The First Hellcat Ace

The Japanese launched their first missions using the manned flying bomb, the Ohka, on March 21, 1945. From that date—with their focus on the fleet assembled at Okinawa—they tried to shape the war to their favor with this strange, desperate weapon. The Ohka was essentially a 2,600-pound bomb mounted into the nose of a cigar-shaped fuselage with stubby wings and three small rocket motors fixed into the tail. Capable of speeds of more than 500 miles per hour, the bomb was small, only 20 feet long with a wingspan of just over 16 feet. What made it unique was its guidance system: a live pilot. The concept was fantastically morbid to us, and we quickly dubbed the weapon baka, which was Japanese for foolish or crazy.

Unable to take off on its own, and obviously not designed with the capability to land, the Ohka had to be slung underneath a mother plane, usually a Betty bomber. The mother plane then carried the flying bomb to within range of our fleet—about 15 miles—before releasing it. Upon release, the Ohka pilot had to fire the rockets, which weren’t very reliable, spot a target and fly through our antiaircraft fire and into a ship.

While plausible—although grotesque—in concept, the actual deployment posed formidable problems. First, the weight and drag of the Ohka drastically limited the speed of the mother planes, making them more vulnerable than ever to interception by our fighters. Protection of the mother planes with fighter escorts sounded feasible, but the Japanese fighter pilots of the day generally lacked expertise. Combine that with their inferior equipment and it all but negated their effectiveness. In most cases, enemy escorts proved nothing more than a distraction to our hordes of well-trained, well-equipped, and aggressive fighter pilots.

Another problem the Japanese faced stemmed from the characteristics of the flying bomb itself. Its construction was rudimentary at best, and reliability suffered because of it. The pilots had very little training with it, and because of the nature of the mission there was no way to bring back any lessons from its employment in combat. In other words, once the baka bomb was released from its mother ship, the pilot was going to die one way or another. And dead men tell no tales.

Moreover, the pilots, if they were actually launched within range of our ships, had to find a target and then fly the aircraft into it. No one alive knows for sure, but it couldn’t have been easy. Finally, to be effective against a fleet our size, the flying bombs needed to be deployed in huge numbers, and the Japanese simply didn’t possess enough mother planes—or enough Ohkas themselves.

Of the many attempts made against our fleet, at best only a few dozen of these flying suicide bombs were ever carried close enough to be launched. Typically, the mother planes—with or without fighter escort—were set upon by our fighters and sent down in flames long before they could get close enough to launch their payloads. And of those few Ohkas that actually made their way through our antiaircraft fire and managed to strike a ship, none was given sole credit for destroying even a single surface combatant.

Considering how few of these manned bombs were actually launched, it is probably unusual that I personally witnessed two Ohka attacks on two separate days. I was on a radar picket combat air patrol on the afternoon of April 12, when my attention was caught by a small, dark shape streaking downward at very high speed. Off to my left side and below me, this thing was making a line straight for a destroyer on the picket line. We had already been briefed on the existence of Ohkas, and because of its odd shape and the high speed at which it was moving, I instantly knew what it was.

The purpose-built Ohka (Cherry Blossom) suicide aircraft was a flawed concept and an operational failure. McWhorter encountered these piloted, rocket-powered bombs during the battle of Okinawa. (Wikimedia Commons)

The Japanese pilot must have known what he was doing, because only a few seconds later he crashed himself and the bomb directly into the bow of the destroyer. The entire ship seemed to be engulfed in the huge explosion, which sent a plume of fire, smoke, and spray hundreds of feet into the sky. Shock waves rippled out from the stricken ship, sending more rings of spray into the air. I felt certain that the ship and her crew were finished.

But we Americans build a sturdy boat. When the smoke cleared, the ship was still floating, though her bow looked to be almost completely blown off. Almost immediately, my division was given a vector, and we left the ship behind in a vain search for bombers that might be carrying other Ohkas.

I didn’t expect the ship to stay afloat. I later learned that the ship was the destroyer Stanly, and not only did she stay afloat but she never stopped making way. In fact, she took several more kamikaze hits that day and suffered only three men wounded.

A couple of weeks later I was again on station above a radar picket destroyer when, in almost an exact repeat of what had happened to the Stanly, another baka attacked a destroyer. This bomb either missed the ship or smashed clear through it without exploding, because it didn’t detonate until it struck the water on the other side.

