When Kamikazes Faced the Grim Reapers

On the morning of October 26, 1942, the war came howling out of the loudspeakers.

“General quarters, general quarters! All hands man your battle stations!”

The klaxon’s rising shriek ricocheted through every steel corridor and cramped bunkroom aboard the USS Enterprise. Men tumbled out of hammocks and bunks, boots slamming onto deck plates, hands reaching for helmets and life jackets with the clumsy speed of adrenaline.

On the flight deck, under a sky still streaked with gray dawn, the air already smelled of hot oil and avgas. Crewmen in colored jerseys sprinted across the non-skid surface, waving signal paddles, dragging chocks. Engines coughed, then roared, thick smoke washing over the deck in waves.

In the middle of the chaos, with his helmet clipped and goggles pushed up on his forehead, Lieutenant (jg) Stanley “Swede” Vejtasa moved with a kind of contained fury, barking at the younger aviators as they ran for their F4F Wildcats.

“Get those birds in the air as quickly as you can!” he shouted, voice carrying even over the roar of warming engines. “We’re already late to the party!”

He wasn’t trying to scare them. They were already scared. He was forcing them past it, putting their minds on the task instead of the consequences.

Men nodded, faces pale but eyes sharp. This was not their first scramble. It might be their last.

He jogged to his own aircraft, the ladder banging against the fuselage as he climbed. The Wildcat—stubby, rugged, ugly in the way only something designed to survive battle could be—throbbed beneath him as the mechanic at the nose gave the prop a final tug and stepped clear.

“Swede, she’s topped off and angry,” the mechanic yelled, hand on the cowling. “Bring her back in one piece, huh?”

“I’ll try,” Vejtasa said, though he knew full well that very little about this day would be “one piece” for anyone.

He dropped into the cockpit, the familiar close embrace of armored seat and instrument panel wrapping around him. The straps dug into his shoulders as he snapped them tight. He shoved the canopy forward, leaving it cracked open for air.

The engine’s vibration climbed as he pushed the throttle forward. Instruments came alive. Oil pressure. Manifold pressure. Ammunition switches. The world outside shrank to a rectangle framed by armored glass and metal.

Ahead, the deck officer rotated his arm in a circle—run it up—and then slashed it forward.

Go.

Vejtasa shoved the throttle to the stop.

The Wildcat lunged, wheels clattering over the deck seams. The nose pitched up slightly, the tail lightening, then floating. The end of the flight deck rushed toward him, beyond it the gray, restless surface of the Pacific. For a moment it looked absurdly close.

Then the deck fell away and the Wildcat’s wings grabbed the air.

He was flying.

A glance at the mirror above the canopy showed another Wildcat just behind and to his right, Ensign Lou Little’s aircraft tucked in where it belonged. Beyond that, eight more F4Fs clawed into the sky: eight planes in the division known as the Grim Reapers.

He leveled slightly to let them form up, the carrier already shrinking below, wake a long white scar across the dark sea. In the distance, another carrier—Hornet—steamed with its own darting specks of fighters and bombers, while between and around them rode a dozen escorts: cruisers, destroyers, oilers.

From 10,000 feet, twenty-one ships made a pattern on the water. Close up, each was a world of its own—hundreds of men at stations, guns poised.

Those men were why the Wildcats were launching.

As soon as the division tightened into formation, Vejtasa keyed his radio.

“Grim Reaper Lead to all Reapers,” he said. “Set course heading two-nine-five. Radar says they’re forty-five miles out and closing fast.”

He could feel his own heart pounding, not from fear, but from a savage urgency.

They were behind the curve.

The intercept geometry played out in his head: distance, altitude, speed. They were already climbing hard, nose pitched up so the Wildcat’s engine growled like a bear. But the radar plot on the fighter director’s board—passed up through the net to his ears—had made something inside him twist.

They were late. Too late.

“We don’t have enough time to reach the right altitude and distance,” he thought, jaw tightening. “The defense is badly compromised before the battle has even begun.”

He didn’t have to say it aloud. Every man in his flight could sense it from the clipped orders, the urgency in his tone.

Below, the American battle group spread across miles of ocean. Two carriers were the prize, but every ship was a potential graveyard if the Japanese got through.

Hundreds, maybe thousands of men—friends, faces he saw in the chow line, young kids who had never seen land combat and might not if he did his job right—all of them depended on what happened in the next few minutes.

“FUBAR already,” he muttered under his breath. “They scrambled us too late.”

Little’s voice crackled in his ears, a little too loud with forced bravado.

