Kamikaze attack the carriers

On the afternoon of 5 November 1944 several Japanese aircraft appeared over a force of American carriers operating east of Luzon. One of them, already ablaze from anti-aircraft hits, neither turned away nor released its bomb, but slammed into the superstructure of the carrier Lexington. The explosion and burning fuel wrecked much of the ship’s “island”, and fire engulfed gun positions and walkways. Fifty sailors were killed and 132 wounded. Even so, after about twenty minutes the fires were under control, and the carrier went on recovering and launching aircraft.

Twenty days later, on 25 November, Japanese suicide aircraft hit four carriers of the fast carrier force on a single day: Intrepid, Essex, Cabot and Hancock. Both days showed that the kamikaze attacks that had begun during the Battle of Leyte Gulf were not a one-off act of desperation, but a new and permanent method of fighting for the Japanese air arm.

From Samar to Luzon

The first organised attack by the special units was carried out on 25 October 1944, when Lieutenant Yukio Seki’s group struck the escort carriers of “Taffy 3” just after the Battle off Samar and sank St. Lo. The originator and patron of the tactic was Vice Admiral Takijirō Ōnishi, commander of the First Air Fleet in the Philippines. Only a few months earlier he had rejected suicide attacks as contrary to the principles of the art of war; after the loss of the Marianas, with only a few dozen serviceable aircraft at his disposal and orders to support the fleet in the Shō operation, he came to see them as the only way of putting the American carriers out of action for a few days. Mitsubishi A6M fighters carrying a 250-kilogram bomb were to crash onto the flight decks, where fuelled and armed aircraft stood.

After the Battle of Leyte Gulf the Japanese fleet was no longer a threat, but the struggle for the Philippines went on. On Leyte, where the Americans had landed on 20 October, the Japanese were shipping in division after division through Ormoc Bay, and the airfields of Luzon and the Visayas were being reinforced with aircraft sent from Formosa and Japan. The task of Admiral William Halsey’s Third Fleet fast carriers was to destroy these aircraft on the ground and in the air and to sink shipping in Manila Bay. On 30 October Vice Admiral John S. McCain took over command of Task Force 38 from Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher.

It was precisely this duty – long weeks in the same area, within range of enemy airfields – that made the carriers an easy target to find. The Japanese grasped this quickly. On 29 October a kamikaze struck one of Intrepid’s anti-aircraft gun positions, killing ten men (some sources give 30 October; the US Navy’s Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, DANFS, and the US Navy’s history give the 29th). On 30 October suicide aircraft hit Franklin – 56 killed – and the light carrier Belleau Wood, on which 92 people died. Both had to go back to shipyards in the United States. On 1 November, in Leyte Gulf, kamikazes and bombers sank the destroyer Abner Read and damaged several others.

5 November: Lexington

On 5 and 6 November Task Force 38 launched heavy raids on the airfields and ports of Luzon. The most painful blow fell on shipping in Manila Bay. Aircraft of Rear Admiral Frederick Sherman’s Task Group 38.3 spent the whole day attacking the heavy cruiser Nachi, flagship of Vice Admiral Kiyohide Shima, who had escaped from the Battle of the Surigao Strait. After several waves of attacks and torpedo hits the cruiser broke apart and sank; according to the US Navy’s history, 808 of her crew were killed. American pilots claimed more than 400 Japanese aircraft destroyed in the air and on the ground – a figure that, as usual in both sides’ reports, was inflated, but Japanese losses were undoubtedly very heavy. The Americans lost about 40 aircraft in combat and accidents.

That same afternoon, as the aircraft were returning to their decks, a Japanese group broke through to the force. Lexington, Sherman’s flagship, was hit by a burning aircraft that struck right next to the superstructure. Most of the “island” was burned out or smashed, and wreckage and burning petrol showered the gun positions. According to DANFS, 50 men were killed and 132 wounded; the US Navy’s history gives similar figures.

The description of the ship as “heavily damaged” calls for some qualification. The loss of life was serious and the superstructure needed rebuilding, but the hull, the flight deck and the machinery spaces were untouched. The fires were put out in about twenty minutes; the carrier did not leave formation and continued flight operations, and later that day her guns shot down another suicide aircraft diving on the carrier Ticonderoga. On 9 November Lexington put into Ulithi atoll, where she was repaired in field conditions; by December she was back in action. Radio Tokyo announced, not for the first time, that the ship had been sunk – yet another occasion on which Japanese propaganda “sank” the carrier, which for that reason the Americans called the “Blue Ghost”.

