The Twilight Warriors (26 page)

Each of the floatplanes was hoisted to one of the two immense catapults. Minutes later, one after the other, they hurtled down the catapult track and wobbled into the sky. After a cursory search for
submarines in the path of the task force, they turned north and vanished in the murk.

Ito ordered another course correction, heading the task force back to the east. He planned to continue the deception into the morning by returning to a westerly course, letting the American spotter planes report the zigzagging to their headquarters. At the right moment he would abruptly wheel to the south and race at flank speed toward Okinawa. Sometime after nightfall he would be closing with the American fleet, bombarding the enemy shore positions, spreading havoc with the U.S. invasion force.

Yamato
’s task force would have no air cover. That much had been decided even before the order for Ten-Go was written. Whatever airpower the Japanese Imperial Navy still possessed had already been allocated to the
kikusui
operation, the massed
tokko
attacks on the U.S. fleet.

The previous day, April 6, had been the first day of the first
kikusui
. The planners of Ten-Go, including Ugaki, Toyoda, and Ohnishi, were gambling that the American carrier-based warplanes would be too busy countering the waves of
tokko
raiders to mount a serious air attack on
Yamato
.

It was a pipe dream, Admiral Ito knew.
Yamato
’s fate was in the hands of the gods.

O
ne of the screening destroyers,
Asashimo
, was having trouble. With the task force still steaming on the diversionary northwestward course,
Asashimo
was drifting slowly behind, unable to keep station. From the bridge of
Yamato
, Ens. Mitsuru Yoshida read the signal flags hoisted on the destroyer: “Engine trouble.” A few minutes later came another message: “Repairs will take five hours.”

It was bad news. Without the collective support of its task force, a lone destroyer in the waters south of Kyushu was as good as dead. If a submarine didn’t pick it off, a flight of American warplanes would find it.

Aboard
Yamato
, Admiral Ito considered the situation.
Asashimo
’s problem seemed to be a damaged reduction gear in her power plant. Ito decided to give them time to repair the problem. The task force would reverse course, go back to gather up
Asashimo
, then steam at high speed for Okinawa. If
Asashimo
could maintain station, she would share in the glory of the coming battle. If not, she was on her own.

A
buzz of excitement crackled in the flag plot compartment in
New Mexico
. Unlike similar spaces on other ships, the air on Raymond Spruance’s bridge was not clouded with cigarette smoke. Spruance, a tobacco hater, had banned smoking in his flag spaces.

Spruance was studying the newly received reports about the Japanese task force. Seldom had his staff seen their boss’s cold, gimlet eyes flash like this. The last of Japan’s great battleships was coming out to fight.

Spruance was a black-shoe admiral—a surface sailor who had cut his teeth on battleships. In the Navy of 1945, he was something of an oddity—a nonaviator whose command now included the greatest naval air force ever deployed. But Spruance also commanded a task force of battleships and cruisers whose only duty until now had been the bombardment of enemy shore positions on Okinawa.

The last major engagement of surface forces had been the October 1944 night battle at Surigao Strait when a Japanese fleet of two battleships, one cruiser, and four destroyers, commanded by Adm. Shoji Nishimura, charged blindly into the waiting guns of the U.S. Seventh Fleet battleships. Nishimura himself went down with his flagship
Yamashiro
. For the Americans, it had been a sweet revenge. Five of the Seventh Fleet’s six old battleships had been salvaged from the wreckage of Pearl Harbor.

Now, nearly six months later, the normally cool and analytical Raymond Spruance was hearing the siren song of a last epic sea battle. He signaled Rear Adm. Mort Deyo, who commanded
Task Force 54, to prepare his battle line to meet the
Yamato
task force. Spruance’s own flagship,
New Mexico
, was one of Deyo’s six battleships. It meant that Spruance himself was going to observe the great battle from a front-row seat.

In addition to his aging battleships, Deyo’s task force included seven cruisers and thirty-one destroyers—enough firepower to counter anything the Japanese task force could mount. The prize of sinking the world’s greatest dreadnought could go to the battleship admirals.

Maybe. On the eastern side of Okinawa, in his own flag plot aboard the carrier
Bunker Hill
, another admiral was eyeing the same prize.

19
RACE FOR GLORY

USS
BUNKER HILL
175 MILES EAST OF OKINAWA
APRIL 6, 1945

O
ne of his code names was “Bald Eagle,” and it fit him perfectly. The commander of Task Force 58, Vice Adm. Marc “Pete” Mitscher, had the gaunt, wizened face of a bird of prey. His eyes, according to one of his staffers, “could give an order with a glance.”

Mitscher looked older than his fifty-eight years. His lifestyle was typical of his generation of flag officers, including Halsey and McCain, who disdained exercise and smoked a pack and a half of cigarettes a day. During flight operations Mitscher spent his time in a four-foot-high, specially built swivel chair on the flag bridge. The chair was invariably aimed aft, giving rise to speculation among his sailors that the old man was more interested in where he’d been than where he was going. The truth was that Mitscher didn’t like the wind in his face.

The chair was just one of Mitscher’s foibles. Another was the long-billed baseball cap, his standard shipboard headgear. The “Mitscher cap” was so imitated that in 1946 the Navy authorized it as a work uniform accessory.

Marc Mitscher was, above all else, a naval aviator. Unlike Halsey, McCain, and chief of naval operations Ernest King, who, at an advanced age and rank, had all undergone flight training in order to wear wings and then command aviation units, Mitscher was the real thing. He had been designated naval aviator number 33 back in 1916. While aviation was still an unwanted stepchild of the Navy, Mitscher was catapulting off battleships, flying ungainly patrol planes, and winning the Navy Cross for his role as pilot of
NC-1, one of a group of four Navy Curtiss flying boats to attempt the first transatlantic flight. Mitscher’s plane was forced down in heavy seas near the Azores, but another of the flying boats, NC-4, became the first airplane to make it across the Atlantic.

