Ushijima still counter-attacked the Seventh Division on the east flank at Yonabaru, trying to relieve the pressure there, but the Seventh’s valiant Dogfaces held fast.
A nocturnal kamikaze raid hurled at Okinawa shipping to coincide with Ushijima’s land strikes was shattered, with 150 planes shot down in exchange for the loss of the destroyer-transport Bates and one LSM, plus damage to eight other ships.
The most ferocious display of antiaircraft power yet seen in the Pacific broke up a daring airborne attack on Yontan and Kadena Airfields. It was an unusually clear night, and there were thousands of witnesses to this small savage setback that the suicide spirit was able to inflict on the Americans.
Perhaps twenty twin-engined bombers came gliding through a fiery lacework woven by American antiaircraft gunners. Eleven of them fell in flames. The rest, except one, fled.
That solitary Sally bomber skidded on its belly along one of Yontan’s runways. When it stopped, eight of fourteen men of the Japanese First Air Raiding Brigade were dead in their seats, but six of them were alive, tumbling out the door, coming erect, and sprinting for parked planes while hurling heat grenades and phosphorous bombs. They blew up eight airplanes, damaged twenty-six others, destroyed two fuel dumps housing seventy thousand gallons of gasoline, and killed two Marines and wounded eighteen others before they were finally hunted down and killed.
In the morning the Tenth Army was still grinding down toward the heart of Ushijima’s defense in Shuri Castle. Marines of the First Division in Wana Draw began to draw swiftly closer to the city and its heights to their east. They began to notice Japanese sealing off caves and quitting the draw. At noon of May 26 Major General del Valle asked for an aerial reconnaissance over the Yonabaru-Naha valley. He had a hunch the Japanese were pulling back from Shuri, trying to sneak out under cover of a heavy rain.
A spotter plane from the battleship New York reported that the roads behind Shuri were packed. Between three thousand and four thousand Japanese were on the rear march with all their guns, tanks, and trucks. In thirteen minutes, despite rain and bad visibility, the warships of the fleet were on the target. Soon fifty Marine Corsairs were with them, rocketing and strafing, and every Marine artillery piece or mortar within range had its smoking muzzle pointed toward the valley. They killed from five hundred to eight hundred Japanese and littered the muddy roadways with wrecked vehicles.
Three days later the Marines took Shuri Castle.
It was not supposed to be theirs to take; it was the objective of the Seventy-seventh Division, the very plum of the Okinawa fighting, but the First Marine Division took it anyway.
General del Valle sent a battalion of the Fifth Marines climbing into Shuri on May 29. He wanted to get around and behind the Japanese still holding out in Wana Draw. The First Battalion quickly stormed Shuri Ridge to the east, or left, of the draw—so quickly that Lieutenant Colonel Charles Shelburne asked permission to go on to the castle eight hundred yards east. Del Valle granted it. The Seventy-seventh Division was still two days’ hard fighting from the castle, and the chance was too good to ignore. The light defenses around Shuri might be only a temporary lapse.
Company A of the Fifth Marines under Captain Julius Dusenbury began slogging east in knee-deep mud. Inside Captain Dusenbury’s helmet was a flag, as had become almost customary among Marine commanders since the Suribachi flag-raising. While the Marines marched, del Valle was just barely averting the Seventy-seventh’s planned artillery and aerial strike on Shuri Castle, and then Dusenbury’s Marines overran a party of Japanese soldiers and swept into the castle courtyard, into the battered ruins of what had once been a beautiful palace with curving, tiered roofs of tile. They ran up to its high parapet, and over this Captain Dusenbury flew his flag.
Shuri Castle, the key bastion of the Okinawa defenses, was in American hands—and if the Seventy-seventh Division was irritated, if the Tenth Army was displeased, the soldier who commanded the Americans on Okinawa could not be entirely annoyed. The flag that Captain Dusenbury of South Carolina flew was the flag of Simon Bolivar Buckner’s father. The Stars and Bars, not the Stars and Stripes, waved over Okinawa.
Two days later Old Glory was in its rightful place. General del Valle sent a party with the standard of the First Marine Division, the one that had flown over Guadalcanal, New Britain, and Peleliu.
Now, above Shuri Castle not far from the spot where Commodore Perry had hoisted the American flag a century ago, the most victorious flag of the Pacific was caught and flung in the breeze.
