The only kamikaze attack of the Iwo Jima campaign, the air attack of February 21, 1945, severely damaged one U.S. carrier, and sank a second, the last of the war to be sunk.

Background

February 21, 1945 found two carrier task groups of the U.S. Fifth fleet 70 miles west-north-west of Iwo Jima, providing combat air patrol and launching several airstrikes to support the troops ashore. Missions were also flown against Chichi Jima to put the airfield there out of action and unable to field aerial threats against the U.S. ships off Iwo Jima. Japanese naval and aerial opposition to the Iwo Jima invasion, Operation Detachment, had been light. Air attacks had damaged the destroyer Blessman and minesweeper Gamble, and Japanese coastal batteries had shot up some small gunboats and damaged a heavy cruiser, before D-Day on February 19th. But this was par for the course. No heavy air or naval threats had materialized thus far in the campaign. On the night of February 20-21, some 20 aircraft approached the carrier task groups, but did not press their attack. Anti-aircraft fire shot down two and kept the others at a safe distance; no damage was inflicted on any U.S. ships.[1] On the morning of February 21rst, Admiral Marc A. Mitscher, the commander of Task Force 58, the carrier fleet within the U.S. Fifth Fleet, detached the fleet carrier Saratoga, and three destroyers from Task Group 58.5, to provide combat air patrol the following night over the amphibious forces off Iwo Jima.

 

She was attached to Rear Admiral Durgin’s Task Unit 52.2.2., which comprised three escort aircraft carriers Makin Island (flagship), Lunga Point, and Bismarck Sea, plus three destroyers. These escort carriers, slower and smaller than conventional fleet carriers, mostly quickly built tanker conversions, were used to provide close air support for marines ashore and combat air patrol for amphibious shipping. So were the fleet carriers of Task Force 58, but the escort carrier groups (and there were other escort carriers off Iwo Jima besides the one mentioned here), had to provide these on a round the clock basis, which the fleet carriers of Task Force 58 were unable to do. Their fighter aircraft were also slower and older than those carried by Task Force 58, comprising Wildcat fighters, which had been replaced by the newer Hellcat fighters in Task Force 58, and Avenger torpedo bombers. The escort carriers did not carry dive bombers; pinpoint naval bombing was not required for their tasks, but only general-purpose bombing and strafing, which the Avengers could handle. The escort carrier groups also used their aircraft for observation, and anti-submarine missions, tasks which could be safely shouldered by the slower escort carriers and their escorts.

USS Saratoga

Saratoga was chosen, because like USS Enterprise of Task Group 58.5, her aircrews were trained in night operations.  To provide night combat air patrol over his own fleet, Mitscher retained the latter carrier, along with three cruisers and seven destroyers, the rest of the night carrier group.[2] It was thought that due to the light aerial opposition encountered thus far, that Saratoga and the escort carriers would be able to handle the job, but nobody knew that the Japanese had already decided to up the ante.  The Japanese had launched a kamikaze air attack on February 20th, against the American ships, but it had turned back due to terrible weather[3] that also cramped U.S. ground support missions flown by American naval aircraft.

However, on February 21rst, they tried again. At 8:00 am, that morning, fifty aircraft, of which thirty-two were of the Mitate No.2 Special Attack Unit took off from Katori Airfield, near Yokusuka, Japan. This “special attack unit” as the Japanese dubbed it, was another name for the feared kamikazes, bomb laden aircraft that were used as suicide weapons by their pilots, who would crash them into Allied ships.

The use of suicide aircraft was borne of desperation, the result of the overall poor performance by navy pilots operating in conventional roles due to lack of training. This had been compensated for by the kamikaze program, the brainchild of Pearl Harbor attack planner, Admiral Takijiro Onishi, which ensured a more accurate delivery system for the aerial bomb. It was much easier to fly a plane into a ship, than to drop a bomb accurately from 10,000 feet, or even harder, to make an accurate torpedo run. Tactically speaking, the kamikaze was a good investment, its payoff being generally greater than the loss of plane and pilot. Of course, from a Christian worldview, such tactics are morally off-limits. Acts of valor, even sacrificing one’s life for the sake of others, are well within the Christian just war tradition, but suicide bombing in this manner is not and bears more resemblance to Muslim suicide bombers than the Christian tradition of waging warfare.[4]

