Bloody Okinawa by Joseph Wheelan

Author:Joseph Wheelan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2020-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

THE STRUGGLE AT RP NO. 15 northwest of Okinawa on May 11 eclipsed all previous attacks on the picket ships. The enemy attackers swarmed the destroyers Evans and Hugh W. Hadley, and four smaller vessels: LCS(L)s 82, 83, and 84, and LSM(R) 193. The veteran fighter-director team, which had boarded Hadley at Ie Shima from another destroyer that had seen plenty of action, reported 156 attacks.

“It got to a point where this expert team of air controllers were helpless” to aid the overwhelmed fighter pilots, who were within visual range of all the attackers anyway, said Ensign Doug Aitken, a radar officer on Hadley. “There’s nothing you can do but just let these guys fight it out.”

When the attacks began at 7:40 a.m., twelve planes were on combat patrol. Another sixteen fighters were dispatched, but numerous enemy kamikazes were soon targeting each ship. The Corsairs splashed forty to fifty of them. They fired so many rounds that some of them ran out of ammunition and resorted to riding down the kamikazes into the water.

Two planes crashed Evans at the waterline, with one of its bombs exploding. A third plane struck the destroyer, and its bomb exploded in the forward fire room, causing both boilers to blow up. A fourth kamikaze crashed the main deck, starting fires. Japanese pilots’ bodies were found in the galley and on the flight deck. The strikes left Evans dead in the water with thirty crewmen killed. Its gunners claimed to have shot down fifteen planes. Without power, crewmen battled the fires with portable fire extinguishers and bucket brigades. Their frantic efforts were successful; Evans survived and was towed into Kerama Retto for repairs.60

Three miles away, ten planes attacked Hugh W. Hadley at 9:20 a.m., and she knocked all of them down. Then, a streaking Ohka slammed into the destroyer at the waterline. When it exploded beneath the ship, the decks heaved 20 inches, breaking crewmen’s ankles and bending the keel. A second kamikaze dropped a bomb just before it crashed the aft deckhouse and wiped out a 40mm gun crew. “There was nothing left of the gun and nothing left of them,” wrote Aitken.

Fires sprang up, and the Hadley lost power and began to list. A third suicide plane shredded the ship’s rigging and tore apart the ship’s radio antennas before splashing into the water. Twenty-eight crewmen were killed. Hadley’s gunners claimed twenty-three kills. RP 15’s landing craft ships lashed themselves to the Hadley so that she would not capsize, and towed her to the nearest port, at Ie Shima, for preliminary repairs.61

Around 7 p.m. on the day after the unprecedented attacks on RP 15, the New Mexico was sailing from Kerama Retto to the Hagushi anchorage when a Japanese George fighter made a strafing run on the battleship. When she returned fire, a shell from one of her 5-inch guns exploded beneath the plane, causing it to miss the stern, while detonating its bomb; shrapnel whizzed through the ship. Minutes later, a Frank fighter crashed amidships near the base of the stack, igniting fires.

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