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Marianas Turkey Shoot

Japanese air power in the Marianas: a Marine grins down from a "meatball" on a Zeke wingtip at Aslito, Saipan.

The first large attack wave, the 129 fighters, bombers, and torpedo bombers of the lst Carrier Division, were intercepted about an hour after the battle had begun. The Japanese planes ran head on into a mass of Hellcats, which shattered the formations - about a hundred planes fell before the carriers were reached. And the six of these which actually broke through were destroyed by savage antiaircraft fire or the combat air patrol planes circling the carriers.

Commander Ernest M. Snowden, of the Lexington, recalls how "We could see vapor trails of planes coming in with tiny black specks at the head. It was just like the skywriting we all used to see before the war. The sky was a white overcast and for some reason the planes were making vapor trails at a much lower altitude than usual. That made it easier for our boys to find the incoming Japs."

There were plenty of Japanese to go around, apparently. One young pilot, Ensign Bradford Hagie, found action even during a simple ferry flight. He had been forced to land on another carrier the previous day with engine trouble. Anxious to return to the Lexington, about three thousand yards away, he took off the next morning during what turned out to be the attack by the first wave. Hearing the radio chatter about the approaching unidentified aircraft, he remained air-borne for a while and on his way to the Lexington shot down three planes.

When the second, larger wave approached another young pilot sat gloomily in his Hellcat off to one side of the battle, circling out of the way because his engine was giving him trouble. He was Lieutenant Alexander Vraicu, and with his windscreen smeared with oil and his engine incapable of pulling at full power, he and five other "orphans" (planes with assorted problems but still flyable) orbited over the carriers. The decks had to be kept clear for takeoffs for the fighters.

A Second D-Day June 14, 1944, just nine days after the D-Day invasion of Normandy, another mighty fleet steamed towards its own D-Day landing. A huge U.S. flotilla of 800 ships carrying 162,000 men was about to attempt to smash into the outer defenses of the Japanese Empire. Their target was the Marianas Island group, which included Saipan, home to an important Japanese base and a large population of Japanese civilians, and Guam, the first American territory captured in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. During the next eight weeks, tens of thousands of men, hundreds of airplanes, and dozens of major warships were locked in mortal combat. Offshore, on June 19, Navy pilots shot down 400 planes in one day. The Navy called it the Battle of the Phillipine Sea; the pilots dubbed it The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot. When it was over, 60,000 Japanese ground troops and most of the carrier air power of the Imperial Navy were annihilated; Japan's leader, Tojo, was thrown out of office in disgrace; and the newly captured enemy airfields were being transformed into launching bases for the B-29s that would carry the conventional and, later, atomic bombs to Japan, turning the land of the Rising Sun into a charred cinder. The Army Air Forces quickly built runways on two of the chain's islands, Guam and Tinian. From those runways lifted the B-29s that carried the war to the Japanese homeland - and ultimately ended it with a pair of atomic bombs. After the U.S. victory in the Marianas campaign, the road to Tokyo was clearly in sight. When Saipan fell, so did Japan's government. The Japanese considered the Marianas chain part of the inner perimeter of the defense of Japan itself - and with good reason.

Disappointed, Vraicu, who had gained much experience as a wingman of Butch O'Hare's, listened to the sounds of battle to the west on his radio. He heard the voice of the fighter director of the Lexington calling out vectors of approach. "Vector 265." Vraicu turned the Hellcat in that direction, sharply squinting his eyes until he saw three forms in the sky coming his way. They proved to be the first of perhaps fifty planes, Zekes, Judys, and Jills. Other Hellcats began to race for the formation also. The air armadas met, converged, and then sprang apart into twisting individual air battles. Vraicu had forgotten about his engine trouble; the Japanese planes had ventured too close to the American carriers. Vraicu dived into the formation of Japanese bombers, opening up on the first plane in sight - a Judy. Within five seconds his voice was heard over the radio, "Scratch one Judy!"

Over the next few minutes Vraicu's guns sliced through one Judy after another, until his score for the single battle amounted to six. To the youthful pilot it seemed that there were simply too many planes to be taken care of, and that some came in dangerously close to the American ships. To his dismay he saw one lone Judy heading for a battleship, and he kicked his Hellcat around hoping to head off the bomber. But antiaircraft bursts came up and the Judy flew through the puffs for a few moments and then flashed apart a thousand feet in the air.

Low on fuel, Vraicu returned to the Lexington. For some reason the gunners began shooting at him and Vraicu voiced his views on the ship's gunners as he circled and came in again for a landing. When his plane stopped, Vraicu stood up in the cockpit and held up six fingers. In eight minutes he had brought his total score up to nineteen.

A third Japanese raid was led astray by a faulty compass reading and missed most of the fighting. About a dozen of the forty-seven planes of the 2nd Carrier Division ran into Hellcats, which shot down seven. The remaining forty returned to their carriers.

