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A Japanese bomber belly-landed on the main runway at Yontan Airfield, Okinawa, on the night of May 24, 1945. It stopped a hundred meters from the control tower. Ten commandos climbed out carrying submachine guns and satchel charges.
First Lieutenant Maynard Kelley — a twenty-two-year-old night fighter pilot pulling tower duty — grabbed his revolver, got in a jeep, and drove toward them alone.
There was no infantry on Yontan that night. The men on the field were mechanics, armorers, and radar technicians. None of them had trained for a ground fight. Within minutes, they were in one — surrounded by their own burning aircraft and seventy thousand gallons of ignited fuel.
This is the story of the night Yontan burned — told through the men who were standing on it.
🔔 Subscribe for more untold WW2 stories: https://www.youtube.com/@WWII-Records
👍 Like this video if you learned something new
💬 What would you have done on that airfield with no weapon? Tell us in the comments.
#worldwar2 #ww2history #ww2 #wwii #ww2records
First Lieutenant Maynard Kelley — a twenty-two-year-old night fighter pilot pulling tower duty — grabbed his revolver, got in a jeep, and drove toward them alone.
There was no infantry on Yontan that night. The men on the field were mechanics, armorers, and radar technicians. None of them had trained for a ground fight. Within minutes, they were in one — surrounded by their own burning aircraft and seventy thousand gallons of ignited fuel.
This is the story of the night Yontan burned — told through the men who were standing on it.
🔔 Subscribe for more untold WW2 stories: https://www.youtube.com/@WWII-Records
👍 Like this video if you learned something new
💬 What would you have done on that airfield with no weapon? Tell us in the comments.
#worldwar2 #ww2history #ww2 #wwii #ww2records
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LearningTranscript
00:00Staff Sergeant Robert Dietrich tracked anti-aircraft tracers from the control tower at Yonten Airfield at 2100 on May 24th,
00:081945.
00:09Below him, three runways held more than 150 aircraft, Corsairs, Hellcats, Privateer Patrol Bombers, C-47 transports.
00:2070,000 gallons of aviation fuel filled the dumps along the taxiways,
00:23and 12 Japanese bombers packed with 136 suicide commandos were already airborne.
00:30Four hours north, heading straight for this field.
00:33Dietrich was 28, from Cincinnati, a tower operator with Marine Aircraft Group 31.
00:39He had worked Yonten since April 7th, the day MAG-31 flew 80 Corsairs ashore from the escort carriers Sitco
00:46Bay and Breton.
00:47In seven weeks, the airfield had grown into the busiest base on the island.
00:52Marine and Army Air Force squadrons flew around the clock.
00:56Day fighters hunted kamikazes over the radar picket line.
00:59Night fighters ran intercepts after dark.
01:02Ground crews rearmed and refueled planes through the night to get them airborne again by dawn.
01:07First Lieutenant Maynard Kelly worked the radio beside him, 22 years old.
01:11A night fighter pilot with VMF N-533, Black Max Killers, under Lieutenant Colonel Marion Magruder.
01:19Kelly had earned his wings in 1943 and shipped overseas with Magruder's unit.
01:24On Okinawa, he had flown only a few combat missions since arriving three weeks earlier.
01:29Tonight, he had the duty watch.
01:31A third Marine worked alongside them.
01:34Together, the three of them could see all three runways and the full sweep of the field.
01:39Dietrich knew what Yonten meant to the fleet.
01:41Every morning, Corsairs rolled out and climbed toward the picket stations where Navy destroyers waited for the next kamikaze wave.
01:48Fighters from this field intercepted nearly 60% of the suicide aircraft before they reached the ships.
01:54If Yonten went dark, even for a day, the kamikazes would get through.
01:59For weeks, Japanese bombers had hit the airfield almost every night.
02:03The pattern never changed.
02:06Aircraft at high altitude, bombs across the field, the guns of the first provisional anti-aircraft artillery group answering with
02:14walls of tracers.
02:15The men on the ground knew the rhythm.
02:18Tonight followed the same script.
