98 Year Old Navy Veteran Describes Surviving a Kamikaze Attack
Hell from the Sun: A 98-Year-Old Veteran’s Unforgettable Account of Surviving Five Kamikaze Attacks
The sky turned into a nightmare on the morning of April 6, 1945. A young gunner’s mate, just twenty-three years old, stood at his station on the USS Newcomb, patrolling the dangerous waters off Okinawa. Suddenly, a Japanese Zero emerged from the blinding glare of the sun, aiming directly for the bridge. This wasn’t just a battle; it was a desperate, one-way collision course.
In the span of forty chaotic minutes, the ship was struck by five separate kamikaze aircraft. The veteran recounts the horror of seeing men on fire, the deck shaking under the force of repeated impacts, and the sheer impossibility of surviving such a relentless onslaught. Forty men did not make it home that day. Now, at ninety-eight years old, he shares the visceral, haunting memory of that day, describing a level of combat that no training manual could ever prepare a sailor for.
This is a story of resilience against a cold, calculated strategy designed to ignore all human limits. It is a firsthand account of the largest coordinated suicide attack of the entire war. If you think you know the history of the Pacific War, you need to read this harrowing, eye-witness testimony. Experience the true cost of duty and the unimaginable bravery of the sailors who held the line against the kamikaze tide by checking out the full article in the comments below.
On the morning of April 6, 1945, the USS Newcomb—a Fletcher-class destroyer—was stationed at Radar Picket Station 10, some fifty miles northwest of Okinawa. It was a lonely, exposed position, serving as the outermost tripwire for the American fleet. The twenty-three-year-old gunner’s mate, now ninety-eight, remembers the day with a clarity that defies the passage of nearly eight decades. He was at his post on the 40mm mount, the weapon he had been trained on for months, watching the horizon. Then, the plane appeared.
It did not come from a typical dive-bombing angle. It came directly out of the sun, a tactic meticulously designed to blind the anti-aircraft gunners during the critical ten seconds they had to react. At 350 miles per hour, the Japanese Zero was a streak of light and death. The gunner managed only forty rounds before the plane slammed into the bridge of his ship. What followed was a forty-minute descent into hell as four more aircraft struck the Newcomb, leaving a trail of fire and devastation that would claim the lives of forty of his shipmates.
The Logic of the Suicide Corps
To understand the sheer terror of that morning, one must look at the cold, tactical desperation of the Japanese high command. By 1945, Japan was losing the air war. American pilots were superior in training and equipment, and the massive U.S. industrial machine was replacing lost ships and planes faster than the Imperial Japanese Navy could counter. Conventional air attacks—standard dive-bombing or torpedo runs—faced high attrition rates with low chances of hitting the target.
The kamikaze program, or the “Special Attack Corps,” changed the fundamental equation of warfare. By removing the survival variable from the pilot’s mission, the Japanese eliminated the need for an escape maneuver. They could approach from suicidal angles, fly through heavy flak that would cause a conventional pilot to break off, and focus entirely on the point of impact. For the young sailor on the Newcomb, this meant he wasn’t just fighting an enemy pilot; he was fighting a human missile.
The Thin Steel Reality of the Tin Can
Destroyers like the USS Newcomb were known in the fleet as “tin cans.” At 376 feet long and displacing 2,000 tons, they were the workhorses of the Navy, fast and maneuverable, but their hulls were made of thin steel. A near miss could dent them, and a direct hit could—and did—threaten to split them open. The men who served on them lived with the constant, unspoken knowledge of this fragility.
The veteran recalls that when they arrived off Okinawa, he had developed a certain confidence—not a delusion of safety, but the grounded professional belief that he knew how to perform his duty. But the kamikaze attacks broke the rules of that expertise. There was no maneuvering away from an enemy who refused to miss. When the explosions knocked him off his mount and across the deck, hitting the splinter shield, the reality of the “tin can” life became visceral. He woke up to fire on the bridge, fire on the water, and the sound of men struggling to survive.
April 6: The Largest Coordinated Assault
What the crew of the Newcomb did not realize until later was the scale of the threat. April 6, 1945, marked the beginning of Operation Kikusui (Floating Chrysanthemum) Number One. The Japanese had launched 355 kamikaze aircraft and 341 conventional attackers simultaneously. It was the largest coordinated suicide attack of the entire war. The picket ships were the primary targets, and the Newcomb bore the brunt of the onslaught.
For the veteran, the survival of the Newcomb remains a miracle, credited to the sheer grit of the crew and the timely assistance of another destroyer that pulled alongside to help fight the fires. They did things that day that no training manual could describe, improvising in the face of absolute destruction.
A Legacy of Remembrance
Reflecting on his experience today, the veteran doesn’t speak with the bravado of a hero, but with the quiet gravity of a survivor. He has counted the forty men who died on his ship every single April 6th for seventy-eight years. He speaks not just for himself, but for the history of the “tin can” sailors, the men who manned the most dangerous stations in the Pacific.
His story is a reminder of the fragility of human life and the extreme demands placed on young men in a situation where they are tasked to hold the line against an enemy that has abandoned the survival instinct. The kamikaze attacks were a horrific chapter of the Pacific War, a desperate, fanatic response to a conflict that had already been decided by the overwhelming weight of American production and training. But for the men on the picket line, the strategic context mattered less than the ten seconds they had to stop the plane coming out of the sun. The account of the Newcomb is a testament to those ten seconds, the weight of the men lost, and the enduring burden of the history that lived on long after the fires were extinguished.
