The Twilight Warriors (14 page)

OFF SHIKOKU, JAPAN
MARCH 19, 1945

L
andreth was alive. Still adrift in his tiny raft, he clung to the hope that a submarine might pick him up. He had already stopped believing that a rescue plane was coming. Even if the crew was willing to risk coming this close to the Japanese shore, they’d never spot him in the murk. The weather was lousy. Freezing rain continued to pelt him.

The second day passed. No submarine showed up. Nor did a rescue plane, even though the weather had cleared a bit. By the time darkness fell again, Landreth was in bad shape. His lower body was numb, and hypothermia was sapping the last of his energy. He had what seemed like pneumonia. He knew he couldn’t last much longer.

On the morning of the third day, he was dimly aware of voices coming to him across the water. They weren’t speaking English. Out of the gloom appeared a rowboat. The two young Japanese men in the boat stared at him, keeping their guns ready while they warily circled Landreth’s raft. Finally, deciding that the bedraggled figure was not a threat, they hauled him into their rowboat and took him ashore.

It was the first day of Country Landreth’s ordeal as a prisoner of war.

T
he morning of March 19, 1945, was a replay of the day before—same predawn wake-up, same breakfast on tin trays, same briefing in the ready room. Wearing their red-lensed glasses to protect their night vision, the pilots again listened to Will Rawie tell them that they were going to Japan. He said it in the same
matter-of-fact style as the day before, as if he were giving them directions to the wardroom.

This time the ante was going up. The target was a big one—the Kure naval base. Kure was on the southern shore of Honshu, the main island of Japan, 12 miles from the city of Hiroshima. Kure was the Japanese equivalent of the United States’s Norfolk naval base. It was where the greatest ships of the Imperial Japanese Navy were constructed and repaired, and where one, the greatest of them all,
Yamato
, was still home-ported. The complex contained airfields, oil depots, foundries, docks, workshops, slipways, and administrative buildings. Towering over the harbor was Mt. Yasumi, which was covered with antiaircraft gun emplacements. Across the bay was the island of Eta Jima, site of the Imperial Naval Academy, with its own concentration of antiaircraft batteries. Kure was one of the most heavily defended targets outside of Tokyo.

Erickson was again CAG Hyland’s number four. The downside of flying with the air group commander, of course, was that any mistake he made would result in a monumental ass chewing back on the ship. The big plus was that the CAG’s division was always the first into the air and the first to land back aboard. Everything revolved around Hyland, who was responsible for coordinating the strike. His wingmen were responsible for covering his tail.

For Erickson, another plus was his section leader, Lt. (jg) Windy Hill. For all his faults—a tendency toward mouthiness and a streak of narcissism—Hill was a good fighter pilot. He’d made it through the Solomons and had the enemy aircraft kills to prove it. Erickson trusted Hill to make the right calls when the shooting started.

The ten
Intrepid
Corsairs would be joined by a trio of four-plane divisions of Hellcats from
Yorktown
. As the flights joined up, Erickson was suddenly aware of the number of airplanes in the strike. “The sky was full of planes as far as the eye could see, all making their way toward the home islands of Japan.”

But somehow the
Intrepid
strike group and
Yorktown
’s group
became separated. By the time Hyland’s ten Corsairs were crossing the island of Shikoku, bound for Kure, they were alone. Directly in their path lay the Japanese airfield of Matsuyama. What they didn’t yet know was that Matsuyama was the home base of the 343rd Kokutai (air group), the Imperial Japanese Navy’s most elite fighter unit. The Japanese fighters were already airborne, waiting for them.

D
awn was breaking as the Corsairs crossed the inland sea between Shikoku and the main island of Honshu. Beneath their noses sprawled the Kure naval base. Still at 12,000 feet, they dropped their belly tanks—jettisonable auxiliary fuel tanks—and armed their .50-calibers. The antiaircraft gunners had already spotted them. The sky over the Kure harbor was filling with bursts of fire.

