The Twilight Warriors by Robert Gandt Read Free Book Online Page B

wrote in his diary, “However impatient I might be hoping to save this crisis by all means, I can’t do anything now. All I can do is to send off the outgoing year, expecting to exert efforts next year.My thoughts ran wild seeking ways to save the empire.”
    To save the empire
. As if by a miracle, a way to save the empire came to Ugaki on the night of February 9, 1945, while he was still finishing his bottle of sake. It arrived in the form of a phone call, via the local police station. The admiral was to proceed to Tokyo immediately for an audience with the emperor. Ugaki would be appointed commander in chief of a newly established unit, the Fifth Air Fleet, with the responsibility for guarding all of Japan’s southern shore.
    Although the new command was called a “fleet,” Ugaki knew there was no fleet. The Fifth Air Fleet was a suicide force composed of
tokko
aircraft and pilots, Kaiten manned torpedoes, and
Ohka
flying rocket bombs.
    Ugaki considered the assignment a gift from heaven. He already believed that the only strategy left to Japan was to bleed the Americans until they sued for peace. In Tokyo he had heard the whispers and veiled suggestions from certain officers that Japan should avoid total ruin by negotiating a conditional surrender. Ugaki had only contempt for these weaklings. In his view, Japan’s honor demanded that every fighting man and citizen be willing to sacrifice his life.
    Matome Ugaki was a religious man. Like most senior officers, he worshiped at the Yasukuni Shrine, where, according to Shinto belief, the
kami
, or spirits, of Japan’s fighting men resided. Ugaki mused in his diary that if he, too, could be honored to be enshrined with the other spirits at Yasukuni, he would be content.
    “I’m appointed to a very important post,” he boasted that night in his diary, “which has the key to determine the fate of the empire, with the pick of the Imperial Navy available at present. I have to break through this crisis with diehard struggles.”
    Ugaki already had an idea where the diehard struggles would occur. The Americans were bringing the war closer to Japan. Their next target would surely be in the Bonin Islands, perhaps Chichi Jima or Iwo Jima. And then would come the stepping-stones to southern Japan, the Ryukyus—and the island of Okinawa.

5YOUR FAVORITE ENEMY
    SAN FRANCISCO BAY, CALIFORNIA
FEBRUARY 20, 1945
    A steady barrage of thunder pulsed in Erickson’s skull. His stomach churned, and he had the dry heaves. The twenty-two-year-old fighter pilot was an inexperienced drinker, and now he had a hangover of seismic proportions.
    He wasn’t alone. The squadron’s deployment bash at the Alameda officers’ club had left most of theTail End Charlies in a near-comatose state. As
Intrepid
slid away from her berth at Alameda, the forty-man junior officers’ bunkroom they called Boys’ Town looked like a death ward. From the lavatories came a steady litany of gagging and retching.
    Despite their nausea, Erickson and a few others mustered the strength to go topside to watch
Intrepid
’s departure. The ship’s crew, wearing their dress blues, lined the edges of the flight deck. As the carrier steamed across San Francisco Bay, past the rocky hump of Alcatraz, someone yelled, “So long, Big Al.” For the old hands who had made this passage several times, it was a tradition. It didn’t matter that the prison’s most famous inmate, Al Capone, was no longer in residence.
    The men on the flight deck and in the island watched the great spans of the Golden Gate Bridge looming ahead. There was always a crowd on the bridge to observe warships departing, but this time was different. The people lining the rails of the bridge were
girls
, dozens of them. They were waving brassieres, scarves, panties. They yelled and blew kisses to the men on the deck.
    The men whistled and yelled and waved back. Even the carrier’s new skipper, Capt. Giles Short, who had the best view ofanyone, was