Chapter 17: The Surprise Attack on Etajima (Part I)

During World War II, radar research and development in various countries was still in its early stages, and its performance was very unreliable. The pen "Fun" Pavilion www.biquge.info is particularly bad at identifying friend and foe.

In the past few days, Japanese pilots have fled to Hiroshima from the fallen prefectures of the northeastern region to join up with the large forces. Because the communications and command systems of the Japanese troops on the ground have now completely collapsed, it is natural that these planes will not give any advance notice when they come, and as a result, the air defense units on Kure Harbor and Etajima Island will be frightened three times a day: From the radar of these years, it is impossible to distinguish whether it is a US plane or a Japanese plane.

As a result, a bunch of misshoots were caused, and several ace pilots of the Japanese Navy and Army and high-ranking officers of air forces in various localities were almost beaten down by their own men instead of being killed by the enemy...... In the end, the lawsuit reached Principal Keno Kurita, who discussed it with a few experienced people, and then instructed the radar station to distinguish friend from foe by looking at altitude: The incoming US plane must be the B-29 Super Flying Fortress, which can fly to an altitude of eight or nine thousand meters, while Japanese planes generally cannot fly so high. Therefore, those who come from high are enemies, and those who come from low are their own people.

Radar stations and air defense posts act in accordance with the law as if they were decreed by divine order. As a result, for more than a month, all the planes came to Japan, and there was no sign of half of the American planes (the United States had never bombed the area west of Kyoto in Japan at this time), so it gradually relaxed. Who knows that to this day, the enemy planes attacking from the east are not the B-29 Super Flying Fortress bombed at high altitudes, but the torpedo planes and bombers of the US aircraft carrier naval aviation that are raiding at low altitudes! Wu Gang's side almost waited until the first bomb was dropped on his head before he woke up like a dream, and quickly sounded the alarm...... But it's too late!

Sharp air raid sirens and the sound of anti-aircraft guns sounded at the same time, and the sky over the Naval Academy on Etajima was full of smoke and fire for a while. However, it still could not stop the US military planes from diving and dropping bombs one after another, causing huge columns of smoke to rise everywhere on the campus.

-- The three principals, Jizaburo Ozawa, Keno Kurita, and Narumi Inoue, had just rushed out of the office building with a number of subordinates, and before they could go far, they saw that the British-style red-brick dormitory building of the Etajima Naval Academy, which was in the same style as the Tokyo Naval Provincial Building, was being smashed through the roof by a 500-kilogram semi-armor-piercing bullet...... Then there was an earth-shattering bang, and the whole house "swelled" like a balloon, and all kinds of masonry, wood, broken glass and metal components were swept away by the air wave, falling like raindrops, and a raging fire was ignited on the shattered wreckage.

However, the buildings on the ground are dead objects after all, and it is a pity that they were blown up, but that's what it is. What made these naval personnel feel even more distressed was that all the Japanese warships anchored in the bay at this time were also bathed in smoke and fire:

Due to the surprise in advance, most of the sailors did not have time to return from the shore, and several aircraft carriers simply did not have planes and pilots at all, and they did not have time to set sail and sail out of port, and the result was that the American warships at Pearl Harbor were extremely vulnerable to air raids.

I saw that one group after another of US bombers or torpedo planes drilled out of the lead-gray gloomy clouds, swooped down almost vertically, and plunged straight into the sea like a plumb sinker, until they were close to the sea level, and the wings almost swept the waves and pounced on the moored warships......

The first batch of attacking US planes were mainly dive bombers, and with the exception of a few that were shot down, most of them did not drop their bombshells until they were about 50 meters away from the target ships. At this distance and speed, the aerial bombs bounced off the surface of the sea like pebbles in the water, hitting the hulls of various Japanese battleships or aircraft carriers from the weak sides, and some even burrowed into the belly of the ships at once!

Then, with the explosion and fire and the heart-rending wails of despair, the battleships Haruna, Ise and Hinata, the aircraft carriers Amagi, Katsuragi, Hosho and Ryuho, all of the most striking big men anchored in the waters of Kure Port began to burn one after another. On the murky sea, which is filled with heavy oil and debris, there are sailors who have jumped into the water to escape. There are also several large merchant ships that have unloaded their cargo, and it seems that they have also been used as aircraft carriers by the American pilots with bad eyes, and they have also been blown into burning iron coffins by bombs falling from the sky.

