May 11, 1945.
The Pacific Ocean, 60 mi northwest of Okinawa.
The destroyer USS Hugh W Hadley drifts in the morning mist.
336 crew members, 2,200 tons of steel, and 100 Japanese aircraft flying straight at them.
In 95 minutes, this ship will set a record that still stands today.
23 kamicazis shot down by one ship in an hour and a half.
But let’s get one thing straight before the history books dry the ink on this chapter.
This record wasn’t set by brave sailors, not by superior tactics, not by divine intervention.
It was set by a device the size of a milk bottle, costing eight tinses containing 130 electronic components, each of which had to withstand 20,000 gs of force.
This device was called the VT proximity fuse.
And today, we’re not just looking at a naval battle.
We’re conducting a technological audit of the most expensive secret of World War II.
A secret that cost a billion dollars.
A secret guarded as tightly as the atomic bomb.
A secret that turned human missiles into a statistical error.
This is the story of how an electronic circuit defeated the samurai spirit.
This is the proximity fuse.
The technology that destroyed the divine wind.
Chapter 1.
The problem.
Why anti-aircraft guns didn’t work.
To understand why the VT Fuse changed everything, we need to go back and understand one simple thing.
Before 1943, shooting down an airplane with anti-aircraft fire was virtually impossible.
I’m not exaggerating.
Here’s the math.
Picture this.
A Japanese ID3A Valive bomber is flying at you at 250 mph.
That’s 366 ft per second.
Your shell travels at 2,600 ft per second.
The aircraft is a target roughly 33x 40 ft.
Now, here’s the fun part.
Your shell doesn’t have to hit the airplane.
It has to explode near the airplane because a direct hit is a lottery with 1 in 10,000 odds.
How did this work? Before the VT fuse, you used something called a time fuse.
Before firing, the gunner had to first estimate the distance to the target.
Second, estimate the target’s speed.
Third, estimate the target’s direction.
Fourth, calculate where the target would be in 5 to 10 seconds.
Fifth, manually set the fuse timing.
Sixth, fire.
Seventh, prey.
And here are the statistics that show you how well that worked.
In 1942, to destroy one Japanese aircraft, the US Navy needed an average of 2,000 rounds of 5-in shells with time fuses.
2,000 shells for one airplane.
Dr.
James Van Allen, the same physicist who would later discover Earth’s radiation belts, worked on the VT fuse at John’s Hopkins.
He later recalled, “Almost no one ever hit an airplane with the old-fashioned fuses.
It would be just a sheer stroke of luck to hit anything.
” Now, imagine it’s not one aircraft flying at you.
It’s a hundred.
And each one is piloted by someone who has no intention of coming home.
That was called kamicazi.
And that was a problem you couldn’t solve with more shells.
Chapter 2.
Kamicazi.
Human missiles.
October 1944.
The Philippines later Gulf.
Vice Admiral Takajiro Anishi gathers his officers for a meeting.
Japan has just lost most of its experienced pilots in the Battle of the Philippine Sea.
Americans called it the Great Mariana’s Turkey Shoot.
That’s how one-sided the slaughter was.
Onishi looks at his officers and speaks the words that would change the war in the Pacific.
In my opinion, there is only one way of assuring that our meager strength will be effective to a maximum degree.
That is to organize suicide attack units composed of zero fighters armed with 250 kg bombs with each plane to crash dive into an enemy carrier.
Silence, then agreement.
Thus were born the Tokatai, special attack units.
The West would call them kamicazi.
Divine wind.
And here’s what made this tactic so effective.
A conventional air attack on an American ship in 1944 had about a 2% success rate.
The pilot had to approach the ship, drop a bomb or torpedo, turn around, and fly away, all under withering fire.
A kamicazi didn’t need to turn around, didn’t need to aim from a distance.
He was the bomb.
The first kamicazi attacks in the Philippines showed an effectiveness rate of 34%.
One in three suicide pilots reached their target.
Think about that math from Japanese command’s perspective.
One obsolete aircraft, one inexperienced pilot with 50 hours of flight time, one 550 pound bomb against a destroyer worth $6 million with a crew of 300 with years of training and experience and a one in three chance of success.
It was monstrously rational.
It was inhumanly effective.
The American fleet faced a threat it wasn’t prepared for.
As Admiral Raymond Spruent, commander of the fifth fleet, said, “This is my second experience with a suicide plane hitting my flagship, the Kamicazi aircraft is a very effective weapon, which we must not underestimate.” But Japanese command had one problem they didn’t know about.
