On the morning of 16 April 1945, US Sumner class destroyer DD-724, the USS Laffey, was assigned the most dangerous job in the US Navy: radar picket for the Fifth Fleet off of Okinawa. The USS Laffey was expected to identify Japanese air attacks originating from the Japanese Home Islands and direct American fighters to intercept. The problem was that many Kamikaze attacked the first American ships they saw, which invariably were the radar pickets.

Just after dawn while most men were in breakfast chow line, the first Japanese bomber was spotted radar and the crew raced to battlestations. The single D3A Val divebomber with its distinctive fixed landing gear retreated from the Laffey’s anti-aircraft fire. An obvious scout, the Val was a harbinger for the hell about to descend on the Laffey.

At 0825, the Laffey identified a large raid of 320 Japanese aircraft. They directed the fighters to intercept. At 0830, four Val divebombers attacked. Twelve minutes later, 50 planes broke off from the main formation to attack the Laffey, including 22 Kamikaze. The Laffey had just four older FM2 Wildcat Fighters from the escort carrier USS Shamrock Bay flying top cover.

The captain, Commander Frederick Becton, ordered the Laffey to flank speed while the helmsman made frequent radical course corrections to disorient the attacking Japanese. The first Kamikaze hit started a fire that the flank speed exacerbated. Becton slowed the ship down to contain the flames, but this just convinced the Japanese that the Laffey was crippled and ready to sink. After several more strikes, Becton increased the speed and the crew fought the flames, flooding, and Japanese simultaneously.

The Laffey, the four Wildcats, and eventually twelve F4U Corsair fighters desperately fought off the Japanese attacks for over 80 minutes. In that time, the Laffey took serious damage: she was hit by six Kamikaze, four bombs, strafed three times, and was even clipped by a Corsair whose daring pilot prevented an attacking Val dive bomber from slamming into the bridge. By 1030, the Laffey was on fire and out of ammunition, listing to port, and the stern was almost underwater due to flooding. She had all of her 5” guns knocked out, half of her 20mm and 40mm AA mounts destroyed, all of her masts knocked down, and the American flag hung off of a makeshift pole.

When asked if they should abandon ship, Becton replied, “No! I’ll never abandon ship as long as a single gun will fire.” He did not hear a nearby lookout who said under his breath, “And if I can find one man to fire it…”

At 1033, 24 more Corsairs and F6F Hellcats arrived and shot down the last of the attackers to much jubilation from the remaining crew. The USS Laffey suffered 32 dead and 71 wounded in two hours of fighting.

The USS Laffey is now a museum ship off of Patriots Point, outside of Charleston, South Carolina.

By 1945, the Battle of the Atlantic was won by the Allies. However the Germans clung to the hope that wonder weapons and superior technology could somehow turn the tide. U-1206 was a brand new Type VIIC boat that could travel faster and stay submerged longer than U-boats before it.

Part of the reason U-1206 could stay submerged for long times was the toilet system. Unlike Allied submarines where human waste went into a holding tank, waste on German U-boats was flushed directly into the sea. The lack of a holding tank allowed more space for other critical necessities, like fuel and batteries. This also meant that the waste couldn’t be flushed out while submerged too deeply, an unfortunate olfactory situation for a submarine if it was submerged for too long. The Type VIIC boats fixed this problem, not with a holding tank, but a complicated high pressure valve system that permitted a crew member to flush while deeply submerged. The valve system was so complicated that “Toilet Specialists” were needed to operate it.

On 14 April 1945, the captain of U-1206 was taking his daily constitutional while submerged off Scotland. He didn’t want to bother the toilet specialist to flush, so he broke out the manual to do it himself. In the process, he stuffed up the toilet. Swallowing his pride, but not too much, he called the boat’s engineer to fix the problem instead of the junior ranking toilet specialist. While trying to unplug the toilet, the boat’s engineer opened the wrong valve and seawater flooded into the boat. The water eventually reached the boat’s batteries and the chemical reaction caused a cloud of chlorine gas. The crew brought the boat to the surface so they could open the hatches to air the gas out. While on the surface, U-1206 was promptly sunk by the RAF.

