During the last seven months of the late war, from February 1 to September 1, 1945, American naval forces in the Pacific suffered almost twice as many casualties as they had received in any comparable previous period. This was of course due, in great part, to the fact that we were bringing the weight of our fleet to bear directly on the enemy’s homeland, but the overwhelming majority of our losses, both in personnel and ships, can be directly attributed to the carefully planned and nearly successful Kamikaze campaign.
Contrary to general public opinion, the suicide planes were not the desperate measures of an enemy facing doom. They were the spearhead of a coolly calculated operation, taking into consideration the following conditions which applied to the Pacific war during the period under discussion:
(1) Our fleet, especially the fast carriers in Task Force 38/58, Third-Fifth Fleet, could not be withdrawn from striking distance of the Japanese home airbases without seriously endangering the success of the land operations we were committed to on Iwo Jima, and later, Okinawa.
(2) Though our fleet had supply and repair bases at Ulithi and Guam, any ship receiving considerable damage had to return to Pearl Harbor or the west coast, a good 7,000-mile voyage. Any ship having to make this voyage could be considered completely out of action for upwards of three months.
(3) Our carriers had been proved “soft-tops,” their unarmored flight decks making them peculiarly susceptible to air attack.
(4) Our A.A. gunnery and Combat Air Patrols, both making use of radar, were superb, averaging about 90 per cent success in destroying enemy aircraft, and effectively breaking up the usual Japanese dive-torpedo bomber attacks.
(5) Japan had a large number of semi-obsolescent aircraft, which, while comparatively modern, were hopelessly out-classed by new American types.
(6) Many Japanese aviators were perfectly willing to sacrifice their lives in suicide attacks, due to the fanaticism and “Love of Emperor” which had been inbred into the Japanese people for many generations.
The Japanese had everything to gain, and nothing to lose. We were rapidly establishing ourselves within easy striking distance of their homeland, and as soon as we accomplished this Japanese defeat would be inevitable. If their campaign failed, it would simply hasten the impending doom. If it succeeded, it would accomplish something that they were striving for at this time, a long war-—with an increasing clamor in war- weary America for conditional surrender terms. The plan itself was very simple— hurling fleets of aircraft at our naval vessels, with explicit orders to crash deliberately into our ships. The direct object-—the knocking out of the U. S. Fleet from the war.
The Japanese gamble almost paid off. The Kamikaze Attack Corps, named after a “divine wind” that had supposedly won a Japanese sixteenth-century naval battle, was formed in late 1944, and was used in full force almost immediately. Prior to this time there had been many purported and a number of actual attempts by Japanese aviators to crash into our ships, but these were unrelated instances, generally occurring when an enemy plane was crippled, with little chance of reaching safety. From February, 1945 on, the attacks were intentional and coordinated.
By the end of May, the large carriers Hancock, Saratoga, Intrepid, Enterprise, Ticonderoga, and Bunker Hill had been sent limping homeward as a direct result of the suicide attacks. Another one of the big carriers, the Franklin, was caught with her planes armed and fueled on the flight deck by a single plane that was probably on a Kamikaze mission, but which simply released its bombs on this sitting target, turning the ship into a funeral pyre for 772 members of the crew. Another ship on the agonizing voyage home, another vital carrier out of the war.
The Intrepid's experience is typical. On April 16, 1945, about 220 aircraft came down to attack the fast carrier task force off Okinawa. Of these planes, 210 were shot down by the carrier Combat Air Patrols and by ship’s gunfire, but a Kamikaze plane smashed into the parked planes just aft of the forward elevator on the Intrepid's flight deck, causing extremely heavy casualties.
The situation was bad. The Japanese could well afford to trade 210 planes for a single carrier, their whole air force for our fleet. And they apparently had every intention of doing so. We could not pull the carriers out, so we had to find some way to protect them. The problem was—how?
Okinawa, with-its vital beachhead to be protected, lay 400 miles south of the Japanese airfields on Kyushu. The carriers were even farther to the southward. This meant that the heavily loaded suicide planes (almost entirely the “Zeke” fighter, “Judy,” “Jill,” and “Val” dive bombers, for the first four months of the campaign) had a high speed 450-mile trip to make, during which they were constantly under attack by carrier planes and the few land-based fighters from Okinawa. This left the Japanese suicide pilots neither the will nor the gasoline to attack the fleet from all directions, a maneuver that would have been of great value to them, as they relied little on close formation flying for protection, and by coming in from all sides would divide and hamper the U. S. Combat Air Patrols.