“Ah, hell, Swede,” he said. “You dealt with three Zeros in a Dauntless. We got this.”

There was a ripple of laughter among the younger voices. Nervous, but real.

It was a story they all knew. Something to hold onto when the odds looked ugly.

Five months earlier, over the Coral Sea, he’d been a dive bomber pilot in a lumbering SBD Dauntless, caught alone by three A6M Zeros. On paper, the fight had been suicide. The Zero outclimbed, outturned, outaccelerated the Dauntless in almost every regime.

On paper, he should have died.

Instead, he’d outflown them. He’d used every ounce of the Dauntless’s strengths and quirks—its dive speed, its ruggedness, its surprisingly responsive ailerons—to twist, dive, and yank the aircraft into positions the Japanese pilots didn’t expect.

He’d killed two of them outright and crippled the third, sending it trailing smoke back toward its carrier.

No one quite believed it at first. Then the gun camera footage and after-action reports had been parsed and re-parsed. The math checked out.

He’d been pulled off dive-bombers and given a fighter cockpit. With it had come a new rank, a new call sign, and a new reputation.

Grim Reaper.

Now, as the Pacific slid by beneath his Wildcat, he wasn’t alone in a plodding bomber. He led eight fighters—eight sets of wings, eight sets of guns, eight sets of eyes.

“Eyes on the horizon, gentlemen,” he said, voice sharpening, pulling them back to the present. “Let’s earn our name.”

They climbed.

At 13,000 feet, the air had a different quality—a thinner, sharper feel through the vents. The horizon stretched farther. Tracer from the ships below, when they finally started, would be like glowing threads reaching up to meet whatever came.

“Contacts! Two o’clock high!” Little’s shout snapped him out of his calculations.

Vejtasa peered along the indicated bearing.

There, emerging from between scattered clouds, a group of dark shapes—small, hunched, with fixed landing gear and straight wings. Aichi D3A “Val” dive bombers.

They were above.

“Damn,” he hissed. “We’re far too low. They’re going over our heads.”

“Climb at maximum speed!” he barked into the radio.

The Wildcats’ noses pitched up as one. Emergency power engaged, throttle forward, mixture rich. Engines howled. The Wildcats clawed at the sky, their climb rate straining to turn the distance into negligible seconds.

He could feel the airframe shudder slightly as they pushed it hard.

But the geometry was unforgiving.

The Vals had been vectored onto the fleet from an angle and height the Americans hadn’t anticipated. They had started higher. They were closer.

And they weren’t waiting.

“They’re going straight in,” someone said, voice tight. “Right for the Hornet.”

Below, the air over the carriers bloomed with movement.

The Japanese formation broke, each Val peeling off into its own attack dive. Bomb bay doors swung open. Their engines screamed as they plunged toward the ships.

From the American decks, anti-aircraft batteries cut loose. 5-inch dual-purpose guns hurled shells into the sky, timed fuses bursting in jagged black puffs among the diving bombers. Smaller 40mm Bofors and 20mm Oerlikons stitched lighter streams of fire, green and red tracers reaching up like desperate fingers.

To the men watching from the decks of the Hornet, the scene looked like something out of a nightmare.

“Here they come!”

“Keep firing, you bastards, keep firing!”

Tracer rounds flashed and ricocheted. Some found their marks. One Val blossomed into flame halfway down its dive, shearing apart, debris trailing smoke.

But several others bored in undeterred, wings rock steady.

On Vejtasa’s radio, a fragment of another voice, from a shipboard director, came through, swamped by static and other calls.

“—Val splashed, but more—repeat, more—”

He watched, helplessly far, as the first bombs hit.

From altitude, explosions looked almost slow. A flash, an expanding sphere of orange and black, then a mushrooming cloud of smoke and debris.

He saw at least two direct hits on the Hornet’s flight deck, geysers of fire punching through the planks, smoke erupting in greasy columns.

“Damn it,” he spat. “We’re too late.”

The line on his own life—from that dive bomber against three Zeros to this moment—felt suddenly like a bad joke. All his skill, all their training, and they hadn’t been there when they were needed most.

His eyes burned.

“Don’t look at it,” he told himself. “Do something about it.”

“Go straight for them!” he snapped. “We don’t have time to buy these Vals a drink before we start dancing!”

They were below optimal intercept angle now. They weren’t going to be heroes saving the day in a perfect dive.

They were going to be avengers.

He drove his Wildcat’s nose down, aiming for the Vals pulling out of their runs.

“Grim Reapers, stay with your wingman,” he barked. “Pick a bomber, make it count.”

