The Day Japan Lost 600 Aircraft in a Single Afternoon

# Part 1

On the evening of June 19, 1944, an officer sat at a small desk aboard the Japanese carrier *Taiho* and opened the fleet’s flag log.

Around him, the great ship still moved through the Philippine Sea, but the day had altered everything that movement once implied. The Imperial Japanese Navy had come east carrying the weight of an empire’s expectations. Its carrier force had sailed with hundreds of aircraft, a striking arm intended to reach farther than the Americans could reach, to destroy them before they could close the distance, and to turn the waters west of the Mariana Islands into the scene of the decisive battle Japanese planners had sought since the war began.

The officer lowered his pencil to the page.

That morning, Vice Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa’s 1st Mobile Fleet had possessed roughly 430 carrier aircraft.

Now he wrote the number that remained operational.

35.

The figure did not explain itself. It gave no account of the pilots who had disappeared into the clear blue sky, of aircraft tumbling in smoke toward the sea, of submarines waiting beneath the surface, or of the commanders who were still issuing orders according to assumptions that had ceased to exist hours earlier.

It was simply an accounting.

430 in the morning.

35 by evening.

The explanation for that number did not begin over the Philippine Sea.

It began nearly 3 months earlier, in the wreckage of an aircraft off the coast of the Philippines, with a briefcase that should have disappeared into deep water and did not.

On March 31, 1944, Admiral Mineichi Koga, commander in chief of Japan’s Combined Fleet, was flying through a typhoon over the Philippines. The storm caught his aircraft and destroyed it. Koga was killed.

His chief of staff, Vice Admiral Shigeru Fukudome, traveled in another aircraft. That plane also went down.

Fukudome survived.

So did the documents he had been carrying.

Filipino guerrillas recovered a briefcase from the wreckage and passed its contents into General Douglas MacArthur’s military intelligence network. The papers moved to Brisbane, where they were translated, and then onward through the American command structure until they reached Admiral Chester Nimitz in Honolulu.

Inside was the Z Plan.

It was more than a collection of operational notes. It described the strategic architecture Japan intended to use in the decisive naval engagement it still believed could change the course of the Pacific war. The precise operation Ozawa would carry into battle in June was known as Operation A-Go, and although details evolved, the essential framework did not materially depart from what American commanders had already read.

Japan was preparing to fight according to a plan its enemy understood.

Ozawa did not know this.

He could not know that each movement of his fleet would be interpreted by men who already possessed the assumptions beneath it. Nor could he know that the plan itself was only 1 of the disadvantages gathering around him.

The more serious weakness had been building for 2 years.

In June 1942, at Midway, the Imperial Japanese Navy lost 4 fleet carriers. The ships were catastrophic losses, but steel could eventually be replaced. What could not be rebuilt so easily were the men inside their air groups.

Japan had entered the Pacific war with some of the finest naval aviators in the world. Many had trained for years. They had learned carrier operations through long practice, accumulated hundreds of hours in demanding aircraft, and perfected the intricate coordination required to launch, assemble, navigate, attack, and return across enormous distances over open ocean.

At Midway, many of those men died.

More were lost at Santa Cruz in October.

Then came the grinding campaigns around the Solomon Islands. Carrier air groups were sent ashore to bases such as Rabaul and Bougainville, where experienced pilots were fed into repeated combat over jungle, sea, and distant island airfields. Every mission consumed a resource Japan had never built an adequate system to replace.

The losses were gradual enough to obscure what they meant.

A carrier could receive another aircraft.

A squadron could receive another pilot.

A roster could be made complete on paper.

Experience could not.

By the middle of 1944, Japanese carrier squadrons still included skilled veterans, but around them were younger pilots who had received far less preparation than the men they were expected to replace. Japan’s training system faced shortages of fuel, aircraft, instructors, and time. The demands of the war continually pulled men forward before they were ready.

Across the American fleet, conditions were moving in the opposite direction.

Many American pilots entering the coming battle had received at least 2 years of training and accumulated roughly 300 flying hours before reaching combat. They entered squadrons that increasingly benefited from experienced instructors, standardized procedures, improved fighter direction, and a vast logistical system capable of supplying fuel and replacement machines in quantities Japan could no longer match.

The contrast was becoming decisive.

And then, in May 1944, even the training available to Ozawa’s men was restricted further.

The 1st Mobile Fleet had been operating from Tawi-Tawi, close enough to the expected area of operations to serve as a useful forward anchorage. But American submarines prowled the surrounding waters.

On May 22, the light carrier *Chitose* went to sea for training. The American submarine USS *Puffer* attacked her with torpedoes.

The message was difficult to misunderstand.

By the end of the month, Ozawa prohibited open-ocean training sorties.

It protected his carriers from submarine attack.

It also meant that many of his inexperienced aviators would enter the most important carrier battle Japan had fought since Midway without the practice they needed most.

Their machines offered little margin for error.

The Mitsubishi A6M Zero had been a revelation in 1941. It was light, exceptionally maneuverable, and possessed extraordinary range. In the hands of the veterans who had mastered it before the war, it had seemed almost untouchable.

But the qualities that made the Zero light had also made it vulnerable.

