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to maintain power in temperatures of 130 degrees. The Bunker Hill attacks cost 396 men killed and 264 injured. One of them might have been the post-war movie star Paul Newman. He was ordered to the ship as radioman/gunner in an Avenger with a draft of replacements shortly before the attack, but by a fluke of war was held back because his pilot had an ear infection. The rest of his detail died. As with Franklin, hit on 19 March with the loss of 798 lives, on Bunker Hill brilliant damage control kept the hulk afloat, but removed Mitscher’s carrier from the war.

Just three days later, when another wave of twenty-six kamikazes descended, nineteen were shot down by fighters, six by gunfire. Yet one got through, exploding beneath the forward elevator of the admiral’s new flagship, Enterprise, and inflicting damage which required her to withdraw from operations. The Americans were fortunate that this was their last fast carrier loss. The overall cost of kamikaze operations to the U.S. fleet off Okinawa was appalling: 120 ships hit, of which twenty-nine were sunk.

THE CAMPAIGN was the first of the Pacific war to which the Royal Navy made a modest contribution. Hitherto, the British Eastern Fleet had merely conducted tip-and-run raids against Japanese installations in the Dutch East Indies and Malaya. Now four British carriers, along with two battleships, five cruisers and escorts, began to operate against Japanese airfields on Formosa, and suffered their share of assaults from kamikazes. “Task Force 57,” as Vice-Admiral Bernard Rawlings’s force was known, represented an attempt to satisfy Winston Churchill’s passionate desire for Britain to play a visible part in the defeat of Japan. Its beginnings were inauspicious. Admiral King was bitterly hostile to any British presence in the Pacific, on both nationalistic and logistical grounds. It required the president’s personal intervention to force the U.S. Navy to accede to the prime minister’s wishes.

Thereafter, in the first months of 1945 it proved embarrassingly hard to muster a British fleet for Pacific service. The Royal Navy, like its parent nation, was overstretched and war-weary. Australia’s shameless dock labour unions delayed the deployment of both warships and the fleet train of supply ships. When Rawlings’s ships finally joined Spruance, they were hampered by design unfitness for tropical conditions, which inflicted chronic hardship on crews. British Seafire and Firefly aircraft were too delicate for heavy labour, and British carriers embarked far fewer planes than their American counterparts. Ships like Illustrious had been fighting since 1939, and were troubled by old wounds—in mid-April, the carrier was obliged to sail home. Rawlings’s fleet struggled to keep up with its vastly more powerful allies. In an early series of air strikes, the British lost forty-one aircraft in 378 sorties, a casualty rate which would have been deemed disastrous even by Bomber Command. Sir Bruce Fraser wrote later in his dispatch: “There can be little doubt772 that the Americans are much quicker than we are at learning the lessons of war and applying them to their ships and their tactics…As a result the British fleet is seldom spectacular, never really modern…”

A British war correspondent, David Divine, joined the battleship King George V after weeks aboard Lexington, which refuelled and resupplied at sea in winds of up to Force 6, in a fashion reflecting the superb professionalism of the 1945 U.S. Navy. Now, Divine watched in dismay as “KGV went up astern of one rusty old tanker, which appeared to be manned by two Geordie mates and twenty consumptive Chinamen, and it took us, I think, an hour and a half to pick up a single buoyed pipe-line, fiddling around under our bows.” Replenishment operations at sea remained an embarrassment for the British. In a placid sea, an American carrier refuelled in two hours. A British one required all day. A proud service found itself struggling to play a bit part in a vast American drama. Vice-Admiral Rawlings wrote later of the “admiration and…it must