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each vessel’s nerve center where sailors worked silently in darkened compartments below. On the bridges or in sea cabins immediately adjacent to them stood the ship captains and task group commanders, tense and with furrowed brows anticipating—while dreading—those sudden emergencies that arise swiftly and require instant reaction. Throughout TF 38 hundreds of men perched high on the crow’s nests of masts swept the sea with binoculars, looking for those telltale tips of periscopes cutting through the water, and thus supplementing the electrical impulses of the radar or the pinging of the sonar sniffing out strangers submerged beneath the waves.
    Day after day as the carriers penetrated deeper and deeper into enemy waters, they were turned into the wind to launch planes, either for antisubmarine or defensive fighter patrols. As they were catapulted into the air, the destroyers on pilot-rescue duty churned closer to either side of the flattops. It was the “tin cans’ ” duty to rescue crashed pilots. Aboard these slender long “black-water ships,” always a thrilling sight with their sterns dug into the water and their prows high, sometimes even bouncing on the waves, throwing up huge plumes of white spray, the deck officers kept a worried eye on the carriers’ deck angle. If a flattop in a changing wind turned suddenly to keep it on its bow, the destroyer might ram the carrier. To prevent such disaster, deck officers—usually young and highly responsible sailors—were carefully screened and trained.
    Each carrier had a dual organization, its regular crew that sailed or fought the ship and its air group. The air group maintained and flew the planes: about eighty in the big Essex class twenty-seven-thousand-ton flattops, forty in the smaller Independence class, a carrier with flight decks mounted on a cruiser’s hull. With Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher in tactical command, TF 38’s airplanes—those peerless Curtiss Helldiver dive-bombers and Grumman Avenger torpedo planes, Grumman Hellcat fighter-bombers and fighters—would scourge Okinawa land and sea, especially the enemy island’s three operational airfields as well as the one on little Ie Island off Okinawa’s midwestern shore. All facilities—runways, barracks, warehouses, hangars, AA (antiaircraft) defenses, parked planes—would be blasted. Perhaps just as important, camera planes would take mosaic strip photographs of the island for map-makers back in Hawaii.
    Before dawn of October 10, 1944, while intelligence officers briefed air crews on Okinawa’s defenses, all seventeen of the flattops made ready for battle. Elevators brought planes topside to be stationed in rows on teakwood decks awaiting launch or takeoff. Below, armorers armed the planes with bombs, five-inch rockets, twenty-one-inch torpedoes, or belts of .50 caliber machine-gun ammunition. At dawn pilot-rescue destroyers took station. With an ear-piercing swooosh! bow catapults hurled aloft those planes that needed artificial momentum while others roared down the deck to become airborne themselves.
    Between daybreak and dusk the American airmen flew 1,396 sorties over Okinawa, dropping more than five hundred tons of bombs, destroying suicide submarines, flaming enemy fighters, sinking a tender, smaller ships, and the power-driven fishing boats in Naha harbor, while setting that city of sixty-five thousand persons ablaze. In all, ten transports and thirty merchant ships went to the bottom, along with half of the power-driven fishing boats and sixteen smaller warships—a serious loss of Okinawa’s patrol boats and trawlers assigned to supplying the island.
    Perhaps more serious were the attacks on Naha warehouses, where three hundred thousand sacks of rice—enough to feed the Thirty-second Army for a month—were burned, plus the loss of five million rounds of rifle and machine-gun ammunition, ten thousand rounds of light artillery and mortar shells, and four hundred rounds of 47 mm