The Twilight Warriors (55 page)

Ugaki would take the path of the warrior. He rationalized that because he had not yet received an official cease-fire order from navy general headquarters, he was not constrained from carrying out a final
tokko
mission. In his last diary entry he wrote, “I’m going
to
follow in the footsteps of those many loyal officers and men who devoted themselves to the country, and I want to live in the noble spirit of the special attack.”

At 1600 that afternoon, he drank a farewell sake toast with his staff at the Fifth Air Fleet headquarters. Then he removed all badges and emblems of rank from his dark green uniform. By auto he rode to Oita airfield, carrying with him the short ceremonial sword given him by Admiral Yamamoto.

Waiting on the ramp at Oita were eleven Asahi D4Y Judy dive-bombers—the same type he had dispatched by the hundreds on
tokko
missions against the Americans. Their two-man crews were waiting, all wearing the ceremonial
hachimaki
headband with the emblem of the rising sun.

Ugaki protested. He had asked for only five airplanes for his mission. The commander of the detachment, Lt. Tatsuo Nakatsuru, insisted that the admiral not conduct such a mission with only five airplanes. “My unit is going to accompany him with full strength!”

Ugaki was touched. He climbed onto a stand and addressed the pilots. “Will all of you go with me?”

“Yes, sir!” they replied, raising their right hands. Ugaki was at first taken aback, then his face brightened. The prospect of adding more lives to the thousands already sacrificed didn’t seem to trouble him. Nor did the pointlessness of the mission.

The admiral shook hands with each of his staff, then he boarded Lt. Nakatsuru’s plane, taking the rearmost seat in the dive-bomber. In the gathering dusk, the flight of bombers roared off the runway at Kanoya and turned south.

By the time the news of Ugaki’s mission reached navy general headquarters, it was too late to stop them. The commander in chief, Adm. Jisaburo Ozawa, was furious. “It was wrong of him to take his men with him as companions to the other world, knowing the Imperial mandate through the emperor’s broadcast. If he wanted to commit suicide, he should have done it alone.”

By the time Ugaki’s flight neared Okinawa, three of the eleven dive-bombers had already turned back with “engine trouble.” At 1924, Ugaki radioed a message. He intended to “
ram into the arrogant American ships, displaying the real spirit of a Japanese warrior.”

No one saw Matome Ugaki again. None of his planes made it through the U.S. air defense screen, and no U.S. ships were struck by kamikazes. The mission of the last kamikaze had ended in failure.

T
he war is over
. The news spread at the speed of sound through the passageways, compartments, and decks of USS
Intrepid
. The chorus of yelling and cheering swelled over the ship, spilling across the surface of the Eniwetok anchorage, becoming a collective din of sirens and horns and cheering men. The sound was an echo of the same jubilation going on in every city and town of America.

It was 1100 on August 15 in Eniwetok. The new president, Harry Truman, had announced the surrender of Japan. Minutes later the order from Admiral Nimitz’s headquarters flashed to all units of the U.S. Navy in the Pacific: “Cease offensive operations against Japanese forces.”

For the young men on the ships, it was too soon to comprehend the full meaning of what had happened. Fifty million human beings had perished in the costliest war in history. The political geography of the planet had been changed forever. Weapons of unthinkable destructive power had been unleashed. Their own lives had been transformed in ways that would not be apparent until years from now.

None of this was clear to them on this August day in the sweltering heat of the South Pacific. But the Tail End Charlies knew that they had the best reason in the world to celebrate. The war they’d almost missed had ended. The enemy they had hated with a
cold, unreasoning fury was defeated, and they had helped win the victory. Now it was time to go home. At least for some of them.

E
rickson sprawled in the leather-padded ready room chair, waiting for his name to be called. The squadron skipper, Will Rawie, was reading the list of the pilots who were eligible to leave the Navy immediately.

