The Twilight Warriors

by Robert Gandt

  Then came a third Zero, flying low from astern. Every aft and starboard gun on Intrepid was blazing away, tracers converging on the low-flying Zero. Somehow the Zero kept coming. The sky behind Intrepid roiled with black smoke and explosions. The surface of the sea frothed from the hail of spent ordnance.

  As he came closer, the kamikaze pilot pulled up in a steep climb, then rolled over and dove toward Intrepid. By now every eye on Intrepid’s topside area, including the admiral’s, was riveted on the incoming Zero. The kamikaze and its bomb exploded into the flight deck aft of the island, a few feet forward of the mid-deck number three elevator. The mass of the wrecked fighter punched through the wooden deck, penetrating the gallery deck suspended beneath the flight deck, spewing flame and shrapnel into the hangar deck below.

  In Ready Room 4, on the gallery deck beneath where the kamikaze first struck, death came instantly for thirty-two sailors, most of them radarmen waiting to start their duty shift. On the flame-filled hangar deck, armed and fueled airplanes were exploding. Firefighting crews rushed to the scene of the worst conflagration. The ship’s fire marshal, Lt. Don DiMarzo, reported to the captain that the damage was bad, but he would get it under control.

  And he might have if it hadn’t been for what happened three minutes later.

  The pilot’s name was Kohichi Nunoda. Even at this low altitude, less than a hundred feet off the water, Nunoda had no trouble spotting his target. A thick column of black smoke was rising from the enemy carrier’s flight deck where it had been crashed into minutes earlier by Nunoda’s squadronmate Suehiro Ikeda.

  Today was the most concentrated tokko raid to date—125 dedicated pilots plus their accompanying reconnaissance and fighter escorts. Not since the Leyte Gulf battle a month earlier had so many Japanese warplanes been launched against the U.S. fleet.

  As the ship swelled in his windshield, Nunoda hauled the nose of the Zero into a steep climb, rolled up on a wing, judged his dive angle, then plunged downward. He aimed for the middle of the flight deck, which was already ablaze from Ikeda’s attack.

  Nunoda was taking no chances that his mission might fail. With the deck of the carrier rising to meet him, he released his bomb. Then he opened fire with his 20-millimeter cannons. Nunoda’s guns were still firing when his Zero crashed into the ship.

  The devastation was immediate and spectacular. The bomb drilled straight through Intrepid’s wooden flight deck. It ricocheted off the armored base of the hangar deck, then hurtled forward to explode where the firefighters were still battling the blaze from the first kamikaze.

  Lieutenant DiMarzo and his firefighters were blown away like chaff. Nearly every airplane on the hangar deck burst into flame. Secondary explosions from airplane ordnance turned the cavernous hangar bay into a maelstrom of fire and shrapnel.

  The worst killer was the smoke. It gushed into passageways and filled compartments, trapping men on the shattered gallery deck with no route of escape. The smoke billowed into the sky through the open holes in the flight deck. Firefighting crews manned hoses on the open deck, trying to keep the flames from spreading to more airplanes and ammunition stores. The debris of the wrecked Zero—the second kamikaze—still smoldered on the forward deck. In the wreckage someone discovered the mostly intact body of the pilot, Kohichi Nunoda. His remains were given an unceremonious burial at sea.

  The second kamikaze strike jammed the ship’s sky-search radar. Sailors were drafted as lookouts, their eyeballs serving as Intrepid’s primary warning system. The towering column of smoke was a beacon for more kamikazes. “For God’s sake,” said a gunnery officer, “are we the only ship in the ocean?”

  They weren’t. The massed wave of tokko aircraft had fanned out to other targets. At 1254, another pair of Zeroes dove on the light carrier Cabot. The first crashed into the forward flight deck among a pack of launching airplanes. Less than a minute later, a second Zero attacked from nearly straight ahead. At the last second, the gunners put enough rounds into the plane that the Zero veered off course and crashed into the port side at the waterline. Still, the intense shower of flame and debris wiped out the gun crews on Cabot’s exposed port rail. By the time the flames were extinguished, the toll of Cabot’s dead and missing, mostly men of the gun crews, had swelled to thirty-five, with another seventeen seriously injured.

