DIVINE WINDKANOYA AIR BASE, KYUSHU, JAPAN
APRIL 6, 1945
The drums rolled. The tokko pilots stood in a long row awaiting their final orders. Each was dressed in a bulky flying suit and helmet, a ceremonial white hachimaki headband tied around his head. The first wave would take off at 1320.
As he always did when dispatching young men to their deaths, Vice Adm. Matome Ugaki wore a somber expression. With him was Combined Fleet chief of staff Vice Adm. Ryunosuke Kusaka, both admirals wearing their starched whites, swords, medals, and white gloves. On long tables before them stretched the row of empty cups, the plates of rice wafers.
Ten-Go was the first and most ambitious of the ten planned kikusui operations. It would be a mass air attack by both tokko aircraft and conventional warplanes, coordinated with the surface attack by the Yamato task force. At the same time, General Ushijima’s 32nd Army was supposed to counterattack on Okinawa and retake the airfields at Yontan and Kadena.
Ugaki was skeptical about Ten-Go’s chances for success. Like most Japanese operations, the complex plan depended on precise timing and careful coordination. From experience Ugaki knew how poorly the army and the navy coordinated their operations. He doubted that General Ushijima would seize the moment to regain the lost ground on Okinawa. He was even more pessimistic about Yamato’s chance of success. Ugaki, an old battleship sailor, had been opposed to the mission. It was “superficial,” he declared, to regard the battleship as useless.
Ugaki spoke to the assembled pilots. In the same low voice he always used when delivering final orders to the tokko warriors, he told them that this was the first of a series of kikusui operations. More than two thousand warplanes were being assembled for the campaign, three-quarters of them dedicated to tokko missions. In a succession of blows they would annihilate the American fleet off Okinawa. The enemy would be paralyzed and unable to proceed with their invasion. The noble young tokko airmen would be in the vanguard of saving the empire.
They gazed back at him in respectful silence. Whether or not they actually believed him didn’t matter. Questioning such an order was not an option. Nor was reneging on their pledge to die for the emperor.
The cups were filled. Solemnly Ugaki raised his to the assembled pilots. “We shall meet at Minatogawa,” he told them.
They had heard Ugaki make this promise several times now. The tokko volunteers who had not yet flown their missions accepted it as an article of faith that the admiral would follow them into death. They would be reunited in spirit at the shrine commemorating the legendary battle of Minatogawa.
The pilots drank from their cups. They saluted Admiral Ugaki, then bowed respectfully. The admiral gave the order to man their planes, and in unison the pilots yelled three banzai cheers. The drums beat a steady tattoo while they trotted to the camouflaged revetments where the armed and ready airplanes were concealed.
Minutes later, the stillness at Kanoya was split by the sound of radial engines coughing and rumbling to life. The first group of attack aircraft—fifty-six Zeroes, each laden with a 250-kilogram armor-piercing bomb—appeared from beneath the camouflage nets and lumbered over the uneven ground toward the runway.
It was an emotional moment. Well-wishers, ground crew, and pilots awaiting their own tokko missions watched and cheered. One after the other the warplanes throttled up and roared down the patched runway. With them went ten Zero fighter escorts. It was insufficient fighter cover, Ugaki knew, but it was a sign of the times. The ten fighters and their pilots were all that could be spared. Experienced fighter pilots were in such short supply that their commanders were refusing to send them into hopeless duels with the superior enemy air forces.
When the last of the tokko planes had disappeared in the cloudy southern sky, Ugaki returned to his bunker. He settled himself into his command chair and assumed the position that he had adopted since the first tokko operations—sitting upright, hands folded in his lap, eyes fixed straight ahead as if he were in a trance. He would remain there until the first reports came back from the battle.
The kamikazes were coming. That much U.S. intelligence officers had gleaned from the intercepted Japanese communications. April 6 was supposed to be the day of the greatest massed attack yet staged by the kamikazes.
Admiral Spruance put the entire Fifth Fleet on alert. From the radar picket stations to the beaches at Hagushi to the anchorage at Kerama Retto, guns were loaded and pointed skyward. Radarmen in every red-lighted CIC compartment peered into their yellowish green scopes. Lookouts on every ship gazed upward at the scudding clouds. Flights of Corsair and Hellcat CAP fighters droned over each carrier task group.
Early morning—a favorite time for the kamikazes—passed and nothing happened. Afternoon came and the weather worsened. Visibility went down and a northwest wind whipped the surface. A high broken cloud layer obscured the sun, bathing the sea in dark splotches of shadow. Still nothing happened.