02:19Just after 20-hundred, bombers appeared over Yonten and neighboring Iyashima, high and fast.
02:26Between 21-10 and 22-05, two runs came through.
02:30Their bombs hit nothing critical.
02:32The firing slowed.
02:34Kelly told Dietrich he would pay $50 to get up there and take a shot.
02:38Minutes later, three bombers crossed over the field at once.
02:42Kelly raised his voice.
02:43The stakes, he said, had just gone up.
02:46The high altitude runs were a screen.
02:4950 conventional bombers had been sent ahead to pull the American night fighters and anti-aircraft guns away from what
02:55was coming behind them.
02:56Five surviving KI-21 transports, the type the Allies called Sally, were closing on Okinawa at 150 feet, low enough
03:05to slip beneath the radar net.
03:07Captain Chuichi Suwabe commanded the flight crews.
03:11Each transport carried a dozen commandos from the Juretsu Kuteitai, trained by Captain Michiro Okuyama for this single mission, armed
03:19with submachine guns, satchel charges, and phosphorus grenades.
03:22Their orders, belly land on the runway, destroy every plane within reach, and fight until dead.
03:29What happened next turned this airfield into a ground war where every mechanic grabbed a rifle.
03:35If this story grips you, hit like and subscribe.
03:38You will not want to miss the rest.
03:40At 22-25, Dietrich spotted a twin-engine aircraft skimming the treetops at the north end of the field.
03:47It was not bombing.
03:49It was not climbing.
03:50It was lined up with the main runway, dropping fast, gear up.
03:54Then three more appeared behind it.
03:58The anti-aircraft gunners of the 1st Provisional Anti-Aircraft Artillery Group had been firing at high-altitude bombers for
04:05two hours.
04:06Their barrels were hot.
04:07Their crews were tired.
04:09And the aircraft, now sliding across the treetops at 22-25, were not following any pattern they had seen before.
04:17Dietrich watched from the tower as the lead sally came in at rooftop height from the north.
04:21Marine gunners on the perimeter swung their weapons down and opened fire.
04:26Tracers stitched across the dark at nearly flat angles.
04:29The 1st transport shuttered, rolled left, and came apart before it reached the runway threshold.
04:34Burning wreckage scattered across the scrub north of the field.
04:37Five minutes later, three more appeared, all low, all heading for the runway with their landing gear up.
04:44The guns along the eastern and western edges of the field fired simultaneously.
04:49One sally caught a burst in its left engine and cartwheeled into the dirt south of the airstrip.
04:54A second absorbed dozens of rounds and pancaked into the taxiway, breaking apart on impact.
05:00The third took a direct hit from a 40-millimeter gun.
05:03Its left wing separated from the fuselage in midair.
05:07That wing fell on a search-like position manned by Corporal Lavat O'Miller and Private Nathaniel Collinsworth from the 16th
05:14Anti-Aircraft Artillery Battalion.
05:16The severed wing struck the emplacement and buried both men.
05:19Neither survived.
05:20They were the first Americans killed that night.
05:23Not by enemy fire, but by three tons of aluminum falling out of the sky.
05:27Dietrich saw the explosions from the tower.
05:29He saw the burning wrecks and the tracers crisscrossing the field.
05:33But what he did not see, what none of them saw, was the fifth sally.
05:38It came in lower than the others, wheels up, no running lights.
05:41It cleared the anti-aircraft positions at the south end of the field and touched down on the northeast-southwest
05:47runway at approximately 2230.
05:50The belly of the transport scraped across crushed coral, throwing sparks and dust in a trail 200 yards long.
05:57It slid to a stop roughly 100 meters from the control tower.
06:01Dietrich was the first to see what came out.
06:03The nose section of the sally cracked open, and figures dropped to the ground.
06:08Ten, maybe 12 men carrying submachine guns and canvas satchels.
06:13They moved fast.
06:15No hesitation.
06:16No pause to regroup.
06:17They split into pairs and ran toward the nearest line of parked aircraft.
