A Shipboard Marine's Okinawa Diary (April, 2005)

The article is about some diary entries by a man that served on the battleship Texas during the Okinawa campaign.

March 21, 1945: He writes that his ship set sail for Okinawa, part of Task Force 54, along with the battleship Maryland, heavy cruiser Tuscaloosa and the destroyers Laws, Longshaw, Morrison and Prichert.

March 25: He writes that the kamikaze were the main concern of the fleet, showing just how feared the kamikaze attacks were, and just how effective. The ship's captain decided that the men who manned the guns were to sleep topside. This would save time because, ordinarily, men slept below and had to climb up ladders and rush to their positions. With the men sleeping topside, the guns were basically ready twenty-four hours of each day.

March 26: A Japanese torpedo bomber plane attacked after midnight, launching a torpedo at Maryland but missing. Two hours later there was a similar attack, but there was no damage on either side.

March 27: A carrier plane went into the water near the Texas, and there was a major effort to save the pilot. This was unlike the Japanese approach in many respects. Many of the pilots flew without parachutes on purpose; there didn't seem to be any equal effort to rescue downed pilots, and this had an effect, in that in undoubtedly increased pilot loss. The Japanese were fierce aerial fighters at the start of the war because they had the best pilots; as those pilots were killed off, the ones replacing them lacked the same training and weren't as good. They were more easily shot down, and this just continued till the end of the war.

March 28: A Japanese plane dropped flares, but it was shot down by the destroyers.

April 9: Three planes attacked. One was shot down and the other two left.

April 12: Early in the morning, when it was still dark, a Betty bomber attacked. They hit it and it ended up in flames, passing just barely over the Texas, so close the men there could feel the heat from the plane's burning. A second plan ran away, and a third plane was shot down by the destroyers.

A mail-carrying destroyer came alongside, but while it was there three kamikaze attacked the destroyer. Two were shot down but one hit the destroyer and it had to leave the area to return to the US for repairs. It suffered 66 casualties, half of whom were dead. This should give a good idea of the effectiveness of a kamikaze attack, when one single plane can kill over thirty men and knock a ship out of the war.

The Tennessee was attacked by five planes, four of which were shot down, but the fifth hit the ship. That ship had over 100 casualties. By the end of the battle, he writes that the fleet had around 700 casualties with 11 ships hit, two sunk. The Japanese had lost around 200 planes.

April 13: He heard that FDR had died, and he noted FDR was the only president he had ever known.

April 16: Another heavy air attack starting at nine o'clock. Two planes approached the Texas. The planes separated, one still attacking the Texas, one th Mobile. The plane attacking the Texas looked like it was going to hit the ship, but the wings sheared off the plane and it splashed, doing no damage to the ship.

May 12 and 13. The Texas had a reputation of being a lucky ship and it apparently was. There were seven ships in their unit, and two were sunk and the other four were hit. They had around 250 dead, 250 wounded. The Texas was not hit at all.

May 14: The Texas leaves the area. The men had been living on deck for fifty days in a row. I think it's possible that the Captain's idea of having the men do that, and be able to man their guns in an instant, might have helped the ship survive.

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