Читать книгу Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45 - Max Hastings, Sir Max Hastings, Max Hastings - Страница 16

For all the majesty of the big ships, the thrill of racing destroyers and PT-boats dancing over the waves, by 1944 every sailor in the Pacific knew that the fleet’s airborne firepower was what counted: Avenger torpedo-bombers; Helldiver dive-bombers; Hellcat and Corsair fighters. The fast fleet carriers operated in task groups of four, accompanied by appropriate escorts. Concentrating ‘flat-tops’ economised on standing fighter patrols—CAPs, which covered their operations against Japanese air attack. The big ships sought to operate in open seas, offering maximum scope for manoeuvre, minimum exposure to surprise. They were screened by destroyer radar pickets, posted many miles out to provide early warning. A few years earlier, carrier-borne aircraft had been thought a poor substitute for land-based air support. In 1944-45, it remained true that heavy bombers could not operate from flightdecks, but so vast was the US Navy’s aerial armada that it could deliver a devastating punch against any target afloat or ashore. Each fleet carrier carried a mix of around fifty fighters, thirty dive-bombers, a dozen torpedo-bombers. The chief limitations on the ability of Nimitz’s fleets to support land operations were weather and the admirals’ yearning to pursue their own strategic purposes, unencumbered by responsibilities to soldiers or Marines.

The men of the air groups wore uniforms which implied that they belonged to the same service as seamen, but the ‘flyboys’ of the ‘brown shoe navy’ thought of themselves as a separate breed. Their lives were almost entirely divorced from those of parent ships’ crews. Until the last stage of the war, around one-third of carrier airmen could expect to die, in combat or one of the accidents inseparable from high-pressure flight operations. A catapult failure, careless landing, flak damage which injured hydraulics or undercarriage—all these things could, and did, kill a crew or two most days—10 per cent aircraft losses a month were factored into the planning of carrier operations.

Airmen were roused from their bunks two hours before take-off, to dress and eat—they were usually briefed for a dawn sortie the previous night. They received the order ‘Pilots, man your planes!’ through bullhorns and the broadcast system, then ran through the hatches along catwalks to the flightdeck, to be strapped into their seats by plane captains waiting on the wings. If it was dark or twilight, deck crews with illuminated batons pointed the way to the port side, where catapult rings and rigs were attached to the heavier torpedo-bombers—fighters usually took off unassisted—while pilots ran through their checklists. Then, on signal, at intervals of a few seconds, one by one they gunned their engines and were hurled forward into the air. Men took off from relative calm and comfort, flew into the heat of combat, experienced thrills and fears such as few seamen knew, then bounced back onto a heaving deck, to be violently checked by an arrester hook. They pulled themselves stiffly out of their cockpits after anything up to seven hours sitting on an unfriendly dinghy pack, went below for debriefing—and probably a shot of bourbon. Aircrew were the despair of many regular navy officers. Most cared nothing for the honour and traditions of the service, nor for ship’s discipline. They reckoned that if they flew and fought, nothing else was anybody’s business.

The rest of the US Navy might be dry, but few air groups were. On the carrier Makassar Strait, for instance, commanding officer Herbert Riley—one of just two regulars aboard, a former naval aide to Franklin Roosevelt—wrote: ‘There was medicinal liquor aboard all the carriers to be used under supervision of flight surgeons. Their supply was generous…Liquor had its uses, believe me.’ After one of his air groups’ first missions, he found flight surgeons ‘dispensing liquor in water glasses…the pilots were high as kites’.

Thereafter, Riley introduced rules. He ordered the vacant admiral’s cabin to be converted into an aircrew club, complete with Esquire pin-ups and cocktail tables. Inside, any aviator was eligible for two drinks a night, provided he was not scheduled to fly. Cmdr Bill Widhelm, operations officer of TF58, complained bitterly about discrimination between officers and men in the allocation of alcohol: ‘There are men out there on those ships that haven’t had a foot on shore for a year. I don’t see why we can’t do like the British, give those enlisted men a grog. Pilots get it. I had it. But those enlisted men never get it.’

