The Twilight Warriors Read online

  ALSO BY ROBERT GANDT

  NONFICTION

  SEASON OF STORMS

  The Siege of Hong Kong 1941

  CHINA CLIPPER

  The Age of the Great Flying Boats

  SKYGODS

  The Fall of Pan Am

  BOGEYS AND BANDITS

  The Making of a Fighter Pilot

  FLY LOW, FLY FAST

  Inside the Reno Air Races

  INTREPID

  The Epic Story of America’s Most Legendary Warship (with Bill White)

  FICTION

  WITH HOSTILE INTENT

  ACTS OF VENGEANCE

  BLACK STAR

  SHADOWS OF WAR

  THE KILLING SKY

  BLACK STAR RISING

  BROADWAY

  Copyright © 2010 by Robert Gandt

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Broadway Books,

  an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  BROADWAY BOOKS and the Broadway Books colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gandt, Robert L.

  The twilight warriors : the deadliest naval battle of World War II and the men who fought it / Robert Gandt.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. World War, 1939–1945—Campaigns—Japan—Okinawa Island. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Naval operations, American. 3. United States. Navy—History—World War, 1939–1945. 4. United States. Navy—Biography. I. Title.

  D767.99.O45G36 2010

  940.54’25229—dc22 2010014062

  eISBN: 978-0-7679-3243-1

  v3.1

  FOR PAULA AND PHOEBE WITH LOVE

  OLD MEN FORGET: YET ALL SHALL BE FORGOT,

  BUT HE’LL REMEMBER WITH ADVANTAGES

  WHAT FEATS HE DID THAT DAY.

  —HENRY V TO HIS TROOPS ON THE EVE OF THEIR VICTORY AT AGINCOURT, 1415 (SHAKESPEARE, KING HENRY V)

  MANY OF THESE THINGS I SAW

  AND SOME OF THEM I WAS.

  —VIRGIL, THE AENEID

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Map

  Time Line

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  THE WAY OF THE WARRIOR

  1 The Next Island

  2 Tail End Charlies

  3 You Are Already Gods

  4 Tiny Tim

  5 Your Favorite Enemy

  6 First Blooding

  7 The Mood in Boys’ Town

  8 Shoot the Son of a Bitch

  9 We Will Save the Ship

  10 Thunder Gods

  11 Three Seconds to Die

  12 And Where Is the Navy?

  13 Gimlet Eyes and the Alligator

  PART TWO

  STORMING THE GREAT LOOCHOO

  14 Love Day

  15 Bourbon and Puddle Water

  16 Ten-Go

  17 Divine Wind

  18 Breakout

  19 Race for Glory

  20 First Wave

  21 Ducks in a Gallery

  22 There She Blows

  23 Dumbo and Mighty Mouse

  PHOTO INSERT

  PART THREE

  FLOATING CHRYSANTHEMUMS

  24 A Ridge Called Kakazu

  25 Ohka

  26 Gunslingers

  27 Black Friday

  28 Keep Moving and Keep Shooting

  29 As Long as a Gun Will Fire

  30 Glory Day

  31 Target Intrepid

  32 Call Me Ernie

  33 Counteroffensive

  34 Bottom of the Barrel

  35 Gone with the Spring

  36 Change of Command

  37 Ritual of Death

  38 Setting Sun

  Acknowledgments

  The Honored Dead of Carrier Air Group 10

  Notes

  References

  U.S. Order of Battle

  Japanese Order of Battle

  Glossary

  Credits

  TIME LINE

  1944

  JUNE 17 At Saipan, Admirals King, Nimitz, Spruance discuss Okinawa as next major stepping-stone.

  SEPTEMBER 15 Air Group 10 re-formed under Cmdr. J. J. Hyland.

  OCTOBER 23–26 Battle of Leyte Gulf. IJN suffers calamitous defeat.

  NOVEMBER 25 USS Intrepid severely damaged by two kamikazes off the Philippines.

  1945

  JANUARY 26 Spruance assumes command of U.S. Fifth Fleet; Mitscher takes over Task Force 58.

  FEBRUARY 10 Vice Adm. Ugaki takes command of IJN Fifth Air Fleet.