The fifty plane formation was made up of of 12 D4Y “Judy” dive bombers, and 8 “Jill” torpedo bombers, brand new aircraft, escorted by 12 “Zero” fighters, all in the kamikaze role, along with 18 bombers operating in the conventional mode.  Landing at Hachijo-jima, in the Northern Bonin Islands, the force refueled, and took off again for the 600-mile trip to Iwo Jima. Four of the planes had to abort the mission, suffering mechanical failures or damage from U.S. fighters.

As Saratoga took up station 35 miles northwest of Iwo Jima, at 4:30 pm, with most of her aircraft on board, bogeys, (unidentified aircraft) were reported 75 miles out. Six Hellcat fighters from Saratoga’s combat air patrol were vectored out to have a look, but it was determined that the planes were friendly after all. This was the wrong guess, and it would have terrible consequences.

Attack on the Saratoga

The big Saratoga, at 36,000 tons, dwarfed the smaller escort carriers, and naturally was an inviting target for the Japanese pilots. The force split as they approached the task group. Some concentrated on the Saratoga, and others moved to attack other targets, of which the escort carriers were the juiciest. The first warning the Saratoga received that the approaching aircraft were not friendly was when a Hellcat pilot reported downing two Zeroes at 4:50 pm. But Providence was not with the Americans that late afternoon. The sky was overcast and the ceiling was down to 3,500 feet, conditions that favored air attack. The Japanese pilots may not have been well trained, (some kamikaze pilots received as little as 30 hours in the cockpit), but they were shrewd, and they took full advantage of the cloud cover as they dove in to make their attacks. The cloud cover hampered the intercepting fighter planes, and they downed no Japanese planes other than two, already mentioned.

At 4:59 pm, six Japanese aircraft broke out of the cloud cover at 3500 feet, on Saratoga’s starboard quarter. Saratoga’s anti-aircraft batteries opened up on the incoming aircraft. The carrier was already at general quarters. One plane was shot down, but the next two, though set ablaze by the carrier’s anti-aircraft gunners, still bored in toward the carrier, sprouting flames. Hitting they water, they skipped atop at wave height and plunged into the side of the ship at the waterline, penetrating the hull, where their bombs exploded within. At least one “smashed through three steel bulkheads, rupturing a gas line, and finally exploding on the hangar deck.”[5] Two holes were thus blown in the Saratoga’s hull at the waterline, one 40 feet in diameter. This occurred just as the carrier finished launching fifteen fighters. Two more were on the catapults ready to launch. As the carrier shuddered under the twin blows, she had just received, a fourth Japanese plane dropped a bomb on the anchor windlass, which blew out a good section of the flight deck forward. The fifth plane smashed into the port catapult, and the sixth crashed into an airplane crane on the starboard side, its wing shearing off to strike the No. 1 gun gallery, killing all within, and “spraying the starboard gun gallery with a lethal shower of flaming gasoline.”[6]

All these blows took place in quick in succession, between 5:00 and 5:03 pm. Saratoga was badly hurt topside; her flight deck was wrecked forward and unserviceable, but her power plant was in good shape and she built up speed to 25 knots, as damage control officer Lieutenant Commander Bernard R. Tarrant’s damage control parties got to work fighting fires and repairing damage. Within two hours they had the fires under control, getting the one on the hangar deck under control by 6:30 pm, and the one in wing tank control twelve minutes later.[7] As the carrier was in no shape to recover airborne fighters these were directed to land on escort carriers until the carrier’s flight deck could be made serviceable again. However, the carrier’s suffering was not yet over. At 6:46 pm, parachute flares burst into the sky, illuminating five more kamikazes boring in toward the Saratoga from out of the clouds. As they hurtled down off the carrier’s port side, Saratoga’s gunners filled the air with shell bursts, and the destroyers joined in, knocking down four of the attackers. But the fifth got through and dropped a bomb that exploded on the Saratoga’s flight deck, blasting a 25-foot hole. “The explosion shook Sara from anchor windlass to stern tubes…”[8] The Japanese pilot followed his bomb by smashing into the flight deck after it, but did not penetrate the deck with his machine. Instead, the Japanese airplane bounced off, and went over the side into the ocean.

