The Twilight Warriors (12 page)

Rawie read off the aircraft assignments. Twelve Corsairs were headed for Kyushu. Another eight Corsairs as well as four F6F-5N Hellcat night fighters would fly CAP—combat air patrol—over the task group.
Intrepid
and her task group were dangerously close to Japan. The job of the CAP fighters was to intercept enemy aircraft before they could get to the carriers.

The Japanese already knew they were there. All through the night enemy aircraft had been probing the task force defenses. The snoopers were driven off by antiaircraft fire from the destroyer screen. No one doubted that they would be back in force now that they’d located the fleet.

At 0520 the gravel-voiced order came over the ready room squawk box: “Pilots, man your planes.” Each man pulled on his parachute harness, Mae West life preserver, and .38 revolver. They
dropped the red-lensed goggles in a box outside the ready room. In silence they trudged down the dimly lighted passageway and up the steel ladder to the catwalk at the edge of the flight deck.

A chill wind swept over the deck. Beyond the rail they saw only the empty void of the ocean and sky.

The flight deck was covered with warplanes. Ordnancemen were scrambling over them, hanging bombs, rockets, loading .50-caliber guns. The Corsairs were in the front of the pack, wings folded, noses tilted up, looking like raptors in the darkness.

Country Landreth was one of the CAP pilots. As a combat veteran with three and a half kills to his credit, he had been a natural choice for the critical job of fleet defense on their first day of action.

Picking his way through the parked airplanes, Landreth found his Corsair in the front of the pack. The CAP fighters would be first to catapult, then take their station over the task group while the strike aircraft were launching. The wings of the CAP fighters were clean—no bombs or rockets, just the single 160-gallon drop tank on the center station beneath the fuselage.

Erickson’s fighter was further back on the deck. He found it in the darkness, gave it a once-over, then climbed up to the cockpit. The plane captain—the Navy term for a crew chief—was an enlisted man a good ten years older than Erickson. Erickson was surprised to see that the man was in tears and shaking. He’d heard the sky was thick with Japanese airplanes headed for the
Intrepid
. He was afraid for his life.

Erickson was struck by the absurdity of the situation. He was about to launch on a combat mission into the heartland of the enemy. But before he took off he had to console an anxiety-stricken sailor who would remain behind on the carrier. Erickson told the man not to worry, everything would be fine.

After he’d strapped in, Erickson flicked on the instrument panel lights. Seconds later a voice boomed over the flight deck bullhorn: “
Erickson, turn off those goddamn lights!” He flicked off the lights.
Damn
. He’d forgotten that the flight deck was supposed to be
blacked out. He wondered for a moment how the air boss knew who he was, then he remembered: up in the island they had every plane and pilot’s position on the deck plotted. His first mission, and everyone on the flight deck had just heard that he’d screwed up.

Minutes later over the same bullhorn came the order to start engines. Up and down the deck the big three-bladed propellers whirled. Tongues of flame spat from exhaust stacks. The rustle of wind was dissolved in the sound of chuffing, belching radial engines. A cloud of sweet-smelling exhaust smoke drifted down the deck and through the open cockpits.

Erickson’s engine settled down to a low, steady throb. Following the lighted wands of the plane director, he taxied to the number one catapult on the port side of the forward deck. On signal, he unfolded the Corsair’s wings, then checked to make sure they were locked in place.

Nearly an hour remained before sunrise, but the eastern sky was turning pale, offering a tiny pencil line of horizon. Except for his night carrier qualifications aboard USS
Core
nearly four months before, Erickson had no experience at launching in darkness.

One after another, the Corsairs hurtled down the catapult track. Erickson’s flight leader, CAG Hyland, was already airborne. Windy Hill had just launched from the starboard catapult. Erickson waited while the crewmen hooked the catapult shuttle to the belly of his airplane. On signal he pushed the throttle up to full power, checked his gauges, then shoved his head back against the headrest. He gave the ready-to-launch salute.

The catapult fired. Erickson felt like a stone in a slingshot. He sensed the dark shape of the carrier sweeping away behind him. The hard thrust of the hydraulic catapult abruptly ceased, and the Corsair hurtled into the night sky.

Minutes later, Erickson was joined up with Hyland’s flight, tucked in behind Windy Hill’s right wing, on his way to Japan.

F
rom his CAP station at 20,000 feet, Landreth squinted into the pinkening sky. It was still too dark to pick out the shapes of warships against the blackened ocean. All the carriers in
Intrepid
’s Task Group 58.4 had launched their strikes. Now the aircraft were en route to the targets.

Most of the time, combat air patrol was an exercise in boredom. You droned in an orbit over the task force, conserving fuel, waiting for a sudden urgent call from the FIDO—fighter director—whose radar showed incoming unidentified aircraft, called bogeys. When the bogeys were identified as hostile, they became bandits. In the space of seconds, boredom was replaced with a surge of adrenaline-charged excitement.

For Landreth, no such call had come. In the warm solitude of his cockpit, he had time to reflect. Like most pilots in the wartime Navy, he was a reserve officer. When the war ended and the military shrank back to peacetime size, they would return to civilian life. Now that Landreth was in his second tour of combat duty, he had reached a decision. He wanted to stay in.

The night before, he’d brought up the subject with the skipper over a toddy in Rawie’s stateroom. Technically, it was a breach of regulations. Drinking aboard Navy ships had been banned since 1914 when Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels issued General Order 99: “The use or introduction for drinking purposes of alcoholic liquors on board any naval vessel, or within any navy yard or station, is strictly prohibited, and commanding officers will be held directly responsible for the enforcement of this order.”