The Japanese retreating to the south could see it. They fired on it, missing. They kept firing, for they understood that the terrible power it symbolized was already massing to come south and destroy them.
Chrysanthemums Die in Sea and Sky
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Plane and pilot losses in the Fifth Air Fleet and Sixth Air Army had been so severe that in Japan a special kamikaze corps had been organized. Replacements in both machines and men were fed from bases in central and northern Nippon to Kyushu. Often these aviators were hardly more than raw recruits whose training periods were of short duration. At first the kamikaze had been strictly volunteers, but as the Okinawa campaign continued, all Japanese sailors and soldiers were subject to suicide duty whether or not they wished to go. Sometimes commanders “volunteered” their entire units for this not-always desirable service. More and more “glorious young eagles” began to “get lost” and returned to base. Others who went willingly were frustrated by frequent engine trouble or the weather. These were the ardent, idealist youths such as the pilot who left the verse: “When I fly the skies / What a fine burial place / Would be the top of a cloud.” Others were not so eager to make the supreme sacrifice, like the one who wrote: “I say frankly, I do not die willingly. I die not without regret. My country’s future leaves me uneasy... I am terribly distressed.”
Much of the glamour of the Special Attack Forces had faded. Its members were still idolized, of course, and there was always a ceremony for the final departure: toasts of sake to be drunk and cigarettes from the Imperial Gift to be smoked—Hirohito’s parting benefaction upon his private army of assassins. But the scourging of the Kyushu bases by American air power had turned these once-thriving and stimulating centers into dreary, dismal limbos where the kamikaze awaiting the death order escaped boredom—or depression—by helping local farmers with their spring planting.
Rain, it seemed, always brought the kamikaze, and on May 11 as the Tenth Army assault slogged and slipped forward, the growl and grumble and whistling rain of the Great Loo Choo’s skies were a welcome sound to about 150 Japanese aircraft hurtling south from Kyushu. Those who were believing Shintoists said a prayer of thanksgiving to the Sun Goddess for having providentially averted her face, forgetting in their gratitude the disaster that had crippled their attack at its outset. A formation of Judy bombers climbing from Kokobu Airfield’s Airstrip 2 crashed into a formation of Val suiciders taking off from another runway, with a total loss of 15 planes. The remaining 135, however, continued to roar south for Okinawa and TF 58.
Those that reached Picket Station 15 about 7:50 A.M. were delighted to sight two enemy destroyers clearly visible below them. They were the Evans and Hugh W. Hadley, commanded by Naval Academy classmates Commanders Robert Archer in Evans and Baron Mullaney in Hadley. They watched in apprehension as no less than 50 suiciders peeled off to begin orbiting above them—and when they began to dive, there ensued probably the classic ship-airplane battle of World War II.
For an hour and a half without letup Evans and Hadley fought off fifty kamikaze. Hadley alone shot down twenty-three of them, while Evans claimed fifteen. The Marines from Yontan and Kadena knocked another nineteen out of the skies. Commander Mullaney of Hadley called for Marines to help him. Back came the squadron leader’s answer: “I’m out of ammunition but I’m sticking with you.” He did, flying straight into a flurry of ten kamikaze coming at Hadley fore and aft, trying to head them off—while othe
r Marines of his squadron rode down through the ack-ack with stuttering guns. They were not always successful, for both of these tough little ships took four kamikaze hits apiece. But they survived to be towed to that anchorage in Kerama-retto that had become a vast hospital ward for stricken and maimed American ships, and there Commander Mullaney could write this tribute to the Yontan and Kadena fliers: “I am willing to take my ship to the shores of Japan if I could have these Marines with me.”
Meanwhile, another fifty kamikaze had found Task Force Fifty-eight. On the bridge of his flag carrier Bunker Hill Admiral Marc Mitscher watched in open admiration as the Japanese pilots skillfully used rain clouds and window to deceive the American radar. He frowned as a Zero suicider broke from low clouds on the carrier’s starboard quarter, smashing through rows of planes on the flight deck to start fires before crashing overboard and exploding. Behind it came a Judy diving straight down from astern. It hit at the worst possible moment—with armed planes refueling on the flight deck. While a broken fuel line fed a roaring fire, these planes exploded like a burst from a giant machine gun. In a few moments 400 sailors were killed or blown out of sight and another 264 wounded.
