The Twilight Warriors (27 page)

Burke was sure of it. Sometime the next morning, the Japanese commander would make his charge toward Okinawa.

I
n his flag bridge aboard
Yamato
, Ito ordered the task force into a turn to the southwest. They were at the spot where he had planned to pick up the lagging
Asashimo
and reintegrate her into the force. But
Asashimo
still couldn’t keep up. She hadn’t sorted out the reduction gear problem that had caused her to fall behind.

There was no time to wait. Ito gave the order to abandon the destroyer and proceed with only nine ships. As the fleet charged through the squally seas at a speed of 22 knots, the hapless destroyer disappeared from view.

There was only one prudent choice for
Asashimo
’s captain, Lt. Cmdr. Yoshiro Sugihara: to reverse course and return to Kyushu. The destroyer was no longer under the protective umbrella of the task force’s air defense guns.

But this was not a day for prudence. Sugihara had no intention of missing what was surely the last stand of the Imperial Japanese Navy.
Asashimo
continued limping behind the task force, following the wake of the
Yamato
.

I
n the early hours of April 7, Mitscher became sick. Though the admiral’s physician didn’t have a diagnosis, he came to flag plot to inform Burke that Mitscher would have to stay in bed. The
gaunt, heavy-smoking admiral was already in frail condition, and the doctor was worried that he might become incapacitated.

With Mitscher indisposed, the black-shoe chief of staff, Burke, became the de facto task force commander, with fighter pilot Cmdr. Jimmy Flatley as his air warfare expert. They ordered eight Hellcat fighters launched at dawn to comb a fan-shaped 90-degree sector from northeast to northwest. A division of four Marine Corsairs was stationed at 60-mile intervals to relay the message back to the task force flagship.

At 0830, a Hellcat pilot from
Essex
spotted the Japanese task force through the broken cloud deck. The ships were steaming on a northwest course of 300 degrees.

Northwest course?
Receiving this information, Admiral Spruance ordered Deyo to go after the Japanese task force. Now he was worried that they might be slipping northward toward Sasebo. If so, they’d soon be out of range of both battleships and warplanes.

Aboard
Bunker Hill
, Burke reached a different conclusion. It was a head fake, he believed. The
Yamato
task force was making a zigzag turn, feinting northwestward. Sticking to his hunch, he deployed another sixteen-plane search group to a point
south
of the reported position. If he was right, the Japanese force would soon make a hard turn to port and be picked up by the search group.

And they did. Another
Essex
Hellcat radioed that the task force was now heading southwesterly, on a course of 240 degrees. Burke’s hunch was right: the Japanese commander was making the course changes to confuse the trackers.

Burke sent the order to each of the carrier task groups: prepare their bombers, fighters, and torpedo planes for action.

Later that morning, Mitscher returned to the flag plot. Looking gaunter and more birdlike than ever, he settled himself into his chair and resumed command. “
He looked like hell,” Burke recalled. Later he surmised that Mitscher had suffered a small heart attack during the night.

The success of the attack would depend on the search planes keeping track of the Japanese task force and directing the warplanes toward it. The strike planes would be at the extreme end of their range, some nearly 300 miles from their carriers. They would have only minutes to locate the enemy and make the attack. Mitscher had no intention of running his airplanes out of gas before they made it home. He’d already had that experience the previous June in the Philippine Sea when nearly a hundred of his warplanes, returning from a maximum-range strike, were forced down in the ocean.

Another problem was communications. At this distance the planes would be out of contact with the task force command. Mitscher ordered more fighters to be stationed between the carriers and the estimated Japanese position to relay reports.

At 1000, the strike took off. The first to go were the planes from
Belleau Wood, Hornet, Bennington
, and
San Jacinto
. They were quickly followed by the warplanes from
Bunker Hill, Essex, Bataan, Cabot
, and
Hancock
—283 airplanes of every type in the inventory, including Corsairs, Hellcats, Avengers, Helldivers, and even a few plodding Wildcat fighters.

Fifteen minutes later,
Hancock
’s fifty-three-plane group took off. At 1045, 106 warplanes from
Intrepid, Langley
, and
Yorktown
—the carriers farthest from the target—headed off in search of the enemy task force.

From his swivel chair on
Bunker Hill
’s bridge, Mitscher watched the warplanes depart, then he settled back to await the results. Either the Japanese would be where Burke had estimated, or they wouldn’t be.

Not everyone in flag plot shared Burke’s conviction. A Royal Navy observer, Cmdr. Charlie Owen, asked Burke if he actually
knew
where
Yamato
was going to be in two hours.

Burke shrugged off the question. “No.”

“But you have launched before you can possibly be sure of their location.”

“We are taking a chance,” said Burke. He put his finger on a point on the chart. It was well south of
Yamato
’s most recent position. “We are launching against the spot where we would be if we were the
Yamato.”

Mitscher, for his part, seemed to have no doubts. He had gotten over his misgivings about having a destroyer sailor as his chief of staff. In fact, he’d become sufficiently impressed with Burke that he tried to have him promoted to rear admiral. Burke resisted, not wanting to be promoted over the heads of many senior captains, and settled for the rank of commodore, a wartime quasi-flag status with a one-star insignia.

