The Twilight Warriors (11 page)

The second kamikaze was less successful. Searching for a target on the darkened atoll, the pilot zeroed in on what appeared to be the silhouette of an enemy warship. It was, in fact, tiny Sorlen Island. The Frances bomber plunged straight into the uninhabited islet and exploded.

The brazenness of the attack shocked everyone. To fleet and task force commanders, the attack was an eye-opener. Before they invaded Okinawa, they would have to stamp out the bases where the kamikazes lived.

S
moke was still spewing from the charred fantail of
Randolph
the next morning when
Intrepid
pulled into the Ulithi anchorage. Sober-faced sailors stared from the rail at the wreckage on
Randolph
’s stern. For those who had just joined the carrier in San Francisco, it was a first glimpse of the reality of war.

The voyage from Pearl Harbor had taken ten days. To the “plank owners”—sailors who had been aboard
Intrepid
since her commissioning in August 1943—pulling back into the Ulithi lagoon evoked a flood of memories, some good, some painful. Ulithi was where they had come between battles to rest and replenish. The recreational facility on Mog Mog Island was where they sloshed around in the surf, drank their ration of two warm beers, and swapped news and war stories with sailors from other ships.

Ulithi was also the place where
Intrepid
had come five months earlier, her decks smoldering and the stench of death filling the hangar bay, after enduring two consecutive kamikaze strikes off the Philippines.

Ulithi looked different now. Everywhere, from one end of the big heart-shaped lagoon to the other, were ships—carriers, destroyers, battleships—all part of the the vast fleet assembling for the invasion of the last stepping-stone to Japan, Okinawa.

The U.S. military’s path to Japan had been divided since 1943 when the joint chiefs dictated that forces of the U.S. Army, under Douglas MacArthur, would advance via the Solomons, the Bismarck Archipelago, New Guinea, and the Philippines. The U.S. Navy, led in the Pacific by Chester Nimitz, would drive across the central Pacific, landing Marines in the Marshalls, the Carolines, and the Marianas, and now on Okinawa.

It was an awkward, two-headed command structure, unlike the situation in Europe, where Gen. Dwight Eisenhower had supreme command of all U.S. forces. At Okinawa, the Army-Navy command sharing would continue. A U.S. Army general, Simon Buckner Jr., would command the ground forces, while Fifth Fleet commander Adm. Raymond Spruance would have overall responsibility for the invasion.

Just as confusing was the Navy’s habit of changing the fleet designations. When Spruance was in command, the armada was called the Fifth Fleet, but when he was relieved by his counterpart,
Adm. Bull Halsey, it became the Third Fleet, and the designation of each task force and task group was similarly changed.

The name changes gave everyone headaches, including the enemy. Halsey likened it to changing drivers and keeping the horses. “
It was hard on the horses,” he explained later, “but it was effective. It consistently misled the Japs into an exaggerated conception of our seagoing strength.”

Neither Halsey nor hardly any other American in 1945 had trouble using words such as
Japs
or
Nips
. No one would forget that it was the Japs who had perpetrated the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. Magazine articles and intelligence reports confirmed that rampaging Jap troops bayoneted babies, beheaded prisoners, and raped their conquered people. Hating Japs made it easy to kill them.

The hatred and racism were mutual. Japanese fighting men held Americans, as well as most other Westerners, in contempt. Japanese soldiers and sailors were fed a steady stream of salacious stories about how barbaric U.S. troops rolled over civilians and prisoners with their tanks. Americans were spoiled, decadent, uncivilized. They would go down in defeat because they lacked the courageous spirit of Japanese fighting men.

W
e welcome
Intrepid
to the Okinawa area,” said the silky voice on the radio. “Kamikaze division number 147 will join you on your arrival.”

The voice belonged to Tokyo Rose, whose broadcasts from Japan were coming over the ship’s radio. The announcer was supposed to sound like an evil seductress who knew the location of every U.S. ship and planted thoughts about what the GIs’ wives and girlfriends were up to while they were at war. The idea was to erode the morale of the U.S. fighting men, but it produced the opposite effect. Most thought it was great entertainment.

