The Twilight Warriors

by Robert Gandt

  Ugaki was a classically educated scholar who had made a lifetime study of Buddhist philosophy. He was also a devoted family man, inordinately proud of his son Hiromitsu, who had just become a naval surgeon. Ugaki had never stopped mourning his wife, Tomoko, who died five years earlier. He made regular visits to her tomb to clean the grounds and offer prayers.

  Ugaki had begun the war as chief of staff of the Combined Fleet, serving under the brilliant Yamamoto. He remained in that post, surviving the Battle of Midway, until April 18, 1943, when Yamamoto’s and Ugaki’s planes were ambushed by American P-38s over Bougainville. Yamamoto’s Mitsubishi G4M “Betty” bomber was shot down in flames and crashed in the jungle. Ugaki’s bomber also went down, ditching offshore. Ugaki managed to crawl out and survived by clinging to floating wreckage.

  Though badly injured, he recovered from his wounds, was promoted to vice admiral, and took command of a battleship division in time for the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Again he escaped death, though his fleet was pounded by American carrier-based planes, sinking the 72,000-ton dreadnought Musashi. En route back to Japan, Ugaki endured the further ignominy of losing more ships—the battleship Kongo and the destroyer Urakaze—to American submarines in the East China Sea.

  Then Ugaki’s career slid into limbo. For the rest of 1944 he was attached to the navy general staff, with no specific duties. Each day passed much like the one before, puttering in his flower garden, writing in his diary, drinking sake. He took long walks and gazed balefully into the sky. American bombers were a steady presence. On the last day of 1944 he wrote in his diary, “However impatient I might be hoping to save this crisis by all means, I can’t do anything now. All I can do is to send off the outgoing year, expecting to exert efforts next year. My thoughts ran wild seeking ways to save the empire.”

  To save the empire. As if by a miracle, a way to save the empire came to Ugaki on the night of February 9, 1945, while he was still finishing his bottle of sake. It arrived in the form of a phone call, via the local police station. The admiral was to proceed to Tokyo immediately for an audience with the emperor. Ugaki would be appointed commander in chief of a newly established unit, the Fifth Air Fleet, with the responsibility for guarding all of Japan’s southern shore.

  Although the new command was called a “fleet,” Ugaki knew there was no fleet. The Fifth Air Fleet was a suicide force composed of tokko aircraft and pilots, Kaiten manned torpedoes, and Ohka flying rocket bombs.

  Ugaki considered the assignment a gift from heaven. He already believed that the only strategy left to Japan was to bleed the Americans until they sued for peace. In Tokyo he had heard the whispers and veiled suggestions from certain officers that Japan should avoid total ruin by negotiating a conditional surrender. Ugaki had only contempt for these weaklings. In his view, Japan’s honor demanded that every fighting man and citizen be willing to sacrifice his life.

  Matome Ugaki was a religious man. Like most senior officers, he worshiped at the Yasukuni Shrine, where, according to Shinto belief, the kami, or spirits, of Japan’s fighting men resided. Ugaki mused in his diary that if he, too, could be honored to be enshrined with the other spirits at Yasukuni, he would be content.

  “I’m appointed to a very important post,” he boasted that night in his diary, “which has the key to determine the fate of the empire, with the pick of the Imperial Navy available at present. I have to break through this crisis with diehard struggles.”

  Ugaki already had an idea where the diehard struggles would occur. The Americans were bringing the war closer to Japan. Their next target would surely be in the Bonin Islands, perhaps Chichi Jima or Iwo Jima. And then would come the stepping-stones to southern Japan, the Ryukyus—and the island of Okinawa.

  5 YOUR FAVORITE ENEMY

  SAN FRANCISCO BAY, CALIFORNIA

  FEBRUARY 20, 1945

  A steady barrage of thunder pulsed in Erickson’s skull. His stomach churned, and he had the dry heaves. The twenty-two-year-old fighter pilot was an inexperienced drinker, and now he had a hangover of seismic proportions.

  He wasn’t alone. The squadron’s deployment bash at the Alameda officers’ club had left most of the Tail End Charlies in a near-comatose state. As Intrepid slid away from her berth at Alameda, the forty-man junior officers’ bunkroom they called Boys’ Town looked like a death ward. From the lavatories came a steady litany of gagging and retching.