06:22Kelly saw them from the tower at the same moment.
06:25He did not stay at the radio.
06:27He grabbed his service revolver, ran down the tower ladder,
06:30climbed into a jeep, and drove straight toward the belly-landed transport.
06:35A 22-year-old pilot with a sidearm, heading alone into a group of commandos,
06:40armed with automatic weapons and demolition charges.
06:43First Lieutenant Clark Campbell heard the crash from across the field.
06:47Campbell was with VMF N-542, the Tigers,
06:52a night fighter squadron that had been at Yontan since the first week of April.
06:56Campbell, 28 years old.
06:58He knew the field lay out in the dark.
07:00He knew where the aircraft were parked, where the fuel dumps sat,
07:03where the maintenance crews slept.
07:05When the sally skidded to a stop,
07:07Campbell understood immediately that this was not a bombing run.
07:10Someone had just landed troops on their airfield.
07:13Campbell grabbed Technical Sergeant Chandler Beasley
07:16and started moving toward the flight line.
07:18What they had was a sidearm each,
07:20and the knowledge that 150 American aircraft
07:23were sitting in the open, with their fuel tanks full.
07:27The first grenade detonated against a Corsair
07:2960 seconds after the commandos hit the ground.
07:32Then a second.
07:33Then the fuel dump along the eastern taxiway
07:36erupted in a column of fire, visible from five miles out.
07:41The commandos moved through the parked aircraft in pairs,
07:45exactly as they had rehearsed.
07:46One man would clamp a magnetic charge or satchel
07:50onto the fuselage of a larger plane,
07:53a privateer, a C-47,
07:55while the second threw phosphorus grenades
07:57at the smaller fighters on either side.
08:00They worked from east to west along the flight line,
08:03away from the belly-landed sally
08:05and toward the densest concentration of Corsairs.
08:08Dietrich tracked the fires from the tower.
08:11One Corsair was burning near the northeast runway,
08:14then a second.
08:14A privateer patrol bomber erupted 30 yards further down the line.
08:19Its fuel tanks caught, and the wings collapsed inward.
08:23The eastern fuel dump was already a wall of flame.
08:2670,000 gallons of aviation gasoline had gone up in the first two minutes,
08:30and the light from the blaze turned the entire airfield
08:33into a bright orange theater,
08:35where every aircraft, every vehicle,
08:38and every man on the ground cast hard black shadows.
08:42Private Jack Kelly, a fighter squadron mechanic,
08:45had been working on a Corsair engine
08:47when the alarm sounded at 2230.
08:50He ran for the nearest bunker
08:51and threw himself inside.
08:53A dozen other ground crew were already there.
08:56None of them had weapons.
08:57The belly-landed sally sat roughly 100 meters from their position.
09:01Through the bunker entrance, Kelly could hear grenades detonating against aircraft
09:06and the sharp crack of submachine gun fire.
09:09He could see the glow of burning fuel reflecting off the underside of low clouds.
09:13All they could do was listen and wait,
09:15and hope that someone with a rifle would arrive before the commandos found them.
09:19Kelly reached the area around the sally in his jeep.
09:23He drew his service revolver
09:24and fired at the nearest figure he could identify in the firelight.
09:28The details of what happened next depend on which account survived the night.
09:33Dietrich, watching from the tower,
09:35saw Kelly engage, and then saw him fall.
09:38One source records that Kelly turned on a searchlight to illuminate the raiders
09:42and was hit by automatic weapons fire.
09:44Another records that he drove into the area
09:46and was killed by small arms at close range.
09:49What is confirmed is that 1st Lieutenant Maynard C. Kelly
09:52was fatally shot within minutes of leaving the tower.
09:56He was the first Marine killed by enemy fire on Jantzen that night.
10:00Technical Sergeant Roderick Wogan
10:02was somewhere near the flight line when the commandos came through.
10:05Wogan was also with the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing.
10:08He was killed by small arms fire in the same opening minutes.
10:12The circumstances of his death were not recorded in detail.