The first Val in his sights was already banking away, climbing slightly, bomb racks empty. Somewhere below, a 250-kilogram bomb it had carried was doing its lethal work.

Val pilots had been told: hit your target and run. Their aircraft were nimble, but fragile. You did not linger in the gun umbrella.

This one never got the chance.

Vejtasa slid in behind it, the Val’s rising arc intersecting with his downward rush. He closed the range quickly, the Japanese aircraft swelling in his gunsight.

He saw the gunner in the rear seat swivel, the twin-mount machine gun spitting a few feeble tracer rounds back at him. They went wide, the gunner panicked by the closing speed.

“Too little, too late,” Swede thought.

He squeezed the trigger.

The Wildcat’s six .50-caliber wing guns hammered, the sound a buzzing roar through the cockpit frame. Bright streams of tracer converged on the Val’s fuselage.

Bullets ripped through the thin skin, punching out chunks of metal and fabric. Fuel misted, then ignited. Flame licked along the wing, then roared.

The Val twitched once, rolled slightly, then fell off into a death spiral, flames trailing.

“One down,” he said into the radio, not proudly, just marking it.

“Watch it, another wave coming in!” Little called.

He glanced left.

More Vals. Second wave. Diving for the Hornet as if nothing had changed.

He hauled the Wildcat around, the G-forces clawing at his chest, and pointed his nose at another.

Another quick burst. Another Val shuddering, one wing tearing off, the whole aircraft tumbling.

But two—three—made it through the flak, through the wild, slashing runs of the Wildcats.

Bombs blossomed on Hornet’s deck. One punched through the forward elevator and detonated in the hangar deck. Others exploded near the island structure.

Smoke swallowed half her shape.

The rest of the Grim Reapers fell upon the retreating Vals with a kind of cold fury, their guns flashing. Japanese aircraft disintegrated in midair, fell burning into the sea.

Despite their efforts, one Val slipped through.

It flew low, hug-hugging the chop, engines at full scream. Its bomb racks looked strangely bare.

On Hornet’s bridge, a brown-haired signalman spotted it and jabbed a finger.

“There!” he yelled. “Starboard bow! Coming in low!”

On the deck, gunners swung their guns, firing frantic bursts. Tracer whipped around the incoming bomber.

“Drop it, drop the damn bomb,” one sailor thought, watching the black shape grow in his field of view.

The Val did not drop anything.

Instead, it climbed slightly, then leveled, pointed directly at the carrier’s island.

“He’s gonna ram!” someone screamed.

The Val’s nose came in like a spear.

The impact was too bright, too loud. The aircraft slammed into the island superstructure, fuel igniting in a blinding flash. Metal and flesh tore. Shrapnel scythed across the deck. For a moment, the island vanished in a ball of orange and black.

Men on the flight deck were knocked off their feet, ears ringing. Others were simply gone.

Damage control parties sprang into action even as fires raged. Sailors dragged the wounded clear, hoses snaked, men in as-bestos suits rushed into the thick smoke.

Rear Admiral George D. Murray, standing near the bridge when the hit came, staggered but did not fall. Within moments, he was in the thick of the aftermath, helping pull a burned seaman away from a pool of burning fuel, shouting for medics.

“If any of them are as brave as you,” he told the men around him gruffly as they fought the flames, “we can’t lose.”

Above, Vejtasa saw the flash on the Hornet’s island.

For a heartbeat, he thought: another bomb. Then the shape of it registered.

“No,” he whispered. “He… rammed.”

A chill crawled up his spine that had nothing to do with altitude.

Five months into the Pacific War, the word “kamikaze” did not yet exist in Allied parlance. Organized suicide attacks would still be two years away. But individual pilots, pushed beyond the edge, had already begun to improvise their own fatal tactics.

Down below, a Japanese aviator had chosen not to jettison his bomb and dive for the sea.

He had chosen to crash his entire aircraft into the Hornet’s heart.

Vejtasa’s gut twisted.

“We were too late,” he thought. “We were too damn late.”

Before he could let that thought settle, the radio crackled.

“Incoming attack, bearing two-three-zero, approaching Enterprise,” came the voice of the fighter director officer from the Enterprise. Calm, clipped, deadly serious.

New threat.

New chance.

“Leave those that have already dropped bombs,” Vejtasa snapped, jaw tightening. “Regroup. There’s more coming. We’ve got to cover the Enterprise.”

“Yes sir! Copy that!” came the replies.

He took one last look at the smoke pouring from the Hornet, feeling a pang as sharp as any shrapnel, then tore his gaze away.

