The Conquering Tide

by Ian W. Toll

  Flying east now, stalking the enemy bombers as they raced toward the American carriers, Vraciu destroyed two more. As he emerged over the outermost screening ships, antiaircraft fire began to rock his F6F. In seven minutes he had shot down five Japanese planes, and he could have let the antiaircraft fire take care of the remaining “bandits,” but he had a sixth plane in his sights and did not want to let it go. He overtook it, lined it up, pressed the trigger, and was amazed at the results. “Number six blew up with a tremendous explosion right in front of my face. I must have hit his bomb. I had seen planes blow up before but never like this! I yanked the stick up sharply to avoid the scattered pieces and flying hot stuff, then radioed, ‘Splash number six!’ ”50

  Zenji Abe’s Aichi was one of a few Japanese planes to run the gauntlet of fighters and penetrate into the heart of the American fleet. At 13,000 feet, he saw white wakes on the sea ahead, below, and to the left of his engine cowling. He knew a swarm of Hellcats was behind and above him. His wingmen were gone. Without time to set up a proper dive-bombing attack, Abe simply lowered his nose and flew toward the nearest carrier. The plane wobbled and shuddered as it flew into a barrage of antiaircraft fire. He released his bomb over the Wasp. It missed, but detonated close enough to the ship to cause light damage and injure two men. Against the odds, Abe escaped and returned to the Japanese task force, where he recovered on the carrier Junyo. He was the only Japanese pilot to drop a bomb on an American carrier that day and live to tell the tale.

  Four Japanese torpedo planes made runs on the Enterprise and the Princeton. All were taken down by antiaircraft fire. “On at least one occasion,” wrote a lieutenant stationed on the bridge of one of the big carriers, “so many Japanese planes were being shot down—great balls of fire, which, in spite of intense sunlight showed brilliantly red against the sky, or long plummets of black smoke plunging to the sea—that it was impossible to make an accurate count of them. For minutes on end there were beautiful vapor streams forming crisscrossing white arcs against the azure sky as planes dived and climbed.”51

  Running low on gas, Alex Vraciu entered the Lexington’s landing circle and made a clean recovery. As his Hellcat came abeam of the island, he looked up at the Flag Bridge and held up both gloved hands with six fingers extended. Several war correspondents (stationed on the Lexington because she was Mitscher’s flagship) witnessed the gesture and described it in their newspapers, making Vraciu’s six gloved fingers one of the enduring iconic images of the Battle of the Philippine Sea.

  WHILE LAUNCHING THE LAST OF HIS SECOND WAVE, Ozawa’s flagship had come under attack by an American submarine, the Albacore. From a range of 5,300 yards, Skipper J. W. Blanchard had fired a six-fish spread at the Taiho. Warrant Officer Sakio Komatsu, piloting one of the just-launched planes, caught sight of an incoming wake and reacted with extraordinary dexterity and valor. He banked hard and dived into its path. The aircraft, pilot, and torpedo were consumed in the explosion. Four more torpedoes missed astern, but the sixth struck a particularly vulnerable part of the Taiho’s hull, near her aviation gasoline tanks. Albacore went deep and endured a long period of depth-charging, but the crew heard the explosion and correctly reckoned that they had scored at least one hit.

  The Taiho’s crew was initially confident of containing the damage, and Ozawa appeared to be in high spirits after the attack. The carrier, Japan’s newest, had been engineered to absorb one torpedo hit and more, so there was no reason to believe she was in danger. But when the damaged avgas tanks spread combustible fumes throughout the lower deck, a damage-control officer made the fatal decision to attempt to ventilate the ship. The Taiho’s air ducts and blowers spread the gases through her interior, and a chain of spectacular explosions tore through the ship. Her armored flight deck heaved and finally ruptured. Flames roared up from the hangar. Shortly after 11:00 a.m., Ozawa removed the emperor’s portrait from his stateroom and transferred his flag from the stricken ship. He descended first into the destroyer Wakatsuki, then moved to the cruiser Haguro, and finally to the Zuikaku.

  The Taiho was obviously finished, but her captain hesitated to order the crew off the ship. That evening, shortly after six, the blazing wreck finally went down, taking more than 1,500 men with her. That concluded the maiden combat cruise of the Taiho.