While they were gathering thousands of young pilots for suicide missions in a basement laboratory in Maryland, a group of American physicists had already assembled the answer, a shell that knew when to explode on its own.
Chapter 3.
The birth section T summer 1940 Washington DC Dr.
Mel Tuve receives an assignment from the National Defense Research Committee.
The assignment sounds simple.
Create a shell that will automatically explode near its target.
The theory was elementary.
Build a miniature radar into the shell.
The shell would emit radio waves.
When the waves bounced off a nearby target, the Doppler shift in frequency would activate the detonator.
Simple, right? Here’s the list of problems Tuve’s team faced.
Problem one, the radio receiver and transmitter had to fit in a space the size of a milk bottle.
In 1940, a radio the size of a suitcase was considered compact.
Problem two, all components had to survive being fired from a cannon.
That meant withstanding 20,000 gs.
For comparison, astronauts at launch experience 3 to 4 GS.
Fighter pilots blackout at 9 GS.
Problem three, the shell spins at 25,000 RPM due to the rifling in the barrel.
All components had to work under that rotation.
Problem four, vacuum tubes, the basis of all electronics at the time, were made of glass.
Glass shatters on impact.
The tungsten filaments inside the tubes were thinner than a human hair.
British scientists who first proposed the concept concluded, “It’s impossible.
The tubes won’t survive the firing.” Tuvi said, “We’ll try.” In April 1942, the work was transferred to the newly created Applied Physics Laboratory at John’s Hopkins University, APL.
The team received the code name section T.
And here’s where a young physicist named James Van Allen enters the picture.
His task was specific.
Make vacuum tubes that wouldn’t break.
Van Allen worked with Sania, a company that manufactured miniature tubes for hearing aids.
They experimented with new glass formulas, new cushioning materials, new ways to mount tungsten filaments, months of testing, thousands of broken tubes, thousands of shots from cannons, and finally success.
The tubes survived.
In August 1942, the team was ready for combat trials.
The brand new cruiser USS Cleveland sailed into the Chesapeake Bay.
The targets were radiocontrolled drones, unmanned aircraft.
The tests were scheduled for 2 days.
They ended on the first day.
Three drones, four shells, three downed drones.
The Navy canled the rest of the tests and immediately launched mass production.
This was nail number one, creating the impossible.
Chapter 4, production, industrial warfare.
To understand the scale of what happened next, you need to understand one thing.
The VT Fuse wasn’t just a clever idea.
It was an industrial feat comparable to the Manhattan project.
Each fuse contained about 130 components, five miniature vacuum tubes, a battery that activated on firing, a radio transmitter, a radio receiver, a detonator, and all of this in a housing the size of a fist.
Each component required precision to thousandth of an inch.
Now, here are the production numbers.
By the end of the war, American factories had produced over 22 million VT fuses.
22 million units and 130 components each.
That’s nearly 3 billion parts.
The total program cost exceeded $1 billion in 1940s dollars.
In today’s money, that’s roughly 1517 billion.
87 companies and 110 factories participated in production.
Here are some of them.
Crosley Corporation produced 5,258,913 fuses.
That’s 24% of the total.
Crosley factories employed 10,000 people in three shifts, 7 days a week.
RCA, Eastman, Kodak, General Electric, McQuay Norris, Zenith, even Woritzer Organs, a company that made musical organs, all were involved.
Sylvania produced miniature vacuum tubes.
Rathon and Western Electric helped with electronics.
And here’s what shows the true scale of American industrial power.
In 1942, one VT fuse cost 732.
By 1945, the price had dropped to 18 from 732s to $18.
A 97.5% reduction in 3 years.
That’s called a learning curve.
That’s called mass production.
That’s called industrial warfare.
By April 1945, American factories were producing 70,000 fuses per day.
And what could Japan put up against this? Nothing.
Japanese scientists understood the principle of the VT fuse.
The Germans had passed them information about Allied special munitions via submarine.
But Japanese industry, devastated by strategic bombing and resource shortages, couldn’t produce anything like it.
Vacuum tube technology required manufacturing precision that Japan simply didn’t have.
The Japanese Type22 radar, the country’s best naval radar, operated on wavelengths that made miniaturization theoretically impossible.
This was nail number two, industrial superiority.
While Japanese generals gathered thousands of young pilots for one-way missions, American factories were stamping out millions of smart shells.