Though damaged in seven different places, Saratoga was a tough old lady, having been torpedoed twice on two separate occasions during this war. It was going to take more than what she had taken to put her under. By 8:15 am, repair parties had repaired enough of the flight deck aft to enable her to land planes, but the forward flight deck was too badly damaged to be patched up, and Saratoga was unable to launch planes. Nevertheless, she could land her own fighters, and did. One fighter pilot, from one of the escort carriers, confused in the dark, mistook Saratoga for Bismarck Sea, and landed on the Saratoga. He remarked as he left his cockpit, “Gee, I am glad I am not on that old Sara. All hell’s broken out there.” One of the deckhands replied, “Take a good look around, brother. This is hell!”[9] And hell it had been. The Saratoga had suffered 123 killed and 192 wounded, and 36 of her aircraft had been burned up, exploded to bits, or jettisoned as a fire hazard. Under her own power, the carrier steamed to Einwetok, and then to the West Coast for three months of extensive repairs. As the U.S. Navy had plenty of newer fleet carriers, the Saratoga was not returned to front line service, but was repaired as a training carrier.

USS Bismarck Sea

Attack on the Bismarck Sea

But if Providence that late afternoon was with the Saratoga, it was not with the Bismarck Sea. The Japanese pilots did not deprive the smaller escort carriers of their attention, for as the airstrike split, some of the planes ganging up on the old fleet carrier, others took on the smaller escort carriers. The escort carriers had headed into the wind to recover their own aircraft that were supporting the marines ashore on Iwo Jima, as well as aircraft from the Saratoga. This task had been completed by 6:45 pm, when lookouts opened fire on a plane attacking the Lunga Point, which they shot down. But in the twilight, it was hard to see the enemy aircraft, and therefore it is understandable that Bismarck Sea’s lookouts missed another Japanese plane until it was 1000 yards away. The carrier’s anti-aircraft gunners held their fire, because the Japanese plane was roaring towards a screening destroyer on the carrier’s beam, and they did not want to hit the destroyer by accident. As for the destroyer, it too did not open fire on the plane. Word had passed to the ship that Saratoga’s aircraft were buzzing about, and in the darkening twilight it was hard to distinguish friend from foe.  However, the Japanese pilot wished to expend his life by hurting a more important warship than a destroyer, and he zipped around the destroyer’s stern, and headed straight for the Bismarck Sea. As a target, she was evidently more to his liking.[10]

Twenty-five feet above the water, the plane roared directly toward them, as the after starboard anti-aircraft gun tracers locked onto the approaching suicider, and fire began to rip the attacker. But the Japanese plane kept coming, though it was flaming now. The desperate gunners kept shooting, but they couldn’t depress their weapons low enough to bring down the plane, and in any event, it was too close. The Japanese pilot crashed his machine abeam of the after elevator, between the waterline and the flight deck. The impact split the elevator cables and dropped the elevator to the bottom of its well as well as knocking torpedoes from the starboard rack and scattering them about the hangar deck floor.  Fires immediately broke out in the vicinity, but the ship’s water curtain and aft sprinkler system were inoperable due to the kamikaze crash, which had damaged the fire main. All available hands immediately moved aft to tackle the fire, and it appeared that this fire was able to be controlled.

However, the orange glow showing through the open elevator well drew the attention of a second kamikaze. This plane roared down vertically from overhead, and crashed into the flight deck just forward of the elevator well. The large explosion that resulted slew all of the fire-fighters and members of a nearby damage control party, whose station was directly below the fire. This second explosion stove in the bulkheads the gallery spaces over the hangar deck and collapsed other decks in the 20- and 40-millimeter clipping rooms, dumping a large quantity of 40- and 20-millimeter ammunition into the flames. The aircraft that been brought aboard had not been drained of fuel, and the large explosion ignited the gasoline in these planes, “which went up with a roar.”  Crewmen attempting to enter the hangar deck to fight the fires were immediately forced to quit their efforts due to exploding ammunition. The after section of the ship was now an inferno, with flames blazing high into the night sky through the hole in the flight deck.  Exploding 20- and 40-millimeter ammunition made it impossible to fight the fires, and Captain Pratt was worried that the torpedoes rolling around on the hangar deck directly amidst the intense fire blazing in the after section of the ship would cook off. With no way to reach and jettison them, Captain Pratt saw no alternative but to abandon ship. His decision was made on the advice of the Executive Officer, who went down into the area and reported on the conditions in the hangar deck.

