The strike on Kure and USS Franklin

On the morning of 19 March 1945 more than three hundred aircraft from American carriers flew in over the coasts of Shikoku and Honshu and fell upon the naval base at Kure on the Inland Sea – the main base of what remained of the Japanese Combined Fleet. Other aircraft of the same force attacked the port of Kobe. Only a few dozen minutes earlier, at about 7.08 a.m., a single Japanese dive bomber, undetected by radar, had emerged from the clouds over the carrier Franklin, manoeuvring some 50 nautical miles off the coast of Japan, and dropped two bombs on its deck. Within minutes the ship had become a blazing wreck, and a series of explosions of fuel, bombs and rockets killed more men aboard her than on any other American warship that survived the war.

War chronologies record under this date that the carriers of Task Force 58 “heavily bombed important naval bases in Japan, Kobe and Kure”, and that Franklin, hit by two bombs fifty miles from Japan, lost hundreds of men and was disabled. The second part of this account is accurate. The first needs adding to: the attack was indeed powerful, but its results proved modest – not a single Japanese warship was sunk at Kure, and Kobe itself was above all a commercial port and shipbuilding centre rather than one of the fleet’s main bases.

Before Okinawa

The mid-March strike was part of the preparations for Operation Iceberg – the invasion of Okinawa, set for 1 April 1945. The island lay within range of aircraft flying from airfields on Kyushu. American planners remembered how the kamikaze had attacked the carriers off the Philippines in the autumn of 1944 and how in January 1945 they had harried the fleet on its way to Luzon, and they wanted to destroy as many Japanese aircraft as possible before the invasion fleet arrived off Okinawa. The second target was the remnant of the Japanese surface fleet, which could threaten the landings.

The whole force was commanded by Admiral Raymond Spruance, commander of the Fifth Fleet. The strike was carried out by the fast carrier force – Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher’s Task Force 58 – made up of four task groups with more than a dozen fleet and light carriers, screened by fast battleships, cruisers and destroyers. It was the force’s third foray into Japanese waters: in February its aircraft had attacked the Tokyo area and then supported the fighting on Iwo Jima, where organised Japanese resistance ceased in mid-March.

After a short rest at Ulithi atoll – where on 11 March a Japanese long-range bomber, sent on a suicide attack from Kyushu, struck the carrier Randolph at anchor – the force put to sea on 14 March. The Japanese detected it on its way but did not know whether this heralded a landing or just another raid. The air defence of Kyushu was directed by Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki, formerly chief of staff to Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto and since February commander of the Fifth Air Fleet, with his headquarters at Kanoya. Ugaki decided not to wait, but to strike at the American carriers before they destroyed his aircraft on the ground.

18 March: the Kyushu airfields

On 18 March the aircraft of Task Force 58 attacked dozens of airfields on Kyushu – 45, according to an American tally. They found few aircraft on them, because the Japanese had managed to disperse them or get them into the air to attack, but there was a great deal of air fighting; the Americans put enemy losses that day at about 110 aircraft. Japanese aircraft also reached the task force itself: they lightly damaged the carriers Enterprise and Intrepid, and a bomb that hit Yorktown killed five of her crew.

The same day American reconnaissance aircraft photographed concentrations of ships at Kure and Kobe. At Kure they identified, among others, the battleships Yamato and Haruna and several carriers. The task force command made them the main target for the next day: three task groups were to strike Kure, the fourth Kobe.

19 March: the raid on Kure

Before dawn on 19 March fighters flew over the Kure area to clear the skies before the bombers arrived. Waiting for them was the 343rd Kōkūtai – an elite naval fighter group organised by Captain Minoru Genda, one of the authors of the plan to attack Pearl Harbor, and equipped with the new Kawanishi N1K Shiden fighter. The first clash, with Hellcats of squadron VBF-17, lasted about 25 minutes. According to an American study, 14 American and 25 Japanese aircraft were shot down in the fighting over Kure that day; both sides – as usual – claimed far more victories at the time.

