2nd time around.....I had already typed this up, but explorer crashed and I had to re-type this. This time around, I typed this up in Notepad, saving it every couple minutes....
I was thinking about this topic, and since my grandfather was almost killed by a suicide japanese pilot during WW2, I wanted find and look through a book that my grandfather had given me so I didn't get anything wrong. The book is about the story of a ship my grandfather served on during WW2. The author of the book was the ship's commanding officer. The ship was the USS England, a destroyer escort. What is amazing about this ship is that it sank six Japanese submarines in twelve days, more than any other US ship.
On 9 May 1945, while patrolling northwest of Okinawa, the group of ships came under attack by Japanese fighters/light bombers, and the ship went to general quarters. My grandfather, who was one of several radio operators, went to his battle station to help with the ammuntion, or something like that. During the attack, a damaged Japanese Val flew into the ship, above mid deck, and killing 37 sailors, and wounding 40 others.
It isn't clear if the aircraft was originally a kamikaze or if it was simply trying to bomb them and the pilot decided to crash into the ship because of the damages his aircraft had sustained. But whatever the case was, he was scuicidal at the end....
The Japanese aircraft destroyed the radio/communications compartment on the ship, killing every radio operator on the ship, that is, all except my grandfather. I don't know why my grandfather was the only radio operator who was assigned a battle station away from the radios, and it's terrible that the other operators, and his friends were killed, but I am glad he survived.
As a result of being hit by the Japanese aircraft on May 9 1945, the USS England was taken out of the war.
Here's a link to the book on Amazon.
Antisubmarine Warrior in the Pacific : Six Subs Sunk in Twelve Days
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