On July 10, 1945, Admiral William Halsey’s 3rd Fleet closed to within 150 miles of mainland Japan.
The Japanese home islands represented the last major target of the United States Navy.
Attacking them was the culmination of more than three years’ worth of obstinate combat.
At last, the Navy had the enemy’s homeland almost in sight, and from its position off
the coast, it had the opportunity to deliver the knockout blow.
Halsey was determined—almost obsessed—with sinking every Japanese capital ship that had
been involved in the war.
Before peace could be reached, he wanted to ensure that Japan’s navy would be defeated.
In his mind, unconditional surrender involved total annihilation of Japan’s war machine.
On the morning of July 10th, hundreds of US carrier planes took off from his Fast Carrier
Task Force—called Task Force 38—and executed the first of several massive air raids against
installations in mainland Japan.
On that first day, Halsey’s pilots aimed for the airfields outside of Tokyo.
Then, on July 14 and 15, they hit train yards on Hokkaido and northern Honshu.
Then, for the last thirteen days of July, they participated in five additional raids
designed to sink all the Japanese ships that lay at anchor.
On the third raid, Halsey instructed his aviators to find and sink the Imperial Fleet’s most
prized target, Nagato, a battleship which had once been the flagship of the Japanese fleet.
In some ways, the raid against the Nagato was strategically worthless.
At the time, the ship was in nearly helpless condition.
The previous month, the Japanese had removed all of Nagato’s secondary guns and half
of its antiaircraft battery to boost its shore defenses.
Destroying the battleship would not, it seemed, hasten the end of the war.
Still, the Japanese were prepared to defend the toothless battleship.
At its berth in Yokosuka, they had camouflaged Nagato so it could not be seen from the air.
Additionally, the Japanese parked it near a museum ship, the Mikasa, which had served
as Admiral Togo’s flagship during the 1905 Battle of Tsushima.
Hopefully, the Mikasa’s presence would lead the Americans to conclude that Nagato had
been mothballed and that the whole area could be avoided.
On July 18th, strike groups from the carriers Yorktown, Cowpens, Shangri-La, and Randolph
tested their luck, glide-bombing Nagato from 10,000 feet.
Twenty-year-old Radioman Second class George William Whitehurst of Torpedo Squadron 88
was in the belly of a TBM Avenger flown by LT Douglas LaPierre.
Whitehurst recalled the frightening moments as his squadron plummeted through the hail
of antiaircraft fire in their effort to deal a deathblow to the Japanese battleship.
"Peeling off at 10,000 feet amidst heavy antiaircraft fire, nine of the planes dove on the target.
The procedure called for the bombers to pull out at 3,000 feet, dropping their bombs as
they did so.
In my case, what followed was a harrowing experience.
My pilot did not pull out at 3,000 feet, and when I did not feel the Gs—that is, the
sensation of pulling out of the dive—I looked over my shoulder and saw the altimeter needle
passing 3,000 feet, then 2,000, and finally stopping at just under 1,000 feet.
Alarmed, I called the pilot on the intercom and I was told to take a look at the left
wing where a 40-mm shell had struck, opening a large hole.
The pilot had made a long shallow pullout to save pressure on the wing.
He said that we had been hit at 6,000 feet and he had jettisoned the bomb, knowing that
it would have been fatal to try to complete the dive with it.
And where did that errant bomb fall?
You guessed it!
The Mikasa was about three-quarters of a mile from the Nagato and it suffered a direct blow.
For a 1904 ship, that was devastating.
The Japanese could never understand why the Americans would want to bomb an old ship that
was on land and refused to believe that it was a mistake."
Two decades after the war, in an effort to prove their sincerity, the US Navy helped
restore Mikasa to its former appearance.
Carrier planes pounded Nagato all day, and the ship suffered so much bomb damage that
it eventually settled on the harbor bottom, unable to be moved.
It could not sink because the harbor depth was too shallow.
As a result, it was the only Japanese battleship to survive World War 2.
