The Twilight Warriors (54 page)

Ushijima’s only reaction had been to smile. Surrendering to Buckner was never a consideration. Now, with the battle of Okinawa nearing its conclusion, Ushijima intended to exercise his final option. He would join the American general in eternity.

I
n accordance with Buckner’s orders in the event he was killed, Maj. Gen. Roy Geiger, USMC, took command of the Tenth Army, making him the only Marine ever to command a field army. It was a distinction that wouldn’t last. The assignment immediately ignited memories of the old Army-Marine blood feud. Five days later Geiger was relieved by Army Lt. General Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, who was a MacArthur ally and one of Buckner’s most vocal critics. As far as the Army was concerned, order had been restored.

It no longer mattered. The campaign was over. By the time Stilwell took charge, the American flag had been raised on the southern tip of Okinawa. After the mop-up, the new commander’s primary task was to preside over the occupation.

O
n June 21, while the remainder of Ushijima’s 32nd Army was being exterminated on Okinawa, a gloomy Admiral Ugaki
gave the order to launch
kikusui
No. 10. The calamity unfolding at Okinawa only convinced the admiral more than ever that Japan’s survival depended on destroying the enemy at sea.

The problem, of course, was that his
tokko
assets—airplanes and airmen—were becoming scarce. For what would be the last of the floating chrysanthemum attacks, only forty-five airplanes could be mustered. Six of these would be Ohka-carrying bombers, and for the first time they would receive an umbrella of fighter protection.

At dawn on June 22, Ugaki watched the bombers and fighters rumble into the pinkening sky. As usual, he assumed his trancelike solitude in the underground shelter to await reports. Also as usual, the scratchy, blurted radio messages led him to the same erroneous conclusion: the attacks were a brilliant success.

In truth, one American ship took a direct kamikaze hit. A Nakajima Ki-84 “Frank,” a high-performance Japanese fighter, managed to penetrate the air defense screens around Kerama Retto and crash the seaplane tender USS
Curtiss
on the starboard side forward. The ship blazed like a torch all night, and forty-one of her crew were dead.

Of the six
Ohka
-carrying bombers, only two released their human-guided bombs in the target area. Both missed. Two others failed to release, and two were forced to turn back. Despite Ugaki’s high hopes, the exotic
Ohka
guided bomb had turned out to be a dismal failure.

Kikusui
No. 10 was the last major
tokko
mission. Not only Admiral Ugaki but most of his airmen sensed that Okinawa was a lost cause, not worth the expenditure of lives and airplanes. From now on, Ugaki would hoard his resources for the fiery final battle on Japanese soil.

U
shijima was cut off. It was the night of June 21, and inside the rabbit warren of caves and tunnels beneath Hill 89, Ushijima and his chief of staff, General Cho, were delivering their final
orders. Ushijima had already received an urgent message from his 24th Division, fighting a battle to the death a mile away. The situation was hopeless, reported the commander.

Ushijima didn’t need to be told. From directly over his head he could hear the thump of enemy grenades, the chatter of their machine guns. That evening Ushijima and Cho held a farewell party for their staff, complete with fish cakes, cabbage, rice, and plenty of sake. For the occasion Cho broke out his remaining stock of captured Scotch whisky.

Soon after midnight, most of the 32nd Army’s remaining staff officers and men took up their weapons and went outside. In the glow of a full moon, they made a final
banzai
charge to the hilltop. The frenetic chattering of enemy machine guns lasted for less than ten minutes, then it was over.

A few minutes before 0400, Ushijima and Cho, in full dress uniform, went out to a ledge overlooking the ocean. Each opened his tunic to expose his abdomen for the ritual. Standing behind them was the
hara-kiri
assistant, Captain Sakaguchi, a master swordsman.

Ushijima, being senior, went first. He thrust the short dagger into his belly. An instant later Sakaguchi, wielding his sword in both hands, swung the razor-sharp blade downward, beheading the general. A minute later, General Cho followed suit. Again Sakaguchi’s unerring sword flashed in the moonlight.

The ritual was finished. The few remaining soldiers in the headquarters broke ranks and ran down the cliff to meet the enemy in their own fashion. The death of their commander was also the death of the 32nd Army—and the end of organized resistance on Okinawa.

38
SETTING SUN

SAN FRANCISCO
MAY 19, 1945

T
he sign said it all. Someone stuck it on the dock alongside
Intrepid
at the Hunters Point shipyard: “This Fighting Lady has a date in Tokyo.
DON’T MAKE HER LATE!
”

The carrier’s voyage from Pearl Harbor had taken five days. Now everyone was in a hurry. The airedales of the air group and most of the ship’s crew headed off for two weeks’ leave while the workers at the shipyard labored nonstop to repair
Intrepid
’s battle damage.

The Tail End Charlies scattered like Gypsies across the continent. Maurie Dubinsky headed straight for Kansas City to see his family and sweetheart. Wes Hays jumped on a train for Texas to rejoin his wife and infant son. Charlie Schlag was on his way to meet his family in West Virginia. Phil Kirkwood, the Grim Reapers’ leading ace with twelve kills, had an appointment in New Jersey to collect on the promise of $100 for every Japanese airplane he shot down. Eric Erickson headed for his home town of Lincoln, Nebraska, to become acquainted with the fiancée he still knew mainly through letters.

