Okinawa (6 page)

He did. From the start of the American attack at 5:45 A.M. on March 18 and throughout the following day Ugaki hurled 193 planes—including 69
kamikaze
—at the Americans again attacking in four separate carrier groups. Of these, 161 planes—or 83 percent—were lost, while another 50 planes were damaged on the ground. Even with such staggering losses Admiral Ugaki was gratified, for his pilots—again retrieving victory from defeat with a few strokes of the pen, and for whom all minnows were whales during those two days—had reported hitting five carriers, two battleships, three cruisers, and one unidentified ship. But they reported these “losses” with such joyful shouts of victory that Ugaki assumed that they were all sunk, and that Spruance had withdrawn because his fleet was so badly crippled that the Okinawa invasion would be postponed for some time.

Actually, TF 58—though shaken—was far from being crippled. Japanese bombers had indeed scored hits, damaging four big carriers:
Wasp
seriously and
Franklin
so badly that she was presumed lost. It was at exactly 7:08 A.M. on March 19 that
Franklin
’s ordeal began. At that moment a lone Judy
³
bomber undetected by radar emerged from a low overcast to drop two 550-pound bombs from only a hundred feet above the flattop’s wooden flight deck. The first missile pierced the deck just ahead of a pair of Helldiver bombers, while the second penetrated aft among a group of twenty-nine fueled and armed Helldivers, Avengers, and Corsairs awaiting their turn to be launched. Zooming up and away from the double explosions’ flame and shock waves, the Judy was unharmed by the fusillade of shells fired at her by the carrier’s AA gunners, but was shot down by Commander E. B. Parker, chief of
Franklin’s
air group. But its destruction was small compensation for the dreadful damage it had inflicted on the carrier.

Both bombs exploded in the hangar deck, setting afire twenty-three planes, fueled, armed, and awaiting their turn to be moved by elevator to the flight deck above. Flames and explosives flashing from the stricken planes instantly killed most of a line of about two hundred sailors and airmen waiting to descend to the mess deck below for breakfast. Almost simultaneously a huge and growing cloud of black smoke enveloped
Franklin,
obscuring her from the sight of surrounding ships.

On the navigation bridge concussions struck
Franklin’s
skipper, Captain Leslie Gehres, knocking him sprawling. Jumping erect, he was horrified to see “a sheet of flame come out from under the starboard side of the flight deck” engulfing the starboard batteries and spreading aft. At the same instant, Gehres saw that “a great column of flame and black smoke came out from the forward elevator well.” To clear the smoke and flame from his ship, he ordered Quartermaster V. R. Ryan to steer
Franklin
to the right. Ryan did, but succeeded in surrounding the entire “island” superstructure—himself and the skipper included—in a cloud of hot, oily smoke issuing from the parked planes burning aft. Realizing that his ship was also stricken in its stern, Gehres ordered Ryan to swing the carrier the other way, meanwhile ordering the still-functioning engine room to increase speed by two-thirds. Almost at once the scorching smoke was blown clear of
Franklin.

Now there ensued a spate of morning-long blasts, mostly from bombs and Tiny Tim twelve-inch rockets stored on deck. The Tiny Tim were especially frightening to men trying to fight the flames, because, as Commander Joe Taylor, the ship’s executive, later described it, “Some screamed by the bridge to starboard, some to port and some straight up the flight deck.” Yet, even in the midst of this death-dealing holocaust, neither Gehres nor Taylor lost their sense of humor. “Joe,” Gehres said when he saw Parker approaching, “I’ll have to say the same thing the admiral told you when you were last bombed: your face is dirty as hell!”

Grinning, the knot in his stomach quickly coming undone, Parker hurried to the flight deck to organize fire-fighting parties. From there he hastened to the hangar deck to organize the same details. Because foam and CO
₂
were useless to squelch the inferno raging on
Franklin’s
decks, a pair of emergency pumps began supplying salt water to the fire hoses now put into play. Meanwhile, hundreds of sailors and airmen trapped by the flames took the only recourse possible to save themselves: they jumped overboard to a man, until there were long strings of heads bobbing on either side of the carrier. While
Franklin
pulled ahead of the swimmers at a steady eight knots, pilot-rescue destroyers closed her stern to pick up the survivors. Eventually they rescued hundreds.

