IKE KYUSHU MR STRIKES
AS the Japanese strike force flew out to find the Allied carriers, the planes from the Allied carriers were flying in to strike the Japanese air bases. The American pilots were puzzled to find so few aircraft in the air.
They should have looked up. As the Allied planes passed over the Cape Shoto area, the first segment of the Japanese attack units was high above them going the other way. As Admiral Ugaki noted, it was a piece of luck that the Japanese planes, having taken off late, were not in the area where the Allied fighters could see them. As was their habit they formed up and flew high until they spotted the enemy targets.
The Allied planes swooped in low over the Kyushu coast and
The Kamikazes
began hitting the airfields. They were surprised to find so few planes down there, too.
Later the Allied air-intelligence officers decided the Japanese had most of their planes in the air that morning. That was not the case. The truth was that the Japanese concealment program was extremely effective. Hundreds of planes were down there, but the pilots did not see all of them. At Kokubun air base the fighters found a heavy bomber and three Ginga bombers on the apron, getting ready to take off. They destroyed all three by strafing, then destroyed scores of other planes on other fields.
The Allied planes then attacked continually until about 10:00 A.M. Admiral Ugaki estimated their strength at 375 planes.
The Allied attack waves came back again and again in the afternoon. Altogether that day the Japanese counted 1,400 planes over their territory.
A little before 7:00 P.M. the Japanese search planes found five ships, three of them carriers, and reported to base. The strike force was informed and changed course to attack.
The first to attack was a Betty bomber, but it was not a suicide attack in the sense of the Tan Operation. The bombs and torpedoes were not fixed in the aircraft and the pilots had the option of dropping or ramming.
This Betty pilot dropped a bomb on the carrier Enterprise , then tried to crash into the carrier Intrepid. The bomb hit squarely but it was a dud and did not explode. The Intrepid's anti-aircraft fire smashed the Betty and the pilot crashed in the sea just short of his objective. But he was so close and the inertia of the hurtling plane so great that burning fragments bounced onto the carrier and killed two men and wounded forty-three. Fires were started on the hangar deck.
Three dive bombers chose the carrier Yorktown as their target. Two dropped bombs for near misses, the third dropped a bomb that hit the bridge and deflected down through the deck and exploded on the hangar deck. The explosion blew two holes in the ship’s side above the waterline.
The Battle of Japan— II
That was the extent of the damage done by the Japanese to the American task force that day.
Back at Fifth Air Fleet headquarters, Admiral Ugaki waited for results. He learned that one carrier was seen burning, but that is about all he learned. Still, that news brought a smell of success.
He waited all afternoon for results of the first strike. No planes came in to headquarters base, which was understandable. He also waited for results of the second strike, which was supposed to take off in the middle of the afternoon for a dusk attack.
All afternoon the admiral’s staff telephoned the bases but could not get through. There was a good reason: they were under almost constant attack from Admiral Mitscher’s carrier planes.
Finally the admiral left headquarters and traveled to the nearest attack base, from which the Ginga bombers had taken off. He had no sooner arrived than the bad news began to come in. There was no word from the attack group. The air-raid alarm sounded and the admiral ducked for the Ginga squadron’s slit trench outside headquarters. He cowered there as wave after wave of Allied fighters and bombers swept the field, smashing the hangars, blowing up the shops, even destroying the operations office.
Not since the previous October, the admiral later said, had he experienced such a shaking up. (During the Sho Operation, as noted, Admiral Ugaki had been chief of staff to Admiral Kurita on his dash for San Bernardino Strait. They were blown off their flagship, and then aboard the battleship Yamato they took another beating from Allied aircraft.)
Finally, in late afternoon, the pounding ended and the admiral shakily emerged to try to make some order out of the madness that had become base headquarters. All evening, the admiral stayed at the field, trying to get in touch with his subordinate commands. Finally he began to get the picture.
Many of his planes had been lost in the air, many on the ground. The Shin Rai Squadron’s Cherry Blossom suicide unit had been lost completely. They were supposed to take off with escorts, but the escorts had never shown up and the Kamikaze pilots were
230 The Kamikazes
overwhelmed and shot down without a chance to attack.
All those hopes of mid-morning vanished. The morning attack had not been satisfactory; one carrier damaged for fifty-two planes was an unsatisfactory exchange. The afternoon attack had never unfolded. Another day was lost.