When the fourth raid was launched, some of the spared pilots of the third raid joined it to make up a farce of about eighty aircraft. This force too was led astray, but instead of returning to the carriers, the planes turned north, toward Guam, and ran into the Hellcats of the Cabot, Wasp, Monterey, and Bunker Hill. The day's slaughter continued in a whirl of dogfights - Japanese bombers attempting to get at the carriers were shot out of the air. Eighteen, met by Hellcats, were soon cut in half. The scattered survivors of the raid, forty-nine in all, were jumped over Guam as they attempted to find haven there. Thirty planes flared and fell; the remaining nineteen that finally landed, in various stages of distress, either crashed or were strafed into junk. Of the eighty planes which had left on the strike, nine returned to their home bases. The last of the survivors of the day's battle fled for their carriers around six forty-five in the evening. The final battle of the Turkey Shoot occurred over Guam when four Hellcats, led by Lieutenant Commander C. W. Brewer over Orote Field, pounced a limping Jill attempting to land. Brewer's forces were in turn jumped by a large number of landbased Zekes, which had somehow eluded the day's bombings and strafings. Brewer was killed in this last battle of the day as darkness fell on the great battle arena.

The coming of night brought little comfort to Ozawa; he had no decisive victory to report. Two of his largest carriers were deep under the sea and 346 of his planes simply did not return to the carriers. And not one American plane had approached the Japanese carriers during the entire day. Toyoda, at Combined Fleet headquarters at Hiroshima, ordered Ozawa to withdraw before the Americans found his other carriers. Bitterly, Ozawa complied. He planned to refuel his ships and strike back with all he had on the next day.

Spruance then unleased the straining Mitscher, who set off westward with three carrier groups, leaving one in the vicinity of the Marianas to continue creating a hell on earth on Guam and Rota. At one o'clock on June 20, 1944, Ozawa transferred to the carrier Zuikaku (now the sole surviving veteran of the Hawaii Operation) ; he planned to strike again on the twenty-first. It appeared that he might have his way, for there was no sign of the American fleet. Search planes launched by Mitscher had not found the Japanese fleet either.

At one-thirty in the afternoon Lieutenant R. S. Nelson had taken off in an Avenger and set off on his search pattern. Two hours and ten minutes later, when he was about at the end of his tether, Nelson found what no one had yet found in the past several days: the Japanese fleet. He began sending a message back to the Lexington, but distance and weather garbled it and, although alerted, Mitscher was unable to make a decision. And in less than four hours he knew the sun would go down suddenly, as it did in the Pacific.

As Nelson continued sending messages they were picked up by the Japanese cruiser Atago nearby. They could only mean that the Americans had found the Japanese fleet. Ozawa was immediately notified and he ordered all refueling stopped and the ships away at twenty-four knots.

It took nearly fifteen minutes of sending before Nelson's contact report finally made any sense. Mitscher had already begun to make his plans, however. When Nelson's final, corrected position and disposition report came in at 4:05 P.m., Mitscher was prepared to launch his aircraft. But not without risk, for it was already late in the day and the Japanese ships were 275 miles away. It meant a long flight for them, then the battle and a long flight back. "Taking advantage of this opportunity to destroy the Japanese fleet was going to cost us a great deal in planes and pilots because we were launching at the maximum range of our aircraft at such a time that it would be necessary to recover them after dark," Mitscher realized. "This meant that all carriers would be recovering daylight-trained air groups at night, with consequent loss of some pilots who were not familiar with night landings and who would be fatigued at the end of an extremely hazardous and long mission."

At four forty-one the carriers turned into the wind and ten minutes later no less than 216 planes were air-borne, 85 of them Hellcats. Two hours of flying brought them within sight of the Japanese ships. Six oilers, left astern after Ozawa had ordered the ships away, were the first to come under attack. Dive bombers swept down and disabled two - Genyo Maru and Seiyo Maru - so thoroughly that they were abandoned and scuttled by evening.

One of the last messages the American pilots had seen as they raced from their ready rooms was chalked on the blackboards, "Get the CARRIERS." worthy targets, the carricrs were the prime objectives so far as most pilots were concerned. Leaving the transports burning and scattered, the carrier pilots continued their search for the Japanese carriers. Soon they came into view.

Lieutenant George B. Brown, Avenger pilot from the Belleau Wood, led seven other Avengers (four of them from the Yorktown), circled around the Japanese ships, and then selected the Hiyo to the port. The Yorktown Avengers split away and headed to the starboard for the larger Zuikaku (now Ozawa's flagship), and the four Belleau Wood Avengers headed for the Hiyo. Antiaircraft fire was desperately heavy and Brown's Avenger was hit as he ran the plane in. He had not yet dropped his torpedo when a fragment of his left wing ripped away and flames filled the cockpit of the Avenger. The radioman and gunner bailed out, but Brown, who had said before taking off that he would get a carrier "at any cost," continued the run. The fire had burned itself out and Brown dropped his torpedo; his wingman, Lieutenant Benjamin Tate, dropped too but did not claim a hit. Lieutenant Warren Omark, however, placed a torpedo into the Hiyo.