During the “Phony War” between the Western Allies and Germany in 1939 and early 1940, both sides eyed Norway as a potential area of operations. The Allies wanted to cut off Germany’s supply of Swedish iron ore that was shipped thru the Norwegian port of Narvik, and ship arms and supplies to Finland who was at war with Germany’s de facto ally, the Soviet Union. (Finland surrendered in March before the plan came to fruition) Germany wanted to use Norway’s fjords for U-boat bases, and use airfields on the Norwegian Sea to secure the iron ore shipments. In early April 1940, both sides struck near simultaneously but where Allied operations (and the Norwegian response) were characterized by confusion and timidity, the German attack was characterized by decisiveness and audacity.

In the early hours of 9 April, 1940, two hundred German transport planes approached the various Scandinavian coasts. Each of the distinctive three engine Ju-52s carried a “stick” of 18 German Fallshirmjaeger (paratroopers) and a canister containing their weapons and ammunition (The Germans jumped unarmed and retrieved their weapons on the ground). The lightly armed paratroopers had to hold out against a possible overwhelming Allied response before any help could arrive by troops carried by the Kriegsmarine (German Navy) The fallshimjaegers’ vital mission was to seize five airfields that constituted the all-important initial objectives for the first contested airborne operation in history: Operation Weserubung.

Operation Weserubung was the German codename for the invasions of Norway and Denmark. It was a complicated and flawed, but tenaciously executed joint, interagency, and multinational (well, two anyway) surprise attack that had little reason to succeed, and every reason to fail. It required independent simultaneous successful actions against a series of linear unsupportive but logistically connected objectives. The plan required airborne troops to seize airfields for future Luftwaffe dominance of the sky. Simultaneously and underneath the nose of the British Home Fleet at Scapa Flow, the Kriegsmarine landed troop at five spread out target cities along the Norwegian Atlantic coast. Due to troop transport shortages, the ground troops available were woefully understrength for the tasks assigned to them. A serious failure at any point would have caused the failure of the entire operation. However, German diplomatic and informational efforts more than made up for the troop shortfall.

During the military attack, the German Foreign Ministry convincingly continued to negotiate with the Norwegians and prevented a timely full mobilization. Additionally Norwegian fascists under Vidkun Quisling sabotaged any response and assisted from within their socialist cousins from the south. Fortunately for the Germans, individual initiative from their junior officers mitigated any temporary Allied successes, and most importantly, Allied indecisiveness assured German victory.

The Allied invasion fleet was actually off of Narvik on 9 April but was recalled to Scotland in order to not offend the Norwegians, despite reports of German planes and ships nearby. It was turned around and sent back five days later. Unfortunately for the Norwegians, this five day delay meant any Allied assistance arrived long after they could be used to attack the vulnerable German enclaves in the southern portion of the country. Through dishonest and duplicitous negotiations, the Nazi Foreign Ministry prevented a full mobilization of the Norwegian Army. The Norwegian delgation continued to negotiate in good faith for days, all the way up until Gestapo agents arrested them. Furthermore, the Quislings in the government, particularly the bureaucracy, prevented the partial mobilization from being carried out efficiently. Instead of two days, it took a week for the Norwegian Army to mobilize. By then it was too late and air landed German troops poured into the country through the secured airfields.

The only Allied successes in the first few days were at sea. On the night of 9 April, five British destroyers attacked and scattered the German’s Narvik invasion force, whose ships were then hunted down and sunk by a larger task force centered on the battleship HMS Warspite. In the south, the Oslo Invasion Force but halted by Norwegian cannon protecting the entrance to the fjord, which allowed time for the Norwegian royal family, the parliament, and the treasury to escape capture. But the captain in charge of the German embassy’s security, on his own initiative, commandeered a few Norwegian Army trucks and a company of German paratroopers, and chased the Norwegian decision makers out of the country, which further delayed Norway’s response to the German invasion.

