TINY TIMATLANTIC CITY NAVAL AIR STATION, NEW JERSEY
JANUARY 4, 1945
The Grim Reapers were splitting up. The news came while the squadron was still on the East Coast, packing up to fly to California and board the Intrepid. Instead of one big Corsair squadron, the legendary Fighting 10, a new outfit—Bomber Fighting 10—was being spun off.
The new squadron reflected the current thinking about air group composition. Task forces needed more fighters to protect them from the growing specter of kamikazes. The F4U Corsair was both an air-superiority fighter and a bona fide bomber. Unlike the plodding SB2C Helldivers and TBM Avengers, which needed fighter cover while they hauled bombs to their targets, the Corsair provided its own protection. Since the air-to-air and air-to-ground missions were distinctly different, someone in Washington had decreed that they should be performed by different squadrons.
Wilmer Rawie was tapped to command the new squadron, now designated VBF-10. True to form, Rawie grabbed up most of his cadre of handpicked students and instructors from his former training unit. Meanwhile, the fighting squadron, which got to keep the VF-10 designation and the old Grim Reapers logo, received a new skipper, a heavyset, mustached lieutenant commander named Walt Clarke, another veteran with four kills from the Solomons campaign.
No one was happy about it. To the old hands, splitting up a legendary outfit like the Reapers was the same as breaking up a family. It didn’t seem right. Despite the hoopla about bombers and fighters, weren’t the airplanes and the missions the same?
Not exactly. What they didn’t yet know was that the experimental new bomber-fighting squadron had been selected to fire an experimental new weapon, a rocket called the Tiny Tim. And as the pilots would find out, there was nothing tiny about it.
Like most of the Tail End Charlies, Erickson was in awe of his senior officers. Within the squadron, the skipper, Will Rawie, occupied the top rung on the ladder of official respect. Just beneath him came the executive officer, Lt. Timmy Gile, architect of the famous Atlantic City party and an ace with eight kills. Close behind were guys such as Paul Cordray and William “Country” Landreth, old hands with combat time on their records.
One figure stood out above all others. With the possible exception of God Himself, no one received greater deference than Cmdr. Johnny Hyland, who went by “CAG,” the acronym for air group commander. Hyland was one of those rare commanders who seemed to have it all—good looks, a quick, focused intelligence, a charismatic personality, and the skills of a natural leader. The son of a naval officer, Hyland was a 1934 graduate of the Naval Academy. He’d put in a year as a surface officer aboard USS Lexington and then the four-stack destroyer Elliot before going to Pensacola for flight training. His first assignment after earning his wings was a made-in-heaven job—flying with the Navy’s most prestigious fighting squadron, VF-6, aboard Enterprise. He should have been in the sweet spot for quick advancement when war came.
But Hyland’s timing was off. On the day Pearl Harbor was attacked, December 7, 1941, Hyland was in the cockpit of a lumbering PBY patrol plane attached to Patrol Wing 10 at Olongapo in the Philippines. He flew the last patrol plane from the Dutch naval base at Ambon before the Japanese swarmed over the Dutch East Indies. Of the wing’s original forty-six patrol planes, only three escaped.
Sent to Washington, D.C., Hyland became the operations officer, then the executive officer at Anacostia Naval Air Station. Instead of rotating to a combat billet in the Pacific, he was chosen as the personal pilot for the chief of naval operations, Adm. Ernest King. Hyland was missing the war, a victim of his own competence.
He pulled every string, including a request to King himself. Finally, in the summer of 1944, came the orders Hyland had been praying for. A new air group was being formed aboard USS Intrepid. John Hyland would take command.
The assignment came just in time. If Hyland was to have any chance at ascending to high rank in the postwar Navy, he had to collect his share of combat ribbons. He’d come dangerously close to missing out.
By now the new bomber-fighting squadron had been sorted into four-pilot divisions. Each division was split into a pair of two-plane sections, with a senior pilot leading each division and section. The junior pilots—the Tail End Charlies—were assigned as their wingmen.
Erickson learned that he would be the wingman of a veteran of the Solomons campaign, Lt. (jg) Robert “Windy” Hill. Hill had been in VF-17, a famous squadron called the Jolly Rogers. He was one of the more flamboyant pilots in the squadron, earning the nickname “Windy” for his fondness for over-the-top storytelling. Hill was the epitome of the World War II fighter pilot—cocky, aggressive in the air and on the ground, with movie-star good looks.
“If there were two good-looking women in the room,” remembered one of the Tail End Charlies, “you could count on them both going for Windy. The smart thing was to stay close and grab the one he didn’t take.”
