The Twilight Warriors (6 page)

What Ohnishi still didn’t know was how the pilots would respond. The admiral kept an impassive face while he presented the idea to the squadron commanders of the 201st Air Group, the officers who would direct the
tokko
missions.

The officers stared back, showing no expression. Seconds ticked past. Finally the air group executive officer broke the silence. He asked a staff officer how effective a plane carrying a standard 250-kilogram (551-pound) bomb might be if it crashed into a carrier’s flight deck. The officer answered that the chances of scoring a hit were greater than by conventional bombing.

No one was surprised. Conventional bombing against the American fleet had produced dismal results. Still, no one seemed happy about Ohnishi’s
tokko
proposal. The executive officer asked for a few minutes to consider. He then went to his room and discussed the proposal with other pilots.

Finally he returned. The pilots, he reported, were enthusiastic about a Special Attack Unit. The executive officer asked only that he be allowed to organize the new unit.

A feeling of relief swept over Ohnishi. The hard part was over. He had his first cadre of
tokko
warriors. A divine wind might still save Japan.

2
TAIL END CHARLIES

PASCO NAVAL AIR STATION
,
WASHINGTON
SEPTEMBER 1, 1943

E
ric Erickson could feel the parachute thumping the back of his legs as he walked across the flight line. It was still a new feeling, and he liked it. This was the day he would make his first solo flight in the Stearman N2S biplane, the trainer the Navy cadets called the “Yellow Peril.”

Flying was the only thing the cadets liked about Pasco. The remote base was enclosed with a galvanized wire fence. There was nothing there but a few two-story barracks for the cadets and for the enlisted men who worked on the yellow-painted Stearmans. The town of Pasco had no bars, no entertainment, and, worst of all, no available women. The closest real town was Yakima, a two-hour bus ride away, but the cadets had learned that Yakima wasn’t much of an improvement over Pasco.

They were there to learn to fly, and that’s what most—but not all—did at Pasco. Washing out of the program meant an end to the cadet’s status as an officer candidate. Washouts went back to the fleet as seamen second class, the next-to-lowest enlisted rating in the Navy.

Back in Nebraska, Erickson had been an aspiring artist. He was the son of hardworking parents who traced their roots to Sweden. His father was a foreman for the Iowa Nebraska Light and Power Company, a veteran of World War I, and deeply suspicious of anyone who didn’t earn a living by physical labor. That one of his sons actually wanted to
paint pictures
for a living disturbed him.

The war changed everything. Erickson was studying art in a California academy when the wave of patriotic fervor swept America after the attack on Pearl Harbor. By the summer of 1943 he was
marching with his fellow cadets on the parade ground of the Navy’s Preflight School in northern California.

Erickson was a tall, skinny kid, six foot two and 160 pounds, lithe and agile enough to handle the strenuous physical training program. His previous college work gave him a leg up on the engineering and mathematics classes.

Then came flight training. The former art student seemed an unlikely candidate to be a Navy fighter pilot. On
every
training flight, he became violently airsick. Each time they went aloft, he’d have to lean out and vomit over the side of the little Aeronca training plane. Erickson’s classmates gave him a nickname: “Bucket.” His job after every flight was to wash down the barf-stained fuselage of the Aeronca.

The airsickness continued until the day his instructor cleared him for his first solo flight. It was as though his gut experienced an epiphany. From that day on, he was finished with the bucket.

By the time Erickson and his class got to the Yellow Perils at Pasco, flying had become great fun. There were close calls, but none were deadly. Engines sometimes failed. Once in a while someone “ground looped”—caught a wing tip on landing and went swirling to a stop in a cloud of dirt, sagebrush, and torn fabric. Naval aviation, they believed, was not inherently dangerous. Sure, there were risks, but if you were good—
really
good, like they were—nothing bad would happen.

