Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [274]
The Royal Navy discovered that its most significant assets in Pacific combat were its carriers’ armoured flight decks. The extra weight reduced their complement of aircraft, but rendered them astonishingly resistant to kamikazes, in contrast to their fir-decked American counterparts. When a Zero dived vertically onto the carrier Indefatigable on 1 April, its aircraft were able to resume landing within an hour. Though HMS Formidable suffered damage and fifty casualties when it was hit on 4 May, the ship was soon operational again. On 9 May, Victorious was hit twice and Formidable a second time, by kamikazes which eluded patrolling British fighters. Here too, the Royal Navy found that inexperience cost dear. Fraser’s Seafires and Hellcats shot down a steady stream of intruding Japanese, but lacked the mass which the Americans possessed, together with the refined fighter-direction skills. There was a further twist to British tribulations when the Canadian government announced that only those of its citizens who chose to do so need continue to serve against the Japanese once the war against Germany was over. Despite offers of increased pay, 605 ratings of Rawlings’s Canadian-crewed cruiser Uganda insisted upon exercising their right to go home. Only with difficulty was the ship persuaded to stay on station until a relief arrived.
The British Pacific Fleet’s difficulties mounted with every week of operations. Crew morale suffered from the heat, discomfort and overcrowding: “Except for those engaged774 in flying operations, it was proving to be a dull war.” At the end of April, Admiral King renewed his efforts to remove the Royal Navy from operations against Japan by dispatching Fraser’s ships to support the Australian landings on Borneo. This proposal was defeated only by direct British appeals to MacArthur and Kinkaid. At the end of May, to the acute embarrassment of Fraser and the British government, battle damage, crew exhaustion and mechanical failures obliged Rawlings’s squadron to withdraw to Sydney for extended repairs. When TF57 departed, it had completed just eleven air-strike days, dropping 546 tons of bombs and firing 632 rockets. It claimed 57 enemy aircraft destroyed, for the loss of 203: 32 to suicide attacks; 30 in a hangar fire; 33 to enemy flak or fighters; 61 in deck landing accidents; and 47 to “other causes.” It was a sorry story, indeed one of the most inglorious episodes of the Royal Navy’s wartime history. The misfortunes of the fleet reflected the fact that Britain, after almost six years of war, was simply too poor and too exhausted to sustain such a force alongside the United States armada. A British squadron returned to Halsey’s command only in the last days of July.
OKINAWA was declared secure on 22 June, eighty-two days after the landings of Buckner’s assault force. The U.S. Navy had lost 4,907 men killed, the army 4,675, the Marines 2,928. Another 36,613 men had been wounded ashore, over 8,000 at sea. A further 36,000 soldiers and Marines became non-battle casualties, many of them combat-fatigue cases. Buckner was unable to celebrate the victory he had yearned for. A Japanese shell killed him, unmourned, in the last days. His Japanese counterpart, Gen. Misomu Ushijima, also perished. He and his chief of staff committed ritual suicide in their headquarters cave on 22 June. Nine of his staff officers shot themselves. Dispute persists about how many Okinawan civilians died, because it is uncertain how many were evacuated before the battle began. Estimates range from 30,000 to 100,000, together with around 70,000 of the island’s defenders. About 1,900 kamikazes died in their assaults on the U.S. fleet off the island. A total of 7,401 Japanese surrendered, almost half of these local Okinawan conscripts.
Some Japanese officers, including Kouichi Ito, retained a lifelong conviction