Cmdr Jim Lamade of Hancock sought discretion to fine aviators for misdemeanours, because traditional navy punishments held no meaning for them: ‘These young pilots…are not naval officers as we know a naval officer. They’re just flying because it’s their job…Discipline…means nothing to them. If you say, “We’ll ground this pilot,” well…they don’t want to go to combat anyhow, so they’d just as soon be grounded…they will lay around the bunk room all day and read…But if you take some money away from them, they will feel that.’

Likewise Cmdr Jim Mini of Essex: ‘The boys in a squadron these days don’t have the navy as a career. There’s a problem of leadership; you have to have the boys like you. You can’t lean on being a commander and saying, “You’ll do this or else.” You have to present it to the boys in an attractive fashion…I can safely say that if [the tour] had been much longer, we would have had trouble, and the boys would have broken down more than they did.’ A high proportion of aviators caused disciplinary problems, declared a navy report: ‘The very exacting nature of flight duties has combined with the youth and frequent irresponsibility of flying officers to create difficulties which a special board was created to police.’ Fliers’ letters home displayed carelessness about security; they broke the rules by keeping diaries; and ‘drink is often an issue’.

Flying combat planes from carriers was one of the most thrilling, yet also most stressful, assignments of the war. Ted Winters remarked of some of their long, long sorties: ‘It isn’t a question of how much gasoline, it’s how long you can keep your fanny on that seat.’ It was an inherently hazardous activity to operate a plane from a cramped and perpetually shifting ocean platform, even before the enemy became involved. ‘We learned to listen for the slightest change in the sound of the engine which might reveal a loss of power,’ wrote a pilot. ‘We always welcomed a moderate wind which increased the air flow over the flightdeck. Five to ten knots made the difference between a comfortable take-off and “sweating it out”.’

Beyond combat casualties, the log of a Marine Corsair squadron on Essex showed that during a typical fortnight, one plane ‘splashed’ taking off on each of two successive days; on the second of these, another plane crashed on landing. Three days later, one Corsair was lost at sea. Thereafter, three more went into the sea at two-day intervals. Hard deck landings damaged airframes. Sherwin Goodman, an Avenger gunner, suffered a typical mishap one morning when the flightdeck hydraulic catapult failed in mid-launch. His plane slumped into the sea. Seconds later, the huge ship passed close enough to strike the sinking Avenger a glancing blow. A destroyer retrieved the crew intact, however, collecting the usual six gallons of ice-cream ransom for returning them to their carrier, and to operations.

‘Oh I’d rather be a bellhop than a flyer on a flat-top,’ the pilots sang, ‘with my hand around a bottle not around the goddamn throttle.’ Unpredicted violent weather could write off whole squadrons of aircraft, because it made navigation problematic. Error meant a descent into the sea when gas ran out. As on shore, almost every aviator wanted to be a ‘fighter jock’, with the thrill of engaging enemy aircraft in the war’s best carrier fighter, the Grumman Hellcat. It is intoxicating to go into battle knowing that your own side possesses much better-trained, and thus more proficient, pilots than the enemy. By late 1944, the average Japanese flier had just forty flying hours’ experience before entering combat. His American counterpart had at least 525 hours, and it showed. In the last phase of the war, US carrier fighters were inflicting amazingly disproportionate losses on their failing foes. Cmdr Winters: ‘Most of our kills were from the rear end. [The Japanese] are scared to death of the Grummans. Only when they outnumber you terrifically will they even stay near you. They will make passes, but stay far away and scram when you turn on them.’ Such cautious enemy behaviour seemed a long march from the kamikaze spirit, of which so much would be heard in 1945.

Flying became more hazardous, however, when planes were committed to ground strafing or ship attacks. Low-level dive-bomber and torpedo-carrier missions remained gruelling to the end. Lamade of Hancock was shocked by the intensity of the Japanese barrage as he and his men dive-bombed targets around Hong Kong. With unusual sophistication, enemy anti-aircraft gunners followed the American planes down almost to ground level, from 15,000 feet to 8,000, then 3,000. ‘From pull-out, I looked back and saw five planes of my group going down in flames. We’re going to have to figure out some way to combat that AA,’ Lamade told navy debriefers. ‘After that attack, Admiral McCain said he was very sorry we had lost so many pilots. I told him we…can’t go on fighting Japs continually without suffering some losses.’

