During World War II, Allied airmen learned to beware of “flak traps”—decoys or unusable aircraft, for instance, surrounded by antiaircraft guns—laid out by German and Japanese defenders.
In the summer of 1945, Kure Harbor was the greatest flak trap on Earth. It contained nothing that could harm the U.S. Third Fleet. But Geisha-like Kure smiled (or smirked) behind her ceremonial fan, crooked a fetching finger at Admirals Ernest King, Chester Nimitz, and William “Bull” Halsey, and coyly invited them in. They rushed to accept.
Near the western tip of Honshu on the Inland Sea, Kure lay ten miles southeast of Hiroshima and barely five miles across the bay from the naval academy at Etajima.
Established in the 1890s, Kure Naval Arsenal was one of Japan’s four major shipyards, with facilities for warship construction and repair plus steel and weapon production. Kure built the 32,000-ton battleship Nagato in 1920 and the 65,000-ton Yamato in 1941. (Her sister, the Musashi, came from Mitsubishi Nagasaki.)
As a major naval base, Kure was targeted by the U.S. Navy and Army Air Forces from spring 1945. On 19 March, Fifth Fleet carriers launched against Kure and environs, drawing a heavy response. In exchange for damage to two fast carriers—the USS Franklin (CV-13) and Wasp (CV-18)—Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher’s aviators damaged four immobile Japanese carriers, four battleships, and a light cruiser.
From April through June, Marianas-based B-29 Superfortresses mined Kure Harbor and adjacent waters while bombing industrial targets in the city. Then, on 1 July, Major General Curtis LeMay’s XXI Bomber Command flew an incendiary raid that burned down about 40 percent of the city. Subsequent U.S. Army Air Forces missions largely involved Okinawa-based B-24 Liberators.1
Admiral Nimitz’s “Graybook,” with daily summaries of Pacific Fleet operations, contained repeated references to Kure. Some were forward-looking, such as the 11 July notation that the Kobe-Osaka “appears impracticable to operate in that area until sterilizers render the mines inoperative in February 1946.” Thus, “Kure appears to be preferable as a base from which to control the Inland Sea.”2
Planning for Kure
But looking ahead nearly two weeks, on 13 July, the Commander-in-Chief, Pacific (CINCPAC), ordered attacks and fighter sweeps concentrated on the Kure-Kobe area beginning the 24th. On the 28th, Admiral Halsey’s Third Fleet carriers, under Vice Admiral John S. McCain, were to attack northern Kyushu while sweeping Kure airfields.
Nimitz directed “sustained strikes against naval combatant strength Kure-Kobe area, sweep Maizuru, strike air installations Kobe-Nagoya area.” The order also laid out plans for operations, retirement, and replenishment.
McCain’s Task Force 38 was composed of 14 carriers in three task groups. In May, he had selected the USS Shangri-La (CV-38) for his flagship, as the eight-month-old Essex-class carrier had staff space and ample communications. For the Kure strikes, the “Shang” cruised in Rear Admiral Arthur Radford’s Task Group 38.4.
Though a Johnny come lately to aviation, “Slew” McCain had a superb staff. His air operations officer was Captain John S. “Jimmy” Thach, whose assistant was Lieutenant Commander William N. Leonard—both distinguished fighter pilots in 1942. McCain gave varied impressions to his shipmates. Leonard said, “I don’t think he could fly an airplane to save his life, but he filled the slot when it was needed.”3
Some subordinates regarded the admiral with bemusement; one said with his jutting jaw he resembled Popeye the Sailor who had slept in his clothes for three days, referring to his unkempt appearance. McCain removed the grommet from his hat, leaving a shapeless khaki lump. He rolled his own cigarettes, occasionally dribbling tobacco onto his clothes. An Air Group 85 aviator said, “He’s a funny little guy.”4
But there was deadly serious business afoot. Said Leonard,
Some Neanderthals back at PacFleet wanted continuation of a navy versus navy fight, and we lost many good people to no good purpose. With the Jap navy lying doggo, PacFleet began to assert itself more into the assignment of missions and objectives of the fast carriers.5
McCain largely agreed, preferring to strike airfields and aircraft factories, though he kept his counsel for awhile. However, Home Island operations already had shown the benefits of sinking Japanese coastal traffic, notably the Hokkaido coal ferries—a task carrier aircraft could accomplish with few losses. But, inevitably, airmen were drawn to Japan’s aviation industry while steamers and merchantmen—Tokyo’s exposed jugular—lacked the perceived glamor of air power.