The main strike wave consisted of 158 Curtiss SB2C Helldiver dive bombers and Avenger torpedo bombers, escorted by 163 Hellcat and Corsair fighters – 321 aircraft in all, almost as many as the Japanese had sent over Pearl Harbor in December 1941. The original targets had been the fuel tanks and port installations, but the strike coordinator, Commander George Ottinger, seeing the anchored warships from the air, sent all the bombers against them.

Kure was defended by several hundred anti-aircraft guns, and the fire was the heaviest the airmen of Task Force 58 had yet encountered. Bombs hit many ships, but sank none. The carrier Ryūhō took three bombs and two rockets, and Hyūga a bomb that killed about 40 sailors; two bombs hit Ise, and one each Haruna and Yamato, where the bomb exploded near the bridge. The carriers Amagi and Katsuragi were also hit. The worst damaged were the escort carrier Kaiyō, which after fires and flooding had to be towed into shallow water, and the cruiser Ōyodo, which was beached off Etajima island. Anti-aircraft fire shot down eleven Helldivers and two Avengers. The details of the hits differ from one study to another, but the overall result is not in doubt: the raid damaged the Japanese fleet but did not destroy it.

Wasp and Franklin

The Japanese did not sit idle. At dawn Ugaki’s aircraft came out over the American force, and their attacks concentrated on Rear Admiral Ralph Davison’s Task Group 58.2. At about 7.10 a.m. a single aircraft that had slipped through unnoticed hit the carrier Wasp with a bomb. It pierced several decks and exploded in the galley, where breakfast was being prepared. 101 members of the crew were killed and 269 wounded, but an efficient damage-control effort brought the fires under control within a quarter of an hour, and in less than an hour the ship was landing aircraft again.

Franklin – an Essex-class carrier that had already been hit by a kamikaze off the Philippines once, on 30 October 1944, and had only just returned from repairs – came closer to the Japanese coast that morning than any other American carrier in the war. Her crew had gone to general quarters twelve times during the night, so her captain, Leslie Gehres, relaxed the state of readiness to let the men eat and rest, though the guns remained manned. The ship had already sent aircraft over Honshu and her second strike wave was taking off when a single dive bomber emerged from the clouds – most often identified as a Yokosuka D4Y Suisei (“Judy” in the American code). It dropped two bombs, each of about 250 kilograms according to later analysis, before the gunners could open fire.

The first bomb pierced the flight deck amidships and exploded in the hangar, destroying the combat information centre; the second hit the after part of the ship and passed through two decks. On the flight deck at that moment stood 31 armed and fuelled aircraft with their engines running, and in the hangar there were more, some with full tanks. Almost all of it caught fire at once. Bombs, fuel tanks and petrol vapour exploded one after another, while heavy Tiny Tim rockets slung under the Corsairs ignited by themselves and shot across the decks. Of the men in the hangar, only two are said to have survived. Smoke filled the engine rooms, which had to be abandoned; Franklin lay dead in the water without power or communications, with a growing list to starboard, and because the explosions had destroyed the water mains her magazines could not be flooded.

Saving the ship

Rear Admiral Davison transferred his flag to the destroyer Miller and suggested abandoning ship, but Gehres refused: there were still men alive below decks. Hundreds of sailors were blown into the sea or jumped overboard to escape the fire. They were picked up by destroyers, some of which brought their bows right up against the side of the burning carrier to take off men cut off by the flames. The light cruiser Santa Fe came alongside Franklin, played water on her and took off hundreds of wounded and members of the air group who were not needed to save the ship.

On board, the fight against the fire went on for hours. Two men in particular became famous. The ship’s chaplain, the Jesuit Joseph O’Callahan, gave the last rites to the wounded and dying while also organising firefighting parties and leading sailors to flood magazines that were in danger of exploding. Lieutenant (junior grade) Donald Gary found about 300 men trapped in a smoke-filled mess compartment, searched out a way out and went back several times to lead further groups to safety; he then directed the firefighting in the hangar and helped get a boiler going in one of the boiler rooms. Both received the Medal of Honor; O’Callahan’s was presented to him in 1946 by President Harry Truman. Dozens of Navy Crosses and Silver Stars were also awarded for that day; among the posthumous awards was one to the ship’s doctor George Fox, who was killed while tending the wounded.

