Twilight of the Gods

by Twilight of the Gods (retail) (epub)

  The task force offshore found itself under a low thick cloud ceiling, with the overcast suspended just 500 feet above the flight decks. That was a tactically dangerous situation, because it permitted Japanese planes to evade the combat air patrol and descend suddenly through the clouds before the antiaircraft guns could react. The Enterprise was struck by a large bomb on its forward elevator, and the Intrepid was slightly damaged when a G4M bomber hit the sea close aboard. A few minutes after 3 p.m., the carrier Yorktown (Admiral Radford’s flagship in Task Group 58.4) was hit on the starboard side of her signal bridge. All three carriers managed to contain the damage, but the crews were unnerved by these determined and surprisingly skillful conventional (non-kamikaze) bombing attacks, which seemed to prove that the Japanese had conserved some of their best and most seasoned aviators for the climactic phase of the war.

  That impression was confirmed the following morning, when a large airstrike was launched against Japanese warships anchored in the harbors of Kure and Hiroshima in the Inland Sea. The outgoing strike had a rough time of it. Over Matsuyama, an airbase on the north coast of Shikoku, two squadrons of Hellcats were ambushed from above and behind by Japanese fighters of the elite 343rd Kokutai, flying fast and powerful Kawanishi N1K2-J Shinden-Kais. The number of U.S. planes shot down in the dogfight over Matsuyama on March 19, 1945, is unknown, but the Japanese claimed more than a dozen kills. The surviving U.S. planes went on to suffer additional heavy losses over Kure, where the antiaircraft fire was severe. The SB2C and F6F pilots planted bombs on seven different Japanese warships, but sank none. For the day, the Americans lost sixty planes.

  Meanwhile, a Japanese airstrike was on a reciprocal heading for the task force, and found it just a few miles off the south coast of Shikoku. Once again, the partial overcast at 2,000 feet allowed the attackers to elude the CAP; Mitscher described the conditions as “perfect for the enemy. . . . Radar again was unable to compete.”9 A swarm of well-handled bombers descended on the big carriers at the hub of Admiral Davison’s Task Group 58.2. The Wasp took a bad hit at 7:10 a.m. The bomb penetrated three decks before detonating and killing about one hundred crewmen. Minutes later, a Yokosuka D4Y Suisei dive-bomber plunged through the base of the clouds, about a thousand yards directly ahead of the Franklin, and dropped two 250-kilogram bombs before the gunners could react. The deadly missiles punched through the Franklin’s flight deck and plunged into the heart of the ship. The results were calamitous. The fires and explosions aboard the “Big Ben” were worse than those suffered by any aircraft carrier that survived the Pacific War. Hundreds were killed instantly, probably before they were even aware that the ship had been hit.

  The attack was so sudden that Captain Leslie Gehres, on the bridge, never caught a glimpse of the plane or the bombs it had dropped. The Franklin had been in the process of launching planes. The ordnance and ready service ammunition in the antiaircraft mounts was cooked off by the explosions, which in turn caused more explosions. Several F6F Hellcats were armed with “Tiny Tim” rockets, which ignited and began launching from the disabled planes. According to Commander Joe Taylor, the executive officer, “Some screamed by to starboard, some to port, and some straight up the flight deck. The weird aspect of this weapon whooshing by so close is one of the most awful spectacles a human has ever been privileged to see. Some went straight and some tumbled end over end. Each time one went off, firefighting crews forward would instinctively hit the deck.”10 Firefighters were forced to seek cover, interrupting their efforts to control the fires.

  On other ships of the task force, witnesses trained binoculars on the exploding carrier. Admiral Radford, whose ship was at least 15 miles away, noted a series of mushroom clouds and the largest pall of smoke he had ever seen emerge from a single ship. “We could not believe that anyone remained alive on a ship undergoing such travail,” he said. “I mentally said goodbye to my classmate Admiral Davison and to Franklin’s skipper, my friend, Captain Leslie Gehres.”11 On the Yorktown, 12 miles away, an officer on the bridge counted nine huge explosions. A shipmate remarked: “That’s all, brother! We can tell ‘Big Ben’ goodbye.”12

  But Gehres chose to fight to save his ship. The cruiser Santa Fe came alongside and took off many of the surviving crew, including Admiral Davison and his staff. (He shifted his flag to the Hancock.) The fire control parties kept at it for four hours, until by 11:00 a.m. the fires had subsided to the point that the cruiser Pittsburgh managed to take the Franklin in tow. Soon the badly wounded carrier was making 3 knots on a southerly course.13 At three o’clock the next morning, after a twenty-hour fight for her life, the “Big Ben” regained power and was able to make 20 knots under her own steam. Spruance sent her back to Ulithi, and then to Pearl Harbor. From there, she made a 12,000-mile voyage to New York, also under her own steam.