Even so Bunker Hill’s ordeal did not quite equal the agony of Franklin, although there was just as much heroism in the fight to douse her flames and keep her afloat. Machinist’s Mate Jack Salvaggio would forever bless the porthole in the ship’s stencil room that he had so fervently cursed for the wind blowing through it to scatter his papers. Now he wriggled through this passport to continued life. Another machinist named Harold Fraught believed he was trapped in a smoke-filled passageway, until he saw a tiny open porthole. “I was about to reach it but couldn’t, and I was just about to give up when someone pushed me through. I sure would like to find out who it was who kept pushing every guy through but not saving himself.”
For 5½ hours Bunker Hill’s gallant crew fought the flames threatening to consume and sink their ship. Splendid seamanship saved her: heeling from a list to starboard to one to port, the great vessel gradually combined gravity and gathering momentum to send a huge mass of burning gasoline and oil, water and foam, sloshing slowly from the hangar deck overboard into the sea. At this point, Admiral Mitscher transferred his flag from Bunker Hill—the second-worst-hit ship in the Navy to survive, though she would need many months of repair—to the more famous Enterprise.Next day, the kikusui struck again, but not nearly with as much savagery as on May 11—scoring only one hit on the Bache, a radar picket ship far south of Okinawa, knocking out its power plant and killing forty-one sailors.
Nevertheless Admiral Spruance was alarmed by the renewed fury of the Floating Chrysanthemums and ordered Mitscher to take two task groups north to work over the Kyushu airfields. Mitscher did, introducing a naval novelty in the night-flying Air Group Ninety aboard Enterprise, which gave the weary Japanese airmen no rest. Mitscher also struck hard at Ugaki’s northern airfields, shifting his sights from the enemy’s battered southern bases. Meanwhile, Corsairs and Hellcats ranged among enemy interceptors like devouring wolves while the torpedo-launching Avengers and Helldiver dive-bombers ravaged no less than thirty-four of Ugaki’s air bases.
Still the kamikaze fought back. On May 14 a flight of eighty-four fighters zoomed aloft as cover for twenty-six Zero suiciders bent on punishing TF 58 for its audacious strikes at the homeland. A pretakeoff briefing could not have been briefer: three words, “Get the carriers!” Young Lieutenant Tomai Kai could not forget this command as he roared aloft in his bomb-laden Zero. To his delight he soon found himself above TF 58 and a monster carrier. He had no way of knowing that this was Enterprise—the “Big E, ” one of the most battle-seasoned flattops of World War II—but he didn’t hesitate to jump her despite the bucking and bouncing of his frail craft from enemy ack-ack exploding around him. Bursting from a cloud at fifteen hundred feet, Kai pointed his Zero’s nose at the Big E’s stern and opened his throttle, miraculously passing unscathed through a storm of 20 and 40 mm tracers flowing toward him. Standing on the carrier’s bridge Admiral Mitscher’s calculating eye calmly watched the enemy’s approach.
Two hundred yards astern Lieutenant Kai flip-flopped his aircraft upside down just as he passed over Enterprise, and then, to steepen his dive, yanked the stick all the way back. Just before he crashed into the carrier’s flight deck at an angle of fifty degrees, he released his 550-pound bomb. The missile plunged straight down the yawning elevator well, exploding with a monstrous roar that sent the elevator roof spinning lazily into the sea. Fortunately, most of the crewmen above deck were wearing flash-proof clothing so that only a few men were badly burned in comparison to the horrible scorching of Franklin’s crewmen. Moreover, only thirteen were killed and sixty-nine wounded. Big E’s alert crewmen had prepared their ship for attack. Fuel lines had been drained and filled with CO2; aircraft had been disarmed, drained of fuel, and stowed below; compartments had been made watertight by dogging down the bulkheads, and emergency rations were stored within them. Best of all, when flames did erupt, the fire-fighting details were ready for them.
Thus, when Admiral Mitscher on his flag bridge stared quizzically at the hole left in the flight deck by Kai’s Zero, he was not dismayed. Instead, he removed the long-visored baseball cap he always wore, scratched his bald head and said: “Tell my task group commanders that if the Japanese keep this up, they’re going to grow hair on my head yet.” Marc Mitscher also would cherish a calling card found on the intact corpse of the heroic young Lieutenant Tomai Kai who had come so close to sinking the admiral’s flagship.