As Halsey related: “Slew McCain strongly opposed our strikes against Kure. He and his staff considered the Japanese fleet only a minor threat; they wanted to use our air strength against other, more profitable targets.” But Halsey felt there were four good reasons why this fleet had to be destroyed:
1. For the sake of national morale. This was the appropriate retaliation for Pearl Harbor.
2. For the sake of the Russians. U.S. high command knew of its impending declaration of war and knew that if the United States had to establish a supply line to them, it would run between Kamchatka and Hokkaido—a route so exposed that even a few enemy cruisers and destroyers could dominate it.
3. For the sake of the peace terms. The United States could not afford to have a surrendered Japan use the existence of part of its fleet as a bargaining point, as Germany had after World War I.
4. CINCPAC had ordered the fleet destroyed. “If the other reasons had been invalid, that one alone would have been enough for me.” (Emphasis added.)6
Taking Halsey’s contentions in order:
1. U.S. national honor demanded destruction of the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN). How that argument arose is never explained, especially since the Allies already had demanded Japan’s unconditional surrender.
2. Destruction of remaining IJN capital ships was “necessary” to prevent them from intercepting U.S. convoys to Russia. The notion is absurd on its face. The “doggo” fleet at Kure was hemmed in by mines, out of fuel, more than 1,000 miles from the convoy routes, and Halsey ignored the dominant U.S. submarines and aircraft.
3. Destruction was “necessary” to prevent Tokyo from using its remaining immobile fleet as a bargaining chip as Germany had attempted to do in 1919. As per U.S. national honor, the claim was irrelevant because the Allies required unconditional surrender.
4. Halsey was all too willing to comply with orders from Fleet Admirals King and Nimitz, apparently eager to run up the Navy’s score against the certainty of an independent U.S. Air Force.
Marginalized Allies
Behind the scenes, Halsey did not want to share the Kure spoils, so he directed the British Pacific Fleet (Task Force 37) to attack airfields and port facilities at Osaka. The Graybook noted:
Task Force 37 be prepared operate in conjunction with Task Force 38 in accordance this schedule as practicable. Also, be prepared for separate operations on north Honshu-Hokkaido targets during this period. Movement and attack schedule for TF 37 by separate annex later.
Preparing for late July strikes, on the 21st and 22nd, the Third Fleet probably conducted the largest at-sea replenishment of the war. More than 100 ships received some 6,000 tons of ammunition, 379,000 barrels of fuel oil, 1,600 tons of provisions, and 99 aircraft, plus some 400 personnel.7
Like many harbors, Kure was far too shallow for conventional torpedoes. Many ships were moored within 50 yards of shore, often in 25 to 30 feet of water—about equal to major ships’ drafts. The defenders anticipated what was coming and took what measures were possible. They included declaring the battleship Ise and cruiser Aoba as “floating antiaircraft batteries.”
Three antique cruisers were veterans of the Battle of the Tsushima Strait 40 years prior. The Kitakami received more 25-mm antiaircraft mounts. The Yakumo replaced her 6- and 8-inch guns with dual-purpose 5-inchers and more light weapons. The Iwate’s main batteries were replaced by 12.7-mm mounts.
Intelligence and reconnaissance sources revealed Kure’s increased antiaircraft defenses. In response, Task Force 38 planners assigned radar proximity-fused bombs to suppress Japanese gunfire. Exploding overhead, the weapons spewed steel shards over a wider area than direct hits, decimating enemy gun crews.
Ordnancemen also loaded rare 2,000-pound bombs in Avengers’ bellies for maximum effect against enemy ships’ hulls.8
24 July
Carriers of Task Force 38 launched against Kure before dawn on the 24th, achieving surprise at daybreak. It was the beginning of a long day with 1,747 sorties.
Task group strike coordinators knew where to send their squadrons. The World War I–era battleships Hyuga, Ise, and Haruna drew particular attention. The 30,000-ton sisters Hyuga and Ise had been modified with aft flight decks that were never used.
The Ise was attacked by 60 aircraft in two strikes, receiving hits on the bow, flight deck, number three turret, main deck, and bridge, killing the captain. She settled by the bow, taking three days to pump water out.
The Hyuga was worse off. She was hit by perhaps ten bombs that blew off part of her bow, destroyed her bridge and killed her captain, and ignited major fires. Some 200 sailors were killed and 600 wounded in the attack.
Despite elaborate camouflage and dummy buildings on deck, the 20,000-ton carrier Amagi absorbed four attacks with extreme damage, most notably by an Avenger’s one-ton bomb that destroyed most of the upper hangar deck and bulged the flight deck for 200 feet.9
The Haruna, reputedly sunk by B-17s in the Philippines in December 1941, had seen extensive combat, particularly in the Solomons. She survived for four days.
