34  BOTTOM OF THE BARREL

KANOYA AIR BASE, KYUSHU

MAY 1, 1945

Matome Ugaki had a bad case of diarrhea. The problem only worsened the admiral’s foul mood, which was caused by the news from Europe. Mussolini had been captured and executed by his own people. The Russians were in the streets of Berlin. Hitler had committed suicide.

Ugaki thought the Fuehrer’s death was a tragedy. “But his spirit will remain long with the German nation,” he wrote in his diary, “while the United States and Britain will suffer from communism some day and regret that their powerful supporter, Hitler, was killed.”

Another floating chrysanthemum operation—kikusui No. 5—was supposed to be coordinated with the counteroffensive by Ushijima’s 32nd Army on Okinawa. Ugaki was skeptical of the army’s chances. “This attempt does not have much prospect of success,” he wrote, “but better to be venturesome, hoping to put up a fight while they have enough guts, than to be knocked while idle.”

Ugaki was sending every plane he could muster into this next kikusui. It wasn’t enough—only 125 dedicated tokko aircraft, along with an equal number of conventional warplanes—but the admiral retained his high hopes. He was sure that with improved tactics they would cause even more destruction to the Americans than in the first days when the tokkotai were at full strength. The trouble was, American B-29s were showing up almost every night, cratering runways and making it risky to assemble the waves of tokkoairplanes.

In the waning light of May 3, during a break from the bombers, Ugaki’s first wave of kikusui No. 5 rumbled into the sky.

To the tin can sailors on RP10, 73 miles west of Okinawa, it was the same old story—blips on the radar, klaxons blaring, bullhorns ordering the crews to battle stations. CAP fighters roared overhead, heading northward to intercept incoming bogeys. Nervous gunners aboard the tin cans peered into the pale gray sky.

A sailor with a dark sense of humor put up a sign on his destroyer with an arrow pointing eastward: “Carriers That Way.”

Radarmen aboard the destroyer-minelayer Aaron Ward and destroyer Little were tracking a swarm of incoming bogeys. The fighter CAP—four F6F Hellcats—had already engaged the attackers, but they were overwhelmed by sheer numbers. Two dozen kamikazes swept over the destroyers and their four accompanying gunboats.

Within minutes, the picket ships were fighting for their lives. Ward’s gunners splashed the first two attackers, both Vals. Then came a faster-moving Zero fighter on the port side. Just before impact, the Zero released its 550-pound bomb. The explosion killed more than a dozen crewmen, jamming her rudder to port and slowing the ship to a crawl.

It seemed a replay of the Laffey ordeal two weeks ago. Sensing blood, more kamikazes appeared, but Ward’s gunners turned them away. She was out of danger, but only for the moment.

The nearby Little was in just as much trouble. Her gunners downed one kamikaze, then another, but it wasn’t enough. Four more, one after another, crashed into Little, wrecking the destroyer’s superstructure and breaking her keel. With the ship listing severely to starboard, her rails nearly submerged, Little’s skipper, Cmdr. Madison Hall, gave the order to abandon ship.

The order didn’t come too soon. Four minutes later, Little sank in 850 fathoms of water, taking thirty of her crew with her.

The carnage on RP10 continued. LSM(R)-195, a rocket-firing amphibious support craft, was at full speed to assist the destroyers when she came under attack by a pair of kamikazes. The 203-foot-long gunboat lacked both the firepower and the speed to fight off the kamikazes. One crashed into her port side, exploding her rocket magazines, flinging fire and shrapnel around the decks. In fifteen minutes, the amphibious craft was gone.

Meanwhile, more kamikazes were pouncing on the damaged and smoking Aaron Ward. Ward’s gunners fought back, shooting down three attackers. Then, in quick succession, the destroyer took five more kamikaze strikes and bombs on her main deck, her hull on the port side, her superstructure aft, and her number two stack. Her engines were dead. Ward lay adrift, burning in the gathering darkness.

Incredibly, the destroyer stayed afloat. Through the long night Ward’s crew, aided by the destroyer Shannon and two gunboats, fought to save the ship. Early the next morning, the shattered but still defiant Aaron Ward arrived under tow in Kerama Retto.

For its opening day, kikusui No. 5 had been impressive. Two U.S. ships had gone to the bottom of the East China Sea. Several others were damaged, including Aaron Ward, so badly mangled she was out of the war. In the brief action of May 3, the picket ships had suffered 248 casualties. To the sailors on the tin cans, it didn’t seem that it could get much worse.

