Okinawa: The Ten Kikusui Attacks, April – June 1945

“Japanese night raiders are greeted with a lacework of anti-aircraft fire by the Marine defenders of Yontan airfield, on Okinawa,” 1945, in the words of the original caption; searchlights and tracers fill the sky. Photo: T/Sgt. Chorlest (as credited), U.S. Marine Corps, USMC photograph (NARA), Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Kamikaze · Chapter 5 of 9

Okinawa: The Ten Kikusui Attacks

For eighty days in the spring of 1945 Japan sent its special attack aircraft against the fleet off Okinawa in ten great waves and many smaller ones; more U.S. sailors died there than soldiers or Marines ashore.

6 April – 22 June 1945Kyushu · Kerama Retto · Hagushi · the picket line~27 min read

On 1 April 1945 American soldiers and Marines landed on the west coast of Okinawa, the largest island of the Ryukyus, about 550 km south-west of Kyushu. The landing was almost unopposed. The Japanese 32nd Army had withdrawn into the hills of the south, and its commanders expected the decisive fight to be at sea and in the air, not on the beaches. Five days later the air offensive began. Between 6 April and 22 June the Imperial Japanese Navy and Army launched ten massed special attacks, which the Navy called Kikusui, against the hundreds of American and British ships supporting the invasion, together with many smaller raids and conventional attacks. They sank or damaged more ships than any other campaign of the Pacific war and killed more than 4,900 U.S. sailors, more than the Army or the Marine Corps lost in the fighting ashore.

This chapter follows that offensive from its prologue at Iwo Jima and Ulithi through the ten Kikusui raids. The picket destroyers that took the first and heaviest blows, and the individual ships, Laffey, Bunker Hill, Enterprise and the British carriers, are the subject of Chapter 6; the American defences are described in Chapter 7.

A note on evidence. The framework of dates, aircraft numbers and ship losses comes from the Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC), especially the H-Gram series by its director, Samuel J. Cox, which draws on action reports and Samuel Eliot Morison’s official-commissioned history, and from Steven Zaloga’s table of Kikusui sorties, compiled from Japanese records. The figures for aircraft are numbers of special attack aircraft committed; they do not include escorts and conventional bombers, and they count aircraft that turned back. American casualty totals are those of NHHC and of the Navy’s 80th-anniversary message of March 2025, which cover all causes at sea, mostly but not only kamikazes. The Japanese side survives in Vice Adm. Ugaki Matome’s diary, written at Kanoya at the time, and in the pilots’ letters and later testimony described in Chapter 3.

Prologue: Iwo Jima and Ulithi

The special attack campaign had begun in the Philippines in October 1944 and spent itself there by mid-January 1945 (see Chapter 2). The next blow came at Iwo Jima. On 21 February 1945, two days after the Marines landed, the 2nd Mitate Special Attack Squadron, formed from the 601st Air Group at Katori east of Tokyo with 32 aircraft (12 Suisei dive bombers, 8 Tenzan torpedo bombers and 12 Zero escorts), attacked the ships off the island. The old fleet carrier Saratoga (CV-3) took five hits in about three minutes and lost 123 men killed and 192 wounded; she survived. That evening two aircraft struck the escort carrier Bismarck Sea (CVE-95). She burned, exploded and sank, with 318 of her crew lost, the last American carrier sunk in the war. The net cargo ship Keokuk and LST-477 were also hit. The Mitate unit lost 43 men. The story of that day is told in the Iwo Jima collection’s chapter Sea, Air and the B-29s.

Three weeks later the Navy tried something more ambitious. On 11 March 1945 24 twin-engined Ginga bombers of the Azusa special attack unit, each with an 800 kg bomb, took off from Kanoya in southern Kyushu for Ulithi Atoll in the Carolines, the anchorage of the fast carrier task force, more than 2,000 km away. The plan, Operation Tan No. 2, depended on long-range navigation over open sea, and the bombers reached Ulithi after dark. At 20:07 local time one of them, whose pilot is believed to have been Lt. Fukuda Kōetsu, crashed into the carrier Randolph (CV-15), killing 25 men by one count in the Japanese study of the raid (27 by another), with 3 missing and 106 wounded; another crashed on Sorlen Island in the atoll.

