When the Predator Became Prey — Japan's Last Carrier Strike, 1944

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]Imagine you are handed a mission, a clean, simple order. You will fly out, find the enemy, and end this. Simple.

[00:00:07]Now imagine, somewhere on the other side of that horizon, 600 aircraft are already in the air coming for you. You don't know that yet. Your commanders told you this was the moment, the decisive battle, the one the Imperial Japanese Navy had been preparing for, refining, rehearsing in their minds for years. The plan had a name, Operation A-Go. It was designed to lure the American fleet into a trap, crush it in a single afternoon, and reverse the tide of a [music] war that had been slipping away. Slowly, then all at once. The date was June 19th, 1944. The place, a stretch of open Pacific water west of the Mariana Islands. A place with no landmarks, no shelter, just sky [music] and sea and the sound of engines climbing toward altitude.

[00:00:54]The Japanese pilots believed they were flying into history. They were right.

[00:00:59]Just not the history anyone had promised them.

[00:01:02]What happened over those 2 days would later be called by American aviators with a phrase that carried equal parts awe and dark humor.

[00:01:10]A phrase that told you everything about how lopsided the outcome was before [music] you knew a single detail. What was that phrase? And why did the most powerful naval air force Japan had [music] ever assembled essentially cease to exist in a single afternoon? The Pacific War, by June of 1944, had already consumed 2 and 1/2 years of grinding, savage combat across thousands of miles of ocean. Midway, Guadalcanal, the Solomon Islands campaign. Each battle had cost Japan something it could not replace. Not ships. Ships could be built, pilots could not. The men who had launched the strike on Pearl Harbor, who had swept through the Dutch East Indies and the Philippines with terrifying precision, who had made the Pacific feel like a Japanese lake in 1941, [music] most of them were gone.

[00:01:59]Scattered across the bottom of the ocean or consumed in the long exhausting war of attrition that Guadalcanal had become.

[00:02:06]What Japan had left by the summer of 1944 were machines and men who had barely [music] learned to fly them. The Americans in the meantime had been building. Shipyards running around the clock, pilot training programs producing thousands of aviators with hundreds of hours of flight time each, and new technology, [music] quiet and deadly, that the Japanese had no answer for.

[00:02:28]The invasion of Saipan, which began on June 15th, forced Japan's hand.

[00:02:33]>> [music] >> The Mariana Islands were not optional.

[00:02:36]If the Americans took them, their new long-range B-29 bombers could reach the Japanese home islands directly.

[00:02:43]Japan had to fight. Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa assembled his fleet.

[00:02:48]Nine carriers, 473 aircraft, >> [music] >> the largest carrier force Japan would ever put to sea again. And he sailed straight toward the worst day in Japanese naval aviation history. Every catastrophic defeat has a moment somewhere near the beginning where everything looked logical. Operation A-Go was that kind of plan. Conceived by Admiral Soemu Toyoda, commander-in-chief of the combined fleet, A-Go was built around a specific geographic advantage.

[00:03:18]The Mariana Islands sat in a zone where land-based aircraft from Guam, Rota, and Tinian could coordinate with carrier aircraft to hit the American fleet from multiple directions simultaneously. On paper, it doubled Japan's striking power without needing additional carriers.

[00:03:34]Ozawa's carriers would launch from beyond the range of American aircraft.

[00:03:38]They would strike, recover at the land bases, refuel, rearm, and strike again on the return [music] trip. A one-way punch that the Americans could not answer in kind. It was called the shuttle attack concept. And in a briefing room with maps and pointers and clean lines drawn in grease pencil, it looked devastating. There was one problem. The Americans already knew it was coming. Not through spies, not through intercepted [music] radio transmissions, though American code breakers were extraordinary throughout the war. The Americans simply understood from intelligence accumulated over months that Japan would have to defend the Marianas.