After the first wave of US dive bombers left, the US torpedo planes, which were slow and belated, finally arrived at the battlefield and bravely withstood the still fierce anti-aircraft fire, and released torpedoes against the steel behemoths that were still struggling on the water -- although Wu Harbor had set up mine protection fences and lightning protection nets, there were too many ships coming in from various places these days to accommodate them at all, and in addition, the port personnel of the former town guard had fled a lot in the riots, and now they were managed by military cadets, and the management of the anchorage berths was in chaos, many warships are not protected by mine nets at all.

As a result, the Amagi aircraft carrier, which had been taken from Yokosuka Castle as its flagship, had not been able to release any counterattack planes at all, and was blown to pieces by one torpedo after another and slowly sank...... Jizaburo Ozawa couldn't help but take off his military hat, leaving behind tears of pain.

But General Jizaburo Ozawa actually has no time to care about his flagship at this time, and what needs to be concerned most at the moment is his small life.

-- Because of their previous slackness in their precaution, the Japanese planes in Kure Harbor were basically unable to take off to meet the attack for half an hour after the attack, and the US planes escorting the escort could not find their opponents for a while, and they began to lower their altitudes one after another and strafe all kinds of ground targets that could be found.

Just a few dozen steps away from the group, I saw an F4U "Corsair" plane swooping down extremely rampantly, striking a deadly chain of fire on the ground of the Etajima Naval Academy, completely tearing several naval cadets who had been burned to the ground and rolling on the ground into burning flesh and blood fragments! Next, after pulling up the height and turning around, the F4U "Corsair" plane shot at the three principals with a lingering attitude!

Looking at the oncoming enemy plane spitting flames, a group of people fleeing were suddenly at a loss, some were so frightened that they froze in place, and some screamed and threw themselves on the ground and drilled into the grass (although these guys are soldiers, they basically sit in the office in military schools, and most of them have never even seen the battlefield), so angry that Ozawa Jizaburo almost wanted to curse. But a strange young man who was following Principal Inoue suddenly took out a gadget that looked like a mini grenadier from his backpack, set it on his shoulder, and pulled the trigger on the F4U "Corsair" machine that had just flown overhead in the air!

The next moment, with a small roar, a small rocket rose from his shoulder, hitting the rampant F4U "Corsair" from the belly of the plane, causing it to fall crookedly with a puff of smoke, and finally hit the ground with a bang, exploding into a pile of burning aluminum sheets.

Seeing that the enemy plane was shot down, the fleeing crowd couldn't help but let out a short cheer. However, General Jizaburo Ozawa looked at the young man and the "miniature bazooka" in his hand with curious and confused eyes...... It's just that at the moment the air raids are continuing, and this is not the time to speak. So he just glanced at the strange young man a few times, then turned around and took the bulletproof steel vest that his subordinates had just found and put it on. Then, in order to reduce the target and avoid being overwhelmed, the three principals evacuated separately with their respective men, and went to find cover in different directions to avoid the air attack......

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As waves of U.S. warplanes attacked one after another, from Etado Island to Kure Port, there was a fire and smoke everywhere.

However, after being struck by the naval aviation of the Halsey fleet, the Japanese navy and army air teams gradually began to organize a counterattack, although the scene was still very chaotic, as time went on. In any case, the current Hiroshima area is home to more than 10,000 Japanese naval and army planes, and even if you deduct the slow and sluggish transport planes, torpedo planes, bombers, and seaplanes, as well as the reconnaissance planes that lack armed firepower, and the old biplanes that are only suitable for spraying pesticides, there are at least 3,000 fighters of various types. Even though the current Japanese army has lost its unified command, there are still many pilots who are willing to spontaneously go to the sky with their enthusiasm to fight the enemy!

About an hour after the start of the air raids, from the already somewhat outdated Zero fighters, to Mitsubishi's "Venus" and "Thunderbolt" fighters, and Nakajima's Army Type 4 fighters "Hurricane", they all took off from the aircraft carriers and airfields that had not yet been destroyed, and launched an unprecedentedly fierce bloody battle with the attacking US naval aviation.