Tokyo Rose, who was actually a composite of eight or more female broadcasters, had a mocking, sardonic humor that made
them laugh. “Hello again,” she would start out, “this is your favorite enemy.” The shows had music, popular and classic, and news from home, mostly concerning disasters and privations of the war, and then accounts of all the American ships sunk and battles lost. Sailors cracked up when they heard, often for the third or fourth time, that
their
ship had been sent to the bottom.

Still, the Tail End Charlies had to wonder. How did she know
Intrepid
was on its way? What else did she know about them? Was it true about the kamikazes joining them? What was so important about Okinawa?

T
he answer was geography. The Great Loochoo—the name the ancients bestowed on the island of Okinawa—was 340 miles from Japan. The island was 64 miles long, set in the middle of the Ryukyus, the chain that dangled like a stinger from the rump of the Japanese home islands.

For seven centuries the Great Loochoo had been an autonomous kingdom, maintaining a precarious balance between the competing powers of China and Japan. The militaristic Meiji dynasty of Japan swept down to annex the Ryukyus in 1879 and since then had governed it in colonial fashion. Okinawans became second-class citizens of the Japanese empire, whose administrators considered the Okinawans to be ignorant and racially inferior. As a result, the natives of the Great Loochoo retained their own customs and dialects. For the most part they had no use for the abstract Japanese notions of
bushido
and loyalty to an emperor.

The majority of the 450,000 Okinawans lived in the south. Most were farmers living in thatched huts or small frame houses. Private automobiles were virtually nonexistent. Two of the three primitive railroads were horse-drawn. There were only three towns of any significance: Toguchi, on the sparsely populated northern peninsula; Shuri, ancient seat of the Great Loochoo and site of a castle; and Naha, the modern capital.

Okinawa’s major assets were its three airfields and half dozen
natural harbors. But the real prize was its proximity to the enemy homeland. The Great Loochoo would be the springboard to Japan.

By mid-March 1945, the man responsible for the amphibious assault on the Great Loochoo was making his final preparations.

T
hey called him the “Alligator.” In a war that demanded the invasion of the enemy’s ocean empire one island at a
time, Vice Adm. Richmond K. Turner was the acknowledged master. Though Kelly Turner earned the “Alligator” label because of his mastery of amphibious operations, those who knew him thought it also described his personality. His subordinates had their own name for him, never used in his presence—“Terrible” Turner. A
Time
magazine article commented about Turner, “To his colleagues (who know how to use monosyllables respectfully) he is known as ‘a mean son of a bitch.’ ”

Turner had a high, receding hairline, bushy eyebrows, and steel-rimmed spectacles through which he could direct a withering glower like a barrage from his guns. Ships he commanded were remembered as “taut” rather than “happy.”

The Alligator, for his part, had no interest in happy. His reputation for arrogance nearly matched that of his old boss, Adm. Ernest King, the chief of naval operations, who once described Turner as “brilliant, caustic, arrogant and tactless.” Coming from King, it was the highest form of compliment. It meant that he saw in Turner a version of himself.

Turner and his equally cantankerous counterpart, Marine Maj. Gen. Holland “Howlin’ Mad” Smith, had been a formidable team in the invasions of Betio, Makin, Majuro, Kwajalein, Roi, and Namur. In March 1944, Turner commanded the nearly flawless landings on Saipan, Tinian, and Guam. In February 1945, he directed the bloody campaign at Iwo Jima.

Here at Okinawa the Alligator would be running the greatest invasion of them all. As usual, he had developed a plan that covered every detail of the complex operation, leaving his subcommanders
no gray area or need for improvisation. He was still, as naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison observed, “the same driving, swearing, sweating ‘Kelly’
whose head could conceive more new ideas and retain more details than any flag officer in the Navy.”

