The Twilight Warriors (24 page)

Admiral Spruance put the entire Fifth Fleet on alert. From the radar picket stations to the beaches at Hagushi to the anchorage at Kerama Retto, guns were loaded and pointed skyward. Radarmen in every red-lighted CIC compartment peered into their yellowish green scopes. Lookouts on every ship gazed upward at the scudding clouds. Flights of Corsair and Hellcat CAP fighters droned over each carrier task group.

Early morning—a favorite time for the kamikazes—passed and nothing happened. Afternoon came and the weather worsened. Visibility went down and a northwest wind whipped the surface. A high broken cloud layer obscured the sun, bathing the sea in dark splotches of shadow. Still nothing happened.

Then, a few minutes before 1500, it began. First came the sudden, frenetic radio calls. Radarmen had picked up a wave of incoming bogeys. CAP fighters on the northern stations roared northward to intercept them.

More raiders were showing up behind the first wave. All seemed to be headed southwestward for the Hagushi beachhead and the fleet of transport ships. Their course would take them directly over the northern radar picket stations, called RP1 and RP2.

T
o Cmdr. R. E. Westholm, skipper of the destroyer
Bush
, the radar picket station designated RP1 had just become the most dangerous place on earth. Westholm could see them coming, a swarm of dark-colored bandits swinging into an orbit around his ship. They looked like raptors swooping down on an easy kill.

During the predawn hours
Bush
and her sister ship USS
Colhoun
had fended off sporadic night raiders. Those were hecklers, mostly feeling out the defenses of the U.S. fleet. These kamikazes swarming around
Bush
were the real thing.

First came the Aichi dive-bombers, code-named “Val.” The Val was an obsolete, fixed-gear warplane, easy to identify with its big, flowing wheel fairings. The slow-flying bomber was relatively easy to hit, too, and
Bush
’s gunners flamed two of them. A few minutes later a Nakajima B6N “Jill” torpedo bomber, a tougher target, came skimming in low on the water, somehow penetrating
Bush
’s wall of antiaircraft fire. Westholm swung his ship broadside to give his main battery a clear shot. Every gun on the destroyer was hurling fire at the incoming kamikaze.

Nothing could stop it. The Jill kept coming, weaving and dodging, finally crashing with deadly precision between
Bush
’s twin stacks. The high-explosive bomb penetrated to the forward engine room, killing every man in the compartment and most of those in the two fire rooms. Dead in the water,
Bush
listed to port, seawater flooding her lower compartments.

From 10 miles away, the destroyer
Colhoun
came racing at 35 knots to help while her skipper, Cmdr. G. R. Wilson, frantically called for more CAP fighters. The fighters assigned to cover them were already engaged with incoming bandits. Now they were running out of fuel and ammunition.

The stricken
Bush
was easy to spot. An oily black smoke column marked the position where she drifted, drawing more kamikazes.
As
Colhoun
closed with
Bush
, a swarm of fifteen kamikazes bore down on both ships.

Bush
’s big guns—her 5-inchers—were jammed. Her gunners blazed away with the Bofors 40-millimeters, and
Colhoun
joined in with her own batteries. It was like swatting hornets. Kill one, and another would appear in its place. The kamikazes were attacking from all directions.
Colhoun
’s 5-inchers scored a hit on a diving Zero, splashing it midway between the two destroyers. “One down, eleven to go,”
Colhoun
’s skipper remarked.

Colhoun
’s gunners killed another off the starboard bow, splashing him 50 yards abeam. Then another. But a fourth Zero, diving toward the port bow, plunged into
Colhoun
’s main deck, wiping out both 40-millimeter gun mounts and their crews. The bomb exploded in the aft fire room, killing every man inside and rupturing the main steam line.

Colhoun
was wounded, but she was still making 15 knots, most of her guns still firing. Her damage control crews were getting the blazes under control when three more kamikazes—two Val dive-bombers and a Zero—bored in from opposite sides.

