The Twilight Warriors (13 page)

It seemed like the replay of a bad dream. Most of the men on the deck had been aboard
Intrepid
four months earlier when two kamikazes, five minutes apart, plunged through the carrier’s flight deck, snuffing out nearly a hundred lives and taking the ship out of action.

This one was a twin-engine bomber, and its pilot seemed to be blessed with divine protection. Oily black bursts were exploding all around him. The ocean below the bomber frothed with the splashes of spent ordnance. He kept coming.

Japanese planes had been stalking
Intrepid
all morning. Fresh yellow blips kept showing up on the radar screens in CIC—the combat information center. CAP fighters from all the task group carriers were intercepting the bogeys, which were quickly tagged as bandits. As the intruders flew into range of the antiaircraft guns on the screening ships, the CAP fighters were forced to withdraw and let the gunners blaze away. Most of the attackers were shot down or chased away.

But not all. Through the CAP screen and then through the hail of antiaircraft fire came a Yokosuka P1Y Frances bomber.
Intrepid
’s 5-inchers hammered away, mostly missing. As the Frances came closer, every Bofors 40-millimeter and rapid-fire Oerlikon 20-millimeter gun on
Intrepid
’s starboard side opened up.

The Frances was taking hits, trailing smoke—but still flying. The men on
Intrepid
could see the two round cowlings with the radial engines and the distinctive long, slender wings. As the bomber bored closer, they could make out the figures of the pilots in the glass-enclosed cockpit.

The gunners braced themselves for the inevitable. This thing was clearly not a torpedo plane or a bomber. It was another kamikaze, and he had them bore sighted. Just when it seemed that the Japanese plane would smash into
Intrepid
’s flight deck, a round from one of the 5-inch guns clipped the Frances’s tail.

The bomber’s nose pitched straight down. In a scene that lasted less than two seconds but would remain fixed in their memories for the rest of their lives, the gunners had a plan view of the Japanese bomber. It was so close they felt they could reach out and touch it. The moment was captured by a combat photographer—the orange ball of the rising sun emblazoned on the starboard wing, port wing tip shattered by gunfire, Japanese crewmen hunched inside the cockpit.

The bomber hit the water 50 feet from
Intrepid
’s starboard bow. The explosion showered fire and debris against
Intrepid
’s starboard side and into the exposed hangar bay. Flames enveloped the forward hangar bay, lighting off the fabric control surfaces of parked airplanes and scorching painted surfaces.

By a miracle, none of the airplanes exploded. There were casualties, but not all were caused by the kamikaze crash. One of
Intrepid
’s escorts, the cruiser
Atlanta
, was also shooting at the incoming kamikaze and fired a 5-inch shell too close to
Intrepid
’s fantail. In the brief action, one sailor was killed and forty-four others wounded.

Intrepid
’s seasoned damage control crews had the fires extinguished in fifteen minutes. The worst damage was to the hangar deck curtain—the screen that shrouded the open hangar bay during night operations. No airplanes were destroyed, and the flame-damaged aircraft control surfaces would be quickly repaired.
The hangar bay and forward starboard hull were fire-blackened and required new paint.

The morning had just begun. While
Intrepid
was fighting off her attacker, a Yokosuka D4Y Judy dive-bomber put a 500-kilogram bomb into the carrier
Enterprise
, operating only a few thousand yards from
Intrepid. Enterprise
’s long string of luck held. The bomb punched a neat hole in her flight deck, then crashed into a machinery space without exploding.

A few minutes past 1300, it was
Yorktown
’s turn. Three Judy dive-bombers dove on the carrier, and two missed their target. The third put its bomb through
Yorktown
’s signal bridge, penetrating one deck before exploding and blowing two big holes in the ship’s side. Five
Yorktown
crewmen were killed, and another twenty-six were wounded.

R
eturning from the strike on Kyushu,
Intrepid
’s Tail End Charlies were learning another lesson the hard way: a wingman used more fuel than his leader. This was because wingmen were forced to make constant throttle changes to keep their position in the flight. Each throttle movement consumed precious gasoline. After four and a half hours in the air, Hyland’s wingmen were almost out of fuel.