They were wrong.

Biplanes? The gunners on the destroyer Morrison the next morning couldn’t believe what they were seeing. They peered through the pall of smoke at the apparitions coming toward them. There were seven of them—old-fashioned biplanes, equipped with floats. They were lumbering toward Morrison at the approximate speed of a Jeep. Each of the ancient floatplanes had a 250-kilogram bomb strapped beneath it.

It was the latest twist in the battle at RP1. Since dawn Morrison, her accompanying destroyer, Ingraham, and their four gunboats had been under siege by a continuous wave of kamikazes. CAP Corsairs had already taken down four at close range to Morrison, and two more were splashed by the destroyer’s guns. One of the bogeys, chased by a Corsair, glanced off Morrison’s bridge and crashed close astern. Another sheared a wing on the destroyer’s bridge.

Then Morrison’s luck had run out. Two Zeroes, pursued by Corsairs and hammered with antiaircraft fire, exploded into the destroyer’s topside, opening her hull and setting the ship ablaze. It was then, while the crew was battling the fire, straining to pick out the next wave of kamikazes through the smoke, that they saw the biplanes.

Code-named “Dave,” the antiquated aircraft were, in fact, highly effective kamikazes. Their wood-and-fabric structure made them nearly invisible on search radars. The proximity fuses of antiaircraft shells failed to detonate when they whizzed past the flimsy craft. Pilots of high-speed CAP fighters were having a devilishly hard time shooting the twisting, slow-moving biplanes.

On they came. Looming out of the smoke, one of the biplanes crashed into Morrison’s aft 5-inch mount, lighting off the magazine and causing a cataclysmic explosion. A second biplane, in no hurry, landed in the water behind the destroyer long enough to elude a pursuing Corsair, then took off again. The kamikaze continued straight into Morrison’s stern, touching off another magazine explosion.

It was the final blow for Morrison. Ripped apart, the destroyer rolled to starboard and sank stern first. One hundred fifty-two men—nearly half Morrison’s crew—went down with her.

The battle wasn’t going any better for Morrison’s escorts. One of the gunboats, LSM(R)-194, was caught in the stern by a diving Val. Within minutes her bow tilted up and she joined Morrison at the bottom of the sea. Thirteen men aboard the rocket-firing LSM went down with her.

It was a sobering sight for the crew of the nearby destroyer Ingraham, who had watched Morrison’s death throes while they fought off their own attackers. Now the kamikazes were turning their full attention to Ingraham. Ingraham’s gunners and the CAP fighters shot down a succession of attackers, but it wasn’t enough. Ingraham had two near misses before a Zero crashed near her number two 5-inch mount, flooding the forward fire room and killing fourteen men.

The CAP fighter pilots overhead were astonished at the variety of kamikaze warplanes—everything from Betty bombers and Zero fighters to training planes and museum-piece biplanes. The Japanese were scraping the bottom of the barrel. Did they have anything left to throw at the Americans?

They did. In the murky sky over RP14, Sub-Lt. Susumu Ohashi was lowering himself through the bomb bay of the twin-engine Mitsubishi Ki-46 “Dinah” bomber, settling into the cockpit of his Ohka guided bomb. Ohashi was one of seven Thunder Gods of the 7th Cherry Blossom Unit who had launched that morning from Kanoya airfield.

The Dinah bombers were an improvement over the slower G4M Bettys that carried the first Ohka guided bombs. Originally designed as reconnaissance aircraft, the Dinah was faster than the Betty, but it was more lightly armored. Now the pilot of Ohashi’s Dinah was becoming anxious. Enemy fighters had just spotted them. They were already swooping in a pursuit curve onto the bomber’s tail. Machine gun tracers were converging on the Dinah.

The Dinah pilot wasn’t waiting any longer. He gave the signal to Susumu Ohashi, who had just strapped himself into the cockpit of the Ohka: ready or not, he was going to be released now.

The gunners on the minelayer Shea were cursing the smoke. The visibility around them and their escorts was now less than three miles, and it was because of the damned smoke screen someone had laid down back at the Hagushi anchorage. The smoke had drifted northward until it covered Shea and her escorts on their picket station. Shea’s nervous gunners were squinting through the murk, trying to pick out the first ominous silhouettes of incoming bogeys.

