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As World War II wound down in the Pacific, I was riding the USS South Dakota (BB-57) as combat intelligence officer on the staff of Vice Admiral Willis A. Lee, Jr., Commander, Battleship Squadron Two. In late 1942, while operating in the South Pacific, the ship had torn a hole in her bottom during an unexpected encounter with a submerged coral head. One continuing reminder of this contretemps was an almost indecent shimmy imparted by a bent propeller shaft when the ship was required to operate at high speed. This happened every time the carriers launched aircraft, and it got so bad that we had to stop whatever we were doing and hold on. In May 1945, the admiral finally decided to get it fixed and signalled Guam that he was bringing the ship down to get the shaft straightened.
Once in Guam, the South Dakota went into drydock, and I went to CinCPac headquarters to start doing my homework on potential bombardment targets in Japan. I found a number of old friends, including a former colleague, Ellery Husted from the Yale School of Architecture, who was in the target
section. It didn’t take us long to weed out the good targets and clear them with Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz's staff, so we went to work on getting submarine reconnaissance on them, chiefly to determine the presence of mines. All went well until Admiral William F. Halsey, Commander Third Fleet, announced in his plan for the next operation that a place way up north in Hokkaido would be our first objective. It was on our list, but not as a high priority target. None of us was very happy about this decision. Then one of CinCPac’s intelligence people dug up a message intercept suggesting that the big factory that constituted our prospective target had been dismantled and moved elsewhere.
This was too tenuous a clue to justify a change in plan, but it was enough to convince us that we should take a look before the whole Third Fleet took off for Hokkaido. We had tried to coordinate our target schedule with the B-29 bombers of the Army Air Forces. This unprecedented piece of interservice cooperation had touched the heart of Major General Curtis LeMay's combat intelligence officer, Lieutenant Colonel John R. Haas, who was involved in target selection. Thanks to this fortuitous circumstance, I was able to go directly to 21st Bomber Command with a request for a reconnaissance of the designated area with a view to determining its status. The fly-boys didn’t stand on formality. Colonel Haas took me to a morning briefing and introduced me afterward to General LeMay, cigar in mouth.
“Commander Mathews has a request, General, Haas said.
“Ugh,” said LeMay, looking off into space.
“Sir,” I said, “the Fleet is scheduled to bombard Kushiro. We have reason to believe there’s no target there now. The only way to find out is to fly up and see. Can we have a photo reconnaissance before departure?”
LeMay’s cigar shifted across his face. “Yup,” he said, and walked away without looking at me.
"Do you think he heard what I said?” I asked the colonel.
“Hell,” he said, “you’ve got your reconnaissance- I’ll start laying it on today.” And he did.
A week later, I flew out to Leyte in a DC-3 with what seemed like 15 tons of paper. Departure was scheduled for the next evening, and I wondered hoW I would ever get the bombardment information distributed in time. At Tacloban two youths in a landing craft materialized, joined me for a beer, and loaded the sacks of paper. We took off through the fleet, shedding sacks as we went. Late that evening, ^ reported aboard the “Sodak,” weary but content, t0 find that no word had come from Guam. A few weeks earlier, Admiral Lee and part of his staff had been recalled to the United States and replaced by Rear Admiral John Shafroth and his staff. I was kept °n because of my familiarity with bombardment plans.
We departed Leyte on 1 July, bound for Japan, having received no further word. My heart sank when I thought of the waste of time, fuel, and money involved in bringing this immense force hundreds of miles to an empty target. On the afternoon °f the first day out, however, a destroyer came boiling alongside. “Special intelligence material for Commander Mathews,” said the loud hailer, and a big sack came across the line and was dumped in my mom. Colonel Haas had delivered the goods!
Husted, who had come aboard the night before, and I fell upon the sack and tore open the envelopes within. \There we found our assigned target, with °nly a blotch where the big steel plant had been—a cRar and incontrovertible interpretation from 21st Romber Command, declaring the target worthless.
I wrote out a dispatch to Third Fleet for Admiral Shafroth’s signature, and we brought him and the cbief of staff the photos and report. There could be n° argument, but it seemed up to us to name an ^tentative target. Ellery and I both suggested Kamaishi, a steel town on the Honshu coast, and after some discussion we signalled Third Fleet, proposed the change of target, and gave our reasons. We received prompt authorization and fell to work preParing for a bombardment of Kamaishi in two days.
We liked Kamaishi because the main target, a big steel mill, was well removed up a deep bay from the little town. This meant that we could shoot up the mill without killing townspeople and destroying buildings. We were confident (wrongly) that any merchant vessels had by now taken refuge in the Inland Sea or on the west coast. When, in the opera- hon order we restricted the cruisers and destroyers of the screen to “targets of opportunity,” 1 felt sure, on ’•he basis of aerial reconnaissance, that no such targets "'Quid appear.
We fueled the next day off the Japanese coast and sPent the next night distributing late information to °ut force, which consisted of three battleships (South Dakota, Indiana [BB-58], and Massachusetts [BB-59]), e'ght cruisers, and about 20 destroyers, plus a hfitish battleship and her escort. (The British ships wete forbidden to receive direct orders from anyone ^Ut Nimitz and were cautiously relegated to a posi- bon well clear of any possibility of damage resulting h°m an unheralded change of course.)
We picked up the coast of Honshu in the gray dawn of 14 July and bore down at high speed on the unsuspecting little city. Our force constituted a formidable phalanx of gray ships, with spray creaming over our bows and signal flags snapping at the halyards. As we rounded onto the bombardment track, I was surprised to see a large merchant ship, high in the water, emerge from the mouth of the inner bay. She was followed by two others, then by a miniscule gunboat which had the impertinence to poop tiny shells at us that fell half way. They had sneaked in since the last photo reconnaissance.
The screen was screaming for permission to release batteries. None of them had ever encountered so juicy a target. Just then we opened fire on the mill with the 16-inch guns, and either someone cut the screen loose or they just couldn’t stand it any longer. At any rate, the air became solid with flying metal. (It was the first big-gun bombardment of one of the Japanese home islands during World War II.) The merchantmen and their escort disappeared behind great curtains of spray from concentrated salvos. They were directly in line with the town, and soon red gouts of flame showed where the "overs” had ignited the little frame houses. Smoke from the burning town began to obscure the mill, but the merchantmen continued on their way and finally disappeared behind a headland, seemingly unscathed.
In the meanwhile, the battleships were throwing everything they had in the direction of the mill. Several tiny islands stood across the mouth of the big bay below the mill. They looked like the corniest kind of Japanese prints, higher than they were wide, with overhanging rocks surmounted by weeping willows and clumps of bamboo, and each island with a little white house at the edge of the miniature cliff.
As we bellowed back and forth on our bombardment track, one small island in particular drew our attention. It was close aboard, a particularly charming one, with the conventional white paper house in which dwelt a little white-kimonoed man with a tiny white dog. At the moment I noticed it, the little dog, probably frightened by the noise, was careering around the island with the man in hot pursuit. Around and around they went, and each time we repassed the island we shouted encouragement. Finally, on our last turn, the man caught the dog, gave him a whack, dashed into the paper house and banged the paper door behind him, obviously convinced that therein lay security. A triumphant cheer rose from our formation as we turned away.
Kamaishi lay behind us, a seething mass of smoke and flame. Our humane intentions had been betrayed by circumstances. But I couldn’t help laughing when I remembered that little man and his dog.