To beat flak, pilots learned to dive faster and more steeply than they had ever trained for. Cockpit glass fogged with the dramatic change of atmosphere as they pulled out of a descent and soared upwards after releasing bombs. As ever in combat, the men who survived were those who were determined but careful: ‘We had four or five pilots who were over-eager,’ Fred Bakutis of Enterprise told debriefers. ‘They were excellent boys, very energetic and hard to hold down. It is these people who generally don’t come back, because they are so anxious to do damage to the Japs that they take risks beyond reason.’ Yet there were also shy pilots, content to release their bombs and swing away towards safety with a carelessness of aim that exasperated their commanders. And because these were very young, sometimes wild young men, they were sometimes reckless in the use of their lethal weapons. Senior officers were irked by the frequency with which American planes misidentified as Japanese were shot down by ‘friendly fire’ from combat air patrols. A pair of bored young pilots unable to identify an enemy target might work off their frustration on a Filipino fishing boat or lumbering cart ashore.

The job nobody wanted was night operations. Take-offs and landings in darkness were more hazardous, the monotony of patrols usually unrelieved by action. If a pilot made a poor deck approach in daylight, he was ‘waved off’ to try again, but in darkness he had to land and take the consequences, rather than hazard the ship by having it switch its landing lights on again. ‘What the boys want to do,’ said a night-fighter squadron commander, Turner Caldwell of Independence, ‘is to get into a day fighter squadron or a day torpedo squadron and get to be aces and sink Jap carriers and that sort of thing. And so we have to give them inducements of various kinds because they are kids and they don’t understand enough about the military life to know that this stuff has to be done. All they know is that they don’t want to do it.’

While the carrier crews might remain at sea for years on end, the men of the air groups knew that they were only passing visitors. If injury or death spared them, they were rotated ashore after six months’ duty. After two combat tours, asserted a navy report, pilots ‘lose their daring…feel they have done their parts and other pilots who have not fought should take over the burden’. One pool of replacement pilots was held ashore on Guam. A second group waited on fleet supply ships, condemned to weeks of crucifying boredom before being abruptly informed one morning that their turn had come, and trans-shipped by breeches buoy to join an air group. Some replacements idled at sea for months before reaching a carrier. ‘Upon arrival,’ complained a squadron CO, ‘they were practically worthless, because they had forgotten everything they had been taught.’ It was tough for a man to be pitchforked among strangers, beside whom within hours he was expected to fly and die. ‘All of a sudden,’ said Jim Lamade of Hancock, ‘they’re expected to go ahead and hit the ball right smack on with a combat fighting squadron…those boys get discouraged and you can’t blame them.’ Some such men reported sick. Flight surgeons felt obliged to be harsh. ‘Combat fatigue is a word we use continuously,’ said Lamade, ‘and nobody knows what it means. It covers a multitude of sins. I think it ought to be thrown out of our language.’

Squadron commanders found that the strain of leading their men in combat left them little patience or energy for routine duties back on the ship. They complained about bureaucracy and paperwork. A CO was exasperated to find that after some of his men hit the airfield of neutral Portuguese Macao by mistake, a court of inquiry was summoned. Planes, by contrast, were casually expendable. Salt corroded paintwork, yet the remedy was always in short supply, because nobody cared to store large quantities of notoriously flammable paint aboard a carrier. If an airframe was badly damaged, or a plane completed eight months’ service, it was most often tipped overboard. With American factories producing new aircraft by the thousand, a worn one seemed worth little.

There were accidents, always accidents. When tired young men were pushing themselves and their equipment to the limits, mistakes were inevitable. The guns of aircraft parked on flightdecks were triggered, injuring neighbouring planes and people. Badly battle-damaged planes were discouraged from landing on their carriers, to avoid messing up flightdecks. Ditching in the sea was an almost routine occupational hazard. Destroyers shadowed carriers during flight operations, to retrieve sodden fliers. As long as pilots were lucky, and ensured that their cockpit hoods were locked open to avoid plunging to the bottom with their planes, they could expect to survive an ocean landing. Ninety-nine men in Jim Lamade’s air group endured the experience, most with an insouciance conceivable only at such a time and place.

