Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [264]
From the destroyer Howorth, Yeoman James Orvill Raines wrote one of many passionate letters to his wife, Ray Ellen, back home in Dallas. “We are back up at Okinawa now, we came back very fast (can’t tell why yet). Anyway its colder than a well-digger’s seat in Montana but everything is OK. No sleep last night due to Bogies but things are squared away now. Bye darling. More later. Poppie.” Raines, twenty-six years old, had been a somewhat rootless child of the Depression who settled into a career as a journalist just before the war came. On 6 April, a kamikaze ploughed into Howorth’s gun director, killing sixteen men and blowing Raines, badly burned, over the side. He died in the water, in another man’s arms. “Your husband,751” Howorth’s captain wrote later to Ray Ellen, “was very popular among officers and men on board this ship. There certainly was no finer bluejacket to be found anywhere.” It is to be hoped that Mrs. Raines never knew these were the same phrases offered to the families of every one of Howorth’s dead. Yet how could a captain personalise such missives, when they had to be dispatched wholesale?
About four hundred Japanese aircraft broke through the CAP on 6 April. Six ships, including two destroyers, were sunk. Eighteen more were damaged, almost all by kamikazes. This was only the first round of a struggle which persisted throughout the ground campaign for Okinawa, and indeed after its ending. Radio warnings of imminent enemy attack announced “skunks” by sea, “bogies” by air. Thus, perhaps: “Bogey raid four, estimated fifty, bearing 185, distance 30 course 110, speed 300, estimated high, 1114, apparently circling fleet, out.”
American defences inflicted fearsome losses. Balloons held aloft a forest of cables over the anchorage, to impede the enemy’s approach. Each attack was met by a barrage of fire. Ships’ five-inch batteries, firing shells detonated by radio-guided proximity fuses, were joined by massed 40mms and 20mms, filling the sky with black smoke balls, littering decks with mountains of spent cases. Often, the gunners engaged at point-blank range. By scores, Japanese planes collapsed into the sea. But some always escaped, to crash onto their targets with appalling effect. Fighter direction had become a sophisticated art, yet it was also an imperfect one. Cmdr. Bill Widhelm752, operations officer of a carrier task group, described how radar detected one Japanese bomber a hundred miles out, at 22,000 feet, and tracked it to forty-three miles. The plane then vanished from every screen in the fleet, was briefly picked up again at sixteen miles, and thereafter only when “about fifteen feet off the stern of the ship.”
Tens of thousands of American seamen who badly wanted to live were stunned by the onset of hundreds of Japanese pilots who seemed happy to die. “I don’t believe I’ll ever forget753 the noise a plane made as it came racing in,” wrote an officer on the carrier Bennington, “something like when a plane flat hats a field or a house. But instead of trailing away in the distance, it ends with a sudden startling ‘splat!’” An officer watched one Japanese pilot fall without a parachute: “He seemed to float down754, arms and legs extended like a sky-diver, his flight jacket puffed out by the air, falling at such a slow rate that we wondered if he might be able to survive.” The destroyer Luce found itself with three Japanese aircrew prisoners, of whom one proved to be an ex-Berkeley student who spoke fluent English. An officer told a Japanese still eager to commit suicide: “You’re out of the war now, you know,” but the man seemed obsessed with the loss of his family honour. Another prisoner was Korean, a most reluctant kamikaze conscript, who had successfully averted his intended fate. Luce’s crew were wryly amused to find themselves spoon-feeding enemies on whom they had lavished so much verbal hatred. When the prisoners were collected by Marines, however, they received much rougher treatment.