The two Vals went down in a hail of fire, but the Zero didn’t. The kamikaze penetrated the hail of fire and crashed into
Colhoun
’s forward fire room. The exploding bomb blew out both boilers, ripping a 4-by-20-foot hole in the hull below the waterline.

Now
Colhoun
was as badly crippled as
Bush
. Each of the stricken destroyers was sending up a tall, unmistakable pillar of roiling black smoke, and the kamikazes seemed bent on finishing them off instead of going after fresh targets.

At 1725,
Colhoun
downed a Zero 150 yards abeam, but at the same time two Vals came swooping through the defensive fire. One clipped
Colhoun
’s after stack with a wing tip, showering the deck with flaming gasoline. The kamikaze’s bomb exploded in the water alongside, ripping a hole in the destroyer’s hull at the waterline. The explosion and cascade of seawater blew every man off
Colhoun
’s fantail.

The second Val was still boring down, but it missed
Colhoun
. Pulling up, the kamikaze pointed its nose at the nearby
Bush
. Gutted by fire, her main batteries no longer firing,
Bush
was almost defenseless. The Val hit the destroyer amidships between the stacks, nearly cleaving the vessel in half.

Bush
was doomed, but the kamikazes weren’t finished. At 1745, yet another Zero smashed into the destroyer’s forward port side, killing all the wounded men and medics in the wardroom.

It was
Bush
’s death blow. Engulfed in flames and settling at the bow, the destroyer abruptly broke in half and sank.

Meanwhile in the gathering darkness,
Colhoun
was fighting for her life. Another Zero, attacking the dying
Bush
, switched targets at the last moment and went for
Colhoun
. Despite withering 40-millimeter fire, the flaming kamikaze exploded into
Colhoun
’s port side.

Colhoun
was finished. With night coming fast, Commander Wilson ordered his crew to abandon ship.
Colhoun
was still blazing in the darkness, a beacon for more Japanese attackers. She received her coup de grace by gunfire from the destroyer
Cassin Young
, which had come to rescue survivors.

The ordeal for the crews of the sunken destroyers wasn’t over. Many who survived the attacks were terribly burned. In the darkened ocean they clung to the few rafts and flotsam remaining from their lost ships. Because enemy airplanes were still overhead, search vessels couldn’t use floodlights to illuminate the area. By the time the rescue operation ended the next morning, a total of 129 officers and men, most of them from
Bush
, were dead or missing.

T
he radar picket stations weren’t the only scenes of action. From the catwalk outside the bridge of
New Mexico
, Admiral Spruance had a front-row view of the drama off the western shore of Okinawa. CAP fighters had chased four bandits southward from the island of Ie Shima. Almost directly over Spruance’s flagship
they caught up with them. While Spruance watched, all four kamikazes, one after the other, were shot down in flames.

But more were on the way. Rear Adm. Mort Deyo had already begun moving his fire support ships away from their exposed stations near the Hagushi beachhead. As the force of battleships and cruisers, surrounded by a screen of seven destroyers, moved northward toward Ie Shima, lookouts on the lead destroyer,
Leutze
, spotted bogeys eight miles out. Within seconds, the graying sky turned red with the fire of every antiaircraft gun in the force.

The raiders were Nakajima B5N “Kate” torpedo bombers and Ki-43 “Oscar” fighters. They were coming in so low that the lookouts had spotted them before they appeared on radar. Like the first wave, they were going for the destroyers instead of the higher-value targets behind them.

The destroyers in the fore—
Leutze
and
Newcomb
—took the brunt of the attack. In the space of a few minutes, a kamikaze crashed into
Newcomb
’s after stack. Another fell to the destroyer’s guns, but a third, carrying a larger weapon than the standard 250-kilogram bomb, struck amidships. The explosion blew up both engine rooms and turned the after fire room into a mass of rubble. Every man in the three spaces was killed instantly.