That evening Admiral Ugaki went back to his headquarters base. Before the admiral lay down for a troubled rest that night he made sure the search planes were out again to track the enemy. If the Allied ships had not left the area the First Air Fleet would attack again.
The Allied carrier fleet had no intention of leaving the area so soon. The attack on Kyushu was being staged to diminish the danger of air and sea response by the Japanese to the coming invasion of Okinawa. The Japanese search planes found the carrier force at ten minutes after midnight. It was still moving at less than a hundred kilometers off the Kyushu coast.
The admiral was up long before dawn, troubled by the failures of March 18. At headquarters he found Admiral Yokoi and his staff officers, bleary-eyed and worried. His chief of staff and staff officers had been up all night trying to analyze the problems of the March 18 attack. Why had it failed?
They thought they had the answers. The leaders of the strike had lost control as the planes moved in on the enemy ships, and instead of moving in fast in a unit, hitting and moving out, they had tried to fight with the Combat Air Patrol. The result was chaos and loss of the initiative.
In other words, the flight leaders had funked out. That meant the strike was abandoned when it was not even halfway along. On the way home most of the Japanese planes were picked off by the enemy fighters.
Ugaki listened as the staff presented the facts and their opinions, and he called the leaders in and chastened them severely. This he found hard to do, because secretly he knew that the fault lay higher up in the hierarchy than at the flight-leader level.
“But what is past is past,” he told the fliers. “Once again this
The Battle of Japan—II
morning you will go out and this time, you are to do the job right.
“Stick together and attack swiftly at the same time without any hesitation. Be sure you have the carriers in view before attacking. Choose targets carefully. Resolute determination is the answer.”
AT 5:30 A.M. on March 19 Admiral Ugaki’s search planes again found the enemy, with the number of carriers estimated at fourteen to sixteen. This time the Allied planes were conducting strikes on the Inland Sea Four Provinces. This meant the areas of Osaka, Kobe and Kure on the northern coast of Kyushu.
Once again the shock to the Japanese was tremendous. Since the beginning of the war the Inland Sea area had been considered inviolate.
This was the “lake” on which the Japanese naval units conducted early training, and here were the shipyards and bases where the navy felt protected.
Until recently the Inland Sea had been regarded as immune to attack. First the B-29s and now the carrier planes were changing the picture.
The Allied planes this day were after ships more than airfields. They found the battleship Yamato , still the flagship of the almost nonexistent Japanese surface fleet, and the carrier Amagi , and damaged both.
The Allied planes had not flown far to make the attack. The carriers were located about a hundred kilometers south of Cape Shitsudo off Yuyaku Chu.
Admiral Ugaki sent heavy bombers, Ginga bombers, Tenzan bombers and Suisei bombers to conduct conventional attacks on the carriers. By this time, the suicide craze had seized all those who would have it. These were kichigai , the madmen, as they came to be called by the nonsuicidal types. The kichigai , in their turn, called those who wanted to live the sukebei , or lechers, because they secretly forswore the delights of the Yasukuni shrine in favor of those of the teahouse.
The Kamikazes
The attack unit that set out on the morning of March 19 was made up of both types of pilots. Admiral Ugaki was preparing his suicide units for Operation Ten Go, but many of the First Air Fleet fliers were already determined that they would function as Kamikazes.
THE morning search had come across Admiral Davison’s American task group. The first ship to be hit was the Franklin , the ship Admiral Arima had gone for just before the opening of the Sho Operation in the Philippines.
The Franklin was launching her second strike that morning, under a heavy overcast with a thick cloud layer at two thousand feet. One of Admiral Ugaki’s bombers approached through the overcast. It came in so fast that the anti-aircraft gunners were caught by surprise. The plane dropped two bombs and zoomed off.
One bomb pierced the flight deck and exploded on the hangar deck, which was filled with planes that were gassed and armed with bombs for the air strike. The bomb exploded among the planes, set them to burning and exploding, and started huge fires. The disaster was dreadful: every man on that part of the deck was killed. The fires spread down to number three deck.
The second bomb struck the other end of the flight deck, exploded on the hangar deck among planes that were tuning up to be launched and set them to burning and exploding. Both of the carrier’s elevators were smashed. Through the openings rose clouds of smoke and flame. The smoke from the fires quickly enveloped the carrier and she could no longer be seen beneath the pall.
