Kamikaze off Okinawa in May

In early May 1945, as one German army after another was surrendering in Europe, the war in the waters around Okinawa entered its bloodiest phase for the US Navy. In less than twenty-four hours, on 3 and 4 May, Japanese suicide aircraft sank three destroyers and several smaller vessels and damaged more than a dozen others, among them an escort carrier and a cruiser. At the same time, on the night of 3–4 May, the Japanese 32nd Army launched a general counter-offensive on land, which by 5 May had collapsed with enormous losses. May brought further waves of attacks: on 11 May two suicide aircraft struck the flagship of Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher, the carrier Bunker Hill, killing nearly four hundred men.

The kamikaze successes are often associated with 5 May, but that is a simplification: the heaviest losses of early May fell on 3 and 4 May, while 5 May was above all the day the Japanese counter-offensive on land was defeated. Nor did the kamikaze “successes” consist in reversing the course of the battle – that was beyond them – but in inflicting losses on the American fleet without precedent in its history.

Background: a month of Kikusui

From the landing on Okinawa on 1 April 1945 the American and British fleets had to remain off the island, covering the ground forces of Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner’s Tenth Army and their supplies. Unlike in earlier campaigns, they could not strike and withdraw. For the Japanese this meant a stationary target less than 600 kilometres from their airfields on Kyūshū.

The Japanese command responded with a series of mass suicide attacks named Kikusui (“floating chrysanthemum”). The first, on 6–7 April, coincided with the sortie of the battleship Yamato, sunk on 7 April by carrier aircraft. The April operations that followed scored hits on battleships and carriers and sank the destroyer Mannert L. Abele with a piloted Ohka flying bomb – the period of the kamikaze over Okinawa in April. The brunt of the attacks fell above all on the destroyers deployed around the island on radar picket stations, which were the first to detect incoming aircraft and the first to be attacked.

At the end of April several days of bad weather gave the sailors a brief respite. The Japanese used it to prepare the fifth Kikusui operation, this time coordinated with an army offensive on land.

3 May: Little and Aaron Ward

The weather cleared on the afternoon of 3 May. At dusk a group of Japanese aircraft appeared over one of the radar picket stations. The attack fell on the destroyer Little and the destroyer-minelayer Aaron Ward. According to American records, Little took four or five suicide hits within a few minutes; her keel was broken and her engine rooms wrecked. She sank at about 7.55 p.m. Thirty-one of her crew were killed and several dozen wounded. In the same attack the fire-support ship LSM(R)-195, accompanying the destroyers, also went down.

Aaron Ward survived one of the heaviest attacks suffered by any US Navy ship in the war. Despite repeated hits by aircraft and bombs, fires and exploding ammunition, the ship – without power and listing – stayed afloat and was towed to Kerama Retto. Several dozen sailors were killed; the ship was never repaired after the war.

4 May: the pickets’ blackest morning

On the morning of 4 May the main force of the fifth Kikusui operation arrived. According to a tally cited in American studies, some 125 navy suicide aircraft and several dozen army machines took part, accompanied by bombers and fighters. Many were shot down by the covering fighters and the anti-aircraft guns, but those that got through struck with remarkable effect.

At around 7.40 a.m. two aircraft attacked the destroyer Luce. The first, shot down just alongside, knocked out the ship’s power with its bomb blast; the second hit her stern. At 8.14 a.m. Luce sank, taking with her, according to American figures, 126 of her 312 crew. Less than half an hour later the nearby destroyer Morrison, serving as a fighter-direction ship, was struck in turn by a fighter and three old biplane floatplanes that had managed to slip in low over the water. The ship capsized and at 8.40 a.m. went down so quickly that most of the men below decks were lost – 152 sailors. Two fire-support ships, LSM(R)-190 and LSM(R)-194, were also sunk that day.

Many more vessels were damaged. The destroyer-minelayer Shea was hit by a piloted Ohka bomb, which passed right through her superstructure and exploded on the far side. Kamikaze also struck the light cruiser Birmingham and, in the evening, the escort carrier Sangamon, which was almost completely gutted by fire but stayed afloat. That same day suicide aircraft hit two British carriers, Formidable and Indomitable, which were operating against the airfields in the Sakishima Islands. Thanks to their armoured flight decks, both resumed flying within a few hours.

All told, 3 and 4 May were among the US Navy’s heaviest days of the entire campaign: according to American tallies several hundred sailors were killed or missing, while Japanese losses exceeded a hundred aircraft.

The 32nd Army’s counter-offensive

The air attacks were meant to support a blow on land. The commander of the Japanese 32nd Army, General Mitsuru Ushijima, gave way to the urging of his chief of staff, General Isamu Chō, who demanded a switch from defence to attack. The army’s operations officer, Colonel Hiromichi Yahara, opposed it, convinced that the Japanese army’s only chance was to bleed the enemy white on the fortified line around Shuri Castle.