The commander who sent them was Vice Adm. Ugaki Matome, the former chief of staff of the Combined Fleet, who had taken command of the 5th Air Fleet at Kanoya in February. His diary, kept throughout the war and published in English as Fading Victory, is the closest contemporary record of the Kikusui campaign from the Japanese side. On the day of the Ulithi raid he wrote:

I also am determined to follow at some time after the young men in the Special Attack Corps.

— Vice Adm. Ugaki Matome, diary, 11 March 1945, as translated on kamikazeimages.net (from Fading Victory)

He kept the resolution on 15 August 1945, after the Emperor’s surrender broadcast, in an unauthorized flight from Ōita that is described in Chapter 8.

Ten-gō: The Plan for Okinawa

The Japanese plan for the defence of the Ryukyus, Ten-gō (天号, “Heaven Operation”), rested on the air forces. The 32nd Army on Okinawa was to hold out as long as possible in prepared positions in the south of the island, while the Navy and Army air forces attacked the invasion fleet. The purpose, as NHHC summarizes it, was to prolong the fight, inflict maximum casualties, and show the Americans that an invasion of Japan itself would be extremely costly. Some Japanese planners hoped that losses at sea would force the fleet to withdraw and leave the troops ashore unsupported. That did not happen; but the cost to the U.S. Navy was the highest of the war.

The Navy’s main instrument was Ugaki’s 5th Air Fleet, reinforced by the 3rd and 10th Air Fleets. Its main bases were Kanoya and Kushira on the Ōsumi peninsula, Kokubu, Miyazaki and Izumi, with seaplanes at Ibusuki. The Army contributed the 6th Air Army in Kyushu, under Lt. Gen. Sugawara Michiō, flying from Chiran, Bansei, Miyakonojō and other fields, and the 8th Air Division in Formosa. For Ten-gō the two services agreed to coordinate their attacks, but they kept separate units, separate records and separate counts of their dead, which is one reason the totals in this collection are given as ranges.

The Navy gave the mass attacks the name Kikusui (菊水, “floating chrysanthemum”), the crest of Kusunoki Masashige, the fourteenth-century loyalist commander who died fighting for the Emperor Go-Daigo at Minatogawa in 1336 against hopeless odds and was held up in prewar Japan as the model of loyalty unto death. The name was chosen for what it meant, and it is used here as the historical term it is. Between the ten Kikusui operations, smaller attacks went on almost every day the weather allowed.

Kyushu, Kerama Retto and L-Day

The Americans tried to break the air threat before the landing. On 18 and 19 March Task Force 58 struck the airfields of Kyushu. The Japanese struck back with conventional and special attacks. On 19 March a single Japanese bomber put its bombs into the carrier Franklin (CV-13) as she launched aircraft, starting fires and explosions that killed more than 800 of her crew. Franklin’s ordeal is often listed among kamikaze attacks; it was not one. On 21 March the first Ohka mission was wiped out by Hellcats before it reached the fleet (Chapter 4).

On 26 March, a week before the main landing, the 77th Infantry Division seized the Kerama Retto, a group of small islands west of Okinawa. It wanted the islands for one reason above all: the sheltered water between them would make an anchorage, a seaplane base and a fleet repair yard close to the battle. The landings also uncovered Shinyo suicide boats hidden in the islands for use against the invasion fleet. The same day the destroyer Halligan (DD-584) struck a mine off Okinawa and sank with 153 men lost (NHHC). The radar picket stations around Okinawa were manned from 26 March onward.

On 1 April, L-Day, two Marine and two Army divisions landed over the Hagushi beaches on the west coast. Yontan and Kadena airfields were taken the first day, and Marine fighter squadrons were soon flying from them. The fleet that supported the invasion was the largest the U.S. Navy had assembled in the Pacific: the transports and landing ships off the beaches, the old battleships and cruisers of the gunfire support groups, the escort carriers, the fast carriers of Task Force 58 to the east and the four armoured carriers of the British Pacific Fleet off the Sakishima islands to the south-west. For the next three months most of it had to stay where it was, within reach of the Kyushu airfields, while the Army and Marines fought their way south.