He banked his Wildcat toward the new bearing and began to climb, pulling his battered division back into some semblance of formation.

Eight fighters, some with ammunition counters already halfway down, some with holes in their skin from near-misses, clawed back toward altitude.

“Get your heads straight, Reapers,” Swede said into the radio. “We can’t unbreak what happened to Hornet. But we sure as hell can keep the Big E off that list.”

The USS Enterprise. The “Big E.” The last of the pre-war carriers still standing in the South Pacific after Lexington, Yorktown, and Wasp had been sunk or crippled.

Losing her would be like losing an entire limb.

“Protect the ships at all costs,” he said.

“Copy, flight leader,” came the chorus.

They climbed back through a layer of ragged clouds, condensation trailing from their wingtips in thin snakes.

The radio crackled again; this time it was Little’s voice, edged with excitement.

“Vees, I see ‘em. Four Vals, eleven o’clock, just above the cloud tops.”

He saw them too: four dark silhouettes crossing a break in the clouds. Their formation was tight, disciplined. Their noses pointed toward the part of the horizon where Enterprise steamed, unseen beyond the curve.

“Eight of us, four of them,” Swede thought. “Fair fight, for once.”

They didn’t wait for a perfect setup.

They punched out of the clouds head-on, eight Wildcats bursting into the Vals’ path like ghosts out of mist.

There was no pause.

Vejtasa rammed the throttle forward and fired in the same smooth motion, his guns spitting lead before the Japanese pilots could fully register what had happened.

His first stream of bullets chewed into the leading Val’s nose and cockpit. The aircraft seemed to freeze in midair, then exploded into a shower of fragments, fuel igniting in a brief fireball.

The sudden, violent loss of their point man threw the rest of the Japanese formation into chaos.

“Fighters!” one of them yelled over his intercom. “Ahead!”

“Where did they come from?” another cried.

The Val pilots tried to break, some rolling to dive away, others veering to one side or the other. Their training had prepared them for intercepting fighters coming from below or from the side, not a snarling wall of Wildcats materializing directly in front of them.

The Grim Reapers drove through their formation like a steel fist.

Swede yanked his Wildcat into a tight left turn, feeling the Gs clamp down. He swung in behind another Val whose pilot, fixated on the flak he could see blooming over the target area, seemingly hadn’t processed the new threat behind him.

The rear gunner was still swiveling, searching for targets, when Swede’s guns lit up.

Bullets traced a line from the Val’s tail to its wing, stitching a cruel seam. Wing fabric shredded. A small tongue of flame became a hungry blaze. The Val rolled onto its back, then dove, disappearing into cloud before reemerging far below as a smoking trail.

“Two,” Swede thought clinically.

“Too many,” he added, seeing other Vals diving through flak toward the ship, knowing he couldn’t get them all.

“Regroup,” he ordered. “We go in again. Second round.”

But the surviving Vals, faced with a sky full of flak and Wildcats, didn’t wait for a second pass.

They went to their old reflex: dive for the water.

They tilted nose-down and plunged, hoping the combination of speed and low altitude would make them harder targets.

“Stay with them if you can,” Swede began, intending to assign pairs, but his wingman’s sudden shout cut him off.

“Below! Torpedo bombers!”

Lieutenant Leroy “Tex” Harris sounded like he’d just had a bucket of ice dumped under his flight suit.

Swede snapped his head downward.

There, below the path of the Vals, another group of Japanese aircraft plodded along at low altitude: Nakajima B5N “Kate” torpedo bombers. Green shapes with fixed gear and long wings, torpedoes hanging underneath their bellies like fat, deadly fruit.

They were heading not for Hornet. Not for some cruiser or destroyer.

Their line of flight, if you traced it out, went straight for the Enterprise.

“Tex, take us down,” Swede said, voice dropping into something like a growl. “Now.”

The two Wildcats tipped their wings and dove.

The air around them pushed back, compressing against the cockpit frames. The engine’s pitch climbed. The Kate pilots below had no idea what was about to hit them.

From their vantage point, the only immediate threat was the flak they expected near the carriers. They had launched from distant decks with the usual prayers. Their squadron leader droned on in calm, practiced Japanese about bearing, timing, release altitude.

One of them glanced out his canopy and saw a brief glint in the sky above, then dismissed it as sun on flak bursts.

He didn’t have time to revise that assessment.

Swede and Tex came out of the dive almost directly above and behind the formation, their speed advantage enormous.

“Pick your dance partner,” Swede said. “Make it count.”

He squeezed his triggers and felt the Wildcat shudder as streams of bullets poured downward, tracing invisible plumb lines through the air.