Seconds later yet another kamikaze was boring in on
Newcomb
’s port beam, crashing into the forward stack, spraying the entire midsection of the destroyer with flaming gasoline.
Newcomb
became an inferno, spouting flame hundreds of feet into the darkening sky. The smoke was so dense that nearby ships lost sight of the destroyer and thought she had gone down.

The destroyer
Leutze
came racing to assist the blazing
Newcomb
. As
Leutze
’s crew was passing hose lines to fight the fires, a fifth kamikaze streaked in toward
Newcomb
’s bridge. At the last second, a 5-inch antiaircraft shell caught the attacker. The kamikaze veered off, crashing into
Leutze
’s fantail and exploding.

Now
Leutze
was in as much peril as
Newcomb
. The explosion holed her hull and jammed her rudder hard right.
Leutze
’s skipper,
Lt. Leon Grabowsky, who at age twenty-seven was one of the Navy’s youngest destroyer captains, ordered every heavy object jettisoned—torpedoes, depth charges, topside weights—keeping the destroyer afloat so that it could be towed by a minesweeper back to Kerama Retto.

Both tin cans stayed afloat. Back in the Kerama Retto anchorage, astonished sailors gawked at the fire-blackened, shattered hulks. The wreck of a kamikaze plane still lay across
Leutze
’s fantail.
Newcomb
’s number two stack was gone, and her number one stack was bent at a garish angle to starboard. Her fantail was only six inches above the water.

Forty men from
Newcomb
were dead, as were eight aboard
Leutze
. Neither ship would see combat again.

L
ike swarms of locusts, they kept coming. Fresh waves of kamikazes threaded their way through the gauntlet of CAP fighters, headed for the ships of the amphibious force off the Hagushi beachhead.

The gunners on the transports lacked the discipline of those on the tin cans and the battlewagons. They were firing helter-skelter, without clear direction, shooting just as enthusiastically at friendly CAP fighters as they were the enemy. Shrapnel from their gunfire was raining back down on the task force, causing almost as much damage as the kamikazes.

Three Kawasaki Ki-45 twin-engine Nick fighters and a pair of Aichi Val dive-bombers made it through the CAP screen, then ran into the storm of fire from the transports. Four were shot down, and the fifth, apparently losing his nerve, retreated back to the north. More showed up to take their place, this time picking on destroyers of the antisubmarine screen.

The tin cans
Witter
and
Morris
each took kamikaze strikes but stayed afloat. Another,
Hyman
, was struck in the torpedo tubes, causing a violent explosion. Yet another destroyer,
Howorth
, rushing to assist
Hyman
, took a kamikaze in her main battery director.
Mullany
, patrolling on the eastern side of Okinawa, also received a crippling kamikaze hit. The stricken destroyers were all dragged back to Kerama Retto, which was beginning to resemble a destroyer graveyard.

To the north, a minesweeper unit was clearing the channel between Iheya Retto and the eastern shore of Okinawa when they came under heavy kamikaze attack. Marine Corsairs from the Fast Carrier Task Force ripped into the attacking aircraft, shooting down twenty.

It wasn’t enough. Five kamikazes singled out the destroyer
Emmons
. Two dove into the destroyer’s fantail, taking out her rudder, and another crashed into the bow. Another flew directly into the destroyer’s bridge, killing every man in the CIC. The fifth attacker crashed into the already blazing superstructure.

Emmons
was finished. When the destroyer
Ellyson
came alongside two hours later to rescue survivors,
Emmons
’s hulk was still afire. Worried that the derelict would drift ashore to an enemy-held beach, Admiral Turner gave the order to sink her with gunfire. Of
Emmons
’s crew, eleven officers and fifty-three men had been killed.

As devastating as the attacks on the destroyers were, the kamikazes were still missing the bigger game. The anchorage at Kerama Retto where ammunition and fuel ships were clustered like ducks in a gallery came under only sporadic attack. A small landing ship filled with fuel oil was struck and blazed like a beacon through the night. Two thin-hulled Victory ships loaded with ammunition were hit. Their burning cargoes continued shooting tracers and explosions into the night sky until the ships were finally sunk by gunfire.