By 1944, its weaknesses were well understood. It lacked the armor protection common in newer American fighters. It lacked self-sealing fuel tanks. It could burn with terrifying ease once hit. Its advantages in maneuverability remained real, but they no longer existed in isolation.

The newer Yokosuka D4Y *Judy* dive bomber offered greater speed but shared a dangerous vulnerability to fire. The older Aichi D3A *Val* was slower, creating problems when mixed formations attempted to operate with newer types.

Ozawa was therefore assembling strike groups containing aircraft of different performances, flown by pilots of uneven ability, many of whom had not been permitted the sea training necessary to turn a collection of machines into a coherent carrier air arm.

Across the water waited the Grumman F6F Hellcat.

The Hellcat was heavier than the Zero and formidable in a dive. It was armored. It carried self-sealing fuel tanks. It was built to absorb punishment that could destroy a lighter Japanese fighter.

More important than the machine was the man inside it.

The American pilot was increasingly likely to have trained longer, flown more, practiced more carrier operations, and entered combat within a system designed to find the enemy before the enemy arrived.

Radar would provide early warning.

Fighter directors would interpret the radar plots and guide combat air patrols toward approaching formations.

And below the fighters, American ships carried another advantage Japanese pilots could not see.

Proximity-fused anti-aircraft ammunition allowed shells to detonate near an aircraft rather than requiring a direct impact. A Japanese pilot who penetrated the fighter screen would still have to fly into a volume of fire made more effective by shells designed to explode when they passed close enough to kill.

On paper, Ozawa still commanded a powerful carrier force.

In reality, its cutting edge had been worn thin.

He did not know how thin.

On June 6, 1944, as Allied forces landed on the beaches of Normandy on the other side of the world, Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher led Task Force 58 out of Majuro Harbor in the Marshall Islands.

The fleet was so large that clearing the harbor required roughly 5 hours.

There were 15 carriers, 7 battleships, 21 cruisers, 69 destroyers, and nearly 1,000 aircraft.

The scale belonged to a war being fought across oceans simultaneously. While armies struggled through France, another immense force moved northwest across the Pacific.

Its destination was the Mariana Islands.

Saipan.

Tinian.

Guam.

For American planners, the islands mattered because geography had changed.

The Boeing B-29 Superfortress possessed the range to make the Marianas something earlier island chains had not been: bases from which American bombers could reach the Japanese home islands.

Not an isolated military outpost.

Not the perimeter of Japan’s empire.

Japan itself.

Tokyo was within reach.

That fact gave the approaching campaign a significance understood by both sides.

The Americans needed airfields.

Japan could not permit them to have those airfields.

Every calculation narrowed toward the same coral islands.

Admiral Soemu Toyoda, now commander in chief of the Combined Fleet, committed virtually the full remaining strength of Japanese naval aviation to the coming fight.

He described the stakes without ornament.

The fate of the empire rested on the battle.

In this, he was correct.

In the assumptions underlying the battle plan, much was already wrong.

American submarines watched the Japanese fleet depart Tawi-Tawi on June 13 and tracked its movement through the Philippine Sea.

Ozawa believed he possessed an advantage that could compensate for his weaknesses.

Range.

Japanese carrier aircraft could generally strike from farther away than American carrier aircraft. If Ozawa remained beyond the effective reach of Mitscher’s carriers, he could launch attacks from distances at which the Americans could not immediately answer.

And he expected help from land.

His plan relied heavily on approximately 500 land-based Japanese aircraft operating from Saipan, Guam, Rota, and surrounding bases. Those aircraft were supposed to strike first, weakening the American carrier force before Ozawa’s naval air groups arrived.

Then the carriers would finish what the land-based aircraft had begun.

The idea depended on several things being true at once.

The land-based aircraft had to exist in adequate numbers.

They had to survive long enough to participate.

They had to locate the Americans.

They had to inflict meaningful losses.

None of those conditions could safely be assumed.

Before the invasion of Saipan began on June 15, American attacks had already destroyed roughly 200 Japanese land-based aircraft in the region, some in combat and many on the ground.

The destruction was severe.

The reporting of it was not clear.

Commanders responsible for the island air forces did not give Ozawa an accurate picture of what remained.

So he sailed east counting on hundreds of aircraft that, in practical terms, no longer existed.

The Americans, meanwhile, knew the Japanese fleet was coming.

Among the carrier aviators of Task Force 58, anticipation grew almost impatient.

They had crossed enormous distances to fight. Now they wanted the enemy carriers brought within reach.

A flag operations officer aboard 1 American carrier wagered $1,000 with the ship’s fighter squadron that the battle would occur. The pilots pooled their money to cover the bet.

If they lost the wager because the Japanese fleet appeared, they considered the loss worthwhile.

Admiral Raymond Spruance did not share their appetite for pursuit.

As commander of the 5th Fleet, Spruance was responsible not merely for destroying Japanese carriers but for protecting the invasion force at Saipan.

His aviators wanted him to move west.

Find Ozawa.

Strike first.

Use the speed and power of Task Force 58 while the opportunity existed.

Spruance refused.

He would not uncover the invasion beaches in pursuit of a fleet whose exact intentions and position still contained uncertainty. He kept Mitscher’s carriers close enough to defend the Marianas.

To aggressive pilots, his caution was maddening.

