The Twilight Warriors (51 page)

It wasn’t enough. Somehow the Nick kept flying. Ignoring the ominous vibration from his damaged propeller, Klingman took another whack at the Nick. This time he chopped off the Nick’s rudder and part of the horizontal stabilizer.

Still, as if defying all laws of aerodynamics, the Nick kept flying.

The chase had taken them out to sea, north of Okinawa. The thought crossed Klingman’s mind that he might not have enough fuel to make it back to Kadena. He pushed the thought away as he went for a third chopping session on the Nick’s tail. This time he lopped off most of the right elevator.

The Nick was finished. Streaming debris, the Japanese fighter fell away in a spin. And so did Klingman, his Corsair having stalled out in the thin air. When he recovered a few thousand feet below, he could see the Nick still spinning. The Japanese fighter shed both its wings and dove like a stiletto straight into the ocean.

Now Klingman was in trouble. His Corsair was rattling like a farm tractor from its shattered propeller. At 10,000 feet, still well north of Kadena, the engine coughed and quit, out of fuel. With no power and the propeller slowly windmilling, the Corsair descended like a brick toward the airfield.

He almost made it. Klingman landed in the dirt overrun short of the runway, then bounced up to the hard surface and rolled to a stop. The Corsair was a mess. Six inches were missing from each of the three propeller blades. Shrapnel from the chopped-up Nick was embedded in the wings, cowling, and propeller.

Two days later, on another mission, Klingman ran into trouble again. His hydraulic system failed, and he elected to bail out instead of making a crash landing on one wheel. He was picked up by a destroyer escort, which deposited him on Admiral Turner’s flagship
Eldorado
.

Klingman didn’t know that he was a celebrity. Admiral Turner had heard about Klingman and insisted that he stay aboard and have dinner. The Alligator loved a good war story, and he wanted to hear the one about the Marine who had chopped off a Jap’s tail.

E
rickson couldn’t believe his eyes. He was standing on the flight deck of
Intrepid
as the carrier slid up to her berth in Pearl Harbor on May 11. There on the dock to greet them were a twenty-piece band, hula girls, and a women’s glee club.

And something else. Erickson thought he recognized a face in the crowd, not one of the musicians or singers, but a guy in a gaudy Hawaiian shirt. He was grinning like a baboon, mixing it up with the hula dancers, waving at the men on the flight deck. Erickson stared at the apparition. The guy looked exactly like Windy Hill, whom he’d last seen floating without a life raft off the coast of Kyushu.

It
was
Windy Hill, alive and apparently in the pink of health. In fact, judging by the suntan and relaxed expression, Hill appeared to be in better shape than most of the pasty-faced men staring at him from the deck of the
Intrepid
. Hill was eager to get back aboard
Intrepid
, he told his buddies, because he needed a rest from all this tiresome shore duty.

But when Hill returned to the stateroom he had shared with Lt. Hal Jackson, he received a shock. Most of his stuff was gone from his locker. Jackson had given away most of his clothes, thinking that Hill was dead.

That wasn’t the worst part. He had also disposed of Hill’s stash of whisky. It had been for a good cause, Jackson explained, because when they heard that Hill had been rescued by a submarine, they
decided to celebrate. It had been a terrific party, Jackson told him. Windy should feel honored that he had so many friends.

A
s he did for every floating chrysanthemum operation, Admiral Ugaki stood on the tarmac watching the
tokko
planes and the Thunder Gods of the
Jinrai Butai
take off. It was May 11, the day of the sixth massed
kikusui
attack.

With his dwindling inventory of airplanes, Ugaki could muster less than half the number he’d launched on the first
kikusui. Kikusui
No. 6 totaled only 150 warplanes.

When the last of the
tokko
planes had lifted from the runway at Kanoya, the admiral returned to his shelter, where he was moved to write a melancholy poem.

Most of the
tokko
warriors would attack the usual targets—the picket station destroyers and the gunboats to the north of Okinawa.

But not all. Some were hunting bigger game. They were headed for the eastern side of the Ryukyus, where the American carrier force had last been sighted.

36
CHANGE OF COMMAND

TASK FORCE 58
MAY 11, 1945

M
itscher hated the steel battle helmet. Almost as much as he despised wearing the helmet, he hated the kapok life preserver. The bulky life preserver and the tublike helmet made the skinny admiral look even more emaciated. It had taken the nagging of Arleigh Burke, Mitscher’s chief of staff, to finally get him to wear the battle gear when he stood out on the exposed bridge wing of the carrier
Bunker Hill
. Burke was concerned not only about Mitscher’s safety but also about the example the admiral set for
Bunker Hill
’s crewmen.

The Bald Eagle had a routine. During combat operations, he would exchange his baseball cap for the helmet and life preserver and observe the action from the exposed bridge wing. If the kamikazes were getting uncomfortably close, he’d duck back into the heavily shielded flag plot, one level below the captain’s bridge, and watch the battle through the bulletproof glass windows.

Mitscher looked wrung out these days. So did Burke, the rest of the flag staff, and, for that matter, most of the men on
Bunker Hill
. May 11 was their fifty-ninth straight day at sea. They’d been in almost daily action since two weeks before the invasion of Okinawa.

Mitscher and Burke were both called into flag plot a few minutes after 1000. CIC had picked up incoming bogeys. An enemy formation appeared to have sneaked in behind a returning flight of
Bunker Hill
’s strike planes. A broken cloud layer was helping to hide them from the CAP fighters.

In the next two minutes, the radio speaker on the fighter frequency confirmed it: “Alert! Alert! Two planes diving on the
Bunker Hill!”
Mitscher recognized the voice. It was Maj. Jim Swett,
whom Mitscher knew from the Guadalcanal campaign, where the Marine had shot down seven enemy planes on one sortie and was recommended by Mitscher for the Medal of Honor.

