CHAPTER SIX
In the middle of March the planning stages for Operation Iceberg came to an end and the preinvasion bombardment intended to soften up Okinawa for the attack began. Now Task Force Fifty-eight under Admiral Spruance sortied from its anchorage at Ulithi for the first phase of destroying enemy airpower based on Kyushu.
Spruance’s fast carriers could not have appeared at a more difficult time for Admiral Ugaki. Preparations for Ten-Go were not complete, and even if they had been, the Heavenly Operation’s prime targets were to be comparatively defenseless troop transports and supply ships—not those seventeen dreadful American flattops with their thousand airplanes, those half-dozen big battleships, those fourteen cruisers—all of which could fight back. Only the Fifth Air Japanese Fleet was ready for action, and of its eight air groups two were strictly one-way suiciders. Even these heroic kamikaze had been so few hours in the air that they still had difficulty landing their planes. Kyushu’s fifty-five airfields had not yet been made ready for the anticipated raids, although Ugaki’s engineers were tunneling into the hills to shelter pilots, troops, ordnance, and repair facilities, while camouflaging runways and littering abandoned fields with dummies and useless aircraft. Communications were poor—as they usually were among the Japanese—and there were real problems in transmitting orders from Ugaki’s headquarters at Kanoya. Poor mechanical communication inhibited Japanese battle coordination throughout the war, but even worse was the consistent failure to report defeat, perhaps because to do so would require the unfortunate commander to kill himself. Probably the worst instance of this peculiarly Japanese weakness was after the Battle of Midway. Admiral Yamamoto never told the Army he had lost four carriers there; although he informed Premier Hideki Tojo he had been defeated, he never supplied the details. Emperor Hirohito heard nothing. On a much smaller scale, but perhaps even more shocking, was the report to Tokyo Headquarters of the complete annihilation of the two-thousand-man Ichiki Detachment by the Second Battalion, First Marines, on Guadalcanal. All that was revealed was that “the attack of the Ichiki Detachment was not entirely successful.” Japan’s unique ideographic language was another cause of imprecise orders. Finally, the acrimonious debates that could divide staff planners at every level was one more hindrance; such a furor arose at Imperial Headquarters over whether or not to use the Special Attack Forces against Spruance’s approaching fleet.
One side was against expending the kamikaze against enemy warships when the true purpose of Ten-Go was to destroy as many troop transports and supply ships as possible, while the opposing group argued that a passive defense on Kyushu would expose the island to such destruction from sea and sky that there wouldn’t be any aircraft left to strike TF 58. In the end, Tokyo ordered Ugaki to hit Spruance with what he had.
He did. From the start of the American attack at 5:45 A.M. on March 18 and throughout the following day Ugaki hurled 193 planes—including 69 kamikaze—at the Americans again attacking in four separate carrier groups. Of these, 161 planes—or 83 percent—were lost, while another 50 planes were damaged on the ground. Even with such staggering losses Admiral Ugaki was gratified, for his pilots—again retrieving victory from defeat with a few strokes of the pen, and for whom all minnows were whales during those two days—had reported hitting five carriers, two battleships, three cruisers, and one unidentified ship. But they reported these “losses” with such joyful shouts of victory that Ugaki assumed that they were all sunk, and that Spruance had withdrawn because his fleet was so badly crippled that the Okinawa invasion would be postponed for some time.
Actually, TF 58—though shaken—was far from being crippled. Japanese bombers had indeed scored hits, damaging four big carriers: Wasp seriously and Franklin so badly that she was presumed lost. It was at exactly 7:08 A.M. on March 19 that Franklin ’s ordeal began. At that moment a lone Judy3 bomber undetected by radar emerged from a low overcast to drop two 550-pound bombs from only a hundred feet above the flattop’s wooden flight deck. The first missile pierced the deck just ahead of a pair of Helldiver bombers, while the second penetrated aft among a group of twenty-nine fueled and armed Helldivers, Avengers, and Corsairs awaiting their turn to be launched. Zooming up and away from the double explosions’ flame and shock waves, the Judy was unharmed by the fusillade of shells fired at her by the carrier’s AA gunners, but was shot down by Commander E. B. Parker, chief of Franklin’s air group. But its destruction was small compensation for the dreadful damage it had inflicted on the carrier.