Erickson fidgeted in the chair, agonizing over his decision. Stay in or get out? He had come to love the Navy. He especially loved flying fighters like the Corsair. He knew in his gut that he would never again be bonded as strongly to any group as he was to his squadronmates here in this ready room.

Rawie was going down the list, stopping at each name to see if the pilot raised his hand. He came to Erickson’s name. After a moment’s hesitation, the young pilot’s hand, as if disconnected from his body, shot straight into the air.

And that was it. Decision made. Erickson would return to civilian life to pursue his dream of becoming an artist.

That evening he packed his seabag, then stopped off to have a farewell martini with Windy Hill, who had restocked his private booze stash after his absence on the submarine
Sea Dog
. The next morning Erickson and eight of his squadronmates rode a boat to Okinawa, where they would await transportation to the United States.

For most of them, it was the first time they had ever actually set foot on the island. They gazed around the rocky landscape with almost reverential awe. Looking at the rutted, pockmarked terrain, it was impossible not to reflect on the battle that had changed their lives.

The human cost for capturing Okinawa had been staggeringly high—12,520 Americans killed or missing, another 36,631 wounded. Among the dead were 4,907 Navy men, with nearly as many wounded, 4,824. Thirty-four Allied ships and other craft had
been sunk and 368 damaged, with 763 aircraft lost, making Okinawa the costliest naval engagement in U.S. history.

For the Japanese who defended Okinawa, the price had been exponentially higher, with 110,000 sons of Nippon killed and 7,400 taken prisoner. In the air and sea fighting for Okinawa, Japan lost 16 ships and more than 4,000 airplanes. But the greatest suffering had been among Okinawa’s civilian population. Most studies estimated that more than 100,000 noncombatants died in the fighting.

The rationale for seizing Okinawa—that the island would be a springboard for the Allied invasion of Japan—had been obviated by the surrender in August. The objective of Admiral Ugaki’s massed
tokko
attacks and General Ushijima’s defense of the island was to prove that the Japanese would fight to the death not just for an outpost such as Okinawa but for their homeland. Faced with such resistance, the Japanese believed, American commanders would decide
not
to invade Japan’s home islands.

And so they did—but not for the reason the Japanese expected. Appalled at the casualties suffered at Okinawa, the new president, Harry Truman, concluded that invading Japan would be “
an Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other.”

To Truman and his commanders, the lesson of Okinawa was that the use of
any
weapon, even one as horrendous as the atomic bomb, was preferable to an invasion.

E
ric Erickson would finish art school and become a successful artist and interior designer in California. Wes Hays would return to Novice, Texas, and start a thriving hardware business. Grim Reapers top ace Phil Kirkwood would leave the Navy to become a dentist, and so would his Tail End Charlie, Ray James. Ziggy South would go back to Kansas to become a chiropractor.

Not all the Tail End Charlies would leave the Navy. Some, such as Dick Quiel and Windy Hill and Bill Ecker, had found their calling. They would stay in uniform, fight another war in Korea, and eventually rise to senior rank.

Another was Country Landreth, who had languished in a Japanese prison since his first mission over Japan in March. On September 2, 1945, the newly repatriated Landreth had a splendid view from his hospital ship of the great gray battleship
Missouri
, anchored in Tokyo Bay, while Japanese emissaries formally surrendered to the United States. The next time Landreth came to Japan, it would be as skipper of his own carrier-based squadron.

Air Group 10 commander John Hyland would also stay in the Navy. During the years of the Cold War, Hyland would rise steadily in rank, eventually wearing four stars and commanding all U.S. naval forces in the Pacific.

Few of the Japanese combatants at Okinawa would return to their homeland. The architects of the
tokko
attacks, Admiral Ohnishi and Admiral Ugaki, as well as the two senior army officers on Okinawa, General Ushijima and General Cho, chose a samurai’s death. An exception was Col. Hiromichi Yahara, chief strategist of the battle of attrition on Okinawa, who ended the war as a prisoner. In the postwar years Yahara’s bitterness at what he considered the ineptitude of Japan’s wartime leadership would spill out in his 1972 book,
The Battle for Okinawa
.