Then one day one of Erickson’s buddies, a fellow Nebraskan named Paul Hyland, was practicing a solo acrobatic routine. He inadvertently put the Yellow Peril into an inverted spin—a rotating, disorienting maneuver—and was unable to recover. The Stearman plunged into a wooded field near Pasco, scattering pieces of the wood-and-fabric biplane over the field like yellow confetti. Hyland was killed instantly.

The accident stunned them all. They had been together since preflight training school. Hyland was a good-looking, well-liked kid who seemed blessed with above-average skills both on the ground
and in the air. Of all the class, he seemed one of the least likely to be killed in a flying accident.

For the cadets, it was their first brush with a hard truth. Okay, naval aviation
was
dangerous. If they stayed with it, finished training, and went into combat, they could expect more such losses. Next time it might be
them
.

A few quietly dropped out and were not seen again. Others, like Erickson, wrestled with their misgivings, then stopped dwelling on it. If it happened, it happened. Anyway, Erickson rationalized, weren’t his parents the beneficiaries of his government $10,000 insurance policy? Hell, it was more than his father earned in a year.

Erickson and about half his class made it through Pasco and went on to Corpus Christi, Texas, for advanced training. They flew the “Vultee Vibrator,” the fixed-gear SNV, in which they learned instrument flying. Then they graduated to the big North American SNJ Texan trainer, learning formation flying, gunnery, and radio navigation. A few more cadets washed out, but by now most of the fainthearted had been eliminated.

Meanwhile, the war in the Pacific was tilting inexorably in favor of the United States. The new
Essex
-class carriers were joining the fleet, and the Japanese were on the defensive. To Erickson and his classmates, it was something to worry about: after all this training, the damned war would be over before they got there.

Almost to a man, each wanted to be a fighter pilot. Flying dive-bombers or torpedo planes took guts and skill, but the real glory was in the Corsair and Hellcat fighters. In newsreels, comic books, and recruiting posters, fighter pilots grinned down from cockpits covered with rows of swastika and rising-sun victory symbols. Absolutely nothing matched the pure testosterone-loaded glamour of being a World War II fighter pilot.

On a steamy May afternoon in 1944, Erickson and his classmates stood on the hot tarmac at the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station and received their gold bars as newly commissioned ensigns and their naval aviators’ wings of gold. The big prize, though, was
the orders: Erickson and four of his buddies—Maurie Dubinsky, Jack Ehrhard, Bill Ecker, and Joe Arvidson—received the top assignments in the class. They were going to be fighter pilots.

T
hey were sleek and sexy and, at first sight, intimidating. They were lined up at the naval air station, each in blue livery and adorned with white lettering and broad bars with a star. The newly winged naval aviators stared in awe at the voluptuous objects. They were Chance Vought F4U Corsairs, and they were, arguably, the hottest fighters in the world.

It was what Erickson and his buddies had been training for all these months. They’d been through fighter combat school in the Grumman F6F Hellcat in Vero Beach, Florida. They’d been up to Lake Michigan to qualify in carrier landings aboard a vessel called the
Wolverine
, a makeshift carrier converted from a paddle-driven passenger ship.

Now they had orders to a combat squadron, the famous VF-10 Grim Reapers, which would soon be split into two units—a fighting squadron and a bomber-fighting squadron, each equipped with the new Corsair fighter. And here they were, standing on the ramp at the Atlantic City Naval Air Station, gazing at the row of long-snouted fighters.

The Corsair had several nicknames, some complimentary, some not. They called it “Hose Nose,” “U-bird” for its frontal shape, “Bent-Wing Bastard,” and sometimes “Hog.” The name that bothered the Tail End Charlies was “Ensign Eater.” The Corsair was harder to fly than more forgiving airplanes such as the Hellcat, and it had a reputation for turning on inexperienced pilots like a mean-tempered pit bull.

