Desperation Defense

Last week Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz posted the score for a month of his task forces' sweeps against the Japanese homeland and the Ryukyus invasion campaign. The enemy losses were staggering: more than 100 warships and auxiliary vessels sunk, 2,569 planes destroyed.

But U.S. naval forces had taken losses, too: five destroyers,*a destroyer transport, two ammunition ships, two mine-craft, four smaller vessels. The cost in men in the Ryukyus (Okinawa) operation told a truly surprising story: 989 officers and men of the fleet killed, 2,220 wounded. 1,491 missing; ashore, 478 Army men and marines killed, 2,457 wounded, 260 missing.

Thus, for probably the first time in a Pacific amphibious operation, the Navy had suffered more casualties than the troop units it had landed for battle. The reason: intense and repeated Jap air attacks on the swarms of ships off Okinawa. The chief method of attack: the Japs' frantic, fanatic Kamikaze Corps' suicide crash dives on U.S. ships (TIME, April 23).

By now it was clear that the Jap command had resorted to a defense as macabre to Western minds as it was typically Japanese. There was no question that the harakiri tactic of Kamikaze (Divine Tempest) airmen had been adopted as a chief effort. There were strong indications that it had become the major hope of a defense of desperation.

Locked Cockpits. Now nearly all Jap air attacks are suicidal. Last week the Navy confirmed reports that the Japs were building a special Kamikaze plane, with a cockpit into which the pilot is locked before the takeoff. The plane (reportedly in production in Manchuria) is a pusher type, engine and propeller at the rear of the fuselage. Its torpedo-like nose carries a long ton (2,240 Ibs.) of explosive, fused to let go upon impact of nose or wings.

In spite of their huge losses at the beginning of the Okinawa campaign, the Japs still spent planes and pilots recklessly, throwing everything in their air book at the Americans. Observers counted more than 15 types of aircraft in the buzzing swarms, even the slow, clumsy "Mary" bombers that had been obsolete since the earliest days of the war.

What It Is Like. A picture of what it was like on the receiving end of a Kamikaze attack came from TIME Correspondent Robert Sherrod, who cabled:

"The first suicide attack I saw was last winter, against a ship from which I had recently been detached. I had the excruciating experience of watching a flaming furnace which contained many of my friends. Seven Jap planes got through the fighter screen. Six were shot down, but the seventh crashed my old ship. It poured a column of smoke 300 feet high. Through the black an occasional explosion pitched roaring flames.

"A little less than an hour after the original attack the Japs came in again. This time there were six, and five were knocked down by fire from various ships. The "last bored in toward the wounded craft. The pilot was diving in low, at about a 15-degree angle. Terrific ack-ack poured into his plane and soon it was burning. But the Jap never wavered. He smacked into the middle of the smoke and a huge billow of orange-red flame reached for the sky.

"I saw my old ship later, when she vas going back for repairs. The flaming surface had never reached below the main deck, but there had been many casualties. She, like nearly every major ship hit by the Kamikazes, has returned to action.

"Since then I have seen several other such attacks. Nearly all have failed. The Japs have poured hundreds of planes and pilots into their bizarre scheme, but their return has been relatively small. One ship recently took three suicide hits in rapid succession but stayed in action."

Tactical Superforts. Relatively small though the U.S. losses might be, the Pacific command was determined to make them smaller. Last week U.S. airmen threw everything in their own book at the Japs--and one thing that was never in the book for the big B-29 bombers. For the first time, but probably not the last, the long-range Superfortresses did a chore of close-up tactical bombing in direct support of the Okinawa operations. Four times in six days, large forces of them ranged far & wide over Japan's home island of Kyushu, hammering airfields from medium altitude.*

*The U.S.S. Bush, Colhoun, Halligan, H. L. Abele and Pringle. *Among the nine targets: the field at Usa, a town from which the Japanese used to export to the U.S. cheap jewelry stamped: "Made in USA."

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