Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [119]
Onishi’s vision for achieving Japan’s salvation through the “divine wind” soon attained demented proportions: “If we are prepared to sacrifice twenty million Japanese lives in ‘special attacks,’” he said, “victory will be ours.” Not all officers shared his enthusiasm. Lt. Cmdr. Tadashi Minobe, who led a night-fighter group in the Philippines, was transferred back to Japan after openly denouncing the kamikaze concept. Propaganda, however, immediately set about ennobling this new ideal. The last letters of suicide pilots passed into Japan’s national legend. Petty Officer Isao Matsuo wrote on 28 October: “Dear parents, please congratulate me. I have been given a splendid opportunity to die. This is my last day.”
Through the weeks that followed, as Onishi and Inoguchi mustered more volunteers, suicide attacks and American losses in the seas around the Philippines mounted dramatically. On 30 October, a hit on the carrier Franklin killed fifty-six men. Vernon Black, manning a .50-calibre machine gun on Belleau Wood, watched a green-nosed Japanese attacker diving on his own ship: “He was afire in the engine320, then something hit me. Burning gasoline sprayed all over. It got awfully hot…my clothes began to burn.” Black, like many others, leapt into the sea to escape the flames: “There was a lot of screaming in the water and whistles blowing.” His life jacket immediately burst, burnt through. He scrambled onto a raft with a dozen other men, and forty minutes later was picked up by a “merciful can”—a destroyer. Down in Belleau Wood’s engine room, at first news of the strike “nobody got particularly excited as flight-deck fires were no novelty, and none of us up to that time had heard of the word ‘kamikaze,’” in the words of Ensign Bob Reich. But the damage was grave: the carrier lost twelve planes, ninety-two crew killed and fifty-four seriously injured. Like Intrepid, Belleau Wood was forced to withdraw to Ulithi for repair.
Many Japanese attackers were shot down, but an alarming number broke through to the fleet. The balance of the air battle seemed to be tilting in favour of the enemy. Some U.S. carriers were obliged to leave station for rest and resupply. More Japanese planes arrived from Formosa and Kyushu. Tacloban airfield was still only marginally operational for U.S. fighters. Escorts began to take heavy punishment. When a kamikaze hit a destroyer’s hull, a Brooklyn sailor said wonderingly: “You could of drove a Mack321 truck tru duh hole.” “This type of attack is quite different322 from what we have been combating before,” said Cmdr. Arthur Purdy of the destroyer Abner Read, lost at Leyte on 1 November. “This Japanese needs merely to get up there and get into his power dive with fixed controls to solve a very simple problem, because a ship’s ability to turn during a thirty-or forty-second approach is so limited.” Purdy argued that nothing smaller than five-inch gunfire could stop such a plane. He urged the need for increased fire protection on upper decks. Blazing fuel, rather than the initial explosion, doomed his own ship. Three other destroyers were damaged in the same series of raids.
The Americans quickly perceived that the attacks represented a systematic campaign, rather than the whim of individual pilots. The enemy was also mounting conventional fighter, bomber and torpedo attacks against troops, airfields and ships by day and night. A smokescreen was laid across the San Pedro anchorage whenever an air threat was identified—in 1945 this became a navy SOP, Standard Operating Procedure. The light cruiser Honolulu survived a torpedo hit which killed sixty men as a result of heroic exertions by her crew, but mechanic Leon Garsian found himself trapped alone far belowdecks