Human resources versus industrial resources, samurai spirit versus assembly line.
The outcome was decided before the first shot was fired.
Chapter 5.
First blood.
USS Helena.
January 5th, 1943.
Guadal Canal, Solomon Islands.
The cruiser USS Helena is escorting a convoy of transports bringing reinforcements for the Marines.
Morning.
Tropical heat.
And four Japanese II D3A Vald dive bombers coming in for an attack.
On Helena’s stern, Lieutenant Red Cochran commands a battery of 5-in guns.
In the breaches, shells with new secret fuses.
Cochran gives the order to fire.
First salvo, miss.
Second salvo.
The shells didn’t hit the aircraft directly.
They passed nearby 6,100 ft away and exploded.
The lead valve falls apart in midair.
Third salvo.
Another aircraft goes down.
In 90 seconds, two Japanese bombers destroyed around 50 60 shells total.
This was the first combat success of the VT Fuse.
The Helena Gunner’s report stated, “The value of the ammunition with the Mark 32 fuse cannot be overestimated.” The Bureau of Ordinance had been waiting for exactly this report.
Production was immediately increased, but Helena didn’t live to see the triumph of her weapon.
In July 1943, the cruiser was sunk by Japanese torpedoes in the Battle of Cooler Gulf.
However, the technology survived and began its march across the Pacific.
This was nail number three, Baptism by Fire.
Chapter 6, death statistics.
The numbers that explain everything.
Let’s talk about math because math is what explains why the VT fuse changed everything.
Here’s US Navy data for the period from October 1944 to January 1945, the peak of kamicazi attacks in the Philippines.
5-in shells with conventional time fuses, 1 162 shells per kamicazi shot.
5-in shells with VT fuses, 310 shells per kamicazi shot down.
The difference almost four times.
Now, let’s translate that into the language of real combat.
An Allen M.
Sumner class destroyer carried roughly 200 rounds of 5-in ammunition.
With conventional fuses, it could shoot down about one aircraft before running out of ammunition.
With VT fuses, about four.
But these are average figures.
Under optimal conditions, the results were even more dramatic.
The destroyer escort USS Abocrombi in May 1945 shot down a kamicazi with two VTfused shells.
Two.
Let me explain why this worked.
A conventional shell with a time fuse had a lethal radius of about 20 ft.
The shell had to explode within 20 ft of the aircraft for shrapnel to hit the target.
The VT fuse had a lethal radius of about 70 ft.
The shell knew when it was approaching a target and detonated automatically.
70 ft versus 20 ft.
The kill area 12 times larger.
But the main advantage was something else.
With a time fuse, gunners had to guess where the aircraft would be in several seconds.
Any error and the shell explodes too early or too late.
With a VT fuse, gunners just had to point the shell in the aircraft’s general direction.
Close.
Good.
Further still works.
As Van Allen put it, before it was just luck.
Now it was physics.
By 1945, the US Navy had increased the proportion of VT fuses in anti-aircraft ammunition from 25% to 75%.
Three out of four shells on every American ship were smart.
This was nail number four.
Mathematical superiority.
Chapter 7.
Okinawa, the gates of hell.
April 1st, 1945.
Easter Sunday.
April Fool’s Day.
The crulest joke in the history of the Pacific War.
540,000 American and Allied servicemen begin the invasion of Okinawa, the last major island before Japan.
1,400 ships, the largest amphibious operation in the Pacific.
And Japanese command knows this is the last line of defense.
Vice Admiral Mat Ugaki, commander of the fifth airfleet on Kushu, gathers everything that can fly.
3,000 aircraft, fighters, bombers, trainers, even biplanes.
Half of them will be used for kamicazi attacks.
The plan is called Kikusui, floating chrysanthemums.
The idea is simple.
Send kamicazis in waves against the American fleet.
Sink enough ships to make the invasion choke.
April 6th, 1945.
Operation Kikasui number one, 391 Navy aircraft, 133 Army aircraft.
Of these, 215 Navy and 82 army kamicazis.
297 suicide pilots in one coordinated attack.
The commander of the destroyer USS Laffy, Frederick Julian Beckton, would later describe the approaching waves of kamicazis as a swarm of bees flying toward the only flower in the desert.
And here begins a story that textbooks rarely tell in full.
Yes, the kamicazis inflicted terrible damage over the entire Okinawa campaign.
