The Twilight Warriors (29 page)

Ariga was peering into the sky, trying to judge the flight of the tiny wobbling objects hurtling toward him, yelling commands to the helmsman. He was able to evade many of the bombs, but not all. With terrible frequency they were crashing down on
Yamato
’s deck. Even more were exploding in the water close enough to buckle bulkheads and shear rivets, opening up compartments to flooding.

The battleship’s gunnery officers were cursing the miserable results of their antiaircraft fire. Communications had been shattered early in the battle, ending all coordination of the air defense guns. Each gun director was picking his own targets, firing
independently. Like most technical skills in the Imperial Japanese Navy, shipboard gunnery had fallen victim to poor training and backward technology. For the overwhelmed gunners, shooting at the swarming American warplanes was like trying to catch hornets with their bare hands.

Yamato
’s nine 18.1-inch main guns, designed for surface warfare, were ill-suited as air defense weapons. They were mounted in three turrets, and each took an interminable 40 seconds to reload between firings. Even though the gunners were firing the vaunted
san shiki
antiaircraft shells, the projectiles were exploding like harmless fireworks, hitting almost nothing. Even the secondary guns—the half-dozen 6-inchers and twenty-four 5-inch guns—were designed primarily to be used against other ships.

Yamato
’s most potent antiaircraft weapons were the two dozen 5-inch guns and her 150 machine guns. The machine guns could be deflected to fire straight up. Most of the machine guns fired at a rate of 220 rounds per minute, but some up on the tower bridge could fire at twice that rate. The trouble was, the machine gun crews were being mowed down as quickly as they could be replaced.

The worst was yet to come. Off
Yamato
’s port beam appeared the torpedo planes, looking dark and ominous in the gray murk. The Avengers were jinking to throw off the gunners but continuing straight through the hail of fire.
Yamato
’s gun directors were firing the big 18.1-inch guns directly into the water ahead of the oncoming warplanes, trying to throw up a wall of shrapnel-filled water. It didn’t stop them.

As the Avengers bored in closer, the smaller guns on
Yamato
joined in the collective defense. One of the torpedo planes took a hit in the wing, pulled up in flames, then plunged into the sea.

The others kept coming. Torpedoes began dropping from the bellies. The gray shapes slashed through the water on converging courses toward
Yamato
.

Yamato
’s captain ordered a violent turn toward the incoming
torpedoes, trying to “comb the wakes”—paralleling their path and steering between them. As Ariga barked the orders, two junior officers on the bridge plotted the tracks of the incoming torpedoes on a maneuvering board.

It worked, almost. The first bubbling white wake streaked past
Yamato
’s sides. Then another. It seemed that Ariga’s luck was holding. Another passed close abeam.

Then one slammed into
Yamato
’s port bow. The impact knocked Captain Nomura, the executive officer, to the deck. Staggering back to his feet, Nomura, who also had the job of chief damage control officer, called for flooding reports.
Yamato
was still making 27 knots, he was told, and she wasn’t listing.

Two more bombs exploded on the deck near the aft gunnery control tower. The explosions caused heavy casualties but didn’t penetrate to a vital place belowdecks.
Yamato
was damaged but still fighting. The first wave of attackers seemed to be withdrawing, leaving
Yamato
’s crew to wonder when the next was coming.

They didn’t have long to wonder. The next wave was almost there.

21
DUCKS IN A GALLERY

EAST CHINA SEA
APRIL 7, 1945

L
eading the last division of
Intrepid
’s Corsairs, Lt. (jg) Wes Hays was having trouble keeping Rawie’s flight in sight. They had launched from the carrier at 1045, two and a half hours before, flying at 1,500 feet beneath a solid overcast. Now the cloud cover was getting worse. Seeking better visibility, Rawie had led the formation up through the layers in the clouds. It was a game of blindman’s bluff, each division leader trying to keep the preceding division in sight as they groped through the murk.

Somewhere between cloud layers, Hays lost sight of Rawie. In fact, he’d lost sight of everyone. Hays and his three wingmen—Hollister, Carlisi, and Erickson—were on their own.

Wes Hays’s military career was typical of the wartime Navy. From newly winged naval aviator in February 1943, he’d gone through training as a photo reconnaissance pilot, then put in a tour instructing in Corsairs at Green Cove Springs, where Will Rawie handpicked him for his newly formed Grim Reaper squadron. Hays came from the western outback of Texas, a one-stop town called Novice, where his wife and baby son were living.

Hays was listening to the babble on the radio, and it didn’t give him a good feeling. The weather was lousy and getting lousier. Everyone was having trouble finding the Jap task force, including Will Rawie. The lead Avenger in Rawie’s group had gotten a radar contact from 30 miles out. The only problem was, it wasn’t a Jap ship. It was a reef in the East China Sea.