[00:04:16]When Saipan came under assault, the trigger was pulled. And Admiral Raymond Spruance, commanding the American 5th Fleet, began positioning his forces [music] accordingly. Spruance was not a gambler. He was a calculator.

[00:04:30]Meticulous, conservative, exactly the kind of commander you want when the enemy is walking into your prepared position. He assigned Admiral Marc Mitscher and Task Force 58, the fast carrier force, the job of finding and engaging the Japanese fleet.

[00:04:45]Task Force 58 was something the world had never seen before. 15 carriers, seven battleships, 21 cruisers, 69 destroyers, and 900 aircraft against Ozawa's 473.

[00:04:59]The numbers alone told a story, but numbers alone do not explain what happened on June 19th. What happened that day required a more complete reckoning. With technology, with training, and with the brutal arithmetic of what happens when a plan meets a reality it never accounted for. Ozawa launched his first wave before dawn. 69 aircraft rising from his carriers in the pre-dawn [music] dark, forming up, heading east. They never got close. The Americans had deployed submarines to watch the approaches. The USS Cavalla had been tracking Ozawa's fleet [music] since June 17th. Her captain, Lieutenant Commander Herman Kossler, had transmitted detailed [music] contact reports. Position, heading, speed, composition. Spruance knew what was coming before the first Japanese aircraft left the flight deck. And there was another layer to the American advantage, something the Japanese pilots could not see, could not jam, and did not fully understand: radar. The American carriers and their screening ships carried radar [music] systems capable of detecting incoming aircraft at distances exceeding 150 km. When Ozawa's first wave appeared on those screens, it appeared as a swarm of bright dots, orderly, predictable, locked into their approach vectors. The Americans had 12 minutes of warning. 12 minutes is an eternity in aerial combat.

[00:06:19]Mitscher gave the order at 10:23 that morning. All available fighters, launch.

[00:06:25]Vectored by radar, directed by fighter directors on the carriers who could see the entire battle from their radar screens [music] like pieces on a chessboard, the Hellcats climbed to intercept. The Japanese pilots flew on [music] into a sky that was already full of Americans waiting for them. Before we get to the most intense part [music] of this battle, a quick favor. Bringing these forgotten stories to light takes a lot of effort. If you appreciate military history, please subscribe and hit the like button to support the channel. It's the only way to guarantee [music] our next documentary.

[00:06:57]The Grumman F6F Hellcat was not a beautiful aircraft. It was wide, blunt-nosed, heavy. It had none of the elegant lines of the Japanese Mitsubishi [music] A6M Zero, which had ruled the Pacific skies in 1941 and 1942 [music] with a reputation that bordered on the mythological.

[00:07:16]The Zero was light, maneuverable, fast to climb.

[00:07:21]In the hands of Japan's experienced pre-war pilots, it had been a weapon of extraordinary precision.

[00:07:27]The Hellcat was built to beat it, not to match it, to beat it. Grumman's engineers had reverse-engineered [music] the problem. The Zero was lethal in a turning fight, so they made the Hellcat fast [music] enough to avoid one.

[00:07:40]The Zero was vulnerable to gunfire because it carried no armor and no self-sealing [music] fuel tanks. So, they gave the Hellcat both.

[00:07:48]The Hellcat could absorb punishment that would have turned a Zero into a fireball and keep flying. Powered by a Pratt & Whitney R-2800 engine producing 2,000 [music] horsepower, the Hellcat had a top speed of approximately 610 km/h at altitude. It could dive faster than a Zero could follow, and it was armed with six.50 caliber machine [music] guns that turned the air in front of it into a wall of metal. American pilots had been trained specifically in the tactics that negated the Zero's advantages. Hit fast, hit [music] hard, break away.

[00:08:20]Never get drawn into a slow turning duel. Never let the Zero use its maneuverability.