  Albacore’s sister Cavalla had been stalking the Japanese fleet and faithfully reporting its movements for a week. Skipper Herman Kossler’s persistence was rewarded with a prime opportunity to attack the Shokaku at point-blank range. Raising his periscope a few minutes before noon, he saw the ship looming on the near horizon. He could make out a fantastic degree of detail, including her “bedspring” radar, her enormous “sun and rays” ensign, and even the faces of individual crewmen on the flight deck. The Cavalla fired six torpedoes at a range of 1,200 yards. Three of the six connected, and the ship immediately began settling by the head.

  The Cavalla went deep to evade the inevitable depth-charge treatment. Her main induction system was flooded, rendering her dangerously heavy. She went more than a hundred feet below test depth. The crew counted 106 depth charges in a three-hour ordeal. Half were uncomfortably close, but the Cavalla escaped with only superficial damage.

  Shokaku’s engine rooms quickly flooded, cutting all power to the ship. Dead in the water, she burned helplessly. Without power the firefighters could not get water pressure to the hoses. Bucket brigades threw water on the flames, but that did little good. Explosions in the lower decks and hangar began to tear the carrier apart. The captain ordered the crew off the ship. At 2:10 p.m., her magazine detonated in a mighty thunderclap. The big ship rolled onto her starboard beam ends, her bow lifted from the sea, and she slid under.

  Of the six carriers that had attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the Shokaku was the fifth to go into the abyss. Now only the Zuikaku remained.

  While the two stricken carriers were still fighting their losing battles for survival, Ozawa committed most of his remaining airpower to a third strike: thirty fighters, forty-six Zero fighter-bombers, and six torpedo planes from Carrier Division 2. The admiral had not yet learned that his first two strikes had been obliterated in air combat without seriously damaging any American ship. Had he known of those results, he might have hesitated to commit everything he had to another attempt on the American fleet.

  The outbound formation cleaved into three widely separated elements soon after departing the Japanese carriers. The largest group diverted off course to the north, then course-corrected to the south and approached the American fleet from the northwest. At a few minutes before one, American fighter director officers directed Hellcats to intercept bogeys on a bearing of 338 degrees at a distance of seventy miles. All the intruders, numbering about forty-seven planes, were either driven away or downed in a nine-minute melee. Several of the attackers were seen to veer off, evidently not eager to risk flying into antiaircraft fire. Another group of bogeys was picked up on radar a few minutes after 2:00 p.m., on a bearing of 205 degrees at a distance of a hundred miles. Outbound search planes skirmished with the newcomers, until the ubiquitous radar-guided F6Fs arrived in force. As in the earlier waves, a few Japanese planes got through the Hellcats and made spirited runs into the heart of the American task force, where they were incinerated in a storm of antiaircraft fire.

  Other elements of the last waves took a southerly heading and failed to find the American fleet at all (or perhaps evaded battle) and flew toward airfields on Guam or Rota. They were tracked on radar. Fighter director officers began vectoring Hellcats toward the islands, setting up the day’s climactic aerial massacre. A dozen F6Fs from the carrier Cowpens arrived over Orote Airfield as a group of about forty Japanese planes were in landing approach. Another seven F6Fs from the Essex and eight from the Hornet converged on the same location and joined the attack.

  The Americans enjoyed insuperable tactical advantages over Orote Peninsula. The Japanese planes were in a low-altitude, low-speed landing approach. With their fuel tank
s running dry, they had no alternative but to land. Most of the Japanese antiaircraft batteries around Orote had been silenced by a week of bombing and strafing attacks. The runway was pockmarked and cratered. F6Fs stalked the approaching Japanese planes down to treetop altitude. Ensign W. B. “Spider” Webb of VF-2 slipped into the traffic circle as if he were intending to land, positioning his Hellcat directly behind a division of three Japanese planes. Holding his thumb down on the trigger, he swept them with .50-caliber fire. All three went down. Webb banked port and shot down another; the Japanese pilot managed to get free of his cockpit and pull his chute. Webb had lost altitude in the turn. When he pulled up, he found another Japanese plane in his sights, blew it apart with another short burst, and then flew through the debris. That brought his score to five. Webb now found himself in a head-on run with an aggressive Zero. When it closed to 1,000 yards, optimal range for the F6F’s guns, he fired and cut the plane in half. Running low on ammunition, he destroyed two more bombers with short bursts and then pulled away to return to his carrier. Webb’s remarkable run of kills was confirmed by his gun camera.