Being Hill’s wingman suited Erickson just fine. Then he learned the rest of his assignment. The leader of their four-plane division was none other than the air group commander himself.
Erickson didn’t know whether to cheer or moan. The CAG could have picked anyone he wanted as his Tail End Charlie. It meant that Hyland trusted Erickson to cover his tail. It also meant that if Erickson somehow screwed up and didn’t cover Hyland’s tail, he was dead meat.
Off they went, in flights of four, headed for California and the USS Intrepid. It was not a smooth journey. Before they reached Alameda and their new carrier, two more Tail End Charlies were gone.
One was an ensign named Charles Jensen, who decided to take a detour over his hometown of Mesa, Arizona. In a classic case of boldness exceeding judgment, Jensen was buzzing the floor of the desert when he clipped the ground. The Corsair crashed and exploded in full view of the pilot’s horrified family.
Almost as soon as they reached California, they lost another. Ens. Spence Mitchell took off on a training flight over the cloud-covered Pacific. He was never seen again, and no trace was found of his fighter. The best guess was that he’d become disoriented in the clouds and spun into the ocean.
Meanwhile, the pilots of the new bomber-fighting squadron had one more square to fill. They flew out to the Navy’s ordnance testing facility at Inyokern Naval Air Facility, in the California high desert country, for indoctrination in the new weapon called the Tiny Tim. Inyokern was part of the Navy’s China Lake ordnance test base. The place looked like the set of a movie Western. There were a couple of bars and a motel, but not much else of interest to young fighter pilots.
No one got a good feeling when they first saw the Tiny Tim rocket. The weapon already had a bad reputation. In one of its first test firings at China Lake, it had killed the crew of the SB2C launch plane when the rocket blast destroyed the Helldiver’s control surfaces. The fix the engineers came up with was to drop the weapon far enough to clear the aircraft before igniting the rocket with an attached lanyard. The fix didn’t always work. If the rocket wasn’t released from a precise 45-degree dive, the missile could fly through the airplane’s propeller. Or it could veer off and hit an unintended target, such as the plane that launched it.
Even the name seemed like a joke. The Tiny Tim was a monster—over 10 feet long and more than half a ton in weight, with a diameter of 11.75 inches, which by no coincidence was the dimension of a standard 500-pound semi-armor-piercing bomb, the warhead of the Tiny Tim. It also happened to be the diameter of standard oil well steel tubing, which was used as the casing for the rocket. The Tiny Tim had a solid-propellant motor that could accelerate it to nearly 600 mph, with an effective range of over a mile. When it leaped from beneath its launching aircraft, streaming a trail of fire, the Tiny Tim looked like a creature from hell.
Between classes and missile-firing sorties, the pilots had time on their hands. They played cards, checked out the drinking establishments, and pursued the local girls. It was mostly a futile chase. After Atlantic City, Inyokern seemed like a desert outpost, which in fact it was.
Finally came the end of Tiny Tim training. Someone decided that the newly qualified pilots should conduct a firepower demonstration for the Navy brass. Eight Corsairs, each armed with a Tiny Tim and eight 5-inch HVARs—high velocity rockets—dove in formation on a practice target. Led by Johnny Hyland, they salvoed their weapons on signal.
It was spectacular. Spewing flame and smoke, the rockets roared toward the earth at nearly supersonic speed. More than six tons of high explosive slammed into the target like the broadside from a battleship. The concussion rumbled across the desert floor, rattling every window in Inyokern and sending a eruption of dirt, sagebrush, and black smoke hundreds of feet into the sky. The senior officers watching the demonstration were flabbergasted. Even the citizens of Inyokern, long accustomed to loud noises from the Navy weapons range, were startled.
Most of all, it shocked the pilots in the Corsairs. A single collective thought passed through their brains: Holy shit! It dawned on them that this thing could do a hell of a lot of damage. And not just to the enemy.
Vice Adm. Matome Ugaki poured himself another sake. It was evening, and he was alone in his small wood-and-fabric home in the coastal town of Atami, 60 miles southwest of Tokyo.
Drinking had become one of Ugaki’s preoccupations since his return from the disastrous battle at Leyte Gulf. Unlike his mentor, Adm. Isoruku Yamamoto, who was a teetotaler, Ugaki loved sake. When he had nothing else to do, he frequently drank himself into a stupor. This evening, like most evenings lately, he had nothing else to do. Nothing except think about the war and write in his diary.
The war news was all bad. The Americans were in Subic Bay, on the main Philippine island of Luzon. The Red Army was within 15 miles of Berlin. American B-29s were flying nightly over Japan. From his garden Ugaki could hear the drone of the bombers on their way to raze another city.
