Customer Reviews

KAMIKAZES, CORSAIRS, AND PICKET SHIPS: Okinawa 1945

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

There seems to be a spate of kamikaze-themed books lately; witness AT WAR WITH THE WIND, DANGER'S HOUR and INFERNO. The latest 'Bodycrasher' entry is this well-researched, well-written account of the 'small boys' - the DDs, DEs, LSMs and misc. craft - who served as radar pickets off Okinawa in the spring and summer of 1945. Serving as the first line of defense for the American troops and naval ships besieging Okinawa, the picket ships fought off horrific attacks from Japanese aircraft.

Since the fall of Okinawa was seen as a precursor for an invasion of Japan, the Japanese military determined to eradicate the American invaders using the only effective weapon they had left - airpower. Yet the Bettys, Zeros, Tonys, Kates and other aircraft that soon swarmed towards Okinawa from Japan and Formosa were on one-way trips, determined to body-crash into USN ships. Though carriers and battleships were the preferred target, the radar pickets ievitably drew the bulk of the attackers. And, although American planners assumed attacks would come, they seriously underestimated the scale of those attacks and made other errors that resulted in the radar pickets being swamped by waves of kamikazes. Hundreds of Japanese aircraft were splashed but 29% of the radar pickets were sunk or damaged by the time the attacks ended in July/August.

Author Robin Reilly does a marvelous job of retelling the ordeal the radar pickets underwent. After chapters explaining the nature of picket duty, the navy ships assigned to that duty, the aerial adversaries that would clash over the radar pickets, Japanese tacics and so on, he chronicles the attacks that begun on 1 April 1945. Along with relating the frenzied attacks that pitted a variety of IJAF and IJN aircraft against the radar pickets and their USN/USMC/USAAF protectors, Reilly also points out the various mistakes American brass made that inadvertently aided the suiciders.

Putting the reader right in the middle of the seemingly endless attacks, Reilly interweaves the air and surface actions into a seamless, gripping whole. Often the attacks were followed by equally desperate attempts by USN crews to save their badly battered craft and here too Reilly effectively captures the drama. The book is illustrated with dozens of photos of U.S. and Japanese sailors and airmen, ships and aircraft along with maps and damage diagrams.

KAMIKAZES, CORSAIRS AND PICKET SHIPS is, at once, a gripping history of some horrendous air/sea battles and a tribute to the American sailors and airmen who were determined to persevere. And it's a great read to boot. Highly recommended.

This is the story of the valiant men that served as radar picket ships to warn the main US fleet of the approach of Japanese (often Kamikaze) aircraft. As these ships were generally small, isolated, and the first thing that the Japanese attackers saw, they often took the brunt of the attacks.

Rielly has picked what seems to be a relatively important, under-reported-upon topic. However, the telling is difficult (and the reading a bit tedious) due to two reasons.

First, there's no overall narrative to the underlying events (as there might be, to, say, the story of a battle) other than "somebody decided radar picket ships were a good idea. radar picket ships were put into place and over the course of their deployment the tactics and thinking changed slightly, but more or less what happened was that they got damaged and sunk a whole lot. then the war ended." So, taken as a whole, for most even pretty serious readers the book comes across as a general description of a phenomenon rather than the narration of a story. Rielly did what he could here and so I don't fault him as this might actually be the only way to tell this story, but this reality does no favors to the reader.

Second, it seems fairly clear that Rielly was doing his best but was working from a limited set of references. Since I don't have the book in front of me at the moment this is an educated guess, but basically I suspect much of middle of the book to basically be annotated after action reports. The problem with this is that both objectivity and "narrative effect" suffer. The author truly has done yeoman's work in getting the timetable right and fusing so many after action reports into, despite my previous paragraph, the closest thing to a narrative that could be hoped for. Unfortunately, he's not very good on technical details (much of the text dealing with aircraft operations - such as incredibly naive comparisons of aircraft speeds and altitudes - is one-star-worthy poor) and not much better in describing human interactions and feelings. After reading this book, I feel I have only a slightly better understanding of what being on those ships was actually like.

As you might have guessed by this point, the style of the book is fairly dry and analytical. And, to this end, the first few chapters (maybe it's just the first one - sorry again for not having it here) really shine and are worth the price of admission. I got 95% of the benefit from the first overview chapters and found the middle "action" stuff a very tough, repetitive slog especially since it seemed that the after action reports, doubtlessly filled with over-claims and the like, seemed to largely be taken at face value. The author did a commendable job with what few relatively few English-language sources there are on the Japanese side of thing (such as coaxing a few relevant remarks from Ugaki's diary), but a better analysis of the Japanese side, difficult as that would have been, would have been very useful.

I vacillated between giving this three and four stars and finally settled on four since many of the "flaws" are fundamentally traceable to the fact that it' a very hard topic to research and tell and at the end of the day despite the prose bizarrely dropping into colloquialisms here and there, the author has done his best to keep the work well organized, scholarly and professional, which puts it well above the dewy-eyed nonsense that passes for "history" simply because it is published in a too flattering hardback edition for the local big box book store. No, "Kamikazes, Corsairs, and Picket Ships" is better than that, and is a valuable if imperfect addition to the serious student's library.