  While Intrepid and Cabot were fighting their fires, yet another carrier in the same task group, USS Essex, was under siege. At 1256, an Asahi D4Y “Judy” dive-bomber, a sleeker replacement for the fixed-gear D3A “Val” bomber, flown by a young man named Yoshinori Yamaguchi, came slanting out of the sky toward Essex. Trailing a dense stream of smoke from its burning left wing, the kamikaze dove straight and true into Essex’s port deck edge. A geyser of fire and smoke leaped into the sky and enveloped the carrier’s flight deck.

  Later it was determined that Yamaguchi’s plane carried no bomb. Intelligence officers searched for an explanation. Was he not a kamikaze? Had he already dropped his bomb, then spotted Essex and decided to crash into it? The mystery only added to the aura that was growing around the kamikazes. What sort of people would turn themselves into human bombs?

  In less than a half hour, four carriers had been struck. Cabot, Hancock, and Essex could be patched and returned to duty, but Intrepid’s wounds were more serious. The hangar deck was a scene of horror. Decks and bulkheads were warped from the intense fires. Bodies and body parts were still being recovered. Sixty-nine men had perished in the attacks, and 150 were wounded. Many of the dead had simply vanished, blown overboard or their bodies never found.

  Intrepid was headed back to San Francisco for extensive repairs. When she returned, Intrepid would have a fresh air group embarked. The war was entering its final act. And halfway around the world, the stage was being set for the last great sea battle of history.

  By the time Chester Nimitz arrived in Washington in October 1944, the debate about which Pacific island would be next was officially over. Nimitz was accompanied by Fifth Fleet commander Vice Admiral Spruance and a square-jawed Army lieutenant general named Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr. Buckner had just been given command of the newly formed Tenth Army, which would make an amphibious assault on either Formosa or Okinawa.

  Nimitz, Spruance, and Buckner were all of the same mind: Okinawa should be the target. All they had to do was convince the hardheaded chief of naval operation, Adm. Ernest King.

  To their surprise, King needed no more convincing. He had already studied the logistics reports and reached the same conclusion. An invasion of Formosa would entail unacceptably high American casualties and would only lengthen the war. Formosa would be bypassed. After capturing the island fortress of Iwo Jima in early 1945, Nimitz’s forces would invade Okinawa.

  With the Joint Chiefs of Staff in agreement, the planning began in earnest. The invasion of Okinawa now had a code name: Operation Iceberg.

  4 TINY TIM

  ATLANTIC CITY NAVAL AIR STATION, NEW JERSEY

  JANUARY 4, 1945

  The Grim Reapers were splitting up. The news came while the squadron was still on the East Coast, packing up to fly to California and board the Intrepid. Instead of one big Corsair squadron, the legendary Fighting 10, a new outfit—Bomber Fighting 10—was being spun off.

  The new squadron reflected the current thinking about air group composition. Task forces needed more fighters to protect them from the growing specter of kamikazes. The F4U Corsair was both an air-superiority fighter and a bona fide bomber. Unlike the plodding SB2C Helldivers and TBM Avengers, which needed fighter cover while they hauled bombs to their targets, the Corsair provided its own protection. Since the air-to-air and air-to-ground missions were distinctly different, someone in Washington had decreed that they should be performed by different squadrons.

  Wilmer Rawie was tapped to command the new squadron, now designated VBF-10. True to form, Rawie grabbed up most of his cadre of handpicked students and instructors from his former training unit. Meanwhile, the fighting squadron, which got
to keep the VF-10 designation and the old Grim Reapers logo, received a new skipper, a heavyset, mustached lieutenant commander named Walt Clarke, another veteran with four kills from the Solomons campaign.

  No one was happy about it. To the old hands, splitting up a legendary outfit like the Reapers was the same as breaking up a family. It didn’t seem right. Despite the hoopla about bombers and fighters, weren’t the airplanes and the missions the same?

  Not exactly. What they didn’t yet know was that the experimental new bomber-fighting squadron had been selected to fire an experimental new weapon, a rocket called the Tiny Tim. And as the pilots would find out, there was nothing tiny about it.

  Like most of the Tail End Charlies, Erickson was in awe of his senior officers. Within the squadron, the skipper, Will Rawie, occupied the top rung on the ladder of official respect. Just beneath him came the executive officer, Lt. Timmy Gile, architect of the famous Atlantic City party and an ace with eight kills. Close behind were guys such as Paul Cordray and William “Country” Landreth, old hands with combat time on their records.