It would also ensure that when the Japanese aircraft came east, nearly the full American air strength would be waiting.

On June 18, Ozawa found the Americans.

He had the range advantage.

He could have attacked before nightfall.

He chose not to.

Many of his pilots could not safely make carrier landings in darkness. If he launched late, surviving aircraft might return after sunset and be lost while attempting to recover aboard their ships.

So Ozawa waited for morning.

Night settled over the Philippine Sea.

Across the distance separating the fleets, men slept where they could, checked engines, studied charts, loaded ammunition, examined radar equipment, and prepared for a battle neither side could yet see.

Every hour Ozawa waited gave American fighter direction teams another hour to organize.

Another hour for pilots to rest.

Another hour for radar crews to prepare.

Another hour for a defensive system built through years of war to become fully ready.

Dawn came clear on June 19.

Visibility was exceptional.

At altitude, the air was cool and blue. Aircraft crossing the sky drew white contrails visible from miles away. Far below, the Philippine Sea burned green beneath the tropical sun. At deck level, the temperature climbed toward 90 degrees.

Sailors stood on the exposed decks of dozens of American ships.

Above them, combat air patrols were already flying.

At approximately 10:00 a.m., radar operators detected aircraft.

They were still roughly 150 miles away.

That distance represented 30 to 45 minutes of warning.

The Japanese were not approaching a fleet they could surprise.

Before most of them had even seen an American ship, the Americans knew they were coming.

Fighter directors began moving Hellcats toward the contact.

Pilots turned west.

Far beyond the horizon, Ozawa’s 1st raid was already in the air.

69 Japanese aircraft moved toward Task Force 58—a mixture of fighters, dive bombers, and torpedo aircraft.

They had crossed barely half the distance when the first American fighters found them.

The sky ahead filled with Hellcats.

The Japanese formations began to break.

Pilots who had trained for an attack against carriers now found themselves fighting for survival 50 miles from the nearest flight deck they had been sent to bomb.

42 aircraft from the raid were shot down before they could reach the American fleet.

Only 22 survived the day.

While the battle opened above the surface, another attack was already developing beneath it.

USS *Albacore* had maneuvered into position near the Japanese fleet.

Her fire-control computer had failed.

Her commanding officer, J. W. Blanchard, could not rely on the system designed to calculate the firing solution against a fast-moving target.

Ahead of him was a carrier steaming at approximately 27 knots.

The carrier was *Taiho*.

Japan’s newest and most modern fleet carrier.

Ozawa’s flagship.

Blanchard brought the submarine around and calculated his shot visually.

He fired 6 torpedoes.

On *Taiho’s* flight deck, Japanese aircraft were launching.

Pilot Sakio Komatsu had been airborne only seconds when he saw the torpedo track approaching the carrier.

He turned back toward it.

There was no time to explain what he intended.

Komatsu drove his aircraft down.

He struck the water at the torpedo’s path and died instantly.

The torpedo was deflected.

For a moment, the sacrifice appeared to have saved the ship.

Then another torpedo struck *Taiho*.

The damage did not look fatal.

The carrier remained afloat. Her machinery continued operating. On a ship designed with modern protective features, a single torpedo hit seemed manageable.

But aviation fuel had begun leaking.

Vapor accumulated within the ship.

A damage-control officer attempted to remove it by opening the ventilation system.

The intention was reasonable.

The result was disastrous.

Instead of clearing the explosive fumes, the ventilation ducts carried them through more of the vessel.

Deep inside *Taiho*, invisible fuel vapor spread through passageways and compartments.

The carrier continued steaming.

Men continued working.

Aircraft continued operating around her.

Nothing in the ship’s outward appearance revealed that its interior was becoming an explosive chamber.

Somewhere, eventually, there would be a spark.

Above the fleet, Ozawa’s 2nd raid was forming.

It was the largest Japanese strike of the day.

128 aircraft.

Fighters.

Dive bombers.

Torpedo bombers.

They climbed away from the carriers and turned east.

Before the Americans fired at them, before they reached radar range, before they saw Task Force 58, they flew over Rear Admiral Kurita’s forward surface force.

The Japanese ships below opened fire.

For several confused moments, Japanese anti-aircraft batteries were shooting at Japanese aircraft.

2 aircraft were destroyed.

8 more were damaged badly enough to turn back.

By the time the formation had cleared its own fleet, 19 aircraft were already gone from the attack.

The survivors continued east.

Ahead of them was an American fleet that had been watching their approach on radar.

Hellcats were climbing.

Fighter directors were calling courses and altitudes.

Gun crews were waiting.

And in the brilliant morning sky, the white contrails of the approaching formations announced exactly where they were.

# Part 2

The 2nd Japanese raid entered the American defensive zone as a formation already diminished by confusion, friendly fire, mechanical difficulty, and inadequate training.

Then the Hellcats reached it.

The battle unfolded across miles of open sky, too broad for any single man to understand while it was happening. A pilot saw only the aircraft nearest him, the flash of guns, the movement of wings, an enemy passing through his windscreen and disappearing beneath the nose. Sailors on the ships below saw contrails bending into loops and spirals. They saw black columns of smoke begin high in the air and lengthen toward the sea.