[00:08:25]It worked. The pilots who flew the Hellcats on June 19th were not young men fresh from training. They were veterans, men who had fought at Rabaul, at Wake Island, >> [music] >> at Tarawa. Men with hundreds of hours of combat flying time. Men who knew the difference between a panicking pilot and a dangerous one. The Japanese pilots they faced that morning were something else entirely. Japan's pilot training program had collapsed under the weight of the war.

[00:08:51]The losses at Midway in June of 1942 had been catastrophic, not just in aircraft, but in aircrewmen.

[00:08:59]The Guadalcanal campaign consumed another generation of experienced aviators in 6 months of daily attrition.

[00:09:06]By 1944, the Imperial Navy was graduating [music] pilots with as few as 240 hours of total flight time. American naval aviators typically arrived in combat with over 300 hours, much [music] of it in advanced tactical training.

[00:09:21]240 hours in an aircraft they had never flown in combat against men who had been doing this for years. There was one more element that the Japanese pilots could not have known about. A small, unassuming device that the Americans had been quietly deploying across their fleet, the VT fuse, variable time fuse, also called the proximity [music] fuse.

[00:09:44]Before this device, anti-aircraft gunners had to calculate exactly where a moving aircraft would be at the moment their shell exploded. Get the timing wrong by a fraction of a second, the shell harmlessly detonated above or below or behind the target. The VT fuse contained a miniature radar unit inside the shell itself.

[00:10:03]As it passed within a lethal radius of an aircraft, it detonated automatically.

[00:10:08]You did not have to aim perfectly. You had to be close. Against a dense formation of aircraft flying predictable approach vectors, the effect was devastating. Shells that would previously have missed now found their targets. The air around the Japanese formations [music] lit up with explosions. Aircraft that had no reason to expect a hit simply came apart. The Japanese did not know why their losses were so high. They pressed on anyway.

[00:10:34]The first Japanese wave hit the American combat air patrol at approximately 10:58 in the morning. It never reached the fleet.

[00:10:42]25 of the 69 aircraft in that first [music] wave were destroyed before they got anywhere near a carrier. The survivors scattered. [music] Some turned back. A handful pressed on, disoriented, separated from [music] their formations, flying alone into airspace swarming with Hellcats. None of them found a carrier. The second wave launched from Ozawa's carriers not long after. 128 aircraft, the largest single strike [music] Japan sent that day. They climbed, formed up, and headed east into the same sky that had just swallowed the first wave whole. The radar screens on the American ships [music] lit up again.

[00:11:20]Fighter director officers on the carriers tracked the incoming formation with the calm precision of men reading a weather report. They vectored their Hellcats to altitude, positioned them up sun, placed them exactly [music] where they needed to be.

[00:11:34]The Japanese formation flew into the intercept. 97 aircraft from that second wave were destroyed. 97 out of 128.

[00:11:45]The third wave, 47 aircraft, fared no better. Most were intercepted before they reached attack range. Those that broke through found themselves facing the combined anti-aircraft fire of the American fleet, now augmented by the VT [music] fuse, filling the sky with proximity detonated shells. Seven aircraft from the third wave returned to their carriers.

[00:12:08]Seven.

[00:12:09]The fourth wave was 50 aircraft sent on a navigational error. Their strike coordinator misread his charts. The formation flew north of the American fleet [music] entirely, found nothing, split apart looking for targets, and lost aircraft to [music] fighters and fuel exhaustion.

[00:12:25]Most never came back.

[00:12:27]By the time the sun began to lower in the west, [music] the arithmetic was complete. Japan had launched approximately 373 carrier aircraft that day.

[00:12:38]Approximately 280 were destroyed. The Americans lost 23 aircraft in aerial [music] combat. 23.

[00:12:46]Lieutenant Commander Paul Buie, a Hellcat pilot who flew that day, reportedly said afterward that it reminded him of a turkey shoot, a phrase used in America for a contest where the targets were so plentiful [music] and so vulnerable that it barely constituted to do the challenge. The name stuck, the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot. It carried the weight of dark, [music] exhausted humor that combat men reach for when the reality of what they have witnessed is too large to process cleanly because those were not turkeys, they were men.