His rounds struck one of the Kates squarely, tearing into the cockpit and left wing. The fabric skinned away, the structure collapsing. The bomber lurched, wing folding, then dropped like a rock.

Tex’s guns snarled at the same time, cutting into another Kate. For a moment, the sky below them seemed to light up—a pair of blossoms of flame, then debris.

The remaining bombers broke discipline.

Where a moment before they’d flown in a neat V, now they scattered in all directions, weaving, diving, climbing, trying to escape the unseen hawks descending from above.

Swede chose another target and went after it, cutting across the chaotic traffic like a runner shooting the gap in a defensive line.

He overshot one, pulled hard, felt his aircraft groan. He adjusted, came in again.

“Too fast,” he thought. “But they’re slower, heavier. I can pick my angle.”

He swung back in, pulled the nose up slightly to catch the trailing edge of another Kate trying to peel away.

His bullets walked along its fuselage, striking something vital. Smoke blew out, then fire. The bomber curved downward, still carrying its torpedo.

The rest of the Kates, realizing they were being shredded, dove for the relative cover of lower altitude, hugging the sea, trying to get into the flak envelope around the ships where the Wildcats might hesitate.

Swede pulled up, resisting the urge to chase every last one.

“Let ‘em go,” he ordered. “There’s more coming. Conserve ammo.”

“Only those in retreat,” Tex replied. “I’m giving chase.”

“Conserve ammunition,” Swede repeated. “There’s more inbound.”

“Copy that.”

They regrouped, climbing again, engines straining, pilots’ neck muscles burning from repeated high-G turns.

For a brief moment, the fight eased.

He used the time to survey.

Below, he saw other Wildcats picking off stragglers—more Kates trailing smoke, more Vals limping away only to be finished off by angry .50-caliber fire.

Flak puffs bloomed in clusters above the Enterprise and the ships around her, dark flowers in the sky.

He checked his ammo counters. Not great, not empty.

Enough.

Then he saw what he dreaded.

Farther out, gleaming faintly against the gray-blue sea, a neat, tight V of shadows. Not the ragged remains of a mauled group. Fresh.

Eight Kates, undisturbed, lumbering toward the Enterprise.

“No fighters on them. No flak yet. No idea we’re up here,” he thought.

“Torpedo bombers!” he snapped. “Formation of eight headed for Enterprise! Intercept!”

He didn’t wait for acknowledgment.

He shoved the throttle forward and pointed the Wildcat straight at the formation.

“Let’s dance,” he murmured.

Below, the Enterprise’s air search radar had just begun to paint the incoming group. Fighter direction officers called bearings, shipboard gunners started swinging barrels, elevation wheels spinning.

AA crews strapped helmets on and reached for firing lanyards.

“Enemy torpedo planes, bearing—” a voice came over the TBS (talk between ships) circuit. “All ships, commence fire as they enter your range.”

The first flak bursts bloomed around the Kates: puffs of black and gray, jagged-edged, the air full of razor shards.

Swede dove right into it.

Frantic Japanese pilots saw a Wildcat slash down in front of them, its wings flickering with muzzle flashes, and began to break formation.

One rolled right, one rolled left, one climbed, three dropped lower. The neat V dissolved into a spray of panicked aircraft.

The torpedoes under their bellies meant they couldn’t maneuver as violently as they wanted. One wrong move and the heavy weapon could tear free or send the plane out of control.

One Kate in particular caught Swede’s eye—the lead. Its pilot was stubborn, holding formation longer than the others, probably drilled into obedience from years of naval training.

He went for that one.

The Kate’s rear gunner fired a burst that zipped past too high. Swede ignored it, closing in from below and slightly to the side, the rear gunner’s field of fire disrupted.

The bomber dove into a cloud, a desperate attempt to break line of sight, to make the American guess.

Swede did not need to guess.

He’d been flying fighters long enough to know how a frightened pilot moved. The instinct to turn left or right, to hold a certain angle, to correct too much or too little.

He followed, plunging into the same cloud, water droplets streaking across his canopy, the world turned gray-white.

He came out the other side with his guns already lined up.

The Kate’s silhouette filled his sight.

He fired.

Bullets tore into the bomber’s right wing. Flame blossomed, then spread. The Japanese pilot, still committed to his line of attack, hesitated only a second before the growing fire told him the truth.

Swede broke away, not needing to watch it fall.

He pulled up, scanning for more.

The rest of the Grim Reapers had arrived, falling on the scattered Kates like wolves. One by one, the torpedo bombers took hits. Some tried to launch their weapons early, casting their torpedoes in awkward arcs toward the general vicinity of the American ships, but most never got the chance.