For the Japanese aircrews, there was no single defensive line to penetrate.

There were layers.

American fighters intercepted far from the carriers.

Those Japanese aircraft that survived continued toward the task groups and entered coordinated anti-aircraft fire.

Shells burst among them.

The proximity fuses made near misses lethal.

Aircraft that escaped the flak still had to find targets while American fighters continued attacking from above, behind, and out of the sun.

More than 100 aircraft from the 2nd raid were shot down.

A small number penetrated far enough to attack the carriers *Wasp* and *Bunker Hill*. They caused limited damage.

The raid had been designed as a major blow.

It became another disappearance.

From the first 2 raids combined, only about 30 aircraft returned to the Japanese carriers.

Their pilots climbed from cockpits exhausted, shaken, and convinced they had seen a far different battle.

They reported American carriers sunk.

They reported heavy damage.

Their accounts were not necessarily deliberate inventions.

Air combat produced illusions even among experienced men. A bomb falling near a carrier could throw up water and smoke large enough to conceal the ship. Anti-aircraft fire created explosions in every direction. Burning aircraft crossed one another’s paths. Pilots attacked at high speed, often under fire, with seconds to observe the result.

A man might see an explosion where his bomb appeared to strike and be gone before the smoke cleared.

He returned believing he had hit.

Another pilot repeated the report.

Several observations became a sinking.

Several fires became a crippled task force.

The chaos assembled itself into victory.

Ozawa listened to the returning pilots.

He believed them.

A commander at sea possessed no complete view of an air battle hundreds of miles across. He depended on reports from the men who had been there. The pilots themselves believed much of what they described.

The information reached Ozawa through a system that reinforced expectation.

The Americans were supposed to have been weakened by land-based aircraft.

They were supposed to be vulnerable.

Japanese carrier aircraft were supposed to use their superior range to attack without suffering equivalent retaliation.

Now returning pilots reported damaged and sinking carriers.

The reports fit the plan.

The fact that the plan had failed was harder to see.

Below the surface, where no pilot’s report could reach him, another Japanese carrier was already marked.

Around noon, USS *Cavalla* was tracking *Shokaku*.

Unlike *Taiho*, *Shokaku* was no new arrival to the war.

She had been present from its beginning.

Her aircraft had taken part in the attack on Pearl Harbor.

She had fought at Coral Sea.

She had survived Santa Cruz.

She had outlived many of the ships and men with whom she had started the Pacific war.

Now *Cavalla* maneuvered into position.

Torpedoes struck.

At first, *Shokaku* remained afloat.

Then fires spread through the carrier.

Hours later, flames reached ammunition spaces.

The veteran ship came apart.

Men went into the sea.

Another flight deck vanished from the Japanese order of battle.

High above Task Force 58, a 25-year-old American pilot named Alexander Vraciu was flying combat air patrol.

Vraciu had grown up in East Chicago, Indiana, the son of Romanian immigrants. Earlier in his combat career he had flown as a wingman to Edward “Butch” O’Hare.

Now he flew an F6F Hellcat.

The aircraft was not functioning perfectly. Its supercharger was malfunctioning.

Vraciu remained in the fight.

He sighted a formation of Japanese D4Y *Judy* dive bombers coming toward the American fleet.

He attacked.

The engagement lasted approximately 8 minutes.

Vraciu fired 360 rounds of .50-caliber ammunition.

6 enemy aircraft fell.

The arithmetic was extraordinary in its economy: about 60 rounds for each aircraft destroyed, each firing burst lasting fewer than 5 seconds.

The 6th *Judy* exploded directly ahead of him.

Pieces of the aircraft filled his windscreen.

Vraciu pulled hard on the controls to avoid flying through the wreckage.

Then the engagement was over.

He returned to *Lexington*.

As his Hellcat came down onto the flight deck, men around the carrier already knew something unusual had happened.

Vraciu climbed from the cockpit.

A camera caught him raising 6 gloved fingers.

6 victories.

He was still 25.

Ordnance crews later examined the ammunition expended.

360 rounds.

The image of the young pilot with his hand raised would become 1 of the most recognizable moments of the battle, but in the sky around him the same process was happening on a scale no photograph could contain.

Elsewhere, Ensign Wilbur Webb was flying from USS *Hornet*.

Webb had survived Pearl Harbor.

On June 19, he was circling above a downed American aviator, waiting for rescue, when he noticed a large formation overhead.

He climbed toward it.

The formation contained roughly 40 Japanese Aichi *Val* dive bombers moving toward Orote Field.

For a time, Webb simply joined them.

Then he transmitted over the 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 did not wait for the help.

Webb attacked.

He shot down 6 Japanese aircraft before other American fighters arrived.

By the time his own Hellcat returned, it was so badly damaged that it never flew again.

Most of the Japanese formation suffered the same fate.

From the decks of the ships below, the battle took on a strange distance.

Thousands of sailors could do little more than look upward.

The tropical heat pressed against steel decks.

Above, the sky was enormous and clear.

Contrails curved and crossed high overhead, marking turns too distant for the aircraft themselves to seem substantial. Smoke descended in long black streaks. Occasionally an aircraft fell close enough for men aboard the ships to identify its markings.

Again and again, the falling machines carried the red disc of Japan.