Ugaki had started the diary during the months before the war in 1941. Like a good navy man, he began most entries with an observation about the weather. Amid cynical comments about the course of the war and the damage inflicted on Japan’s homeland, he inserted snippets of poetry, thoughts about nature and the changing seasons, and notes about his health problems. He disliked going to Tokyo, he wrote, because the lack of warm water aggravated his piles.
Even when he was drunk, Matome Ugaki seldom smiled. Photographs showed a bullet-skulled man with a stern, unyielding countenance. The expression was common to senior Imperial Japanese Navy officers, most of whom wished to emulate the fierce image of a samurai warrior. The nickname bestowed on Ugaki by his subordinates was the “Golden Mask.”
There was more, however, to Matome Ugaki. Behind the mask was a man of intelligence and sensitivity. Like his colleague, Vice Adm. Takijiro Ohnishi, founder of the Special Attack Corps, Ugaki embodied all the ancient contradictions in Japan’s culture—the warrior’s bloody bushidoethic balanced against an aesthete’s tears over the changing of the seasons.
Ugaki was a classically educated scholar who had made a lifetime study of Buddhist philosophy. He was also a devoted family man, inordinately proud of his son Hiromitsu, who had just become a naval surgeon. Ugaki had never stopped mourning his wife, Tomoko, who died five years earlier. He made regular visits to her tomb to clean the grounds and offer prayers.
Ugaki had begun the war as chief of staff of the Combined Fleet, serving under the brilliant Yamamoto. He remained in that post, surviving the Battle of Midway, until April 18, 1943, when Yamamoto’s and Ugaki’s planes were ambushed by American P-38s over Bougainville. Yamamoto’s Mitsubishi G4M “Betty” bomber was shot down in flames and crashed in the jungle. Ugaki’s bomber also went down, ditching offshore. Ugaki managed to crawl out and survived by clinging to floating wreckage.
Though badly injured, he recovered from his wounds, was promoted to vice admiral, and took command of a battleship division in time for the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Again he escaped death, though his fleet was pounded by American carrier-based planes, sinking the 72,000-ton dreadnought Musashi. En route back to Japan, Ugaki endured the further ignominy of losing more ships—the battleship Kongo and the destroyer Urakaze—to American submarines in the East China Sea.
Then Ugaki’s career slid into limbo. For the rest of 1944 he was attached to the navy general staff, with no specific duties. Each day passed much like the one before, puttering in his flower garden, writing in his diary, drinking sake. He took long walks and gazed balefully into the sky. American bombers were a steady presence. On the last day of 1944 he wrote in his diary, “However impatient I might be hoping to save this crisis by all means, I can’t do anything now. All I can do is to send off the outgoing year, expecting to exert efforts next year. My thoughts ran wild seeking ways to save the empire.”
To save the empire. As if by a miracle, a way to save the empire came to Ugaki on the night of February 9, 1945, while he was still finishing his bottle of sake. It arrived in the form of a phone call, via the local police station. The admiral was to proceed to Tokyo immediately for an audience with the emperor. Ugaki would be appointed commander in chief of a newly established unit, the Fifth Air Fleet, with the responsibility for guarding all of Japan’s southern shore.
Although the new command was called a “fleet,” Ugaki knew there was no fleet. The Fifth Air Fleet was a suicide force composed of tokko aircraft and pilots, Kaiten manned torpedoes, and Ohka flying rocket bombs.
Ugaki considered the assignment a gift from heaven. He already believed that the only strategy left to Japan was to bleed the Americans until they sued for peace. In Tokyo he had heard the whispers and veiled suggestions from certain officers that Japan should avoid total ruin by negotiating a conditional surrender. Ugaki had only contempt for these weaklings. In his view, Japan’s honor demanded that every fighting man and citizen be willing to sacrifice his life.
Matome Ugaki was a religious man. Like most senior officers, he worshiped at the Yasukuni Shrine, where, according to Shinto belief, the kami, or spirits, of Japan’s fighting men resided. Ugaki mused in his diary that if he, too, could be honored to be enshrined with the other spirits at Yasukuni, he would be content.
“I’m appointed to a very important post,” he boasted that night in his diary, “which has the key to determine the fate of the empire, with the pick of the Imperial Navy available at present. I have to break through this crisis with diehard struggles.”
Ugaki already had an idea where the diehard struggles would occur. The Americans were bringing the war closer to Japan. Their next target would surely be in the Bonin Islands, perhaps Chichi Jima or Iwo Jima. And then would come the stepping-stones to southern Japan, the Ryukyus—and the island of Okinawa.