The deadly attacks Japanese suicide planes made against U.S. Navy ships are a prominent aspect of the Battle of Okinawa. Less well-known is a different sort of kamikaze attack that U.S. Marines guarding the island’s Yontan Airfield contended with on the night of 24-25 May 1945. The Giretsu Airborne Raiding Force had been assigned the task of destroying as many U.S. planes as possible on the ground at Yontan and Ie Shima airfields, to increase the chances of suicide aircraft penetrating American air cover. Twelve twin-engine planes transporting the force’s 120 commandos were to land at the airfields under cover of darkness, but in the end, only one touched down.
The night of the Giretsu kamikaze mission, Marine combat correspondent Sergeant Claude R. “Red” Canup, a former sports editor from Anderson, South Carolina, was huddled in a foxhole near Yontan. Confusion, indiscriminate shots, antiaircraft fire, explosions, and fires left no doubt in his mind that the Japanese had flown under the airfield’s radar. Assigned to Marine Aircraft Group 31 for the Okinawa campaign, Canup later interviewed two Marines who were in the control tower during the attack, wrote their accounts, and filed the stories, which appear below, unfiltered and unedited. Onion-skin copies of the two articles were recently discovered in Canup’s treasured binders of Pacific war dispatches.
Eye-Witness Account of May 24-25 Attack on Yontan
Note: This eye-witness account of the attack on Yontan airfield by air-borne suicide squadrons from Japan was told to Sergeant Claude R. Canup, a Marine Combat Correspondent, by Marine Sergeant Leroy D. Hall, of Devils Lake, ND, a tower operator on duty during the raid that started the night of May 24 and ended sometime before dawn the morning of May 25.
The Japs came in five planes, one belly landed on the airfield, about 250 feet from the tower, with a dozen or more Japanese soldiers destroying 9 planes, damaging 29 and flaming over 70 thousand gallons of fuel. Another crashed on the field with two Japs spotted. Maynard Kelly was the only casualty.1 Eighteen were wounded.
I was the first one to see the Japs of the suicide squadron after their bomber had made a belly landing on the northeast-southwest runway, and I fired at the last member of the party to be seen alive on the field several hours later.
There were three of us in the tower that night. We had full view of all three runways and the entire field. Two bombers had come over between 9:10 and 10:05, flying high, dropping their bombs and getting away, just out of reach of the ack-ack.
At about 10:30 the ack-ack opened up again, the red tracers zooming just over the tower. We ducked behind sandbags and then looked out to see if we could spot the plane. I didn’t see her until she burst into flames about 500 yards away. It was coming in at tree-top level, headed for the north-south runway but exploded 300 yards from the tower. The next morning I saw several burned and mangled Jap bodies in the debris.
The second twin-engine bomber came in a couple of minutes or so behind the first. I just glimpsed it as it glided through the light of the exploded plane. Its engines were cut and it made a belly landing on the northeast-southwest strip skidding to a stop 100 yards or so away from the tower.
I snatched up a pair of field glasses and trained them on the bomber. At about the same instant it stopped, I saw two men sneak from the blind side of the plane and crouch, joined quickly by five or six more. I yelled to Marines close by, who had just come out of dugouts, that Japs were on the field. They grabbed rifles and took up positions on a road just off the field. Some other Marines hid under the tower.
The Japs, bunched together, spread out and slowly walked away from their bomber toward our planes across the runway. Walking slowly in a crouch, they had taken only a few steps when Marines opened fire. The Japs hit the strip and began firing tommy guns and rifles toward the men and the tower. They kept crawling. Two turned toward the tower and the others made for the plane. It was a bright, moon-lit night. We could see clear as day.
When the Japs started shooting at the tower, we got in a hurry. I got my rifle and joined the men in the road. By this time three of our Commandos were burning.2 A Jap threw a small fire bomb at another plane. The bomb hit the fuselage. The plane burst into flames.