Then, a few minutes before 1500, it began. First came the sudden, frenetic radio calls. Radarmen had picked up a wave of incoming bogeys. CAP fighters on the northern stations roared northward to intercept them.
More raiders were showing up behind the first wave. All seemed to be headed southwestward for the Hagushi beachhead and the fleet of transport ships. Their course would take them directly over the northern radar picket stations, called RP1 and RP2.
To Cmdr. R. E. Westholm, skipper of the destroyer Bush, the radar picket station designated RP1 had just become the most dangerous place on earth. Westholm could see them coming, a swarm of dark-colored bandits swinging into an orbit around his ship. They looked like raptors swooping down on an easy kill.
During the predawn hours Bush and her sister ship USS Colhoun had fended off sporadic night raiders. Those were hecklers, mostly feeling out the defenses of the U.S. fleet. These kamikazes swarming around Bush were the real thing.
First came the Aichi dive-bombers, code-named “Val.” The Val was an obsolete, fixed-gear warplane, easy to identify with its big, flowing wheel fairings. The slow-flying bomber was relatively easy to hit, too, and Bush’s gunners flamed two of them. A few minutes later a Nakajima B6N “Jill” torpedo bomber, a tougher target, came skimming in low on the water, somehow penetrating Bush’s wall of antiaircraft fire. Westholm swung his ship broadside to give his main battery a clear shot. Every gun on the destroyer was hurling fire at the incoming kamikaze.
Nothing could stop it. The Jill kept coming, weaving and dodging, finally crashing with deadly precision between Bush’s twin stacks. The high-explosive bomb penetrated to the forward engine room, killing every man in the compartment and most of those in the two fire rooms. Dead in the water, Bush listed to port, seawater flooding her lower compartments.
From 10 miles away, the destroyer Colhoun came racing at 35 knots to help while her skipper, Cmdr. G. R. Wilson, frantically called for more CAP fighters. The fighters assigned to cover them were already engaged with incoming bandits. Now they were running out of fuel and ammunition.
The stricken Bush was easy to spot. An oily black smoke column marked the position where she drifted, drawing more kamikazes. As Colhoun closed with Bush, a swarm of fifteen kamikazes bore down on both ships.
Bush’s big guns—her 5-inchers—were jammed. Her gunners blazed away with the Bofors 40-millimeters, and Colhoun joined in with her own batteries. It was like swatting hornets. Kill one, and another would appear in its place. The kamikazes were attacking from all directions. Colhoun’s 5-inchers scored a hit on a diving Zero, splashing it midway between the two destroyers. “One down, eleven to go,” Colhoun’s skipper remarked.
Colhoun’s gunners killed another off the starboard bow, splashing him 50 yards abeam. Then another. But a fourth Zero, diving toward the port bow, plunged into Colhoun’s main deck, wiping out both 40-millimeter gun mounts and their crews. The bomb exploded in the aft fire room, killing every man inside and rupturing the main steam line.
Colhoun was wounded, but she was still making 15 knots, most of her guns still firing. Her damage control crews were getting the blazes under control when three more kamikazes—two Val dive-bombers and a Zero—bored in from opposite sides.
The two Vals went down in a hail of fire, but the Zero didn’t. The kamikaze penetrated the hail of fire and crashed into Colhoun’s forward fire room. The exploding bomb blew out both boilers, ripping a 4-by-20-foot hole in the hull below the waterline.
Now Colhoun was as badly crippled as Bush. Each of the stricken destroyers was sending up a tall, unmistakable pillar of roiling black smoke, and the kamikazes seemed bent on finishing them off instead of going after fresh targets.
At 1725, Colhoun downed a Zero 150 yards abeam, but at the same time two Vals came swooping through the defensive fire. One clipped Colhoun’s after stack with a wing tip, showering the deck with flaming gasoline. The kamikaze’s bomb exploded in the water alongside, ripping a hole in the destroyer’s hull at the waterline. The explosion and cascade of seawater blew every man off Colhoun’s fantail.
The second Val was still boring down, but it missed Colhoun. Pulling up, the kamikaze pointed its nose at the nearby Bush. Gutted by fire, her main batteries no longer firing, Bush was almost defenseless. The Val hit the destroyer amidships between the stacks, nearly cleaving the vessel in half.
Bush was doomed, but the kamikazes weren’t finished. At 1745, yet another Zero smashed into the destroyer’s forward port side, killing all the wounded men and medics in the wardroom.
It was Bush’s death blow. Engulfed in flames and settling at the bow, the destroyer abruptly broke in half and sank.
Meanwhile in the gathering darkness, Colhoun was fighting for her life. Another Zero, attacking the dying Bush, switched targets at the last moment and went for Colhoun. Despite withering 40-millimeter fire, the flaming kamikaze exploded into Colhoun’s port side.