Another survivor was Ens. Mitsuru Yoshida, the young radar officer on the battleship
Yamato
. In later life Yoshida would become a successful banker in Japan, retiring in 1979. Like many of his countrymen, he would never stop questioning his actions in the last battle of the war. In the closing pages of his book
Requiem for Battleship
Yamato, he would ask:

F
or the rest of his life Erickson would be able to close his eyes and summon with perfect clarity the events of that first day. It was March 18, 1945, and his Corsair had been poised on
Intrepid
’s No. 1 catapult. He was peering out into the blackness of the predawn Pacific, hearing only the deep-throated rumble of his Pratt & Whitney radial engine.

Seconds later Erickson had been hurled into the night sky. For the next hour he and his squadronmates flew northwestward toward Japan. Their target—the naval base at Saeki—finally appeared through the morning mist on the coast of Kyushu. At the first angry black puffs of antiaircraft fire, Erickson had felt a jolt of adrenaline coursing through him.

One after another they had dived on the row of enemy airplanes parked on the airfield below. Through his gun sight Erickson had seen the distinctive red meatballs on their wings. He had squeezed the trigger, feeling the hard rattle of the six .50-caliber machine guns. He saw one of the enemy airplanes explode. Then another.

And that’s when it happened. In the space of a few seconds—two bursts of machine gun fire—Erickson understood that his life—and the lives of his fellow Tail End Charlies—had changed forever. Nearly two years of waiting and training and worrying that the war would end before they got there were behind them. The moment would remain fixed in their memories for the next half century.

It had been the first day of the ninety-five-day-long air, sea, and land battle for Okinawa. For the Tail End Charlies, it was the day they became warriors.

A
t the heart of this story are the real-life heroes of Carrier Air Group 10. Their generosity in sharing with me their recollections, mementoes, letters, and photographs helped bridge the sixty-five-year chasm between the events at Okinawa and today. Special thanks are owed to pilots Wesley Hays, William “Country” Landreth, Charles Schlag, Ray James, James South, Les Gray, Dick Quiel, Maurie Dubinsky, Jack Anderson, Orlo Wilmeth, Ed Deutschman, Jim Hollister, Don Oglevee, Frank Stolfa, Jim Clifford, and Dave Anderson, who gave me their perspective of the air and sea battle for Okinawa and whose friendship I will always cherish. Hanging in a place of honor on my office wall is the plaque they presented making me an honorary member of their illustrious air group.

My thanks again go to sailors Felix Novelli, Ray Stone, and Ed Coyne for sharing their wartime experiences aboard USS
Intrepid
.

For his help with research and in finessing the finer points of military nomenclature, I am indebted to submarine officer, historian, and stickler for accuracy Julian K. “Joe” Morrison III. His brother, Capt. Vance Morrison, USN (ret.), receives big thanks for threading the labyrinths of Washington’s archives to retrieve many of the photographs. Cdr. Robert “Boom” Powell, USN (ret), offered valuable comments on the early drafts. Researcher John Bowen helped track down some of the more elusive photographs needed for the book.

Another round of thanks to my editor at Broadway Books, Charlie Conrad, for his belief in this project and for his expert guidance with the structure and tone of this story. Thanks to Jenna Ciongoli of Broadway Books for her cheerful and efficient help with assembling the parts of the book.

As he did for
Intrepid
, Robert A. Terry created the splendidly detailed maps. Dr. Harry Ohanian, master modeler, shared with me his incredibly real vision of the mighty
Yamato
. Artist Robert Bailey gave permission to use his dramatic painting,
Imperial Sacrifice
. Jason McDonald, of MFA Productions LLC, donated transcripts from
www.dayofthekamikaze.com
. Turner Publishing Company kindly gave permission to quote from Roy D. Erickson’s memoir,
Tail End Charlies
.