would never see combat again.
Franklin
had suffered the greatest damage inflicted on any aircraft carrier without being sunk. Her losses—724 killed and 265 wounded—were among the most on any single U.S. warship. The carrier owed her survival to a combination of human courage and skilled firefighting. Much had been learned about shipboard damage control since the battles in which the carriers
Lexington, Yorktown, Wasp
, and
Hornet
were lost. Improved techniques, special firefighting schools, and new equipment including fog nozzles, foam generators, and independent fire mains were saving ships that otherwise would have gone to the bottom. Each carrier’s damage control crew received intensive training before going into combat.
Franklin
wasn’t the only victim that day. Soon after sunrise on March 19, the fast carrier
Wasp
was launching strikes when adive-bomber appeared directly overhead. No one had picked up the intruder either visually or on radar. The bomber, probably another Judy, put its bomb through
Wasp
’s flight deck, but it penetrated to the hangar deck, then passed through the number three and number two decks before exploding in the crew galley. Despite the slaughter in the mess compartment and fires that spread to five decks, the blazes were quickly extinguished.
But it wasn’t over for
Wasp
. Fifteen minutes later, while she was recovering aircraft, yet another bomber dove on the carrier. This one, a bona fide kamikaze, narrowly missed the deck edge and exploded in the water alongside the ship.
Wasp
’s losses from the attacks amounted to 101 killed and 269 wounded, but she stayed on line for several more days before withdrawing to Ulithi for repairs.
The next day, March 20, it was
Enterprise
’s turn again. A swarm of fifteen to twenty Japanese warplanes bore down on the veteran carrier. One managed to get close enough to score a near miss with its bomb and rake the flight deck with its machine guns.
At the same time, yet another carrier, the
Hancock
, was fighting off an incoming Zero. At the last moment,
Hancock
’s gunners managed to pick off the incoming kamikaze. The flaming wreckage skimmed past the carrier’s flight deck edge, crashing into the main deck of the destroyer
Halsey Powell
, which had just completed refueling from
Hancock
.
What happened next was a classic example of why Navy men called destroyers “tin cans.” The kamikaze’s bomb penetrated
Powell
’s thinly armored deck, punching completely through the destroyer’s hull without exploding. Still, ten of the tin can’s sailors perished in the attack, and twenty-nine more were wounded.
Powell
’s steering gear was wrecked, and the destroyer was out of the fight.
T hat night Vice Adm. Marc Mitscher pulled his carrier task force southward from their dangerous stations close to Japan. The strikes had been effective but costly. The operation they werehere to support, the amphibious invasion of Okinawa, was still a week away, and already four fleet carriers—
Franklin, Enterprise, Yorktown
, and
Wasp
—would have to retire for damage repair.
To Mitscher, the past three days had been an ominous preview of the coming battle. The Japanese could hurl hundreds of kamikazes at the U.S. fleet and lose almost all of them. If only one slipped through, it could mean the loss of a ship.
Pilots on the strikes against the Japanese bases claimed a total of 528 enemy aircraft destroyed on the ground and in the air. It was an inflated number, mostly derived from the claims of multiple pilots hitting the same targets. The Japanese reported that they’d lost 161 out of 193 aircraft in addition to an undetermined number of unflyable airplanes destroyed on the ground.
The truth lay somewhere in between. Exaggerated action reports were not unique to either side. Both the Japanese and the United States overestimated the numbers of ships and planes destroyed and troops killed by their side. Airmen were like prizefighters who, after landing a
Franklin
had suffered the greatest damage inflicted on any aircraft carrier without being sunk. Her losses—724 killed and 265 wounded—were among the most on any single U.S. warship. The carrier owed her survival to a combination of human courage and skilled firefighting. Much had been learned about shipboard damage control since the battles in which the carriers
Lexington, Yorktown, Wasp
, and
Hornet
were lost. Improved techniques, special firefighting schools, and new equipment including fog nozzles, foam generators, and independent fire mains were saving ships that otherwise would have gone to the bottom. Each carrier’s damage control crew received intensive training before going into combat.
Franklin
wasn’t the only victim that day. Soon after sunrise on March 19, the fast carrier
Wasp
was launching strikes when adive-bomber appeared directly overhead. No one had picked up the intruder either visually or on radar. The bomber, probably another Judy, put its bomb through
Wasp
’s flight deck, but it penetrated to the hangar deck, then passed through the number three and number two decks before exploding in the crew galley. Despite the slaughter in the mess compartment and fires that spread to five decks, the blazes were quickly extinguished.
But it wasn’t over for
Wasp
. Fifteen minutes later, while she was recovering aircraft, yet another bomber dove on the carrier. This one, a bona fide kamikaze, narrowly missed the deck edge and exploded in the water alongside the ship.
Wasp
’s losses from the attacks amounted to 101 killed and 269 wounded, but she stayed on line for several more days before withdrawing to Ulithi for repairs.
The next day, March 20, it was
Enterprise
’s turn again. A swarm of fifteen to twenty Japanese warplanes bore down on the veteran carrier. One managed to get close enough to score a near miss with its bomb and rake the flight deck with its machine guns.
At the same time, yet another carrier, the
Hancock
, was fighting off an incoming Zero. At the last moment,
Hancock
’s gunners managed to pick off the incoming kamikaze. The flaming wreckage skimmed past the carrier’s flight deck edge, crashing into the main deck of the destroyer
Halsey Powell
, which had just completed refueling from
Hancock
.
What happened next was a classic example of why Navy men called destroyers “tin cans.” The kamikaze’s bomb penetrated
Powell
’s thinly armored deck, punching completely through the destroyer’s hull without exploding. Still, ten of the tin can’s sailors perished in the attack, and twenty-nine more were wounded.
Powell
’s steering gear was wrecked, and the destroyer was out of the fight.
T hat night Vice Adm. Marc Mitscher pulled his carrier task force southward from their dangerous stations close to Japan. The strikes had been effective but costly. The operation they werehere to support, the amphibious invasion of Okinawa, was still a week away, and already four fleet carriers—
Franklin, Enterprise, Yorktown
, and
Wasp
—would have to retire for damage repair.
To Mitscher, the past three days had been an ominous preview of the coming battle. The Japanese could hurl hundreds of kamikazes at the U.S. fleet and lose almost all of them. If only one slipped through, it could mean the loss of a ship.
Pilots on the strikes against the Japanese bases claimed a total of 528 enemy aircraft destroyed on the ground and in the air. It was an inflated number, mostly derived from the claims of multiple pilots hitting the same targets. The Japanese reported that they’d lost 161 out of 193 aircraft in addition to an undetermined number of unflyable airplanes destroyed on the ground.
The truth lay somewhere in between. Exaggerated action reports were not unique to either side. Both the Japanese and the United States overestimated the numbers of ships and planes destroyed and troops killed by their side. Airmen were like prizefighters who, after landing a
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