90% of German objectives were seized within 24 hours, if tenuously. Denmark fell in six hours. But even with the German’s amazing initial successes, the British, French, Polish and Norwegian troops resisted and even advanced over the next two months, especially around Narvik. It took the fall of France in June and the impending invasion of Britain for the Allies to evacuate their troops and finally surrender Norway.

The only positive outcome for the Allies was the near total annihilation of all of Germany’s destroyers and troop transports in the two months of battles against the Allied navies in the North and Norwegian Seas. Their loss forced Germany to require total control of the air over the English Channel to compensate for the lack of escorts for the slow invasion barges destined for Operation Sealion, the invasion of Great Britain.

At dawn on 7 April 1945, the crews of the fourteen remaining ships of the Japanese 2nd Combined Fleet were assembled on their decks and briefed on Operation Ten’ichigo, “Heaven One”. Now commonly known as Operation Ten-Go, the plan was a naval Kamikaze attack on the American Fifth Fleet off of Okinawa.

The last remnants of the 2nd Combined Fleet centered on the mighty battleship Yamato, which was still the largest and most powerful battleship in history. Once there, the Yamato and his escorts were to beach and become unsinkable shore batteries, with the Yamato’s massive 18” guns destroying the American invasion fleet. Each sailor was given the opportunity to stay behind, and of course none did. The Japanese task force departed Yokohama with all of the remaining fuel in port for the one way trip to Okinawa. Hundreds of aircraft Kamikaze from the second wave of Operation Kikusui No. 1 were to keep the Americans busy while they were in transit.

Fortunately for the Allies, the 2nd Combined Fleet never made it to Okinawa. Two submarine’s spotted them departing but could not engage because of the TF’s speed. The Japanese, with no air cover, planned to avoid submarine and air attack by traveling at flank speed and violently zig-zagging for the entire trip. The tactics worked for about five hours, until the first planes of three waves of over 400 American and British torpedo and dive bombers finally found them and attacked just after noon. For two hours Japanese gunners and damage control crews valiantly kept the ships afloat, but by 1400 the one sided contest was over. All of the ships were sunk and the Yamato took twelve torpedo hits and eight bomb hits before he went down. Operation Ten-Go was the last significant action in the Second World War by the Japanese Navy, which three short years earlier was the terror of the Pacific.

In 1336, Japanese warrior Kusunoki Masashige fought a brave but futile defense at the Battle of Minatogawa. The moment before his inevitable defeat, Masashige committed seppuku, ritual suicide, in front of his attackers rather than surrender or be taken prisoner. Masashige became a legend in Japanese history and his emblem, the kikusui or floating chrysanthemum, became the symbol for Japan’s struggle to death with the Allies in 1945.

On 6 April 1945, the Japanese launched the first of ten massed airborne Kamikaze strikes against the US Fifth Fleet off Okinawa. Operation Kikusui, No 1 consisted of almost 700 aircraft including 355 Kamikaze. US codebreakers knew of the attack and every fighter in the Fifth Fleet was airborne to meet them. Nonetheless, the Allied fighter patrols could only shoot down 200 or so before they reached the fleet. The northern most destroyers on radar picket took the brunt of the initial attacks. Notwithstanding orders to bypass the destroyers and hit the vulnerable carriers closer to Okinawa, most Kamikaze struck the first ships they came across. Once a “gap” was made in the picket line, Kamikaze continued on toward the fleet. 200 more were shot down by antiaircraft gunners. It wasn’t enough.

180 Kamikaze and normal strike aircraft slammed into the fleet. Despite hours and even days of epic damage control efforts, two destroyers were sunk, and four more so damaged that they were sent to scrap after the day’s battle. Four other destroyers and two destroyer escorts were so badly damaged that they required more than 30 days of repairs. One LST and two ammunition ships were destroyed, and one fleet carrier, the USS Hancock, was sent back to Pearl Harbor for repairs.

The Japanese were not pleased with results considering the resources expended. The Americans’ mastery of the fundamentals: damage control, disciplined anti-aircraft fire, radar direction, combat air patrols, intelligence, and fleet logistics provided the fleet a resilience that had prevented a disaster.

Unfortunately, the worst was yet to come.