Manned flying bombs aside, the Japanese were contesting Okinawa with as many aircraft as they could muster. In fact, during the entire campaign, they expended more than 2,000 kamikaze sorties alone. Thousands more sorties were flown in more conventional attacks against our fleet, and quite often our combat air patrols were overwhelmed by the sheer number of enemy aircraft that suddenly appeared, mostly from airfields in southern Japan. But by this point in the war, fortunately, most of the enemy pilots were so poorly trained that only rarely were they able to shoot down an American pilot. More often than not, the Japanese tried to escape rather than engage in aerial combat.

Aside from having little training, the enemy—particularly the kamikaze corps—was reduced to using obsolete equipment. Because their factories just couldn’t produce the numbers of airplanes they needed, the Japanese were forced to throw into the air whatever they could collect from their far-flung airfields. Indeed, it was not uncommon for our pilots to encounter older types of aircraft with fixed, nonretractable, landing gear—something we never saw during our combat tour in 1943–44.

All this translated into an incredibly lopsided tally of aerial combat in favor of our forces. Many pilots scored in the double digits, and there were quite a few ace-in-a-day pilots. In short, enemy airplanes were everywhere, and they were easy to shoot down.

I just couldn’t seem to find them. Except for the big fight on April 17—the one in which Mike Michaelis wouldn’t let me play—I hadn’t seen an enemy airplane in the sky for weeks. If there was big action over the fleet, it was the same day that I was moving mud with bombs on Okinawa. If enemy aircraft managed to make it to the island some other day, then I was probably in some quiet sector over the fleet. I didn’t know what the problem was. Perhaps it had something to do with which side of the bunk I crawled out on, or the way I held my tongue when I flew, or maybe I was unwittingly paying my dues for having seen so much aerial combat early on in the war. At any rate, it was frustrating. If there were enemy airplanes around, it was almost a certainty that I was nowhere nearby.

As we continued to grind out sorties, Okinawa quickly became a gruesome consumer of our men and equipment. On April 14, Ensign Eddie Jindra went over the side as he attempted to take off during an enemy attack. Luckily, he survived the plunge and was later rescued by a destroyer that had returned to look for him after the attack. Not so lucky was Ensign Bill Mason, who was killed in a landing accident on April 17. As the action intensified over the next several weeks and we all became worn out, these types of operational accidents became nearly as deadly a hazard as the Japanese.

And the pilots weren’t the only ones at risk. Even without kamikaze attacks, the deck of an aircraft carrier was one of the most hostile workplaces in the world, keeping our deck crews and mechanics always at tremendous risk. One accident I remember involved a sailor who accidentally drove an aircraft tug off the edge. He was never found. There was another incident when a plane captain servicing a torpedo bomber walked into a spinning propeller—a gruesome accident that every one of us had imagined but hoped never to see.

The heavy, dangerous workload and the threat of kamikaze attacks began to wear on everyone, and our cramped wardroom arrangement didn’t help the matter. The situation was ripe for an incident, and what happened—in retrospect—is quite humorous. At the time, however, it was rather hair-raising.

As a result of the kamikaze attacks at Iwo Jima, we had moved our squadron ready rooms down to the officers’ wardroom, which was just below the armored hangar deck. But since the wardroom wasn’t designed for such use, there was nowhere to hang our flight gear; we just piled it on the deck along the bulkheads. Our flight gear included Smith & Wesson .38 Special revolvers that we carried in shoulder holsters when we flew. Loaded with tracer ammunition, they were to be used primarily as signal guns during rescue, rather than for self-protection.

The tempo of operations during the fight for Okinawa was exhausting and mistakes were common. Ensign William Mason was killed when his aircraft went off the deck in a landing accident on May 17, 1945. (U.S. Navy)

Anyway, one day in late April, two of the wardroom stewards got into a rather heated argument. One of them reached down into a pile of flight gear, grabbed one of the .38 pistols, and went after the other. The steward who was the intended target recognized what was about to happen and desperately scrambled toward the hatch, intent on a record-breaking exit.

Six incredibly loud shots rang out, and .38-caliber tracers began ricocheting around the wardroom. The pilots in the room immediately made a mass dive under the tables and did not emerge until the shooting had stopped. Fortunately, the mess attendant was a lousy shot and no one was hurt. It was bad enough to go out and get shot at by the Japanese, but to be shot at in your own wardroom was beyond too much!