Following the failure of the Floating Chrysanthemum operation that included the airborne attack on Yontan-Kadena and Lieutenant Kai’s crash dive on Enterprise, the Fifth Air Fleet was so short of planes and pilots that it pressed into service twenty Shirigaku twin-engine trainers. These awkward aircraft, certainly no match for the swift and sturdy American fighters, comprised most of the aircraft deployed in Kikusui 7 on May 24. No decision could have been more indicative of the desperation of Ugaki and Sugahara. They would not only lose the invaluable pilots and crew-trainers of the Shirigaku, but have few instructors remaining to teach the low-quality recruits being dragooned in the north and sent to Kyushu. And they did lose them, as the Marine Corsairs roved among them with stuttering guns. Nevertheless, Kikusui 7 did hole the destroyer Stormes, while damaging the destroyer-transports Bates and Barry so badly that Bates sank and Barry was converted to a kamikaze decoy.
But the Divine Winds were back on May 27-28 for Floating Chrysanthemum 8, a novelty in that on the twenty-seventh some eighty-five Army and Navy aircraft attacked at night. Here was a demonstration of how inept aircraft designed for daytime combat can be fighting in darkness. Picket destroyers Anthony and Braine firing on radar quickly took out an indefinite number of invisible assailants, identified only by gasoline fires on black water. Wisely, the others waited until dawn to renew the assault, slightly damaging Anthony and mangling Braine to kill about a hundred American seamen and wounding about the same number.
The next day in clearing weather the kikusui were back, this time swooping again on their favorite target: the ships of Radar Picket Station 15. Destroyers Drexler and Lowry were hit and staggered, but above them Marine Corsairs were plucking petals from the Chrysanthemums. Lieutenants R. F. Bourne and J. B. Seaman each downed a red-balled enemy, while Seaman exploded a third. As both pilots joined to attack a fourth, peeling the enemy’s metal hide, its pilot maintained control and plunged into Drexler with an impact that sent flames shooting hundreds of feet high. Within a minute Drexler rolled over and sank, taking 158 men down with her.
Reports of this disaster made eyelids flutter in Washington. Had the enemy perfected a new and fearful explosive? The answer came from a board of inquiry that preferred to believe—and probably correctly—that a heavy bomb striking a ship’s magazine could easily produce such a violent fireball.
After May 28, Admiral Ugaki fully intended to continue his kikusui attacks, sti
ll believing that Admiral Spruance now commanded a ghost fleet of floating wrecks and derelicts. But then bad weather and the Army’s disenchantment with the Floating Chrysanthemums—the generals had always believed that Japanese air power should be husbanded for homeland defense—interfered with his plans. To his dismay General Sugahara and his Sixth Air Army were removed from Navy control. He still had the cooperation of the Army’s Third Air Division, however, and planned to resume what can only be described as his Graveyard Operation with Kikusui 9 on June 3.
Before then American airpower received a powerful reinforcement—in the arrival of a squadron of Army P-47 Thunderbolts. Here was a fighter unrivaled for its speed, armament, armor, and climbing power. On May 28 a flight of eight Thunderbolts under Captain John Vogt jumped twenty-eight Zeros forming in a Lufbery circle—a defensive aerial tactic perhaps copied from a ring of show horses moving tail to nose. Thus, each Zero was to protect the tail of the plane ahead. Because the Zero with its light armament and thin armor was fast and maneuverable, these pilots probably thought they were safe from attack, but the Thunderbolts climbing at full throttle moved high above their quarry at twenty-eight thousand feet—and then came screaming down in a dive that sent six of the enemy flaming into the sea along with two “probables.” Captain Vogt claimed to have accounted for five of them.
Floating Chrysanthemum 9 did take to the skies on June 3, supposedly with about 101 aircraft. But this seems unlikely. The naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison gives only fifty. Whatever their number it was sharply reduced by the Yontan-Kadena Marine Corsairs, succeeding only in holing a minelayer. The next day the kamikaze dove again, but in almost negligible strength. Once again the unfortunate Anthony was their target. To the crew’s unbelieving eyes a suicider barely nicked by gunfire actually bailed out! This most unwarlike tactic, however, availed him nothing: his parachute streamed after him unopened to mark his plunge into the briny. Another plane dived at Anthony but her 40 mm gunners shot it down.