[00:13:16]Young men sent into a fight their commanders had already lost before the first aircraft left the deck. The American pilots knew it. Some of them said so years later when they could [music] speak about it plainly. The sky had been full, and then it was nearly empty.

[00:13:33]And the day was not over yet. While the aerial slaughter unfolded above, something was happening below the waterline that Ozawa did not know about.

[00:13:42]Two American submarines had been hunting his fleet since before the battle began.

[00:13:46]>> [music] >> The USS Albacore had been repositioned specifically to intercept Ozawa's carrier force as it moved into attack range.

[00:13:54]Her commander, Lieutenant Commander James Blanchard, [music] picked up the Japanese fleet on the morning of June 19th. He maneuvered carefully, patiently, working his way into position against [music] a fleet that included destroyer screens specifically designed to prevent exactly this. At approximately 9:25 in the morning, Blanchard fired a spread of six torpedoes. One of them found its target, the Taiho.

[00:14:17]The Taiho was the most advanced aircraft carrier [music] in the Imperial Japanese Navy. Launched only the previous year, she had been built with an armored flight deck, >> [music] >> a design innovation intended to make her resistant to air attack.

[00:14:31]She displaced 31,000 tons. She had been Ozawa's flagship, the ship from which he was directing the entire battle. A single torpedo struck [music] her forward aviation fuel storage system.

[00:14:43]The damage initially seemed manageable.

[00:14:45]The Taiho did not sink immediately. She continued to operate. Aircraft continued to land and launch, but aviation fuel vapors were spreading through her ventilation system.

[00:14:56]A damage control officer trying to reduce the fume concentration made a critical error and ordered the ventilation fans run at full speed.

[00:15:04]The decision accelerated the spread of explosive gases through the ship. At approximately 3:30 in the afternoon, a spark found them. The Taiho detonated from the inside. She sank in minutes.

[00:15:17]Ozawa transferred his flag to a destroyer, then to the carrier Zuikaku.

[00:15:21]He continued to direct the battle from there without yet understanding the full scale of what had happened in the air above him. He did not yet know about the Shokaku. The USS Cavalla had been tracking Ozawa's fleet since June 17th.

[00:15:33][music] Her captain, Lieutenant Commander Herman Cossler, had already sent the contact reports [music] that gave Spruance his targeting data. Now, on June 19th, Cossler found himself in position to act directly. The Shokaku was one of the oldest and most celebrated carriers in the Japanese fleet. She had participated in the attack on Pearl Harbor. She had fought [music] at Coral Sea, at the Eastern Solomons, at Santa Cruz. She had survived everything the Pacific War had thrown at [music] her for 2 and 1/2 years. At 11:18 in the morning, the Cavalla fired six torpedoes. Three of them hit. The Shokaku's aviation fuel ignited. Her forward ammunition magazines cooked off. She burned for hours before the sea finally took her.

[00:16:16]Out of a crew of approximately 1,660 men, only 570 survived. In a single day, without a single American aircraft being involved, Japan had lost two of its largest [music] carriers to submarines they had failed to detect.

[00:16:32]Ozawa's fleet had entered the battle with nine carriers. It would leave with six and almost no aircraft left to fly from any of them. June 20th, 1944, the day after.

[00:16:43]Ozawa was retreating northwest toward Okinawa, trailing fuel and smoke and the wreckage of a naval air doctrine that no longer existed. He still believed in the chaos of conflicting reports that his land-based aircraft from Guam and Rota had inflicted significant damage on the Americans. He believed a portion of his striking power had survived and could be reconstituted. Neither belief was true.

[00:17:07]Admiral Mitscher spent the daylight hours of June 20th searching. His scout aircraft ranged west looking for [music] Ozawa's fleet. They found nothing until late afternoon. At 4:05, a search plane radioed back coordinates. [music] The Japanese fleet was 480 km away. 480 km. Mitscher's aircraft, to reach the target and return, would be flying to the edge of their [music] fuel range and slightly past it.