For the next ten days, Halsey’s aviators repeated their performance against other naval
installations, including a massive four-day raid against Kure Naval Base.
But none of this did anything to break down Japanese resistance.
U.S. Army air force bombers had been saturating Japanese cities with incendiary bombs for
five months, and still the Japanese government refused to surrender.
To casual observers, the addition of the Navy’s bombing campaign seemed to have no tangible
effect on Imperial Japan’s decision to continue its resistance.
However, on August 6 and August 9, the situation changed dramatically when Army Air Force bombers
deployed atomic weapons over the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing perhaps as
many as 200,000 people—soldiers and civilians alike.
When word of the successful atomic bombings reached the fleet at sea, the sailors exploded
with joy, believing that this news was the war’s final act.
Japan had finally been brought to its knees.
All the United States had to do was wait for Emperor Hirohito to come to his senses.
But the American aviators were sorely mistaken.
Even though atomic weapons had been deployed, Admiral Halsey refused to bring an end to
the Navy’s bombing missions.
He wanted the Navy to be in at the close, so he continued ordering missions over Japan.
He scheduled three more raids for August 10, 13, and 15.
On August 13, Radioman Whitehurst was back in the air for his 10th strike over the mainland
and he was not happy about it.
He saw little value in bombing Japanese civilians to conclude a war that had already been won.
He recalled: "We were carrying a 2,000-pound bomb, so large
that it filled the bomb bay.
My torpedo squadron was assigned a fishing village in a cove where some coastal vessels
were anchored.
I knew that not a few of our bombs would fall in that village with devastating consequences.
I really didn’t want us to bomb that village and called Lieutenant LaPierre on the intercom
about it.
He cut me off, saying that we had our assigned target and would try to hit those small ships,
so that’s what we were going to do.
So over we went, and as I suspected, some of the bombs fell on the village and heaven
knows how many people we killed.
In a sweep over a nearby airfield, we lost a fighter pilot to antiaircraft fire.
The pilot was Lieutenant Wilson L. Dozier of Norfolk.
This account is not in my flight log.
The reader will wonder why I wanted to spare a fishing village but was earlier willing
to strafe farms.
In retrospect, I know this was an inconsistency, since both were civilian targets, but I was
20-years-old, and simply made choices."
One of the most dangerous missions took place on the morning of August 15, 1945.
That day, USS Yorktown’s Fighting Squadron 88 took off with twelve planes.
Its mission was to sweep Atsugi Airfield, which was well-protected by anti-aircraft guns.
Fighting Squadron 88’s pilots flew the Grumman F6F Hellcat, a single-seat fighter plane.
Their job was to clear the way for bombers and torpedo planes—each armed with a 2,000-pound
bomb—that would come in a few minutes later to crater the runway and hangars.
Early in the mission, several of the planes got lost in the overcast, leaving only six
planes to perform the sweep.
The pilots were: Lieutenant Howdy Harrison, Ensign Billy Hobbs, Ensign Eugene Mandeberg,
LTJG Joseph Sahloff, LTJG Ted Hansen, and LTJG Maury Proctor.
As the Hellcats winged their way toward Atsugi, good news came over the airwaves.
While they were in the air, Admiral Chester Nimitz’s message arrived aboard USS Yorktown
and suspended all further combat operations.
The war was over!
The carrier relayed this news to the men flying the mission, instructing them to jettison
their ordnance and return to the ship.
Unfortunately, the message did not reach the six pilots of Fighting Squadron 88 in time.
They were already reaching Atsugi Airfield when they received the news.
Quickly, they breezed over the airfield without firing a shot and began their return trek.
Undoubtedly, they felt elated, but for these men, peace would last only a few minutes.
About five miles from Atsugi Airfield, midway between the runway and the coast, twenty Japanese
fighters attacked them.
The news of war’s end had not yet reached any of their adversaries.
It was a recipe for slaughter.