The men watching could not know the precise numbers.

But they could see the direction in which the battle was moving.

The Japanese 3rd raid met the same defensive system.

The 4th suffered something worse.

Its pilots failed to locate the American fleet.

Fuel could not be ignored. Aircraft that continued searching would eventually lose the ability to return anywhere.

The formation turned toward Guam, hoping to land and refuel.

But the Americans were already there.

Orote Field had been battered by American attacks. Fighters waited above the damaged airfield.

The Japanese aircraft arrived not at a refuge but at another interception point.

30 of 49 were shot down overhead.

19 managed to land.

Those survivors were in such poor condition that they could not fly again.

By the end of the day, 73 aircraft associated with the 4th raid had been destroyed or damaged beyond repair.

The air battle began to fade.

By late afternoon, Japanese contacts disappeared from American radar.

The radio channels quieted.

The sky that had been crowded with aircraft became empty again.

On the Japanese side, the absence was more difficult to interpret.

Ozawa believed many missing aircraft had diverted to Guam.

He had reports of American carriers damaged or sunk.

He could still imagine that the battle had proceeded roughly according to plan.

Then, at 4:32 p.m., *Taiho* found the spark that had been waiting since the submarine attack.

The aviation-fuel vapor spread throughout the carrier’s ventilation system ignited.

The explosion came from inside.

Japan’s newest carrier tore itself apart.

The ship Sakio Komatsu had died trying to protect began to sink.

His sacrifice had diverted 1 torpedo.

Another had been enough.

Ozawa survived and transferred his flag to the cruiser *Haguro*.

His flagship went down behind him.

Elsewhere, *Shokaku* was already lost.

Yet even after the destruction of 2 major carriers and the disappearance of most of his air groups, Ozawa did not fully understand the scale of what had happened.

The surviving pilots told him the Americans had suffered heavily.

He believed that many of his own missing aircraft were safe on Guam.

He expected that damaged units could regroup.

Ships could refuel.

Aircraft could be recovered.

The fleet could resume operations.

He began preparing for another day.

The truth existed elsewhere, in scattered wreckage, empty squadron spaces, silent radios, and finally in the flag log.

An officer sat down that evening and made the accounting.

35 operational aircraft.

The 1st Mobile Fleet had begun the morning with roughly 430.

The reduction was not merely a tactical defeat.

It represented the destruction of the carrier air arm Japan had spent years trying to rebuild after Midway.

Aircraft could be manufactured again.

Carriers could be repaired or replaced if time and industry permitted.

The pilots were another matter.

Aviation is cumulative. Experience gained in training becomes experience under pressure. Combat survivors become flight leaders. Flight leaders become instructors. Instructors produce men who enter battle better prepared than the men before them.

When enough experienced aviators are lost, the process reverses.

New pilots arrive with less instruction.

Those pilots die more quickly.

Fewer veterans survive to teach the next class.

Standards fall because war does not wait for standards to recover.

By June 1944, Japan had already entered that downward cycle.

The Philippine Sea accelerated it beyond repair.

Ozawa could not see that from *Haguro’s* bridge.

He saw darkness.

He saw a fleet still afloat.

He had reports claiming American carriers had been hit.

Somewhere ahead was an enemy he believed had also paid heavily.

He intended to continue.

The Americans spent the night under a different uncertainty.

They knew they had destroyed huge numbers of Japanese aircraft. Radar plots, fighter reports, and the evidence visible from their ships made that unmistakable.

What they did not yet possess was the position needed for a decisive strike against Ozawa’s carriers.

June 20 opened with Task Force 58 searching.

Aircraft went out across the Philippine Sea.

Hours passed.

The Japanese fleet was withdrawing, but distance remained its protection.

For much of the day, Mitscher lacked a sufficiently reliable contact report.

Then, at approximately 4:05 p.m., a sighting arrived.

The report was imperfect.

The position was uncertain.

The range was extreme.

Sunset was about 75 minutes away.

On *Lexington’s* bridge, Mitscher faced a calculation that contained no comfortable answer.

If he launched immediately, his pilots could reach Ozawa near sunset.

They would attack at the end of daylight.

Then they would turn home across approximately 250 miles of ocean.

Darkness would fall before they arrived.

Fuel would be nearly exhausted.

Many of the pilots had been flying or standing alert for much of the day.

Carrier aviation at night was dangerous even under controlled conditions. These men would return from combat in scattered groups, low on fuel, searching for moving ships in a moonless ocean.

Mitscher understood what the decision could cost.

He also understood what waiting would mean.

By morning, Ozawa might be beyond effective range.

The opportunity to strike the Japanese carrier force could disappear.

The question on the bridge was therefore not whether the attack was dangerous.

Everyone knew it was.

The question was whether the chance to destroy Ozawa’s carriers justified sending more than 200 menned aircraft into a darkness from which some would not return.

Mitscher looked at the problem.

Then he gave the order.

“Launch ’em.”

Across the American carriers, deck crews moved.

Engines turned.

Aircraft taxied forward.

85 fighters.

77 dive bombers.

54 torpedo bombers.

They rose from the flight decks and formed over the fleet.

Then they turned west.

The sun was already descending.

Ahead waited Ozawa.

Behind them, the distance to home continued growing.

