The Twilight Warriors (5 page)

The singing grew louder.

By the time they closed the bar a few minutes before midnight, the party had gotten rowdy. A drunk pilot had to be subdued after demonstrating how to smash the mirrors behind the bar. Another stuck his fist through a plaster wall. One of the junior officers nearly drowned when he passed out over the toilet. Several had to be hauled nearly comatose back to the ship and loaded aboard like cordwood.

The
Intrepid
’s departure the next morning was a hazy, indistinct memory for most of the Tail End Charlies. As the ship entered the heaving ocean, the hangovers magnified to bouts of barfing. Eric Erickson, who had never been aboard a vessel larger than a canoe, stayed sick for three days.

After a week of provisioning and training in Hawaii,
Intrepid
was under way for the western Pacific. In the smoke-filled ready room of Bomber Fighting 10, the pilots learned for the first time where they were going. The intelligence officer stuck a chart on the bulkhead. It was a map of southern Japan and the Ryukyu island chain.

The Tail End Charlies stared at the map. The men knew some of the place names—Shikoku, Kyushu, Okinawa. Until then that was all they’d been, just names. Now reality was setting in. Those places on the map—the ones with the hard-to-pronounce names—were where they would see their first combat.

But there was more. What none of them yet knew—not the pilots or the intelligence officers or the flag officers planning the operation—was that the island in the middle of the chain, the one called Okinawa, was where the Imperial Japanese Navy would make its last stand.

Kamikaze crashes into USS
Intrepid
, November 25, 1944
.
(
INTREPID
SEA, AIR & SPACE MUSEUM
)

1
THE NEXT ISLAND

SAIPAN
JUNE 17, 1944

T
he flies were everywhere. Vice Adm. Raymond Spruance maintained his stone-faced silence as he waved the insects away from the table. They were large and black, and entire squadrons of them were swarming into the wardroom of Spruance’s flagship, the cruiser
Indianapolis
.

Indianapolis
was anchored in the lagoon on the eastern shore of Saipan. The heavy tropical air was seeping like a dank cloud through the spaces of the non-air-conditioned warship. Spruance’s guests were his two immediate bosses, chief of naval operations Adm. Ernest King and the commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, Adm. Chester Nimitz. Dinner had been served early in the hope that an ocean breeze might still be wafting through the portholes of the wardroom.

Instead of a breeze, they got these damned flies. Splotches of perspiration were staining the admirals’ starched khakis as they waved at the insects. King and Nimitz had just completed a Pacific inspection tour. They had stopped to confer with Spruance, whose Fifth Fleet had just won a resounding victory at the Battle of the Philippine Sea. Joining them in the wardroom was Vice Adm. Richmond K. Turner, who had commanded the amphibious landings on Saipan.

In keeping with wardroom tradition, the admirals were avoiding high-level military discussions at dinner. They were also avoiding the subject of the black flies and where they came from. King and Nimitz had taken a tour of Saipan that afternoon. Most of the island’s thirty thousand Japanese defenders and twenty-two thousand civilians were dead, and their decomposing bodies had been
moldering in the tropical heat for nearly a week. Saipan and the adjoining lagoon where
Indianapolis
was anchored were swarming with flies.

Eager to be done with dinner and the flies, the admirals evacuated the wardroom and returned to the business of war. Spruance was aware that his actions in the recent Battle of the Philippine Sea had come under heavy criticism. Instead of dispatching Vice Adm. Marc Mitscher’s Fast Carrier Force in an all-out attack on the Japanese task force, he had held them back to cover the landings on Saipan. By the end of the engagement, the air strength of the Imperial Japanese Navy had been crushed—six hundred aircraft destroyed and three carriers sunk—but in the view of many senior officers, it wasn’t enough. Spruance had allowed the Japanese to escape with most of their fleet intact.

It wasn’t the first time Raymond Spruance had been accused of excessive caution, nor would it be the last. At the 1942 Battle of Midway, after his dive-bombers had sunk four Japanese carriers, Spruance chose not to press his advantage and pursue the remainder of Adm. Isoruku Yamamoto’s fleet after nightfall. The remnants of the Japanese force survived to fight another day.

If Spruance was worried about his boss’s judgment, he could relax. The Navy’s senior officer put the subject to rest. “
You did a damn good job there,” he said. “No matter what other people tell you, your decision was correct.” Coming from the hard-boiled Ernest King, it amounted to high praise.

Few officers could have been more different in style and temperament than King and Spruance. Ernest King was tall, arrogant, fond of hard liquor and loose women. He was also a notorious bully who ruled the Navy with an iron fist. By contrast, Raymond Spruance was a cerebral, mild-mannered officer whose demeanor seldom changed. He was an oddity in the 1940s Navy, an officer who neither drank nor smoked, and in a generation that disdained exercise, he was a fitness fanatic. If his fellow officers didn’t warm up to Ray Spruance’s personality, they never doubted his brilliance.
Even the arrogant King acknowledged that Spruance was the smartest officer in the Navy—though King put himself second.

It was precisely because Spruance was so well regarded that King was aboard
Indianapolis
this evening, the flies notwithstanding. The conquest of the Marianas was complete. The decision had already been made that the island of Luzon in the Philippines was next. But then what? King wanted to know what Spruance thought should be the next objective in the ultimate conquest of Japan.