Mitscher served in a succession of aeronautical staff and carrier-based assignments, and in 1941 became the first skipper of the newly built USS
Hornet
. It was from the deck of the
Hornet
, under Mitscher’s command, that Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle and his sixteen B-25 bombers launched on the first strike against Japan on April 18, 1942.

As commander of the Fast Carrier Task Force at the Battle of the Philippine Sea in 1944, Mitscher won fame—and the everlasting gratitude of his pilots. When the planes of a strike were forced to return to the carriers after nightfall, Mitscher broke with standard operating procedure and ordered the flight deck lights and ships’ searchlights turned on, exposing his carriers to Japanese subs and airplanes. The gamble paid off. Mitscher recovered most of his planes and pilots, and his precious carriers survived.

Like most senior brown-shoe commanders, Mitscher had spent a career battling the black shoes, especially the battleship admirals who had steered the navy’s thinking for most of the current century. One of those was Raymond Spruance, and another was Chester Nimitz, both of whom were now Mitscher’s bosses.

A decree had come down the previous year from the chief of naval operation, Ernest King, that carrier task force commanders would henceforth have surface officers assigned as chiefs of staff. The idea was that the mix of cultures would give the commander better coordination with his screening ships. Mitscher was assigned a highly decorated destroyer squadron commander, forty-three-year-old Capt. Arleigh Burke, as his chief of staff.

Mitscher had not been happy. Having a nonaviator so closely involved with the command of his carrier task force offended him, especially when it was one like Burke, who was already a celebrity for his exploits as a hard-charging destroyer division commander.
He had earned a nickname, “Thirty-one-Knot” Burke, for being a fast mover not only in a destroyer but in all things that involved guns and ordnance.

Burke, for his part, was just as unhappy. Without warning he’d been yanked from his Destroyer Squadron 23 at the Bismarck Archipelago and exiled to the most foreign of environments, the flag spaces of a 27,000-ton aircraft carrier. The two men were like dogs in a kennel, each warily sizing up the other.

It took a few weeks, but the crotchety Mitscher was eventually won over by Thirty-one-Knot Burke’s obvious brilliance. By the time Task Force 58 arrived off Okinawa, the Bald Eagle and his black-shoe chief of staff had bonded into a formidable team.

Now Mitscher was seeing an opportunity he couldn’t resist. Studying the sighting reports of the Japanese task force, he felt a stirring of the old battleship-versus-aircraft-carrier rivalry. Though the great battles of the Pacific had mostly been fought by the carriers, the matter of whether airpower alone could prevail over a surface force had not been proven beyond all doubt.

It had been Mitscher who sent carrier-based planes after
Yamato
and her sister ship
Musashi
at the Battle of Leyte Gulf.
Yamato
had escaped, and although
Musashi
eventually went down, the actual cause of her sinking was not certain. No one had ruled out the possibility that the coup de grace was delivered by a submarine. Here was a chance to end the debate forever.

But there was a problem. Mitscher’s immediate superior, Admiral Spruance, had just transmitted an all-fleet order to allow the enemy task force to proceed southward, where it would be engaged by Admiral Deyo’s surface task force. In the meantime, Mitscher’s orders were “to concentrate the offensive effort of Task Force 58 in combat air patrols to meet enemy air attacks.”

The battleships were going to get the
Yamato
.

Or maybe not. Like a team of sharp-eyed contract lawyers, Mitscher, Burke, and Cmdr. James Flatley, the fighter pilot who served as Mitscher’s operations officer, pored over Spruance’s
order. It was a situation as old as warfare itself, officers trying to find the tiniest amount of slack in their orders.

Mitscher had served under Spruance long enough to know his style. Spruance believed in allowing his commanders discretion to act on opportunity, and Mitscher believed that he was looking at just such an opportunity. In any case, Spruance’s order had not specifically
forbidden
Mitscher to go after the enemy task force. It was as much slack as Mitscher needed.

The problem, in Mitscher’s mind, wasn’t in complying with Spruance’s order to maintain combat air patrols. With twenty-four carriers and air groups in his task force, he could provide plenty of combat air patrol coverage
and
still deploy a knockout blow against the enemy fleet. The trick was in knowing where the enemy fleet was headed and what their objective was.

Then came another order from Spruance. Deyo was to form his two battleship divisions, two cruiser divisions, and twenty destroyers into line of battle and head north. In his flag plot, Mitscher read his copy of the dispatch, then sent his own order to each of his carrier task groups. They were to steam northwestward, shortening the distance between them and the next day’s likely position of the Japanese force. If Spruance had any objection, he would have to countermand Mitscher’s order.

The race to get
Yamato
was on.

By now both Mitscher and Flatley were bleary-eyed after the arduous day. Each left to hit his bunk, leaving Burke to ruminate about the Japanese task force. Long ago Burke had learned how to ration his rest periods, catnapping during lulls in the action, seeming never to run out of alertness.

Alone in flag plot, Burke sucked on his pipe and thought about the Japanese task force. Spread out before him were charts of the seas off southern Japan and the Ryukyus. In his mind, he tried to insert himself into the Japanese commander’s position. Where would
he
go? In which direction? After what objective?

The more he pondered the situation, the clearer it became to him. The Japanese commander intended to attack the amphibious force off the western shore of Okinawa. He wouldn’t telegraph his intention by proceeding on a direct course, which would bring them into range of the carrier task force on the east side of Okinawa. He would ease westward, perhaps northward, feinting in the direction of Sasebo on the far coast of Kyushu, staying out of range of the carrier-based warplanes.