36 American ships were sunk, 368 damaged, fourth 97 sailors killed, 4th and 924 wounded.
These were the heaviest losses the American fleet suffered in the entire war.
But here’s what the textbooks don’t emphasize.
Without VT fuses, these numbers would have been many times higher.
Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, commander of amphibious forces at Okinawa, wrote in his report to the chief of naval operations, “Without the VT Fuse, our losses from kamicazi attacks would have been unbearable.” Japanese kamicazis were a fearsome weapon that could have changed the outcome of the war in the Pacific.
had it not been for our technological superiority in anti-aircraft defense.
Admiral Raymond Spruent, who experienced kamicazi hits on two of his flagships, wrote, “The VT Fuse saved countless ships and lives.
It was the thin line between bearable and unbearable losses.” Let’s look at specific examples.
Chapter 8.
USS Laf, the ship that would not die.
April 16th, 1945.
Radar picket station number one 30 mi northwest of Okinawa.
The destroyer USS Laffy, Commander Frederick Beckton.
On board 336 crew members in the magazines, hundreds of shells with VT fuses.
At 0830, radar shows too many targets to count.
This is the third wave of Kikosui.
165 kamicazis, 120 Navy, 45 Army, plus 150 conventional escort aircraft.
Over the next 80 minutes, 22 Japanese aircraft attack Lafy specifically.
The result, Lafy shoots down nine aircraft with her anti-aircraft fire.
Six kamicazis crash into the ship.
Four bombs hit their target.
The ship is on fire.
Steering is jammed.
Three gun turrets are destroyed.
32 men dead, 71 wounded, and Lafy is still afloat.
Commander Beckton would later say, “Without shells with proximity fuses, my ship would have been sunk in the first 10 minutes.” Nine shot down out of 22 attackers, 41%.
With conventional fuses, that number would have been closer to 10%.
The difference between 9 and two shot down, that’s the difference between survival and death.
Lafy earned the nickname the ship that would not die.
Today, she stands as a museum ship at Patriots Point, Charleston, South Carolina.
This was nail number five, surviving the impossible.
Chapter nine, USS Hugh W.
Hadley.
The absolute record.
May 11th, 1945.
Radar picket station number 15, 60 mi northwest of Okinawa.
The destroyer, USS Hugh W.
Hadley, Commander Baron Joseph Melany, nearby.
The destroyer, USS Evans, and four small support ships.
0755.
Radar shows approaching aircraft.
A lot of aircraft.
A whole lot.
About 100 Japanese planes are heading toward their position.
This is the sixth wave of Kikusui.
Over the next 95 minutes, what naval historians would call the most intense air battle in the history of surface ship air defense takes place.
Hadley and Evans find themselves in the eye of the hurricane.
Combat air patrol CAP fighters do everything they can, shooting down 4050 aircraft, but dozens get through.
By 0920, 10 aircraft are attacking Hadley simultaneously from bow and stern.
Hadley’s gunners destroy all 10, but the ship takes hits.
One bomb, an ochre rocket, a piloted rocket bomb, two kamicazis.
Engine rooms are flooded.
Fire engulfs the superructure.
Ammunition begins to explode.
Commander Melany gives the order to raise all flags.
If this ship is going down, she’s going with all flags flying.
286 crew members go over the side into life rafts.
50 remain on board to fight for the ship, and they save her.
Final score for USS Hugh W Hadley.
23 Japanese aircraft shot down by one ship in 1 hour and 40 minutes.
This is the absolute record which still stands today.
Together with Evans, 38 aircraft shot down.
Hadley’s ammunition expenditure.
8001 rounds of 5 in, 8,50 rounds of 40 m, 5,90 rounds of 20 m, 28 dead, 67 wounded.
Hadley was so badly damaged that she had to be towed 7,000 m to San Francisco.
The tow line parted nine times on route.
After arrival, the ship was deemed beyond repair and scrapped.
But 28 dead against 23 destroyed kamicazis.
Without VT fuses, Hadley would have been sunk, taking most of her crew with her.
Commander Melany received the Navy Cross, his gunnery officer, also seven silver stars, seven bronze stars, about 151 purple hearts.
The ship received the presidential unit citation.
This was nail number six, the absolute record.
Chapter 10.
USS Aaron Ward, 51 minutes in hell.
May 3, 1945.
Radar picket station number 10.
The destroyer mine layer.
USS Aaron Ward, Commander William Sanders, 1813.