In the afternoon the heavy cruiser Pittsburgh took Franklin in tow, pulling her at about five knots. The ship was listing by more than ten degrees, and the huge quantities of water poured in to fight the fires had dangerously reduced her stability. The next day part of the machinery was got going again and Franklin moved off under her own power. Fifty-nine of her aircraft had been destroyed.

The casualty figures vary depending on whether the air group’s airmen, passengers and those who later died of wounds are included. Samuel Eliot Morison, author of what is in effect the official history of US Navy operations, gives 724 killed and 265 wounded for 19 March; Joseph Springer, citing official data, writes of 807 killed and at least 487 wounded. These were the heaviest losses suffered by any American warship that survived the war.

Withdrawal and the first Ohkas

After the attack on Kure and Kobe, Task Force 58 began to withdraw southwards, covering the damaged ships, while its fighters went on attacking the airfields of southern Kyushu. On 20 March a Japanese suicide aircraft struck the destroyer Halsey Powell, and Enterprise, accidentally hit by anti-aircraft fire from her own side’s ships, was for a time unable to land aircraft. On 21 March Ugaki for the first time sent against the force Yokosuka MXY7 Ohka manned missiles – rocket-powered glide bombs steered by a suicide pilot and carried beneath Mitsubishi G4M bombers. According to most accounts, all 18 bombers of this mission were shot down by American fighters before they could release their Ohkas, and the escort lost most of its 30 aircraft. The Americans had nonetheless learned that the Japanese had prepared a new, specialised suicide weapon.

The outcome of the four-day operation was ambiguous. The Americans claimed the destruction of several hundred Japanese aircraft in the air and on the ground – figures that, as usual, were inflated – and they delayed mass attacks on the invasion fleet off Okinawa by a few days. The price was damage to several carriers and heavy loss of life, and the Japanese fleet had not been eliminated. Japanese propaganda, meanwhile, proclaimed a great victory over the American carriers.

The road to New York

Franklin reached Ulithi under her own power, where she underwent emergency repairs, then went on to Pearl Harbor and from there through the Panama Canal to the New York Navy Yard in Brooklyn, which she entered on 28 April 1945. She was repaired on the East Coast because the West Coast yards were overloaded with ships damaged by kamikaze. On the way Gehres accused many crew members who had ended up in the water on 19 March of desertion, and announced that 704 men had stayed with the ship. An inquiry in New York showed that about 400 had remained on board throughout, and that many of the “deserters” had jumped into the sea to escape the fire or in the belief that the order to abandon ship had been given. The charges were quietly dropped, and in July 1945 Gehres was transferred to a shore post. The rebuilt Franklin never returned to combat service; she was placed in reserve in 1947 and sold for scrap in 1966.

Its place in the war

The March strike on Kyushu and Kure opened the Okinawa campaign. On 26 March the Americans landed on the Kerama Islands west of Okinawa, and on 1 April on Okinawa itself. So began the longest and bloodiest combined sea and land battle of the Pacific War, in which Ugaki threw hundreds of kamikaze and Ohka missiles against the American fleet; the United States Navy lost more men off Okinawa than in any other campaign. Several of the ships damaged at Kure on 19 March still took part in the war: on 6 April Yamato set out on a suicide voyage towards Okinawa and was sunk the next day by the aircraft of Task Force 58. The other ships that survived at Kure were destroyed or disabled only by the American carrier raids on Kure and the Inland Sea in July.

At the same time as the carrier raid, B-29 bombers from the Marianas were conducting the March campaign of incendiary raids on Japanese cities, in which districts of Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka and Kobe burned. From March 1945, therefore, Japan was being attacked simultaneously from the air and from the sea, right off its own coasts, and its fleet was no longer able to do anything about it.

Franklin became a symbol of both sides of this war: of the enormous destructive power that a single well-aimed bomb could unleash on a carrier, and of the endurance of a crew that saved a ship already all but given up for lost. Her story, recorded in the wartime documentary film The Saga of the Franklin, also became one of the US Navy’s most important lessons in damage control – above all in how dangerous armed and fuelled aircraft standing on the deck are at the moment of an attack.