Upon receipt of this report, Captain Pratt “passed the word for all hands to go to their abandon ship stations.” The men made their way to their abandon ships in an orderly manner; there was no panic, and even the engineering crew got out of their compartments, which were directly below the areas of the ship that were ablaze. Life rafts were tossed into the sea, including from aircraft parked forward on the hangar deck, on the command of the gunnery officer, and the men followed, sliding down lines into the dark sea.  The men in the Internal Communications Room stuck to their posts as long as possible and ensured that every compartment acknowledged the abandon ship order over the ship’s internal telephones. The sick bay personnel did a “remarkable job” in Pratt’s opinion, ensuring that sick bay was evacuated and its occupants gotten off the ship. Captain Pratt was the last man off the doomed carrier. As he was leaving the flattop, a massive explosion occurred aboard her, the result of torpedoes cooking off, blowing off the aft part of the flight deck, as well as the sides of the ship “aft of a point about halfway down the flight deck.” Pratt described the noise as “deafening” and noted that the ship “rocked tremendously.” Underwater damage was immediately apparent, because Bismarck Sea took on an immediate list to starboard, and between twenty and thirty minutes, rolled over and sank.

Final massive explosion aboard the Bismarck Sea

But getting off the Bismarck Sea was not the end of the ordeal. The 22-knot wind ensured that the seas were rough, and the waters were colder than what the sailors were accustomed to. Many men drowned, especially those who had been stunned or injured by fragments of the ship that fell off near the stern. “The disbursing officer was injured in this way,” Captain Pratt wrote, “the gun sponsons on the flight deck after the third explosion just fell off into the sea and a large number of personnel were struck by these parts.” The survivors grouped together in clusters knowing that this was make them easier to spot by the rescue vessels. Captain Pratt and the Assistant Navigator swam about, encouraging the men. It took all night for three destroyers and three destroyer escorts to pick up the survivors, because the rescue operation was rendered difficult due to the darkness and the rough seas. To make matters more difficult, Japanese planes returned and strafed the survivors in the light provided by the fires on the sinking carrier. At least one raft, containing most of the quartermasters, was hit by Japanese bullets and apparently sank, because, Pratt explained, “they were not seen afterward.”

The officer of the deck was slightly wounded by strafing as well. A lighted buoy was placed over the point to provide a point of origin for the search, and the search continued all night, but all survivors were taken aboard by 12:30 pm, because no more crew of the Bismarck Sea were rescued after this time. 45 minutes after leaving his ship, Captain Pratt was taken aboard the destroyer escort Edmonds. Watching the rescue efforts from that ship, he remarked that the “crews of the recovery vessels were heroic. I was on the Edmonds, and witnessed many men jump from the ship into the water to assist people who didn’t have strength enough to hold onto the lines alongside the ship or the cargo nets which were put over the side to form ladders on which they could climb into from the water to the deck.”

Of the 943 men aboard the escort carrier, 218 were lost. Of these Captain Pratt estimated that 125 were killed aboard the Bismarck Sea by the explosions.

