The Twilight Warriors (38 page)

O
ne of the
kikusui
No. 1 pilots was an enlisted flight petty officer named Sata Omaichi. Before Omaichi had reached his
target, his Mitsubishi JM2 “Jack” fighter was intercepted and shot down by a Hellcat fighter from the
Hornet
.

Omaichi, however, was not bent on suicide. After he ditched his stricken fighter, he was taken prisoner aboard the destroyer
Taussig
. Interrogators learned from the garrulous pilot that the next massed attack—
kikusui
No. 2—was set for April 11. This one, Omaichi boasted, would be the most intense attack ever and would wipe out the American fleet.

It was valuable information. Combined with intercepted messages from Admiral Ugaki’s headquarters at Kanoya, it was enough to persuade Mitscher and Spruance to suspend ground attack missions over Okinawa on April 11. Mitscher ordered all his dive-bombers and torpedo planes defueled, disarmed, and parked on hangar decks. CAP coverage would be increased over the picket ships and the carrier task groups.

Then came the rain. Squalls and low visibility shut down air operations for both the Japanese and Americans. As the weather cleared on April 11, the kamikazes came out, but not in great numbers. It seemed to be a patchwork attack, with the apparent purpose of keeping pressure on the American fleet. Of the swarm of
tokko
aircraft sent southward, only a few reached their targets.

One was a Zero that threaded its way through the storm of fire thrown up by the carriers and escorts of Task Group 58.4. Skimming low on the water, the Zero swept in on the stern of the
Missouri
, aiming for what was considered the battleship’s most vulnerable spot—the bridge. Instead, the kamikaze plowed into the rail of the starboard gun deck, shearing off the port wing and cart wheeling forward to crash behind a gun mount. Flames and debris showered
Missouri
’s deck, but the fires were quickly extinguished.

The
Missouri
had been lucky. The kamikaze’s bomb didn’t explode. The only real damage to the heavily armored battleship was a dented rail and scorched paint, and the only casualty was the kamikaze pilot, whose remains were found among the wreckage. He appeared to be a young man of eighteen or nineteen years of age.

The next morning Chaplain Roland Faulk conducted a funeral service for the dead Japanese. The service angered several of
Missouri
’s crew, who didn’t think he ought to be rendering military honors to a deceased enemy.

Faulk went ahead with the funeral. “
A dead Jap,” the chaplain declared, “is no longer an enemy.”

25
OHKA

KANOYA AIR BASE, KYUSHU
APRIL 12, 1945

V
ice Adm. Matome Ugaki was frustrated.
Kikusui
No. 2 was behind schedule. He had been stymied first by the dismal weather, then by the lack of success his search planes had in locating the enemy carriers.

By dawn on April 12, Ugaki thought he had a clear picture of the enemy’s disposition. Reconnaissance planes had located the American carrier force 60 to 80 miles east of the northern tip of Okinawa.

Ugaki had a special hatred for the American aircraft carriers. In one battle after another since the war began, he had seen the balance of the war tilting against Japan. He blamed it on the carriers. “I want to wipe them out by any means,” he wrote in his diary.

Though his
tokko
warriors hadn’t scored great successes yet against the enemy carriers, Ugaki believed they had caused significant damage to the enemy’s heavy surface ships. According to the action reports, the attacks of April 6–8—
kikusui
No. 1—had sunk or seriously damaged sixty-nine American ships. These supposedly included two battleships, three cruisers, and three destroyers.

The Japanese estimates were wildly off the mark. In total, twenty-eight American ships had been hit, eight of them sunk. Two were the destroyers
Bush
and
Colhoun
, and five others—
Leutze, Morris, Mullany, Newcomb
, and
Bennett
—had taken such damage that they were out of the war. They were serious losses, but of no real consequence to the operating strength of the Fifth Fleet.

What worried Ugaki now was a recent report from Okinawa. Spotters had counted as many as 130 enemy fighters, mostly F4U Corsairs, based at the two captured airfields, Yontan and Kadena.
Being so close to the anchorages at Okinawa, the shore-based fighters posed an even more serious threat to the
tokko
raiders than the American carrier-based planes. Ugaki ordered that the two airfields on Okinawa receive special attention from the next wave of
tokkotai
.

Kikusui
No. 2 finally took to the air in the late morning of April 12. For this massed attack, Ugaki had assembled 185
tokko
aircraft, 150 fighters, and 45 torpedo planes.

First went the fighters, taking off in twenty-four-plane waves throughout the morning. Their mission would be to engage the enemy air patrols guarding the carriers and the anchorages at Okinawa. At midday, 129 more warplanes roared down the runway at Kanoya. Eight were Mitsubishi Betty bombers carrying
Ohka
rocket-boosted, human-guided missiles.

As wave after wave of warplanes headed toward their targets, Ugaki again settled himself in his command post to await the reports. As usual, he entered his trancelike state while the excited voices of men in the last minutes of their lives crackled over the speaker: “Stand by for the release of
Ohka.”
Then, “Release—hit a battleship.” Finally, “One battleship sunk.”

Battleship?
Listening to the terse radio transmissions, Matome Ugaki could barely contain his excitement. Could the reports be true?

T
he reports weren’t true. Of the three battleships under attack by kamikazes—
New Mexico, Idaho
, and
Tennessee
—none had been sunk. On Turner’s order, Rear Adm. Mort Deyo had moved his entire beach gunfire force—ten battlewagons, seven cruisers, and twelve destroyers—out to what was being called “Kamikaze Gulch,” the open triangle of ocean bounded by Ie Shima, the Kerama Retto, and the shore of Okinawa. Once on station, Deyo arranged his ships in air defense formation to await the kamikazes.

