28  KEEP MOVING AND KEEP SHOOTING

NORTHERN RADAR PICKET STATIONS

APRIL 16, 1945

One thing they would all agree on later: April 16 was a hell of a day. For the tin can sailors as well as the fighter pilots sent to protect them, it was the wildest day of combat most of them would ever experience.

The day began with another massed kamikaze attack, the second phase of kikusui No. 3. Three divisions of Grim Reaper Corsairs were on CAP stations over the radar picket ships.

One of the divisions was led by Lt. (jg) Phil Kirkwood. Still on his wing was Ens. Dick Quiel, who knew that staying close to Kirkwood meant you had a good chance of seeing action. Their second two-plane section was led by Ens. Horace “Tuck” Heath, whose wingman was a baby-faced ensign named Alfred Lerch.

Photographs of Al Lerch showed a skinny, grinning kid who looked barely old enough to borrow his father’s roadster. Lerch was from Coopersburg, Pennsylvania, and he had become a Grim Reaper by accident. He was supposed to have joined VF-87 aboard USS Ticonderoga, but a broken leg caused him to miss their deployment. In January 1945 he was reassigned to the re-formed VF-10 on Intrepid.

Al Lerch was still looking for his first air-to-air victory. As he had already discovered, being the Tail End Charlie in a division meant that you got the leftovers. Two days earlier he had flown on Tuck Heath’s wing while Heath methodically shot up an incoming Betty bomber and sent it smoking into the ocean. Lerch, the Tail End Charlie, never got to fire his guns.

But this was another day, and things were looking up for Lerch. En route to the CAP station, Heath developed radio trouble. It meant that Lerch was now the section leader. It also meant that he would get first crack at the bogeys.

The action started twenty minutes after they reached the CAP station. Bogeys were reported inbound, passing the island of Amami Oshima. Lerch and Heath headed north, while Kirkwood and Quiel took a station a few miles behind them. Kirkwood stayed low, beneath the cloud deck, where he could pick off any wave-skimming kamikazes, and sent Quiel to a high perch at 8,000 feet. The assignment suited Dick Quiel, who was happy to be on his own. Any target he spotted was all his—if he was lucky.

Minutes later, Quiel got lucky. He spotted the bogeys. They were high, heading south, and Quiel could tell by the fixed landing gear and the peculiar straight leading edges of the wings that they were Nakajima Ki-27 Nate fighters. The Nate was an obsolete warplane that had seen its heyday in the China battles of the 1930s. Now they were relegated to kamikaze missions.

The Nates were spread out in a loose gaggle, two flights of three each. In a wide pursuit curve, Quiel swung in on their tails. He selected the furthest aft Nate fighter and opened fire. The unarmored Japanese fighter burned almost instantly.

Quiel nudged the Corsair’s nose over to the next Nate and repeated the process. That Nate burned almost as quickly as the first. Both were leaving blazing trails down to the sea.

But now Quiel was overtaking the rest of the slow-flying Nates. The Japanese pilots were all flying straight ahead, seemingly unaware that two of them had just been shot down.

Quiel pulled up to the right, then swung back in a pursuit curve on the four remaining Japanese fighters. He shot down another one. Then another. But with the Corsair’s speed advantage of nearly a hundred knots he was again overrunning the two surviving fighters.

As Quiel bore down on them, one of the Nates abruptly rolled inverted and did a split-S—the bottom half of a loop, disappearing into the clouds. Quiel guessed that he would impact the water before pulling out.

The single remaining Nate continued boring straight ahead, apparently fixated on one of the picket destroyers in the ocean. Quiel was overtaking him too fast to get a shot. He tried to slow the Corsair, snatching the throttle back, putting the propeller into full low pitch, extending several degrees of landing flap.

It wasn’t enough. Seconds later, Quiel found himself alongside the Nate fighter, wing tip to wing tip. Time seemed to freeze while Quiel stared at the enemy pilot 30 feet away. The Nate’s cockpit canopy was open. Quiel could see the young man’s face, the leather helmet with white fur trim. The Japanese pilot refused to look at him. As in a trance, he had his eyes riveted on his target—the destroyer straight ahead.

Quiel opened his canopy and yanked out his .38 revolver. There was almost no relative motion between the airplanes. He’d shoot the son of a bitch the old-fashioned way. At this range he couldn’t miss.

Quiel was aiming the pistol, about to squeeze off a round, when an explosion erupted just ahead of him. Then another. Antiaircraft fire was erupting all around him. Damn. The gunners on the destroyer were shooting at both airplanes, not bothering to distinguish between them.

