At War With The Wind

363 Pages·2008·2.02 MB·English

by  David Sears

ALSO BY DAVID SEARS
The Last Epic Naval Battle: Voices from Leyte Gulf
AT WAR WITH THE WIND
The Epic Struggle with Japan’s
World War II Suicide Bombers

DAVID SEARS
CITADEL PRESS
Kensington Publishing Corp.
www.kensingtonbooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
To Stan, Lucy and Larry
Table of Contents ALSO BY DAVID SEARS
Title Page
Dedication
Portents: Cole and Lindsey
Part One - THE WAR OF BEACHHEADS
Chapter 1 - The Alligator and the Bull
Chapter 2 - Dark Waters
Chapter 3 - Green Hells
Chapter 4 - Forager, June and July 1944
Chapter 5 - The Big Blue Blanket
Chapter 6 - Clearing Skies, June 1944
Chapter 7 - Returning
Chapter 8 - Narrow Straits, October 1944
Part Two - THE KAMIKAZE BOYS
Chapter 9 - Becoming Young Gods, October 1944
Chapter 10 - To Get In and Get Aboard, November 1944
Chapter 11 - HI-RI-HO-KEN-TEN, November 1944
Chapter 12 - Target Paradise, November 1944
Chapter 13 - Suicide at Its Best, November–December 1944
Chapter 14 - The Far Side of Leyte, December 1944
Chapter 15 - The Shadow of Lingayen, December 1944
Chapter 16 - Uncompensated Losses, December 1944
Part Three - THE CRUELEST MONTHS
Chapter 17 - Corpses That Challenge the Clouds, January 1945
Chapter 18 - From Hot Rocks, February 1945
Chapter 19 - To the Great Loochoo, March 1945
Chapter 20 - Far from Ordinary Skies, 1 April–6 April 1945
Chapter 21 - A Perfect Day for What Happened, 6 April 1945
Chapter 22 - “Delete All After ‘Crazy,’” 7 April–13 April 1945
Chapter 23 - Wiseman’s Cove, 13 April–30 April 1945
Chapter 24 - The Same Tooth, May 1945
Chapter 25 - Short of Home, June and July 1945
Epilogue - Movies on Topside, August 1945–Present
Notes
Glossary
Sources and Acknowledgments
Citations
Roll Call
Copyright Page
Notes
Portents: Cole and Lindsey
A great trial in your youth made you different—made all
of us different from what we could have been without it.
—OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

On 12 October 2000 the Cole (DDG-67), a U.S. Navy 8,600-ton cruise-missile-
firing destroyer, entered the Yemeni port city of Aden for a routine fuel stop.
The Republic of Yemen, a Persian Gulf state, had the reputation of being a safe
haven for terrorists. Yemen’s troubled history included ties to Saddam Hussein’s
Iraq.
Cole completed mooring in the harbor at 0930 local time and refueling began
an hour later. Sailors wielding automatic weapons were posted as sentries on
Cole’s decks, but rules of engagement were precise and strict: no firing unless
directly fired upon or unless permission had been obtained from the ship’s
skipper or a duty officer. The rules would be of little use in what followed.
At 1118 a small skiff suddenly approached the Cole’s port side. As the skiff
drew alongside, its passengers smiled and waved at watching crewmen. Then,
just as suddenly, the boat exploded, blasting a jagged 40-by-40-foot hole at the
ship’s waterline. The explosion mangled Cole’s engineering and crew mess
spaces and set off fires and flooding. It was evening before Cole’s crew had the
damage under control. Seventeen sailors were killed and 39 were injured in the
blast. Many corpses lay snared in mazes of twisted steel and wire.
It took nine days for work crews of divers, metal cutters, welders, and medical
corpsmen to recover the 17 sailors’ bodies. New plates welded to interior
bulkheads created a watertight dike around the hull puncture, and millions of
gallons of seawater flooding the lower decks were pumped out. Seventeen days
later the patched-up Cole limped away from Aden harbor guided by four Yemeni
harbor tugs.
As the ship cast off, its crew lined up at the bow and stern to salute a giant
Stars and Stripes fluttering stiffly from the mast, raised from half-mast after the
mourning period for the sailors who were killed. Along with “The Star-Spangled
Banner,” the recorded tunes blasted from the destroyer’s loudspeakers included
“America the Beautiful,” “Anchors Aweigh,” the Marine Hymn, and the choice
of the Cole’s enlisted crew, a Kid Rock rap titled “American Bad Ass.” The
defiant posturing of its lyric (“The chosen one I’m the living proof With the gift
of gab / From the city of truth”) was probably lost on most Yemenis within
hearing range.
Once Cole was in open water, the harbor tugs passed control to the USS
Catawba (ATA-210), a Navy deep-sea tug. Catawba then towed Cole 25 miles
farther to a rendezvous with the chartered Norwegian salvage ship Blue Marlin.
The next morning at first light, the Navy began the thirty-six-hour process of
raising Cole onto Blue Marlin’s deck.
It was a slow-moving, but remarkable, show—one usually reserved for
hoisting massive oil-drilling rigs in and out of the Persian Gulf and the North
Sea. The salvage vessel pumped water into its ballast tanks, slid under the Cole,
and then raised itself and the Cole by pumping the ballast water out again. When
it was over, the Cole sat inert like a beached whale athwart Blue Marlin’s
stadium-size midsection. The wound to her flank was still gaping and raw, but
Cole was ready for the five-week, six-thousand-mile voyage home.