[00:17:32]They would be returning in darkness over open ocean with tanks running on fumes.

[00:17:37]Mitscher stood on his flag bridge and considered the math. Then he launched.

[00:17:42]216 aircraft rose from the American carriers and headed west into the setting sun.

[00:17:48]They found Ozawa's fleet [music] at dusk. In the remaining minutes of twilight, they sank the carrier Hiyo, damaged two more carriers, sank two oilers, and damaged a battleship and a cruiser. Then they turned around and flew east into [music] the dark.

[00:18:03]What followed was one of the most dangerous return flights of the Pacific War. Aircraft running dry. Pilots who had been airborne for hours, tense, exhausted, now navigating by instruments over black water with no horizon [music] and no landmarks. Mitscher made a decision that violated every rule of wartime blackout discipline. He ordered [music] the fleet to turn on its lights.

[00:18:24]Every ship, every carrier. Searchlights pointing skyward. Deck lights illuminated. Signal lights and running lights blazing in the darkness.

[00:18:34]The entire task force burning like a city on the water, visible to any Japanese submarine or aircraft [music] within range.

[00:18:41]He did it anyway.

[00:18:43]80 aircraft were lost that night.

[00:18:46]Some ran [music] out of fuel and ditched. Some crashed on landing. Some simply vanished into the dark [music] water.

[00:18:53]But the destroyers and cruisers moved through the night, pulling men from the sea. Of the pilots and crewmen who went down, the majority were recovered.

[00:19:02]Mitscher's decision cost him the element of concealment. It saved most of his men. The Battle of the Philippine Sea was over. Japan had lost three carriers, approximately 450 aircraft, and something that could not be counted in any [music] official damage report, the core of its trained naval aviator core, gone in 2 days. The Americans had lost 130 aircraft in total, the majority of them to the night recovery operation, [music] not to enemy fire. The carriers were untouched. Ozawa requested permission to resign. Admiral Toyota refused to accept it. There was still a war to fight, but both men knew what the numbers meant. The carriers Japan still possessed were now hollow, beautiful, enormous, structurally intact vessels sailing west toward home with empty flight decks and skeleton crews. Months later, at the Battle of Leyte Gulf [music] in October of 1944, those same carriers would be sent south as bait, decoys. Their job was to draw the American fast carriers [music] away from the main landing force, not to fight, because there were no aircraft left to fight with. The Imperial Japanese Navy used its carriers as empty traps, [music] because that is all they had left to do with them. There is a photograph taken on the deck of a Japanese carrier sometime before the battle. Young men in flight suits posed, serious, the way men look when they know something important is about [music] to happen, and they are not entirely certain they will see the other side of it.

[00:20:30]They knew the odds were not good. Some of them had been flying for less than a year.

[00:20:34]They had been told repeatedly that this was the decisive moment, that sacrifice [music] now would turn the war.

[00:20:43]That they were part of something larger than any individual. They believed it.

[00:20:47]The Pacific does not keep records of everything [music] it takes. The water closes, and the sky clears, and the coordinates become just numbers again.

[00:20:56]But somewhere west of the Marianas, at the bottom of a sea that [music] has no particular interest in human catastrophe, the Shokaku rests at a depth of over 4,000 m.

[00:21:06]The Taiho sits not far away. Their flight decks, which once trembled with the weight of departing aircraft, are still now, permanent. The men who flew from those decks in the morning of June 19th, 1944, were not cowards. They were not fools. They were the last of something, a naval air doctrine built on skill and experience, [music] which had been ground down battle by battle, island by island, year by year, >> [music] >> until what remained was the shape of a force without its substance.

[00:21:35]The Americans called it a turkey shoot.

[00:21:37]History called it a turning point. The young men in that photograph had no name for it at all. They simply flew west into the morning and did not come back.

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