The raids on Kure

On the morning of 24 July 1945 hundreds of aircraft from American carriers appeared over the bay of Kure, the largest base of the Imperial Japanese Navy on the Inland Sea. Their targets were ships that only a few years earlier had formed the core of one of the three largest navies in the world: battleships, carriers and cruisers lying at anchor close to the shore and the islets of the bay, without fuel, turned into floating anti-aircraft batteries. In three days of raids – 24, 25 and 28 July – the aircraft of Task Force 38 sank, or settled on the bottom of their shallow anchorages, almost every major warship Japan still had.

War chronologies record under 24 July that “the British and Americans begin bombing Kure”, and under 28 July that the battleships Haruna and Ise were sunk by Task Force 38 aircraft at the base’s shallow anchorage. Both entries need filling out. Kure had been bombed since March 1945, both by carrier aircraft and by B-29s, and the July raids on the base itself were the work of the Americans alone – the British carriers, although operating with the Third Fleet at the time, attacked other targets. The date of 28 July for Haruna and Ise is accurate; it need only be added that neither ship sank in the ordinary sense – both settled on the bottom in shallow water – and that a third battleship, Hyūga, had already met the same fate after the raid of 24 July.

A fleet without fuel

After its defeats in the battles of the Philippine Sea and Leyte Gulf in 1944, the Japanese navy had ceased to be a force capable of operating on the open sea. The last attempt to use it was the suicidal sortie of the battleship Yamato towards Okinawa, which ended with her sinking on 7 April 1945. Cut off by American submarines from the oil of the Dutch East Indies, and from the end of March also by B-29 minelaying in coastal waters and the Shimonoseki Strait, the fleet lacked fuel even for short trips out of harbour.

The remaining ships were therefore concentrated in the Kure area, in several bays and beside islets near the base. The battleship Haruna, the oldest survivor, a veteran dating back to 1915, lay off the island of Etajima, home of the Naval Academy. The hybrid battleship-carriers Ise and Hyūga, rebuilt in 1943 so that more than twenty aircraft could be catapulted from a flight deck at the stern, now had neither aircraft nor fuel. In and around the base lay the new carriers Amagi and Katsuragi, which had never gone into action, the heavy cruisers Tone and Aoba, the light cruiser Ōyodo – until the autumn of 1944 the flagship of the Combined Fleet – as well as the old training cruisers Iwate and Izumo and the former battleship Settsu, used as a target ship.

Most of them were painted in camouflage colours and draped with nets and branches, and some were moored right up against the shore. The Japanese command no longer counted on them in a naval battle. The ships were to defend the base with their anti-aircraft guns and, in the event of an American invasion of the home islands, to support the coastal defences. It was precisely this dense network of anti-aircraft guns, on ships and ashore, that made Kure one of the most heavily defended targets in Japan.

Earlier attacks on Kure

The base had been attacked before. On 19 March 1945 more than three hundred aircraft of Task Force 58 struck Kure, hitting many ships but sinking none; the same morning a Japanese bomber nearly destroyed the carrier Franklin. After that the base was taken in hand by the bombers of XXI Bomber Command. According to American tallies, B-29s mined the harbour approaches at the end of March and the beginning of May, bombed the naval aircraft works at nearby Hiro on 5 May and the naval arsenal at Kure on 22 June. On the night of 1–2 July an incendiary raid destroyed, according to the same figures, about 40 per cent of the city’s built-up area. Kure itself was thus no new target in July; what was new was that this time the blow was aimed at the ships with the clear intention of destroying them for good.

Halsey’s decision

In July 1945 Admiral William Halsey’s Third Fleet was waging a campaign off the coast of Japan that had begun on 10 July with a strike on the airfields around Tokyo. Its core was Vice Admiral John S. McCain’s fast carrier force, Task Force 38, and from mid-July a force of the British Pacific Fleet, designated Task Force 37, under Vice Admiral Bernard Rawlings, operated alongside it; its carriers were commanded by Vice Admiral Philip Vian. The aircraft of both forces attacked airfields, ports, shipyards and industrial plants, while the battleships shelled coastal industrial towns.

According to American studies, McCain himself and his staff opposed the attack on Kure. They believed that the immobilised ships no longer posed a real threat and that the risk of losses to anti-aircraft fire was high; it seemed more important to them to destroy the aircraft the Japanese were stockpiling against an invasion, including those intended for kamikaze attacks. Halsey, however, decided otherwise. In his memoirs he gave four reasons: destroying the fleet would raise American morale and avenge Pearl Harbor; it would prevent the Japanese from interfering with the expected Soviet operations in the north, around Hokkaido; it would deprive Japan of a fleet that it might use as a bargaining chip in peace talks; and finally, he had received such an order from Admiral Chester Nimitz.

The British were excluded from the attack on Kure. According to accounts cited by historians, the aim was that the destruction of the remnants of the Japanese fleet should be an exclusively American achievement, so that Britain could not later lay claim to it. Task Force 37 was given other targets in those days: airfields, the port of Osaka and shipping on the Inland Sea and along the coasts of Shikoku and Kyushu. The “British and American” bombing of Kure recorded in the chronologies was thus in reality a single joint operation by the Allied carriers, in which Kure fell to the Americans and neighbouring targets to the British.

24 July

The strike began at dawn on 24 July. According to American figures, Task Force 38 aircraft flew 1,747 combat sorties that day against targets in western Japan, a large proportion of them against Kure and the nearby anchorages. The attackers were Grumman F6F Hellcat and Vought F4U Corsair fighters, Curtiss SB2C Helldiver dive bombers and Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo bombers. No torpedoes were used – the anchorages were too shallow – so the ships were attacked with bombs and rockets. To reduce losses to anti-aircraft fire, some aircraft dropped bombs with proximity fuzes, which burst over the gun positions, before the main attack.