Swede moved through the chaos like a knife, picking shots, making bursts count.

He killed two more Kates in quick succession—one with a clean burst into the engine, another with rounds that ripped through the cockpit and sent it plunging.

The air seemed full of debris—bits of wing, fragments of fuselage, smoke, and the occasional parachute. The ocean below was scarred by flaming wrecks and the white wakes of torpedoes that would never hit anything.

Then, suddenly, it was almost quiet.

The immediate threat to the Enterprise was gone.

The most disciplined among them might have called “Cease fire” in their heads, conserved what ammunition they had for unknown enemies yet to appear. Others, adrenaline spiking, were tempted to chase every fleeing shape to the horizon.

Swede’s breathing slowed.

He checked his ammo counters again.

Low.

He was about to key the radio, call his division back to some semblance of order, when he saw it.

A lone Kate, lower than the others, trailing fire but still flying.

It had been on the edge of the engagement, missed by the initial storm. Its torpedo was still slung underneath. Its course was ragged, but its nose pointed stubbornly toward the battle group.

He squinted.

Toward Enterprise.

He felt something inside him go cold.

“Where the hell are you going?” he whispered, though he already knew.

He checked his ammunition again. The counters hovered near zero.

Not much left. Maybe enough.

He reached down and flicked the gun switches back on, all six. No point in holding anything back now.

“This Kate is going down,” he promised himself. “One way or another.”

He pushed the Wildcat’s nose down and lined up on the bomber.

The Japanese pilot, aware now that his aircraft was a flying torch, had made a decision of his own.

He could have peeled away and ditched, trying to save his crew.

He did not.

“For the Emperor,” he whispered in his cockpit, hands steady on the controls despite the heat licking at his legs.

The rear gunner, coughing in the smoke, glanced back at the blazing fuel and understood. He nodded, a small, numb motion.

They both knew what this was now.

Swede eased in behind and below the Kate, positioning himself out of the rear gunner’s line of fire, the bomber’s silhouette framed neatly in his sight. The flames gave him a target even in the haze.

He pulled the trigger and held it.

The Wildcat’s guns spat a continuous stream of rounds, tracers pouring out like water from a firehose. The sound was a steady, punishing vibration.

Bullets tore into the Kate. Fabric and metal shredded. The left wing sagged. Fire blossomed brighter.

Swede’s heart pounded.

“Go down,” he urged. “Go down, damn you.”

His guns clicked empty.

He realized he’d been holding his breath.

The Kate wobbled.

Then, impossibly, it steadied.

The flames engulfed much of the wing and part of the fuselage, but the bomber remained under control, nose still pointing toward the American formation.

Swede’s stomach dropped.

The torpedo was likely still live. The bomber was a fireball. Any rational pilot would have tried to ditch.

The Japanese pilot did not.

The Kate turned slightly, adjusting course.

Toward the Enterprise’s general location.

“He’s going to ram,” Swede thought, a sick certainty settling in. “He’s going to hit something with that wreck even if he can’t drop the torpedo.”

His mind ran through options.

No guns. No ammo. His only weapon now was his own aircraft.

“I can chop his tail off with my prop,” he thought in a flash of reckless desperation. “Get in close, eat his rudder, spin him out. Maybe he falls short. Maybe…”

Maybe he dies. Maybe Lou dies trying to follow. Maybe the Wildcat disintegrates on contact.

But the alternative was letting that flaming bomber throw itself into the side of a carrier filled with hundreds of men.

He shoved the throttle forward, closing the distance.

The tail of the Kate grew in his field of view. The burning fuselage wobbled.

He lined his nose up with the rear of the bomber, his prop a spinning blur.

“Swede, what the hell are you doing?” Lou shouted over the radio, seeing the angle.

Swede didn’t answer. He didn’t have time.

All he could see was that tail, the flicker of flames, the slight waggle of rudder.

The Japanese pilot glanced back, saw the Wildcat closing, and understood the American’s plan.

A strange smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.

“We are not the only ones who sacrifice,” he thought.

He tightened his grip on the stick and rolled his aircraft inverted.

The Kate went upside down, flames licking upward, then shoved its nose down into a steep dive.

“Long live the Emperor!” he shouted, voice hoarse.

Swede hauled back on his stick, trying to adjust, but the sudden inversion and dive threw off the geometry.

The Kate dropped away, falling at a new angle.

Toward a different ship.