# Part 3

The American strike reached the Japanese fleet as the sun approached the horizon.

There was little time for maneuver.

The pilots had crossed hundreds of miles knowing that every minute spent searching, circling, or reorganizing would be taken from the fuel needed to return.

Then ships appeared below them.

The formation broke into attack.

For approximately 20 minutes, the Philippine Sea again filled with diving aircraft, anti-aircraft fire, torpedo runs, explosions, and smoke.

The light carrier *Hiyo* came under attack.

4 Grumman TBM Avengers from the light carrier *Belleau Wood* pressed their runs against her.

Their fuel reserves were already thin.

The target was in front of them.

The question of the return journey belonged to later.

Their attack helped send *Hiyo* to the bottom.

Other American aircraft struck *Zuikaku*.

They hit *Junyo*.

Japanese fighters rose where they could, but the air strength available to defend the fleet had been reduced catastrophically the day before.

During those brief 20 minutes, approximately 65 additional Japanese aircraft were destroyed.

Then daylight began to leave.

The Americans turned east.

Home was roughly 250 miles away.

The battle they had just fought was finished.

A different fight began.

The moon was absent.

As the remaining light vanished, the horizon disappeared with it.

Over open ocean on a moonless night, sky and water became a single black surface. Pilots accustomed to keeping an aircraft level by visual reference could no longer trust their senses. A slight bank could feel level. A gradual descent could go unnoticed until an altimeter revealed it.

Instrument panels cast dim light inside cockpits.

Fuel gauges moved toward empty.

Approximately 202 aircraft were trying to find 15 carriers somewhere ahead in the dark Pacific.

The ships themselves were moving.

Pilots were scattered.

Formations had broken apart during the attack.

Radio calls overlapped.

Some men knew where they were.

Others knew only where they hoped they were.

The great carrier strike that had seemed so powerful in daylight became a collection of isolated cockpits moving east across black water.

Every pilot carried the same narrowing calculation.

Distance.

Fuel.

Time.

The margin disappeared minute by minute.

On his flagship, Mitscher understood what was happening.

He had made the decision to send the strike.

Now he had to decide how much additional risk he was willing to accept to bring it home.

Normally, a naval force at night protected itself through darkness.

Ships reduced lighting.

They avoided giving submarines easy visual references.

A carrier force illuminating itself at sea could provide exactly the kind of target an enemy submarine commander wanted.

Mitscher ordered the lights turned on.

Not a few shaded lights.

Not merely the carriers.

The fleet.

Running lights came alive.

Deck lights illuminated flight decks.

Searchlights cut into the darkness.

Destroyers fired star shells.

Across Task Force 58, ships announced their position to the night.

The order violated the instinct of naval survival.

It also gave the returning pilots something they desperately needed.

A horizon of human light.

The black ocean began to contain points of reference.

Men who had been flying toward darkness could see the fleet.

Then came the landings.

There was little elegance in them.

Pilots did not always return to the carrier from which they had launched. Some landed on the first available flight deck. Others approached whatever illuminated surface looked possible.

Aircraft arrived low on fuel, sometimes damaged, sometimes with pilots exhausted by hours in the cockpit.

Some men attempted approaches to cruisers and destroyers before realizing they were not looking at carriers.

Every correction consumed fuel.

Every wave-off mattered.

Some engines stopped before their aircraft reached a deck.

Pilots went into the sea.

Others deliberately ditched when they understood they would not make the fleet.

Aircraft struck water and disappeared.

In total, roughly 80 American aircraft were lost during the return.

Most were not destroyed by Japanese fighters.

They were not brought down by anti-aircraft fire.

They were lost to darkness, navigation, accidents, and fuel starvation.

They were the price of the sunset strike.

Mitscher had known such a price was possible when he ordered the launch.

Now the fleet worked to prevent aircraft losses from becoming equal losses of men.

Destroyers and cruisers moved through the darkness.

Boats went into the water.

Search crews found rafts, flotation gear, debris, and men waiting in the sea.

Pilots who had ditched far from the carriers watched ship silhouettes approach through the dark.

Others spent hours in the water before rescue.

When the recovery effort ended, all but 49 aircrew from the returning force had been found.

The sea had taken aircraft by the dozens.

It gave most of the men back.

The battle itself was essentially over.

The accounting came afterward.

Across the 2 days, Japanese aircraft losses approached 600. The exact total varies depending on the records used and whether particular land-based aircraft are included, but the major historical estimates generally fall between roughly 550 and 600 carrier and land-based aircraft destroyed or rendered unusable.

3 Japanese carriers were gone.

*Taiho*.

*Shokaku*.

*Hiyo*.

Approximately 3,000 Japanese sailors and airmen were dead.

The exact number of Japanese aircrew lost cannot be established with certainty. Some records went down with the ships. Some units were shattered too completely for precise reconstruction. Some aircraft disappeared over hundreds of miles of sea with no witness to identify where they fell.

The Americans lost approximately 125 aircraft across the battle.

109 men were dead.

More than half of the lost American aircraft had not been destroyed by Japanese action. They had been sacrificed to the night return after Mitscher’s June 20 strike.

The contrast on June 19 had been far more severe.

The aerial kill ratio approached 12 to 1.

