On 11 March 1945 twenty-four Japanese twin-engine bombers took off from Kanoya on Kyushu on a one-way kamikaze mission against the US fleet anchorage at Ulithi Atoll, far to the south in the Caroline Islands. Engine trouble, bad weather and a navigation error thinned the formation, and only two aircraft reached Ulithi, after dark. One crashed into the carrier USS Randolph, killing some 25 or 26 men; the other hit an island. The carrier was repaired on the spot and was back in action off Okinawa within weeks.
A strike at the fleet's anchorage
By early 1945 Ulithi Atoll, in the western Carolines, was the main forward anchorage of the US Pacific Fleet, the place from which the fast carriers sailed against Iwo Jima and Japan itself. Bob Hackett and Sander Kingsepp, who reconstructed the raid from Japanese and American records, write that the lagoon could hold more than 1,000 large ships. The Japanese navy planned to catch the carriers at anchor there, far beyond the range of ordinary strikes.1
The plan, named Operation Tan No. 2, relied on the tactic first used in organized form at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944: pilots who deliberately crashed their aircraft into ships. According to Hackett and Kingsepp, Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki, commander of the Fifth Air Fleet, backed it, and a new unit, the Azusa Special Attack Unit, was formed for the mission.2
A ten-hour flight
On the morning of 11 March twenty-four Yokosuka P1Y Ginga bombers, known to the Allies as "Frances", took off from Kanoya, each carrying a single heavy bomb, as the Azusa Special Attack Unit. Hackett and Kingsepp add that flying boats guided them part of the way and that the submarine I-58 served as a radio beacon on the route, and that the distance was close to the limit of the bombers' range.3
The formation fell apart on the way. Pacific Wrecks counts five that turned back, twelve that ditched at sea and three that strayed to Yap, west of Ulithi, after a navigation error. Only two bombers reached the anchorage, well after nightfall, and both achieved complete surprise.4
USS Randolph is hit
No alert had been sounded and the ships were lit when the first bomber struck the Essex-class carrier USS Randolph on her starboard side aft, just below the flight deck, shortly after eight in the evening. Many of her crew were watching a film in the hangar deck, Hackett and Kingsepp write. The sources give different casualty figures: the Navy's Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships gives 25 killed and 106 wounded, while Hackett and Kingsepp and Pacific Wrecks give 26 killed and 105 wounded.5
The second bomber missed the fleet. Pacific Wrecks says it mistook Sorlen Island for a carrier and crashed into a warehouse there; Hackett and Kingsepp say it mistook the recreation island of Mog Mog for a carrier and came down on a lit baseball field. Only its crew died. According to Hackett and Kingsepp, ten of the bomber crewmen survived the whole operation, including the unit's leader, Lieutenant Naoto Kuromaru.6
A failed gamble
Randolph was repaired at Ulithi, rejoined the carrier task force in April and fought off Okinawa as flagship of Task Force 58. Hackett and Kingsepp write that the Japanese at first believed the raid had succeeded, until a reconnaissance flight the next day found the carriers still at anchor; they blamed the failure on unreliable engines and the extreme distance.7
The raid was one small part of a far larger campaign. Britannica writes that kamikaze attacks sank 34 ships and damaged hundreds of others during the war, and that off Okinawa they killed almost 5,000 US Navy men. That campaign is covered in our article on the Battle of Okinawa, and the war at sea in our guide to the greatest naval battles.8
Note: the casualty figures for USS Randolph and the place where the second bomber crashed differ between sources, and the text names the source for each.