Swett’s warning came just as the antiaircraft guns in
Bunker Hill
’s task group opened up. For many of the crew on deck—plane handlers, ordnancemen, pilots still in their cockpits—there was no other warning, just the sound of the guns, then the blurred glimpse of a dusky shape hurtling toward them from astern. A trail of machine gun fire spattered across the deck, chewing up wood and pinging into airplanes.

Still in his dive, the Zero pilot, a Japanese navy ensign named Yasunori Seizo, released his bomb. The bomb hit a millisecond before the Zero, plunging through the wooden deck, through the gallery deck directly below, then into the hangar deck and piercing a hole in the portside bulkhead. With its delayed fuse, the 250-kilogram bomb didn’t explode until it was 20 feet outside the carrier’s hull.

The effect was almost as disastrous as if it had detonated inside the ship. The explosion mowed down gunners and crewmen along the carrier’s port side. Shrapnel sliced into the hangar bay, setting fueled airplanes ablaze. The inferno leaped from airplane to airplane through the hangar bay.

Meanwhile, the wreckage of the Zero fighter glanced off the aft flight deck and skidded through the pack of airplanes waiting to be launched. Airplanes were hurled in every direction, bursting into flame, exploding like firecrackers. The blazing fuselage of the kamikaze snagged a Corsair and part of the catwalk filled with sailors and yanked them all over the side.

With
Bunker Hill
’s aft flight deck ablaze and sending up a dense cloud of black smoke, a second kamikaze appeared. The Zero was flown by an ensign named Kiyoshi Ogawa, a former student and the wingman of the kamikaze who had just crashed into
Bunker Hill
.

This time the gunners had warning. For nearly half a minute,
every available gun on
Bunker Hill
and her escorts poured fire at the onrushing Zero.

It wasn’t enough. Even as shrapnel and 20-millimeter bullets shredded Ogawa’s Zero and set it ablaze, he kept his aim straight and true. Like the first kamikaze, he released his bomb just before impact.

The effect was even more horrific than the strike of a few minutes before. The bomb hit amidships, drilling through the wooden flight deck and exploding in the gallery deck immediately below. An entire ready room full of fighter pilots was immolated. So were almost all the spaces on the fragile gallery deck. Many on the gallery deck who weren’t killed by the blast died soon after from burns or smoke inhalation.

The shattered kamikaze plane careened into the base of the island—the carrier’s superstructure—sending a tower of flame leaping high above the ship. Deadly smoke, laden with poison and soot, gushed through the ship. The smoke poured into Mitscher’s flag plot through the ventilators, forcing the admiral and his staff to evacuate. Standing outside, Mitscher paused to take in the scene around him. As he watched, a third kamikaze came diving toward
Bunker Hill
. At the last moment, gunners sent him cartwheeling into the ocean.

Bunker Hill
’s agony went on for the rest of the afternoon. As flames and smoke continued to billow from the carrier, the cruiser
Wilkes-Barre
and several destroyers came alongside to help fight the raging fires. Not until nightfall were most of the blazes extinguished.

Though still under her own power,
Bunker Hill
was out of the war. The attack cost 396 men aboard
Bunker Hill
their lives, making it the single most deadly kamikaze strike of the war. Only
Franklin
, which lost 724 men to a Japanese dive-bomber, suffered greater damage and casualties and still remained afloat.

At 1630 Mitscher and his staff gathered up their gear and transferred the task force commander’s flag to the carrier
Enterprise
.
Mitscher seemed unfazed by what had happened. The fact that a kamikaze had come within 20 yards of obliterating him didn’t show in the old Bald Eagle’s piercing gaze. After three and a half years of war, it was his first close-up encounter with a kamikaze. Such a thing didn’t seem likely to happen again.

But it did, three days later.

M
itscher resumed tactical command of Task Force 58 the next day, May 12. The situation on
Enterprise
was far from ideal. His flag plot was stuck atop the captain’s bridge instead of below it, as on
Bunker Hill. Enterprise
had been designated a night carrier, which meant that aircraft engines and catapults roared and hammered through the hours of darkness while the ship spent much of the daytime at general quarters.

The disaster on
Bunker Hill
made one thing abundantly clear:
something
had to be done about the kamikazes. At the urging of his staffers, Burke and Flatley, Mitscher ordered his carriers north to carry out two days of strikes on the Kyushu airfields.

As usual, the results of the strikes were hard to measure. How many kamikaze airplanes had been destroyed on the ground? No one knew for sure. But the airfields had been shot up and the runways damaged, even if only temporarily. If nothing else, the presence of the strike planes had the effect of delaying the next
kikusui
offensive.

But the strikes also put the carriers dangerously close to the kamikazes’ bases. Soon after dawn on May 14, Mitscher was in his padded chair in flag plot when CIC reported twenty-six incoming bogeys on the radar screen.

By now it was a familiar ritual: the crew running to general quarters, anxious lookouts squinting into the sky, CAP fighters racing to intercept the raiders. Picking off the kamikazes one by one, the fighters managed to take down nineteen. Antiaircraft gunners accounted for another six.

Which left one. The lone remaining Zero was flown by a
twenty-three-year-old lieutenant (jg) named Shunsuke Tomiyasu. He had been the leader of the group that took off from Kanoya at dawn, and he was the only still alive. Now Tomiyasu was dodging in and out of the cloud cover, looking for an opening.

Down below, gunners were straining to catch a glimpse of the single kamikaze. At 0656 they spotted him, breaking out of the cloud cover. Every gun aboard
Enterprise
and her escorts opened up.
Enterprise
’s captain had the carrier heeled hard over in an emergency turn.