In late June, while the pilots were returning to the
Intrepid
for the long voyage back to the war, they heard the reports. The battle for Okinawa was over. The longest and bloodiest campaign of the Pacific war had finally ground to a halt.

To the Tail End Charlies it was good and bad news. It meant that this time they really
were
catching the tail end of the war. But what they were catching was going to make Okinawa look like a picnic.

I
t was a now-familiar passage. Erickson, Hill, Dubinsky, and most of the rest of the squadron were lined up on
Intrepid
’s flight deck. Gliding past them were the gray hump of Alcatraz, the stark skyline of San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge bearing another contingent of underwear-waving girls. Then came the barely perceptible rolling motion as the great ship entered the open ocean.

There were few hangovers this time and almost no seasickness. It occurred to Erickson that since his previous departure for the Pacific, heaving his guts out, he’d changed. Technically he was still a Tail End Charlie, but he was no longer one of the new guys. They had a fresh batch of new guys, replacements for the pilots lost during
Intrepid
’s previous combat cruise. Now he understood why the veterans had been cool to him and the other Tail End Charlies.

Erickson had been tested. He’d been fired on by enemy planes, ships, and shore-based heavy guns. And he’d fired back. He’d been credited with shooting down one and a half enemy fighters, bombing and strafing bases in Japan, and helping to destroy the
Yamato
task force, and he had two Distinguished Flying Crosses to show for it. He’d seen half a dozen friends plummet to their deaths.

None of this had the new guys yet experienced. Until they had, they would be segregated from the veterans by a subtle wall of formality.

Erickson now enjoyed another privilege: he no longer had to live in Boys’ Town. The new guys would take up residence there. Though he missed the rowdy camaraderie of the bunkroom, Erickson liked the privacy of his new two-man stateroom. He had good light and a quiet place to work on his paintings and sketches.

On July 30, 1945,
Intrepid
steamed out of Pearl Harbor, headed for Eniwetok, where she would prepare to join Halsey’s armada off Japan. En route the carrier and her air group would pause long enough to bombard Japanese-occupied Wake Island.

The island itself no longer had any strategic importance. Since
its capture by the Japanese in the weeks after the Pearl Harbor attack, Wake had been bypassed by American forces. Cut off by U.S. submarines from all resupply lines, the Japanese garrison had slowly starved, surviving mainly on the island’s abundant rat population.

But shooting up Wake Island had become a rite of passage. No self-respecting task force or carrier group commander passed Wake without giving the place a token bombing, mainly for the hell of it, but also for the purpose of warming up the air group on a real enemy. Like trapped animals, the Japanese could be expected to fight back, but not with great lethality.

Not everyone thought it was a good idea. Johnny Hyland complained that “
if there is anything that sounds unreasonable to a pilot, it is the idea that he should practice encountering fire from an anti-aircraft gun.”

They did it anyway. Both Corsair squadrons were equipped with new airplanes, the latest model of the Corsair, the F4U-4. This one had a massive four-bladed propeller, a full bubble canopy, and a more powerful Pratt & Whitney R-2800-18W, and it was nearly 30 knots faster than the F4U-1D the squadrons had taken to Okinawa.

On the morning of August 6, thirty-eight of the new Corsairs, each loaded with 5-inch rockets, swept over the Wake atoll. They were followed by twenty-eight bomb-loaded Avengers and Helldivers. For most of the day, the
Intrepid
warplanes bombed and strafed Wake while enemy gunners obligingly fired back with their few remaining guns. There was no air opposition; the last Japanese fighter at Wake had been destroyed long ago, and the airfield once used by the U.S. Marines was now a bomb-holed moonscape.

No
Intrepid
planes were shot down, and the worst threat of the day came from a towering afternoon cumulonimbus. By nightfall, all
Intrepid
’s airmen were safely back aboard, and the carrier was steaming at 15 knots for Eniwetok.

What no one aboard
Intrepid
knew was that while their bombers were hitting the Japanese on Wake, another bomber—a solitary
B-29 named
Enola Gay
—was releasing a single weapon over the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

And then three days later, while
Intrepid
lay at anchor in the coral-reef-enclosed lagoon at Eniwetok, it happened again, this time over a place called Nagasaki.

It was a confusing, frustrating time for the men aboard
Intrepid
. Atomic bomb? Few aboard the carrier had ever heard of such a thing. Most had never seen a B-29 up close. The notion that one bomb could devastate an entire city stretched the limits of their imaginations. Rumors spread like wildfire. Where were they headed? Would Japan surrender? Would there be an invasion?

On the morning of August 15, while
Intrepid
was taking on fresh ammunition and provisions, the answer was crackling over the radio in Japan.

M
atome Ugaki leaned forward, straining to understand the thin, reedy voice. The static made the emperor’s words hard to understand. Hirohito was carefully avoiding the word
surrender
, but his meaning was clear. The war situation, he told his countrymen, “has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.” The Japanese people would have to “bear the unbearable” and “endure the unendurable.” The Japanese would have to lay down their arms.

Listening to the broadcast, Ugaki was filled with an excruciating torment. While sending hundreds of
tokko
warriors to their deaths in the floating chrysanthemum attacks, he had always consoled himself with the promise that someday he would join them. Now, as a dutiful subject of the emperor, he was bound to obey a direct order to surrender. But he was also a warrior steeped in the
bushido
ethos. Death in battle was the only acceptable way for him to end the war.