The Twilight Warriors (39 page)

Another lucky ship was the destroyer
Jeffers
, which had been ordered to RP14 to assist the stricken
Abele
. Unlike the previous crews, the men aboard
Jeffers
spotted the peculiar, stubby-winged aircraft while it was being launched from a Betty bomber high overhead. Watching the tiny craft gaining speed, they realized that
Jeffers
was its target.

Every antiaircraft gun on the destroyer opened as the guided bomb came at them, trailing a plume of smoke. Some of the gunfire appeared to hit the rocket ship, but it kept coming. At the last moment,
Jeffers
’s skipper gave the tin can hard left rudder.

It was enough to throw off the
Ohka
pilot’s aim. The missile smacked the water fifty yards off
Jeffers
’s port rail, then ricocheted into the destroyer’s starboard quarter without exploding. By a miracle
Jeffers
escaped with only slight damage.

I
t was the Americans’ first close encounter with the
Ohka. Stanly
’s skipper, Cmdr. R. S. Harlan, reported, “From the scraps of the jet-propelled plane that were left on board, we observed that they are constructed largely of plywood and balsa, with a very small amount of metal, most of that being extremely light aluminum.”

Intelligence officers were already piecing together the parts of the puzzle. An example of the piloted bomb had been captured intact a few days ago at Yontan airfield on Okinawa, with a cherry blossom emblem on its nose. Intercepted Japanese message traffic
referred to an operation involving bombers “equipped for cherry blossom attacks.”

The
Ohka
quickly received an American code name—
baka
. In Japanese it meant “idiot.”

L
ate that afternoon, April 12, the Betty bomber that had carried Saburo Dohi’s
Ohka
thumped back down on the runway at Kanoya after a nearly six-hour round trip. The Betty was the only survivor of the eight
Ohka
-carrying mother ships that had departed at midday. One never made it to the target area. The other six were shot down after launching their
Ohka
rocket planes.

The crew of the lone Betty bomber brought with them the electrifying news of Dohi’s success. They had watched his
Ohka
streak downward toward a battleship, six miles in the distance. Minutes later, a column of black smoke belched 500 meters from the ocean where the enemy battleship had been. It was glorious!

What the bomber crew identified as a battleship was, in fact, the destroyer
Mannert L. Abele
. But it didn’t matter. After all the discouraging failures, Dohi’s success was a hugely symbolic victory. The Thunder Gods had sunk their first ship.

What none of them knew was that it was also their last.

Saburo Dohi’s place was quickly taken by a new arrival. Since the beginning of the
kikusui
operations, there was a constant flow of new faces at Kanoya. Those who had departed on one-way
tokko
missions now numbered in the hundreds.

The mood among the pilots waiting for their final flights was a mixture of melancholy and pride. With the arrival of spring, some volunteered to help the local population, who were mostly farmers, with their harvesting. The villagers reciprocated by bringing them gifts—eggs, chickens, even a cow.

One day a mother and daughter came to Kanoya to visit the young woman’s fiancé. They hadn’t heard from him recently and they were concerned. What they didn’t know was that he was a
tokko
volunteer. He had made his last flight a few days before. The
pilot’s best friend was at a loss what to tell the two women, so he sought the advice of Cmdr. Tadashi Nakajima.

The senior officer thought it would be too cruel to tell the truth. The women were informed that the young man had left a few days before to go to an advance island base. They were showed the room that had recently been occupied by the departed pilot. The young woman touched the bamboo bed on which her fiancé had recently slept. “
No further questions were asked,” recalled Commander Nakajima, “but they seemed instinctively to understand what had happened.”

26
GUNSLINGERS

TASK FORCE 58
130 MILES NORTHEAST OF OKINAWA
APRIL 11, 1945

L
t. Mark Orr peered into the blackness beyond the Hellcat’s nose, trying to pick up the bogey. It was like staring into an inkwell. The visibility was down to four miles, the sea and the night sky blending into a horizonless void. Orr and his wingman, Ens. Tom Stixrud, had been on station over the carrier task force when the FIDO sent them on a hot vector after the bogey.