  Despite their nausea, Erickson and a few others mustered the strength to go topside to watch Intrepid’s departure. The ship’s crew, wearing their dress blues, lined the edges of the flight deck. As the carrier steamed across San Francisco Bay, past the rocky hump of Alcatraz, someone yelled, “So long, Big Al.” For the old hands who had made this passage several times, it was a tradition. It didn’t matter that the prison’s most famous inmate, Al Capone, was no longer in residence.

  The men on the flight deck and in the island watched the great spans of the Golden Gate Bridge looming ahead. There was always a crowd on the bridge to observe warships departing, but this time was different. The people lining the rails of the bridge were girls, dozens of them. They were waving brassieres, scarves, panties. They yelled and blew kisses to the men on the deck.

  The men whistled and yelled and waved back. Even the carrier’s new skipper, Capt. Giles Short, who had the best view of anyone, was laughing. Minutes later the Golden Gate and the rocky shoreline of Marin County were receding in the distance.

  Then came the open ocean. As Intrepid took on a gentle roll, the hangovers were compounded by violent seasickness. Erickson, a kid from the Great Plains, lay in his bunk feeling deathly ill for three days. Then one morning, halfway to Hawaii, he woke up feeling fine. By the time Intrepid pulled into the channel at Pearl Harbor, Erickson felt like an old sea dog.

  While most of the pilots hit the beach and prowled the bars at Waikiki, the former art student packed up his sketchbook and watercolors and spent his liberty time touring the mountains of Kaneohe. At the highest point on the island’s mountain ridge, Erickson spent an afternoon sketching the magnificent scenery. It was hard to imagine, gazing around at the tranquil mountainscape, that somewhere beyond the western horizon a war was raging.

  The air group was scheduled for a five-day operational training session aboard the Intrepid. After the first day, the exercise was abruptly canceled and Intrepid was ordered back to Pearl Harbor. The crew was told to prepare for immediate departure.

  The pilots and aircrewmen were herded into an open-air theater on Ford Island for a briefing on escape and evasion techniques. The next morning, March 3, 1945, Intrepid was under way, joined in her voyage by the carriers Franklin, Bataan, and Independence, the battle cruiser Guam, and eight destroyers. They were on their way to an atoll called Ulithi, in the Caroline Islands group. Since late 1944, when Marines seized Ulithi from the Japanese, the atoll had become the U.S. Navy’s principal anchorage in the western Pacific.

  Now Ulithi was brimming with warships staging for what would be the largest amphibious operation of the Pacific war. The ships of Raymond Spruance’s Fifth Fleet would converge on the island of Okinawa, where, on April 1, 1945, 182,000 troops of the U.S. Tenth Army would storm ashore.

  The Ulithi atoll was more than a thousand miles from the closest enemy air base in Japan. Their vital anchorage, most senior U.S. commanders believed, was safe from attack.

  They were wrong.

  Vice Adm. Matome Ugaki studied the map spread out on his desk. The tiny atoll looked no bigger than a flyspeck. Reaching the enemy base at Ulithi would be a demanding feat of navigation for his tokko airmen, but it could be done.

  Ugaki had arrived at his new command post in Kanoya in mid-February 1945, just as the American invasion of Iwo Jima was about to begin. Frustrated and angry, the admiral followed the inexorable progress of the battle. By March 6, 1945, the vital airfield at Iwo Jima was in American hands. In two more weeks the battle for the island would be over.

  With carrier-based close air support no l
onger necessary, the American carriers were withdrawing from Iwo Jima. A Japanese reconnaissance plane had just reported that sixteen U.S. carriers were entering the lagoon at Ulithi.

  To Ugaki, this was an irresistible opportunity. It would be glorious! Such an audacious tokko mission would send a single, shining statement to the world: the Japanese people would never surrender.

  Ugaki gave the order to prepare the operation, which took the name Tan No. 2. (Tan No. 1 had been a similar strike on the U.S. anchorage at Majuro from the Japanese base on Truk but was aborted because the U.S. fleet departed Majuro before the attack.) Called the Azusa Special Attack Unit, the tokko pilots would fly two dozen twin-engine Yokosuka P1Y “Frances” bombers nonstop from Kanoya to Ulithi, a distance of 1,350 miles. Each bomber had a crew of three and carried an 800-kilogram (1,764-lb.) bomb. The Tan operation would be the longest and boldest kamikaze raid ever attempted.