First of all, since most of the best aircraft are in the South Seas, the performance of most of Japan's fighters is generally one notch behind that of American fighters.

Secondly, because the Tokyo nuclear bombing came too suddenly, from top to bottom, they were not prepared for local operations at all, so at this time, the pilots who stayed on the mainland of the Japanese Empire, whether they belonged to the navy or the army, were also mostly novices, or drove transport planes, and even many were rookies who had not even graduated from flight school.

On the other hand, however, the Halsey Fleet, which was attacking across the ocean, was the essence of air warfare in the United States, and the ace pilots who had fought bloody battles with Japanese planes and Nazi German planes abounded: During World War II, 70 percent of the planes shot down in air battles around the world were shot down by ace pilots, although their number was only 5 percent. The actual combat experience, experience and tactics of these veterans cannot be replaced by anything. They know the strengths and weaknesses of various enemy aircraft, know how to approach, how to fire, how to escape.

Therefore, despite the fact that hundreds of Japanese pilots, with the enthusiasm of youth, rushed into the sky one after another to meet the formidable enemy. But in general, the interception of Japanese fighters was clearly not rationally organized, and the anti-aircraft fire was not tight enough and lacked discipline. The US naval air force continued to penetrate the interceptions of Japanese planes, and the ground of the harbor and the dense anti-aircraft fire of enemy ships dropped deadly torpedoes and bombs on the Japanese fleet in the harbor again and again.

All of a sudden, the sky was covered with colorful smoke balls, and the sea was like a forest of water, and the US and Japanese armies used all their strength to start a desperate struggle, with rain and fog, cannonballs shuttling, the sea roaring, and the sky thundering. The fire of the anti-aircraft guns on the ground and on the ships was as blazing as if a volcano had erupted, and the sailors operating the anti-aircraft guns had already lost their heads, as if fighting in a dream. But the planes of the US Naval Aviation are still stubbornly entangled.

The sailors on several Japanese battleships even fired the famous three-type incendiary shotgun with their main guns, in other words, it is a flowering bomb, which theoretically can explode countless burning fragments with a single shot, stick to the target and directly paste your face, and can clean up a piece of aircraft with a single shot -- the fighter formations of this era are different from modern fighters, and there is no need for the two fighters to be separated very far apart in order to avoid collisions. On the contrary, many of the older aircraft of the time did not even have radios. In order for the pilots to be able to see each other's gestures clearly and even hear each other's voices, when a dozen or dozens of planes are dispatched to fly in formation, they are usually crowded tightly. It will only disperse when it is time to fight. The killing range of a three-type incendiary shotgun is a spherical space with a diameter of about 300 meters, and theoretically only one shot can kill an enemy's flying squadron. At that time, an aircraft carrier only had three or four squadrons of carrier-based aircraft, and after a few shots were hit by the three-type shotgun, the aircraft carrier that released the fighters became an empty shell.

Unfortunately, with the hit rate of the main guns of the battleships during World War II, it was a bit difficult to get the first hit. And the enemy planes are not fools, seeing a three-way fired shotgun coming, the formation will be disbanded immediately. Therefore, unless there is a ship mother possessed and the power of faith is bonus, so that the three-type fired shotgun hits the target in the first round of bombardment, it is impossible to achieve the delusion of one cannon and one carrier-based aircraft formation. Moreover, firing this thing will seriously ablate the barrel, and it is still a source of danger when mounted on a large battleship, and its nature is very unstable, and it may explode at some point in a turbulent naval battle...... In short, in the face of the overwhelming array of US bombers, the Japanese fleet relied on the three-type shotgun that was used as the weapon of the final battle. It didn't have much effect.

Starting from the fifth attack wave of the US military, a large number of large aircraft such as B-17 and B-26 even appeared in the sky over Kure Harbor, and there were few new fighters left in the sky of the Japanese army......