As fighters of the 1940s went, the Corsair was
big
. Powered by the Pratt & Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp radial engine, the Corsair mounted a 13-foot 4-inch three-bladed Hamilton Standard propeller. To accommodate the massive propeller, Vought came up with the Corsair’s unique inverted gull-wing design. The design
permitted a shorter landing gear while allowing clearance for the long prop blades. The stubbier gear could retract straight aft into the wing, leaving no bulges and still allowing room for internal wing tanks.

The Corsair was fast—faster than almost any other fighter in the world. On its fifth test flight back in 1940, it became the first single-engine production fighter to exceed 400 mph in level flight. The Navy was sufficiently impressed that they placed an order for 584 Corsairs in June 1941.

But then came the problems. During the Corsair’s carrier suitability tests, the test pilots found that they couldn’t see the carrier deck or the landing signal officer over the 14-foot-long nose. Worse, when the Corsair was at landing speed, about to plunk down on the deck, the left wing would drop like a rock, resulting in a swerving, heart-stopping arrival and sometimes a collapsed landing gear. Even when the Corsair came down on both wheels, the oleo shock absorbers sometimes bounced the fighter back into the air. The tailhook would skim over the arresting wires, causing the fighter to crash into the cable barricade stretched across the forward deck.

This was not suitable behavior for a carrier-based fighter. There was a war on, and the Navy urgently needed fighters on the new
Essex
-class carriers. They opted for the reliable Grumman F6F Hellcat and banished the temperamental Corsair to shore duty with Marine and Navy squadrons in the Solomons.

In the hands of Marines such as Pappy Boyington and Ken Walsh and Navy aces such as Tommy Blackburn and Ike Kepford, the Corsair proved itself to be one of the most lethal aerial killing machines ever designed. And it was then that the big fighter earned another nickname, this one from the Japanese—“Whistling Death,” for the high-pitched howl from its wing-root air coolers.

Meanwhile, Vought and Navy engineers were working on the Corsair’s carrier landing problems. The nasty wing drop was fixed with a simple 6-inch stall strip mounted on the leading edge of the starboard wing. The dangerous bouncing tendency was cured
by reengineering the oleo shock absorbers in the landing gear. The visibility over the long nose was much improved simply by raising the pilot’s seat 18 centimeters and giving him a Plexiglas bubble-type canopy.

The best fix came not from engineering but from technique. British Royal Air Force squadrons had been operating Corsairs from their own carriers since mid-1943. The Brits had learned to make a continuously turning approach to the carrier deck, not leveling the Corsair’s wings until they were almost over the ramp. The pilot had a clear view of the deck and the landing signal officer all the way to landing.

The fixes worked. After two years of being sidelined, the F4U was cleared for U.S. Navy carrier duty. And just in time.

F
rom his new office on the Atlantic City naval air station, Lt. Cmdr. Wilmer Rawie could see the row of new Corsairs. They were arriving one or two at a time, and so were the pilots, many of them fresh out of flight training.

But not all. Rawie’s previous job had been superintendent of training in Green Cove Springs, Florida, where he’d been responsible for training Corsair pilots for the fleet. When he received orders to be skipper of the newly formed VF-10 Grim Reapers, Rawie cherry-picked the best instructors and students to take with him.

Will Rawie had come up from the ranks, serving a hitch as an enlisted man before going to the Naval Academy. After graduating in 1938, he’d put in two years as a surface officer before going to flight training. He saw a brief flurry of combat flying F4F Wildcat fighters from USS
Enterprise
at Wake, Marcus, and Midway, and he flew cover when Jimmy Doolittle’s raiders took off for their raid on Tokyo.

But then the war passed Rawie by. He was rotated back to the States to be an instructor, and there he stayed for two years. A lieutenant commander with no command experience, Rawie had reached a dead end.

His break came in late 1944. An air group was being formed under the command of Cmdr. John Hyland, an old squadronmate of Rawie’s from the
Enterprise
. Hyland tapped Rawie to lead the new fighting squadron. When their training was complete, they would deploy to the Pacific aboard one of the fast new
Essex
-class carriers, the USS
Intrepid
.