The Twilight Warriors (10 page)

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.

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.

V
ice 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 longer 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.

I
t 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.