn’t. With shellfire exploding all around them, going into the sea seemed as bad a choice as staying with the ship.

By the time the guns had stopped firing, eighty-six
Longshaw
crewmen were dead, including the captain. Ninety-seven more were wounded. The ruined
Longshaw
, still trapped on the reef, had to be destroyed by gunfire and torpedoes.

T
he massed kamikaze attacks resumed on May 23. Instead of concentrating on the northern picket stations this time, most of the 165 planes of
kikusui
No. 7 tried an end run around the pickets and CAPs and went after the fire support ships.

Most of the
tokko
planes arrived over their targets after dark, flying in the glow of a full moon. They managed to crash a
destroyer-transport,
Barry
, damaging her badly enough that her abandoned hulk would be towed out to sea to serve as a decoy for further kamikazes. A minesweeper,
Spectacle
, was knocked out of action, as well as the destroyer
Stormes
and an LSM fire support ship. The destroyer-transport
Bates
, after taking two kamikaze strikes, made it under tow back to Hagushi, only to capsize and sink the same day.

The
tokko
pilots weren’t the only night raiders. At the Japanese base at Kumamoto, in central Kyushu, a daring mission called Operation
Giretsu
(Operation Faith) lifted into the sky after nightfall on May 24. Each of the twelve specially equipped Mitsubishi Ki-21 twin-engine “Sally” bombers carried ten special attack commandos. Their mission was to assault the Marine bases at Kadena and Yontan.

Admiral Ugaki, who was still convinced that the Okinawa airfields were being used for attacks on his bases in Kyushu, had ordered the
Giretsu
operation. The truth was, the first strikes on Japan from Kadena and Yontan weren’t flown until June 10, 1945.

A wave of conventional bombers went ahead of the commando-carrying
Giretsu
aircraft, attacking Kadena and Yontan as well as the newly captured air base on Ie Shima. But like most tightly coordinated Japanese missions, this one unraveled early. Several of the
Giretsu
aircraft became lost in the darkness. Several more developed engine trouble.

By 2230, when the commando-carrying Sally bombers arrived over the northern tip of Okinawa, they were down to only four airplanes. Directly ahead of them, illuminated in the pale moonlight, was the runway at Yontan.

And then they were spotted. The antiaircraft guns opened up, and within a minute three of the Sallys had gone down in flames. The lone survivor made it through the gunfire unscathed, lined up on a runway at Yontan, and belly-landed. While the twin-engine bomber was still scraping along the concrete surface, sending up a
shower of sparks, pieces, and propeller blades, the hatch flew open and ten
Giretsu
commandos tumbled out.

For several minutes they had the advantage of surprise. Sprinting down the darkened flight line, the
Giretsu
commandos threw hand grenades and phosphorous bombs into the rows of parked warplanes. Flames from burning Corsairs and transports billowed into the night sky. The surprised Marines on the base’s perimeter defense reacted quickly, chasing down the raiders one by one.

It took most of the night. As dawn came to Yontan, the charred remains of seven warplanes were still smoking. Twenty-six other airplanes had been damaged, some irreparably. Two fuel dumps had gone up in flames, torching 70,000 gallons of precious aviation gasoline. The body of each
Giretsu
commando lay on the tarmac where he had been shot.

Two Americans had been killed in the action and eighteen wounded. Fifty-six Japanese commandos and bomber crewmen had been sacrificed. The audacious
Giretsu
raid, if nothing else, was a graphic reminder that the spirit of
bushido
was still very much alive.

A
dmiral Ugaki was running out of airplanes. For his next
tokko
attack,
kikusui
No. 8 on May 27, Ugaki could muster only 110 aircraft. It was the smallest number of airplanes so far in any of the floating chrysanthemum attacks.

Some of the
tokko
aircraft were antiques, including flimsy Kyushu KIIW
Shiragiku
trainers, with a top speed of only 100 mph. Even in a dive, they reached a maximum speed of no more than about 200 mph.

Ugaki had no illusions about their chances. “Apart from their use at night,” wrote Ugaki in his diary, “they couldn’t stand even one second against enemy fighter attacks.”

Despite the decrepitude of the airplanes and their small numbers,
kikusui
No. 8 was deadly. Two Val dive bombers set the
destroyer
Braine
afire, killing 67 men and wounding 103. Many of the tin can sailors died gruesome deaths in the water, devoured by sharks after they abandoned the burning ship.

The next dawn, May 28, a twin-engine bomber, probably a Nick, managed to slip past two Corsair CAP planes and a wall of flak from the destroyer
Drexler
. The Nick was carrying a larger-than-normal kamikaze payload. When the kamikaze crashed the
Drexler
amidships, the cataclysmic explosion blew the sides of the destroyer out. She was gone in less than a minute, taking 158 crewmen with her.

The bloody month of May was drawing to a close. Ninety U.S. ships had been sunk or damaged to the extent that they were out of the war. More than a thousand Navy men were dead, with hundreds more injured, many from horrible burns. The Battle of Okinawa had become the costliest naval engagement in U.S. history. And it wasn’t over.

T
hese grim facts were hanging like a pall over the deck of the cruiser USS
New Mexico
on the cloudy morning of May 27. Raymond Spruance, wearing his standard expressionless countenance, greeted his old friend Bill Halsey. In the space of a salute and brief verbal exchange, Spruance turned over command of the world’s mightiest naval armada. Once again the Fifth Fleet was the Third Fleet. Task Force 58 became Task Force 38, and every task group and unit changed its prefix accordingly.

Spruance had been a pillar of tenacity throughout the ordeal of Okinawa. Historian Samuel Eliot Morison observed, “
A less serene and courageous man might, before reaching this point, have asked, ‘Is this island worth the cost? Is there no better way to defeat Japan?’ But no such doubts or questions ever even occurred to Raymond A. Spruance.”

On the same day that Spruance was relieved by Halsey, Marc Mitscher handed over Task Force 58—the Fast Carrier Task
Force—to his counterpart, Vice Adm. John “Slew” McCain. As the two grizzled admirals met on the deck of
Randolph
, the years of nonstop combat operations showed in their haggard looks. Mitscher was fifty-eight, McCain not yet sixty-one, but each had the face of a man two decades older. Though McCain was just beginning another tour of duty, he looked as beat-up as Mitscher. Neither man weighed much over a hundred pounds, their khaki uniforms hanging like shrouds over their skinny frames.

Everyone was tired, including the flag staff officers. Several days later, when Mitscher and Burke and their staff lined up back in Pearl Harbor for an awards ceremony, they looked “
like a parade of scarecrows,” according to Mitscher’s biographer. Of all the senior commanders, Spruance seemed to be holding up the best, his smooth face never showing signs of strain. Like everything about Spruance, though, it was hard to tell.