5 November showed both faces of the new war at sea. American carrier aircraft could destroy Japanese ships and aircraft in their own bases without much hindrance, and yet even a few aircraft flown by pilots ready to die could kill and wound more than 180 men on a single carrier. A few days later, on 11 November, Task Force 38 aircraft smashed a convoy bound for Ormoc Bay, and on 13 and 14 November they sank the light cruiser Kiso and several destroyers in Manila Bay. The need to go on supporting the fighting on Leyte, however, led Halsey on 11 November to recommend, reluctantly, that the planned raids on Japan be postponed. The carriers stayed off the Philippines – and thus within reach of the kamikazes.

25 November: four carriers in one afternoon

After several days of bad weather, Task Force 38 resumed its raids on Luzon on 25 November. In the morning aircraft from Ticonderoga caught the heavy cruiser Kumano, damaged back in the Battle off Samar, in Dasol Bay on the island’s west coast and sank her. The Japanese struck back at noon. Between about 12.30 and 1.30 p.m. three waves of aircraft appeared over two carrier groups; as the Americans later established, they had taken off from airfields in southern Luzon, not from the Manila area, over which American fighters were patrolling.

Intrepid suffered worst. At about 12.53 p.m. the first kamikaze struck a 20 mm gun position on the port side manned by Black stewards, who – as the US Navy’s history stresses – kept firing to the end. Moments later a second aircraft went through the flight deck and its bomb exploded in the hangar, starting a dangerous fire among the aircraft and fuel. The number killed varies with the source: DANFS gives 65, the Navy’s official historical study 66, and some other sources 69. The ship lost neither propulsion nor her place in formation, and the last fires were put out in less than two hours. The damage to the flight deck and hangar was nevertheless serious enough for Intrepid to be sent to a shipyard the next day; she reached San Francisco on 20 December.

The often repeated statement that on 25 November Intrepid was hit by a kamikaze for the third time is true if one counts individual aircraft: the first struck the ship on 29 October, two more on 25 November. There were, however, two attacks in which the carrier was hit. Earlier, in February 1944 off Truk, Intrepid had been torpedoed by a Japanese aircraft, and in 1945 she took one more suicide hit – hence the joking nicknames her sailors gave her, mocking her bad luck and frequent spells in dock.

Almost at the same moment, at about 12.55 p.m., a suicide aircraft struck the port edge of Essex’s flight deck, among aircraft fuelled for take-off. The impact, caught on film that became one of the most frequently shown images of the Pacific War, killed 15 men and wounded 44, but the damage proved superficial; it was the first damage the ship had suffered in action. The light carrier Cabot shot down several attacking aircraft, but one, already burning, crashed on the port edge of the flight deck, destroying gun positions and a fire-control director, and another exploded right alongside, showering the ship’s side with fragments and burning debris. According to the US Navy’s history, 36 men were killed and 16 wounded; DANFS speaks of 62 killed and wounded in all. Cabot kept her station and was later repaired at Ulithi.

Hancock, McCain’s flagship since 17 November, suffered least. A kamikaze diving on her out of the sun was blown apart by anti-aircraft fire about 90 metres above the ship, but a piece of the fuselage fell amidships and part of a wing caught fire on the flight deck. The fire was quickly put out. In all, on 25 November more than 110 men were killed and nearly a hundred wounded on the four carriers, according to the sum of the figures in the US Navy’s history.

Halsey cancelled the raids planned for 26 November and withdrew the carriers further from the Philippines. At the end of November Task Force 38 put into Ulithi for about ten days of rest, replenishment and – above all – consultation on how to protect the ships against the new weapon.

How to defend against a suicide pilot

For American commanders November 1944 was a painful lesson. Since the end of October kamikazes had hit seven fast carriers (counting the lightly damaged Hancock), three of which – Franklin, Belleau Wood and Intrepid – had had to return to the United States for repairs. Every such ship out of action for several months meant more to Task Force 38 than dozens of Japanese aircraft shot down. The old rules of anti-aircraft defence were no longer enough: an aircraft hit and burning, which in 1942 would have turned away or fallen into the sea, now kept flying at its target, and the pilot had no need of an accurate bomb release, because he himself was the missile.