  The first component of the mission, a Japanese flying boat, took off at 0300 from Kagoshima, on the southern tip of Japan, to scout the weather en route to Ulithi. Four land-based bombers left Kanoya at 0430 to patrol in advance of the main force. Four more flying boats launched from Kagoshima at 0730 to serve as pathfinders for the twenty-four kamikaze bombers, led by Lt. Kuromaru Naoto.

  The Tan No. 2 mission began to unravel early. Plagued by the same problems that afflicted every Japanese air combat unit—bad gasoline and shortages of parts—thirteen of the Frances bombers developed engine trouble. Most were able to divert to the Japanese-held island of Minami Daito. Two ditched in the ocean.

  As the remaining eleven bombers neared Ulithi, a system of heavy rain squalls forced them to climb above the clouds, depriving them of visual navigation cues. When they guessed they were near Ulithi, they descended back through the clouds—and saw nothing. Finally spotting the island of Yap, 120 miles west of Ulithi, they turned toward their target.

  By now the mission was well behind schedule. Darkness was descending over the Pacific. Because of the diversions around weather, the bombers were at the extreme end of their range. One by one the Nakajima NK9B engines coughed and went silent. Nine of the bombers splashed into the darkened sea.

  Two were still flying. As the shape of Ulithi lagoon loomed out of the darkness, the fatigued pilots peered down, trying to pick out the ships in the anchorage. Their targets were almost invisible. Almost, but not entirely.

  It was dark on the flight deck of the USS Randolph. Radioman Second Class V. J. Verdolini had just gotten off watch. He was walking along the starboard edge of the flight deck, on his way to the Radio 3 compartment near the stern, when he heard music. It was coming from the hangar bay below. A movie—A Song to Remember—was playing, and more than a hundred crewmen were crammed into the open bay. Verdolini hesitated, then decided to go below and catch the end of the movie. It was a decision that saved his life.

  The movie was nearly over. It ended with Cornel Wilde, as the composer Frédéric Chopin, playing the “Heroic Polonaise.” Verdolini was standing in the back of the crowded hangar bay, about to head back to the stern, when a white flash blinded him. A thunderous explosion rocked the ship. Verdolini was slammed to the steel deck.

  Dazed, he staggered to his feet, dimly aware of the klaxon sounding the general quarters alarm. Bodies were lying around him. Except for flash burns on his face and arms, Verdolini wasn’t seriously injured. By the time they extinguished the blazes on Randolph, twenty-five men were dead and more than a hundred were wounded.

  Not for several more hours did they piece together what had happened. The kamikaze bomber—one of the two that made it to Ulithi that night—crashed into Randolph’s starboard side aft, just below the flight deck. With almost no fuel remaining, the Frances bomber didn’t burn, but its bomb exploded with horrific results. They later found the remains of the three Japanese crewmen in the wreckage of the bomber.

  The second kamikaze was less successful. Searching for a target on the darkened atoll, the pilot zeroed in on what appeared to be the silhouette of an enemy warship. It was, in fact, tiny Sorlen Island. The Frances bomber plunged straight into the uninhabited islet and exploded.

  The brazenness of the attack shocked everyone. To fleet and task force commanders, the attack was an eye-opener. Before they invaded Okinawa, they would have to stamp out the bases where the kamikazes lived.

  Smoke was still spewing from the charred fantail of Randolph the next morning when Intrepid pulled into the Ulithi anchorage. Sober-faced sailors stared from the rail at the wreckage on Randolph’s stern. For those who had just joined the carrier in San Francisco, it was a first glimpse of the reality of war.

  The voyage from Pearl Harbor had taken ten days. To the “plank owners”—sailors who had been aboard Intrepid since her commissioning in August 1943—pulling back into the Ulithi lagoon evoked a flood of memories, some good, some painful. Ulithi was where they had come between battles to rest and replenish. The recreational facility on Mog Mog Island was where they sloshed around in the surf, drank their ration of two warm beers, and swapped news and war stories with sailors from other ships.

  Ulithi was also the place where Intrepid had come five months earlier, her decks smoldering and the stench of death filling the hangar bay, after enduring two consecutive kamikaze strikes off the Philippines.

  Ulithi looked different now. Everywhere, from one end of the big heart-shaped lagoon to the other, were ships—carriers, destroyers, battleships—all part of the the vast fleet assembling for the invasion of the last stepping-stone to Japan, Okinawa.