Kikusui No. 1, 6–7 April

The first mass attack came on the afternoon of 6 April. NHHC counts 355 special attack aircraft (230 Navy, 125 Army), with about 340 more in conventional strike and escort roles: the largest single kamikaze effort of the war. They came down from the north and north-west in waves, and the first ships they met were the radar picket destroyers stationed around Okinawa to warn the fleet. The destroyers Bush (DD-529) and Colhoun (DD-801), on the northern picket stations, were overwhelmed by repeated attacks and sunk. The destroyer-minesweeper Emmons (DMS-22) was sunk; LST-447 and two Victory ships, Hobbs Victory and Logan Victory, loaded with ammunition for the troops ashore, were set on fire and lost. The destroyers Newcomb, Leutze and Morris and the destroyer escort Witter were damaged beyond repair, and several more were put out of action for a month or more. On 7 April a kamikaze hit the carrier Hancock (CV-19), which had to return to the United States.

Japanese claims, based on the reports of returning escorts, were far larger. American records show the reality: of the hundreds of aircraft sent, most were shot down by combat air patrols and ships’ guns, turned back or failed to find a target. But the few that got through did grave damage. The pattern of the whole campaign was set on the first day: the picket destroyers bore the brunt, and the survival of a ship depended on luck, on the gunners and on whether the fighters of the combat air patrol arrived in time.

Yamato: A Surface Special Attack

The Navy matched the first Kikusui with a sortie by what was left of its surface fleet. On the afternoon of 6 April the battleship Yamato, the largest warship ever built, left the Inland Sea with the light cruiser Yahagi and eight destroyers. The operation, Ten-ichi-gō, was designated a surface special attack (kaijō tokkō). The force had no air cover. It was to reach Okinawa, beach Yamato as a gun battery if it could, and fight until destroyed. It is often said that she was given fuel for a one-way voyage only; accounts differ on how much fuel she actually carried, and the point is less important than the order itself, which did not expect her return.

American submarines tracked the force overnight, and flying boats from the Kerama Retto shadowed it in the morning. On 7 April Task Force 58 launched 390 aircraft against it, a first wave of about 280 from about 10:00 and about 110 more later. In about two hours of attacks by dive bombers and torpedo bombers, Yamato took a long series of torpedo and bomb hits, capsized and blew up south-west of Kyushu. Yahagi and four of the destroyers were also lost; one of the survivors reached Japan without her bow. NHHC gives about 4,240 Japanese dead, 3,055 of them in Yamato; another NHHC page gives about 3,665 for the operation. The Americans lost 10 aircraft and 12 men. Capt. Hara Tameichi of Yahagi, who survived, later described the mission, in the phrase NHHC quotes, as “like throwing an egg against a rock.”

Yamato’s men did not choose their mission in the way the special attack pilots were asked to volunteer, and most of the dead were ordinary sailors. But the logic was the same. A fleet that could no longer win was ordered to die in a way that might cost the enemy something and would, its commanders believed, keep faith with the airmen who were dying every day. The sinking of Yamato is a story of naval aviation and of the end of the battleship; it belongs in this chapter because the Japanese Navy itself put it under the heading of special attack.

The Ten Raids

Over the next eleven weeks the Navy and Army launched nine more Kikusui operations. The numbers fell steadily, from 355 aircraft in the first to 45 in the last, as the supply of aircraft and trained pilots ran down and as the Japanese began to hold aircraft back for the defence of the home islands. The proportion of Army aircraft rose; in Kikusui No. 6 and No. 7 the Army sent more than the Navy. The chart shows the special attack aircraft committed to each raid, as tabulated by Zaloga from Japanese records; the totals for Kikusui 1 to 4 agree with NHHC’s.

The calendar below gives the ten raids day by day, with the losses NHHC records for each. Select a date.