Both to Captain Gehres and Rear Admiral R. E. Davison, commander of Task Group 58.2, it was clear that
Franklin
was badly hurt and might go under. To continue to direct his ships and planes against the enemy, Davison had no other choice but to remove his flag to another ship. But as he prepared to board the light cruiser
Santa Fe,
which he had ordered to come alongside the blazing Franklin to help fight fires and take off wounded, he was pleased to hear Gehres flatly reject any proposal to abandon ship. Gehres knew that perhaps three hundred of his men were trapped below in a mess compartment beneath the blazing hangar deck. “I had promised these kids I’d get them out,” he explained. Meanwhile, Dr. J. L. Fuelling, a ship’s physician, calmed the trapped sailors by ordering them to sit quietly and not consume oxygen by talking. As they sat terrified—who would not be?—in the stifling heat, the only air reaching them came from a hole in the ship’s side just big enough to pass a baseball through. It is probable that they might have suffocated if not rescued soon, and that succor did come from a brave junior-grade lieutenant named Donald Cary.

As ship’s fuel and water officer, Cary was familiar with the maze of passageways and compartments belowdecks, and he relied upon this knowledge to grope his way to locate the trapped bluejackets and lead them topside to safety—a daring feat for which he received a Medal of Honor.

That highest military award in the gift of the United States also went to Chaplain Joseph O‘Callahan. To Commander Stephen Jurka,
Franklin’s
navigator, Father O’Callahan was “a soul-stirring sight. He seemed to be everywhere, giving Extreme Unction to the dead and dying, urging the men on and himself handling hoses, jettisoning ammunition and doing everything he could to save the ship.” He seemed as composed as his Master moving through the smoke with the cross on his helmet shining like a beacon, “his head bowed slightly as if in meditation or prayer.” Marveling at his serenity, Captain Gehres said: “I never saw a man so completely disregard the danger of being killed ...”

Perhaps the most awesome feat of seamanship during
Franklin’s
entire ordeal came from Captain Hal Fitz of the
Santa Fe,
who daringly slammed into the carrier’s side, remaining there to fight fires and take off wounded as well as able sailors. In spite of continuing explosions like strings of giant firecrackers, Fitz doggedly held
Santa Fe
fast, his own hoses joining
Franklin’s
in dousing flames, meanwhile taking aboard eight hundred of the carrier’s seamen.

By noon the fires were dying down and the explosions less frequent and dangerous. But
Franklin
was still dead in the water, her black gangs having been driven from the engine rooms by intense heat. Commandeering a pickup force of messmen, Commander Taylor successfully seized a towline from the heavy cruiser
Pittsburgh
and began a crawling withdrawal from Japanese waters at a limping speed of six knots. That night a special detail equipped with breathing apparatus reduced
Franklin’s
dangerous list of thirty degrees while a party of daring volunteers braved smoke and heat to enter a boiler room and relight a pair of boilers.
Franklin
began to move under its own power.

The next day, with six boilers operating, the carrier dropped the
Pittsburgh
tow and went cleaving through the waves at a spanking fifteen knots. But then, in early afternoon, hearts breathing free at last constricted in fear again when another bold Judy bomber came gliding out of the sun. Without power to operate the flattop’s plentiful AA guns,
Franklin
appeared helpless—until another crew of volunteers wrestled a heavy quadruple 40 mm gun mount around and fired it so accurately that the Judy was forced to nose upward at its release point, and its bombs—almost grazing the carrier—exploded harmlessly in the sea about two hundred feet from the ship.

Soon
Franklin
was out of the impact area. Captain Gehres now took stock of his human losses. He was shocked to find that 724 of his men had been killed and another 1,428 either wounded or unavailable and presumed to be aboard the five destroyers and two cruisers assigned to rescue duty. But there were still 103 of ficers and 603 enlisted men present able to sail the ship, although many of them were still in shock. Rather than have many more succumb to the paralysis of combat fatigue, Gehres wisely instituted a program of punishing and distracting work: burying their fallen comrades at sea, clearing the decks of wreckage, and scouring blackened compartments. By the time
Franklin
reached Pearl Harbor, those who saw her decks looking like “a shredded wheat biscuit” were amazed that she had survived the four-thousand-mile voyage back to base; and when her anchors went clattering down the hawse pipes off New York’s Brooklyn Navy Yard she looked “almost presentable.” In truth, because of her gallant skipper and crew,
Franklin
was by far the most shattered carrier on either side to survive its ordeal.

