WWII Continued

Our ship had one of the best gun crews in the navy which was demonstrated when we first sailed into Okinawa. We were on early morning patrol and a Japanese Betty (Medium Bomber) made a bombing run on us and our crew shot it down before it got to us. Part of the wing fell on our ship so it was pretty close. Our ship must have had a charmed life because during the Okinawa campaign we were under 576 Japanese suicide raids and never got hit once. On one raid a suicider flew right between our stacks and hit a battleship on the other side. It was fascinating to hear the radio say enemey aircraft approaching bearing 265 and closing. First one could hear the heavy five inchers cut loose and then the 40MM's would chime in and then when really close the 50 calibres would start. We sailed around Okinawa for a week bombarding shore installations before the landing parties went in. The day was a beautiful blue sunshiny day at the start and by noon the sky was so full of smoke that it looked like an overcast stormy day. Watching the army and marines go in was quite a sight. Their little craft would go between the long line of ships right up to the beach and then they would jump out and rush ashore firing their rifles. We laid down the most terrible barrage of rockets and heavy fire that I have ever seen and places that were beautifully green with foliage were left bare as the desert. I wondered how on earth people could live through that kind of torture but they did and always put up quite a lot of resistance when anyone tried to land.

The suiciders continued and I saw ships come back with holes in them big enough for a greyhound bus to drive though. Every night we lost one or two small ships. The Japanese never seemed to have any coordination on their raids. First they would have a surface raid, then an air raid, and then a submarine raid. With the U.S. Forces they would hit with everything all at once and that is what made our forces so devastating. The Japanese were clever and I received a call on the radio one morning to lay down a barrage in a such and such sector. The sender could not authenticate the message by the system in use at that time and so we did not act on the request. We later found out that it was a Japanese who had ordered the barrage in the area where our front line marines were at the time.

Our coordination was further demonstrated when the marines called for fire support because the Japanese had saved all their tanks for one last thrust and were coming down from the hills to force our marines into the sea if they weren't killed first and our fleet laid down a wicked broadside and knocked out all the tanks before they could get to the marines. Our firepower was so heavy that the ship would ease over just a little bit to one side from the firepower.

We listened to Tokyo Rose on the radio and she reported several times that a Wichita type cruiser was destroyed by the Imperial Japanese Navy that day, but we knew she was lying because our ship was the only one of its kind in the fleet.