At 0857, they spotted one. It was a twin-engine bomber, still high, at the upper edge of the haze blanket. A pair of FM-2 Wildcat fighters was already after it, guns blazing. The bomber would be splashed before it came close enough to threaten Shea and her entourage. There was nothing to worry about.

High above, the Wildcat pilots were pouring machine gun fire into the Dinah bomber when they glimpsed something peculiar. An odd-shaped object dropped from the bomber’s belly. Not until a few seconds later, when they saw fire spit from the object’s tail, did they know what it was. Then it was too late.

The Ohka was accelerating like a bullet. One of the Wildcats dove after the weird-looking aircraft, but it was no contest. The rocket-boosted guided bomb was already moving at 350 knots, becoming a distant speck in the Wildcat pilot’s gun sight.

Down below, the startled gunners on the Shea had almost no warning. The gnatlike object came screaming out of the hazy murk, aimed like a meteor for the bridge of their ship. Gun captains were yelling commands, trying to track the object, but it was unstoppable.

The Ohka slammed like a battering ram into the starboard side of Shea’s bridge superstructure—and kept going. A millisecond later, the Ohka emerged on the other side, leaving a large exit hole in Shea’s port hull. Not until the warhead of the Ohka was 15 feet past the ship’s hull did it explode.

Shea rocked from the external blast. Several frames were buckled and plates were ruptured. Twenty-seven men were killed in the attack, and 130 were wounded. Shea had been punctured from one side to the other, but the minelayer could still make her own way and was in no danger of sinking.

Shea had been saved by a miracle—and by the ballistics of the Ohka, which was designed to penetrate heavy armor, not the thin skin of a minelayer such as USS Shea.

At Hagushi anchorage, the gunners aboard the heavy cruiser Birmingham were busy. Birmingham was the flagship of surface force commander Rear Adm. Mort Deyo, and it had been under attack most of the morning by kamikazes coming from the sea. While the gunners were preoccupied, a lone Oscar was sneaking in from over the island of Okinawa, undetected on radar.

No one spotted the kamikaze until he was just a mile out. The close-in 20-millimeter guns opened fire, but it was too late. The bomb-carrying Oscar plunged into Birmingham’s number two 6-inch forward turret, exploding downward into the spaces below.

For half an hour flames poured from the cruiser. Fifty-one men were killed, including most of the ship’s medical corpsmen, who were concentrated in the ship’s wardroom and main casualty center. Eighty-one more were wounded. Birmingham was so badly damaged she had to retire to Guam for repairs.

The Americans weren’t the only targets that morning. Operating off the Sakishima Gunto, the southern island group between Okinawa and Formosa, British Task Force 57 was bombarding the Japanese airfields of Nobara and Sukuma.

The Royal Navy task force had joined the U.S. Fifth Fleet in March 1945, with the responsibility of covering the southern approaches to Okinawa. Now the commander, Vice Adm. Sir Bernard Rawlings, had split off his battleships and cruisers from his carriers, sending the heavy surface ships in close to use their heavy guns.

Which, as it turned out, was a tactical mistake. The screen around the British carriers had been weakened. It was an opening the kamikazes quickly exploited.

At 1131 on May 4, a Zero wound its way through the British CAP fighters and the antiaircraft barrage and crashed into the flight deck of the carrier HMS Formidable. There was a fireball, a number of casualties, and damage to parked airplanes and deck equipment. The kamikaze had splattered on Formidable’s armored flight deck like a scrambled egg.

And that was it. No raging fires or cataclysmic explosions. The carrier shrugged off the hit and continued operating.

The incident revealed a crucial design difference between British and American aircraft carriers. All the U.S. flattops, including the newest Essex-class fast carriers such as Intrepid, had wooden flight decks. With deadly frequency kamikazes were punching through the wooden decks like knives through cardboard, exploding into the packed hangar bays.

The wooden decks were a carryover from 1930s aircraft carrier design. Wood could be more easily repaired than steel and, in theory, the lighter wooden decks allowed the ships to carry more airplanes.

No one had foreseen the specter of suicide planes crashing through the wooden planking. Now U.S. carrier skippers, watching the kamikazes ricochet off the British steel decks, were already thinking about the future. Postwar U.S. Navy aircraft carriers would not have wooden decks.