With
Wasp
and
Franklin
out of action, Admiral Spruance at once reduced his striking strength to three groups, distributing his remaining vessels among them, after which—with a few farewell sweeps over still-numbed and battered Kyushu—he retired far out to sea to refuel. Spruance’s flyers claimed a total of five hundred enemy planes destroyed, three hundred shot down in air battles: an estimate that seems exaggerated. Still, they had certainly decimated Admiral Ugaki’s Ten-Go force, leaving him with about thirty-six hundred of his original command of four thousand planes. Worse were his losses in skilled pilots. And he had not, as he had judged from his aviators’ wildly optimistic reports of enemy ships sunk, in any way delayed the invasion of Okinawa.

Never before—and God willing, may it never be so again—had there been an invasion armada the equal of the 1,600 seagoing ships carrying 545,000 American GIs and Marines that streamed across the Pacific in that fateful spring of 1945 bound for the island of Okinawa. In firepower, troops, and tonnage it eclipsed even the more-famous D day in Normandy on June 6, 1944. In that invasion, except for the enormous thirty-to-one preponderance in air power conferred upon him by 12,000 aircraft, General Eisenhower commanded only 150,000 Allied assault troops (compared to Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner’s attacking force of 184,000 GIs and Marines). True, Eisenhower’s supporting craft would eventually number 5,300, but most of these were far from being seaworthy. And the Allied naval forces off the five Normandy landing beaches could not approach the firepower of Admiral Spruance’s Task Force Fifty-eight. Nor was there any comparison in the distances traveled from staging area to battle-ground. Only about 30 miles of English Channel separated southern England from western France, or at most perhaps 400 miles to faraway ports in the United Kingdom, but ships leaving the West Coast ports of embarkation at San Francisco and Seattle sailed 7,355 miles to the target. Yet, in feats of unrivaled seamanship still not generally recognized, the 1,300 ships arriving off the Hagushi Beaches of Okinawa did get there in time for the landings. And there were still 300 left behind in the various anchorages stretching across the western ocean.

From Seattle and San Francisco no fewer than 3,200 miles had to be traversed before these newest and farthest-away vessels could reach Hawaii, the point from which the stupendous American counter-attack was launched to its last battle 4,155 miles distant. Soon these ships were putting in at the island battlegrounds whose names they bore (Guadalcanal, Bougainville, Tarawa, and the lesser battles of the Gilberts and Marshalls, New Britain, the Admiralties, Buna, and Sidor) to begin the long drive up the New Guinea coast—then staging up through the latest battlegrounds at Peleliu, Leyte, and Saipan-Tinian-Guam. Under the Stars and Stripes they roved boldly and unmenaced across that Pacific Ocean that was now an American lake, for the Philippines were by then subdued; of the mighty Japanese Navy that was to guard the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere—Japan’s euphemism for its stolen empire there—only great
Yamato,
the most powerful warship afloat, had survived the holocaust of disaster of the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Of the emperor’s glorious young eagles whose sneak attack on the Day of Infamy had awakened the sleeping American giant, only a few weary veterans remained to join the ragged remnant of Japanese airpower. British warships were also in the invasion fleet, a fast carrier force of twenty-two vessels, for in Europe the gate had been found open at Remagen Bridge, American troops were over the Rhine, and the Old Queen of the Waves was sending help to her erstwhile daughter, now Sovereign of the Seas.

Fleet Admiral Nimitz was still in overall command in Hawaii as he had been when the Japanese were stopped at Midway, when the long charge began at Guadalcanal. Admiral Raymond Spruance commanded the Fifth Fleet, and there was the saltiest salt still giving orders to the expeditionary force. Vice Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner had brought the Marines to Guadalcanal and now, nearly three years later, still roaming his flagship bridge in an old bathrobe, still a profane perfectionist with beetling brow and abrasive tongue, a matchless planner who would also not scruple to tell the coxswain how to beach his boat, Kelly Turner was bringing the Tenth Army to Okinawa. Many of the officers and men aboard Turner’s ships—especially the Marines—were not ecstatic to have the Old Salt in charge.