  FEBRUARY 19 U.S. Marines land on Iwo Jima.

  FEBRUARY 20 Intrepid deploys to join Task Force 58 at Okinawa.

  MARCH 16 Iwo Jima declared secure.

  MARCH 18 Air Group 10 flies combat missions against Japanese mainland.

  MARCH 19 USS Franklin struck by Japanese dive-bomber.

  MARCH 26–29 U.S. 77th Inf. Division captures Kerama Retto.

  APRIL 1 Love Day. U.S. invasion of Okinawa begins.

  APRIL 6–7 Kikusui No. 1. First massed kamikaze attack.

  APRIL 7 IJN battleship Yamato and five escorts sunk by Task Force 58 aircraft.

  APRIL 12–13 Kikusui No. 2.

  APRIL 15–16 Kikusui No. 3.

  APRIL 16 Intrepid struck by kamikaze, withdraws from Okinawa.

  APRIL 16–21 77th Infantry Div. captures Ie Shima.

  APRIL 18 Ernie Pyle killed on Ie Shima.

  APRIL 20 6th Marine Div. secures Motobu Peninsula.

  APRIL 27–28 Kikusui No. 4.

  MAY 3–4 Kikusui No. 5.

  MAY 4–6 Japanese counterattack in southern Okinawa.

  MAY 10–11 Kikusui No. 6.

  MAY 11 Bunker Hill hit by two kamikazes, out of the war.

  MAY 23–25 Kikusui No. 7.

  MAY 17 Vice Adm. Turner relieved by Vice Adm. Harry Hill.

  MAY 27 Spruance and Mitscher relieved by Halsey and McCain.

  MAY 27–29 Kikusui No. 8.

  MAY 30–JUNE 4 Japanese 32nd Army withdraws to southern positions on Okinawa.

  JUNE 3–7 Kikusui No. 9.

  JUNE 18 Lt. Gen. Buckner killed on Okinawa. USMC Maj. Gen. Geiger takes command.

  JUNE 21–22 Kikusui No. 10.

  JUNE 21 Lt. Gen. Ushijima and Lt. Gen. Cho commit ritual suicide.

  JUNE 21 End of organized resistance on Okinawa.

  AUGUST 6 Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

  AUGUST 9 Atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki.

  AUGUST 15 Cessation of hostilities in the Pacific.

  AUGUST 15 Vice Adm. Ugaki conducts last kamikaze mission.

  SEPTEMBER 2 Japanese surrender aboard USS Missouri.

  PROLOGUE

  ALAMEDA NAVAL AIR STATION, CALIFORNIA

  FEBRUARY 19, 1945

  It was late, nearly ten o’clock, but the party was going strong. You could hear them singing a hundred yards down the street from the officers’ club.

  I wanted wiiiings

  till I got the goddamn things,

  Now I don’t want ’em anymoooore …

  Getting plastered before deployment was a ritual in the wartime Navy, and the pilots of Bomber Fighting 10 were no exception. It was the night before their departure aboard the aircraft carrier USS Intrepid. The entire squadron had suited up in their dress blues and mustered in the club for their farewell bash.

  The party began like most such occasions. Pronouncements were made, senior officers recognized, lost comrades toasted. The liquor flowed, and then came the si
nging. It was a form of therapy. For the new pilots, the booze, bravado, and macho lyrics masked their anxieties about what lay ahead. For the veterans, the singing and the camaraderie brought reassurance. Most knew in their secret hearts that they’d been lucky. They’d lived through this much of the war. There were no guarantees they’d make it through the next round.

  Leaning against the bar and clutching his drink, Ensign Roy “Eric” Erickson bellowed out the verses of the song. Erickson was a gangly twenty-two-year-old from Lincoln, Nebraska. He was one of the new pilots in the squadron. They called themselves “Tail End Charlies.” They flew at the tail end of formations, stood at the tail end of chow lines, and now were catching the tail end of the war. They’d spent the past year and a half training to be fighter pilots. Their greatest fear, they liked to boast, was that the war would be over before they got there.

  The Tail End Charlies were seeing a new side to the squadron skipper, Lt. Cmdr. Wilmer Rawie. Rawie liked to drink, and now that he’d had a few he was leading his boys in his favorite drinking song, “I Wanted Wings.”

