Strikes on Kyushu airfields

On 2 and 3 June 1945 aircraft from American carriers struck the airfields of southern Kyushu – the southernmost of Japan’s main islands. For two months suicide aircraft attacking the fleet off Okinawa had been taking off from there. Among the ships that sent their aircraft over Kyushu was the carrier Ticonderoga, with Air Group 87 embarked. The aim was to destroy as many aircraft as possible on the ground before they could take off to attack.

The statement in war chronologies that on this day Air Group 87 aircraft from Ticonderoga attacked the Kyushu airfields to prevent kamikaze aircraft from taking off is confirmed by the ship’s history compiled by the US Navy (Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships): according to it, Ticonderoga’s fighters attacked airfields on Kyushu on 2 and 3 June. It should be added, however, that this was not the action of a single ship but of the whole of Rear Admiral Arthur Radford’s Task Group 38.4, to which Ticonderoga belonged – according to the history of the carrier Yorktown, her aircraft flew four separate strikes against the airfields on 3 June.

Okinawa and the Kyushu airfields

Since the landing on Okinawa on 1 April 1945 the American fleet had had to remain constantly close to the island, covering the ground forces and their supplies. The Kyushu airfields lay less than 600 kilometres away – within range of almost any Japanese combat aircraft. The Japanese command staked everything on mass suicide attacks, organised in successive Kikusui operations. From the first of them, on 6–7 April, the kamikaze over Okinawa sank or damaged dozens of ships.

Two separate organisations operated on Kyushu. The navy was represented by Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki’s Fifth Air Fleet, whose headquarters for most of the campaign was at Kanoya on the Ōsumi Peninsula. Naval aircraft took off from Kanoya, Kushira and Kokubu, among other places. The army air force used above all the airfields at Chiran and Bansei on the Satsuma Peninsula; today Chiran has a museum dedicated to the suicide pilots. Around the main bases there was a network of smaller field landing strips, dispersed shelters and camouflaged aircraft revetments.

The idea of destroying the kamikaze at source, before they reached the fleet, was as old as the campaign itself. As early as March, before the landing on Okinawa, Admiral Marc Mitscher’s carriers had struck Kyushu, Kure and Kobe, paying for it with severe damage to the Franklin. In April and early May most of the B-29 heavy bombers of XXI Bomber Command were also sent to bomb the Kyushu airfields, which General Curtis LeMay accepted reluctantly, as it diverted his forces from the raids on the cities. In mid-May the carrier groups attacked Kyushu once more, and on 14 May a suicide aircraft hit the carrier Enterprise, putting her out of action for the rest of the war.

Halsey takes over the fleet

At the end of May a planned change of command took place. On the night of 27/28 May Admiral Raymond Spruance was relieved by Admiral William Halsey; the Fifth Fleet became the Third Fleet once more, and the fast carrier force became Task Force 38 instead of Task Force 58. Vice Admiral Mitscher was replaced by Vice Admiral John S. McCain. The ships and men remained the same; the commanders and staffs changed.

Halsey had always believed that tying the carriers to the waters around Okinawa wasted their greatest asset – the ability to strike distant targets swiftly and by surprise. In keeping with this conviction, on 2 June he ordered Radford’s task group to go north and attack the Kyushu airfields.

Ticonderoga and Air Group 87

Ticonderoga was an Essex-class carrier of the long-hull version. On 21 January 1945, off Formosa, she was hit by two suicide aircraft; more than a hundred of her crew were killed, and the ship had to return for repairs to the Puget Sound Navy Yard in Washington State. The repairs were completed on 20 April. In Hawaii, on 2 May, a new air group came aboard – Air Group 87, made up of fighter, dive-bomber and torpedo squadrons. After a week’s training the carrier sailed west, reached Ulithi atoll on 22 May and put to sea with Radford’s group on 24 May.

