“Big E, ” one of the most battle-seasoned flattops of World War II—but he didn’t hesitate to jump her despite the bucking and bouncing of his frail craft from enemy ack-ack exploding around him. Bursting from a cloud at fifteen hundred feet, Kai pointed his Zero’s nose at the Big E’s stern and opened his throttle, miraculously passing unscathed through a storm of 20 and 40 mm tracers flowing toward him. Standing on the carrier’s bridge Admiral Mitscher’s calculating eye calmly watched the enemy’s approach.
Two hundred yards astern Lieutenant Kai flip-flopped his aircraft upside down just as he passed over Enterprise, and then, to steepen his dive, yanked the stick all the way back. Just before he crashed into the carrier’s flight deck at an angle of fifty degrees, he released his 550-pound bomb. The missile plunged straight down the yawning elevator well, exploding with a monstrous roar that sent the elevator roof spinning lazily into the sea. Fortunately, most of the crewmen above deck were wearing flash-proof clothing so that only a few men were badly burned in comparison to the horrible scorching of Franklin’s crewmen. Moreover, only thirteen were killed and sixty-nine wounded. Big E’s alert crewmen had prepared their ship for attack. Fuel lines had been drained and filled with CO2; aircraft had been disarmed, drained of fuel, and stowed below; compartments had been made watertight by dogging down the bulkheads, and emergency rations were stored within them. Best of all, when flames did erupt, the firefighting details were ready for them.
Thus, when Admiral Mitscher on his flag bridge stared quizzically at the hole left in the flight deck by Kai’s Zero, he was not dismayed. Instead, he removed the long-visored baseball cap he always wore, scratched his bald head and said: “Tell my task group commanders that if the Japanese keep this up, they’re going to grow hair on my head yet.” Marc Mitscher also would cherish a calling card found on the intact corpse of the heroic young Lieutenant Tomai Kai who had come so close to sinking the admiral’s flagship.
Following the failure of the Floating Chrysanthemum operation that included the airborne attack on Yontan- Kadena and Lieutenant Kai’s crash dive on Enterprise, the Fifth Air Fleet was so short of planes and pilots that it pressed into service twenty Shirigaku twin-engine trainers. These awkward aircraft, certainly no match for the swift and sturdy American fighters, comprised most of the aircraft deployed in Kikusui 7 on May 24. No decision could have been more indicative of the desperation of Ugaki and Sugahara. They would not only lose the invaluable pilots and crew-trainers of the Shirigaku, but have few instructors remaining to teach the low-quality recruits being dragooned in the north and sent to Kyushu. And they did lose them, as the Marine Corsairs roved among them with stuttering guns. Nevertheless, Kikusui 7 did hole the destroyer Stormes, while damaging the destroyer-transports Bates and Barry so badly that Bates sank and Barry was converted to a kamikaze decoy.
But the Divine Winds were back on May 27-28 for Floating Chrysanthemum 8, a novelty in that on the twenty-seventh some eighty-five Army and Navy aircraft attacked at night. Here was a demonstration of how inept aircraft designed for daytime combat can be fighting in darkness. Picket destroyers Anthony and Braine firing on radar quickly took out an indefinite number of invisible assailants, identified only by gasoline fires on black water. Wisely, the others waited until dawn to renew the assault, slightly damaging Anthony and mangling Braine to kill about a hundred American seamen and wounding about the same number.
The next day in clearing weather the kikusui were back, this time swooping again on their favorite target: the ships of Radar Picket Station 15. Destroyers Drexler and Lowry were hit and staggered, but above them Marine Corsairs were plucking petals from the Chrysanthemums. Lieutenants R. F. Bourne and J. B. Seaman each downed a red-balled enemy, while Seaman exploded a third. As both pilots joined to attack a fourth, peeling the enemy’s metal hide, its pilot maintained control and plunged into Drexler with an impact that sent flames shooting hundreds of feet high. Within a minute Drexler rolled over and sank, taking 158 men down with her.
Reports of this disaster made eyelids flutter in Washington. Had the enemy perfected a new and fearful explosive? The answer came from a board of inquiry that preferred to believe—and probably correctly—that a heavy bomb striking a ship’s magazine could easily produce such a violent fireball.
After May 28, Admiral Ugaki fully intended to continue his kikusui attacks, still believing that Admiral Spruance now commanded a ghost fleet of floating wrecks and derelicts. But then bad weather and the Army’s disenchantment with the Floating Chrysanthemums—the generals had always believed that Japanese air power should be husbanded for homeland defense—interfered with his plans. To his dismay General Sugahara and his Sixth Air Army were removed from Navy control. He still had the cooperation of the Army’s Third Air Division, however, and planned to resume what can only be described as his Graveyard Operation with Kikusui 9 on June 3.
Before then American airpower received a powerful reinforcement—in the arrival of a squadron of Army P-47 Thunderbolts. Here was a fighter unrivaled for its speed, armament, armor, and climbing power. On May 28 a flight of eight Thunderbolts under Captain John Vogt jumped twenty-eight Zeros forming in a Lufbery circle—a defensive aerial tactic perhaps copied from a ring of show horses moving tail to nose. Thus, each Zero was to protect the tail of the plane ahead. Because the Zero with its light armament and thin armor was fast and maneuverable, these pilots probably thought they were safe from attack, but the Thunderbolts climbing at full throttle moved high above their quarry at twenty-eight thousand feet—and then came screaming down in a dive that sent six of the enemy flaming into the sea along with two “probables.” Captain Vogt claimed to have accounted for five of them.
Floating Chrysanthemum 9 did take to the skies on June 3, supposedly with about 101 aircraft. But this seems unlikely. The naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison gives only fifty. Whatever their number it was sharply reduced by the Yontan-Kadena Marine Corsairs, succeeding only in holing a minelayer. The next day the kamikaze dove again, but in almost negligible strength. Once again the unfortunate Anthony was their target. To the crew’s unbelieving eyes a suicider barely nicked by gunfire actually bailed out! This most unwarlike tactic, however, availed him nothing: his parachute streamed after him unopened to mark his plunge into the briny. Another plane dived at Anthony but her 40 mm gunners shot it down.
Kikusui 9 suggested that attrition of the Fifth Air Fleet—raids from Okinawa, Iwo Jima, Guam, and the fast carriers—was almost complete. Admiral Ugaki, who had started in April with a fleet of more than 4,000 aircraft, was now in June down to about 1,270, of which only 570 were serviceable—and these marked for conventional duty. Only a handful of kamikaze remained. Nevertheless this relentless—not to say merciless—air admiral prepared Floating Chrysanthemum 10. With Okinawa already doomed, it was scheduled for June 21-22.
Supposedly fifty-eight to forty-five kamikaze had been collected, escorted by an unknown number of fighters. Also aboard were six baka bombs, Ugaki’s masterpiece. How many of them “aborted” and returned to base is not known; but by late June “abortion” was becoming nearly as popular as divine death had been. This last attack of the deadly Floating Chrysanthemums produced only a few near misses while one faithful suicider set the seaplane tender Curtis afire and another struck at Barry—the previously damaged destroyer-escort converted to decoy duty— as it was being towed to its station by LSM-50—sinking both ships. Meanwhile the baka brigade was a complete fizzle: two failed to release from their mother planes and were returned to Kyushu while the other four were either lost when their mother planes were shot down or harmed nothing but a few dozen fishes. Thus the inglorious end of the kikusui that were to save Japan.
Japan’s third Divine Wind had spent itself on the sturdy ships and stout hearts of the United States Naval Service.