10:16In the chaos of a night ground battle among burning aircraft,
10:19individual actions disappeared into smoke and noise.
10:23The problem was not courage.
10:25The problem was that Jantzen was an airfield, not a defensive position.
10:29The men on the ground were pilots, mechanics, armorers, radio technicians.
10:34They serviced and flew aircraft.
10:36They did not run patrols.
10:38They did not dig fighting positions around the taxiways.
10:41Their weapons were locked in unit armories or stowed in tents.
10:45The anti-aircraft gunners had been shooting at aircraft in the sky.
10:49Now the enemy was on the ground, mixed in among their own planes,
10:53and the big guns could not depress low enough to engage targets running between parked corsairs.
10:59Campbell and Beasley were pushing through this chaos toward the flight line.
11:03They could hear the detonations moving west,
11:05which meant the commandos were working deeper into the heart of the field,
11:09toward the largest cluster of aircraft and the main fuel storage.
11:13If the raiders reached the western dispersal area,
11:16where the night fighters of VMF 533 were parked,
11:19the damage would cripple Jantzen's ability to intercept kamikazes for days.
11:24Campbell started pulling men out of bunkers and tents,
11:27mechanics, armorers, anyone with hands.
11:30He told them to find a weapon and get to the flight line.
11:35What Campbell found on the flight line was worse than the fires.
11:39The men who had grabbed weapons were shooting at anything that moved.
11:43Tracers flew across the taxiways in every direction.
11:46Rifles cracked from bunkers, from behind revetments, from the edges of the runways.
11:51In the shifting orange light of burning aircraft and fuel,
11:54every shadow looked like a Japanese commando,
11:56and every Marine who moved between the planes risked being shot by his own side.
12:01The friendly fire started within minutes of the first grenade.
12:05Anti-aircraft crews on the perimeter,
12:07unable to see what was happening among the parked aircraft,
12:10opened up with 20mm cannons at ground level.
12:13Rounds designed to destroy aircraft at altitude,
12:16now ripping through the flight line where Marines were running for cover.
12:20Men in foxholes along the runways fired at silhouettes they could not identify.
12:25Mechanics who had never handled a weapon under stress
12:27emptied magazines into the dark and reloaded without knowing what they had hit.
12:32Dietrich watched it from the tower.
12:33Muzzle flashes sparkled across the field in a full circle.
12:37Some pointed inward at the commandos,
12:39others pointed at other Americans.
12:41The tower itself drew fire.
12:43Rounds cracked through the wooden walls.
12:46Dietrich and the third operator dropped below the window line and stayed low.
12:50They could still see the fires,
12:52but they could no longer stand upright without risking a bullet from their own guns.
12:58A significant number of the 18 Marines wounded that night were hit by American fire.
13:03The after-action reports acknowledged it without assigning blame.
13:07In the dark, on a field full of explosions and burning fuel,
13:10with an unknown number of enemy soldiers moving through the aircraft,
13:14there was no front line.
13:15There was no safe direction to shoot.
13:18Every man with a weapon made his own decision
13:20about what was a target and what was a friend,
13:23and some of those decisions were wrong.
13:26Campbell understood that the shooting would not stop until someone imposed order.
13:30He and Beasley moved along the flight line,
13:33not just looking for commandos,
13:34but pulling Marines into groups,
13:36assigning sectors,
13:38stopping men from firing into areas where other Americans were working.
13:42This was not a skill Campbell had trained for.
13:45Night fighter pilots learned to track radar contacts
13:48and close on enemy aircraft in the dark.
13:50They did not learn small unit infantry tactics.
13:53But Campbell had one advantage.
13:56He knew the physical layout of Yonten better than any infantryman could,
14:00because he had taxied across it,
14:02walked it,
14:03and worked on it every day for seven weeks.
14:06He organized the men he could reach into a rough skirmish line facing west,
14:10the direction the commandos had been moving.
14:12Beasley anchored one end.
14:15Technical Sergeant Jerome Rubel from VMF NOR 542 took a position where he could direct fire
14:21against a cluster of enemy movement near the eastern fuel dump.