On 2 and 3 June Ticonderoga’s fighters, together with aircraft from the group’s other carriers, attacked the airfields of southern Kyushu, strafing and bombing aircraft on the ground, hangars and airfield installations. The ship’s history does not give their results. The overall picture that emerges from American studies is a modest one: the Japanese hid their aircraft in dispersed, camouflaged shelters, often far from the runways, and damaged grass airfields were repaired within hours. The numbers of aircraft destroyed claimed by the pilots often turned out to be inflated, and some of the aircraft hit were dummies or wrecks.

On 4 June Radford’s group returned to supporting the troops on Okinawa, and on the night of 4/5 June Halsey’s fleet was caught by a typhoon that damaged several dozen ships. Ticonderoga came through it almost unscathed; on 6 June her fighters shot down three aircraft heading for Okinawa. On 8 June Radford’s group attacked the Kyushu airfields again, and the aircraft bombing Kanoya – for the first time, according to American tallies – dropped bombs with proximity fuzes, which burst above the ground and sprayed fragments over aircraft sheltered behind earth embankments. After strikes on the Daitō Islands on 9 and 10 June, the group sailed for rest to Leyte Gulf, which it reached on 13 June. With that the fast carriers ended their part in the Okinawa campaign.

The kamikaze keep coming

The strikes on the airfields did not stop the attacks. In May the Japanese had already carried out four Kikusui operations – the last on 23–25 and 27–28 May – and on 3 June, the day after the first strike on Kyushu, the ninth began. According to tallies cited by American studies, several hundred navy and army aircraft took part in it up to 7 June, several dozen of them in a suicide role. On 5 June kamikaze hit the battleship Mississippi and the heavy cruiser Louisville. An escort carrier was also damaged in the course of this operation.

The heaviest price was still paid by the ships on the radar picket stations deployed around Okinawa to give early warning of incoming aircraft. On 10 June an Aichi D3A dive bomber fell into the water right next to the destroyer William D. Porter and exploded beneath her hull; after three hours of fighting fires and flooding the ship sank – according to her history, none of her crew was killed. On the evening of 16 June a Nakajima B6N torpedo bomber torpedoed the destroyer Twiggs and then crashed into her; the ship sank in less than an hour, and of a crew of more than three hundred, 188 survived, according to DANFS. The last, tenth Kikusui operation on 21–22 June involved only a few dozen suicide aircraft; they sank the landing ship LSM-59 and the hulk of the decommissioned destroyer Barry, and damaged two seaplane tenders.

According to American figures, of the more than a hundred destroyers that served on radar picket duty off Okinawa, ten were sunk and more than thirty damaged by kamikaze. The small fire-support vessels that accompanied them also suffered losses.

The limits of fighting “at source”

The June strikes showed the limitations of the method on which American commanders had been relying since March. There were several dozen airfields on Kyushu, the aircraft were dispersed and camouflaged, and the Japanese had learned to bring them out for take-off only just before an attack. The carriers could appear over the island for a day or two, and then had to return to Okinawa, refuel or get out of the way of typhoons. The B-29s dropped their bombs from high altitude on runways that were repaired within a day. Fighters from land airfields on Okinawa and the Ryukyu Islands were more effective – from 17 May Army Air Forces P-47s regularly patrolled the skies over Kyushu, and Marine Corps fighters intercepted the kamikaze on their way to the fleet. In the end the number of attacks fell not so much because aircraft had been destroyed on the ground as, to a large extent, because after the defeat on Okinawa the Japanese decided to husband their aircraft.

What came next

At the end of June, as the fighting of General Mitsuru Ushijima’s Thirty-Second Army on Okinawa was dying down, the Japanese command began to assemble thousands of aircraft, many of them trainers, for the defence of Japan itself under the Ketsu-gō plan. They were to strike en masse only at the invasion fleet off the coast of Kyushu. Drawing lessons from Okinawa, the Americans estimated that the kamikaze could inflict heavy losses during the planned landing on Kyushu (Operation Olympic, part of Operation Downfall), and this fear became one of the arguments in the discussions about ending the war. Halsey’s fast carriers returned to the skies over Japan in July, but no longer to defend Okinawa: from 10 July they attacked airfields, ports and the remnants of the fleet on Honshu and Hokkaido, preparing the ground for an invasion that in the end never took place.