On 28 April 1945, nearly forty-five years and six months before Cole’s labored
departure from Aden, the Navy warship Lindsey (DD-771/ DM-32) left another
distant anchorage, this one ringed by a group of mountainous islands collectively
called the Kerama Retto. Kerama Retto lies fifteen miles west of the southern tip
of Okinawa, the main island in the Northern Pacific’s Ryukyu chain, then and
now sovereign Japanese territory.
Kerama Kaikyo, the strait separating the largest island in the Kerama Retto
from five smaller islands to the west, can accommodate seventy-five ships in
deepwater anchorages with good holding ground. Equally important, both the
north and south entrances to the one-and-a-half mile strait are narrow enough to
protect against the lashing of Pacific typhoons and, in time of war, the intrusion
of hostile shipping.
Since late March 1945, when U.S. forces had captured the islands of the
Kerama Retto and moved in ships and personnel, the roadstead had buzzed with
activity—the arrival, unloading, and departure of cargo ships and oilers and the
reprovisioning, refueling, and rearming of hundreds of warships and small craft.
Work crews labored without interruption, even though Japanese soldiers were
still at large hiding in the islands’ rugged terrain. But by the second week in
April, the work associated with ship arrivals took on a new, more sobering and
burdensome form.
Ships, often in tow, crawled into Kerama Kaikyo trailing wakes of leaking
fuel oil and debris. Many sailors standing at railings to gawk at the battered
newcomers arrive had themselves been passengers in earlier processions. Still,
the sailors would often gaze dumbstruck at the conditions of new arrivals—
drunken lists; flattened bows and fantails; punctured hulls; crumpled
deckhouses; severed gun mounts, masts and stacks.
Once a new arrival anchored or moored, a cleared topside space might be
lined with what, at a distance, could be mistaken for rows of seabags, mattresses,
or sacks of laundry or mail. They were actually shrouds, usually fashioned from
canvas, and the watching sailors knew that counting them gave a rough tally of
that ship’s dead. But only a rough count—remains of more than one sailor might
be mistakenly combined in one bundle or unavoidably spread among several.
And then, of course, there could still be bodies trapped below and others lost
forever in the sea. It was both hard to look—and hard to look away. In the next
days the bodies would be either carted ashore for interment or, if arrangements
could be made with a more seaworthy ship in the roadstead, carried out of the
strait for burial at sea. Before these ceremonies another object would be inserted
in each canvas shroud. Most often it would be a gun projectile or shell casing,
although sometimes a body might be laid atop the metal frame of a bunk.
Whatever object was used had to be weighty enough to ensure that the shroud
and its contents went all the way to the ocean floor.
Lindsey and Cole, although they’d been built half a century apart, nevertheless
shared the same lineage. They were both U.S. Navy destroyers, although, shortly
after its construction, Lindsey had been specially equipped for the dangerous
work of laying coastal mines (a mission it never fulfilled). Each was—by the
standards of its time—a fast, highly maneuverable, versatile, and lethal warship.
Lindsey, however, at 2,200 tons, was barely a quarter the size of Cole, and her
main armament cannons had nowhere near the punch or technical sophistication
of Cole’s weaponry.
Lindsey had been towed stern first and lifeless into Kerama Kaikyo at twilight
on 12 April 1945. During her relatively short time at anchor in the roadstead and
then in dry dock, she was a startling example—though not the only one—of just
how much punishment a warship could absorb and still remain afloat. The
roadstead where Lindsey and other ships like her were gathered was fast
becoming known as the Bone Yard.