14:25Rubel spotted one of the raiders placing a charge on a transport aircraft
14:29and shot him before the charge detonated.
14:32The commandos were still moving.
14:34Another Corsair caught fire near the western dispersal.
14:38Then a C-47 transport.
14:40The raiders placed their charges methodically.
14:42Satchels clamped to fuselages.
14:44Phosphorous grenades tossed into cockpits.
14:47Incendiaries wedged into wheel wells.
14:49They had rehearsed every step on mock-ups of American aircraft back on Kyushu.
14:54Each man had been trained to destroy at least two planes before he died.
14:58And dying was the plan.
15:01There was no extraction.
15:03No rendezvous point.
15:04No second transport coming to pick them up.
15:07By 2300, nine aircraft were fully destroyed and the fire count was still climbing.
15:1329 more had taken blast or fragment damage.
15:16Campbell's improvised line was holding the eastern half of the field.
15:20But scattered shots and explosions still came from the western dispersal area.
15:24Somewhere in the smoke and burning fuel, commandos were still alive.
15:29Still planting charges.
15:31Still carrying out a mission that would end only when every one of them was dead.
15:35The stench hit first.
15:37Burning rubber, aviation gasoline, and something else.
15:41The thick, sweet smell of scorched aluminum skin peeling off airframes in the heat.
15:49The smoke from the fuel dump hung low across the field in the windless air and mixed with the haze
15:55of phosphorus grenades.
15:57Dietrich, still on the tower floor, breathed through his sleeve.
16:02Visibility dropped to 50 yards in places, then opened briefly when a new explosion pushed the smoke aside, then closed
16:09again.
16:10Campbell's skirmish line moved west through the smoke in short advances, a few steps forward, stop, listen, watch for movement
16:20against the glow of burning aircraft, then forward again.
16:24The marines on the line were mechanics and armorers who had fired weapons on qualification ranges and nowhere else.
16:31They gripped rifles they had pulled from armory racks 10 minutes earlier.
16:36Some still had grease on their hands from the aircraft they had been servicing when the alarm sounded.
16:42The commandos had split into smaller groups, twos and threes, spread across an area nearly half a mile wide.
16:50Each group operated independently.
16:52They had no radio communication with each other and did not need any.
16:56Every man carried phosphorus grenades that burned at 2,000 degrees.
17:01Every man carried a pistol with one purpose everyone understood.
17:07Near the western dispersal area, a group of two or three raiders had reached a line of corsairs that had
17:13not yet been hit.
17:14A satchel charge detonated against the wing route of the nearest fighter.
17:19The fuel in the wing tanks caught.
17:21Fire ran along the ground beneath the aircraft and jumped to the next corsair parked 20 feet away.
17:28In 90 seconds, three fighters were burning in a chain that lit up the western end of the field.
17:35Rubel and his group pushed toward the sound.
17:37They found one raider crouched beside a C-47 transport working to fix a charge to the landing gear.
17:44Rubel fired and the man dropped.
17:47But the charge was already set.
17:49The C-47 blew apart minutes later, scattering debris across the taxiway and forcing Rubel's group to fall back and
17:57find a new approach.
17:58The problem was time.
18:00Every minute the commando stayed alive was another aircraft lost.
18:03Campbell could count the fires from where he stood.
18:07At least a dozen burning airframes spread across both sides of the main runway.
18:11The eastern fuel dump was gone.
18:13If the western dump went up, Yonten would lose its entire reserve of aviation gasoline.
18:19Somewhere overhead, Lieutenant Colonel Marion Magruder and his night fighters from VMF N-533 were running low on fuel.
18:27They had been airborne when the attack began, hunting Japanese bombers in the dark.
18:32Now they needed to land.
18:34Magruder radioed Yonten Tower.
18:36Dietrich and the surviving operator could see burning wreckage on at least two of the three runways.
18:42They diverted Magruder's Hellcats to Kadena, five miles south, to refuel and stand by.