Approximately 25 Japanese aircraft begin their attack.
Over the next 51 minutes, Aaron Ward takes Sheks kamicazi hits.
Three bomb hits.
Let me describe what this looked like.
First kamicazi.
Gunners shoot it down on approach.
The engine and propeller tear off and strike gun mount number three.
Second kamicazi.
A zero with a bomb hits the port side.
The explosion floods the engine room.
Third, a near miss damages the rigging.
Fourth, a val crashes into the main deck.
Its bomb explodes in the compartment.
Fifth, a val rams the superructure.
Sixth, an aircraft crashes into the aft smoke stack.
Its bomb detonates in the uptakes.
The ship is on fire.
All engine rooms except one are flooded.
Ammunition is exploding.
The stern is nearly underwater and the crew keeps firing.
Aaron Ward shoots down three kamicazis during the attack.
Others are downed jointly with escort ships.
By the end of the battle, the ship has taken on 1,650 tons of water.
Draft has increased to 18 ft, list 5°, and she’s still afloat.
All night, the crew fights fires, exploding ammunition, and flooding.
At dawn, a tug pulls Aaron Ward into Kurama Retto, which sailors grimly nicknamed busted ship bay.
45 dead, 49 wounded.
Presidential unit citation for the ship.
Despite the destruction of nearly all her gun mounts after when this plane struck her, she took under fire the 10th bombladen plane which penetrated the dense smoke to crash on board with a devastating explosion.
With fires raging uncontrolled, ammunition exploding and all engine spaces except the forward engine room flooded as she settled in the water and listed to port.
She began a night-long battle to remain afloat.
As Commander Sanders said, “Without proximity fuses, my ship would have been sunk in the first 10 minutes.
The ability to fire without precise range finding allowed our guns to quickly switch between multiple threats.” This was nail number seven, impossible survival.
Chapter 11.
Ochre Baka.
The failure of pure speed.
One weapon deserves special mention, the one that was supposed to be unstoppable.
Yokosuka MXY7 ochre.
Americans called it Baka Bool.
This was a piloted rocket, not an aircraft.
A rocket.
2600lb warhead.
Three solid fuel rocket engines.
Maximum diving speed 575 mph.
The idea was that such speed would be impossible to intercept.
A suicide pilot in an ochre was unstoppable in theory.
In practice, the ochre had a critical weakness, a range of only 23 mi.
This meant the carrier bomber, Mitsubishi G4M Betty, had to deliver the ochre almost to the ship itself before releasing it.
And the Betty was a large, slow bomber, easily detected by radar.
March 21st, 1945, first mass deployment of Ocus.
18 Betty bombers, each with an ochre under its fuselage, head toward the American fleet.
Result: American fighters guided by radar intercept the convoy long before the release zone.
All 18 Betties are shot down.
Not a single ochre was released.
The commander of the Thunder Gods unit, Goro Nonaka, died along with all his men without even getting close to a target.
But even when an ochre was released, VT Fuses did their job.
USS Hugh W Hadley was hit by an ochre on May 11th, 1945.
But the ship survived because her gunners managed to shoot down enough other attackers to limit the damage.
Oak sank several ships over the course of the war, but the unstoppable weapon proved far from unstoppable as planned.
The wall of VT explosions created a deadly corridor that any attack had to pass through.
This was nail number eight, victory over speed.
Chapter 12, the psychological effect when the sky betrays.
Now, let’s talk about something that’s rarely discussed.
The psychological impact of the VT fuse on Japanese pilots.
Surviving kamicazi pilots, those who aborted missions due to technical problems or changed orders, later gave testimony to American investigators.
And their accounts are striking.
Pilots described walls of explosions that appeared with impossible precision.
One pilot said, “The shells exploded exactly where we were flying, as if the Americans could see where we would be.” Japanese tactical doctrine was based on the assumption that a high-speed, lowaltitude approach would minimize the effect of anti-aircraft fire.
Pilots were taught that if they were fast enough and low enough, gunners wouldn’t be able to aim accurately.
The VTfuse completely nullified this logic.
A shell that passed 50 ft from a target with a conventional fuse, that’s a miss.
A shell that passed 50 ft from a target with a VT fuse, that’s a kill.
Vice Admiral Ugaki, who directed kamicazi operations from Kyushu, wrote in his diary in late April 1945, “The enemy’s defensive firepower has significantly increased.
Our special attack aircraft are being destroyed at distances we previously considered safe.