In the next instant, the Nate was gone, diving almost straight down at the destroyer. Quiel dove after him, trying to get into firing position again. Antiaircraft fire was bursting around both airplanes.

Quiel couldn’t get another shot. Helplessly he watched the Japanese plane crash into the destroyer’s forward gun turret. He thought it was the end of the destroyer.

It wasn’t. To Quiel’s amazement, the tin can emerged from the smoke and debris of the crash, seemingly unfazed. Still steaming at full speed, the destroyer had shrugged off the kamikaze hit as if it were a mosquito bite.

Phil Kirkwood, true to form, had tangled with a flock of twenty kamikazes that were bearing down on another destroyer. In less than a minute Kirkwood shot down a Val dive-bomber as it was beginning its run. Seconds later he flamed a Nate fighter, also bearing down on the destroyer.

Kirkwood kept shooting, chasing each kamikaze down through bursts of antiaircraft fire. He splashed three more before they could reach the destroyer.

When the enemy airplanes had finally stopped showing up, he rejoined with Quiel. They were on their way back to the CAP station when Kirkwood spotted the silhouettes of kamikazes attacking yet another destroyer. In the space of a few minutes, Kirkwood shot down yet one more Nate, exploding it into the water a hundred yards short of the destroyer.

For Kirkwood and Quiel, the melee over the picket stations was over. Together the pair had accounted for ten enemy airplanes. The day’s action put Quiel on the roster of aces and elevated Kirkwood to double ace status. By downing six in a single mission, Phil Kirkwood had accomplished a feat almost unmatched by anyone else in his squadron.

Almost. What he didn’t know was that twenty miles to the north, his Tail End Charlie, Al Lerch, was making history.

The radarman in the picket destroyer Laffey stared at his scope. There were at least fifty bogeys, more than he’d ever seen in a single cluster. They looked like fast-multiplying amoebas spreading over the fluorescent screen.

The bogeys were headed straight for Laffey.

Escorting Laffey at the lonely radar picket station were a pair of support gunboats, LCS-51 and LCS-116. The gunboats had been on station for two days without firing a shot. There’d been several nerve-jangling late-night calls to battle stations but no kamikaze attacks. Their luck seemed to be holding.

Laffey’s skipper, Cmdr. Julian Becton, had already seen his share of action. He’d been the executive officer of the destroyer Aaron Ward when it was sunk off Guadalcanal in April 1943. After fighting in several more surface actions in the South Pacific, he took command of a new destroyer, USS Laffey, in February 1944. The 2,200-ton Laffey was the second destroyer to bear the name. Her predecessor, DD-459, had also gone down off Guadalcanal in 1942.

Becton and his new ship joined the bombardment force at the D-day landings at Normandy, firing more shells than any other destroyer in the invasion. By the end of 1944, Laffey had transferred to the Pacific, joining the fight in the Philippines, then at Iwo Jima, and now at Okinawa.

Two days ago Laffey had been in the Kerama Retto anchorage taking on ammunition and supplies. As they were leaving, Becton exchanged greetings with the skipper of the destroyer Cassin Young, which had taken a kamikaze hit a few days earlier. Young’s captain was a friend and Naval Academy classmate of Becton’s. “Keep moving and keep shooting,” yelled out Cassin Young’s skipper. “Steam as fast as you can, and shoot as fast as you can.”

It was good advice, Becton thought. So were the parting words from a gun captain on another destroyer, Purdy: “You guys have a fighting chance, but they’ll keep on coming till they get you. You’ll knock a lot of them down, and you’ll think you’re doing fine. But in the end there’ll be this one bastard with your name on his ticket.”

Now it was the morning of April 16, and Laffey was on station at RP1, which had become the kamikazes’ favorite hunting ground. The crew’s chow line had been interrupted once already by a call to general quarters. A snooper had come close enough for the forward 5-inch gun batteries to open fire. The snooper fled, but in his place came the swarm of bogeys. Now they were circling overhead, staying just out of range of the antiaircraft guns.

The first to peel off were four fixed-gear D3A Val dive bombers. Swooping down like vultures, they split into pairs, two on the starboard bow, the other pair coming from astern.

Becton ordered Laffey into a hard turn to port. The destroyer’s forward 5-inchers opened up, splashing both Vals attacking at the bow. The pair from astern were coming in low—so low that one inadvertently caught his landing gear in the wave tops and pitched over into the sea. The second disintegrated in the torrent of combined gunfire from Laffey and one of her escorting gunboats.

