The Twilight Warriors (18 page)

And then he saw that someone had. An ominous gray stream was spewing from the belly of the fighter directly ahead of him. “Windy, you’ve been hit!” he yelled on the radio.

H
ill didn’t need to be told. He had felt the sharp thunk of the shrapnel hitting his airplane. Now he could see his fuel quantity indicator unwinding. He had to get the hell out of Japan, and he had to do it very quickly. During the past week’s operations, several
Intrepid
pilots had taken hits over Kyushu or Shikoku and been forced to ditch. They were all dead or captured.

Hill swung the nose of the Corsair back to the southeast. When the shoreline of Kyushu swept beneath him, he began to feel a tiny ray of optimism. He could see the open ocean ahead. Maybe he’d get far enough to be picked up by a friendly ship. Out the side of the canopy he glimpsed the dark blue shape of Erickson’s Corsair close to his starboard wing. He could see the worried look on Erickson’s face.

Hill took another glance at his fuel quantity. Almost zero. This wouldn’t be his first ditching. Back in his first combat tour in the Solomons, he’d put a Corsair down in the water, and he knew what it was like. It was a hell of a ride.

He called Erickson. “This is my last transmission. I’m depending on you to get someone here to rescue me.”

In the next moment, the Corsair’s engine coughed, stuttered, then went dead. Gliding toward the water, Hill slid his canopy back and locked it. Then, as an afterthought, he unbuckled his parachute. It would be easier to retrieve the one-man raft from the chute container if it was already released, he thought.

Hill aimed for a trough between the waves. The Corsair smacked down hard on its belly but didn’t flip over. With the nose tilting quickly below the surface, Hill struggled to haul the raft out. Too late, he realized that unhooking the parachute had been a serious mistake. The whole package, parachute and raft, had slid to the forward footwell of the cockpit, which was now under water.

Forget the raft. He was barely able to kick himself free of the cockpit before the Corsair sank beneath the waves. Inflating his life vest, Hill bobbed like a cork on the three-foot waves.

He gazed around. There was no sign of the Corsair, not even a bubble left on the surface. For the first time he realized it was
cold
. It was still winter in the northern Pacific, and he was freezing. It was then that the reality of his situation struck Hill like a thunderclap. Without a raft, he was going to die in this damned ocean.

E
very strike briefing included a standard admonition about radio silence. You didn’t blab on the radio. You didn’t clutter the tactical frequency. You didn’t give the Japs a radio signal they could home in on.

Since their first mission together, Erickson and Hill had a private agreement. If one of them went down, to hell with radio silence—the other would get the word out.

Now Erickson was doing just that—filling the airwaves, making nonstop calls to other airplanes, submarines, carriers, anyone who could hear him. Beneath him, bobbing in a yellow life vest, was his best friend. Helplessly Erickson had watched Hill trying to pull out his raft. Now Hill looked like a speck in the ocean. Without a raft in the frigid water, he had a life expectancy of little more than an hour.

Erickson opened his canopy and tried to pull out his own raft to heave down to Hill. At six feet three inches, he was too tall. Each time he rose in the seat to reach the raft, the wind stream hit his head and shoulders and slammed him back down. He kept trying until he was exhausted. For a moment he considered ditching his own Corsair next to Hill so they could share his raft. Looking at the whitecaps on the surface, he decided it was a bad idea. They’d probably both wind up dead.

His own fuel was dangerously low. He waggled his wings one more time over the tiny figure in the water, then turned southward, back to the ship. By the time he was approaching
Intrepid
’s deck,
he estimated that he had enough fuel left for one pass at the deck. He swept over the ramp and plunked down on the wooden deck, snagging a wire. He was still taxiing to the forward elevator when the engine sputtered and quit, out of fuel.

Minutes later Erickson was standing at attention in front of the air group commander. Hyland was livid. Erickson had jammed every goddamn radio circuit in the Fifth Fleet, alerting every submarine, ship, and airplane, and probably the Japs. What the hell had happened to radio discipline?

Erickson had no answer. This had been the worst day of his life. He’d just left his best friend to die in the ocean. He’d barely made it back to the carrier himself. Hyland, his air group commander and the father figure he revered more than any other human on earth, was furious with him.

Despite his best efforts to maintain a manly composure, he couldn’t hold back his emotions. The twenty-two-year-old fighter pilot burst into tears.

12
AND WHERE IS THE NAVY?

IMPERIAL PALACE, TOKYO
MARCH 29, 1945

T
he air raid sirens were wailing again. Ignoring them, Emperor Hirohito seated himself at the conference table in the shelter adjoining the imperial library. The sirens had become a fixture of life in Tokyo. Nearly three weeks before, on the night of March 10, 1945, American B-29s dropped incendiary bombs on the city. Nothing like it had been seen in history. Over a hundred thousand Japanese perished in the fires. More than a million were made homeless. Sixteen square miles of Japan’s capital were turned to charred rubble. The smoke and stench of the blazes still wafted through the Imperial Palace.

Now a month short of his forty-fourth birthday, Hirohito had reigned for nearly twenty years on the Chrysanthemum Throne. He was a fastidious, slightly built man who neither drank nor smoked. His reign was called “
Showa,” meaning “radiating peace.”

How much longer the reign of Hirohito—or the Empire of Japan—might last was very much on the emperor’s mind. Another government was teetering on collapse. The previous prime minister, Gen. Hideki Tojo, had been removed in July 1944 after the defeat in the Philippine Sea and replaced with Gen. Kuniaki Koiso. Now Koiso was on his way out for the same reason: Japan had suffered calamitous setbacks at Leyte Gulf and Iwo Jima. The Allies were about to invade Okinawa.