Now that they had played their hand, it was time to open up with Spruance. But the Bald Eagle could still be disingenuous. He told Burke, “Inform Admiral Spruance that I propose to strike the
Yamato
sortie group at 1200 unless otherwise directed.”

U
nless otherwise directed
. The words hung in the air while Mitscher, still feeling out of sorts, slumped in his padded chair. Fixed in his memory was the night during the Battle of the Philippine Sea when he had proposed to Spruance that his task force race toward the enemy carrier fleet in order to be in position for a dawn strike. After an agonizing delay, the cautious Spruance had denied Mitscher’s request to attack.

Now Mitscher worried that Spruance might again hold back. It would take two hours for the strike groups to reach
Yamato
. If Spruance countermanded the air strike order, it would be at best a huge embarrassment for Mitscher. At worst it could be the end of his command.

The minutes ticked past without a reply. As noon approached, it began to make less and less sense to recall the warplanes. In any case, no gasoline would be saved and the bombs would have to be dumped, if not on the enemy, then into the sea.

Then came a relayed report from the search planes. The
Yamato
task force had been sighted. Burke’s hunch was correct. The first wave of warplanes was about to engage the enemy task force.

Mitscher still hadn’t heard from Spruance. He sent a follow-up message: “Will
you take them or shall I?”

More minutes ticked away. Then Mitscher received the reply he had been praying for. It was probably the shortest operational order of the war: “You take them.”

20
FIRST WAVE

USS
INTREPID
WESTERN PACIFIC, 120 MILES
SOUTHEAST OF MAMI OSHIMA
APRIL 7, 1945

E
rickson wondered what the hell was going on. It was 1030, and he had just been rattled out of his bunk. He’d been the duty officer for the 0600 launch. He was catching up on lost sleep when the squawk box in the Boys’ Town bunkroom blared, “Ensign Erickson, report to the ready room.”

He threaded his way through passageways and knee-knockers, across the hangar deck, and up the ladder to the ready room. He could sense the excitement in the smoke-filled compartment. Flight leaders were already briefing their pilots. Erickson had been yanked out of his bunk because they needed every available pilot. His buddy from flight training, Bill Ecker, had injured his hand and couldn’t fly. Erickson was going in his place.

He wasn’t flying with Hyland that day. The CAG was already airborne on another strike, and VBF-10 skipper Will Rawie was leading the mission. It was a massive strike, with planes from almost every carrier in the task force.
Intrepid
’s air group would be joined by planes from
Yorktown
and
Langley
, with Rawie leading the combined strike group.

They were going after something big. It was called the
Yamato
, and it was headed for Okinawa.

Erickson, now wide awake, pulled on his gear and headed for the flight deck. When he found his Corsair in the middle of the deck, he had to stop and stare. The fighter had a thousand-pound bomb fastened to its belly. So did all the others. Erickson had never dropped a bomb of this size before.

The plane captain, a chatty New Yorker named Felix Novelli, helped him strap in. Before he climbed down from the wing, Novelli handed Erickson a canteen of water and a chocolate bar. Plane captains didn’t normally pass out candy bars, but today was special. It was Novelli’s twentieth birthday, the plane captain told him. He wanted Erickson to sink the
Yamato
as a present for him.

Up and down the flight deck, clouds of gray smoke belched from exhaust stacks. Propellers kicked over. Big radial engines were chuffing to life, all resonating in a staccato growl.

The fighters at the front of the pack were already throttling up, following the deck officer’s signals. The ship was steaming into a stiff northeasterly wind. Most of the fighters would be making deck launches—rolling down the deck under their own power—instead of catapulting.

Things were happening quickly. The deck officer was poised in front of the starboard wing, whirling his flag over his head. Erickson eased the throttle up. The deck officer swung his flag forward, pointing down the deck, and Erickson released the brakes. He shoved in the right rudder to counter the torque of the engine as he pushed the throttle to full power. The roar of the 2,000-horsepower Pratt & Whitney filled the cockpit, resonating through the airframe. The Corsair lumbered down the deck, its tail coming up as it gained speed, lifting off the bow and clawing its way into the sky.

Erickson joined the gaggle of dark blue warplanes circling beneath the clouds. His four-plane division was led by Lt. (jg) Wes Hays, a chuckling, round-faced Texan. The number two and three slots were filled by two more ensigns, Jim Hollister and Russ Carlisi. Erickson slid into his accustomed number four Tail End Charlie position.

When the strike force was assembled, “Red One”—Rawie’s call sign—headed them to the northwest. Weaving through the ragged bottoms of the cloud layer, they crossed the Ryukyu island chain just south of the island called Amami Oshima.

P
eering into the clouded skies, the spotters dutifully counted the planes. Never had they seen so many American warplanes in a single day. This was the third wave to pass over Amami Oshima in the past hour.

By noon the report had arrived on the bridge of the battleship
Yamato:
more than 250 American enemy airplanes had passed over Amami Oshima, all heading north. It appeared to be a massive air strike.

Seated in his commander’s chair on the starboard wing of the flag bridge, Admiral Ito acknowledged the report with a silent nod. Since early that morning when they’d begun the southward dash for Okinawa, Ito had said almost nothing. He sat in his chair, arms folded, more an overseer than a director. Most of the tactical decisions he was leaving to Rear Admiral Ariga, captain of the
Yamato
.