Not only were these Japanese aircraft some of the newest and best remaining, but the
talented pilots who flew them—hoarded by the Japanese to defend their homeland against
an anticipated land assault—represented the most skilled and experienced fliers in
the land.
The Hellcat pilots realized their predicament when LTJG Sahloff spotted them coming in at
high speed.
From his cockpit, he radioed, “Tallyho!
Many rats, six o’clock high, diving!”
With that, the fight was on.
The last important air battle of the Pacific War now ensued.
Outnumbered more than three-to-one, the Americans didn’t stand a chance.
Sahloff was the first shot down.
He tried to get to open water but he didn’t make it.
His plane went down and landed with a tremendous splash in Tokyo Bay.
Next, Proctor’s plane was riddled.
It received twenty-eight holes from enemy fire and he was forced to dive for a lower
altitude and head back to Yorktown.
Then, another Hellcat exploded in fire, forcing its pilot to parachute from 7,000 feet.
Two others took heavy fire as well, and they too plummeted in flames, smashing into the ground.
The last pilot, Ted Hansen, who fended off the Japanese and subsequently made it back
to Yorktown, was so occupied with defending himself that he had no time to identify which
of his three companions had parachuted out and which two had ridden their planes to a
fiery end.
Four men—Billy Hobbs, Howdy Harrison, Eugene Mandeberg, and Joseph Sahloff—had died knowing
the war was over and that they were being killed in a pointless skirmish.
On USS Yorktown, Hansen and Proctor landed their damaged Hellcats on the flight deck
and told their tale.
Yorktown’s flag officer, Rear Admiral Arthur Radford, who had earlier agonized over greenlighting
this mission, later wrote, “These were our last combat casualties.
Their loss was a personal tragedy to me on this day of victory.”
Thus, the Navy’s final battle in the Pacific War was a defeat, one that dampened the mood
of the pilots on USS Yorktown.
While the other ships of the task group were celebrating the end of the war, they were
engulfed in anger and frustration.
In expletive-filled tirades, they castigated Admiral Halsey for insisting on these last
air missions over Japan.
At that point, such sacrifices hardly seemed necessary to the men.
One Yorktown aviator summed up his emotions with a poem.
He wrote: "The last tallyho has been sounded,
The sea washes thick with the tears; Remember the ranks of the fallen,
As memory fades with the years."
Ensign John Willis bore the unenviable task of writing to Eugene Mandeberg’s family
and letting them know that his friend—who everyone called “Mandy”—would not be
coming home.
Willis wrote: "Ironically enough he died on the very morning
the peace was reached.
Six of our boys were to go over Tokyo and make an attack on an airfield in the vicinity.
Just as they got to the target, a dispatch was sent over the air that the war was over
and that all flights were to return to the carrier.
Our boys were overjoyed, I know, at the prospect of no more fighting.
While on the way home, they were jumped by twenty enemy fighters.
Of course, during a melee such as this must have been, our fellows lost contact with each other.
Only two of the six returned.
No one seems to know what happened to the other four, among whom was Mandy.
The two returning pilots had definitely shot down five enemy planes.
Our gains were noticeable but our losses were overwhelming.
We hoped that perhaps a couple of the boys would have gotten to earth safely and been
taken prisoner.
I don’t want to say for you to give up hope, but at the same time I also don’t want you
to build up your hopes too high.
Perhaps I’m wrong in saying these things, but I believe anxiety to be much more difficult
to bear than resignation.
The world, I know, has lost a fine fellow and an intelligent compatriot, but as for
myself, and for the rest of my squadron mates, we have lost a friend.
It’s so difficult to express in writing what a man feels in his heart.
I’m not capable of the fluency in writing that was one of your son’s many accomplishments.
My sincerest regrets to you, who have suffered so much.
I’ll close now with sorrow in my heart.
Ensign John Willis, Fighting Squadron 88."
The result of the last dogfight over Tokyo reminds us of a certain truth about war—that
even in victory, there is grief.