Heavily damaged in the Philippines, the cruiser Aoba of Solomons fame had barely dragged her 9,000 tons to Kure, where she was struck in April and judged unworthy of repair. With her keel on the bottom since then, she sprouted additional 25-mm guns as a “floating” antiaircraft battery. But her 50 gun barrels did little good: sinking to her keel, she was mostly abandoned that afternoon.
The much-traveled Tone (Pearl Harbor, Midway, the Solomons, Philippine Sea, and Leyte) was struck by three bombs plus near misses but remained active. At Etajima lay the light cruiser Oyodo, Combined Fleet flagship since early 1944. She absorbed five bombs and numerous near misses causing a serious fire and starboard list.10
Aerial opposition was surprisingly sparse. Carrier aviators claimed 15 kills on the 24th, mainly by the USS San Jacinto (CVL-30), Shangri-La, and Yorktown (CV-10) squadrons. The price was reckoned at 30 carrier aircraft with 21 pilots and aircrewmen lost or missing.
While the Kure strikes went on, Task Force 38 also hit other targets. On 24 July, more than 40 carrier planes were lost in Home Island missions, including 30 at Kure.
25 July
Task Force 38’s strikes on the 25th occurred amid adverse weather early that afternoon. But McCain’s aviators had enough time to inflict heavy damage on the 30,000-ton battleship-carrier Hyuga and two immobile carriers. They included the much-abused Amagi, alternately savaged by carrier planes and U.S. Army bombers from Okinawa.
The Ise was intended for drydock but was struck by five bombs from the USS Hancock (CV-19) Corsairs; follow-on strikes produced nearly a dozen other hits and near misses. Listing to starboard, the 28-year-old leviathan sank to the bow and was abandoned.11 Seven other combatants sustained lesser damage.
In the day’s 655 sorties, tailhookers also struck airfields and targets of opportunity that sank nine small merchantmen. A lone snooper was shot down over the force. Elsewhere, of 18 aerial kills, eight fell to Belleau Wood (CVL-24) Hellcats, with three lost to Captain Minoru Genda’s elite 343rd Kokutai.
U.S. losses on the 25th were lightest of the series: eight planes. Disappointed with poor hunting, Task Forces 38 and 37 departed to the southward for replenishment.
26–27 July
On the 26th and 27th, Third Fleet’s brain trust huddled with Halsey on board the USS Missouri (BB-63), deciding additional targets and division of labor. The consultants included Royal Navy Vice Admiral Bernard Rawlings, commander of the British Pacific Fleet. The planners targeted Kyushu, central Honshu, and the Inland Sea.12
28 July
The 28th was the most devastating. The battleships Haruna and Hyuga sank in shallow water while the Ise took 16 hits, settling by the bow. No longer useful, some of her antiaircraft guns were moved ashore.
The Tone remained in the fight. Aircrews reported “a steady volume of heavy flak” that noticeably waned after the first planes rolled in—probably the result of proximity-fused bombs that bloodied gun crews. Battered by two hits and perhaps six near misses, she listed 21 degrees to port. Though extra damage-control crews came aboard, the flooding could not be contained. In the afternoon, learning of the Tone’s condition, the USS Essex’s (CV-9) strike coordinator changed the briefing and sent Task Group 38.3 planes to targets of opportunity.
Throughout the day, the Oyodo was swarmed by Wasp, Shangri-La, and Monterey (CVL-26) air groups. Counterflooding failed and she capsized to starboard.
Nimitz’s Graybook noted:
A flash report of the first three of seven strikes by TF-38 planes on the Kure-Kobe area on the 28th shows 19 airborne e/a destroyed and 75 destroyed on the ground.
Left burning and heavily damaged were the BB Haruna, BBxCV [hybrid carrier] Ise, CL Oyodo, CAs Aoba and Tone. Strike photographs showed the BBxCV Hyuga resting on the bottom from the 24th attacks, with the topside well smashed and the deck amidships under water. The CVE Kaiyo was again damaged. Also damaged were 12 miscellaneous light craft including 4 DD and 2 DE.13
Repeated strikes in so few days ensured hazardous exposure to aircrews. The record must have belonged to Carrier Air Group 83 Helldiver pilot Lieutenant (junior grade) Shelby W. Mitchell and Aviation Radioman Second Class William W. Sterner. They were shot down on the 24th, quickly rescued and returned to the Essex, dried out, and sent back into the game. They were dunked again on the 28th, but again a destroyer exchanged them for the ritual ice cream “bounty.”14
Japanese gunners and accidents accounted for the loss of 26 Navy planes bearing 30 fliers, nearly half the total losses for the July strikes. As usual, Helldivers took the heaviest losses, with 11.