A very detailed book about the extremely hazardous duty endured by the various picket ships during the battle for Okinawa. Virtually every attack made on the picket ships is covered and there are many excellent drawings and photographs of the effects of Japanese attacks. I wish there had been more personal stories and reports, but that didn't seem to be the author's intent. If you love reading about tin cans or know someone who was a tin can sailor, this is the book for you.

During the invasion of Okinawa (Operation Iceberg), from 1st April through 22 June, 1945, the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy Air Forces launched some 10 Kikusui or Kamikaze missions against the American fleet off the Ryukyu Islands, heavily damaging amongst others, the fleet carriers Intrepid (CV11), Bunker Hill (CV17) and the venerable Enterprise (CV6), putting them and many other ships out of the war. However, the brunt of the suicide attacks were put against the radar picket ships, a naval cordon around the island made to protect the invasion fleet and the land forces.
The action in these RP (Radar Picket) ships in their 18 stations since 26 March until the VJ-Day, on 13 August, 1945, is described on a day-by-day and ship-by-ship basis, in their heroic and brave stand to shield and protect the huge invasion armada. In this defense they counted with the help of the US Navy/Marine and AAF air squadrons, based on Ie Shima Island and Iontan and Kadena airfields on Okinawa. And the butcher's bill was heavy: 15 US ships sunk, 50 damaged, with some 3.000 casualties. It was but one of the most ferocious and protracted air/naval battles of the Pacific War. Fortunately, it also proved to be the last one.

KAMIKAZES, CORSAIRS, AND PICKET SHIPS is a very detailed report of the activity surrounding Okinawa during the American invasion. The research was meticulous. The book was not necessarily a "fun read" but makes an excellent resource book.

The first reviewer said it all! A great book and a must read for any WWII naval history collector. If you are a descendant of any man who served on one of these ships or flew a plane during this particular campaign you must read this book!

Rielly's book opens with a general description of the strategic situation and a slightly more detailed look at the equipment available to both the Americans and the Japanese. Some of it is a bit surprising. For instance, the Hellcat was more effective against the Japanese aircraft than the Corsair. The Corsair was slightly faster but it's very speed made it less maneuverable and therefore less useful against the slower and lighter Japanese airplanes. And the destroyer types that were used as pickets had a natural tendency to go to flank speed and maneuver radically when attacked by suicidal aircraft, but a slower speed and fewer tight turns would probably have worked as a better defense because the ship's gunnery would have been less likely to be thrown off, and, after all, a less pronounced wake draws less attention to the ship's presence. It's always interesting when hindsight tells us things that contradict common sense.

Some of the analytic material is repeated, along with some newer insights, in the conclusion. I'll briefly sum up the five points Rielly lists as contributing to the American's losses at the picket stations.

1. The Nature of the Kamikaze Attacks. Previous attacks had used only small numbers of Kamikazes. No one was expecting the hundreds that appeared during the invasion of Okinawa.

2. Improper Use of Support Gunboats. Three or four smaller vessels were attached to the two or three destroyer types at each picket station. The destroyer captains didn't want their ships to be hampered by the presence of support vessels during maneuvers, so the support vessels took up stations too far away to be of help in bringing down enemy aircraft.

3. Assignment of Ships Ill-Suited to the Task. The most effective weapon against suicide attacks, aside from the combat air patrol, was the 40 mm. cannon in multiple mounts. The five-inch guns were too slow and many lacked proximity fuzes. As one swab put it, you could smoke a cigarette between rounds. Most ships also carried 20 mm. cannons in single mounts but their effectiveness was limited by range and impact. Destroyers themselves -- that is, DDs -- carried a useful variety of armament, but modified destroyers, like fast minesweepers, with reduced armament were also deployed. Destroyer escorts were even slower and less adequately armed. Worst of all were the LSM(R)s, slow and inadequately armed landing ships modified to carry rockets for use during amphibious landings.

4. Failure to Establish Land-Based Radar at the Earliest Possible Time. Had radar been established early on some of the islands neighboring Okinawa, there would have been less need for ships on picket duty and fewer casualties.

5. Crew Fatigue. Kamikaze attacks were swift and confusing. Often American airplanes were mistaken for unidentified aircraft and the crew sent repeatedly to general quarters for no reason. Gun crews sometimes resorted to sleeping at their stations. The constant tension detracted from maximum effectiveness.

The bulk of the book is thoroughly researched. I doubt that many historians will feel a driving need to get more deeply into the many incidents described in this text, unless they're doing a Master's thesis or something. The problem is that the descriptions, mostly devoid of any individual perspective, soon become repetitive and eventually dull. I was reminded of Samuel Eliot Morrison's volume on submarine warfare in his all-encompassing official history. The details vary but, in the end, one submarine attack begins to look like all the other submarine attacks. The heaviness is compounded here by the author's unavoidable use of abbreviations for dozens of different military units and stations, from the fifteen or so picket stations to the dozens of combat air patrols. The information itself is all there in glorious detail but sometimes I could have used less of it.