The answer came gradually over the following weeks. As early as 20 November McCain recommended replacing some of the Curtiss SB2C Helldiver dive bombers with fighters. On 23 December Admiral Ernest King decided that Essex-class carriers would henceforth carry about 72 fighters and only a dozen or so bombers and torpedo aircraft each; at the turn of the year Marine Corsair squadrons also went aboard. McCain’s operations officer, Commander John Thach, devised a system called the “big blue blanket”: larger patrols of F6F Hellcat fighters circling further from the force, standing patrols over Japanese airfields to pin aircraft down on the ground, and lines of radar picket destroyers stationed several dozen kilometres ahead of the carriers to detect incoming aircraft earlier and direct fighters onto them. According to American naval historians, the system was applied on a large scale from mid-December, during the landing on Mindoro, which – partly for fear of Japanese air power – had been postponed from the beginning of the month to 15 December.

The guns were changing too. Ships received more 40 mm guns, and an increasingly important role was played by 127 mm guns firing shells with proximity fuzes, capable of destroying an aircraft at a safe distance from the ship’s side. None of these measures, however, gave complete protection. A kamikaze that got through the fighters and the gunfire often hit all the same – according to post-war American estimates, roughly one in five suicide attacks ended in a hit or serious damage to the target.

Sacrifice, coercion and propaganda

On the Japanese side, the successes of 25 October and of November settled the expansion of the programme. The attacks, which Ōnishi had presented as a stopgap for the duration of the Philippine operations, became a permanent method of fighting for the navy, and in November the first army air force suicide units also went into action. Officially these were units of volunteers. The accounts of surviving pilots and post-war research show, however, that the line between free will and coercion was blurred: young airmen were assembled at briefings where refusal meant disgrace before comrades and superiors, and in later months some were simply assigned to the missions. Many of them had only a few dozen hours of training behind them.

Japanese propaganda presented the dead as heroes whose “divine wind” would turn the tide of the war, like the storms that, according to tradition, had destroyed the Mongol fleets in the thirteenth century. Headquarters communiqués exaggerated the results of the attacks, claiming the sinking of carriers that in reality returned to action a few weeks later. The dead were promoted posthumously and honoured at the Yasukuni shrine. According to the accounts of Japanese officers, Emperor Hirohito, when told of the first attacks, asked whether it had been necessary to go to such lengths, while adding that the pilots had done well – and this ambiguous approval set the course.

On the American side, censorship long restricted information about the scale of the losses inflicted by suicide aircraft, so as not to reveal their effectiveness to the enemy or spread alarm at home. For the sailors who watched the aircraft diving at them, the kamikazes became one of the most terrifying experiences of the war – not because they killed more than ordinary bombing, but because they could not be deterred.

Significance for the course of the war

The November attacks on the carriers did not change the course of the fighting for the Philippines. The Americans kept command of the sea and the air, took Leyte, landed on Mindoro in December and in Lingayen Gulf on Luzon in January 1945. But they showed what price Japan was prepared to pay for every week of delay. On 27 November suicide aircraft hit the battleships Colorado and Maryland and the cruiser St. Louis in Leyte Gulf; in December and January kamikazes sank and damaged dozens of ships off Mindoro and in Lingayen Gulf. The peak came in the spring of 1945 off Okinawa, where in the mass “Kikusui” raids suicide aircraft inflicted on the American fleet the heaviest losses in men it suffered in any single campaign, and the piloted Ōka rocket bombs also went into action.

According to the most commonly cited estimates, some 3,800 Japanese airmen died in suicide attacks, and more than 7,000 men on Allied ships; several dozen vessels were sunk, mainly destroyers and smaller ships, but not a single fleet carrier or battleship. Ōnishi, who had sent the first pilots to their deaths, committed suicide on 16 August 1945, the day after the surrender was announced, leaving a letter of apology to the dead and their families. The experience of the autumn of 1944 also influenced American calculations about the invasion of the Japanese home islands: if a few aircraft could put a large carrier out of action for weeks, the defence of Japan itself promised to be very bloody.