  One figure stood out above all others. With the possible exception of God Himself, no one received greater deference than Cmdr. Johnny Hyland, who went by “CAG,” the acronym for air group commander. Hyland was one of those rare commanders who seemed to have it all—good looks, a quick, focused intelligence, a charismatic personality, and the skills of a natural leader. The son of a naval officer, Hyland was a 1934 graduate of the Naval Academy. He’d put in a year as a surface officer aboard USS Lexington and then the four-stack destroyer Elliot before going to Pensacola for flight training. His first assignment after earning his wings was a made-in-heaven job—flying with the Navy’s most prestigious fighting squadron, VF-6, aboard Enterprise. He should have been in the sweet spot for quick advancement when war came.

  But Hyland’s timing was off. On the day Pearl Harbor was attacked, December 7, 1941, Hyland was in the cockpit of a lumbering PBY patrol plane attached to Patrol Wing 10 at Olongapo in the Philippines. He flew the last patrol plane from the Dutch naval base at Ambon before the Japanese swarmed over the Dutch East Indies. Of the wing’s original forty-six patrol planes, only three escaped.

  Sent to Washington, D.C., Hyland became the operations officer, then the executive officer at Anacostia Naval Air Station. Instead of rotating to a combat billet in the Pacific, he was chosen as the personal pilot for the chief of naval operations, Adm. Ernest King. Hyland was missing the war, a victim of his own competence.

  He pulled every string, including a request to King himself. Finally, in the summer of 1944, came the orders Hyland had been praying for. A new air group was being formed aboard USS Intrepid. John Hyland would take command.

  The assignment came just in time. If Hyland was to have any chance at ascending to high rank in the postwar Navy, he had to collect his share of combat ribbons. He’d come dangerously close to missing out.

  By now the new bomber-fighting squadron had been sorted into four-pilot divisions. Each division was split into a pair of two-plane sections, with a senior pilot leading each division and section. The junior pilots—the Tail End Charlies—were assigned as their wingmen.

  Erickson learned that he would be the wingman of a veteran of the Solomons campaign, Lt. (jg) Robert “Windy” Hill. Hill had been in VF-17, a famous squadron called the Jolly Rogers. He was one of the more flamboyant pilots in the squadron, earning the nickname “Windy” for his fondness for over-the-top storytelling. Hill was the epitome of the World War II fighter pilot—cocky, aggressive in the air and on the ground, with movie-star good looks.

  “If there were two good-looking women in the room,” remembered one of the Tail End Charlies, “you could count on them both going for Windy. The smart thing was to stay close and grab the one he didn’t take.”

  Being Hill’s wingman suited Erickson just fine. Then he learned the rest of his assignment. The leader of their four-plane division was none other than the air group commander himself.

  Erickson didn’t know whether to cheer or moan. The CAG could have picked anyone he wanted as his Tail End Charlie. It meant that Hyland trusted Erickson to cover his tail. It also meant that if Erickson somehow screwed up and didn’t cover Hyland’s tail, he was dead meat.

  Off they went, in flights of four, headed for California and the USS Intrepid. It was not a smooth journey. Before they reached Alameda and their new carrier, two more Tail End Charlies were gone.

  One was an ensign named Charles Jensen, who decided to take a detour over his hometown of Mesa, Arizona. In a classic case of boldness exceeding judgment, Jensen was buzzing the floor of the desert when he clipped the ground. The Corsair crashed and exploded in full view of the pilot’s horrified family.

  Almost as soon as they reached California, they lost another. Ens. Spence Mitchell took off on a training flight over the cloud-covered Pacific. He was never seen again, and no trace was found of his fighter. The best guess was that he’d become disoriented in the clouds and spun into the ocean.

  Meanwhile, the pilots of the new bomber-fighting squadron had one more square to fill. They flew out to the Navy’s ordnance testing facility at Inyokern Naval Air Facility, in the California high desert country, for indoctrination in the new weapon called the Tiny Tim. Inyokern was part of the Navy’s China Lake ordnance test base. The place looked like the set of a movie Western. There were a couple of bars and a motel, but not much else of interest to young fighter pilots.

