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on a raft in the Sulu Sea after coming down in the Surigao Strait. Comrades dropped him a two-man life raft. “That plus my own one-man raft made my seven-day tour of duty out there pretty pleasant,” he told his debriefers with studied nonchalance. “The weather was pretty good228 except at night when it rained pretty hard. I had lots of water, using my one-man raft as a water wagon. My food consisted of minnows, seaweed, candy rations. My main problem in the raft was to stay comfortable. The hands became very sore—and also my rear end.” On Bakutis’s seventh night adrift, he was wakened from a doze by the sound of diesels, and for a few heart-stopping moments feared that a Japanese vessel was approaching. Instead, however, to his infinite relief an American submarine loomed out of the darkness.

The submarine rescue service, often operating close inshore amid treacherous shoals or under Japanese fire, received the gratitude of every American flier. Together with “dumbo” amphibians and patrolling destroyers, the submarines achieved miracles in saving hundreds of precious aircrew from sea, sharks and the enemy. Cmdr. Ernie Snowden of Lexington’s Air Group 16 paid warm tribute to the submariners: “If they had wheels I think they would climb right up over the beach and pick us up. We have nothing but praise for them.” On 10 October 1944, for instance, twenty-one aircraft were shot down attacking the Ryukyu Islands. Yet only eleven pilots and crewmen were lost, the remainder being rescued, six of them off Okinawa by a single submarine, Sterlet. When Lt. Robert Nelson crashed229 in Kagoshima Bay off Kyushu, his dinghy began to drift inshore. A tiny cruiser-based Kingfisher seaplane landed alongside him, and Nelson clung to its float while it taxied several miles across the water to rendezvous with a submarine—adding a torpedo-bomber crew to its burden on the way.

During an air battle off Iwo Jima, Japanese Zero pilot Kunio Iwashita was astonished when the surface of the sea was suddenly broken by a long black shape, as an American submarine surfaced to pick up a ditched pilot. An American flying boat, apparently bent on the same mission, was shot down by Japanese fighters. Iwashita said: “We were amazed to see the Americans230 taking so much trouble about their people. Nobody provided that sort of service for us.” An extreme example of “force protection” was displayed on 16 September 1944, when Ensign Harold Thompson ditched three hundred yards off Waisile, while strafing Japanese barges in his Hellcat. A Catalina dropped a life raft which Thompson boarded, only to find himself drifting relentlessly towards a pier. Two other Hellcats were shot down trying to protect him by strafing the shoreline—one pilot was killed, the second rescued by a “dumbo.” Thompson moored his raft to a chain of Japanese barges, and two American PT-boats raced in to rescue him. Their first attempt was frustrated by coastal gunfire, but after Avengers dropped smoke floats to mask their approach, a boat snatched Thompson just as the Japanese closed in on him. More than fifty aircraft were involved in the rescue, “which sure was a wonderful show231 to watch,” said Thompson, back on his carrier Santee.

Destroyers traditionally extracted “ransom” for every flier they sent back. “Rescued pilots were prized possessions,” wrote a destroyer officer. “Before returning them, we would strip them232 of all their fancy clothes—silk scarf maps, survival kits with great knives, compasses and magnifying glasses, and their pistol. Then we would ask the carrier to send over all the geedunk—ice cream—they had, plus a minimum of two movies our crew hadn’t seen.”

At sea in the Pacific, by the fall of 1944 the might of the U.S. Navy was unchallengeable. That is to say, no rational adversary would have precipitated a headlong confrontation with such forces as Nimitz now deployed. The summer clashes, the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot,” had fatally crippled Japanese air power. Only the Japanese navy, in the mood of fatalism and desperation which afflicted its upper ranks, could