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into the hangar deck below.
    In Ready Room 4, on the gallery deck beneath where the kamikaze first struck, death came instantly for thirty-two sailors, most ofthem radarmen waiting to start their duty shift. On the flame-filled hangar deck, armed and fueled airplanes were exploding. Firefighting crews rushed to the scene of the worst conflagration. The ship’s fire marshal, Lt. Don DiMarzo, reported to the captain that the damage was bad, but he would get it under control.
    And he might have if it hadn’t been for what happened three minutes later.
    T he pilot’s name was Kohichi Nunoda. Even at this low altitude, less than a hundred feet off the water, Nunoda had no trouble spotting his target. A thick column of black smoke was rising from the enemy carrier’s flight deck where it had been crashed into minutes earlier by Nunoda’s squadronmate Suehiro Ikeda.
    Today was the most concentrated
tokko
raid to date—125 dedicated pilots plus their accompanying reconnaissance and fighter escorts. Not since the Leyte Gulf battle a month earlier had so many Japanese warplanes been launched against the U.S. fleet.
    As the ship swelled in his windshield, Nunoda hauled the nose of the Zero into a steep climb, rolled up on a wing, judged his dive angle, then plunged downward. He aimed for the middle of the flight deck, which was already ablaze from Ikeda’s attack.
    Nunoda was taking no chances that his mission might fail. With the deck of the carrier rising to meet him, he released his bomb. Then he opened fire with his 20-millimeter cannons. Nunoda’s guns were still firing when his Zero crashed into the ship.
    The devastation was immediate and spectacular. The bomb drilled straight through
Intrepid
’s wooden flight deck. It ricocheted off the armored base of the hangar deck, then hurtled forward to explode where the firefighters were still battling the blaze from the first kamikaze.
    Lieutenant DiMarzo and his firefighters were blown away like chaff. Nearly every airplane on the hangar deck burst into flame. Secondary explosions from airplane ordnance turned the cavernous hangar bay into a maelstrom of fire and shrapnel.
    The worst killer was the smoke. It gushed into passageways and filled compartments, trapping men on the shattered gallery deck with no route of escape. The smoke billowed into the sky through the open holes in the flight deck. Firefighting crews manned hoses on the open deck, trying to keep the flames from spreading to more airplanes and ammunition stores. The debris of the wrecked Zero—the second kamikaze—still smoldered on the forward deck. In the wreckage someone discovered the mostly intact body of the pilot, Kohichi Nunoda. His remains were given an unceremonious burial at sea.
    The second kamikaze strike jammed the ship’s sky-search radar. Sailors were drafted as lookouts, their eyeballs serving as
Intrepid
’s primary warning system. The towering column of smoke was a beacon for more kamikazes. “For God’s sake,” said a gunnery officer, “are we the only ship in the ocean?”
    They weren’t. The massed wave of
tokko
aircraft had fanned out to other targets. At 1254, another pair of Zeroes dove on the light carrier
Cabot
. The first crashed into the forward flight deck among a pack of launching airplanes. Less than a minute later, a second Zero attacked from nearly straight ahead. At the last second, the gunners put enough rounds into the plane that the Zero veered off course and crashed into the port side at the waterline. Still, the intense shower of flame and debris wiped out the gun crews on
Cabot
’s exposed port rail. By the time the flames were extinguished, the toll of
Cabot
’s dead and missing, mostly men of the gun crews, had swelled to thirty-five, with another seventeen seriously injured.
    While
Intrepid
and
Cabot
were fighting their fires, yet another carrier in the same task group, USS
Essex
, was under siege. At 1256, an Asahi D4Y “Judy” dive-bomber, a sleeker