On the night of 3–4 May the Japanese artillery, until then carefully concealed, opened a hurricane bombardment, while shipping engineer units tried to land troops behind the American lines on both coasts of the island. Most of the barges were detected and destroyed before they reached the shore. On the morning of 4 May the 24th Division attacked with tanks, supported by the 44th Independent Mixed Brigade. In front of the American 7th and 77th Infantry Divisions the attack broke down under fire from artillery, ships and aircraft. The Japanese guns, forced out of hiding, fell victim to counter-battery fire.

By 5 May the counter-offensive was over. The Japanese had lost, by various estimates, between 5,000 and 7,000 men and most of their artillery, having gained almost no ground. According to Yahara’s memoirs, Ushijima later admitted in tears that his operations officer had been right, and entrusted him with the further conduct of the defence. From then on the 32nd Army confined itself to stubborn defence.

Bunker Hill and the flagships

Defeat on land did not halt the air attacks. On 11 May the Japanese launched the sixth Kikusui operation. That morning the destroyers Hugh W. Hadley and Evans, on duty at one of the radar picket stations, fought off attacks by several dozen aircraft for nearly two hours. Both were badly damaged but stayed afloat, and their crews claimed several dozen aircraft shot down.

The same morning two Mitsubishi A6M fighters emerged from low cloud over the fast carrier force. The first released a bomb and crashed into the flight deck of Bunker Hill, which was crowded with armed and fuelled aircraft; the second struck near the island. A conflagration broke out and engulfed the hangar. According to American figures 396 men were killed or missing and 264 wounded – many suffocated by smoke in compartments below decks. The ship survived but did not return to action before the end of the war. Mitscher, who had lost a large part of his staff, shifted his flag to the Enterprise. On 14 May that carrier too was hit by a suicide aircraft, which smashed into the deck by the forward elevator; Enterprise also had to leave the combat zone for the rest of the war, and Mitscher changed flagships yet again.

The attacks reached the commander of the whole operation as well. On the evening of 12 May, at the Hagushi anchorage, two suicide aircraft hit the battleship New Mexico, which carried Admiral Raymond Spruance, commander of the Fifth Fleet. Fifty-four of the crew were killed and 119 wounded; Spruance himself was unhurt. It was the second of Spruance’s flagships to be hit by kamikaze off Okinawa – at the end of March the cruiser Indianapolis had been damaged.

The second half of May

Further Kikusui operations were mounted on 23–25 and 27–28 May. On the evening of 24 May the Japanese tried a new method: twelve Mitsubishi Ki-21 bombers flew commandos of the Giretsu unit to the Okinawa airfields held by the Americans. Some turned back and some were shot down; five aircraft crash-landed at Yontan airfield, only one of them in anything like a normal landing. According to American figures, the roughly ten surviving commandos destroyed nine aircraft, damaged 29 and set fire to some 260,000 litres of fuel before they were killed. On 28 May kamikaze sank the destroyer Drexler, which capsized and went down in less than a minute; 168 of her crew died.

At the end of the month a long-planned change of command took place. On 27 May Admiral Spruance was relieved by Admiral William Halsey, and the Fifth Fleet became the Third Fleet once again; the next day Mitscher was replaced by Vice Admiral John S. McCain. Staffs and crews worn out by weeks of service under constant threat needed rest.

The men on both sides

For American sailors, service off Okinawa in May 1945 meant weeks of almost unbroken alert. The crews of the destroyers on the radar pickets slept at their guns, and ships’ doctors recorded more and more cases of extreme nervous exhaustion.

On the Japanese side suicide missions became routine in May. The airmen, often twenty years old or younger, took off after brief training from airfields on Kyūshū such as Kanoya, in old and new aircraft alike, often overloaded with a bomb. As had been the case since the autumn attacks on the carriers off the Philippines in 1944, many of them left farewell letters; reading them still provokes debate in Japan about how much of the sacrifice was voluntary and how much the result of pressure from superiors and the state. Most of the pilots died before reaching their targets, shot down by fighters or anti-aircraft fire.

Toll and significance

The suicide attacks continued until the end of the fighting on Okinawa in June 1945. According to the American figures cited in most studies, 36 Allied ships and craft were sunk over the whole campaign and 368 damaged, most of them by kamikaze; the US Navy lost 4,907 killed and missing – more than the number of marines who fell on land. May, with the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth Kikusui operations, was one of the hardest months of the campaign.

Even so, the kamikaze did not achieve their strategic aim. They sank no fleet carrier or battleship and did not force the fleet to withdraw from Okinawa; nor did they manage to cut the troops ashore off from their supplies. The failure of the counter-offensive of 4–5 May meant that the 32nd Army could now only delay its inevitable defeat. Yet the losses off Okinawa had consequences far beyond the island: in Washington they became one of the arguments in the debate over what an invasion of the Japanese home islands would cost, defended as they were by thousands of aircraft being readied for suicide missions.