It's all rather formal. There are a few quotes from participants in the battle but most are taken directly from combat reports, which are also rather formal. If you want an exhaustive account of these events, this is the book for you. But it's not gripping because the perspective is that of the objective analyst and not that of the Steward's Mate who was a loader on mount number two. If the book were an organism, it would have brains but no glands.

I am very interested in destroyers and smaller ships that fought in WWII. This book gives thorough and yes, somewhat hard to read coverage of the battle between destroyers, landing craft modified as gunboats, other less modified landing craft (rocket launcher boats with limited anti-aircraft armament) and small gun boats as they battled the kamikaze, bomber and torpedo aircraft. Also included was the coordination between the ships and the US combat air patrol aircraft.

The nature of the battles makes the narrative somewhat repetitious and thus hard to read because day after day (for months), the battles were similar. If the reader thinks the overall battle will never end, imagine what it felt like to the sailors who had to face a determined enemy combined with somewhat ineffective US defensive methods while fighting the constant fatigue and lack of sleep while on station.


There is one major flaw. I wonder that I must have missed the all important map that shows the picket stations around Okinawa. It is all important because the whole book is about picket duty including the relationship of picket stations to enemy territory. I carefully turned every page at least 4 times looking for the map with no luck. I know the picket station map exists because I have it in two other books in my library and it was almost a necessity to refer to it while reading this book. There are area maps, maps of Japanese air bases, landing beaches on Okinawa and even a map of the air operations reference points. But there is no picket station map. I still feel like my book must be missing a page!

Very informative with all the details of a great battle. I am an avid WWII buff and have 100's of books on the subject and can say this is one of the best.

KAMIKAZES, CORSAIRS, AND PICKET SHIPS: OKINAWA, 1945
ROBIN L. RIELLY
CASEMATE PUBLISHING, 2010
QUALITY SOFTCOVER, $19.95, 435 PAGES, PHOTOGRAPHS, CHARTS, MAPS, BIBLIOGRAPHY, APPENDICES, NOTES


On April 1, 1945, Easter Sunday, the last major battle of World War II began. This was the American invasion of the island of Okinawa, one of the smaller islands that were considered part of the Japanese Home Islands. Actually, it wasn't, as Okinawa had maintained itself as an independent kingdom until the 1870s when the Japanese forcibly annexed it. Okinawa had a population of 500,000 at the time of the invasion, plus a garrison of 110,000 troops. The U.S. force was 287,000 strong, of which over 60% were combat troops in four U.S. Army infantry and three U.S. Marine divisions. The Japanese had learned from earlier island battles, that it wasn't wise to resist on the beaches where U.S. warships could deliver devastating firepower at point-blank range. Better to build defenses inland, where Japanese troops could do their usual "fight to the death" tactic to maximum effect. So it was on Okinawa. While the ground battle has been covered in numerous books and magazine articles, the subsequent air battle hasn't received the attention it rightly deserves. It was on 6 April 1945 that the first major kamikaze attack was launched. Only 24 of 355 suicide aircraft got through, but they caused substantial damage. So much antiaircraft fire was put out, that eight U.S. ships were damaged by friendly fire. On 7 April, a Japanese task force was intercepted by 900 U.S. aircraft before it could reach Okinawa. Japan's largest battleship, the 72,000-ton Yamato was sunk, along with a cruiser and four destroyers. The Japanese also lost 54 escorting aircraft. while the U.S. lost only 10. Throughout May, 1945, Japanese air attacks on U.S. ships off Okinawa continued, with over 1,100 Japanese aircraft destroyed. On 5 May, the Japanese air attacks had their greatest success, sinking 17 U.S. ships in 24 hours. The Japanese lost 131 aircraft in this effort. The kamikaze tactics, first used six months earlier in the Philippines, were employed to maximum effect off Okinawa. Nearby airfields in Japan, as well as the supply of planes and pilots, also made it possible to use non-suicide aircraft attacks. Despite the hundreds of U.S. carrier aircraft available, the Japanese did a large amount of damage to U.S. shipping. About 4,200 Japanese aircraft (1,900 of them kamikaze), went after the U.S. fleet sinking 36 ships (all but two by kamikaze) and damaging 368 (only 164 by kamikaze). Overall, the Japanese lost a total of 7,830 aircraft during the Okinawa campaign versus the U.S. losses of about 800 aircraft. Further, the Japanese lost at least 180 ships, from small subchasers and transports up to major warships during this same campaign. On 22 June 1945, the battle for Okinawa was declared officially over. The U.S. Navy suffered its greatest number of casualties (about 10,000) during this campaign, thus making it the bloodiest campaign in the Pacific. The high casualty rate sustained by both ground and naval forces was a major factor in the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan. KAMIKAZES, CORSAIRS, AND PICKET SHIPS: OKINAWA, 1945 is a detailed and well-researched account of this unknown and barely touched upon segment of the Okinawa campaign. It has personal accounts as well as charts, photographs, and maps that will help the reader understand this overlooked part of the Okinawa campaign.


Lt. Colonel Robert A. Lynn, Florida Guard
Orlando, Florida