During one of our standard target combat air patrols over Amami on April 18, we found nothing at the airfield except the usual antiaircraft gun sites. Thinking that we might try something new, I decided to patrol the coastline to see if we could find any of the small suicide boats that our intelligence people told us might be hiding in the coves and inlets.

We were flying at about 1,000 feet, just offshore and about a mile from the airfield, when I spotted a propeller protruding out of the thick vegetation. I wheeled my division back around and, sure enough, there was a very well hidden Zero, all covered with tree branches except for part of its propeller. I set myself up for a gunnery run and strafed it, but it did not burn. It probably had no fuel. Nevertheless, I don’t think that it did any flying after that.

Excited by our find, we snooped around some more and found about a dozen other Zeroes, similarly hidden. We all strafed them a couple of times over, but again none of them burned even though we filled them with bullets. I’m certain that few, if any of them, ever flew again, and I’m also certain that we saved the fleet from a dozen or so kamikazes.

On April 19 we were airborne, loaded for ground support, when we were called up by the airborne strike coordinator and told to report to the forward air controller (FAC) on the ground. The troops were using large colored panels and red smoke to define the front lines for us. Once we established contact with the FAC, he gave us coordinates for our target which was a series of caves on a ridge that ran down the center of the island. The Japanese had apparently been rolling their artillery pieces out of the caves—just barely into the open—firing them, and then rapidly pushing them back into the caves.

We had to take time to visually identify the targets, because by now the Japanese had caught on to our trick of marking targets with white phosphorous artillery rounds or mortar shells. As soon as they saw a white phosphorous round on the ground, they fired their own white phosphorous rounds back behind our lines to confuse us. It worked pretty well.

On this mission, we each carried six high-velocity aerial rockets and a load of napalm. Once in the area, I double-checked the coordinates with the caves I could see on the ridge. I told my division that we would drop the napalm first, then come back around to deliver the rockets. I selected a large, easily discernible cave and told the others to each choose one of several caves to the right of it.

I went to full power and rolled in from 6,000 feet. I knew that every Japanese soldier in sight would take potshots at us as we flew over their lines at low altitude, and I wanted to be going as fast as possible. The initial part of my dive was at about a 45-degree angle. At about 2,000 feet I started strafing just before I pulled back on the stick to reduce my dive angle to about 20 degrees. With my gunsight pipper over the mouth of the cave I released my drop tank from about 150 feet, then pulled up sharply to climb out of the range of small-arms fire. I looked back and saw that the napalm had hit just below the cave and had splashed up into the mouth, engulfing it in a huge fireball. I watched the other three planes in my division and was pleased to see that every cave they targeted received a good dose of napalm.

We came back around and made rocket attacks on other caves on the ridge, firing two rockets on each run from an altitude of about 3,000 feet. The rockets were our favorite air-to-ground weapons as they were very accurate. We put them right into the mouths of the caves.

After we had expended all of our ordnance, the FAC called and congratulated us on our nice hits, then released us to return to the ship. Surprisingly, considering how many enemy troops were on the ground, none of us was hit by ground fire. This mission, with variations such as bombs instead of rockets, was typical of the many, many ground-support missions we flew.

We had another bad accident aboard the Randolph on April 22. Ensign Lowell Rund experienced engine problems shortly after takeoff and had to come back aboard. Unfortunately, he failed to jettison his full 150-gallon drop tank, and when his plane engaged the arresting wire, the tank broke loose and went through the propeller and immediately burst into flames. The fire crews quickly put out the fire and pulled Rund from the cockpit, but he was out of action for some time with third-degree burns on his face and arms.

Lowell Rund landed with a belly tank and engine trouble. The tank detached and the fuel exploded. This is the aftermath. Rund survived with third-degree burns to his face. (U.S. Navy)

The same thing happened on April 24, when one of our ensigns had an emergency shortly after takeoff and had to land immediately. He was directed to land on the Yorktown, as she had an open deck. He made two serious mistakes: he not only forgot to jettison his full drop tank, but he also forgot to safe his guns. When he engaged the arresting wire on the Yorktown, his drop tank tore loose and burst into flames when it hit the whirling propeller. At the same time, the ensign squeezed the trigger and sprayed the deck with machinegun fire—injuring seven deck crewmen and punching holes in several airplanes. He was not badly injured himself, but neither was he a very welcome guest.