Erickson swiveled his head, glancing left, right, then up—and his heart nearly stopped. Six thousand feet above them, circling like hawks, was a cluster of dusky shapes. Even at this range, Erickson could make out the red meatballs on the wings. It was his first sight of an enemy airplane in the air.

In an excited voice, he reported the fighters to Hyland. Hyland already knew about them. He’d been watching them for the past several minutes. The Japanese fighters didn’t seem inclined to fight. They were in a lazy tail chase, following each other in aileron rolls. Erickson wondered whether they were working up their courage or just showing off.

Keeping an eye on the fighters overhead, Hyland led the Corsairs in a wide turn over the bay, then rolled into a dive on the oil storage tanks at Kure. Half the Corsairs were carrying 500-pound bombs, and the other half were armed with 5-inch rockets.

After putting their bombs and rockets into the tanks, they all came back for a strafing attack. By now black puffs of antiaircraft fire were filling the sky, but without much accuracy. All over the Kure complex, strike aircraft were pummeling their targets. In
their concrete-sheltered berths, the behemoth battleship
Yamato
and the carrier
Amagi
took hits, although neither warship was seriously damaged.

Hyland was pulling out over Kure harbor when he spotted a prize—a Mitsubishi A6M2-N “Rufe” floatplane fighter flying low over the water—and dove after him. Erickson and Hill, now on their own, were climbing back to altitude. Above them, Erickson again saw the dark shapes still circling. As he watched, two of them peeled off in a dive, coming straight down at them.

Erickson and Hill pulled into a hard vertical climb, meeting them head-on. Erickson raked the bellies of the two oncoming airplanes—Kawanishi N1K-J fighters, code-named “George”—with his machine guns as they swept past.

But Windy Hill was in trouble. He hadn’t been able to jettison his belly fuel tank. Now the drag of the external tank was slowing him down. One of the high-performance George fighters was on Hill’s tail, closing in for the kill.

Erickson and Hill went into a Thach weave—a mutual-defense technique of crossing each other’s path, clearing each pilot’s tail. Weaving high to the outside of the turn, Erickson swept back down on the enemy fighter behind Hill.

He opened fire, watching the tracers of his .50-calibers arcing toward the Japanese fighter. In the next moment, the George blew apart. The aft fuselage separated from the cockpit and spun away. No parachute blossomed from the debris of the airplane.

Meanwhile, Windy Hill, despite his still-attached belly tank, had maneuvered behind another of the Japanese fighters. He fired a long burst, and smoke belched from the George fighter. Seconds later the Japanese pilot bailed out.

As the enemy pilot’s parachute blossomed, Erickson flashed past close enough to glimpse the pilot’s dark brown flight suit and the astonished look on his face. On an impulse, Erickson turned hard, trying for a shot at the dangling figure. He couldn’t
turn tightly enough. The lucky Japanese pilot made it to the ground, still alive.

On reflection, Erickson was glad he hadn’t killed the man in the chute—but not for humanitarian reasons. “
I heard it might not be a good thing to do, as it didn’t help the treatment given to our POWs below. I had no moment to consider this, either—I was at war.”

T
hey were still on their own. Flying a hundred yards abeam each other for mutual protection, Hill and Erickson were passing back over Shikoku when more trouble appeared.

Erickson spotted it first—the dark green form of a Nakajima Ki-44 “Tojo” fighter, slipping in behind Hill’s Corsair. A telltale pattern of winking orange bursts was coming from the Tojo’s wings. Bright tracers were arcing like tentacles toward Hill’s tail.

Again the Corsairs went into a desperate Thach weave. The tracers were converging on Hill, who was turning as hard as he could, trying to escape the deadly fire. For a few seconds Erickson had a shot at the Tojo—and missed.

Hill was desperate. He couldn’t shake the Tojo. Tracers were flashing past his canopy. “
Shoot the son of a bitch, Eric!” he yelled on the radio.

“What the hell do you think I’m trying to do?” Erickson snapped back. He swung high and wide to the far side of the weave, then returned his sights to the Japanese fighter. It was a high-angle shot, nearly 90-degree deflection. If Erickson missed this time, Hill would be in flames.