By May 1945, Japanese naval intelligence estimated that fewer than 1 in four kamicazis was reaching its target, compared to one in three during the Philippine campaign.
They attributed the difference to a new type of anti-aircraft shell that explodes with impossible precision.
Commander Tadashi Nakajima, one of the creators of the kamicazi program, admitted after the war, “We knew the Americans had superior technology, but the proximity fuse was beyond our imagination.
Our pilots reported that shells exploded exactly where they were flying, as if guided by invisible hands.
This destroyed not only our aircraft but the fundamental premise of the special attack that spiritual power could overcome material deficiencies.
Captain Ricky Inoguchi, one of the early advocates of kamicazi tactics, survived the war and later reflected, “We believed that willingness to die guaranteed success.
The American electronic fuse proved that technology could overcome even the most determined human sacrifice.
It was not just a weapon, but a statement about the nature of modern warfare.
This was nail number nine, psychological victory.
Chapter 13.
Arley Burke, the voice of a witness.
In 1978, 33 years after the war ended, Admiral Arley Burke gave an interview at the John’s Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in the very building where the VT Fuse was created.
Burke was chief of staff to Vice Admiral Mark Mitchell, commander of the fast carrier task forces during the Okinawa campaign.
He was on the bridge of the flagship USS Bunker Hill when it was hit by two kamicazis on May 11th, 1945.
Here are his words.
When I became chief of staff to Admiral Mitch, who commanded the fast carrier task forces, all of the 5-in 38 and 5-in 25 ammunition was equipped with VT fuses.
And as you well know, those fuses knocked down enemy planes by the dozens.
Pause.
If it hadn’t been for those fuses, our losses of ships and men in the fast carriers in the second half of the war would have been immeasurably greater.
Another pause.
That fuse was a magnificent help.
Burke was there.
He saw kamicazis fall into the sea, torn apart by shrapnel hundreds of meters from their targets.
He saw ships that should have died survive.
His testimony isn’t theory.
It’s an eyewitness account.
Chapter 14.
The final audit.
Okinawa by the numbers.
Let’s tally the final balance of the Okinawa campaign from April 1st to June 22, 1945.
Japanese losses.
Approximately 1,900 aircraft in organized kamicazi attacks across 10 Kikosui operations.
Hundreds of additional aircraft in improvised attacks.
2,25 Navy kamicazi pilots killed.
1,387 Army kamicazi pilots killed.
American losses.
36 ships sunk, 368 ships damaged, 4,97 sailors killed, 4,924 wounded, 763 aircraft lost.
These were the heaviest losses the American fleet suffered in the entire war.
Roughly 1 in seven sailors who died during the entire Pacific War died in the waters of Okinawa.
But here’s what’s critically important to understand.
Not a single battleship was sunk by kamicazis.
Not a single cruiser was sunk by kamicazis.
Not a single fleet carrier was sunk by kamicazis.
Most losses were destroyers and small ships on radar picket duty.
Ships that were first to meet the waves of kamicazis, ships whose VT fuses created the first barrier of defense.
They died, but they bought time and they shot down enough aircraft for the main fleet to survive.
Fleet analysts calculated ships equipped primarily with VTfused ammunition had three times the chance of surviving a concentrated kamicazi attack compared to ships using primarily conventional ammunition.
The destroyer USS Drexler attacked on May 28th, 1945 after expending her VTfused shells and switching to conventional ammunition was sunk in less than a minute by two kamicazis.
158 dead, more than on many ships throughout the entire campaign.
This was nail number 10.
The mathematics of survival.
Chapter 15.
Yamato.
A contrast in technologies.
April 7, 1945.
The super battleship Yamato, the largest warship in history, sets out from Japan on her final voyage.
Operation Tengo, 72,000 tons displacement.
Nine 18.1 in guns, the largest ever mounted on a ship.
at 62 anti-aircraft guns.
Mission: attack the American fleet off Okinawa and beach herself, becoming an unsinkable artillery battery.
Fuel only enough for a one-way trip.
This was a kamicazi operation for an entire battleship.
What happened? American reconnaissance aircraft spotted Yamato.
Admiral Mitchell launched about 380 aircraft.
In 2 hours of battle, Yamato took about 10 torpedo hits and seven bomb hits.
She sank with a crew of about 3,000.
And how many American aircraft did Yamato’s 162 anti-aircraft guns shoot down? Fewer than 10.