On the destroyer USS Smith, men on deck saw a flaming aircraft falling out of the sky like a meteor. They’d been tracking the fight, watching torpedo planes get cut apart. Now this one came not from the direction of the Enterprise, but at a slant straight toward their bow.

“Look out!” someone screamed.

“Take cover!”

The ship’s guns barked, but there was almost no time. The bomber was a streak of fire and metal.

It slammed into the Smith’s forecastle, the impact a sickening crunch of steel and flesh. Fuel exploded, fire washing back over the forward gun mounts. Men were blown off their feet, tossed into bulkheads, hurled into the sea.

On the bridge, the captain grabbed the railing as the destroyer shuddered violently.

“Damage control!” he roared. “Get that fire out or it’s going to cook the magazines!”

Forward, men half on fire themselves sprayed hoses, dragged shipmates whose uniforms burned like torches, stomped at flames. The air was acrid with burning paint, cordite, and flesh.

The Smith did not die.

Blinded, scorched, her forward superstructure wrecked, she stayed afloat. Her crew held the line, fighting the fire back until it was merely a monstrous scar rather than a death sentence.

In the sky above, Swede circled once, helpless, watching the column of smoke from the impact blossom up.

He felt hollow.

The last of his ammunition was gone. The bomber had chosen its target and finished its suicidal run. He had been seconds from killing himself trying to stop it. The numbers, like the geometry of intercepts, did not always work out in your favor.

“Enterprise still intact,” he reminded himself. “Ship’s still there. Hornet…”

He didn’t look toward Hornet. He didn’t want to see the wounded carrier, smoke pouring from her wounds, listing slowly. He knew enough. He’d done what he could to protect her before the call had come to defend his own deck.

“Grim Reaper Lead to Fighter Direction,” he said into the radio, voice flat. “Out of ammunition. Fuel at minimum safe. Request recovery.”

Enterprise’s calm reply came after a beat.

“Roger, Reaper Lead. Vector zero-eight-zero, angels one. Enter the pattern.”

He banked toward home, Little falling into slot beside him.

The Wildcat felt tired, though the metal didn’t know fatigue. It was the man inside whose arms ached, whose eyes burned, whose mind replayed the moments of the last hour in an endless loop.

The carrier deck came into view—scarred but mostly intact, white wake still foaming ahead.

Other aircraft were landing too, some with visible damage: holes in wings, smoke trailing from cowlings. Others did not return at all, their absence a dull ache in the formation.

He dropped his hook, focused on the meatball—the glowing landing aid—and rode it in.

Wheels screeched against the deck. The Wildcat slammed down, tail dropping, hook catching the third wire with a jolt that snapped his head forward.

He came to a stop.

For a second, he just sat there, hands still clamped on the controls, heart hammering against his ribs.

Then the canopy slid back and cold air rushed in, carrying the smell of exhaust, sea, and something else: distant smoke from burning ships.

A deckhand climbed up, reaching to help him unbuckle.

“Nice of you to drop by, Lieutenant,” the man said, trying for humor, but his eyes flicked to the bullet holes in the Wildcat’s skin, to the soot streaks.

“How’s she look?” Swede asked, patting the cowling.

“Better than a lot out there,” the crewman replied. “And the Big E’s still floatin’. That’s what counts.”

Swede nodded, then turned to look aft.

In the distance, the Hornet lay wounded, her deck a patchwork of scars and flame, smoke towering. Destroyers clustered nearby, taking off survivors, ready to scuttle if need be.

Beyond, the Smith still steamed, bow blackened, fire scars visible even at distance, but she moved under her own power.

The cost of the Japanese pilots’ desperate attacks was writ in those scars. But so was the cost to the men who had chosen that path—pilots who, when their bombs didn’t fall quite right or their aircraft were too damaged to return, chose to turn their machines into weapons.

Later in the war, they’d have a name for it. Organized. Glorified. The Kami-kaze, “divine wind.”

Here, at Santa Cruz, it was still an unnamed, terrible improvisation. A pilot’s last, lethal decision.

That afternoon, in the Enterprise’s ready room, the surviving pilots of the Grim Reapers slumped into folding chairs, helmets in their laps, flight suits unzipped to the waist.

The air was thick with sweat, coffee, and cigarette smoke.

On a chalkboard at the front, an intelligence officer marked tallies. Vals. Kates. Fighters. The numbers were rough—it would take days, weeks, perhaps forever to sift truth from the chaos—but some facts were inescapable.

The carriers still floated. Hornet was badly hurt, later lost. Enterprise had survived. Their presence had staved off a massacre.

