Whirlwind - Barrett Tillman [107]
She was Kaiyo, the 16,000-ton escort carrier damaged by naval mines and bombs two weeks previously. Inactive since July, she was painted green and strewn with camouflage netting and artificial trees, giving the appearance of a floating garden. She sat upright but mired on the bottom, useful only as an antiaircraft platform. In truth she was not worth a load of bombs but aerial photos showed her “afloat.”
Ed Hawes didn’t have to fly again. He had orders to return home but “he wanted to get that carrier so bad,” recalled a subordinate. Hawes was thirty-four, a ten-year veteran with 4,700 flying hours, including nearly 1,000 in combat. Known for his aggressiveness (he had three Purple Hearts), he could not pass up a shot at a carrier.
Hawes led twelve B-25s away from Okinawa at 6:00 A.M. on the 9th, relying upon his lead navigator, Captain John W. Long, Jr., to plot the 530-mile flight. Organized in three-plane flights, each Mitchell carried two 1,000-pounders with delay fuses to permit trailing aircraft to escape the blast pattern.
Over Kyushu heavy clouds caused serious problems. Descending from 6,000 feet, one flight became separated and another veered slightly off course in the haze. As one pilot recalled, “The weather was lousy and the visibility was terrible.”
Nevertheless, Hawes glimpsed the target and led his formation down a fairly steep slope, approaching the bay from inland. The bombers leveled off less than fifty feet above the trees.
Flying as copilot for the second flight leader was Lieutenant Chuck Crawford, who had a good view of Hawes’s lead section. He saw the CO’s two bombs leave the aircraft, aligned with the carrier amidships. Then the lead bomber took a fatal blow.
Crawford recalled, “It must have caught a direct hit in the right engine. His B-25 did a snap roll to the right, one and a half times around, and dove into the water, inverted and nose down. Until I saw that happen I didn’t think a B-25 could roll that fast!” He knew the crew could not have survived.
Racing in about twenty seconds behind, Crawford punched off his bombs, which he believed smashed into Kaiyo’s hull. He had no time to watch the other Mitchells, though four of the remaining five aimed their bombs at the ship. Then they turned for home, three and a half hours southwest.
After the 38th’s attack, the last of Kaiyo’s caretaker crew dismantled the AA guns and left the ship.
Ed Hawes, the erstwhile math teacher and tennis coach, left a widow and two sons. He received a belated Silver Star in 1990, as the paperwork had been neglected in the excitement of V-J Day.
Another airman also received a posthumous decoration for an August 9 mission as British planes attacked airfields and Onagawa Bay on Honshu’s northeast coast, 170 miles north of Tokyo. Mines had bottled up half a dozen ships that lay vulnerable, though their military value was minimal. Their total tonnage barely represented a single cruiser.
Leading an eight-plane fighter strike was Lieutenant Robert Hampton Gray, a Canadian flying off HMS Formidable. A former art student from British Columbia, Gray had a year’s fleet experience, including attacks against the German battleship Tirpitz in Norwegian waters. The twenty-seven-year-old flier made a specialty of Axis shipping, having helped sink an escort two weeks before. Now he deployed his Corsairs by two-plane sections, diving in from 10,000 feet.
Sweeping low over the bay, Gray went for a “destroyer” among the small craft and auxiliaries. Actually she was the 870-ton sloop Amakusa.
The sky erupted in flak bursts and tracers from at least four ships and the shoreline. Hit repeatedly, Gray’s fighter spurted flames, and another pilot saw one of his 500-pounders shot off its rack. Nevertheless, “Hammy” pressed his run to minimum altitude, dropping his remaining bomb from perhaps fifty feet. It penetrated the hull, blowing a huge hole in the starboard side.
Gray’s Corsair pulled off target, streaming smoke and flames as it swerved into the water. He perished with