Later, Commander Masatake Okumiya, an Imperial Japanese Navy staff officer, described the basic truth of the battle with little room for romantic interpretation.

The Japanese pilots had scarcely possessed a chance.

Many had entered combat inadequately trained.

They flew vulnerable aircraft against a newer generation of American fighters.

Their operational plan depended upon land-based air strength that had already been largely destroyed.

The enemy possessed radar warning.

The enemy possessed coordinated fighter direction.

The enemy possessed large combat air patrols.

The enemy’s ships carried proximity-fused anti-aircraft ammunition.

And before the Japanese fleet ever sailed into the decisive engagement, American intelligence had obtained the strategic framework under which it intended to fight.

No single factor destroyed Ozawa’s air groups.

All of them met at once.

The Americans had more than superior pilots.

They had a system.

Radar detected the raids long before they reached the fleet.

Fighter directors converted radar information into interception orders.

Well-trained Hellcat pilots met the attackers far from the carriers.

Shipboard anti-aircraft batteries waited behind them.

Damage-control systems protected the vessels that were struck.

Replacement aircraft, spare parts, fuel, ammunition, and trained personnel existed within an industrial structure capable of sustaining the battle.

Japan’s pilots confronted not merely individual fighters but the accumulated result of production, training, doctrine, logistics, intelligence, and technological development.

The outcome had therefore begun long before the first Hellcat opened fire.

It had begun when Japan failed to replace the veteran aviators lost at Midway.

It had deepened as more experienced men died over the Solomons.

It had worsened as fuel shortages reduced training.

It had hardened when submarines made open-ocean practice near Tawi-Tawi too dangerous.

It had been compounded when American attacks destroyed the land-based aircraft on which Operation A-Go depended.

It had become more dangerous when those losses were not properly communicated to Ozawa.

And it became almost inescapable when the Japanese strikes flew into an American fleet waiting behind radar screens.

The slaughter in the air was only the visible end of a much longer process.

Ozawa submitted his resignation after the defeat.

It was rejected.

The war did not end for him.

Nor did the Imperial Japanese Navy stop sending carriers to sea.

4 months later, in October 1944, Ozawa again commanded a carrier force during the Battle of Leyte Gulf.

The ships looked like carriers.

Their decks were still long and flat.

Their hulls still carried the names of vessels built to project air power hundreds of miles across the sea.

But what made a carrier a carrier was no longer there in meaningful strength.

Ozawa’s force possessed barely 100 aircraft in total.

The entire group carried fewer operational aircraft than a single American fleet carrier might bring into battle.

By then, Ozawa understood the nature of the assignment.

His force was not expected to destroy the Americans.

It was not expected to fight a traditional carrier battle.

It was bait.

Japanese planners hoped the presence of Ozawa’s carriers north of the Philippines would draw Admiral William Halsey’s powerful American carrier forces away from the San Bernardino Strait, creating an opportunity for Japanese surface forces elsewhere.

The carriers were valuable because the Americans would want to destroy them.

Their weakness did not make them useless.

It made their use darker.

The man associated with Japan’s development of massed carrier aviation now led ships whose flight decks were nearly empty, offering them as a target in the hope that the enemy would chase them.

The transformation was complete.

At the beginning of the Pacific war, Japanese carriers had represented concentrated offensive power. They had crossed the North Pacific in silence and launched hundreds of aircraft against Pearl Harbor.

Now surviving carriers sailed as decoys.

Ozawa carried out the assignment.

His force came through Leyte Gulf battered.

The flight decks remained nearly empty.

The carrier arm destroyed over the Philippine Sea did not return.

The consequences of June 19 and June 20 extended far beyond ships and aircraft.

In Tokyo, the political effects arrived quickly.

Prime Minister Hideki Tojo’s cabinet fell.

The defense of the Marianas had failed.

American forces secured Saipan.

Then Tinian.

Then Guam.

Engineers followed the combat troops.

Runways were constructed and expanded.

Airfields spread across islands that months earlier had seemed far from the center of the war.

For American planners, this had always been the deeper purpose of the campaign.

The carrier battle mattered because it protected the invasion.

The invasion mattered because it seized geography.

And the geography mattered because of the B-29.

The Superfortress had been designed for distances on a scale that reshaped the Pacific.

From the Marianas, B-29s could fly north toward the Japanese home islands.

The ocean that had once helped protect Japan now became the corridor through which the bombers approached.

They began arriving on the new runways.

Missions followed.

From Saipan, Tinian, and Guam, American bomber formations moved north.

Japan itself entered routine striking range.

The strategic meaning of the Philippine Sea therefore lay not only in the destruction of Ozawa’s aviation.

It lay in what that destruction failed to prevent.

The Japanese fleet had been sent east because the Marianas could not be surrendered safely.

The fleet failed.

The islands fell.

The runways were built.

The bombers came.

On August 6, 1945, 1 of those bombers stood on a runway on Tinian Island.

It was a Boeing B-29 Superfortress named *Enola Gay*.

Before dawn, its engines started.

The aircraft rolled forward.

It lifted from the island and turned north.

The flight did not happen in isolation from what had occurred 14 months earlier.

The runway existed because Tinian had fallen.