Aboard his flagship, the cruiser
Eldorado
, Turner was making final preparations for the invasion when his eye was drawn to a cluster of mountainous islands 15 miles southwest of Okinawa called the Kerama Retto.
Retto
meant “archipelago,” and what interested Turner was the natural anchorage between the largest island of the group and the five smaller ones to the west.

It looked to Turner as if the anchorage—“roadstead” in naval parlance—might be able to shelter seventy-five or more of his ships. Even better, both ends of the anchorage could be protected by antisubmarine nets. Another feature he liked was the Aka Channel, a two-mile clearway ideal for seaplanes and their tenders.

The trouble was, none of Turner’s task group commanders agreed with him. Trying to take the Kerama Retto only a few days before the April 1 invasion of Okinawa was too great a risk. If the Japanese put up a tenacious defense, it would tie up the invasion force and divert resources from the critical landings on Okinawa.

It wasn’t the Alligator’s style to be dissuaded when he knew he was right. True to form, he listened to the arguments, then dismissed them all. Hell, yes, it was a risk, but it was worth it. One thing he’d learned from Iwo Jima was that an invasion fleet needed a sheltered anchorage for replenishment.

In any case, Turner doubted the Japanese would put up a fierce resistance. The whole damned Retto, he told his staff, could probably be captured by a single battalion. Still, to be on the safe side, he would agree to a division-sized amphibious assault.

The major threat to Turner’s ships would be the kamikazes based in southern Japan. And the carriers of Mitscher’s Task Force 58—the Fast Carrier Task Force—were already on their way to Japan to hit the kamikaze bases.

Among them was the newcomer, USS
Intrepid
.

6
FIRST BLOODING

USS
INTREPID
138 MILES SOUTHEAST OF KYUSHU, JAPAN
MARCH 18, 1945

T
he squawk box blared at 0415. Erickson climbed down from his third-tier bunk in Boys’ Town and joined the line in the head. No one had gotten much sleep. The chatter this morning was subdued, not the usual raunchy banter. After a quick breakfast in the wardroom, Erickson made his way to the squadron ready room.

The pilots looked like aliens, all wearing red-lensed goggles to protect their night vision from the glare of the ready room lights. They were also wearing something new—a green nylon anti-blackout suit. Called a “G-suit,” the garment was supposed to inflate during high acceleration, squeezing the pilot’s legs and torso and preventing a blackout because of blood draining from his brain.

Being a lowly ensign, like a full third of the squadron pilots, Erickson knew his place. He went to the back of the ready room and took a seat in the last row. The leather-upholstered ready room seats were another anomaly that was peculiar to the flying Navy, like the brown shoes and green uniforms worn by naval aviators. The high-backed seats looked more appropriate for an airliner than a naval vessel.

A few minutes before 0500, the squadron skipper came barging in. If Will Rawie was nervous, he didn’t show it. In fact, Rawie seemed more nonchalant than ever, keeping a matter-of-fact demeanor as he told them where they were headed on their first combat mission.

They were going to Japan.

The mood in the ready room turned even more somber. No one was really surprised. They’d already been briefed that their first targets before the Okinawa invasion would probably be the airfields in Japan. That was where the kamikazes came from.

Until that morning, that’s what it had been—
probably
. Now Rawie had just cleared it up for them. He stuck a map of southern Japan up on the bulkhead.

From the back of the ready room, the Tail End Charlies stared through their red-lensed goggles. Reality was setting in. Any of them who still worried that he was missing the war could officially stop worrying.

The primary target was Oita airfield on the southernmost island of Kyushu. In case of bad weather, the secondary would be Saeki airfield. Erickson jotted the flight information on his knee board. With a grease pencil he marked on his plotting board the coordinates of Point Option—the position where the carrier was supposed to be at the end of the four-hour mission. If the carrier had to duck into rain squalls for cover or run from an enemy threat, Point Option could be 75 miles off when a strike came home low on fuel.