  The afternoon slaughter at Orote Airfield wiped out approximately thirty of the forty-nine planes that attempted to land. About nineteen managed to put down on the badly pockmarked airfield, but most of these would never fly again.

  Throughout the day, as the air groups made their reports to Mitscher, the number of claimed kills climbed to extravagant proportions. Even accounting for the usual exaggerations and double counting, it was evident that Task Force 58 had scored a victory on a magnitude that no one had expected or foreseen. Of the 373 aircraft launched by Ozawa’s carrier force, only 130 had returned intact. Approximately 50 more had been destroyed after taking off from Guam or Rota. The Americans had lost just twenty-five Hellcats, four by operational accidents.52 The ratio of kills had been about eleven to one. In the Task Force 58 ready rooms, the pilots were celebrating as if they had won the war. “Medicinal” brandy was served and glasses were raised in toasts. On the Lexington, a euphoric fighter pilot remarked, “Hell, this is like an old time turkey-shoot.”53 The remark was often repeated, and the name stuck. Historians would call it the first day of the Battle of the Philippine Sea, but to the aviators it was always the “Marianas Turkey Shoot.”

  THROUGHOUT THE LONG DAY OF AIR OPERATIONS, a steady 15-knot easterly wind had required the Americans to move east, toward Guam and away from the enemy.54 For the moment, the Japanese fleet lay well beyond the reach of a counterstrike. Spruance knew that one or two Japanese carriers had been torpedoed, but he did not yet know that they were gone. If they were crippled and afloat, as seemed likely, it should be possible to finish them off. With those considerations in mind, Spruance approved Mitscher’s plan to chase the enemy into the west.

  Ozawa had only intermittent radio contact with the commander in chief of the Combined Fleet during the chaotic afternoon of June 19. Toyoda had issued orders for a temporary withdrawal to the northwest. The fleet would refuel and then “advance and attack enemy task force in cooperation with Base Air Force.”55

  Though he had only 102 operational planes remaining on his carriers, including about forty on the Zuikaku, Ozawa believed that many of his missing airplanes must have landed on Guam. He also assumed, or perhaps hoped, that the Americans must have suffered grave losses in both ships and aircraft. Ozawa remained under the mistaken impression that Kakuta’s land-based planes had taken a generous bite out of the American task force. His few returned pilots had reported that they had “succeeded in causing four carriers to emit black smoke.”56

  But on Toyoda’s flagship Oyodo, at anchor in Japan’s home waters, the Combined Fleet staff was gradually facing up to the magnitude of the Japanese defeat. It was time to get the surviving ships to safety. At 9:00 p.m., Admiral Toyoda signaled: “Task force will make a timely withdrawal depending upon the local situation, and move as its commander considers fit.”57

  On the twentieth, American air searches failed to find any sign of Ozawa’s retreating fleet until 3:42 p.m., when an Enterprise TBF Avenger piloted by Lieutenant R. S. Nelson radioed a garbled contact report. The time and imputed distance put the enemy fleet about 270 miles northwest. Mitscher signaled the task force: “Expect to launch everything we have, probably have to recover at night.”58

  Low whistles were heard in the squadron ready rooms as the pilots studied the charts and entered data into their plotting boards. Laden with fuel, bombs, and torpedoes, the American warplanes would fly to the edge of their maximum fuel radius. The afternoon was getting on, so they would return to the task force after nightfall. It was a dicey proposition. Very few American pilots had qualified for night carrier landings. Many would be forced to ditch at sea. But this was to be Mitscher’s last opportunity to strike Ozawa, at least in this round, because the Task Force 58 destroyers did not have the fuel for another day’s pursuit. He gave his order: “Launch the deckload strikes and prepare a second load.” Truman Hedding questioned it, alluding to the distance and risks, but Mitscher only replied, “I understand, but launch the deckload strikes.”59