Tinian had fallen because Japan had failed to stop the American invasion of the Marianas.

The decisive naval effort to stop that invasion had been Operation A-Go.

And Operation A-Go had ended with the annihilation of Japanese carrier aviation in the Philippine Sea.

When Admiral Soemu Toyoda had committed the fleet, he had declared that the fate of the empire rested on the coming battle.

At the time, such language might have sounded like the rhetoric of command.

Afterward, it seemed closer to description.

Yet no commander standing on a bridge on June 19 could see the full chain of consequences stretching forward.

Ozawa did not know that night what would happen on Tinian.

He did not know what the Marianas would become.

He did not know how soon Japan’s remaining carrier force would be reduced to a decoy.

He did not even know, as darkness settled around the ships of his retreating fleet, how completely the day itself had ended in defeat.

His pilots had returned with stories of American carriers burning.

He believed many missing aircraft had landed at Guam.

He believed the fleet could regroup.

The information available to him still permitted hope.

Elsewhere aboard the fleet, however, paperwork had already begun stripping away illusion.

A man sat at a desk.

He opened the flag log.

Around him were the ordinary sounds of a warship continuing to function after disaster: footsteps in passageways, machinery beneath the deck, distant voices carrying orders from compartment to compartment.

The sea outside was dark.

Somewhere below it lay *Shokaku*.

Somewhere else beneath the same water lay *Taiho*, the newest carrier in the Japanese fleet, destroyed from within by fuel vapor after surviving the immediate effect of a submarine torpedo.

Across hundreds of miles of ocean lay wreckage from aircraft that had launched only hours earlier.

Many of the pilots who had climbed into those cockpits would never return.

There would be no training program capable of replacing them in time.

No hidden reserve of veteran aviators waited in Japan.

No untouched fleet of 500 land-based aircraft remained in the Marianas.

No second carrier air arm existed behind the 1st.

Those facts had not yet been assembled into a strategic verdict.

But they were already present in the arithmetic.

The officer looked at the figures available to him.

430 aircraft had begun the battle.

He recorded what remained operational.

35.

It was a small number to carry the weight of so large a defeat.

It said nothing of radar.

Nothing of the Z Plan.

Nothing of the Filipino guerrillas who had recovered a briefcase from a wrecked aircraft months before.

Nothing of Koga dying in a typhoon.

Nothing of Fukudome surviving.

Nothing of the intelligence officers in Brisbane translating Japanese documents.

Nothing of the submarines following Ozawa from Tawi-Tawi.

Nothing of the pilots forbidden to train over open water.

Nothing of the young men entering combat with too few hours.

Nothing of the veterans lost at Midway, Santa Cruz, Rabaul, and Bougainville.

Nothing of the hundreds of Japanese aircraft destroyed on the Marianas before the fleet arrived.

Nothing of the officers who failed to tell Ozawa how few remained.

Nothing of the Hellcats waiting beyond the horizon.

Nothing of Vraciu’s 6 raised fingers.

Nothing of Webb joining an enemy formation before opening fire.

Nothing of Komatsu turning his newly launched aircraft toward a torpedo and dying in the attempt to save his ship.

Nothing of *Taiho’s* ventilation system spreading invisible fuel vapor through the hull.

Nothing of *Cavalla* stalking *Shokaku*.

Nothing of the pilots who returned to Ozawa convinced they had sunk carriers that remained afloat.

Nothing of Mitscher standing on *Lexington’s* bridge the following afternoon with sunset approaching and an enemy fleet at extreme range.

Nothing of the order to launch.

Nothing of *Hiyo* sinking.

Nothing of 202 American aircraft turning home into a moonless night.

Nothing of fuel gauges sliding toward empty.

Nothing of carriers, cruisers, and destroyers lighting themselves in black water so exhausted pilots could find the fleet.

Nothing of aircraft running dry and falling into the sea.

Nothing of rescue boats moving through darkness to recover the men.

Nothing of the Marianas becoming American air bases.

Nothing of B-29s lifting from their runways and flying north.

A flag log did not need to explain any of those things.

It only needed to preserve the number.

35 operational aircraft.

By itself, the figure looked almost administrative.

In the history of Japanese naval aviation, it was something else.

It marked the moment when a carrier fleet remained physically afloat but the power that had once made those carriers feared had largely ceased to exist.

The ships would sail again.

Ozawa would command again.

Orders would continue to be issued.

Flags would rise.

Engines would turn.

Flight decks would remain.

But the force that had begun the Pacific war with trained aviators capable of striking across hundreds of miles of ocean had been consumed.

The decisive battle Japan had prepared to fight had finally come.

It had not looked like the battle Japanese doctrine had imagined.

There had been no balanced exchange between great carrier air groups.

No gradual contest in which superior range and fighting spirit overcame American numbers.

No destruction of the invasion fleet.

No restoration of Japan’s defensive perimeter.

Instead, undertrained pilots had flown into an enemy that knew they were coming.

They had entered a system designed to detect them, intercept them, shoot them down, and absorb whatever remained.

By sunset, the sky was empty.

And somewhere in the darkness of the Philippine Sea, while Vice Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa prepared orders for a battle he still believed could continue, an officer bent over a page and wrote down the only number that no report from an excited pilot could alter.

35.