Lt. David Sawyer was leading Taco flight, a flight of newly-deployed
p40-q *1 Skyhawks on a combat air patrol over the invasion fleet that
lay off the southern coast of Kyushu. *2. His was one of several
flights designated to cover the transports and protect them from
kamikaze attacks. It was November 1945 and the kamikaze weapon was
the most effective anti-invasion shipping weapon the Japanese had
left, what with the total destruction of their navy earlier in the
year, and the severe attrition of experienced pilots that had drained
their once-vaunted air force of most of its effectiveness. Still,
the Divine Wind pilots, often boys of fifteen or sixteen with just
enough stick-and-rudder time to take off and fly straight and level
could still bring great destruction to the Allied transport fleet
that lay at anchor off the invasion beaches.
Sawyer knew that this was to be a day of maximum effort, so, for the
first hour and a half of his patrol, he and the other three pilots of
his flight kept circling and watching.
At 10:38 hours, Lt. Jg. Brad Correy reported engine difficulties and
aborted to the carrier Wasp from which they had taken off. That was
the trouble with new aircraft, their service rate wasn't as good
until they'd had a while to break in. The Skyhawk was an advanced
design based on the venerable Wildcat, with which most of the U.S.
Navy had begun the war. It was a hundred knots faster and could
climb and turn with the zero. It didn't have quite the power of the
Corsair or the sheer speed of the Hellcat, but it could outturn
either aircraft.
They were orbiting the transport USS Minerva at a distance of two
miles and at an altitude of 12,000 feet when Lt. JG. Phil Katesby
sang out, "bogeys, four bogeys 10 o'clock low!"
And there they were, four Oscars, strung out in a line northwest of
the ship and beginning to turn in and dive. Sawyer's flight had a
massive height advantage, but whereas in an ordinary bounce, this
would have been a bonus, now it made Sawyer nervous, for the Oscars
were far closer to the Minerva than he was. The intercept would be
tricky and at high speed. He only hoped that the nature of the
Japanese attack would make it possible for his boys to line up their
shots. *3
quickly. Calling to his flight to follow him down, he through his
P40 into a rolling, diving turn. Over the next thirty seconds or so,
the Japanese aircraft grew larger through his windscreen as he kept
his nose on the lead aircraft. They took a curving path and spread
out so as to attack the ship from three sides at once. The Minerva
was unarmed and anchored a sitting duck of a target.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that his number three, Lt. JG.
Mario Felini, a freshly minted pilot with the polish still bright on
his wings had overcontrolled his aircraft and gotten himself into a
spin. Sawyer swore softly and prayed the kid would remember how to
recover. He and Katesby swept in on the port quarter of the lead two
Oscars, which didn't maneuver to avoid the shots. Knowing he'd have
only one shot, Sawyer lined up the lead Oscar and fired a single
two-second burst from his 6 .50 caliber machine guns. he saw
multiple strikes on the fuselage and the Oscar heeled over to
starboard and cart-wheeled into the sea four hundred feet below.
*4 Sawyer hauled back on his stick and the world went gray around
him as the g-forces mounted to over 6. Katesby called that he had
exploded the second Oscar, but where was Felini?
Felini recovered at less than five hundred feet and turned back into
the fray, in time to see the third Oscar miss its dive and crash into
the sea sixty feet in front of the bow of the Minerva. Seeing the
fourth Oscar, he sawed his rudder hard right, trying to line up a
shot, but his airspeed was very low from the stall/spin, and the nose
of his aircraft came around too slow. Just as he squeezed the
trigger, the fourth Oscar struck the Minerva amidships. There was a
massive secondary explosion as burning fuel touched off stacked
ammunition, and the ship disappeared in a globe of vivid flame as
Felini fought to control his aircraft in the crazy air that came with
the shock wave.
It was a sad Taco Flight that landed on the Wasp later to hear that
loss of life on the Minerva had been total.
notes:
1. The p40-Q was a prototype that came out in 1945 but was not put
into production. It shared (and may have provided) some of the
design advances that went into the P51 Mustang. Unlike its early war
predecessors, it could fly with the best the Japanese had to offer.
2. This scenario was set in a hypothetical invasion of Japan by the
U.S. in a world where the atomic bomb did not come into being until
after WWII. The invasion would have taken place in November 1945 and
the probable landing site would have been Kyushu, the southernmost
Japanese home island, to set up for the main event on Honshu later.
3. Because of the nature of the attack, I played the Japanese as
unable to maneuver against the American fighters. Their target was
the ship; the fighters didn't matter.
4. The simulation includes critical hit tables. When I rolled this
shot, I scored a critical which resulted in a "pilot killed" result.
Other notes: The original simulation makes no provision for ground
attacks, so I cobbled something together that was simple and
playable, simply designating a rectangle of coordinates as the
location of the ship and ruling that if I managed to fly the Japanese
planes so they reached 0 or less altitude inside that rectangle they
had hit. For simplicity, hit = victory.
The intercept was very tricky as the Americans had to shed many
thousand feet of altitude quickly, while maneuvering behind the
Japanese pilots to get good shots. By the time the first two had
reached reasonable firing positions, the Kamikaze were about six
seconds from impact and the Americans would have to recover hard, and
would never get around in time. I had underestimated the time it
would take for them to horse their aircraft around to get into
shooting position. If I play this again, I'll drop the American
starting altitude to eight thousand feet or so..
Christopher Bartlett
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