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Springfield couple learns details of relative's death in WWII

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By Tom Stafford, Staff Writer Updated 11:36 PM Sunday, February 7, 2010

SPRINGFIELD — Kamikaze means divine wind.

And in the 13th century, the divine winds stirred up by typhoons off the coast of Japan roiled the waters and frustrated Kubla Khan’s efforts to overwhelm the island nation.

Beginning in October 1944, military strategists of Imperial Japan divined a way they could stir up a man-made wind to blow American vessels island-hopping their way toward the homeland out of the water.

They would send pilots to fly their bomb- and fuel-laden aircraft into the decks of warships in the Marianas and Philippines, vastly increasing the efficiency of targeting and damage inflicted.

If that description provides the detached historical perspective for what happened in the last two years of World War II, Dave Blodgett’s recent e-mail to Springfielders Ed and Amy Knapp provides a ground- and sea-level account of the terror the strategy inflicted and the courage required to resist it. It also describes how Knapp’s uncle lost his life in a fiery wave of flames.

An Internet hit

Until about a month ago, the Knapps had some sense of what happened the morning of Dec. 16 on the beach at Mindoro Island. During Ed’s childhood, the Knapp family had been so secretive about his uncle’s death that the cedar chest shipped home with Clarence’s belongings had remained nailed shut and stored in a basement.

A newsreel clip discovered in an Internet search for a Jan. 18 News-Sun story on Clarence Knapp yielded footage of LST 605, on which Clarence served, being unloaded before that morning’s attack. It also showed the smoky aftermath of an attack.

Days after the story appeared, Ed Knapp found an online blog posted by Blodgett, who had served as a PT boat officer during the war and was on the beach when Clarence Knapp was killed. On a computer in his home in Laguna Woods, Calif., Bodgett, 89, wrote a dramatic account of the events of the day that includes this: “Recently, I searched in vain for a 605 survivor, so I can apologize to its seven officers and 200 enlisted men for the rotten, cowardly way we behaved Dec. 15, 1944.”

Aboard the 605

Blodgett was aboard the 605, part of an invasion armada headed for Mindoro Island, on Dec. 15, when he came face-to-face with Japanese terror.

He recalls the 605 crew looking across the water and “screaming to the USS Nashville to ‘for God’s sake shoot!’” as a kamikaze was bearing down on it.

Never having seen a suicide plane, “the Nashville doesn’t fire a shot,” Blodgett writes. “The kamikaze and its two 500-pound bombs disable the light cruiser, killing 133 and wounding 199.”

Moments later, it was the 605’s turn.

“Oh, my God, this is it!” Blodgett’s account begins.

“The Japanese suicide plane is zeroed in right at me as I stand transfixed on the deck of LST 605 just forward of the bridge.”

It is a concentrated assault.

“Seven kamikazes are attacking three LSTs waiting their turn to hit the Mindoro Island beach,” he writes.

LST 427, just ahead of the 605, is hit and sinks. LST 738, behind it, suffers the same fate.

“Now it’s our turn,” he writes.

“The veteran gunners of the 605 pour fire into the diving plane. The PT boats surrounding us send up a withering wall of 40- and 20-millimeter and .50-caliber machine gun fire. The plane is about to hit. Knowing I am near death, I stand paralyzed with fear. Too numb even to pray.”

Some might quibble with Blodgett’s comparison of the experience to that of a person on the 80th floor of World Trade Center Tower I on Sept. 11, 2001, as a twin-engine jet passenger plane is about to strike. But he makes a convincing case for emotional parity.

“Feel the horror of knowing your life is about to be snuffed out in a horrendous, fiery crash,” he writes. “Know that you are going to die a horrible, painful death.”

But he is spared.

“At the last second, the sheer weight of the anti-aircraft barrage flips the plane over, and it plunges into the sea just off the port side with a tremendous explosion that almost lifts the 328-foot, 4,000 ton ship out of the water.”

Then comes a line that describes his sense of debt to the gunners of LST 605.

“Now realize you are the luckiest person on earth, saved from a crushing, flaming death 10,000 miles away from your beloved wife and 7-month-old son.”

It might have been fear that their luck had been pushed that led Blodgett’s unit to act as it did in the following hours. But Blodgett doesn’t suggest it’s an excuse.

Fleeing danger

“The moment the 605 slides up on the beach after her narrow escape and opens her bow doors, its 150 Navy passengers making up the base force of motor Torpedo Boat Task Unit 70.1.4 (his unit) trample over each other in a mad dash ashore to get as far away from the beached ship as possible,” Blodgett writes.

“They fled ashore in fear of another suicide plane attack,” he adds in a letter to the Knapps.

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