18:48On the ground, the hunting continued in the dark.
18:51Campbell sent pairs of marines along the taxiways to check each revetment and each parked aircraft for raiders.
18:58Every destroyed plane they passed was a potential hiding place.
19:02A commando could be crouched behind a collapsed wing section or inside a burned-out fuselage, waiting.
19:08One marine would approach while another covered.
19:11They cleared each wreck the way infantrymen clear rooms, except these men had never cleared anything in their lives.
19:17By midnight, the firing had thinned, fewer detonations, longer silences between shots.
19:23Either the commandos were dead, or they had gone to ground.
19:27Campbell had no way to know which.
19:29What he knew was that his line had reached the western fuel dump, and it was still intact.
19:34That was the one thing that had gone right since 2230.
19:38Campbell changed tactics after midnight.
19:40Instead of pushing the skirmish line forward, he set up stationary positions at the key points that still mattered.
19:45The western fuel dump, the surviving cluster of night fighters near VMF N-533's dispersal, and the approaches to the
19:52main runway.
19:55If any commandos were still moving, they would have to cross open ground to reach another target.
20:00And on that open ground, against men who were now dug in and watching, they would be visible against the
20:06firelight.
20:07Beasley held the position nearest the western dispersal.
20:10Rubel covered the southern taxiway.
20:12Campbell moved between them, checking fields of fire, adjusting positions, making sure no one shot at friendlies.
20:19The random firing that had ripped across the field for the past 90 minutes had mostly stopped.
20:24The men on the line understood the system now.
20:26Hold your sector.
20:28Watch your front.
20:29Do not fire unless you can identify a target.
20:31It had taken an hour and a half to turn a crowd of panicking airfield personnel into something that functioned
20:37like a defensive perimeter.
20:39Campbell had done it without infantry manuals, without radio contact with higher command, and without knowing how many of the
20:45enemy were still alive.
20:47The answer came in pieces.
20:49A raider was spotted near the northeast runway at approximately 0100, crouched behind the wreckage of the belly-landed Sally.
20:56A marine fired.
20:57The figure dropped and did not move.
20:5920 minutes later, another was found inside a burned-out C-47 on the eastern taxiway.
21:05He had a pistol and one remaining grenade.
21:08He did not surrender.
21:10Marines shot him where he sat.
21:12One by one, through the early morning hours, the commandos were found.
21:16Some had crawled into drainage ditches along the runway edges.
21:19Some had wedged themselves into the gaps between revetment walls.
21:23Some were already dead, killed by blast fragments from their own charges or by gunfire during the opening chaos.
21:30None of them attempted to give up.
21:32None called out.
21:34None raised their hands.
21:36Dietrich remained in the tower through the entire night.
21:38When the firing around the tower subsided enough for him to stand, he resumed scanning the field.
21:43At one point in the early hours, he spotted a figure moving near the southern end of the main runway,
21:50the last raider he could identify from his elevated position.
21:53He fired.
21:54The figure went down.
21:56Dietrich would later tell combat correspondent Sergeant Claude Knupp that he had fired at the first commando he saw and
22:03at the last one still moving on the field.
22:05Knupp himself spent the night in a foxhole near the airfield perimeter.
22:10A former sports editor from Anderson, South Carolina, assigned to Marine Aircraft Group 31 as a combat correspondent.
22:16He could hear the explosions, the gunfire, the anti-aircraft rounds cooking off in the heat of burning aircraft, confusion,
22:25indiscriminate shooting, and fire in every direction.
22:29In the days that followed, Knupp tracked down Dietrich and other tower personnel and recorded their accounts on onion skin
22:36paper, the only detailed first-person narratives of the night that survived the war.
22:41At 0300, Magruder's Hellcats received clearance to return from Kadena.
22:46The main runway had been partially cleared.
22:49Marines had pushed the largest pieces of wreckage off the coral surface by hand and with a single bulldozer that
22:55still ran.
22:56Magruder brought his night fighters in between the fires, landing on a strip lit not by runway lights, but by
23:02the glow of burning corsairs on either side.