Hyūga suffered worst. According to American and Japanese tallies she took some ten direct hits, which wrecked her bridge, tore away part of her bow and started large fires; her crew suffered heavy casualties. The ship flooded and settled on the bottom of the shallow anchorage – most sources date her sinking to the raid of 24 July, although she settled gradually over the following days. The same day three bombs hit the cruiser Tone, which ran aground, while Aoba, already damaged earlier, settled on the bottom after fresh hits. According to the same tallies Ōyodo took five bombs, and Amagi two bombs and many near misses, after which she began to take on water. Also damaged were Ise, attacked by some sixty aircraft, Haruna, hit by a single bomb, Katsuragi, the old carrier Hōshō, Ryūhō (already damaged in March), Settsu and several destroyers. Iwate, although she received no direct hit, was flooded by near misses and settled on the bottom the next day.

That day British aircraft attacked targets west of Kure. According to British figures they badly damaged the escort carrier Kaiyō in Beppu Bay on Kyushu, which was beached, and – together with attacks on the following days – sank two escort vessels and several smaller craft, for the loss of four aircraft.

25 and 28 July

On 25 July the attacks continued, but the weather limited their scale; American and British aircraft struck mainly at airfields and shipping, and Kure yielded no significant new results that day. After a day’s break to take on fuel and ammunition from the replenishment group, Task Force 38 returned to Kure on 28 July. This time the ships damaged four days earlier were easier targets.

According to American tallies, Haruna took eight bombs and settled on an even keel on the bottom off Etajima, her superstructure above the water. Ise was hit by about sixteen bombs and settled on the bottom of her shallow anchorage. Ōyodo, after further near misses, capsized. Katsuragi, which had received only one hit on 24 July, was struck this time by a bomb of about a ton that tore a huge hole in her flight deck – but the carrier stayed afloat. Amagi took new hits; her list increased over the following twenty-four hours and, according to American studies, she capsized on the morning of 29 July (some sources give 27 July). The old cruiser Izumo also capsized, and Tone and Aoba were attacked again.

On 28 July US Army bombers also appeared over Kure. According to USAAF figures, 79 B-24 Liberators from Okinawa attacked the ships in the harbour; four bombs struck the already sunken cruiser Aoba, blowing off her stern. Two bombers were shot down and fourteen damaged. Some of the airmen shot down over Kure that day, both from the B-24s and from carrier aircraft, were taken prisoner and transported to Hiroshima; according to later American findings, several of them died there on 6 August.

The chronologies are therefore right to link the end of Haruna and Ise with 28 July and with the aircraft of Task Force 38. The word “sunk”, however, needs clarifying: both battleships, like Hyūga before them, settled in shallow water with their superstructures above the surface. After the war the wrecks were raised and broken up for scrap in 1946–1947.

The toll

According to American studies, in three days of raids an aircraft carrier, three battleships, five cruisers (counting the two old training cruisers) and several smaller warships were sunk or settled on the bottom, and many others damaged. These were among the US Navy’s largest carrier air operations of the whole war, and also the most destructive to enemy warships. The price was high: according to figures cited in the literature, the Allies lost 133 aircraft during these attacks, shot down by anti-aircraft fire or destroyed in accidents, and 102 airmen. These losses were heavier than in most of the Third Fleet’s earlier operations – a direct result of the dense anti-aircraft defences McCain had warned about.

Japanese casualties are not known precisely. Many sailors were killed aboard the ships, because the crews stayed at their anti-aircraft stations to the end; bombs also fell on the harbour buildings and the shipyard. The city of Kure itself had by then been largely burnt out by the B-29 raid at the beginning of July.

The argument over the point of the operation went on long after the war. Its opponents, led by McCain, maintained that destroying immobilised ships had no military significance and that the aircraft and airmen should have been used against the Japanese air forces preparing to repel the invasion. Its supporters, such as Halsey, held that the fleet, even without fuel, could have supported the coastal defences or become a bargaining counter in peace negotiations. The British official historian Stephen Roskill saw the destruction of the ships at Kure above all as retribution for the losses the Americans had suffered at Pearl Harbor.

The end of the Imperial Japanese Navy as a fleet

After the raids on Kure the Imperial Japanese Navy ceased to exist as a fleet. Of its battleships only Nagato remained afloat, lying at Yokosuka, damaged on 18 July in an attack by Third Fleet aircraft on that base and unable to put to sea. The carriers that had not sunk had neither aircraft nor trained aircrew, and until the end of the war the Japanese navy fought almost exclusively with submarines, suicide weapons – explosive motor boats, Kaiten human torpedoes and kamikaze aircraft – and what was left of its air arm. One of the last successes of its submarines was to be the sinking of the American cruiser Indianapolis on the night of 29–30 July.

The destruction of the ships at Kure also removed an obstacle to Soviet operations: according to historians of the campaign, when the USSR entered the war against Japan on 9 August its Pacific Fleet was able to operate in the Sea of Japan without fear of Japanese surface ships. Soon after Kure, Task Force 38 attacked the Kobe and Nagoya area, and in August northern Honshu and Hokkaido; the British carriers operated alongside it until the last days of the war.

Nine days after the last raid on Kure, on 6 August 1945, an American bomber dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, some 20 km from the base. Japan surrendered in August and on 2 September signed the instrument of surrender aboard the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay. The wrecks of Haruna, Ise and Hyūga remained in Kure Bay for another year before they began to be raised and cut up for scrap. The July raids thus closed the history of the fleet that had attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and ruled the Pacific for half a year, and whose remnants perished in the end not in a naval battle but at anchor in their own base, deprived of fuel and air cover.