  No one got a good feeling when they first saw the Tiny Tim rocket. The weapon already had a bad reputation. In one of its first test firings at China Lake, it had killed the crew of the SB2C launch plane when the rocket blast destroyed the Helldiver’s control surfaces. The fix the engineers came up with was to drop the weapon far enough to clear the aircraft before igniting the rocket with an attached lanyard. The fix didn’t always work. If the rocket wasn’t released from a precise 45-degree dive, the missile could fly through the airplane’s propeller. Or it could veer off and hit an unintended target, such as the plane that launched it.

  Even the name seemed like a joke. The Tiny Tim was a monster—over 10 feet long and more than half a ton in weight, with a diameter of 11.75 inches, which by no coincidence was the dimension of a standard 500-pound semi-armor-piercing bomb, the warhead of the Tiny Tim. It also happened to be the diameter of standard oil well steel tubing, which was used as the casing for the rocket. The Tiny Tim had a solid-propellant motor that could accelerate it to nearly 600 mph, with an effective range of over a mile. When it leaped from beneath its launching aircraft, streaming a trail of fire, the Tiny Tim looked like a creature from hell.

  Between classes and missile-firing sorties, the pilots had time on their hands. They played cards, checked out the drinking establishments, and pursued the local girls. It was mostly a futile chase. After Atlantic City, Inyokern seemed like a desert outpost, which in fact it was.

  Finally came the end of Tiny Tim training. Someone decided that the newly qualified pilots should conduct a firepower demonstration for the Navy brass. Eight Corsairs, each armed with a Tiny Tim and eight 5-inch HVARs—high velocity rockets—dove in formation on a practice target. Led by Johnny Hyland, they salvoed their weapons on signal.

  It was spectacular. Spewing flame and smoke, the rockets roared toward the earth at nearly supersonic speed. More than six tons of high explosive slammed into the target like the broadside from a battleship. The concussion rumbled across the desert floor, rattling every window in Inyokern and sending a eruption of dirt, sagebrush, and black smoke hundreds of feet into the sky. The senior officers watching the demonstration were flabbergasted. Even the citizens of Inyokern, long accustomed to loud noises from the Navy weapons range, were startled.

  Most of all, it shocked the pilots in the Corsairs. A single collective thought passed through their brains: Holy shit! It dawned on them that this thing could do a hell of a lot of damage. And not just to the enemy.

  Vice Adm. Matom
e Ugaki poured himself another sake. It was evening, and he was alone in his small wood-and-fabric home in the coastal town of Atami, 60 miles southwest of Tokyo.

  Drinking had become one of Ugaki’s preoccupations since his return from the disastrous battle at Leyte Gulf. Unlike his mentor, Adm. Isoruku Yamamoto, who was a teetotaler, Ugaki loved sake. When he had nothing else to do, he frequently drank himself into a stupor. This evening, like most evenings lately, he had nothing else to do. Nothing except think about the war and write in his diary.

  The war news was all bad. The Americans were in Subic Bay, on the main Philippine island of Luzon. The Red Army was within 15 miles of Berlin. American B-29s were flying nightly over Japan. From his garden Ugaki could hear the drone of the bombers on their way to raze another city.

  Ugaki had started the diary during the months before the war in 1941. Like a good navy man, he began most entries with an observation about the weather. Amid cynical comments about the course of the war and the damage inflicted on Japan’s homeland, he inserted snippets of poetry, thoughts about nature and the changing seasons, and notes about his health problems. He disliked going to Tokyo, he wrote, because the lack of warm water aggravated his piles.

  Even when he was drunk, Matome Ugaki seldom smiled. Photographs showed a bullet-skulled man with a stern, unyielding countenance. The expression was common to senior Imperial Japanese Navy officers, most of whom wished to emulate the fierce image of a samurai warrior. The nickname bestowed on Ugaki by his subordinates was the “Golden Mask.”

  There was more, however, to Matome Ugaki. Behind the mask was a man of intelligence and sensitivity. Like his colleague, Vice Adm. Takijiro Ohnishi, founder of the Special Attack Corps, Ugaki embodied all the ancient contradictions in Japan’s culture—the warrior’s bloody bushido ethic balanced against an aesthete’s tears over the changing of the seasons.