The pilots we picked up reported that they had plenty of planes and pilots although none were A-1, but their trouble was the shortage of gas. Now that we have cut off their supply of gasoline the going should be easier for us in the future.
The Marines are still going through Okinawa Jima and even now the airfields are in use as the army fighters from Okinawa Jima escorted the Superforts over Japan and shot down 157 Japanese planes.
We refueled on the 9th of April and once more joined the fleet. That morning a can had a definite sub contact and dropped charges. There were two explosions underwater and some debris on the surface. The can thought she had only damaged the sub so late in the evening another sister can went with us out to the spot and circled around all night in hopes the sub would surface so we could polish her off. No luck however. So we joined the fleet the following morning.
We cruised around for several days near Okinawa Jima and one morning a sub fired several torpedoes at the ships with us. We patrolled the spot all day trying to establish a sub contact but had no luck. We joined the fleet that night. Since the invasion of Okinawa quite a few destroyers have been either sunk or damaged by suicide bombers. I wonder just when and where we will get ours as it seems as though we have just missed it so many times. We left the fleet when we refueled and headed in port with two other damaged ships. Our boilers were shot and needed repairs badly.
We only stayed in port for a few days and once more we were underway. This time we went out with the tankers and carried out mail for the fleet to the north of us. As luck would have it we spent 4 quiet uneventful days before meeting the fleet. We passed mail and then received orders to return to port once more. We were really glad to have a few more days in and arrived in port on April 30.
We remained in port until May 7 and went out on picket duty. After three day so firing at sleeves and drones we returned to port and took on supplies and provisions. We left port with the fleet on May 10th .
We had plenty of practice drills for the first couple days at sea, as we had quite a number of green recruits aboard and we were getting them ready for what was ahead. We had seen quite a few cans come n port seriously damaged by suicide planes and knew of many who could not return as they were at the bottom of Davy Jones’s Domain.
On May 12 we hit Kyushu which is the lower part of the Japanese mainland. That night we were sent out on a 12 mile picket with another destroyer and we had planes buzzing around all night. We fired several times but always drove the enemy away. The next day we rejoined the fleet and all day we saw large numbers of planes leave on air strikes. They were knocking everything out on Kyushu they could find. Then on the night of the 13th we received orders to go out on the "Suicide Patrol".
The suicide patrol was well named for more than one reason. First because the Japanese suicide pilots always hit the advance picket ships first and secondly it was almost suicide to go out there on this patrol. This suicide patrol is an advance patrol 50 miles from the remainder of the fleet and forward of it. All planes returning from air strikes have to come over the advance picket and the suicide planes had only to follow the planes of ours to find there target. We were on our battle stations practically all night. We would secure and right away they would sound the alarm again. Out of the entire night we had less than three hours away from our battle stations and this time was divided by 5 as we had 5 general quarters during the night.