  They taught me how to fly,

  And they sent me here to die,

  I’ve had a belly full of waaarrrr …

  Rawie had gotten a brief tour of combat duty in 1942, flying off the Enterprise in the early Pacific skirmishes. But then he was relegated to two tedious years as an instructor back in Florida. Finally, in the twilight of the war, he’d gotten a squadron command. Now Will Rawie was playing catch-up.

  But I’ll take the dames,

  While the rest go down in flames,

  I’ve no desi-ire to be buuurrrned …

  Watching from across the room was the CAG—air group commander—Cmdr. John Hyland. A dozen years older than most of his pilots, Hyland wore the bemused expression of a father chaperoning teenagers. The only one near his age was Rawie, who had begun his commissioned career after a stint as an enlisted man. Hyland had seen lots of these parties, and he had nothing against them. It was a tradition. Let the boys get shit-faced, herd them back to the ship, then get on with the war.

  Though most of his pilots didn’t know it, Hyland was also playing catch-up. When the war began, he was on a patrol wing staff in the Philippines. Since then he had served in a succession of Washington staff jobs. Now Johnny Hyland, who had never flown fighters in combat, was another twilight warrior.

  The singing grew louder.

  Air combat’s called romance,

  But you take an awful chance,

  I’m no fighter, I have learrrned …

  By the time they closed the bar a few minutes before midnight, the party had gotten rowdy. A drunk pilot had to be subdued after demonstrating how to smash the mirrors behind the bar. Another stuck his fist through a plaster wall. One of the junior officers nearly drowned when he passed out over the toilet. Several had to be hauled nearly comatose back to the ship and loaded aboard like cordwood.

  The Intrepid’s departure the next morning was a hazy, indistinct memory for most of the Tail End Charlies. As the ship entered the heaving ocean, the hangovers magnified to bouts of barfing. Eric Erickson, who had never been aboard a vessel larger than a canoe, stayed sick for three days.

  After a week of provisioning and training in Hawaii, Intrepid was under way for the western Pacific. In the smoke-filled ready room of Bomber Fighting 10, the pilots learned for the first time where they were going. The intelligence officer stuck a chart on the bulkhead. It was a map of southern Japan and the Ryukyu island chain.

  The Tail End Charlies stared at the map. The men knew some of the place names—Shikoku, Kyushu, Okinawa. Until then that was all they’d been, just names. Now reality was setting in. Those places on the map—the ones with the hard-to-pronounce names—were where they would see their first combat.

  But there was more. What none of them yet knew—not the pilots or the intelligence officers or the flag officers planning the operation—was that the island in the middle of the chain, the one called Okinawa, was where the Imperial Japanese Navy would make its last stand.

  Kamikaze crashes into USS Intrepid, November 25, 1944. (INTREPID SEA, AIR & SPACE MUSEUM)

  PART ONE

  THE WAY OF THE WARRIOR

  WHEN REACHING A STALEMATE, WIN WITH A TECHNIQUE THE ENEMY DOES NOT EXPECT.

  —MIYAMOTO MUSASHI,

  LEGENDARY JAPANESE SWORDSMAN AND

  MILITARY STRATEGIST (1584–1645)

  MY ONLY HOPE IS THAT THE JAPS DON’T QUIT BEFORE WE HAVE A CHANCE TO WIPE THEM OUT.

  —ADM. JOHN S. McCAIN

  1 THE NEXT ISLAND

  SAIPAN

  JUNE 17, 1944

  The flies were everywhere. Vice Adm. Raymond Spruance maintained his stone-faced silence as he waved the insects away from the table. They were large and black, and entire squadrons of them were swarming into the wardroom of Spruance’s flagship, the cruiser Indianapolis.

  Indianapolis was anchored in the lagoon on the eastern shore of Saipan. The heavy tropical air was seeping like a dank cloud through the spaces of the non-air-conditioned warship. Spruance’s guests were his two immediate bosses, chief of naval operations Adm. Ernest King and the commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, Adm. Chester Nimitz. Dinner had been served early in the hope that an ocean breeze might still be wafting through the portholes of the wardroom.