Four up, four down, but there was no break in the action. Two D4Y Judy dive-bombers were coming in from either side. The Judys were sleeker and faster than the obsolescent Vals—and harder to hit. The 40-millimeter and 20-millimeter gunners chopped up the Judy attacking on the starboard side, but the one from the port side slipped through the fire. As he drew closer, the pilot opened up with his machine guns. Bullets raked the deck, killing gunners and pinging into Laffey’s superstructure.

Just as the antiaircraft fire converged on the Judy, the pilot released his bomb. The bomb detonated on the water, but the explosion sent shrapnel slashing across Laffey’s deck, mowing down more crewmen and knocking out the critical surface search radar.

Keep moving and keep shooting. The words from Cassin Young’s skipper were fresh in Becton’s mind. He was swinging Laffey’s bow in vicious turns from port to starboard and back again, keeping her guns broadside to the attackers.

Another pair of kamikazes, a Val and a Judy dive-bomber, came swooping in from opposite sides in a coordinated attack. Laffey’s gunners splashed them both, but the shattered Val grazed the destroyer’s aft 5-inch mount, killing one of the gunners, before crashing into the sea on the far side of the ship.

Laffey had been under attack for twelve minutes, but it seemed like a year. The destroyer had fought off eight kamikazes without taking a single direct hit. The combined firepower of the destroyer and her two LCS gunboat escorts had taken down every attacking plane. Laffey’s luck seemed to be holding.

For three minutes there was a break in the attacks. Then another Val came roaring in from the port bow. Even as the streams of gunfire from the destroyer and the gunboats poured into the kamikaze, it somehow held its course. The Val slammed into Laffey’s port side, exploding into the amidships 20-millimeter gun station before caroming off the starboard side into the sea.

Three more gunners were killed instantly, and the entire aft half of the destroyer was torched in flaming gasoline. Laffey’s streak of luck had ended.

Afew miles to the north, Tail End Charlie Al Lerch was making the most of his new role—section leader. On his wing was Tuck Heath, whose dead radio, at least according to standard procedure, should have excluded him from the mission. But Heath’s guns still worked, and he was sticking with Lerch.

Then Lerch spotted the most tantalizing sight he’d ever seen—a flock of thirty Nate fighters, droning toward them like ducks to a blind. The Nates were in loose three-plane formations. Each was carrying an external bomb intended for a U.S. ship.

With Heath in trail, Lerch swept down on the Nates. On the first pass, each pilot gunned down one Nate. The panicky survivors scattered, diving for the water, with Lerch and Heath hard on their tails. The inept Japanese pilots were clearly untrained in air-to-air combat, milling around close to the water, making themselves easy targets for the Corsairs.

Lerch slid in behind three slow-moving Nates. Firing from dead astern, he poured .50-caliber bullets into each of the hapless Nates. In the space of three minutes, Lerch had sent all three flaming into the ocean.

Climbing back to altitude, Lerch looked around for Heath, who had gone missing. Then Lerch spotted three more Nates cutting across the northern tip of Okinawa, a few miles away. He was sweeping in behind one of them, about to squeeze his trigger, when he sensed a dark blue object swelling in his peripheral vision.

It was Heath. He was still radioless, but he was fixated on the same target that Lerch had in his sights. At the last instant, Lerch swerved out of the way, barely avoiding a collision, while Heath blazed away at the hapless Nate fighter.

There was no shortage of targets. Minutes later, Lerch was behind another Nate. At close range, he opened fire from directly astern.

The next thing Al Lerch saw was a fireball in front of his nose. Instinctively he ducked in the cockpit, feeling pieces of the exploding Nate thunking into his wings and cowling.

Emerging from the cloud of debris, he peered around. There was nothing left of the Nate. Lerch’s Corsair was damaged—he could see dents and rips in the leading edges—but the engine was still running.

And his guns still worked. Minutes later, Lerch found himself in yet another nose-to-nose contest with Heath, both of them chasing another Nate. This time Lerch got to it first, setting it afire, with Heath delivering the coup de grace.

It was another day for the record books. Phil Kirkwood’s four-plane division had gunned down twenty enemy airplanes, with Kirkwood and Quiel accounting for half the total. The second pair, Tail End Charlies Heath and Lerch, did just as well. Tuck Heath, who by strict interpretation of the rules shouldn’t have been in the fight, was credited with three kills.

But it was Al Lerch who won the greatest share of the glory. In a single mission, the baby-faced ensign shot down seven enemy airplanes, a feat of arms matched by only four other Americans in history.