Fred Bakutis of Enterprise spent a week on a raft in the Sulu Sea after coming down in the Surigao Strait. Comrades dropped him a two-man liferaft. ‘That plus my own one-man raft made my seven-day tour of duty out there pretty pleasant,’ he told his debriefers with studied nonchalance. ‘The weather was pretty good except at night when it rained pretty hard. I had lots of water, using my one-man raft as a water wagon. My food consisted of minnows, seaweed, candy rations. My main problem in the raft was to stay comfortable. The hands became very sore—and also my rear end.’ On Bakutis’s seventh night adrift, he was wakened from a doze by the sound of diesels, and for a few heart-stopping moments feared that a Japanese vessel was approaching. Instead, however, to his infinite relief an American submarine loomed out of the darkness.

The submarine rescue service, often operating close inshore amid treacherous shoals or under Japanese fire, received the gratitude of every American flier. Together with ‘dumbo’ amphibians and patrolling destroyers, the submarines achieved miracles in saving hundreds of precious aircrew from sea, sharks and the enemy. Cmdr Ernie Snowden of Lexington’s AG16 paid warm tribute to the submariners: ‘If they had wheels I think they would climb right up over the beach and pick us up. We have nothing but praise for them.’ On 10 October 1944, for instance, twenty-one aircraft were shot down attacking the Ryukyu islands. Yet only eleven pilots and crewmen were lost, the remainder being rescued, six of them off Okinawa by a single submarine, Sterlet. When Lt Robert Nelson crashed in Kagoshima Bay off Kyushu, his dinghy began to drift inshore. A tiny cruiser-based Kingfisher seaplane landed alongside him, and Nelson clung to its float while it taxied several miles across the water to rendezvous with a submarine—adding a torpedo-bomber crew to its burden on the way.

During an air battle off Iwo Jima, Japanese Zero pilot Kunio Iwashita was astonished when the surface of the sea was suddenly broken by a long black shape, as an American submarine surfaced to pick up a ditched pilot. An American flying boat, apparently bent on the same mission, was shot down by Japanese fighters. Iwashita said: ‘We were amazed to see the Americans taking so much trouble about their people. Nobody provided that sort of service for us.’ An extreme example of ‘force protection’ was displayed on 16 September 1944, when Ensign Harold Thompson ditched three hundred yards off Waisile, while strafing Japanese barges in his Hellcat. A Catalina dropped a liferaft which Thompson boarded, only to find himself drifting relentlessly towards a pier. Two other Hellcats were shot down trying to protect him by strafing the shoreline—one pilot was killed, the second rescued by ‘dumbo’. Thompson moored his raft to a chain of Japanese barges, and two American PT-boats raced in to rescue him. Their first attempt was frustrated by coastal gunfire, but after Avengers dropped smoke floats to mask their approach, a boat snatched Thompson just as the Japanese closed in on him. More than fifty aircraft were involved in the rescue, ‘which sure was a wonderful show to watch’, said Thompson, back on his carrier Santee.

Destroyers traditionally extracted ‘ransom’ for every flier they sent back. ‘Rescued pilots were prized possessions,’ wrote a destroyer officer. ‘Before returning them, we would strip them of all their fancy clothes—silk scarf maps, survival kits with great knives, compasses and magnifying glasses, and their pistol. Then we would ask the carrier to send over all the geedunk—ice cream—they had, plus a minimum of two movies our crew hadn’t seen.’

At sea in the Pacific, by the fall of 1944 the might of the US Navy was unchallengeable. That is to say, no rational adversary would have precipitated a headlong confrontation with such forces as Nimitz now deployed. The summer clashes, the ‘great Marianas Turkey Shoot’, had fatally crippled Japanese air power. Only the Japanese navy, in the mood of fatalism and desperation which afflicted its upper ranks, could still have sought a ‘decisive encounter’ against such odds. The struggle for the Philippines was to provide the setting not only for America’s major land campaign of the Pacific war, but also for the largest sea battle the world would ever know.