Both bombs exploded in the hangar deck, setting afire twenty-three planes, fueled, armed, and awaiting their turn to be moved by elevator to the flight deck above. Flames and explosives flashing from the stricken planes instantly killed most of a line of about two hundred sailors and airmen waiting to descend to the mess deck below for breakfast. Almost simultaneously a huge and growing cloud of black smoke enveloped Franklin, obscuring her from the sight of surrounding ships.
On the navigation bridge concussions struck Franklin’s skipper, Captain Leslie Gehres, knocking him sprawling. Jumping erect, he was horrified to see “a sheet of flame come out from under the starboard side of the flight deck” engulfing the starboard batteries and spreading aft. At the same instant, Gehres saw that “a great column of flame and black smoke came out from the forward elevator well.” To clear the smoke and flame from his ship, he ordered Quartermaster V. R. Ryan to steer Franklin to the right. Ryan did, but succeeded in surrounding the entire “island” superstructure—himself and the skipper included—in a cloud of hot, oily smoke issuing from the parked planes burning aft. Realizing that his ship was also stricken in its stern, Gehres ordered Ryan to swing the carrier the other way, meanwhile ordering the still-functioning engine room to increase speed by two-thirds. Almost at once the scorching smoke was blown clear of Franklin.
Now there ensued a spate of morning-long blasts, mostly from bombs and Tiny Tim twelve-inch rockets stored on deck. The Tiny Tim were especially frightening to men trying to fight the flames, because, as Commander Joe Taylor, the ship’s executive, later described it, “Some screamed by the bridge to starboard, some to port and some straight up the flight deck.” Yet, even in the midst of this death-dealing holocaust, neither Gehres nor Taylor lost their sense of humor. “Joe,” Gehres said when he saw Parker approaching, “I’ll have to say the same thing the admiral told you when you were last bombed: your face is dirty as hell!”
Grinning, the knot in his stomach quickly coming undone, Parker hurried to the flight deck to organize fire-fighting parties. From there he hastened to the hangar deck to organize the same details. Because foam and CO2 were useless to squelch the inferno raging on Franklin’s decks, a pair of emergency pumps began supplying salt water to the fire hoses now put into play. Meanwhile, hundreds of sailors and airmen trapped by the flames took the only recourse possible to save themselves: they jumped overboard to a man, until there were long strings of heads bobbing on either side of the carrier. While Franklin pulled ahead of the swimmers at a steady eight knots, pilot-rescue destroyers closed her stern to pick up the survivors. Eventually they rescued hundreds.
Both to Captain Gehres and Rear Admiral R. E. Davison, commander of Task Group 58.2, it was clear that Franklin was badly hurt and might go under. To continue to direct his ships and planes against the enemy, Davison had no other choice but to remove his flag to another ship. But as he prepared to board the light cruiser Santa Fe, which he had ordered to come alongside the blazing Franklin to help fight fires and take off wounded, he was pleased to hear Gehres flatly reject any proposal to abandon ship. Gehres knew that perhaps three hundred of his men were trapped below in a mess compartment beneath the blazing hangar deck. “I had promised these kids I’d get them out,” he explained. Meanwhile, Dr. J. L. Fuelling, a ship’s physician, calmed the trapped sailors by ordering them to sit quietly and not consume oxygen by talking. As they sat terrified—who would not be?—in the stifling heat, the only air reaching them came from a hole in the ship’s side just big enough to pass a baseball through. It is probable that they might have suffocated if not rescued soon, and that succor did come from a brave junior-grade lieutenant named Donald Cary.