“Lieutenant Vejtasa,” the CAG said, reading from a clipboard. “Seven confirmed. Three Vals, four Kates. Multiple probables.”

There was a low murmur around the room. Even in a war where the sky ate men by the dozen, scoring that many kills in one day was rare.

Ace in a day.

Swede didn’t smile. He didn’t feel much of anything beyond an exhausted fog. His thoughts still skated back to the last Kate, to the moment his guns ran dry and the bomber kept flying.

“You saved this ship,” someone said beside him quietly. It was Tex Harris, bandage on his forehead, a haunted look in his eyes. “Big E would be scrap if you hadn’t taken down those first Kates.”

Swede shrugged, uncomfortable.

“We all did our part,” he said. “You got your share.”

Tex shook his head.

“I saw that last one, Swede,” he said. “You were going to cut him apart with your prop. That was… something else.”

Swede looked at his hands, the knuckles scraped raw from where they’d rubbed against the stick during high-G turns.

“I wasn’t going to let him hit her,” he said simply.

“And he still hit somebody,” Tex replied.

They sat in silence for a moment.

Above decks, the air war had moved on. The Japanese, bloodied and losing too many pilots, would begin to pull back from major carrier engagements. The Americans, learning faster every month, would bring new ships and new aircraft to bear.

In the years to come, Swede would have other flights, other fights. He would sit in different cockpits, on different seas, as the war’s tide turned more decisively toward Allied victory.

By late 1944 and 1945, when organized kamikaze units began slamming into American ships off Leyte and Okinawa, the men in the CICs and fighter ready rooms would remember days like Santa Cruz and say: we’ve seen this before.

Not this many. Not this systematic. But we’ve seen the glint in an enemy pilot’s eye when he decides his life weighs less than the damage he can do.

On those later carriers, newer pilots would launch in Hellcats and Corsairs to meet swarms of inbound suicide planes, their fighter squadrons carrying grim names and grim duties, scrambling to swat fireballs out of the sky before they could reach the thin skins of the ships below.

And some of those pilots would be Grim Reapers in name or spirit—men who had learned under Swede, or under men like him.

Once, after the war, when the world had gone strangely quiet and the ocean was just water again, not a battlefield, a gray-haired Stanley Vejtasa stood on the deck of a museum ship and looked out over a calm harbor.

Beside him, a young sailor—barely older than Swede had been that day off Santa Cruz—stared at an old black-and-white photo mounted on a plaque.

It showed a Wildcat in a hard bank, tracers streaming from its wings. In the distance, a bomber trailed smoke.

“Kamikazes,” the sailor said, shaking his head. “I can’t imagine flying into a ship on purpose.”

Swede’s eyes lingered on the photo, the shape of the bomber, the angle of the dive. He smiled faintly.

“That one wasn’t called that yet,” he said. “We didn’t have the word. But the intent was there.”

“You were there?” the sailor asked, eyes widening.

Swede nodded once.

“I was there,” he said. “We were just figuring out what it meant when a man decided he was the weapon as much as the plane. We were still learning how to stop him.”

“How did you?” the sailor asked.

Swede watched a seagull wheel over the harbor, then turn away.

“By getting there faster than anyone thought we could,” he said. “By putting ourselves between those planes and the men who couldn’t move. By doing everything you can, even when it isn’t enough for everyone.”

He paused.

“And by not letting the fear of what they’re willing to do stop you from doing what you have to,” he added. “That’s what the Grim Reapers did that day. That’s what every man on those decks did.”

The sailor was quiet for a moment.

“Did it ever stop bothering you?” he asked finally. “Seeing them hit us like that?”

Swede thought of the Val slamming into Hornet’s island, of the Kate plunging into Smith, of the men he’d watched disappear in explosions, of the Japanese pilots whose faces he never saw but whose decisions he’d understood in a way that only another pilot could.

“No,” he said. “It never stopped bothering me. But I learned to live with the fact that it bothered me. The day it didn’t, that’s the day I wouldn’t have trusted myself to fly anymore.”

The sailor nodded slowly.

Swede looked back at the water.

On October 26, 1942, somewhere above a patch of Pacific that now bore no scar, men in fragile machines had fought over the fate of ships and the lives of thousands.

Some of those machines had been turned, intentionally, into human-guided missiles. Others, flown by men with grim nicknames and battered hands, had thrown themselves into their path.

When kamikazes—formal or improvised—faced the Grim Reapers, the sky itself had hung in the balance.

And for one long, wild day, a young lieutenant named Stanley Vejtasa and his squadron had made sure that, for at least one carrier, the Reaper wore an American flight suit.