The first wave showed up in the early afternoon. Once
again, they homed in on the northern picket station, RP1. The veteran picket destroyer
Cassin Young
’s luck ran out when a Val dive-bomber slithered through the hail of gunfire and slammed into her, knocking out the vital radar, damaging the fire room, and causing sixty casualties.

More kamikazes sank one of
Cassin Young
’s supporting gunboats, LCS-33, and knocked another out of action. Yet another kamikaze, chased by three CAP fighters, crashed alongside USS
Purdy
, a picket destroyer, knocking out her steering.

In the space of a few fiery minutes, the kamikazes had put every ship on RP1 out of action. Not for long, however. Two more destroyers,
Stanly
and
Lang
, were already racing across Kamikaze Gulch to take up duty at the critical RP1.

They, too, would be met by kamikazes. Among them were the Thunder Gods—the
Ohka
pilots from Kanoya’s
Jinrai Butai
.

L
t. (jg) Saburo Dohi, like the other young Thunder Gods, had lived with the knowledge that he could be called to sortie at any moment. Dohi was from Osaka and was a graduate of the public school system. For the previous two weeks, the young officer had kept himself occupied improving the living quarters of his fellow
Ohka
pilots. They were billeted in an ancient primary school building with holes in the roof and windows broken out from air raids. Dohi and a group of junior pilots mopped floors, patched holes, and acquired straw mats and bamboo beds for the incoming airmen. Until the day came when they departed on their missions, they would have decent beds and quarters to sleep in.

For Saburo Dohi, that day, April 12, had come. He had been assigned as one of the eight Thunder Gods making
Ohka
human-guided bomb attacks against the U.S. fleet.

As the
Ohka
-carrying Betty bombers lumbered through the sky toward Okinawa, they spread out, each taking a different route to the targets. The bitter lesson from the sixteen-ship
Ohka
attack of
March 21 had been that, in a massed formation, the overloaded Bettys were like a flock of geese: easy to find, easy to kill. Every one of the bombers had been gunned down by American fighters.

If Dohi had any trepidation about that day’s mission, it didn’t show. While the bomber droned southward, the young pilot dozed on a makeshift cot until they were within range of American ships. Then, with great formality, Dohi tied his ceremonial white
hachimaki
over his forehead. He shook hands with the aircraft commander, then climbed down through the bomb bay to the cockpit of the
Ohka
. Over the voice tube connection to the Betty crew, he announced that he was ready.

The explosive charge that was supposed to release the
Ohka
failed. The
Ohka
was still fastened to the mother ship. For another perilous minute, while the bomber flew into the jaws of the enemy fleet, Dohi waited in the cockpit of his rocket ship.

Finally a crewman yanked the manual release. The
Ohka
dropped away from the mother ship. Suspended by its tiny wings, the craft plunged earthward from 19,000 feet.

Peering through the flat front glass of his windshield, Saburo Dohi selected his target—a gray object four miles in the distance. The enemy warship appeared to be dead in the water. Nearing the target, Dohi ignited the three rocket boosters. The
Ohka
shot ahead, accelerating to nearly 600 miles per hour.

T
he destroyer
Mannert L. Abele
was already in trouble. On station at RP14, she had just been crashed by a Zero kamikaze plane. The explosion destroyed the engine room, broke both propeller shafts, and broke the ship’s keel. Now, while
Abele
’s crew was struggling to save the ship, antiaircraft gunners picked up another incoming object.

It wasn’t another Zero. This was something tiny, moving at high speed, slanting down toward the stationary destroyer. It didn’t look like anything they’d ever seen before. Before
Abele
’s gunners could track the kamikaze—or whatever the thing was—it was too
late. The object crashed into
Abele
’s hull just below her number one stack.

For the
Mannert L. Abele
, it was instant death. The explosion blew the destroyer in half. Within seconds both pieces of the shattered destroyer sank, taking eighty men to their deaths.

Abele
had just earned a singular distinction: she was the first warship to be sunk by the mysterious new
Ohka
human-guided bomb. And Saburo Dohi had also earned a place in history: he was the first of the Thunder Gods to sink a major enemy warship.

Dohi would not be alone. In the sky over the other picket stations, his fellow Thunder Gods were making their own final flights.

W
hat the hell is that?

None of the gunners on the picket destroyer USS
Stanly
had ever seen such a thing. The low-flying object looked like an aerial torpedo, hurtling at bullet speed across the water.
Stanly
’s gunners weren’t able to touch it.

Before anyone could react, the object slammed into
Stanly
’s hull, hitting with such velocity that it passed completely through the destroyer’s thin steel hull, not exploding until it had exited on the other side. The destroyer’s bow was punctured and wrinkled, but the ship was still operational.

Before
Stanly
’s crew had recovered from the shock of the first attack, another of the weird objects appeared. This one was coming just as fast, low on the water, and it looked as if the pilot couldn’t control it. Porpoising up and down, the craft skimmed over the destroyer’s bow without making contact. The tiny craft went into a hard left turn and was trying to set up for another pass at the destroyer when the gunners finally found the mark. The object exploded into the water slightly more than a mile off
Stanly
’s port side.

Stanly
had been lucky, but the destroyer
Lang
, which had joined
Stanly
for mutual fire support, was even luckier.
Lang
’s gunners had been busy blazing away at incoming enemy planes,
flaming a Val that had attempted a bombing run, when they saw a blur of motion 500 yards to their port. Before they could react, the sleek, fast-moving object crashed into the ocean.

Minutes later, it happened again. Another blurry object just like the first one came zooming in. The high-speed craft went into a violent porpoising movement and crashed into the ocean off the port bow.

The tin can crews were mystified. Whatever the strange new aircraft were, they were apparently difficult to control at such speed. Both pilots had missed their targets.