Yamato had no VT fuses.
Her anti-aircraft artillery used the same mechanical time fuses that Americans had in 1941.
162 guns, thousands of shells, fewer than 10 aircraft shot down.
One American destroyer with six 5-in guns and VT fusers shot down more aircraft in an hour than the world’s largest battleship in an entire battle.
This wasn’t just a victory.
It was a visual demonstration of the technological gap.
Yamato represented the past, the pinnacle of early 20th century ship building.
The VT Fuse represented the future, the beginning of the era of smart munitions.
This was nail number 11, symbol of an era.
Chapter 16.
Operation Downfall, the invasion that never was.
By summer 1945, American planners were preparing Operation Downfall, the invasion of the Japanese home islands.
Intelligence estimated that Japan had retained approximately 10,000 aircraft for kamicazi attacks against the invasion fleet.
But American military planners were confident in their defensive capabilities.
Why? VT fuse production by September 1945 was projected to reach 100,000 units per day.
New Mark 53 and Mark 58 modifications with improved sensitivity and reliability were already coming off the assembly lines.
The invasion fleet was to carry more than 1,000,000 VTfused shells.
1 million smart shells.
Air defense unprecedented in history.
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 ended the war before this final test could take place.
But documents captured after the war showed that Japanese command understood the situation.
Admiral Sue Toyota, chief of the naval general staff testified after the war.
The Japanese Navy expected kamicazi attacks during the defense of the home islands to achieve less than 10% effectiveness against a fleet protected by VT fuses.
1 in 10.
At that ratio, kamicazi tactics became pointless, even by the brutal calculus of a war of annihilation.
This was nail number 12.
Strategic dead end.
Chapter 17.
Legacy from 1945 to today.
Let’s talk about what happened afterward.
The VTfuse didn’t disappear into archives after 1945.
It became a foundation.
Modern anti-aircraft missiles, standard missile, Patriot, Aegis, all use the proximity fuse principle.
Radar detection of target proximity, automatic detonation.
The failen CIWS close-in weapon system, which protects modern warships, works on principles perfected in battles against kamicazis.
Israel’s Iron Dome system, which intercepts Hamas rockets, is a direct descendant of the ideas realized by Merl Tuveet and James Van Allen in a basement laboratory in Maryland.
The VTfuse development program established the model for subsequent American technological achievements.
Collaboration between universities, private industry, and the military, unlimited funding for critically important projects, willingness to solve impossible technical problems.
The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, created for the VT project, continues its work today.
Guided missiles, satellite navigation, spacecraft, all of this grew from the same laboratory.
James Van Allen, who made vacuum tubes rugged enough to survive cannon fire, later discovered Earth’s radiation belts, the Van Allen belts that are taught in school.
Dr.
Merryill Tuve, who led the entire project, later headed the department of terrestrial magnetism at the Carnegie Institution and continued work on fundamental research into Earth’s magnetosphere.
This was nail number 13, Foundation for the Future.
Chapter 18.
The verdict.
Technology versus spirit.
So, let’s render the final verdict.
The VT Proximity Fuse was one of the three most important secret projects of World War II.
On par with radar, on par with the atomic bomb.
Here’s the final score.
Development time from concept to combat deployment 30 months.
Program cost over 1 billion 15-17 billion today.
Manufacturing companies 87.
Factories 110.
Total production 22 million units.
Effectiveness improvement in accuracy 3 to a four times compared to time fuses.
Shells per target 310 VT versus 1,62 conventional.
Increase in nighttime effectiveness 370%.
Human cost.
Kamicazis killed 3,900 pilots.
American sailors killed at Okinawa 4,900.
ships sunk by kamicazis during the entire war.
Fewer than 50 ships that survived thanks to VT countless Admiral Turner’s words.
The contrast between the two approaches to war was absolute.
Japan tried to solve a technological problem with human resources to compensate for lack of accurate guidance with willingness to die.
America solved the same problem with technology to compensate for lack of accuracy with engineering that made accuracy automatic.
Human missiles versus electronic brains, samurai spirit versus assembly line.
The outcome was decided not in the skies over Okinawa.
It was decided in the laboratories of Maryland and the factories of Cincinnati.
Secretary of the Navy James Forestall summed it up.
The proximity fuse helped blaze the trail to Japan.
Without the protection this ingenious device gave surface ships of the fleet, our advance westward could not have been so swift, nor the cost in men and ships so small.
Chapter 19.