Spruance answered without hesitation. “Okinawa.”

King’s eyebrows rose. So did Nimitz’s. It wasn’t what they’d expected to hear. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, including King, were on record as favoring an invasion of Formosa. Why Okinawa?

In his usual low-key monotone, Spruance laid out his case. Formosa was a heavily fortified, mountainous island that would take months to capture. Bypassing Formosa and seizing Okinawa was the quickest way to strangle Japan.

As a prelude to an Okinawa invasion, Spruance thought they first should take Iwo Jima, a volcanic island with an airfield that was within bomber range of Okinawa and Japan. After they’d captured Okinawa, they would be in position to blockade all shipping in the East China Sea. Japan would be cut off. It might preclude a bloody invasion of Japan itself.

An uncomfortable silence fell over the flag compartment. King was dubious. So was Nimitz. Bypass Formosa?

The admirals peered at the map on the bulkhead. Okinawa nestled like a protected pendant in the middle of the Ryukyu island chain, dangerously close to the Japanese mainland. Even if Spruance was right, an invasion of Okinawa would be a hell of a battle.
The Japanese would fight back with every weapon they had left.

D
aylight was fading over Mabalacat airfield, 50 miles from Manila, when the black limousine pulled up. The officers standing outside the command post snapped to attention. The fluttering
yellow pennant on the front of the vehicle indicated an officer of flag rank. In unison they saluted the short, stocky figure that emerged from the back of the limousine.

Vice Adm. Takijiro Ohnishi looked older than his fifty-three years. He had the gnarled, deeply lined face of a man who had spent years at sea. Ohnishi was a complex man, known for his bluntness and coarse manners as well as for his sensitivity. A product of his generation, he was an example of the classic samurai—a warrior capable of horrific deeds who could also shed tears at the sight of a falling petal. Like many of his peers, Ohnishi was a poet who rendered in lyrical verse his deepest feelings about war and death.

This day, October 19, 1944, was Ohnishi’s first visit to Mabalacat. Gazing around, he saw that the place was a mess. The airfield was part of the sprawling complex of the formerly U.S.-owned Clark Air Base, and for the past few weeks American carrier-based planes had been bombing on a daily schedule. Now, in the waning light, Ohnishi saw ground crewmen scurrying to conceal the surviving fighters in revetments, readying them for the next morning’s missions.

Ohnishi had arrived in the Philippines only two days before to take command of the First Air Fleet. The battle—the
real
battle—for the Philippines was about to begin. A powerful American invasion fleet was moving into the Leyte Gulf. Within a few days, U.S. troops would be swarming ashore.

In response, the Japanese high command had devised a complex counterthrust called Sho-1. The plan called for coordinated attacks from the west by three separate heavy surface fleets and a decoying action by a carrier group in the northeast to draw away the American carrier task force.
Sho
meant “victory,” and it reflected the delusional thinking of the high command. Any victory in the coming battle would result more from divine intervention than from Japanese execution.

Sho-1 contained a fatal flaw. The battleships and cruisers of
the Japanese fleet had only their own guns to fend off U.S. planes. Ohnishi’s air fleet in the Philippines would be unable to provide any significant air cover for the Sho operation. His squadrons had been decimated in almost daily attacks from U.S. forces, and the total inventory now amounted to fewer than a hundred fighters. He’d been promised reinforcements from the Second Air Fleet in Formosa, but Ohnishi knew that was a pipe dream. The Formosa squadrons had just endured their own mauling, losing more than five hundred airplanes in three days of attacks by American carrier-based planes.

Knowing all this, it was hard for Admiral Ohnishi not to be discouraged. His meager air forces—his
conventional
air forces—had no chance of turning back the American carrier fleet. But now, in the twilight of Japan’s dominion in the Pacific, Ohnishi’s thoughts had turned to something unconventional.

Japan had one remaining potent weapon, and it was as ancient as the Japanese culture. What Ohnishi had in mind was a Special Attack Corps—a dedicated unit of airmen who would crash their bomb-laden airplanes into American ships.

The desperate strategy had a name—
tokko
. It was interchangeable with
kamikaze
and meant “divine wind.” According to legend, the name came from the wind god, who in the thirteenth century had sent a typhoon to destroy the invasion fleet of Kublai Khan. The divine wind had saved Japan.

Tokko
was an echo of the ancient Japanese code of
bushido—
the way of the samurai. Already embedded in the Japanese military ethos was the idea that a warrior, especially one already wounded, was willing to sacrifice his life for the emperor. But the decision to die was expected to come in the heat of battle when all else had failed. Deploying entire Special Attack units—
tokkotai
—on predetermined suicide missions was something new. And controversial.

To Ohnishi, it amounted to making the best of an impossible situation. The cream of Japan’s experienced pilots had already been killed in combat. Most of the remaining young airmen were
insufficiently trained and lacked superior aircraft and weapons. They faced almost certain annihilation in the coming weeks. The
tokko
missions would allow them an honorable death while dealing a powerful blow to the enemy. Before Ohnishi departed Tokyo, he had obtained the blessing of the minister of the navy for a Special Attack Force.