But the
Intrepid
wasn’t ready to take them aboard. The flight deck was still packed with airplanes waiting to be launched. Watching his fuel quantity gauge, Erickson wished he’d leaned out his fuel mixture and been more prudent with the throttle. It was too late. His tanks were almost empty. So were those of Ens. George Tessier, the young North Carolinian who was flying on Hyland’s left wing.

Hyland put his flight into a low-power, fuel-conserving orbit, waiting for a clear deck on
Intrepid
. While they were still in the orbit, Tessier’s engine abruptly quit. Dropping like a rock from the formation, Tessier’s Corsair splashed down next to one of the screening destroyers. Minutes later the pilot was plucked out of the water by the destroyer crew.

Erickson knew he’d be next. Close to
Intrepid
was
Enterprise
, which had already launched her own strike planes and had a clear deck. Erickson received immediate clearance to land aboard.

After he’d safely made it down on
Enterprise
’s deck and checked his fuel, he found that he had five gallons left. If he hadn’t made it aboard on his first pass, he would have been in the water with Tessier.

Erickson spent the rest of the morning aboard
Enterprise
. By comparison to
Intrepid
, the older
Enterprise
seemed smaller, her flight deck shorter and more narrow. Even her spaces belowdecks seemed cramped. Famished after his four-and-a-half-hour mission, he gobbled down peanut butter sandwiches and cocoa while the deck crew refueled his Corsair. Catapulted back into the air, he was assigned to a CAP station for another hour and a half before finally landing back aboard
Intrepid
.

The kamikazes kept coming. Following the first bomb strike on
Enterprise
, two more raiders were picked off by
Enterprise
’s gunners. One was a Judy dive-bomber whose crew, obviously not kamikazes, bailed out of the shattered airplane.

As the two Japanese parachutes floated down through the smoke and gunfire, one of
Enterprise
’s destroyer escorts came racing up with the apparent intention of capturing the enemy airmen.

They didn’t. While the parachutes were still descending, the destroyer escort’s gunners opened fire with their battery of 20-millimeters. The shredded bodies of the Japanese airmen hit the water, floated briefly, then disappeared beneath the waves.

None of the commanders who witnessed the incident expressed any outrage. To a man, each was filled with the same boiling fury at this maniacal enemy who was crashing into their ships. They were Japs, and you exterminated them wherever you found them.

A
t 1045,
Intrepid
launched its fourth strike of the morning. It was Country Landreth’s second mission, and this time he was
leading a strike against the Japanese airfield complex at Uwa Jima, on the home island of Shikoku.

Arriving at the target, Landreth swept across the airfield, his .50-calibers rattling the fighter’s airframe as he strafed buildings and parked airplanes. As he skimmed over the field at low altitude, he spotted something in the estuary ahead of him. It was a speedboat, racing across the water at high speed, leaving behind it a rooster tail of white water. Guessing that it must be a target of value, he went for it.

Then he noticed something else—a small island in the estuary. Protruding from the vegetation were a few round tanks and tile-roofed buildings. “I decided to give them a squirt on the way to the speedboat,” he recalled.

It was a decision Landreth would regret for the rest of his life. He fired a burst into the tile roof, then shifted his attention back to the boat. In the next second, the innocent-looking building, which happened to be an ammunition storage facility, erupted in a cataclysmic explosion. Flame and debris shot hundreds of feet into the sky. As Landreth’s Corsair flew through the fireball, the G-forces hit him like a giant sledgehammer. His spine compressed, and the airframe of the Corsair shuddered from the impact.

When his vision cleared, Landreth knew he was in trouble. “I looked at the oil pressure dial,” he remembered, “and it read zero.” Thirty seconds later, right on schedule, the big twin-row Pratt & Whitney engine, now out of oil, chuffed once and then stopped. A ghostly silence filled Landreth’s cockpit.

He pointed the Corsair toward the open sea. Landreth’s back was broken, and he had no feeling in his legs. Unable to use rudder pedals, he managed to turn the Corsair into the wind. He blew the canopy off just before the fighter splashed down in the gray sea off Shikoku.