Epilogue.
When the electronic fuse defeated the divine wind.
May 11, 1945.
USS Hugh W.
Hadley.
Radar picket station number 15.0935.
The battle is over.
23 kamicazi shot down.
28 sailors dead.
The ship is burning but not sinking.
Commander Melany looks at his mangled destroyer.
Flags flutter from every mast still standing.
In the forward magazine, empty casings from 801 rounds of 5-in ammunition.
Each of those shells contained a VT fuse, 130 components, five vacuum tubes, a battery, a radio transmitter, all packed into a housing the size of a milk bottle.
$18 a piece.
130 components.
Less than 30 seconds of operation against a kamicazi pilot.
years of training, tons of aluminum and steel, and most tragically, a human life that cannot be replaced.
When the math was multiplied across thousands of engagements across the Pacific, the equation yielded an unambiguous result.
American victory through technological superiority.
Young Japanese pilots, many of whom were university students drafted into special attack units, flew into an electronic killing field that their commanders didn’t even know about.
Their deaths, despite all the tactical damage to American ships, did not achieve their strategic goal to make the price of invasion unbearable.
The VT Fuse transformed their sacrifice from a devastating weapon into a manageable threat.
Letters from kamicazis discovered after the war show a growing awareness among pilots that American defenses had evolved beyond their commander promises.
Here’s what one pilot wrote a few days before his mission.
They tell us that willingness to die guarantees a hit.
But those who returned, the few who had to abort missions, speak of walls of explosions that are impossible to pass through.
He didn’t know about the VTfuse.
He didn’t understand the physics of what was happening.
He just knew that the sky had betrayed them.
Conclusion.
The story of the VTfuse is not just a story about a weapon.
It’s a story about how wars are won not just by courage, but by engineering.
Not just by willingness to die, but by the ability to manufacture.
Not just by spirit, but by physics.
22 million fuses, 87 companies, $1 billion 30 months of development against 3,900 suicide pilots, and an ancient faith in the superiority of spirit over matter.
An electronic fuse weighing less than4 pound, containing 130 components, manufactured for $18 by 1945, and operating for less than 30 seconds, could destroy a kamicazi with a pilot representing years of training, tons of metal, and most tragically, a human life that could not be replaced.
When multiplied across thousands of engagements throughout the Pacific, this equation transformed into American victory through technological superiority that helped determine the outcome of the war.
The success of the proximity fuse against kamicazi attacks validated the American approach to 20th century warfare.
Investment in technology, faith in industrial production, the belief that superior equipment could overcome fanatical determination, all proved correct in the most extreme test possible.
For Japan, the failure of kamicazis against VT fuse defenses meant not just military defeat, but a reputation of foundational beliefs about the superiority of spirit over matter.
Young pilots dying in futile attacks against walls of VT explosions became symbols not of noble sacrifice but of military leadership that failed to recognize technological reality.
Japan’s modern emphasis on technological development and innovation can be partially traced to the harsh lessons of 1945 when electronic fuses defeated human pilots with mechanical precision.
The mathematical precision of the proximity fuses success, 310 shells per kill versus 1,62 for conventional ammunition, translated into saved ships, preserved lives, and proof that technology could provide a decisive edge in modern warfare.
The story of the Pacific War demonstrated that in modern naval combat, the ability to destroy aircraft at a distance determined survival.
Nations that could design, manufacture, and deploy superior defensive technologies had decisive advantages over those who relied solely on human courage.
The comparison of the proximity fuse and kamicazi illustrates this principle at the most fundamental level.
American electronic sophistication defeated Japanese human sacrifice.
The success of the VT fuse at Okinawa established technological superiority as the foundation of post-war military doctrine.
The contrast between American and Japanese approaches to air defense ultimately tells a broader story about industrial warfare in the 20th century.
Nations that could mobilize scientific knowledge, production capacity, and organizational expertise to create superior military technology had insurmountable advantages.
The proximity fuse represented the culmination of American strengths.
Innovative engineering, mass production, and systematic problem solving applied to military challenges.
Its triumph over the kamicazis convincingly demonstrated that in matters of life and death, the quality of equipment could overcome the quantity of sacrifice.
When the electronic fuse met the human pilot in the skies over Okinawa, the outcome was determined by the factories in Cincinnati, the laboratories in Maryland, and the fundamental American belief that technology could save lives while achieving victory.
The divine wind met the electronic wall, and the divine wind lost.
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