It was hard to imagine and no easier to describe the appalling damage Lindsey—
and her crew—had suffered. If the damage decades later to Cole could be
compared to a shotgun blast at close range, the damage to Lindsey was more like
a decapitation. Lindsey essentially had no bow. In the detached, autopsy-like
narrative of her captain’s official damage report, an explosion or series of
explosions “blew off the bow from frame 30 forward from main deck to keel.”
There was little of Lindsey left forward of her bridge and superstructure. What
remained (“the main deck from frame 30 aft to frame 52 was blown upward at
an angle of fifty degrees”) was a cross-sectional slice of contorted steel beams,
shards of steel plate, crumpled piping, and tangled wire. It was as if someone
had opened Lindsey’s bow like a can of soup, pealed back the lid, and discarded
the rest of the can—and its contents—while keeping the rim from which the top
had been separated. Lindsey’s dismemberment had taken the lives of 57 sailors
(roughly a fifth of her crew) and gravely or seriously wounded 61 others.1
Lindsey’s misery had plummeted from the sky in mid-afternoon in the form of
two aircraft piloted by men intent on exchanging their lives for the destruction of
a ship whose name they probably never knew.
One aircraft, colliding on the starboard side at the forward base of Lindsey’s
superstructure, smashed into cooking and living spaces and burst into flames.
Some aircraft remains catapulted onto a superstructure deck just forward of
Lindsey’s bridge.
Pete Peterson, a third class petty officer stationed as a gunner on one of the
ship’s starboard side light machine guns, was standing on that deck when the
plane crashed and watched in horror as his gun loader and six or seven other
men nearby were mowed down by shrapnel. Reflexively, Peterson fled to
Lindsey’s port side, only to see a second plane flying straight toward him.
The crash by the first plane caused considerable damage and resulting flames
threatened more, but up to this point, there were no explosions. Those were the
work of the plane that Peterson saw. This plane crashed too with the bomb
strapped to its undercarriage flying on until it pierced the thin skin of Lindsey’s
port side bow.
This second aircraft was the cocked hammer and its bomb the pulled trigger
for an explosive cataclysm; the fuel was volatile smokeless gun powder packed
in brass shell canisters in Lindsey’s forward ready ammunition room. The
eruption lifted Lindsey up before dropping her nearly bowless to the sea. The
bow-mounted No. 1 gun and its housing—five tons of armored steel—catapulted
up and back to land on the ship’s bridge, the gun’s barrel pointing skyward.
The crewmen from Lindsey’s No. 2 gun mount—the turret just forward and
below the bridge—were among the few survivors on stations forward of the
bridge. Walter Gau, a shell loader, along with the rest of the dazed and confused
gun crew, had been poised to jump out of the mount’s port side hatch—a leap
that would have landed them square in the path of the second plane. Instead, they
left the mount to starboard and scrambled over and around the flaming carcass of
the first aircraft on their way to relative safety. Nonetheless, virtually all of them
sustained serious burns.