It was almost like day-light by then, and 30 or 40 of us were on the road firing at the Japs maybe 50 or 60 yards away. The anti-aircraft guns were trained on the field. We had lots of stuff turned on the Japs. We could see them sneaking around burning planes. One Jap was shot, and when he fell the other two threw hand grenades at us. We ducked for cover.
In the confusion, the Japs fired at two or three fighter planes and ran back across the strip toward their wrecked bomber. We opened fire again. They got near the middle of the field and paused as if picking out more planes. We shot several of them as they ran into the shadows.
During this time, two more bombers tried to come in but were shot down in flames. Three or four Japs got out alive when a plane crashed on the other side of the field. Fires were started in that direction. By this time garrison troops had arrived, and the shooting soon stopped except for sporadic bursts from all over the area.
At daybreak I counted four Jap bodies—two by their bomber, one near a destroyed Commando, one near the front of the tower. That could have been the one Lieutenant Maynard Kelley shot before the Japs shot him. He was the duty officer in the tower when it all started.
Seven or eight men stood looking at one of the Jap bodies. A lone Jap suddenly dashed from the ruins of a Commando, stopped, and threw a grenade at them. All were wounded. Several of us shot the Jap. He set off a grenade under himself, and the explosion lifted him four or five feet. I didn’t see another Jap alive after that. (26 May 45)
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Maynard Kelley Killed on Yontan Airfield
Maynard Kelley never thought about being afraid. The night the Japs sent a suicide squad to Yontan, Kelley was already on duty in the most dangerous place on the field. The 22-year-old Marine was in the radio tower the night of May 24, 1945, when a troop-loaded plane crash landed almost in front of him.
One of the tower operators on duty with Lieutenant Kelley that night, Marine Staff Sergeant Robert N. Dietrich, of Cincinnati, was nearby when the duty officer with Marine Aircraft Group-31 was killed. This is Sergeant Dietrich’s account of the incident:
First Lieutenant Kelley was in the tower during the bombing that preceded the suicide squad landing. “I’d give $50 to be up there and able to get a shot at those guys,” the Lieutenant exclaimed when it started. Several minutes later, when three enemy bombers appeared over the field at one time, he exclaimed louder, “The ante has just been raised. I’d give $75 to be up there right now!”
About that time ack-ack was seen firing at a low target just east of the field. It was a plane. Lieutenant Kelley yelled, “What the hell?” Another plane made its approach and landed just opposite the tower. Thinking some of the crew would still be alive, Kelley grabbed the field glasses. When he saw six or eight forms getting out of the plane, he grabbed his .38, rapelled down the ladder, and hurtled into the jeep. We saw the Japs headed straight for the jeep, and we hollered for the Lieutenant to come back.
About that time the first plane set on fire by the Japs almost went up in their faces. Our guys stopped the jeep, and Lieutenant Kelley jumped out to run back to the tower to alert his squadron by telephone. The Japs were heading our way showering the tower with gun fire.
Lieutenant Kelley started firing his revolver at the slinking forms, and shouted, “I got him! I got that one!” Things were happening all over the field by that time, and several of the guys headed in the Japs’ vicinity. They hollered they wanted the spotlight from the tower thrown in the general direction of the enemy.
Lieutenant Kelley hurriedly scaled the ladder knowing he would be a target for the Japs. A shot struck him in the chest. He turned on the spotlight and still had his finger wrapped around the trigger when he was removed from the tower.
Lieutenant Kelley lived with his grandparents in Seattle and received his commission and wings in 1943. After duty at Jacksonville, Fla., and Cherry Point, N.C., he shipped overseas with Lieutenant Colonel Marion Magruder’s Black Mac’s Killers and had flown only a few times since his squadron landed on Okinawa in May.3 He was buried in the Marine cemetery. (30 May 45)
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1. A Marine enlisted man was also killed. 2d Marine Aircraft Wing, War Diary, May 1945, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD.
2. Curtiss R5C Commando transports.
3. Marine Night Fighter Squadron 533 was nicknamed Black Mac’s Killers.