It was nerve-wracking. Even with precise radar vectoring to within close range of the bogey, the night fighter pilots still had to get close enough to actually
see
the target before they could shoot him. Night air-to-air intercepts were a dangerous and demanding form of combat, wholly different from the swirling dogfights of the daytime. Night fighter pilots trusted their lives to their instruments, constantly fighting the vertigo induced by the lack of visual references. Every pinpoint of light—star, gunfire, ship’s light, aircraft engine exhaust—provided a false clue that could lure them into the black ocean.

Someone had to do it. More and more the Japanese were turning to night attacks. Under cover of darkness, raiders slipped past CAP pilots and destroyer lookouts. Radar was the only means of detection, and shipboard fighter directors vectored the night CAP airplanes to intercept the incoming bogeys. The night fighters used their own onboard radar for the final intercept of the mostly invisible enemy. On most nights the system worked splendidly. Sometimes it didn’t work at all.

The men who flew the night fighters were segregated from the
air group by the clock and by culture. The other pilots—the day fliers—viewed them with awe and suspicion. Anyone who actually
volunteered
for night carrier duty was, by definition, certifiably weird. The night fighters went by various names—“Gloomies,” “Bat-CAPs,” and “red goggle gang,” so called because of the goggles they wore to protect their night vision.

The Gloomies aboard
Intrepid
were led by Orr, a thirty-year-old Texan who formerly had been an instrument instructor in the training command. Orr and his pilots lived like nocturnal animals, sleeping by day, hunting bogeys by night.

Orr and Stixrud were 40 miles east of the task force, closing on the bogey, when Orr picked him up on his onboard radar. The shadowy silhouette of a Betty bomber loomed out of the darkness ahead of them. Like a pair of disciplined hunting dogs, the Hellcat pilots went after him, alternating firing passes. Stixrud attacked from behind, then pulled away as Orr came in on a 45-degree flat run from the starboard side. When Orr broke off, Stixrud came back in to blaze away at the Betty’s left side.

It was a cold and efficient exercise, lasting less than three minutes. Stixrud delivered the final burst of machine gun fire. An orange ball of fire punctuated the night sky. Sheathed in flame, the Betty rolled onto its left side and plunged into the ocean.

Twenty-five minutes later, Orr was chasing another bogey while Stixrud remained at the CAP station. Orr again slid in close behind the bogey—another low-flying Betty bomber—and opened fire. He could see his bullets converging like tentacles on the Betty, but the Japanese plane somehow kept flying.

As Orr kept shooting, his .50-caliber gun barrels overheated. Now half of them were no longer firing. Exasperated, he kicked the Hellcat’s rudder left and right, trying to spray the reduced machine gun fire across the Japanese bomber.

Then came a warning from the FIDO. The two airplanes—Orr’s Hellcat and the Japanese Betty—were flying directly into the
fleet’s antiaircraft screen. Orr had to break it off before he was hit by the ships’ gunners.

In the next second, as if on signal, gunfire from the fleet escort ships erupted around both airplanes.

By now Mark Orr was a driven man. Ignoring the flak, he pulled in close enough to the Japanese bomber to see the orange flickers from the engine exhausts. Before he could fire again, a destroyer fired an antiaircraft burst directly in front of him. Orr zoomed over the top of the destroyer, still chasing the Betty, which was now headed directly for the carrier
Yorktown
.

Orr stayed on the Betty’s tail, spraying bullets with his three still-firing guns. By now both the bomber’s engines were ablaze. Just as it seemed inevitable that it would crash into
Yorktown
, the Betty abruptly nosed over and hit the ocean.

Now Orr was the only target left, and the ships’ gunners kept blazing away. Flying at 50 feet off the water, Orr zoomed through the hail of antiaircraft fire, somehow exiting the area without taking a hit.

It had been a hell of a mission, but it wasn’t over. The climax of a night fighter mission was the night carrier landing. With his eyes fixed on the tiny illuminated stick figure of the landing signal officer on the edge of the flight deck, Orr landed the Hellcat back down on the darkened
Intrepid
. With adrenaline still surging in his veins, he made his way down to the Grim Reapers’ ready room, eager to tell someone what it was like out there.