  Instead of a breeze, they got these damned flies. Splotches of perspiration were staining the admirals’ starched khakis as they waved at the insects. King and Nimitz had just completed a Pacific inspection tour. They had stopped to confer with Spruance, whose Fifth Fleet had just won a resounding victory at the Battle of the Philippine Sea. Joining them in the wardroom was Vice Adm. Richmond K. Turner, who had commanded the amphibious landings on Saipan.

  In keeping with wardroom tradition, the admirals were avoiding high-level military discussions at dinner. They were also avoiding the subject of the black flies and where they came from. King and Nimitz had taken a tour of Saipan that afternoon. Most of the island’s thirty thousand Japanese defenders and twenty-two thousand civilians were dead, and their decomposing bodies had been moldering in the tropical heat for nearly a week. Saipan and the adjoining lagoon where Indianapolis was anchored were swarming with flies.

  Eager to be done with dinner and the flies, the admirals evacuated the wardroom and returned to the business of war. Spruance was aware that his actions in the recent Battle of the Philippine Sea had come under heavy criticism. Instead of dispatching Vice Adm. Marc Mitscher’s Fast Carrier Force in an all-out attack on the Japanese task force, he had held them back to cover the landings on Saipan. By the end of the engagement, the air strength of the Imperial Japanese Navy had been crushed—six hundred aircraft destroyed and three carriers sunk—but in the view of many senior officers, it wasn’t enough. Spruance had allowed the Japanese to escape with most of their fleet intact.

  It wasn’t the first time Raymond Spruance had been accused of excessive caution, nor would it be the last. At the 1942 Battle of Midway, after his dive-bombers had sunk four Japanese carriers, Spruance chose not to press his advantage and pursue the remainder of Adm. Isoruku Yamamoto’s fleet after nightfall. The remnants of the Japanese force survived to fight another day.

  If Spruance was worried about his boss’s judgment, he could relax. The Navy’s senior officer put the subject to rest. “You did a damn good job there,” he said. “No matter what other people tell you, your decision was correct.” Coming from the hard-boiled Ernest King, it amounted to high praise.

  Few officers could have been more different in style and temperament than King and Spruance. Ernest King was tall, arrogant, fond of hard liquor and loose women. He was also a notorious bully who ruled the Navy with an iron fist. By contrast, Raymond Spruance was a cerebral, mild-mannered officer whose demeanor seldom changed. He was an oddity in the 1940s Navy, an officer who neither drank nor smoked, and in a generation that disdained exercise, he was a fitness fanatic. If his fellow officers didn’t warm up
to Ray Spruance’s personality, they never doubted his brilliance. Even the arrogant King acknowledged that Spruance was the smartest officer in the Navy—though King put himself second.

  It was precisely because Spruance was so well regarded that King was aboard Indianapolis this evening, the flies notwithstanding. The conquest of the Marianas was complete. The decision had already been made that the island of Luzon in the Philippines was next. But then what? King wanted to know what Spruance thought should be the next objective in the ultimate conquest of Japan.

  Spruance answered without hesitation. “Okinawa.”

  King’s eyebrows rose. So did Nimitz’s. It wasn’t what they’d expected to hear. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, including King, were on record as favoring an invasion of Formosa. Why Okinawa?

  In his usual low-key monotone, Spruance laid out his case. Formosa was a heavily fortified, mountainous island that would take months to capture. Bypassing Formosa and seizing Okinawa was the quickest way to strangle Japan.

  As a prelude to an Okinawa invasion, Spruance thought they first should take Iwo Jima, a volcanic island with an airfield that was within bomber range of Okinawa and Japan. After they’d captured Okinawa, they would be in position to blockade all shipping in the East China Sea. Japan would be cut off. It might preclude a bloody invasion of Japan itself.

  An uncomfortable silence fell over the flag compartment. King was dubious. So was Nimitz. Bypass Formosa?

  The admirals peered at the map on the bulkhead. Okinawa nestled like a protected pendant in the middle of the Ryukyu island chain, dangerously close to the Japanese mainland. Even if Spruance was right, an invasion of Okinawa would be a hell of a battle. The Japanese would fight back with every weapon they had left.