It was one of those rules that begged to be broken. Most squadron pilots had stashes of booze for the purpose of late-night debriefings, celebrations of promotions and victories, and toasts to fallen comrades. Few commanding officers made an issue of it, and Will Rawie was no exception. Rawie, in fact, was a firm believer in the salutary benefits of a libation with his pilots and kept his own supply for that purpose.

Rawie told Landreth he had his blessing to become a regular
officer in the Navy. It was exactly what Landreth had hoped to hear. He left the skipper’s stateroom with a warm contentment from the drinks and the knowledge that he had a career ahead of him in the Navy.

Landreth was still feeling the contentment as he and his flight continued their orbit on their CAP station. It was quiet in their sector, although the Hellcat night fighter pilots on the opposite side of the task force had been sent after a pair of intruders, a twin-engine Kawasaki Ki-45 “Nick” fighter and a Mitsubishi G4M Betty bomber. They only managed to get a quick burst into the Nick before both aircraft escaped in the clouds.

Landreth’s orbit was bringing him back to an easterly heading. As he watched, the rim of the sun broke through the horizon. In a matter of minutes, the sea was bathed in an ethereal orange glow. One by one, the gray ships below became visible.

Landreth was astounded. “
From horizon to horizon,” he recalled, “the ocean was covered with the might of the United States Navy. Five task groups—twenty-one carriers and all their escorts.” Until that moment, the ultimate victory of the United States over Japan had been only a vague assumption. Gazing down at the armada of warships, Landreth was struck with a sudden realization: the outcome of the war was a certainty. It was almost over. The day was close when the fighting would be over.

What Landreth didn’t know was that for him that day was today.

E
rickson was hearing noises. He was in his assigned slot—Tail End Charlie—in CAG Hyland’s four-plane division. They were droning over the open ocean, en route to Japan. And Erickson kept hearing these worrisome sounds from his Corsair.

With them were more flights from the fighter squadron, VF-10, making a total of nineteen fighters. All were armed with eight of the new 5-inch HVARs, which someone had aptly nicknamed “Holy Moses,” describing their reaction the first time they fired the rockets.

Erickson was still hearing the worrisome noises. He knew what they were, of course, but they didn’t go away. Such noises were a joke—and a common phenomenon—among fighter pilots. On your first long mission over water, you heard things. You heard a roughness in the engine, a buzz in the controls, a rattle that didn’t belong. After you stopped worrying about the noises, you worried about other things: losing fuel, magnetos shorting out, oil leaking.

Erickson knew all this, but he worried anyway. For a while he worried that his guns might not work. After running out of things to worry about, he started wondering about his parachute. Would he be able to open it? He practiced reaching for the D-ring of the chute. Just in case.

After an hour over the water, they spotted the shoreline of Kyushu. The primary target, Oita airfield, lay on the northeast coast, looking across the Bungo Strait at the island of Shikoku. Oita wasn’t visible. It was obscured beneath a heavy cloud cover, and Hyland made his first decision as a strike leader. They would go for the secondary target, the Saeki naval base and airfield. Saeki was thirty miles south of Oita and visible through the broken cloud deck.

Erickson armed his guns and set his rockets to fire in salvo. One after the other the Corsairs pushed over in their dives. As the airfield, buildings, and revetments swelled in his windshield, Erickson could see the parked Japanese airplanes lined up, red meatballs on their wings.

He squeezed the trigger. The six .50-caliber guns rattled in a staccato beat. He saw his tracers arcing down toward the parked airplanes. As in a dream, he watched one of them explode in a roiling fireball. Then another.

The Corsairs swept over the airfield. In the harbor beyond, Erickson spotted a tanker. He salvoed his rockets at the ship, then opened up again with his guns. Peering over his shoulder as he pulled up, he saw that the tanker was ablaze. Crewmen were diving over the sides into the water.

But the enemy was firing back. One of the Tail End Charlies, Ens. Loren Isley, was diving on his target, guns firing—and didn’t pull up. Isley’s Corsair dove straight into the harbor and exploded.

Stunned, the other pilots stared at the blackened slick on the water where the Corsair had hit. No one knew—nor would they ever know—whether Isley had taken an antiaircraft round or just pressed his attack too close.

They came back to strafe the field, expending most of their .50-caliber ammunition, until Hyland gave the signal to pull off and rejoin.

But they weren’t out of harm’s way yet. As they were clearing the Japanese coastline, another Tail End Charlie, Ens. Rob Harris, called that he was losing gasoline. His fuel system had taken a hit, and he was down to only 20 gallons.

A couple of minutes later, Harris’s engine quit, and he put the Corsair down in the frigid water off Shikoku. Overhead, another Tail End Charlie, Ens. Les Gray, circled, keeping an eye on Harris. He could see the pilot scrambling out of the cockpit, but the Corsair was sinking quickly. Harris wasn’t dragging his life raft out with him.

Within seconds the Corsair had vanished. And so had Rob Harris.

7
THE MOOD IN BOYS’ TOWN

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

T
he men in the gun tubs couldn’t believe it. Their first damned day back in the war, and it was happening all over again. A Japanese plane was skimming the water, somehow dodging the curtain of antiaircraft fire, headed straight for
Intrepid
.