Nobody cared. The day fighter pilots were busy watching a movie in the ready room. They weren’t interested in the exploits of the weird Gloomies.

A
s much as any man on the Grim Reaper roster, Lt. Wally Schub flew, talked, and looked like the Hollywood version of a fighter pilot. He had a dark mustache and wore the practiced gaze of a hard-eyed gunslinger. As one of Tommy Blackburn’s
“irregulars” in the VF-17 days in the Solomons, Schub had gunned down two Japanese aircraft. Since then, he had been waiting for the day when he could add three more and be an official “ace”—a fighter pilot with five enemy kills to his credit.

Now it was a few minutes past noon on April 12, 1945, and Schub was leading one of the three VF-10 Grim Reaper CAP divisions over the radar picket stations. On the most dangerous of the stations, RP1, was the destroyer
Cassin Young
, whose fighter directors were frantically vectoring the CAP fighters toward the incoming blips on their radars. The raiders were coming directly for the picket ships, flying down the corridor of airspace from Kyushu to Okinawa that the tin can sailors were calling “Kamikaze Alley.”

Schub was the first to spot the bogeys. There were fifteen of them, Val and Kate dive-bombers, spread out in a loose gaggle low on the water. Directly behind Schub’s division came another Grim Reaper division, this one led by a Marine, 1st Lt. W. A. “Nick” Nickerson. Nickerson was one of four Marine Corsair pilots, formerly deployed aboard
Wasp
, who had volunteered to augment
Intrepid
’s Corsair fighter squadron.

The lumbering Japanese dive-bombers were fat targets. On his first pass, Schub flamed two of the hapless Vals. On Schub’s wing, twenty-one-year-old Ens. John “Barney” Godwin shot down another, and Schub’s second two-plane section—Lt. (jg) Whit Wharton, another VF-17 Jolly Roger veteran, and Ens. Walt Brauer—sent three more down in flames.

Right behind them came Nickerson, shooting down two Vals while his Marine wingman, 2nd Lt. H. O. Taylor, knocked down another. Ens. Fred Meyer, leading the second section, turned his guns on a Val dive-bomber and a Nakajima fixed-gear “Nate” fighter, sending both down in flames. Another Tail End Charlie, Ens. Ed Deutschman, added one more Val to the tally.

The one-sided dogfight was over in minutes. Of the fifteen kamikazes in the formation, twelve had been blown out of the sky,
and the three lucky survivors had disappeared. None of the Corsairs had taken any hits, but the two divisions were now scattered.

As Nickerson was making his way back to the
Intrepid
, he spotted another swarm of ten Japanese planes—a mix of Jill torpedo bombers and Judy and Val dive-bombers. They were circling at 5,000 feet, about to pounce on the picket destroyer
Purdy
and her gunboat escorts. With Ed Deutschman on his wing, Nickerson swept down from directly overhead, splashing one of the Jill torpedo bombers, then going for the Judy dive-bombers.

Too late, Nickerson realized that these Judys were different. Unlike most of the kamikaze-configured planes, these had tail gunners. Nickerson saw the winking orange flashes of the 7.7-millimeter machine guns. An instant later he felt the bullets thudding into his engine. A sheet of oil blacked out his windshield.

With no forward visibility, Nickerson dove through the enemy formation, praying he wouldn’t hit one of them or take more bullets. Directly behind him came his Tail End Charlie, Walt Brauer, who flamed one of the Judys in passing.

Nickerson’s engine, punctured by the tail gunners’ bullets, was out of oil. One way or the other, he was going into the water. He had only one decision left to make: ditch or bail out?

Despite the oil-smeared windshield, he opted for ditching. Flying on instruments, his only view out the side of the canopy, Nickerson glided the Corsair down to the wave tops. The fighter hit, skipped once, then lurched to a halt, still upright. The Marine scrambled out and, minutes later, was hauled aboard one of the LCS gunboats escorting
Purdy
.