Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [265]
An awed sailor gazed on a destroyer grievously mauled by air attack: “Bombs and shells755 and even a suicide plane had plowed into her. Her entire superstructure was a mangled mess of melted steel except for the bridge and radio shack. She was crying and bleeding like a dog set upon by a pack of wolves. She needed blood…her men were burned, shot, cut, torn and shocked. To me, sitting there so apart from everything but my imagination, she took on human nature. She was a good ship. She was hurt badly and was ashamed but yet proud that she had stood up under all the beating they had given her.”
As kamikazes circled Luce, her crew saw “meatwagons” closing in—rescue ships anticipating the worst. Cook Freeman Phillips froze at his 20mm gun position. Virgil Degner, his “oppo,” holding an ammunition canister, started to say something: “His lips were moving756—I had the earphones on—and I didn’t know what he was trying to say…Then the explosion came…a piece of metal flew by and decapitated him. Just like that, his head fell off at my feet. I looked down…and I believe his mouth was still trying to tell me something. His body was still up, holding onto that magazine for what seemed like thirty minutes, but I know it was just a few moments. Then the body began to shake, and it just fell over. Soon it just floated away as the water came up.”
With so many U.S. fighters airborne, radar operators were often unable to distinguish enemy planes slipping in towards the fleet from every point of the compass. “They scatter like quail757,” said U.S. fighter pilot Ted Winters of Lexington, “and come in from wherever they are staying in the clouds.” Anti-aircraft gunnery, especially from transports, was wildly undisciplined, and resulted in frequent “friendly fire” mishaps. When a plane struck a ship, its detonation was often followed by a gusher of flaming gasoline, exploding munitions, carnage among sailors protected by nothing more than helmets, goggles and anti-flash hoods. Hands working below suffered some of the most terrifying experiences. A few minutes after a series of devastating detonations overhead, on 6 April, William Henwood in the engine room of the minesweeper Emmons heard the stop bell: “Someone yelled down the hatch758 and told us to secure and get the hell out. We secured the fires, stopped the fuel oil pump and left. When I first came out of the hatch I was shocked and scared. I saw men swimming in the water and I thought we were going down.” The ship had been hit by five kamikazes.
A second big attack on 12 April, by 185 enemy aircraft, resulted in the destruction of almost all the Japanese planes for the loss of two ships sunk and a further fourteen damaged, including two battleships. A flock of kamikazes picked a victim, then launched a coordinated assault of the kind which struck the destroyer Abele. Her crew shot down two of twenty attackers, but suffered a suicide strike and a jet-propelled bomb hit, which caused the ship to break in two and sink. After Douglas H. Fox was also hit, Cmdr. Ray Pitts wrote: “The first instinct of a destroyer skipper759 who has been blitzed on radar picket station is to…feel that something is fundamentally wrong with the picture. He looks down into the smouldering ruins of his new ship, sees the dead lying in mute rows along the passageways, and wonders if perhaps he has failed either the ship or the dead.”
On 16 April, during another mass onslaught, the destroyer Laffey was pinpointed by thirty enemy aircraft. Four kamikazes struck her and two planes dropped bombs. The ship survived, but suffered ninety-four casualties. Later that day the carrier Intrepid was hit. Between big attacks, smaller-scale raids were mounted, which cost the Americans extravagant quantities of ammunition, and kept weary crews hour after hour at quarters, adding sunburn to the troubles of those on upper decks. Denied hot food, they chewed candy, nursed their bladders—no man could leave his post at Quarters—prayed that today it might be another ship’s turn and not their own. James Phillips said: “I was so tired760