Now the strike group was dispersed, some low over the water and others flying between the cloud layers, dodging rain squalls, using only their eyeballs to locate an enemy fleet. Fuel was
becoming critical. They had only minutes left before they’d have to turn back to the ship.

According to the plotting board on Hays’s lap, they
had
to be near where the Japanese force was last reported. A dark layer of cloud enveloped the whole area. Hays signaled his flight to come together so they wouldn’t lose sight of each other, then he took them down through the clouds until they had only one broken deck between them and the water.

Hays was peering through the gloom, looking for something—
anything
—that resembled a Japanese ship, when he spotted the silhouette of an airplane off his left wing. Friend or foe? While he was still wondering, an anonymous voice crackled over the radio: “
Corsairs, you’re close. Stand by for my mark.”

It was a plane from one of the other ships, he realized, probably
Yorktown
. Whoever the guy was, he knew the location of the enemy fleet. Hays snapped off a quick order to his wingmen: “Arm everything. Use your .50s.” Besides dropping the 1,000-pounders, they’d be ready to strafe any target in sight.

Hays continued on his heading, waiting for the call. A minute later he heard, “Mark!” He shoved the Corsair’s nose down through the cloud deck, praying that they were over water and not an island with a mountain on it. His wingmen stayed with him, descending through the thick cloud.

Hays peered through his windshield, straining to see something, anything. They were in a blind dive toward the ocean.

Abruptly they popped through the bottom of the cloud deck. To Hays’s astonishment, directly ahead of his nose sprawled a great gray object. It was a Japanese cruiser, and the pipper of his gun sight, as if positioned by some mysterious power, was superimposed on the sweet spot—precisely between the cruiser’s center stacks and fantail.

And then he noticed something else. Black, oily puffs were erupting like mushrooms around him. Then he felt the turbulence. The bastards were shooting at him.

W
ill Rawie, the strike leader, was approaching minimum fuel. He was about to turn back when he spotted a wake on the whitecapped surface below. When he dropped down to follow it, he saw the flash of gunfire. Then came more flashes, like twinkling lights in a fog.

Ahead Rawie made out the dark silhouettes of ships—three smaller vessels and one very large one that had the profile of a battleship. A sporadic barrage of gunfire was coming from the big ship. Rawie saw that it was slightly down at the stern, listing to starboard. It had to be the
Yamato
.

As strike leader, Rawie was supposed to coordinate the attacks of his warplanes. Now it seemed like a joke. His strike group was scattered, all dodging and weaving to avoid the antiaircraft fire, trying to get into position to attack. The only ones he could see besides his own flight of four Corsairs were the Torpeckers—the Avenger torpedo planes. He called for them to swing to the left, to set up for an attack from the north. Everybody else should take any target he could find.

Through the clouds Rawie spotted what looked like a cruiser. As he led his flight in a dive through a hole in the clouds, he nearly collided with a flight of Helldiver dive-bombers. They were all plunging through the same hole. Rawie pulled up in a tight circle, his wingmen in trail, then rolled back in for another try at the cruiser.

This time Rawie held his dive until the target filled his gun sight. He jabbed the release button, feeling the Corsair shed its thousand-pound load, and pulled out of the dive.

Grunting against the force of the pull out, Rawie peered back over his shoulder. Explosions were erupting from below the cruiser’s decks. It looked like the cruiser was about to break up.

F
rom his station on
Yamato
’s top deck, Lt. Naoyoshi Ishida saw how wrong they had been about the weather. They had thought that the rain squalls and low clouds would hide them. Instead, it was providing cover for the American warplanes.
Yamato
’s gunners were finding it almost impossible to track the blurred shapes as they came plummeting down from the cloud deck.

Despite the hatred Ishida had for the Americans, he couldn’t help feeling a twinge of admiration. Unquestionably, they were brave. They were diving so low, firing their guns until the last moment, that Ishida could see their faces in the cockpits.

Watching the battle go against them, Ishida wrestled with his emotions. He hadn’t expected that they would win this fight, but he also hadn’t thought the
Yamato
could be so quickly damaged. Ishida was a product of the Meiji generation, the older class of professional naval officers imbued with an unquestioning willingness to die in battle.

Despite his
bushido
feelings, Ishida couldn’t push from his mind the image of his wife and infant son. Without him, they would be alone to face an uncertain future. It was not the way a warrior was supposed to think in the midst of battle.

T
hings were happening too fast for Erickson. He’d barely had time to arm his bomb and guns. Now he was desperately trying to stay with Hays, who was diving on a cruiser beneath his nose. Erickson was hugging Hays’s left wing while the second section—Hollister and Carlisi—hung on to Hays’s right wing. Wherever Hays was going, they were going with him.

Erickson picked out the gray shape of the target. And he saw something else, a few hundred yards beyond the cruiser they were attacking—an even bigger ship, probably the
Yamato
. Every gun on every warship seemed to be firing at him. It didn’t seem possible that they could all miss.