From the 28th onward, the Third Fleet directed strikes on northern Kyushu and sweeps of Kure area airfields. The first two days of August would target northern, then southern, Kyushu fields.
Debrief
Presumably citing July operations throughout Japan, Halsey’s memoir listed 133 aircraft lost with 102 fliers from all causes.15 Assertions that the Kure attacks cost more than 100 American lives apparently was extrapolated from approximately 130 plane losses from all Pacific Fleet carriers. Nonetheless, the Kure toll accounted for half of all PacFleet July carrier losses to all causes. The proportion was even higher for attrition throughout the enemy home islands.
Specifically, in the three Kure strikes TF-38 lost 64 aircraft with 55 aircrew. Helldivers suffered disproportionately with 27 lost, or 42 percent. That compared to 30 fighters (evenly divided between Hellcats and Corsairs) and, surprisingly, just 7 Avengers, presumably the most vulnerable.
Four Helldiver crews, two Avenger crewmen, and a Hellcat pilot were captured but survived. However, there was a bitter postscript. The two B-24s lost on the 28th carried 20 fliers, of whom 14 were captured. Three died that day while eight went to Hiroshima, where they perished in the 6 August atomic bombing. Three survived. A USS Ticonderoga (CV-14) SB2C crew and a Randolph (CV-15) fighter pilot also died at Hiroshima.16
PacFleet policy rewarded a credited hit on a cruiser or better with a Navy Cross. Thus, the July Kure attacks yielded a graveyard that bloomed with 170 decorations, though some were as minor as a single rocket strike.
Meanwhile, at month’s end the Allies issued the Potsdam Declaration from newly occupied Germany, requiring Japan’s unconditional surrender. By then, of course, the Imperial Japanese Navy had ceased to exist, but it mattered not in Tokyo. The doom-laden war cabinet was deadlocked, leading to cataclysmic events in days to come.
The Ultimate Option
An alternative for Kure has been suggested by Dr. Richard P. Hallion, Air Force Historian Emeritus:
Kure might have been a perfect demonstration target for the A-bomb, either the first or more likely the second. B-29s were relatively immune to defenses so the drop could be pretty precise (given the standards of the time). It’s hard to imagine any ships would have survived the combined blast, evacuation of water and bottoming out, the reflecting shockwaves from the surrounding hills, and the subsequent reflooding of the harbor.”17
Kure never appeared on the nuclear target list, but it might have addressed two concerns: a cost-effective way of destroying most of the remaining Imperial Japanese Navy; and satisfying the Army Air Forces at the expense of the Navy’s agenda.
1. Wesley Craven and James Cate, The Pacific: Matterhorn to Nagasaki. The Army Air Forces in World War II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951).
2. Running Estimate and Summary maintained by CINCPAC staff covering the period 1 July 1945 to 31 August 1945.
3. Barrett Tillman, When the Shooting Stopped: August 1945 (Oxford, UK: Bloomsbury-Osprey, 2022), 62.
4. Richard DeMott diary, courtesy of the USS Shangri-La (CV-38) Association.
5. Barrett Tillman, Whirlwind: The Air War Against Japan (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 208.
6. William F. Halsey Jr., with J. Bryan III, Admiral Halsey’s Story (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1947), 265.
7. Samuel Eliot Morison, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, vol. 14, Victory in the Pacific (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1960), 330–31.
8. RADM Samuel J. Cox, USN (Ret.), “H-053-1: The End of the Imperial Japanese Navy,” Naval History and Heritage Command, September 2020.
9. Anthony Tully, “IJN Amagi: Tabular Record of Movement,” CombinedFleet.com.
10 Details of ship damage are found in The Campaigns of the Pacific War (Naval Analysis Division, 1946) and the Nihon Kaigun website by Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully.
11. Bob Hackett, Sander Kingsepp, and Lars Ahlberg, “IJN Ise: Tabular Record of Movement,” CombinedFleet.com.
12. “U.S. Naval Administrative Histories of World War II in the Navy Department Library,” Naval History and Heritage Command, 1 June 2010.
13. ADM Chester W. Nimitz, “Command Summary of Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, USN: ‘Greybook’: 7 December 1941–31 August 1945,” vol. 7, 3,250–548.
14. Pacific Wrecks database via James Sawruk email, 20 January 2024.
15. Halsey and Bryan, Admiral Halsey’s Story, 264.
16. Pacific Wrecks database via James C. Sawruk email, January 2024.
17. Dr. Richard P. Hallion, email to author, 6 March 2024.