Attacks on Other Ships

During the Japanese air attack, the other escort carriers were not neglected. Several Japanese “Jill” torpedo bombers took on the USS Lunga Point. The first plane, taken under fire at 1500 yards, launched a torpedo, was hit by a bursting shell and went down 200 yards from the escort carrier. A second Jill dropped a torpedo that passed in front of the carrier’s bow; this plane made good its escape. A third Jill, blasted by the escort carrier’s 5-inch gun disintegrated. But there remained a fourth Jill. This Jill kept coming, though it was taken under fire from about a thousand yards off the Lunga Point’s starboard side. Six hundred yards off, the Jill released its torpedo, which passed ten to fifteen yards in the carrier’s wake.[11] The Jill was burning, and the pilot intended to smash it into the Lunga Point’s Island. His aim was off slightly, and he clipped his wing against the carrier’s island instead, then skidded across the flight deck, “its propeller chewing up the planking” and dropped into the sea on the port side. Damage was slight, but there was damage. The Jill’s gas tank had exploded against the island as the wing sheared off, and flaming gasoline was splashed over the island, the flight deck, and the catwalks on both sides of the ship; nevertheless, the fires on the flight deck were extinguished within three minutes, and her remaining fires in another two minutes.[12] The ship suffered only slight casualties and nobody was killed. Less providentially favored was the net cargo ship Keokuk, cruising in formation with a group of Landing Ship Tanks, and net tenders about 50 miles southeast of Iwo Jima. At 5:20 pm, a Jill came sweeping out of the clouds, and struck her on the starboard side abaft the bridge, “and slithered aft, wiping out all but one 20-mm gun of the starboard battery. All fires were out by 1850 [6:50 pm] but Keokuk had 17 killed or missing and 44 wounded.”[13] Also hit in the Japanese air attack that sank Bismarck Sea and mauled Saratoga, was LST-477, which was hit by a kamikaze that struck the ship and bounced overboard into the sea, doing the vessel only slight damage.

 

And so ended the air attack of February 21rst, 1945 off Iwo Jima, the only significant Japanese air attack of the campaign. From a tactical standpoint, it was certainly worth the expended Japanese aircrew, for it knocked the Saratoga out of the war, and sank the USS Bismarck Sea, the last U.S. carrier to be sunk during World War Two, and inflicted minor damage on several other ships. From the American standpoint, the air attack manifested the outstanding ability of U.S. navy sailors and the high quality of their damage control efforts, in the case of Saratoga, proved many times before, during the Philippines Campaign, and to be proved many times afterword during the Okinawa campaign.

 

 

[1] Samuel Eliot Morison History of United States Naval Operations in World War II (Urbanna and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001) [Reprint] 14:52

[2] Ibid. Much of the foregoing is simply a paraphrase of Morison.

[3]  Samuel J. Cox, “Iwo Jima: Nightmare in Hell,” https://www.history.navy.mil/about-us/leadership/director/directors-corner/h-grams/h-gram-042/h-042-1.html

[4] In the Japanese militaristic and nationalistic culture, dying for the emperor was considered the greatest honor one could attain. As the Japanese emperor was considered divine by the Japanese, dying in his service was akin to religious martyrdom. Like the suicide bombers of the Islamic world, there were religious aspects to the kamikaze missions. Kamikaze pilots believed that dying for the emperor would gain them eternal life.

[5] Captain Walter Karig, USNR, Lieutenant Commander Russell L. Harris, USNR, and Lieutenant Commander Frank A. Manson, USN, Battle Report: Victory in the Pacific (New York, New York: Rinehart and Company, Inc, 1949) p. 309

[6] Ibid

[7] Samuel Eliot Morison History of United States Naval Operations in World War II (Urbanna and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001) [Reprint] 14:53

[8] Captain Walter Karig, USNR, Lieutenant Commander Russell L. Harris, USNR, and Lieutenant Commander Frank A. Manson, USN, Battle Report: Victory in the Pacific (New York, New York: Rinehart and Company, Inc, 1949) p. 310

[9] Samuel Eliot Morison History of United States Naval Operations in World War II (Urbanna and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001) [Reprint] 14:54

[10] Captain Walter Karig, USNR, Lieutenant Commander Russell L. Harris, USNR, and Lieutenant Commander Frank A. Manson, USN, Battle Report: Victory in the Pacific (New York, New York: Rinehart and Company, Inc, 1949) p. 311

[11] William Y’Blood The Little Giants: U.S. Escort Carriers Against Japan (Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 2012) p. 523

[12] Ibid

[13] Samuel Eliot Morison History of United States Naval Operations in World War II (Urbanna and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001) [Reprint] 14:55