23:06Dawn came at 0530.
23:08The smoke that had hidden the field through the night now lifted into a gray column visible from ships offshore.
23:15Campbell's Marines were still in position.
23:17The firing had stopped, but somewhere on the airfield or in the brush beyond its edges, at least one commando
23:23was still unaccounted for.
23:25Daylight revealed the cost.
23:27Campbell walked the flight line at 0600 with Beasley and counted what was left.
23:31Three corsairs burned to their frames.
23:34Nothing but blackened steel tubing and collapsed landing gear sitting in pools of melted aluminum.
23:39Two privateer patrol bombers destroyed.
23:42Their four-engine fuselages split open by satchel charges.
23:47Four C-47 transports gutted.
23:51Twenty-nine additional aircraft carried blast damage, fragment holes, or scorching.
23:56Twenty-two corsairs, three Hellcats, two more privateers, two more transports.
24:02The eastern fuel dump was a charred crater.
24:05Marine infantry arrived from positions south of the airfield at first light and began the systematic clearing that Campbell's improvised
24:12force had started seven hours earlier.
24:14They moved through the wreckage and fire teams, four men at a time, covering each other as they checked every
24:21burned airframe, every revetment, every drainage ditch.
24:25They found bodies.
24:26Sixty-nine Japanese dead lay scattered across the field and the surrounding scrub.
24:31Some had been killed by gunfire, some by their own explosives.
24:35Some had used their pistols on themselves when they had nothing left to destroy.
24:40No prisoners were taken.
24:42None had attempted to surrender.
24:43The belly-landed Sally sat where it had stopped, 100 meters from the tower.
24:49Eleven bodies were recovered in and around the transport, including the crew.
24:53A map taken from the body of one of the officers showed Yonten's layout in precise detail.
24:59Large red crosses marked the exact parking positions of VMF N-533's Hellcats and another red cross on Lieutenant Colonel
25:07Magruder's tent.
25:08The commandos had known exactly where the night fighters were.
25:12They had not reached them.
25:14On the American side, four Marines were dead.
25:171st Lieutenant Maynard Kelly and Technical Sergeant Roderick Wogan killed by enemy small arms fire.
25:24Corporal Levate Allmiller and Private Nathaniel Collinsworth killed when the severed wing of a Sally crushed their search-like position.
25:3227 more were wounded.
25:33A significant number of those wounds came from friendly fire, Marines shooting at Marines in the dark among burning planes.
25:40The runway was cleared by 0740.
25:43Engineers with bulldozers pushed wreckage off the coral surface.
25:47Ordnance crews swept for unexploded charges.
25:49Ground crews towed damaged aircraft to repair areas.
25:52By 0800, the first Corsairs were rolling down the main runway and climbing toward the radar picket stations, where the
25:59fleet still waited for the next wave of kamikazes.
26:02Yonten was operational again, less than 10 hours after the commandos had landed on it.
26:07The speed of the recovery told the strategic truth.
26:10Operation Gigu had inflicted visible damage.
26:1338 aircraft hit.
26:14A fuel dump destroyed.
26:16Four men killed.
26:17But it had not shut down the airfield for more than a single morning.
26:20The Corsairs that burned were replaced within the week.
26:23The fuel was resupplied.
26:25The night fighters that the commandos had specifically targeted were untouched.
26:29The 60% interception rate against kamikazes continued without interruption.
26:34For Kelly, there would be a Navy cross.
26:36Posthumous.
26:37Technical Sergeant Jerome Rubel received a bronze star for directing fire under chaos, killing at least one raider and protecting
26:45the men in his section.
26:46Campbell and Beasley received no decorations recorded in the available sources.
26:51They had simply done what needed doing and went back to flying night missions the following evening.
26:56Two Marines from the 8th Anti-Aircraft Artillery Battalion found a Japanese officer sleeping in the jungle near the airfield
27:03after the battle was over.
27:04They shot him.
27:05Both were court-martialed.
27:07The war had rules, even on Okinawa, even after a night like that.