Colhoun was finished. With night coming fast, Commander Wilson ordered his crew to abandon ship. Colhoun was still blazing in the darkness, a beacon for more Japanese attackers. She received her coup de grace by gunfire from the destroyer Cassin Young, which had come to rescue survivors.
The ordeal for the crews of the sunken destroyers wasn’t over. Many who survived the attacks were terribly burned. In the darkened ocean they clung to the few rafts and flotsam remaining from their lost ships. Because enemy airplanes were still overhead, search vessels couldn’t use floodlights to illuminate the area. By the time the rescue operation ended the next morning, a total of 129 officers and men, most of them from Bush, were dead or missing.
The radar picket stations weren’t the only scenes of action. From the catwalk outside the bridge of New Mexico, Admiral Spruance had a front-row view of the drama off the western shore of Okinawa. CAP fighters had chased four bandits southward from the island of Ie Shima. Almost directly over Spruance’s flagship they caught up with them. While Spruance watched, all four kamikazes, one after the other, were shot down in flames.
But more were on the way. Rear Adm. Mort Deyo had already begun moving his fire support ships away from their exposed stations near the Hagushi beachhead. As the force of battleships and cruisers, surrounded by a screen of seven destroyers, moved northward toward Ie Shima, lookouts on the lead destroyer, Leutze, spotted bogeys eight miles out. Within seconds, the graying sky turned red with the fire of every antiaircraft gun in the force.
The raiders were Nakajima B5N “Kate” torpedo bombers and Ki-43 “Oscar” fighters. They were coming in so low that the lookouts had spotted them before they appeared on radar. Like the first wave, they were going for the destroyers instead of the higher-value targets behind them.
The destroyers in the fore—Leutze and Newcomb—took the brunt of the attack. In the space of a few minutes, a kamikaze crashed into Newcomb’s after stack. Another fell to the destroyer’s guns, but a third, carrying a larger weapon than the standard 250-kilogram bomb, struck amidships. The explosion blew up both engine rooms and turned the after fire room into a mass of rubble. Every man in the three spaces was killed instantly.
Seconds later yet another kamikaze was boring in on Newcomb’s port beam, crashing into the forward stack, spraying the entire midsection of the destroyer with flaming gasoline. Newcomb became an inferno, spouting flame hundreds of feet into the darkening sky. The smoke was so dense that nearby ships lost sight of the destroyer and thought she had gone down.
The destroyer Leutze came racing to assist the blazing Newcomb. As Leutze’s crew was passing hose lines to fight the fires, a fifth kamikaze streaked in toward Newcomb’s bridge. At the last second, a 5-inch antiaircraft shell caught the attacker. The kamikaze veered off, crashing into Leutze’s fantail and exploding.
Now Leutze was in as much peril as Newcomb. The explosion holed her hull and jammed her rudder hard right. Leutze’s skipper, Lt. Leon Grabowsky, who at age twenty-seven was one of the Navy’s youngest destroyer captains, ordered every heavy object jettisoned—torpedoes, depth charges, topside weights—keeping the destroyer afloat so that it could be towed by a minesweeper back to Kerama Retto.
Both tin cans stayed afloat. Back in the Kerama Retto anchorage, astonished sailors gawked at the fire-blackened, shattered hulks. The wreck of a kamikaze plane still lay across Leutze’s fantail. Newcomb’s number two stack was gone, and her number one stack was bent at a garish angle to starboard. Her fantail was only six inches above the water.
Forty men from Newcomb were dead, as were eight aboard Leutze. Neither ship would see combat again.
Like swarms of locusts, they kept coming. Fresh waves of kamikazes threaded their way through the gauntlet of CAP fighters, headed for the ships of the amphibious force off the Hagushi beachhead.
The gunners on the transports lacked the discipline of those on the tin cans and the battlewagons. They were firing helter-skelter, without clear direction, shooting just as enthusiastically at friendly CAP fighters as they were the enemy. Shrapnel from their gunfire was raining back down on the task force, causing almost as much damage as the kamikazes.
Three Kawasaki Ki-45 twin-engine Nick fighters and a pair of Aichi Val dive-bombers made it through the CAP screen, then ran into the storm of fire from the transports. Four were shot down, and the fifth, apparently losing his nerve, retreated back to the north. More showed up to take their place, this time picking on destroyers of the antisubmarine screen.