The fact that the suicide planes came almost invariably from the north suggested to the Navy a possible method of breaking the force of the attacks. A number of destroyers and destroyer escorts were taken from the immediate screening forces of the fleet and strung in a long line well to the north of the carriers, and intersecting the path of the Kamikaze planes.
The “picket line,” as it was termed, was set up in early May, 1945, and with its establishment began one of the bravest chapters in American history. The destroyers were to give advance warning to the carrier groups when their radar picked up Kamikazes coming down on their one-way trip from Kyushu, and to knock down as many planes as possible with their A.A. guns. The system worked too well; the Japanese realized the danger of letting the picket line exist, and shifted the weight of their attack to the gray line of destroyers.
From then on it was pretty much of a personal battle between the destroyer men and the Kamikazes. The picket line was reinforced by a larger number of new Allen M. Sumner and Gearing class destroyers, hurriedly refitted at United States ports for radar picket duty by the removal of one or even both banks of torpedo tubes, the addition of many 40-mm. and 20-mm. A.A., and the installation of the latest radar equipment, the latter being mounted on light tripod masts forward of the aft stack in many. They employed the new VT fuze for their 5-inch shells, and Japanese losses zoomed 300 per cent. Their quadruple 40’s received individual radar directors, and even more Kamikazes were shot down. It was still touch and go, however, the Bush, Colhoun, Drexler, Luce, Mannert L. Abele, Morisson, Pringle, William D. Porter—all new ships, fine ships, with fine crews—going down under the blast of the Kamikazes. Other destroyers, probably six times as many, attacked as was the Laffey by more than a score of the suicide planes, fought back, shooting them down often in dozens, but were crippled so that they, too, were sent on the voyage stateside for repairs.
It was a hard decision to make. We were losing men at a terrible rate, and the new destroyers were certainly not expendable. However, the picket line idea was working —the Japanese were not getting a carrier for every 200 planes now, or for 500, or a thousand. So the destroyers stayed where they were, breaking up attack after attack, fighting, along with the carrier air groups, a private war against the Japanese air force.
While the radar picket line was being set up, other technological and organizational improvements were made in the carrier groups, to take care of the diminishing number of Kamikazes getting through. The fast battleships, which at the beginning of the Okinawa operation had been formed into a shore support force, were distributed through the carrier task groups, their enormous number of A. A. guns adding to the protection of the carriers. Also adding considerable weight to the A.A. protection of the fleet were the little cruisers of the San Diego-Oakland class, boasting what was (and still is) probably the most accurate anti-aircraft fire in the fleet. The two new large cruisers, Alaska and Guam, were also integrated into the task groups for A.A. protection, and the latter, in one of the most remarkable gunnery exhibitions ever seen, shot down 82 Kamikazes in a half hour. Along technical lines, numerous changes were made in the A.A. armament, gun directors, and radar of our ships. The single 20-mm., standard short range automatic A.A. gun of our Navy, was inefficient against the Kamikaze attacks, as its firing rate was too slow and its gyroscopic computer sight unable to keep up with the amazingly swift suicide attacks. Therefore, as fast as they could be produced, new twin 20-mm. mounts were rushed out to the ships and installed, and all the computer sights were removed. New 5-inch and 40-mm. combination radar and optical gun directors were also perfected, which, combined with the VT fuze, jumped anti-aircraft accuracy fivefold.
One radar development didn’t pan out against the Kamikazes. This was IFF, “Identification, Friend, or Foe,” a device mounted in our aircraft causing a certain pattern to show on the radar scope of a friendly ship picking them up on its air search radar. After we had been using IFF in the Okinawa area for but a short time, the Japanese suicide planes began to come in sending our own IFF patterns. Apparently the Japanese had salvaged some of the IFF gear from U. S. planes that had crashed on Japanese territory during carrier air strikes, and mounted it on their own planes. Eventually we had to abandon the use of IFF entirely.
Mere treaties, mere bits of papers, with names signed to them and with no force back of them, have proved utterly worthless for the protection of nations, and where they are the only alternatives it is not only right but necessary that each nation should arm itself so as to be able to cope with any possible foe.—Hagedorn, Roosevelt.