He saw his tracers bending back toward the Tojo—and connecting. Abruptly the enemy fighter burst into flame. Erickson watched the burning Tojo enter a steep death dive to the green hills below.

They were safe, for the moment. Low on fuel and exhausted from the long mission, they steered toward
Intrepid
using their
ZB homing receivers, which picked up signals from a transmitter aboard the carrier. The transmitter sent a different Morse code signal every 30 degrees of arc from the ship. A different sector was chosen each day as the official inbound gate to the ship, to prevent the enemy from using the code.

Hill was still rattled by the close call with the Tojo fighter. The belly tank that he couldn’t jettison had nearly gotten him killed. Then he found that one of his .50-caliber guns wouldn’t fire. Finally, his oxygen system failed, meaning he was forced to remain at low altitude. He was having a bad day, and it only got worse. Arriving back at the ship, he botched his first landing pass and had to come back for another try.

Finally aboard, he climbed out of his Corsair and trudged down the labyrinth of ladders to the squadron ready room. The old fighter pilot swagger was gone from Hill, at least temporarily. He flopped into a seat in the back row and stared at the bulkhead in what infantrymen called the “thousand-yard stare.” As in an endlessly looping film, Hill kept seeing flak bursts, tracer bullets, and dark green silhouettes of enemy fighters.

It had been a grim second day of battle for
Intrepid
’s air group. More Tail End Charlies were missing. Ens. Bill York was killed in a noncombat accident. A Helldiver crew, Ens. Bob Brinick and his gunner, Crawford Burnette, of VB-10, had been shot down over Kure harbor and were missing. Another Helldiver crew, also hit at Kure, was luckier. They made it far enough offshore to ditch near a picket destroyer.

Even VBF-10’s skipper, Lt. Cmdr. Will Rawie, had been forced to ditch his Corsair. Rawie was picked up by a destroyer and delivered back to the
Intrepid
.

Erickson found that he had sweated off five pounds during the three-and-a-half-hour mission. His tan leather gloves had turned an evil dark brown. His flight suit was so stiff from sweat he could prop it up against the ready room bulkhead.

In recounting the action over Japan, Erickson and Hill found
that each thought he had shot down the first Japanese fighter they encountered. Unable to agree on whose bullets did the job, they split the kill. Each would get one and a half victories for the day.

They weren’t the only ones who scored kills. CAG Hyland, whom they’d last seen pulling off the target at Kure, had gunned down the Rufe fighter he’d chased across the harbor. It was
the thirty-four-year-old Hyland’s first air-to-air kill, and there was no mistaking the grin on his face in the wardroom that evening. The old man was keeping up with the kids.

9
WE WILL SAVE THE SHIP

TASK FORCE 58
150 MILES EAST OF SHIKOKU, JAPAN
MARCH 19, 1945

R
ear Adm. Gerald Bogan, standing on
Franklin
’s flag bridge, was one of the first to spot it. The peculiar object was silver-colored, slanting downward from a broken cloud layer.

It was a few minutes past 0700, and
Franklin
had just finished launching her strike aircraft. That morning she had steamed within 50 miles of Shikoku, the closest any U.S. carrier had ventured to the Japanese homeland in the war.

Bogan could see crewmen on the flight deck readying planes for the next launch. They were arming Corsairs with the new Tiny Tim rockets. In the next few seconds, Bogan heard
Franklin
’s antiaircraft guns open up.

Gerry Bogan was no stranger to kamikaze attacks. He had been the task group commander aboard
Intrepid
during her three kamikaze strikes off the Philippines. Now he was an observer aboard
Franklin
, which was the flagship of Rear Adm. Ralph Davison’s Task Group 58.2.

The silver object was still diving, becoming more visible, somehow evading the hail of antiaircraft fire. Spotters had already tagged it as a Judy dive-bomber, though other observers would report it as an older fixed-gear Val.