The tin cans Witter and Morris each took kamikaze strikes but stayed afloat. Another, Hyman, was struck in the torpedo tubes, causing a violent explosion. Yet another destroyer, Howorth, rushing to assist Hyman, took a kamikaze in her main battery director. Mullany, patrolling on the eastern side of Okinawa, also received a crippling kamikaze hit. The stricken destroyers were all dragged back to Kerama Retto, which was beginning to resemble a destroyer graveyard.
To the north, a minesweeper unit was clearing the channel between Iheya Retto and the eastern shore of Okinawa when they came under heavy kamikaze attack. Marine Corsairs from the Fast Carrier Task Force ripped into the attacking aircraft, shooting down twenty.
It wasn’t enough. Five kamikazes singled out the destroyer Emmons. Two dove into the destroyer’s fantail, taking out her rudder, and another crashed into the bow. Another flew directly into the destroyer’s bridge, killing every man in the CIC. The fifth attacker crashed into the already blazing superstructure.
Emmons was finished. When the destroyer Ellyson came alongside two hours later to rescue survivors, Emmons’s hulk was still afire. Worried that the derelict would drift ashore to an enemy-held beach, Admiral Turner gave the order to sink her with gunfire. Of Emmons’s crew, eleven officers and fifty-three men had been killed.
As devastating as the attacks on the destroyers were, the kamikazes were still missing the bigger game. The anchorage at Kerama Retto where ammunition and fuel ships were clustered like ducks in a gallery came under only sporadic attack. A small landing ship filled with fuel oil was struck and blazed like a beacon through the night. Two thin-hulled Victory ships loaded with ammunition were hit. Their burning cargoes continued shooting tracers and explosions into the night sky until the ships were finally sunk by gunfire.
The real prize, the fast carriers of Mitscher’s Task Force 58, made it through the day unscathed. They were operating far enough out in the Pacific that most of the ill-trained kamikaze pilots were unable to find them. Of those who did, most were shot down by CAP fighters or antiaircraft fire.
With nightfall came a break in the attacks. The day had been a sobering demonstration of Japan’s most fearsome weapon. The kamikazes had sunk three destroyers—Bush, Colhoun, and Emmons. Three more—Leutze, Newcomb, and Morris—were damaged beyond salvage. Several other badly damaged destroyers would be repaired and return to service, but only Howorth and Hyman would see duty before the end of the war. Two ammunition ships and an LST went down at Kerama Retto. A destroyer escort, a light carrier, and seven minesweepers had taken damage.
The most sobering statistic was the toll of dead and wounded. In all, 367 U.S. Navy men died in kikusui No. 1, most in a gruesome fashion. For those who weren’t killed outright by the attacks, death came from terrible burns, mostly from flaming gasoline and ruptured steam lines. Horribly wounded survivors often spent hours of agony in the water without medical attention.
Though American losses in the first kikusui operation were severe, they were far fewer than what the Japanese reported. Radio Tokyo claimed that sixty American ships, including two battleships and three cruisers, had been sunk, and sixty-one more heavily damaged. The attacks were “a blow from which the enemy will never recover.”
While exaggerating the damage inflicted on the Americans, the Japanese high command withheld the facts about their own losses. In the first kikusui operation, seven hundred airplanes, half of them kamikazes, were thrown into battle. The lives of more than 350 tokko airmen had been snuffed out like expendable candles.
The Japanese public was not ready for the hard truth about the tokko warriors. Nor was the man who had sent them to their death.
At 1630 Ugaki roused himself from his command chair. The first wave of tokko aircraft had closed with the U.S. fleet, and reports were being relayed from the battle scene. Ugaki’s spirits soared when he heard a scratchy transmission from one of the radio-equipped tokko aircraft: “I am crashing on a carrier.”
This was exhilarating news. At the same time, the airwaves were filled with American radio transmissions about ships under attack and commanders requesting help. It meant that the tokko warriors were hitting their targets.
Admiral Ugaki’s only disappointment was, as usual, with the army. General Ushijima’s 32nd Army wasn’t doing its share. Ushijima hadn’t launched the promised counterattack on Okinawa in concert with the kikusui operation. “They didn’t move at all,” Ugaki complained, “saying that the general attack was to start in the night of the 8th.”
Still, Ugaki was willing to believe in miracles. “The sea around Okinawa thus turned into a scene of carnage,” he wrote, “and a reconnaissance plane reported that as many as 150 columns of black smoke were observed, while others described it as difficult to observe them.”
The admiral needed no further proof. His tokko airmen had delivered a devastating blow to the American fleet. “It was almost certain that we destroyed four carriers,” he wrote that evening.
Kikusui No. 1 was such a resounding success, Ugaki decided, that it would continue into the next day, supporting the historic mission of the Yamato.