  Mitscher put the word out: “The primary mission is to get the carriers.” On the ready room chalkboards, the three-word directive was written and underlined: “Get the carriers.”60

  At 4:21 p.m., Task Force 58 turned east, away from the enemy and into the wind, and began launching planes. Just eleven minutes were needed to get 216 planes aloft—eighty-five Hellcats, some to fly high cover and some carrying 500-pound bombs; fifty-four TBF Avengers, all but a few armed with bombs rather than the heavy aerial torpedoes; fifty-one SB2C Helldivers with 1,500-pound composite bomb loads; and twenty-six SBD Dauntless dive-bombers. (The SBDs were soon to be replaced; this was to be the last carrier combat mission in the aircraft’s storied career.)

  As the planes were launching, Nelson sent a corrected contact report. The enemy fleet, widely separated into three groups, was actually sixty miles farther west than Mitscher had assumed. Mitscher considered and rejected the option to cancel the attack and recall the planes. He decided to hold the second deckload strike in reserve for the following morning.

  By 4:36 p.m., the 216-plane formation was on its way. Fuel limitations did not allow for a rendezvous into standard squadron or section formations. Planes joined up when and if opportunity offered in what James Ramage called “a running rendezvous.”61 Fuel mixtures were leaned and engines throttled back to minimum power for level flight. According to Ensign Don Lewis of VB-10, stretching an aircraft’s fuel reserve was as much art as science. It was a matter of flying “gently,” of climbing little by little to altitude, of keeping the aircraft balanced by switching between auxiliary fuel tanks.62

  The outgoing formations droned along at about 130 to 140 knots. Many of the aviators later confessed that they were physically exhausted after a week and a half of intensive combat flight operations. The dive-bombers climbed to 20,000 feet, where the physical strain on the aircrew was severe—the cockpits were arctic, men clapped their gloved hands to keep them warm, and ice crystals accumulated in their oxygen masks.

  No one had any illusions. They all knew that they were going beyond normal fuel range and might be getting wet at the end of the day. Mitscher and the other task force commanders had proved that they would go to great lengths to rescue downed aviators. That bond of trust now paid dividends.

  The leading planes overtook the trailing edge of the Japanese fleet at about 6:25 p.m., less than an hour before sunset. The pilots saw long white wakes, indicating that the enemy ships were moving at high speed. In the first (westernmost) group were six large fleet oilers and six destroyers. Flight leaders told their squadrons to ignore the tempting targets and continue flying northwest because their orders were to attack the “Charlie Victors” (carriers). About ten minutes later, the leading wave of planes reported many ships ahead, including carriers.

  Ozawa had managed to get about eighty planes aloft, mostly Zero

  fighters—no smal
l feat considering the beating his air groups had suffered the previous day. F6Fs, flying high cover over the bomber squadrons, moved ahead to engage the enemy fighters. About twenty Zeros went down in the first few minutes of air combat. Commander Jackson D. Arnold of the Hornet Air Group directed all planes to attack the Zuikaku. Sinking the big flattop, Arnold told his pilots, “was their ticket home.”63 There was neither time nor fuel to set up coordinated attacks—they would just drop their noses and go straight into the heart of the enemy fleet.

  Hal Buell led the Hornet Helldivers in a shallow dive toward the target, hoping to achieve surprise. Antiaircraft fire reached up toward them, but the first bursts were low. The Helldivers pushed over into a steep dive and flew through an intense, multicolored barrage. It was the heaviest antiaircraft fire that the veteran Buell had ever encountered. “In the lead plane I was a focal point, and with the mass of shells passing all about me, I felt like I was diving into an Iowa plains hailstorm. . . . Some threw out long tentacles of flaming white phosphorus unlike anything I had ever seen before.”64 The Yorktown’s VB-1 Helldivers followed behind the Hornet planes and rained a dozen bombs down on the big carrier. Towers of whitewater rose on either side of the ship as bombs missed her narrowly, but two or three found the mark. Zuikaku burned fiercely and coasted to rest as her power cut out. F6Fs roared low over her flight deck in strafing runs and killed dozens of her crew.