In the face of the wanton and indiscriminate bombing by US planes, the deck of almost every large warship on the sea surface of Kure Harbor was slippery with blood, and there was no place where there were not shells and bloody corpses. Before the fallen sailors could get up, they were strafed by enemy planes. The damage management team members in those cabins below the waterline struggled desperately with the fountain of water until they were drowned. A considerable number of ships have faulty electrical wiring, and the pumps and steering gears cannot be activated, so the sailors have to use hand pumps and hydraulic steering gears to drain water and operate the warships, but the pumping machines are always far less than the speed at which seawater is poured in. In the end, if these ships could not rush to the beach and sink in time, then the result would still be doomed to capsize one after another in the light of fire and explosions.

-- When the Japanese Navy's Combined Fleet attacked Pearl Harbor that year, it only released two attack waves and fired 40 torpedoes. However, at this time, it was the turn of the US naval aviation of the Halsey fleet to attack Kure Harbor and Etajima, but it bombed from morning to afternoon almost without stopping, and released 16 attack waves in front and back!

A full 16 attack waves, at least 5,000 sorties of American fighters frantically attacked, so that the Japanese navy in Kure Harbor seemed to be in hell for a while.

At half past three o'clock in the afternoon, as the thick clouds gradually dissipated and the weather slowly cleared, the US naval aviation, which had been the last attack wave, finally withdrew one after another after dropping all the torpedoes and aerial bombs. The air raids, which were so long that they seemed to have no end in sight, finally came to an end, leaving only a burning harbor for the Japanese. The sea and land within a radius of more than ten kilometers were full of thick smoke, blazing fire, and explosions one after another.

Telephones were completely cut off, water and electricity were cut off, and even the power plant was blown up. Billowing smoke obscured the view, making it difficult to count the damage just by looking at it. The hateful U.S. Air Force also dropped a number of small timed steel ball bombs, which detonated one after another some time after the bombing ended, further killing and injuring Japanese rescue workers and forcing them back into bomb shelters.

Another hour passed, at half past four in the afternoon, the huge B-29 Super Flying Fortress finally arrived, numbering more than 200 planes, the silver-gray fuselage was simply obscuring the sky, but it seemed to disdain Kure Port and Etajima, which had been bombed into ruins, only symbolically dropped a little bomb, and went straight to the city of Hiroshima to the north, as if intending to trouble the Japanese army over there.

In this regard, after a whole day of devastating air raids, Principal Keno Kurita, who is now physically and mentally exhausted, had to fold his hands in the air-raid shelter and silently pray that the army there would be prepared in advance after receiving the early warning, and not be caught off guard like the navy and suffer heavy losses......

However, the Japanese Navy in Kure Port and Etajima, apparently, relaxed too soon. In the middle of the night, after the bombing of Hiroshima, a large number of B-29 Super Fortresses visited Kure Port and Etajima again. Because the ground and sea were still raging with fire, the US B-29 Super Fortress bomber did not even need to drop flares to carry out night navigation, and bombed the target again with great precision.

Hundreds of tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary bombs made this cradle of the Japanese Navy burn as bright as day in the night, as if it was the most brilliant, brilliant and grand abolition ceremony, as well as the most cruel and bloody farewell ceremony, symbolizing the withdrawal of the Etajima Naval Academy from the stage of history.

The fort was finally belated, numbering more than 200 planes, and its silver-gray fuselage was almost obscured, but it seemed to be dismissive of Kure Harbor and Etajima, which had been bombed into ruins, and only symbolically dropped a few bombs, and rushed straight to the city of Hiroshima to the north, as if intending to trouble the Japanese army there.

In this regard, after a whole day of devastating air raids, Principal Keno Kurita, who is now physically and mentally exhausted, had to fold his hands in the air-raid shelter and silently pray that the army there would be prepared in advance after receiving the early warning, and not be caught off guard like the navy and suffer heavy losses......

However, the Japanese Navy in Kure Port and Etajima, apparently, relaxed too soon. In the middle of the night, after the bombing of Hiroshima, a large number of B-29 Super Fortresses visited Kure Port and Etajima again. Because the ground and sea were still raging with fire, the US B-29 Super Fortress bomber did not even need to drop flares to carry out night navigation, and bombed the target again with great precision.

Hundreds of tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary bombs made this cradle of the Japanese Navy burn as bright as day in the night, as if it was the most brilliant, brilliant and grand abolition ceremony, as well as the most cruel and bloody farewell ceremony, symbolizing the withdrawal of the Etajima Naval Academy from the stage of history.