  At every port on her voyage, witnesses gaped. The Franklin was a pitiable wreck, blackened and gutted. Deformed lumps of charred steel on her flight deck were the only remaining traces of her aircraft. (The fires had burned so hot that the wreckage had fused onto the ship, and could not be jettisoned.) The Franklin’s casualty list included 807 killed and more than 487 wounded, amounting to nearly half her complement. As Chester Nimitz later concluded, “No other ship in World War II, and possibly in history, suffered such extensive injuries and yet remained afloat.”14

  In two days of strikes off southern Japan, Task Force 58 had hit Japanese airfields, ports, and warships, and destroyed about four hundred planes in the air or on the ground. But it had suffered a cruel thrashing in return. Six carriers had been hit and damaged, of which three (Enterprise, Wasp, and Franklin) needed major repairs at a rear base. On March 20, Mitscher decided to pull out of the area without launching a third day of strikes. The wounded ships were sent down to Ulithi, with strong screening escorts, while the others rendezvoused with a service squadron 150 miles southeast of Okinawa for refueling and rearming. There would be no rest for Task Force 58. The carrier air groups were needed to support Operation ICEBERG, the invasion of Okinawa, to commence on April 1.15

  AS A RULE, EACH SUCCESSIVE AMPHIBIOUS OPERATION in the Pacific was larger than the last. Okinawa was the last amphibious operation of the war; accordingly, it dwarfed all previous landings. The ground force included 183,000 combat troops drawn from the army and marines, with an additional 120,000 service troops and engineers. The transport and logistical fleet consisted of more than 1,200 ships. That figure did not include the roughly two hundred warships of Task Force 58 and the British Pacific Fleet, which would furnish air protection. Okinawa was 6,100 miles from San Francisco, 850 miles from Iwo Jima, 920 miles from Manila, 1,400 miles from Guam, almost 1,400 miles from Ulithi—but only 330 miles from the Japanese home islands. Allied forces would be operating at the end of an unprecedentedly long supply line, in waters exposed to constant enemy air attack, for almost three months. “The fleet that came to stay,” as the sailors called it, would burn 6 million barrels of fuel oil per month. All of it had to be transported into the combat zone in commercial tankers and fleet oilers.

  For the sake of secrecy, only senior commanders and their staffs actually knew how many ships were involved in the operation. Men down the ranks could only guess, and trying to count the ships around the horizon was almost as futile as trying to count the stars on a clear night.

  Beginning on March 23, 1945, a week before the invasion, Task Force 58 planes were constantly in the air above Okinawa. They flew bombing and strafing missions, photo reconnaissance missions, and combat air patrols. Looking down through broken cloud cover, a crewman on a Yorktown TBM Avenger saw “a dainty island with crumpled hills, thickly wooded, sloping down to a neat crazy quilt of tan and green farmland.”16 The island’s economy was chiefly limited to fishing and agriculture; the important crops were sugarcane, rice, sweet potatoes, beets, barley, and cabbages. Cane fields, terraces, and sunken rice paddies took up almost all of the island’s central plains, and a fair portion of the hills. Only the hilltops remai
ned thickly wooded with live oaks and evergreen pines. The roads were little more than dirt paths, wide enough for horse-drawn carts. Here and there was a humble little hamlet, with close-built thatched stone houses. West-facing slopes were dotted with stone burial tombs, in the shapes of lyres or keyholes; many had evidently been incorporated into Japanese defensive fortifications.

  Okinawa was about 60 miles long, varying in width from about 15 miles to 3 miles, and took in about 480 square miles of territory. The northern half of the island was rugged, heavily forested, and sparsely populated. About 80 percent of the prewar population had lived in the southern third of the island, which included the cities of Naha and Shuri. Task Force 58 planes attacked the island’s major airfields, at Yontan, Kadena, Machinato, and Naha. All of the runways were badly cratered, and the Japanese seemed to have stopped trying to defend or repair them. There were few Japanese planes to be seen, except wreckage. Naha had been devastated by a Third Fleet carrier raid in October 1944, and it was largely burnt out and depopulated. In the southernmost area, the island was rugged, a region of broken terrain, soaring ridges, plunging ravines, rocky escarpments, and natural caves. Along the southern coast, sheer cliffs abutted rocky beaches. The island’s only paved road was a two-lane highway connecting Naha and Shuri.

