Soon the radar crews would report a hard contact inbound on the fleet. Taiho had the newest addition to fleet radar sets, again nearly six months early, the Type 21, with a detection range of 60 nautical miles against aircraft groups. That meant the enemy was just twenty minutes away, and looking for his ships as they approached. All Hara’s fighters were already in the air, and his crews were now arming and fueling the second wave strike planes. It would be another ten minutes before they would be lifted up onto the flight deck, which was something he did not want. He turned to an officer and spoke: “Spotting operations are suspended. Aviation fuel and munitions are to be secured, and the hangar decks thoroughly ventilated.”
That order was quickly passed below to the hard working maintenance crews, a perfect example of the “hurry up and wait” that lurked in the midst of all military operations. For the carrier, that was particularly true. Hara knew he could not get that second wave strike spotted and launched before the American planes got there, no matter how much he hurried his crews, so he would simply have to wait.
It was a wise precaution, and the time seemed to be stretched thin and taut, like two men pulling on a leather rope. Just when it reached the breaking point of tension, a watchman shouted the alarm—enemy dive bombers!
They were coming off the decks of Taffy 12, commanded by Ray Spruance with Essex and Lexington II. A cruiser commander, Spruance had been thrust into the cauldron of carrier operations after Jack Fletcher’s disastrous losses in the Coral Sea. Halsey had personally asked for that man as well, having faith in his considerable abilities as a sea Captain. The man has seamanship wired tight, said Halsey, and it was a most accurate description of Spruance.
As cool as they came, Spruance was methodical, rational, and careful in everything he did. Far from Halsey’s bawling and sometimes bawdy manner, Spruance was a man of words, quiet, articulate, thoughtful, but rigorously disciplined in day to day operations, with attention to detail in all aspects of his work. He had cleverly plotted the position where he expected to find the enemy carriers, and he had been dead accurate. To make matters worse for Hara, Ziggy had his planes up as well, and they were following those of Taffy 12.
Ray Spruance had thrown every dive bomber he had at the enemy, 53 planes, and 24 of his 31 torpedo bombers, all escorted by nearly two dozen fighters. The dive bombers came in first, seeming to coalesce into fast moving solid shapes emerging from the grey overhead cloud deck. Down they came, the Japanese standard Type 96 25mm autoguns desperately trying to track and kill them. It was particularly ill-suited to that task, with a small clip of only 15 rounds that had to be reloaded after only four seconds of fire. By the time the next clip was fed into the magazine, the gun had to be re-sighted on the target that was moving at a frightening speed in a near vertical dive. So these would fire in fitful spits, and could seldom put out enough firepower to really make a difference.
The larger AA weapons were equally bad against dive bombers, their radar fire control systems slow to respond, taking between ten and twenty seconds to obtain a firing solution. By that time, the target was long gone, and if the ship maneuvered, any solution already obtained based on the last course and speed was useless and had to be recalculated. So instead of relying on the radar, the Japanese tended to fire these weapons in a barrage, the shells set to a specific altitude in one spot in the sky. It was a barrier of flak that the strike planes would have to fly through, but those who made it through were going to have a very good chance in this attack, and there were many.
It would now come down to the skill of the pilots in dropping those bombs, but once they were in the air, spotters would shout the danger to the bridge, and the helmsman was the last line of defense. If he could suddenly steer the ship out of harm’s way, (on the orders of the senior officer on the bridge), those terrible 500 and 1000 pound bombs would find nothing but seawater.
But that didn’t happen this day, and Hara would be dubiously ‘gifted’ with the first bomb. It came hurtling down on the aft deck of the Taiho, exploding on that armored steel, which was now put to a severe test. It held. The bomb did damage, but it had struck one of the thickest segments of the deck, with 80mm of armor, just over three inches thick, almost an inch more protection than the decks of the Kongo. That flight deck had been designed to resist multiple hits by 500kg bombs, (1,100 pounds), and it performed as advertised.
While Hara cringed inwardly with that hit, it was more flash and smoke than anything else. Several deck crewmen were injured by the shrapnel, with three killed, but the deck was not penetrated, and the damage control parties were quickly on the scene to hose down the small fire and drag out more emergency deck patch plating.
As for the other carriers, Tosa had the older style wooden deck cover over thinner 1.5 inch armor, which would in no way stop such a bomb, and the Peregrine Falcon, CVL Junyo, was no better off. Not one, but three bombs would hit that ship, and the icing on the cake was the torpedo that struck forward. Two bombs would get the Tosa, and another would strike the battlecruiser Kongo. When Ziggy’s group delivered the final attack, Junyo and Kongo would both be hit yet again with a single bomb, as would heavy cruiser Atago.
Considering that single torpedo that had been delivered to the hull of Bunker Hill, the American strike did a great deal more damage. Just as Hara received the news that his own carrier was not seriously harmed, he looked out and saw Junyo erupt with fire and smoke. Up went the searing mix of molten steel, fire, and shrapnel laden smoke. The flight deck was smashed, with splinters flying in all directions, some falling as far away as the escorting destroyers churning up the seas and firing all their guns like a pack of angry terriers.
The damage to Junyo would be near fatal, her main elevator wrecked, 40% of her boilers serrated and venting hot white steam, and a hole in her lightly armored sides that was shipping water to the point where the carrier went into an immediate list. The ship started settling deeper into the water to one side, as her Captain desperately ordered counterflooding. Many of her planes were wrecked, for those bombs penetrated easily to the hangar decks, where nothing more than thin fire curtains separated one segment from another. They did not do their job. Captain Shizui Isii would signal his ship had been seriously damaged, and was to be considered unfit for any further operations. It was even doubtful if thePeregrine Falcon could be saved at all.
‘Implacable Mountain’ took all this in with stoic stillness, his eyes fixed on the burning carrier off his starboard bow. Then Kong bawled out an order. “Continue arming and spotting—and with all speed!” He had taken a hard hit from his enemy, and before he even really knew if his first right cross had landed, he was going to throw that left hook.
Chapter 6
It was 10:18 when Lieutenant Tomonaga’s latest signal arrived: “Attack concluded—Homeward bound.” When he received it, Hara was mentally calculating the need to recover friendly planes in about two hours, both from Tomonaga’s strike and his CAP patrols. His damage control parties had already certified his own flight deck as operational. Tosa had raised flags and flashed lantern signals as well, and he knew that she would need at least an hour to clear damage from those two bomb hits and extinguish the fires. One had damaged her forward elevator, the one most often used by the fighters assigned to CAP missions.