On May 6, 1945, a twin-engine kamikaze plane’s bomb exploded beside the destroyer Luce, part of the radar picket ship screen surrounding Okinawa, and ripped her starboard side “like a sardine can.” Flames shot 200 feet high. A minute later, a kamikaze fighter slammed into Luce’s 5-inch stern port guns, and their magazine erupted in a fireball. Luce went down five minutes later with 149 men lost. In the water, sharks hit men “left and right, just tearing them up,” said radioman Tom Matisak, who saw them rip into the ship’s barber. “It was an awful, bloody mess as they chopped him up and pulled him under.”
For three months in 1945, this was an all-too-common occurrence in the seas off Okinawa, where 10 mass kamikaze attacks, each with hundreds of suicide planes, struck the U.S. Fifth Fleet. The attacks did not alter the course of the Pacific war, but the death toll of more than 4,900 Navy crewmen increased the misgivings of some members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff about invading Japan.
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