National Geographic: Untold Stories of World War II Page #5

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of normal military tactics

could not possibly succeed.

And we had to do the unthinkable

or the incomprehensible

in terms of the military acts

in last ditch attempt to primarily get

the American aircraft carriers.

Given that situation,

the men realized they had to become

one with the bomb

in that last, final struggle.

Lieutenant Morimasa Yunokawa commander

on okha squadron.

The thought of my death crossed my mind

only for a fraction of a second.

I was then thinking of only to serve.

No matter how you try to understand

how things were then,

now in this peace time,

I don't think you can.

A kamikaze could send

a ship to its grave

but each flier only had one chance

for success.

Pilots were supposed to aim

for battleships and aircraft carriers,

but destroyers and

their radar gear also were targets.

Aboard the Laffey,

nervous sailors repeated tales

of picket ships breaking in half

and sinking immediately.

The crew would always debate

where is the safest place to be.

That was always the big talk.

Is it safer to be below,

or is it safer to be on deck,

or in the bridge, or wherever.

They all had their own theories

about where was the safest place.

Of course, there was no safe place.

In April 1945,

the noose was tightening on Japan.

As the Battle of Okinawa began,

destroyers patrolled fifty miles

closer to Japan

tempting kamikazes taking off

from the mainland.

Suicide attackers had sunk several

destroyers on this battle station

now it was the Laffey's turn

to stand watch.

On April 16th, the ship began its

third day on the perimeter.

The mood aboard was tense.

At 8:
27 a.m.,

the Laffey's number came up.

Well, the first ones were just they

sorta circled around out pretty far,

maybe, oh eight, ten thousand yards.

And then all of a sudden,

it's like some sort of a signal,

they started coming in.

And first they just came in one

or two at a time,

and you just couldn't take them

all under fire.

So that's when we started getting hit.

For eighty minutes,

the Laffey's crew fought off

the heaviest kamikaze attack ever

on a single ship.

Our closest call was a plane coming in

on the starboard beam,

and it was, when I first saw it,

was low on the water,

about ten thousand yards out.

I figured it was about

eight seconds away from certain death,

Unless our gunners got it.

And our Mount 52,

which was just forward of the bridge,

was firing at it, and firing fast.

I noticed that the bursts

were just off just missing him.

So I just moved it,

and the next one went right into his

hit him right in the nose,

and just blew him up.

And that one is the one that would

have gotten us all.

And it just literally disintegrated,

and everybody heaved

a big sigh of relief.

And just after that,

then there came one in out of the sky

on the port side,

and one came in low on the water

on the port quarter,

and we were at it all over again.

On the morning of April 16th,

we had a suicide plane hit us

right about here.

It hit with enough impact

so that this gun

was blown up, canted upward at

more than a 45 degree angle.

The motor of that plane skidded along

the inside of this left hand gun

and wound up at the hatchway

in the back of the gun on this side.

And when he hit over there, I was

blown up the deck about fifteen feet.

When I regained consciousness,

that's where I was.

Ripped from stem to stern

by the attacks of Jap suicide pilots

at Okinawa,

the destroyer U.S.S. Laffey comes home

the Laffey was struck by everything

in the Jap book.

In the savage attempt

to finish her off,

Seven bomb-loaded planes crashed

on her decks.

the final score was:

nine enemy planes shot down

by the Laffey,

but 32 of her brave men were dead

or missing, and 60 were wounded.

In the worlds of her skipper,

Commander Becton,

she was truly

"the ship that would not die".

Flying conventional aircraft,

kamikaze pilots caused terrible damage

but the okha Corps never really got

a chance to affect the war's outcome.

The bombers that carried

the okhas were slow,

and American fighter pilots shot down

most of them

before they could release

their deadly cargo.

By war's end, Hosokawa was

his unit's only surviving officer.

He found the transition

to peacetime troubling.

All of a sudden, the war was over,

and I had the feeling of someone

who had been in the eye of a typhoon.

And suddenly the typhoon is gone,

the weather is clear and beautiful.

No one, nothing is left but myself,

and the feeling is, why?

It's a very strange feeling that

I cannot understand

why the typhoon spared me.

They were doing

what they felt was right,

just as we were doing

what we felt was right.

It had to be.

How else could you put your life

on the line for something

you didn't believe in?

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