  The U.S. carrier airmen took thousands of photographs. Okinawa was a populous island, they knew, with a 1940 population of 800,000—but now, as they looked down, they saw few people at all. Nimitz’s intelligence analysts had estimated Japanese troop strength on the island at 65,000. The actual number was closer to 100,000—but from the air it was difficult to pinpoint the locations of blockhouses and gun emplacements.17 Circling over the southern hills around Shuri, eagle-eyed pilots gradually discerned a continuous line of well-camouflaged fortifications from the east coast to the west. Mitscher radioed Vice Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner on March 25: “From photos, [the] whole island of Okinawa appears to be honeycombed with caves, tunnels and gun positions, particularly along roads. Tanks and armored cars seen entering caves. It will probably be tough.”18

  Although Okinawa was a fully incorporated prefecture of Japan, the island’s people were culturally, racially, and linguistically distinct from the Japanese. On average, they were shorter of stature and more round-faced than their neighbors to the north. For centuries, the island had been the monarchical seat of the “Great Loochoo” kingdom, which had spanned the Ryukyuan archipelago. Younger Okinawans had learned Japanese in school, and spoke it fluently, but older and less educated inhabitants spoke only Okinawan. Japanese soldiers tended to treat the locals as members of an inferior caste. Since the start of the Pacific War, the Japanese had required hundreds of thousands to evacuate to Formosa and the Japanese home islands, but tens of thousands of Japanese troops had arrived during the same years, so that the net population in 1945 was between 450,000 and 500,000, of whom 100,000 were Japanese military personnel or local militias under Japanese army command.

  As the largest and most important island in the archipelago known as the Nansei Shoto, which stretched almost 800 miles from Kyushu to Formosa, Okinawa sat at a strategic crossroads. It was roughly equidistant to Formosa, the coast of China, and Kyushu, and within an easy flight radius of them all. In Allied hands, Okinawa would provide a logistical backstop for the invasion of Japan, as well as ample terrain suitable for large airfields and harbors. Its airfields would allow Allied air forces to control the skies over the East China Sea. The island would serve as the principal operating base and springboard for an invasion of Kyushu.

  American forces were organized under the overall command of Admiral Spruance, Fifth Fleet commander, whose arguments for the Okinawa invasion had persuaded Nimitz and King to back the operation. Admiral Turner commanded the transport fleet and joint expeditionary forces. Collectively designated Task Force 51, it included the old battleships, the escort carriers, screening cruisers and destroyers, hundreds of attack transports, thousands of landing craft, minesweepers, hospital ships, and innumerable other auxiliary vessels. As the navy’s indispensable amphibious expert, who had led one landing after another since Guadalcanal in 1942, “Terrible Turner” could not be spared. But the admiral was worn out, physically and psychologically, and his temper was more volatile than ever before. It was an open secret that Turner was drinking heavily each night, in breach of standing regulations. Spruance, Nimitz, and King knew about the drinking but judged that Turner would do the job better than anyone else, sober or otherwise.

  The invasion force was organized as the Tenth Army. It was under the overall command of Lieutenant General Simon B. Buckner Jr. of the U.S. Army. Major elements of this force were the army’s XXIV Corps, including three infantry divisions (the 7th, 77th, and 96th) commanded by Major General John R. Hodge, and the III Amphibious Corps, comprising the 1st and 6th Marine Divisions, under the command of Major General Roy S. Geiger. Two additional divisions, one army and one marine, were kept in floating reserve. The British Pacific Fleet, designated Task Force 57, was assigned to cover the region to the south, between Okinawa and Formosa. It included four aircraft carriers, two battleships, and fifteen screening warships, making it about the same size and strength as one of the American carrier task groups. Its commander, Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser, reported directly to Admiral Spruance. Because the British fleet had not yet refined its capabilities for underway refueling and replenishment, it would lean heavily upon the Americans for logistical support.