As ship’s fuel and water officer, Cary was familiar with the maze of passageways and compartments belowdecks, and he relied upon this knowledge to grope his way to locate the trapped bluejackets and lead them topside to safety—a daring feat for which he received a Medal of Honor.
That highest military award in the gift of the United States also went to Chaplain Joseph O‘Callahan. To Commander Stephen Jurka, Franklin’s navigator, Father O’Callahan was “a soul-stirring sight. He seemed to be everywhere, giving Extreme Unction to the dead and dying, urging the men on and himself handling hoses, jettisoning ammunition and doing everything he could to save the ship.” He seemed as composed as his Master moving through the smoke with the cross on his helmet shining like a beacon, “his head bowed slightly as if in meditation or prayer.” Marveling at his serenity, Captain Gehres said: “I never saw a man so completely disregard the danger of being killed ...”
Perhaps the most awesome feat of seamanship during Franklin’s entire ordeal came from Captain Hal Fitz of the Santa Fe, who daringly slammed into the carrier’s side, remaining there to fight fires and take off wounded as well as able sailors. In spite of continuing explosions like strings of giant firecrackers, Fitz doggedly held Santa Fe fast, his own hoses joining Franklin’s in dousing flames, meanwhile taking aboard eight hundred of the carrier’s seamen.
By noon the fires were dying down and the explosions less frequent and dangerous. But Franklin was still dead in the water, her black gangs having been driven from the engine rooms by intense heat. Commandeering a pickup force of messmen, Commander Taylor successfully seized a towline from the heavy cruiser Pittsburgh and began a crawling withdrawal from Japanese waters at a limping speed of six knots. That night a special detail equipped with breathing apparatus reduced Franklin’s dangerous list of thirty degrees while a party of daring volunteers braved smoke and heat to enter a boiler room and relight a pair of boilers. Franklin began to move under its own power.
The next day, with six boilers operating, the carrier dropped the Pittsburgh tow and went cleaving through the waves at a spanking fifteen knots. But then, in early afternoon, hearts breathing free at last constricted in fear again when another bold Judy bomber came gliding out of the sun. Without power to operate the flattop’s plentiful AA guns, Franklin appeared helpless—until another crew of volunteers wrestled a heavy quadruple 40 mm gun mount around and fired it so accurately that the Judy was forced to nose upward at its release point, and its bombs—almost grazing the carrier—exploded harmlessly in the sea about two hundred feet from the ship.
Soon Franklin was out of the impact area. Captain Gehres now took stock of his human losses. He was shocked to find that 724 of his men had been killed and another 1,428 either wounded or unavailable and presumed to be aboard the five destroyers and two cruisers assigned to rescue duty. But there were still 103 of ficers and 603 enlisted men present able to sail the ship, although many of them were still in shock. Rather than have many more succumb to the paralysis of combat fatigue, Gehres wisely instituted a program of punishing and distracting work: burying their fallen comrades at sea, clearing the decks of wreckage, and scouring blackened compartments. By the time Franklin reached Pearl Harbor, those who saw her decks looking like “a shredded wheat biscuit” were amazed that she had survived the four-thousand-mile voyage back to base; and when her anchors went clattering down the hawse pipes off New York’s Brooklyn Navy Yard she looked “almost presentable.” In truth, because of her gallant skipper and crew, Franklin was by far the most shattered carrier on either side to survive its ordeal.
With Wasp and Franklin out of action, Admiral Spruance at once reduced his striking strength to three groups, distributing his remaining vessels among them, after which—with a few farewell sweeps over still-numbed and battered Kyushu—he retired far out to sea to refuel. Spruance’s flyers claimed a total of five hundred enemy planes destroyed, three hundred shot down in air battles: an estimate that seems exaggerated. Still, they had certainly decimated Admiral Ugaki’s Ten-Go force, leaving him with about thirty-six hundred of his original command of four thousand planes. Worse were his losses in skilled pilots. And he had not, as he had judged from his aviators’ wildly optimistic reports of enemy ships sunk, in any way delayed the invasion of Okinawa.