27:14The last commando was found at 1255 on May 25th, a quarter mile behind the headquarters building of Marine Aircraft
27:22Group 31.
27:23Marines shot him in the brush.
27:25He had survived nearly 15 hours on an airfield crawling with armed men who were looking for him.
27:31He did not surrender.
27:33One raider was never found at Yonten at all.
27:36American intelligence later confirmed that a single member of the Juretsu force made it off the airfield,
27:42crossed the active battlefield of southern Okinawa,
27:44and reached the headquarters of the Japanese 32nd Army around June 12th, 18 days after the raid.
27:51His name was not recorded in American sources.
27:54His report changed nothing.
27:56The 32nd Army was already collapsing.
27:58Okinawa fell on June 21st, but the Japanese High Command considered the raid a success.
28:05Within weeks, planners drew up Operation Ken Go, 60 transports carrying 900 commandos aimed at the B-29 bases on
28:14Saipan, Tinian, and Guam.
28:16The raids were scheduled for the nights of August 19th through 23rd.
28:20On August 15th, Emperor Hirohito announced Japan's surrender.
28:24The operation was cancelled.
28:27The war was over.
28:29Staff Sergeant Robert Dietrich went home to Cincinnati.
28:32His account of the night, recorded by combat correspondent Claude Knupp on onion-skin paper,
28:37sat in Knupp's personal binders for decades.
28:40Knupp, the former sports editor from South Carolina, returned to journalism after the war
28:46and kept his Pacific dispatches in a collection that his family preserved after his death in 1999.
28:52The Dietrich interview and the story of the tower that night were rediscovered by Knupp's daughter Linda and published in
28:58Naval History magazine in 2010, 65 years after the raid.
29:03Lieutenant Colonel Marion Magruder continued to command VMF 533 through the end of the Okinawa campaign.
29:10His squadron, Black Max Killers, was credited with shooting down five of the incoming bombers on the night of the
29:16raid,
29:17the night fighters that the Juretsu Commandos had specifically targeted but never reached.
29:22Clark Campbell and Chandler Beasley went back to night fighter operations with VMF-N 542.
29:28The squadron earned a presidential unit citation for its actions on Okinawa between April and August 1945.
29:36Major Robert Porter and Captain Wallace Sigler became the first night fighter aces on the island during that same tour.
29:43The Tigers flew from the same field that Campbell had defended on foot with a pistol and a group of
29:49mechanics.
29:50Maynard Kelly was buried in the Marine Cemetery on Okinawa, 22 years old, raised by his grandparents in Seattle.
29:57Commissioned in 1943. He had been on the island for three weeks. He was the first man on Yonten to
30:05fight back.
30:07Corporal Levate Aumiller and Private Nathaniel Collinsworth remain among the lesser known casualties of that night.
30:14Anti-aircraft gunners who never saw the enemy reach the ground.
30:17The field where all of this happened is gone. Yonten reverted to farmland after the American occupation ended.
30:24There are no runways left. No tower. No revetments.
30:29The crushed coral that Kelly's jeep drove across in the dark has been covered by soil and crops for 70
30:35years.
30:36But the night of May 24, 1945, happened. Mechanics picked up rifles.
30:42A pilot drove a jeep into a firefight with a revolver. A tower operator watched it all from a wooden
30:48box above the flames and lived to tell it.
30:50They deserved to be remembered. If this story stayed with you, hit the like button. It tells us these histories
30:57matter.
30:58Subscribe and tap the bell so you never miss one. We have got more missions like this coming.
31:03Now, here is a question. What would you have done? You are on that airfield. You are a mechanic. You
31:09have never fired a weapon in combat.
31:12And a transport full of enemy commandos just landed 100 meters from where you are standing.
31:17Drop your answer in the comments. And while you are there, tell us where you are watching from. Country? City?
31:23Wherever you are.
31:24Every comment helps this channel reach more people who care about keeping these stories alive.
31:29These men did not fight for headlines. They fought because the field was theirs and someone had to hold it.
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