Tate, harassed by two Zekes and with one gun shot out, ducked into a cloud and lost the Japanese fighters. He then joined up with Brown's badly shotup Avenger. The plane moved erratically and Brown appeared to be bleeding badly. Then Tate lost sight of Brown. Omark, having eluded a Zeke and a couple of Vals, caught up with Brown and tried to guide him back to the American carrier positions. Brown finally disappeared in a cloud and was never seen again. His two crewmen, who had parachuted, were rescued the following day, safely floating in their life jackets. They had witnessed the death throes of the Hiyo, which sank about two hours after Brown and Omark had placed their torpedoes into the carrier.

There was fighting aloft too, for Ozawa had scraped together about seventy-five planes to meet the Hellcats, Avengers, and Helldivcrs. As the Hellcats fought off the Zekes, the bombers attacked and strafed other ships, among them the Zuikaku, which though badly hit was not sunk, the Junyo, Ryuho, and Chiyoda (all light carriers). In the heavy fighting sixty-five Japanese planes went down; American losses reached twenty, victims of fighters and antiaircraft.

When the day ended Ozawa's log noted the tragedy of the two days' fighting of what was officially known as the Battle of the Philippine Sea. "Surviving carrier air power," it was written, "35 aircraft operational." Though he wished to continue the battle, Ozawa canceled the order for a surface battle and ordered the ships back to Okinawa.

About 190 American planes turned away from the battle and headed for their home carriers. Many were shot up, most were low on fuel-and night had fallen an hour before the first plane appeared over the American carriers. Task Force 58 turned into the wind and the hard-bitten Mitscher made another vital decision that day. Earlier in the day he had risked his pilots and planes on a long-range strike and now he believed he owed them something. In defiance of all regulations, caution, and possible Japanese snoopers and submarines, he turned to Captain Arleigh Burke, his chief of staff, and said, "Turn on the lights." "We had almost reached the force when we saw the lights come on," Lieutenant E. J. Lawton of the Enterprise recalled in describing the homecoming of the planes. "It is clear that the task force did all in its power to make it easier for us to get home. Lieutenant [V. Van] Eason led us in over the Enterprise but her deck was fouled for some time. We circled for a few minutes, watching the lights of the planes below fan out in the pattern of a landing circle. But there had been too much strain in the last five hours to reduce things to a pattern now; and inevitably, landing circles became crowded, intervals were lost and deck crashes occurred.

Many planes - too many - announced that their gas was gone and they were going into the water. Others were caught short in the groove. "Seen from above, it was a weird kaleidoscope of fast-moving lights forming intricate trails in the darkness, punctuated now and then by tracers shooting through the night as someone landed with his gun switches on, and again by suddenly brilliant exhaust flames as each plane took a cut, or someone's turtleback light getting lower and lower until blacked out by the waves closing over it."

About 80 planes crashed or splashed into the water during the landing attempts. Rescue ships picked up 59 men; in all, 49 were lost, either in battle or because they sank in their aircraft before they could be rescued. The two days' total loss to the American fleet was 130 planes (compared to Ozawa's 480 - this number includes both carrier and land-base aircraft). Seventy-six American airmen perished in the Battle of the Philippine Sea, a fair trade, in the arithmetic of war, for hundreds of Japanese pilots and planes and three carriers.

The trade for the Marianas as future air bases and harbors for ships and submarines was also worthwhile. Guam and Tinian fell by August 10 and the Marianas were officially declared "secure," although thousands of enemy troops in hiding had to be killed before the islands were completely free of fighting.

Political repercussions in Japan were nearly as drastic as the military defeat. General Tojo, who had scoffed at the thought of a Marianas invasion by the Americans, declared upon the fall of Saipan that "Japan is threatened by a national crisis without precedent." When the fall of Saipan was officially announced to the bewildered people of Japan, so was the fall of Tojo's cabinet. The Emperor, urged on by the jushin (elder statesmen without power who advised him), accepted the resignation of Tojo on July 18, 1944.

The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, which had swollen under Tojo's bellicose domination like some bloated balloon, had begun its inexorable collapse. The arrogant samurai had been diminished into just another turkey.

Edward Jablonski. : From Guadalcanal to Saipan, the war in the air over the Pacific. Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York. 1971.

Red Sun Setting: The Battle of the Philippine Sea This definitive account of the controversial conflict in the Pacific known as the "Great Marianas Turkey Shoot" draws on years of research and is recounted by the fliers and sailors who were on the firing line. Explore every stage of the battle, from the dogfights to the persistent attacks on the Japanese carriers, to the frantic efforts of the returning fliers to land on friendly carriers. Truly a blow-by-blow account.

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