Oh, my God, this is it!
The Japanese suicide plane is zeroed in right at me as I stand transfixed on the deck of LST 605 just forward of the bridge. Seven kamikazes are attacking three LSTs waiting their turn to hit thMindoro Island beach.
LST 472 is ahead of us. A suicide plane plunges into its deck, sets it ablaze and sinks it.
LST 738 is astern. Another suicide plane crashes into her. LST 738 sinks.
Now it’s our turn.
The veteran gunners of the 605 pour fire into the diving plane. The PT boats surrounding us send up a withering wall of forty- and twenty-millimeter and fifty-caliber machine gun fire.
The plane is about to hit. Knowing I am near death, I stand paralyzed with fear. Too numb to even pray.
At the last second, the sheer weight of the anti-aircraft barrage flips the plane over, and it plunges into the sea just off the port side with a tremendous explosion that almost lifts the 328-foot, 4,000-ton ship out of the water.
Imagine being on the eightieth floor of World Trade Center Tower I the morning of September 11, 2001, looking out the window and seeing a twin-engine jet passenger plane coming at you on a collision course. Feel the horror of knowing your life is about to be snuffed out in a horrendous, fiery crash. Know you are going to die a horrible, painful death. Then jump back fifty-seven years to the invasion of Mindoro Island in the Philippines and join me on the deck of LST 605 as she is about to be demolished by a Japanese suicide plane.
Now realize you are the luckiest person on earth, saved from a crushing, flaming death 10,000 miles away from your beloved wife and seven-month-old son.
Rewind.
The Mindoro invasion armada lands 10,000 army troops and supplies on the morning of December 15 and as rapidly as possible pulls off the beach and returns to the relative safety of Leyte Island, 300 miles to the southeast where the invasion begins. All the troop transports and protective cruisers and destroyers disappear over the horizon. All but one—LST 605.
The moment the 605 slides up on the beach after her narrow escape and opens her bow doors, its 150 Navy passengers making up the base force of Motor Torpedo Boat Task Unit 70.1.4 trample over each other in a mad dash ashore to get as far away from the beached ship as possible.
I have to organize a crew to unload the ship and let it return to Leyte, but I have no one to organize. All day long the ship’s exhausted crew works to remove 2,100 tons of cargo. All night the crew labors on. The next morning, still not completely unloaded, LST 605 is a lonely, sitting duck.
I post two seamen to guard the supply dump on the beach, jump into a jeep and drive off to select a site for our base camp. Seconds later I hear the roar of an enemy aircraft, look back and see a twin-engine “Sally” try to fly into the 605’s bow doors. Under heavy fire from the ship, the bomber crashes about fifty yards short of its target into a pile of fifty-five-gallon aviation gasoline drums, sending a sheet of flame over the ship’s bow, incinerating several crewmen manning the twenty-millimeter cannons. Thirty seconds ago I was standing with the two seamen—thirty seconds separate me from another appointment with death. As the “Sally” roars in, both seamen flop onto their bellies in the sand. A sheet of steel flies out of the cauldron of fire and scoops out the underbelly of Seaman Fuellhart. When Seaman Genaro sees the mutilated corpse of his buddy, he flips. Physically unscathed, Genaro is traumatized. When I see him several days later his black hair is snow white. One reads about such events in fiction and scoffs, but Genaro's hair is white as snow.
The 605 finally empties her belly, slides off the beach and gets underway. Her crew has little respect for the 150-man base force of MTB Task Unit 70.1.4.
Recently, I search the Internet in vain for a 605 survivor, so I can apologize to its seven officers and 200 enlisted men for the rotten, cowardly way we behave December 15, 1944.
LST 605’s crew was battle tested. I can hear them screaming at the U.S.S Nashville to “for God’s sake shoot!” as a suicide plane smashes into the invasion fleet’s flagship on December 13 en route to Mindoro. The Nashville doesn’t fire a shot. The kamikaze and its two 500-pound bombs disable the light cruiser, killing 133 and wounding 199.
The tragic event foreshadows daily kamikaze attacks—the heaviest Japanese aerial counteroffensive of the war to that point. Not one ship in the second supply convoy to Mindoro gets through wave after wave of unremitting suicide plane attacks.
Our task unit of twenty-six PT boats suffers one-third casualties and wins a Navy Unit Commendation. I’ve got ribbons with battle stars and nightmares for several years after World War II. We lose one boat to a suicide plane and two boats to “friendly” fire from our destroyers who mistake seventy-eight-foot-long PT boats for twelve-foot Japanese suicide boats used to ram our ships at Luzon with TNT-loaded bows.
My good friend Mike Haughian catches a “friendly” destroyer’s five-inch shell in the chest. We even the score by shooting down a Marine Corsair that makes the mistake of flying over Mangarin Bay immediately after a suicide plane lands on one of our boats. Our PTs shoot at anything that flies, including U. S. Navy PBY flying boats.
Even today I hate the sound of a loud, single-engine aircraft. It reminds me of the nightly visits of “Putt-putt Charley” and the eerie whooooshing sound of a “daisy-cutter” anti-personnel bomb dropping on a nearby random target and mowing down any object or person stupid enough to be standing up within two hundred yards.
As terrified as I am during daily attacks, nothing frightens me more during the Mindoro campaign than the certainty of death, as I stand petrified and trembling on the deck of LST 605 the morning of December 15, 1944.