  The sea around Okinawa was generally less than 100 fathoms deep, and therefore easy to mine. More than a thousand fixed and floating mines guarded the approaches to the island, a threat dramatized by the sudden sinking of the destroyer Halligan west of Naha on March 26, 1945. Prior to “L-Day” (“Love Day,” the scheduled landing date of April 1), minesweepers cleared 250,000 square miles of sea around Okinawa, including six major minefields in shoal water off the island. Working close inshore, the minesweepers were potentially vulnerable to shore batteries—but for the most part, the Japanese refrained from firing upon them, probably to avoid unmasking the position of their coastal artillery pieces. As the minesweepers completed their work, they set out radar buoys to mark the safe channels.

  On March 26, Love Day minus 5, three battalions of the 77th Division landed in the Kerama Islands, 15 miles west of southern Okinawa. The small Japanese garrison, numbering about five hundred troops, was quickly overpowered. The hilly islands of this little archipelago offered no terrain suitable for airfields, but a semienclosed interior waterway ran north to south between its largest island (Tokashiki) and five smaller islands to the west. This “Kerama Roadstead” would function as an advanced fleet anchorage, large enough to accommodate about seventy-five large ships in depths of twenty to thirty fathoms. Its narrow entrances could be guarded against enemy submarines. West of the main anchorage was a zone that would serve as a seaplane base, where the long ocean rollers would not interfere with takeoffs or landings except in the roughest conditions. On March 27, dozens of auxiliary and repair ships began dropping their hooks in the roadstead. From here, in sheltered waters just a few miles from the Okinawa beachhead, a floating logistics task force would provide fueling and ammunition replenishment for the duration of the long campaign. A salvage and repair group provided emergency ship repairs in this advanced position, less than an hour’s steaming time to Okinawa. An unexpected dividend of the Kerama landings was that the Americans captured 350 Shinyo plywood suicide speedboats before they could be launched against the American fleet.

  On March 31, another force was put ashore on the islands of Keise Shima. Just 8 miles west of Okinawa, this allowed 155mm artillery pieces to be directed to hit targets on Okinawa.

  Throughout this week before the invasion, the Japanese continued to launch intermittent air attacks against the American fleet from bases in southern Kyushu and Formosa. Allied intelligence and aviation analysts were trying to understand the scale and resilience of the remaining air threat posed by Japan. Opinions were d
ivided. Estimates of the number of Japanese warplanes remaining in the homeland ranged widely, from a low of about 2,000 to an upper bound of about 5,000. The one-way flight from Kyushu to Okinawa was less than 400 miles. No one in the Allied camp even pretended to know how many proficient veteran Japanese aviators were still alive and flying, but the aerial skirmishes of March 18 and 19 had proved that at least a few remained. While Task Force 58 was retiring from that fight, on March 19, Ugaki’s Fifth Air Fleet had launched its first major effort to attack the enemy with the manned suicide missiles called the Oka (“cherry blossom”). Nineteen G4M bombers took off from Kanoya, each carrying one rocket-propelled Oka, with a pilot seated in the cockpit. The bombers were to carry them to within 40 miles of the U.S. fleet, where they would be dropped from the fuselage and plunge into an American ship. But the flight was tracked on radar, and Hellcats intercepted and shot down all of the G4Ms when they were still 60 miles away, before the craft could be launched. Each Oka weighed more than 2 tons, a burden that made the bombers slow and sluggish, and thus easy to shoot down. This tactical Achilles Heel of the Oka—that its sluggish, overloaded mother plane could be intercepted and shot down before reaching launch range—had never been seriously considered by the Japanese.

  On March 26, just after midnight, the destroyer Kimberly was attacked by two diving Aichi D3A dive-bombers. Her antiaircraft guns took down one plane, but the other crashed her aft gun mounts, killing or wounding more than fifty of her crew. After being patched up in the Kerama roadstead, she was dispatched to California for repairs. The following day brought intermittent kamikaze attacks all day long, resulting in hits on the battleships Nevada and Tennessee, the light cruiser Biloxi, and several other destroyers, transports, minesweepers, and minelayers. On March 31, a day before the landings, Admiral Spruance’s longtime flagship Indianapolis was attacked by a Nakajima Ki-43 (“Oscar”) fighter. The diving plane released its bomb a split second before crashing the ship on her port side aft. It penetrated through the condenser room and mess deck before exploding next to one of the ship’s fuel tanks. The ship was patched up in Kerama and sent home for repairs. Spruance shifted his flag to the battleship New Mexico, another ship that was no stranger to kamikaze attacks. According to flag lieutenant Charles Barber, Spruance was characteristically stoic: “I did not observe any reaction except that he was very disappointed that the Indianapolis was lost to the bombardment prior to the landing and would not be in place where he could observe the operations.”19