The next government would be headed by a navy man, Admiral Kantaro Suzuki, with whom no one was pleased, including Hirohito and even the senior officers of the navy. Suzuki was eighty years old and more moderate than army militarists like Tojo and
Koiso. The hard-liners were worried that the old admiral was inclined toward a negotiated peace with the Americans.

The militarists in the imperial government still held sway, just as they had when the decision was taken in 1941 to attack the United States. Never mind that their strident talk of
bushido
and imperial glory made them sound as if they’d come unhinged. No senior officer in either the Imperial Navy or Army was willing to speak what they all knew to be the truth: Japan had no chance of winning this war. To express such a thought was tantamount to treason. Even those who secretly favored a negotiated peace knew better than to reveal their feelings. That would make them a “Badoglio,” the detested Italian general and prime minister who surrendered his country to the Allies in 1943.

At the conference table with the emperor were his military advisors, the chiefs of staff of the army and the navy and their immediate subordinates. It was the role of Admiral Koshiro Oikawa, Imperial Japanese Navy chief of staff, to interface between His Divine Majesty and the Combined Fleet headquarters, whose commander in chief was Admiral Soemu Toyoda.

The chiefs of staff had presented to Hirohito the plan for the coming counteroffensive at Okinawa. The officers were keeping their eyes averted from the emperor’s divine countenance while Hirohito studied the details of the plan.

Occasionally the emperor stopped, squinting through his wire-framed spectacles, to ask questions. How many aircraft would be used in the attacks? Two thousand, Admiral Oikawa told him. Was that enough? the emperor asked. Oikawa explained that an additional fifteen hundred army aircraft would be available.

Hirohito seemed perplexed. More than a hundred thousand army troops were prepared to die to defend Okinawa, and several thousand
tokko
pilots would be sacrificed. He turned to Admiral Oikawa. “And where is the navy?”

Oikawa exchanged glances with his staff officers. None was sure how to answer. Did the emperor understand that the navy
had been reduced to only a handful of ships? Did he know there was nothing the navy could do that would alter the situation at Okinawa?

Perhaps, but it didn’t matter. The emperor’s meaning was clear. It was not acceptable that the army should make so great a sacrifice while the navy’s ships remained clear of the battle.

The audience with the emperor was over.
Oikawa and his staff returned to the Navy Ministry. They had only a few days to decide what the Imperial Japanese Navy should sacrifice in the battle for Okinawa.

A
nd where is the navy?
The emperor’s question demanded an answer. In his office a few miles southwest of the capital, the commander in chief of the Combined Fleet, Adm. Soemu Toyoda, agonized over the navy’s options.

Toyoda was, if nothing else, a survivor. He had been one of those opposed to a war with the United States, viewing it as un-winnable. Thereafter he had been relegated to administrative positions, too senior to receive a division or fleet command. He was thrust into the topmost naval command post by virtue of attrition after Yamamoto was killed at Bougainville and his successor, Admiral Mineichi Koga, was lost on a flight to the Philippines.

At age fifty-seven, round-faced and thick-bellied, Toyoda was neither a great strategist nor an inspiring leader. His job consisted mainly of mediating between the hard-liners who demanded an all-or-nothing decisive battle with the Americans and those who wanted to hoard the navy’s assets for the defense of the homeland.

With his staff assembled at a long conference table, maps on the wall behind him, Toyoda was hearing both sides. As usual, the shrill voices of the hard-liners were drowning out the others. Neither Toyoda or Oikawa or even the new prime minister, Admiral Suzuki, was willing to challenge them.

The spokesman for the hard-liners was the Combined Fleet chief of operations, Capt. Shigenori Kami. Kami was proposing that the
Second Fleet, which included most of the navy’s still-battleworthy warships, throw its full weight behind the upcoming offensive. A force of ten warships, with the great battleship
Yamato
as its flagship, would hurl itself at the American fleet off Okinawa.

Yamato
’s guns had greater range than anything the Americans possessed. After inflicting maximum damage on the U.S. ships, she would be beached. The great battleship would become a stationary artillery platform, and most of her crew would join the garrison defending Okinawa.

The sea assault would coincide with Admiral Ugaki’s massive aerial
tokko
attacks, while General Ushijima’s 32nd Army on Okinawa would take advantage of the situation and counterattack on the ground. It would be glorious. A last
banzai!
The enemy would be hurled back into the sea.

A stunned hush fell over the conference table. Then the more rational officers in the Combined Fleet staff spoke up. They thought it was preposterous. What possible effect could these ships have on the outcome of the Okinawa campaign? It would be a meaningless waste.

It would be even more meaningless, countered the hard-liners, to have them destroyed at anchor by enemy warplanes. Or, infinitely worse, surrendering them whole to invading American troops.

As usual, the hard-liners prevailed. Whether anyone believed such an attack could succeed hardly mattered. The plan had an almost mystical appeal—the mighty
Yamato
charging like a seaborne samurai directly at the enemy fleet, all guns roaring, sending the terrified enemy into a disorderly retreat. It was the kind of seductive, romantic theme that dwelled in the heart of every Japanese warrior.

Admiral Toyoda nodded his agreement. The hard-liners would have their way. Toyoda would sign off on what would be his last operational order of the war.