  The U.S. military’s path to Japan had been divided since 1943 when the joint chiefs dictated that forces of the U.S. Army, under Douglas MacArthur, would advance via the Solomons, the Bismarck Archipelago, New Guinea, and the Philippines. The U.S. Navy, led in the Pacific by Chester Nimitz, would drive across the central Pacific, landing Marines in the Marshalls, the Carolines, and the Marianas, and now on Okinawa.

  It was an awkward, two-headed command structure, unlike the situation in Europe, where Gen. Dwight Eisenhower had supreme command of all U.S. forces. At Okinawa, the Army-Navy command sharing would continue. A U.S. Army general, Simon Buckner Jr., would command the ground forces, while Fifth Fleet commander Adm. Raymond Spruance would have overall responsibility for the invasion.

  Just as confusing was the Navy’s habit of changing the fleet designations. When Spruance was in command, the armada was called the Fifth Fleet, but when he was relieved by his counterpart, Adm. Bull Halsey, it became the Third Fleet, and the designation of each task force and task group was similarly changed.

  The name changes gave everyone headaches, including the enemy. Halsey likened it to changing drivers and keeping the horses. “It was hard on the horses,” he explained later, “but it was effective. It consistently misled the Japs into an exaggerated conception of our seagoing strength.”

  Neither Halsey nor hardly any other American in 1945 had trouble using words such as Japs or Nips. No one would forget that it was the Japs who had perpetrated the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. Magazine articles and intelligence reports confirmed that rampaging Jap troops bayoneted babies, beheaded prisoners, and raped their conquered people. Hating Japs made it easy to kill them.

  The hatred and racism were mutual. Japanese fighting men held Americans, as well as most other Westerners, in contempt. Japanese soldiers and sailors were fed a steady stream of salacious stories about how barbaric U.S. troops rolled over civilians and prisoners with their tanks. Americans were spoiled, decadent, uncivilized. They would go down in defeat because they lacked the courageous spirit of Japanese fighting men.

  We welcome Intrepid to the Okinawa area,” said the silky voice on the radio. “Kamikaze division number 147 will join you on your arrival.”

  The voice belonged to Tokyo Rose, whose broadcasts from Japan were coming over the ship’s radio. The announcer was supposed to sound like an evil seductress who knew the location of every U.S. ship and planted thoughts about what the GIs’ wi
ves and girlfriends were up to while they were at war. The idea was to erode the morale of the U.S. fighting men, but it produced the opposite effect. Most thought it was great entertainment.

  Tokyo Rose, who was actually a composite of eight or more female broadcasters, had a mocking, sardonic humor that made them laugh. “Hello again,” she would start out, “this is your favorite enemy.” The shows had music, popular and classic, and news from home, mostly concerning disasters and privations of the war, and then accounts of all the American ships sunk and battles lost. Sailors cracked up when they heard, often for the third or fourth time, that their ship had been sent to the bottom.

  Still, the Tail End Charlies had to wonder. How did she know Intrepid was on its way? What else did she know about them? Was it true about the kamikazes joining them? What was so important about Okinawa?

  The answer was geography. The Great Loochoo—the name the ancients bestowed on the island of Okinawa—was 340 miles from Japan. The island was 64 miles long, set in the middle of the Ryukyus, the chain that dangled like a stinger from the rump of the Japanese home islands.

  For seven centuries the Great Loochoo had been an autonomous kingdom, maintaining a precarious balance between the competing powers of China and Japan. The militaristic Meiji dynasty of Japan swept down to annex the Ryukyus in 1879 and since then had governed it in colonial fashion. Okinawans became second-class citizens of the Japanese empire, whose administrators considered the Okinawans to be ignorant and racially inferior. As a result, the natives of the Great Loochoo retained their own customs and dialects. For the most part they had no use for the abstract Japanese notions of bushido and loyalty to an emperor.

  The majority of the 450,000 Okinawans lived in the south. Most were farmers living in thatched huts or small frame houses. Private automobiles were virtually nonexistent. Two of the three primitive railroads were horse-drawn. There were only three towns of any significance: Toguchi, on the sparsely populated northern peninsula; Shuri, ancient seat of the Great Loochoo and site of a castle; and Naha, the modern capital.