And then, a miracle. Despite his injuries, he was able to haul himself out of the cockpit, dragging the life raft with him. Somehow
he clambered into the raft. He pulled his tarpaulin up over him, blue side out to be less visible to the Japanese.

He waited. It was a long shot, but there was a chance that a U.S. submarine or a “Dumbo”—a seagoing rescue plane—would pick him up. His squadronmates had seen him go down and would have passed on his position via the search-and-rescue frequency. For the rest of the day he bobbed in his raft, in agony from his damaged spine.

Night came, and with it a freezing drizzle. Landreth hunkered down in the exposed raft, tarpaulin up to his chin, and waited. His mission had shrunk down to one overriding objective: stay alive until morning.

T
he strikes and fighter sweeps continued for the rest of the day. Twelve more Corsairs bombed and rocketed the airfield at Usa, on the north shore of Kyushu, then turned down the coast to make strafing attacks on the parked airplanes at Oita, which had been spared the earlier strikes because of weather. Escorted by the fighters, SB2C Helldivers and bomb-carrying TBM Avengers then swept in to hammer the buildings and hangars at Oita with 500-pound bombs, returning to finish the job with their machine guns.

By the end of their first day of war,
Intrepid
’s newly formed air group had logged more than 120 combat missions.

That evening the officers’ wardroom was segregated along the usual lines: black shoes and brown shoes. By long tradition, surface navy officers wore black uniform shoes, while the airedales—officers of the flying branch—wore brown shoes with their khakis or aviation green uniforms. But the culture gap between them extended far beyond the color of their shoes.

The black shoes had something to celebrate. There weren’t many days when surface officers on an aircraft carrier could cover themselves with glory, but this was one of them. During the near-death encounter with the kamikaze that morning, the gunnery department and the damage control crews had risen to heroic
status. Now the black shoes were in an animated discussion, reliving the incident.

Jabbering at the opposite end of the room were the brown shoes, gesturing with their hands, rehashing the action over Kyushu and Shikoku. Most had flown two combat missions that day. Images of flak bursts and targets viewed through gun sights and the dry-mouthed anxiety of nearly empty fuel tanks were still fresh in their minds.

Even in normal times, the two groups maintained a cordial distance. Black shoes made no secret of their belief that they were the only
real
Navy men aboard the ship. They alone understood the crafts of ship handling, gunnery, navigation, damage control. Without them, the carrier was nothing more than an immobile barge.

The brown shoes, for their part, couldn’t care less about arcane nautical lore. Most of them, especially the Tail End Charlies, kept saying things like “left” instead of “port,” “floor” for “deck,” “wall” when they meant “bulkhead.” Mainly to annoy the black shoes, they insisted on calling the 27,000-ton aircraft carrier a “boat.”

But what galled the black-shoe officers most about the airedales was their
attitude
. They were like spoiled frat boys. They sequestered themselves in their private berthing spaces, where they played cards, partied, and, if reports were to be believed, actually consumed booze. One of
Intrepid
’s black shoes came up with an analogy: the brown shoes were just like seagulls. Except for flying, all they did was eat, sleep, and crap.

T
here was no party that night in Boys’ Town. The mood had changed. Gone were the horseplay, the banter, the wiseass jokes. There were two empty bunks. “All the ensigns were in quiet conversations, just above a whisper,” remembered Erickson. “Except for a few standby pilots who would now be replacing our losses,
we were no longer virgins.”

Until that day, flying Navy airplanes had been a lark. Even
losing friends in training hadn’t dulled the sense that the war was a great adventure.

Now all that had changed. The best buddies of Loren Isley and Rob Harris were removing the personal effects from their lockers. What happened to them could have happened to any of the Tail End Charlies. “Some were seriously writing letters,” Erickson recalled, “and it didn’t take much to guess what the messages contained. One day of combat had changed boys into men.”

Also among the missing was Lt. (jg) Country Landreth, who by virtue of seniority hadn’t been a resident of Boys’ Town. One of the Tail End Charlies had seen Landreth’s Corsair go into the water offshore. Another pilot reported seeing a Japanese submarine a mile and a half from where he went down.

It meant that Landreth was screwed. By now he was either dead or captured.

8
SHOOT THE SON OF A BITCH