From the vantage point of other ships, the pall appeared to be a shroud, so extensive were the fires. Six separate explosions could be heard aboard the task-force flagship Bunker Hill, which was fifty miles away.
The captain ordered everyone but the firefighters to abandon ship, and most officers and men gave her up for lost. Through enormous effort and great bravery the Franklin was saved, although
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she suffered enormous casualties: a thousand men killed and wounded. She was also out of the war.
The next ship to come under attack was the Wasp, which was struck just two minutes after the Franklin was hit. A Japanese bomber came screaming down through the overcast and dropped a bomb. It penetrated the hangar deck and exploded in the galley on the third deck, decimating the crew of cooks, bakers and mess attendants who were preparing to serve breakfast.
The Wasp suffered more than three hundred casualties that morning. Fires broke out on five decks and a huge column of smoke and flame shot upward from the ship.
The Japanese pilots announced that the carrier was burning; there was no mistake about that. A few minutes later a Kamikaze dived on the ship, but the gunners shot the plane down and it crashed in the water close to the carrier’s side.
The Wasp was still operating, although badly damaged, and three days later was detached and sent back to Ulithi. Later she left for Pearl Harbor and finally made it to the navy yard at Bremerton, Washington, where she was laid up for repairs until the middle of June.
The results of the March 18—19 raid soon became known throughout the Allied fleet and created more than a little trepidation. A thousand casualties aboard the Franklin —it was enough to make a man wonder. For the first time during the Pacific war, morale threatened to become a problem in the American navy.
The day’s attack, and the serious damage done to two major American carriers, was proof of the soundness of Admiral Onishi’s theory that if enough of the carriers could be put out of action, the American drive could be halted.
But there was a catch, and Admiral Ugaki was shortly to become painfully aware of it.
Although twenty planes went out to hit the enemy and fifty fighters later joined in, the attack was a failure from Ugaki’s point of view. Many of the planes did not attack at all. The Japanese planes encountered various waves of Allied fighters returning from
The Kamikazes
the Northern Kyushu strikes, and Allied fighters exacted a heavy toll of the survivors of the aborted attack.
At the end of the day Admiral Ugaki knew that once again his First Air Fleet had failed. All the admonitions, all the advice from the staff officers, had failed to bring the pilots and their leaders into fighting trim.
To be sure, he could blame the army for part of it. The army air forces reported to Imperial Headquarters that they had put into action Air Group Seven and Air Group Ninety-eight. They claimed to have sunk a carrier, two other warships and damaged two warships in the two-day battle off the coast of Kyushu.
Admiral Ugaki’s fliers had never seen the army planes but they did know one thing: the army had not shown up on schedule to carry out the combined attack that had been planned. Admiral Ugaki knew that the army fields had taken a worse beating in the Allied Air attacks than his own. However, the army failures were no excuse for the failures of the naval air arm.
The attack of March 19 had failed for the same reason that the attack of March 18 had missed the mark. The leaders had hesitated before taking the planes in, and the American gunners had had time to put up a hail of fire.
The fighters had allowed themselves to be drawn off and had engaged in what Ugaki called “guerrilla battles,” instead of operating as a unit. In each case the leaders had failed to lead.
And that failure meant a missed opportunity and many casualties. In two days the First Air Fleet had lost 308 men in the air and on the ground.
The reason for the failure was as old as air battle: inadequate training. The Americans had suffered from it at the beginning of the war when the Japanese were the experts. But those expert pilots were long gone and the neophytes at the controls of the Gingas and the Zeroes were no match for the canny and experienced Allied pilots.
What had failed, Admiral Ugaki had to admit ruefully, was the vaunted “fighting spirit” of the samurai. The reason for the failure,
The Battle of Japan—II
the admiral wrote in his secret diary, was the failure of the leaders at the top to prepare the troops for tactical operations. Thorough training was the secret of success as it had been in the days of the great clan wars between the samurai.
“As a rule,” wrote Admiral Ugaki, “improper actions and improper martial spirit as from time immemorial are the causes of fatal failure. That has to be understood.”
Admiral Ugaki had not been one of those who espoused the suicide idea early on. But now the realities of the Japanese situation were inescapable. How many times had it been? The conventional air attack, even when spiced with suicide pilots, had failed to win the victory that was needed. Much, much more had to be done.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO