The Day Japan Lost 600 Aircraft in a Single Afternoon

The harbor takes 5  hours to clear. The scale of what is sailing is almost beyond accounting. 15 carriers, seven battleships, 21 cruisers,  69 destroyers, nearly a thousand aircraft. The war is happening  on two sides of the planet simultaneously and one nation is fighting [music] both.

The destination is the Mariana Islands, Saipan, [music] Tinian, Guam. From airfields on those islands, the new B-29  Superfortress can reach Japan, not the outer fringes, the home islands, Tokyo itself. The Americans need those airfields. Japan cannot allow them to fall. Every strategic [music] calculation on both sides converges on the same chain of sun-scorched coral.

Japanese Admiral Soemu Toyoda, commander of the Combined  Fleet, issues his order, committing virtually the entire Imperial Japanese Navy to the coming fight. He frames it  plainly. The fate of the empire rests on this one battle. He was right about that. He was wrong about almost everything else.

March 31st, 1944. Two and a half months before the battle, Admiral Mineichi Koga, commander of the combined fleet, is airborne over the Philippines in a typhoon. His aircraft does not survive it. Koga is killed. His chief of staff, Vice Admiral Shigeru Fukudome, is flying in a second aircraft with a briefcase.

 That plane also goes down. Fukudome survives. The briefcase does not sink. Filipino guerrillas recover  it from the wreckage and route it to General Douglas MacArthur’s military intelligence service in Brisbane. The documents are translated and forwarded to Admiral Chester Nimitz in Honolulu. Within days, the fleet  commanders have the contents in their hands.

Inside the briefcase was the Z Plan, Japan’s  strategic framework for the decisive naval battle it was planning to fight. The plan that Ozawa will sail with in June, Operation A-Go, does not materially deviate from what the Americans are now holding. The Japanese fleet is about to execute a battle plan that its  enemy has already read.

From this moment forward, every decision Ozawa makes will be watched by an audience  that already knows how the story ends. He does not know that audience exists. But the stolen plan is only part of what will destroy him. The other part is quieter, and it has been building for two years. In June 1942, the Imperial Japanese Navy lost four fleet  carriers at Midway.

And more critically, the experienced air crew aboard them. At Santa Cruz that October, more senior pilots died.  Through the grinding attrition of the Solomon’s campaign, as Japanese carrier aircraft were sent ashore to Rabaul and Bougainville to fight over jungle islands, the losses continued. Particularly among the men who had learned their craft in the years before the war.

 There was no replacing them quickly. Japan’s training pipeline could produce pilots, but not experience. And it was running on too little fuel and too little time.  By mid-1944, Japanese carriers carried a handful of truly skilled men and a great many  who have barely learned the basics. American pilots going into this battle  have a minimum of two years training and 300 hours in the air.

Their counterparts, many  of them, have far less than that. It gets worse. The submarine threat  around Japan’s forward anchorage at Tawi-Tawi is so severe that when the light  carrier Chitose puts to sea for training on May 22nd, the American submarine USS Puffer fires a spread of torpedoes at her.

By the end of  the month, Ozawa has prohibited open ocean training sorties entirely. His pilots  will go into the most important air battle of the Pacific war without the practice  that would keep them alive. The aircraft they’re flying don’t improve the odds. The Mitsubishi  A6M0 was revolutionary in 1941.

 Nimble, long-ranged,  lethal in the hands of a master. By 1944, it is fragile, underpowered,  and without armor or self-sealing fuel tanks. The newer Yokosuka D4Y Judy  dive bomber is faster, but catches fire easily. The older Aichi D3A Vals are too slow to hold formation with the newer aircraft.

The Japanese [music] are equipping their squadrons with a mixed bag of machines flown by men who haven’t been allowed to practice. Across the fleet, Ozawa’s pilots  are about to fly into combat against the Grumman F6F Hellcat, heavier than the Zero, faster in a dive, armored with self-sealing tanks, and a pilot who, in all likelihood, has been flying  for twice as long.

And the Americans have one more advantage that the Japanese [music] do not know about. A proximity-fused anti-aircraft shell that detonates  when it passes near an aircraft, rather than requiring a direct hit. Every attacking wave that descends  toward the American fleet will fly through shell fire that finds them even when it misses.

Ozawa’s sword looks formidable on paper. It has been quietly hollowed out. He doesn’t know. The Americans watch  him coming. American submarines shadow the First Mobile Fleet as it departs Tawi-Tawi on June 13th, tracking its course through the Philippine Sea. On the American  side, the intelligence picture is as complete as the Japanese picture is distorted.

There is one piece of the Japanese plan Ozawa is counting  on heavily, the land-based aircraft on Saipan, Guam, and Rota.  He expects roughly 500 aircraft waiting on those airfields, ready to strike the American fleet in a first wave before his carrier  aircraft ever engage.

 They will gut Mitscher’s air groups, then Ozawa’s carriers, operating at the outer edge of their superior range, will finish the job. But by the time the invasion of Saipan  begins on June 15th, something in the order of 200 Japanese land-based  aircraft have already been destroyed in the air and on the ground, bombed and burned by American pre-invasion strikes.

The commanders responsible for those aircraft  have not told Ozawa the true extent of the losses. He is sailing toward a battle that depends  on air support that does not exist. On the American ships, tension is building into something almost jubilant. Would they get a crack at the Japanese fleet or wouldn’t they? The question dominates every conversation.

On one carrier, the flag operations officer bets the ship’s  fighter squadron a thousand dollars the battle will be joined. The pilots pool their money to match it,  figuring that if they lose, they will lose it gladly. Admiral Raymond  Spruance, commanding the Fifth Fleet, holds to a cautious position, staying near Saipan to protect the invasion  beaches rather than chasing Ozawa’s fleet westward.

His aviators are furious with him. They want to strike first, strike far, strike now. Spruance says [music] no. He will not leave the beaches unprotected on the strength of a gamble. His caution is maddening [music] in the moment. It will prove, in retrospect, to be the guarantee that every aircraft he has will be available for what is coming.

On June 18th, Ozawa detects the American fleet. He has the range advantage. He could attack now. Instead, [music] he waits for dawn. His pilots cannot make carrier landings at night, [music] and he will not risk it. He waits through the dark hours, every hour another hour of American preparation, another hour of fighter  directors organizing their battle plots, another hour of radar operators getting rested  and ready.

The trap closes. Neither man can see it. June 19th,  1944. Clear skies over the Philippine Sea. Perfect visibility.  The air at altitude is cool and clear. Every aircraft formation leaves  white contrails across the blue. Visible for miles. Below,  the sea is blazing green and the temperature at deck level is pushing 90°.

  Sailors stand topside on dozens of ships looking up. At 10:00 a.m., American radar detects incoming  aircraft 150 miles out. 30 to 45 minutes of warning. The Hellcats are already airborne. The Japanese are [music] not flying toward a surprised fleet. They’re flying toward a reception committee. Ozawa’s first raid launches from his rear carrier division.

 69 aircraft, a mix [music] of zeros, Vals, and Jills. They find the American combat air patrol waiting for them 50 miles from the fleet. 42 are shot down before they reach anyone. 22 survive the day. Below the surface, the submarine USS  Albacore is moving into position. Her fire control computer has failed.  Her commanding officer, J. W.

 Blanchard, brings her around for a  visual aiming solution against a carrier moving at 27 knots. He fires six torpedoes by eye. Pilot Sakio  Komatsu has just cleared the flight deck of the Japanese flagship Taiho. He is airborne for seconds when he sees a torpedo tracking toward the ship. He reverses his aircraft and dies on impact.

 He is dead before anyone below can process what he has done. The torpedo is deflected. The ship is saved. One of Blanchard’s other torpedoes runs true and hits. The damage  looks manageable. It is not. A damage control officer trying to disperse [music] aviation fuel vapor that has built up in the hold opens the ship’s ventilation  ducts.

He means to clear it. He spreads it instead throughout the entire vessel. Taiho, Japan’s newest and most modern fleet carrier, is now saturated  with explosive vapor. A fire is waiting to happen. Komatsu’s sacrifice bought nothing. Ozawa’s second raid has already launched 128 fighters,  bombers, and torpedo planes, the largest single wave of the day.

As they fly over Rear Admiral Kurita’s forward surface force, Kurita’s ships erupt in a mistaken  anti-aircraft barrage. They’re firing on their own aircraft. Two Japanese  planes go down. Eight more are so badly damaged they turn back. Before the raid has flown  out of sight of its own fleet, 19 aircraft are already gone.

Shot down by the Imperial Japanese Navy, the remaining aircraft [music] fly on into the American combat air patrol, into the proximity fused flak, into the Hellcats coming  down out of the sun. Over 100 are shot down. A handful reach the  carrier task groups and manage to inflict minor damage on Wasp and Bunker Hill.

30 aircraft from the first two raids make it back [music] to their carriers. Their pilots file their reports. Multiple American carriers  sunk, major damage delivered. They believe this. They saw explosions. They saw aircraft fall. In the chaos of a multi-carrier engagement, they came to the only conclusion the chaos permitted.

 They are wrong in every particular. Ozawa believes them. Around noon, 1,200 ft below the  Philippine Sea, USS Cavalla has been tracking the veteran carrier, Shokaku. Shokaku  has been in this war since the beginning. She launched aircraft against Pearl Harbor, survived Coral Sea, survived Santa Cruz.

She will not survive today. Cavalla’s torpedoes hit. Hours later, fires reach her magazines. The Shokaku comes apart. Lieutenant Alexander Vraciu is 25 years old, a son of Romanian immigrants from East Chicago, Indiana. He flew his first combat missions as a wingman to Edward Butch O’Hare. He is now flying combat air patrol over Task Force 58 in a Grumman F6F Hellcat when he spots a formation of Japanese aircraft, Judy dive bombers, inbound.

His supercharger is malfunctioning. He flies anyway. 8 minutes, 360 rounds of 50 caliber ammunition, 60 rounds per aircraft, each burst lasting less than 5  seconds. The sixth Judy explodes directly in his windscreen. He yanked the stick hard to avoid flying through the  debris. Then he is over Lexington’s flight deck, descending, and when he climbs out  of the cockpit, he raises six gloved fingers toward the camera.

He is 25 years  old. The ordnance men who rearm his plane note the count, 360  rounds, six kills. Elsewhere in the sky over Guam, Ensign Wilbur Webb, a Pearl Harbor survivor, flying a Hellcat  from USS Hornet, is circling a downed American flyer waiting for rescue when he notices a large formation of aircraft overhead.

He climbs to investigate. They are Aichi Val dive bombers inbound toward Orote Field. There are approximately 40 of them. Webb joins their formation, then he keys his radio. “This is spider web to any American fighter pilot. I have about 40 of them cornered over Oroku Point, and I could use a little help.” He does not wait for help.

 He shoots down six before the help arrives. His Hellcat is so thoroughly riddled that it never flies again. Neither does most of what he found over Oroku Point. On the ship decks far below, sailors stand in the tropical heat and watch. Contrails spiral in the blue  sky. Black smoke trails fall. Almost all of them bear rising suns.

 Thousands of men watch the battle [music] they cannot join, and what they are watching is a slaughter that runs in one direction. Raids three and four find no better fortune. The fourth wave cannot even locate the American fleet. They turn toward Guam to refuel. American fighters are waiting over the bombed-out runway at Oroku Field.

30 of 49 aircraft are shot down overhead. The surviving 19 land in a state [music] too damaged to fly again. 73 aircraft from that fourth raid are destroyed or damaged beyond repair before the day ends.  By late afternoon, the sky over the Philippine Sea is quiet. The last Japanese aircraft disappears from American radar screens.

 The radio  channels go silent. At 4:32 p.m., the ventilation ducts aboard Taiho find their spark. Japan’s most modern carrier, the ship Sakio Komatsu died to protect, tears itself apart from the inside. She goes under in the Philippine Sea, taking Ozawa’s flag with her. He transfers to the cruiser Haguro. The day is over, but Ozawa does not know what day it has been.

 His surviving pilots have told him he has won. Multiple American carriers sunk. The enemy fleet crippled. Ozawa believes them not out of vanity or willful blindness, but because his pilots believe it themselves and because every commander in this war has learned to trust the men who flew through the fire. He believes that most of his missing aircraft  have landed safely at Guam.

He plans to refuel his ships, regroup, [music] and fight again tomorrow. He does not know his flagship is at the bottom of the sea. He does not know the Shokaku is gone. He does not know those Guam airfields are rubble. He does not know what the Americans have known since March, that he has been sailing inside his own stolen blueprint.

That evening, an officer in his flag log sits down and records what has actually returned to the Japanese carriers. He writes the only number that matters, 35 operational aircraft. That is what  remains of the 430 that launched that morning. It is not a statistic. It is a verdict.

 And Ozawa, in the darkness of the Philippine Sea, preparing tomorrow’s orders,  does not know it exists. June 20th, Task Force 58 spends most of the day searching for the retreating  Japanese fleet. At 4:05 in the afternoon, a sighting  report comes in, garbled, imprecise, the location uncertain. The sun is 75 minutes from setting.

Mitscher looks at the numbers, extreme range, complete darkness on the return. Pilots coming home with fuel gauges near empty in a moonless night  over open ocean. He turns to his staff on Lexington’s bridge. Launch them. 85  fighters, 77 dive bombers, 54 torpedo bombers. They go. The strike reaches Ozawa’s fleet as the sun touches the horizon.

 20 minutes of attack. The light carrier Hiyo goes down. Sunk by four Grumman TBM Avengers from the light carrier Belleau Wood, flying their last miles with enough  fuel to reach the target and not much thought about what comes after. Zuikaku takes hits. Junyo takes  hits. 65 Japanese aircraft are shot out of the sky in those  20 minutes.

 Then the American pilots turn for home, 250 miles  away. Into the dark. The moon is absent. The horizon disappears. Pilots who have been flying all day now sit inside the dim glow of instrument panels, watching fuel gauges fall, trying to hold formation in blackness where sea and sky are the same thing. 202 aircraft looking for 15 carriers in an ocean that offers nothing back.

On the bridge of his flagship, Marc Mitscher makes the second decision of the day. He orders every ship in Task Force 58 to illuminate. Carriers, cruisers,  destroyers. Running lights, deck lights, searchlights, star shells fired from destroyers. Every ship lit up,  presenting themselves to whatever submarines might be in the area, breaking every rule of naval self-preservation.

Turn on the lights. What follows  is controlled chaos. Pilots who have been flying for hours on nothing but adrenaline and discipline descend toward [music] anything that looks like a flight deck. Some land on the right ship. Some land on whatever ship they can reach. Some make  landing approaches on cruisers and destroyers, burning fuel they do not have.

Some run out  of fuel over the water and go in. 80 aircraft are lost. Not to Japanese guns, but to darkness  and empty tanks. A direct consequence of Mitchel’s decision to launch at sunset  and accept what came after. He sent those men out knowing this might happen. He lit the ocean to bring them home.

Through the night, boats move through black water. Destroyers  and cruisers maneuver in the dark pulling men from life rafts and open sea. When it is over, all but 49 air crew have been recovered.  The sea gives most of them back. The final accounting. Over 2 days of battle, Japan loses nearly 600 aircraft.

 The exact figure varies by source and by what you count, but the consensus among the major historians lands between 550  and 600 carrier and land-based combined. Three carriers go to the bottom, Taiho, Shokaku, Hiyo. Roughly 3,000 Japanese sailors and airmen are dead. The precise  number of air crew lost cannot be recovered with certainty.

The records, like the [music] men, did not all survive. American losses. 125 aircraft. 109 dead. More than half of  those aircraft were lost not to enemy action, but to that moonless night, to Mitchel’s  decision and its price. The kill ratio on June 19th alone  runs nearly 12 to 1.

 Commander Masatake Okumiya, an Imperial  Japanese Navy staff officer, later wrote that his pilots never stood a chance.  Undertrained men in vulnerable aircraft flying a plan their enemy had already read,  without the land-based support their plan required, into radar-guided combat  air patrols and proximity fused anti-aircraft fire.

They were not [music] outfought. They were outbuilt, out-trained, and out-maneuvered before they ever left their flight decks. Ozawa submitted his resignation. It was rejected. He went on to command  the carrier force at the Battle of Leyte Gulf 4 months later in October 1944. His carriers went  out again.

Their flight decks were nearly empty. Barely 100 aircraft among them, fewer than a single American fleet carrier. He knew before he sailed what his force was for. Not a strike. Not a battle.  Bait. His carriers were to draw Admiral Halsey’s fleet north away from a surface  action in the San Bernardino Strait by being a target worth chasing.

The man who had built  Japan’s carrier doctrine, who had conceived the idea of massing carrier aviation into a unified strike force, now commanded hollow ships sailing toward their  own destruction so that other ships might briefly survive. His carriers came through Leyte Gulf. Their flight decks were still empty when it was over.

In Tokyo, the political consequences of June 19th arrived quickly. Prime Minister Hideki Tojo’s cabinet  falls. The Marianas are secured. American engineers begin work on the airfields. B-29 Superfortresses,  the bombers the entire campaign was always about, the machines that could reach [music] the home islands from this precise geography, begin arriving on runways on Saipan and Tinian and Guam.

They begin flying north over Japan. August 6th, 1945. A Boeing B-29 Superfortress named Enola Gay lifts off from a runway  on Tinian Island in the Mariana chain. The same islands, the same geography,  the same runways Japan declared is to defend. 14 months earlier, Admiral Soemu Toyoda had sent his fleet to sea with four words, “The fate of the empire rests on this one battle.

” He was right. A flag log, a small desk,  an officer with a pencil, the evening of June 19th, 1944, one number at the end of one day,  35 operational aircraft. That is where the fate of the empire was written.