April: Kikusui No. 2, 3 and 4

Between the great raids the attacks did not stop. On 11 April, a day of scattered attacks on Task Force 58, a Zero struck the starboard side of the battleship Missouri (BB-63) below the main deck. The damage was slight and no one aboard was badly hurt. The pilot’s remains were recovered aboard; Missouri’s captain, William M. Callaghan, ordered that he be buried at sea the next morning with military honours (see Chapter 9 on how the episode is remembered at Pearl Harbor today). The pilot is believed to have been Petty Officer 2nd Class Ishino Setsuo, aged 19, of the 5th Kenmu unit from Kanoya. The same afternoon a single aircraft crashed into the destroyer Kidd (DD-661), killing 38 men and wounding 55; Kidd survived and is now a museum ship at Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Kikusui No. 2 came the next day, 12 April: 185 special attack aircraft (125 Navy, 60 Army). It brought the first Ohka success. The picket destroyer Mannert L. Abele (DD-733), north of Okinawa, was hit by a Zero and about a minute later by an Ohka, which broke her in two; 84 of her crew died (Chapter 4). The gunboat LCS(L)-33 was sunk; the destroyer Zellars, the minelayer Lindsey and LSM-189 were damaged so badly that they were out for the rest of the war, and the battleship Tennessee and five other ships for more than a month. NHHC estimates the day’s cost at about 270 American dead and 430 wounded. Within hours, news reached the fleet that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had died at Warm Springs, Georgia, on the afternoon of 12 April, American time.

Kikusui No. 3, on 15–16 April, sent 165 aircraft (120 Navy, 45 Army). On the morning of 16 April the destroyer Laffey (DD-724), on Radar Picket Station No. 1 north of Okinawa, was attacked by about 22 aircraft in about 80 minutes and survived being struck, by NHHC’s count, by six kamikazes and four bombs, an action told hour by hour in Chapter 6. On Station No. 14, about 70 miles north-west of the Motobu peninsula, the destroyer Pringle (DD-477) was hit at 09:20 and sank about five minutes after an explosion split her in two. NHHC gives her dead as 62 in one account and 65 in another, with 110 to 113 wounded. The carrier Intrepid was hit and put out of action for more than a month; the destroyers Bryant and Hobson, the destroyer-minesweeper Harding and the destroyer escort Bowers were out for the war. About 225 Americans were killed and 390 wounded in the raid.

The fourth raid, on 27–28 April, was smaller: 115 aircraft (65 Navy, 50 Army). It sank the ammunition ship Canada Victory. On the night of 28–29 April a kamikaze struck the hospital ship Comfort (AH-6), killing 27 Army personnel aboard, among them six nurses and ten patients (NHHC). Whether the pilot recognized her as a hospital ship in the dark cannot be established from the sources. During the same raid a single suicide boat disabled the destroyer Hutchins so badly that she was never repaired. The raid killed 77 sailors and wounded 87, besides Comfort’s dead.

May: The Worst Weeks

The first days of May were the deadliest of the campaign for the Navy. Kikusui No. 5, on 3–4 May, sent 125 aircraft (75 Navy, 50 Army), and they fell above all on the picket line. On the evening of 3 May, on Station No. 10, the destroyer Little (DD-803) was hit by at least four kamikazes and broke in two, sinking within minutes; 30 of her crew were killed and 79 wounded (NHHC). The minelayer Aaron Ward, on the same station, was hit by six and kept afloat. The next morning the destroyers Morrison and Luce were sunk on Stations 1 and 12, with about 150 dead each; the destroyer-minelayer Shea was hit by an Ohka; three rocket landing ships, LSM(R)-190, -194 and -195, were sunk; and off the Sakishima islands the British carrier Formidable was hit. NHHC counts over 580 U.S. sailors killed in the two days, “the deadliest two-day total of the Okinawa campaign for the U.S. Navy.”

Kikusui No. 6, on 10–11 May, sent 150 aircraft, 80 of them Army. On Station No. 15 the destroyers Hugh W. Hadley and Evans fought off dozens of attackers, claiming 23 and 15 aircraft shot down respectively; both were crippled and towed in, and both survived. East of Okinawa, at about 10:04 on 11 May, two Zeros flown by Ens. Yasunori Seizō and Ens. Ogawa Kiyoshi of the 7th Shōwa unit from Kanoya struck the carrier Bunker Hill, Vice Adm. Mitscher’s flagship, within about thirty seconds of each other. Fire spread through the aircraft fuelled and armed for launch. Between 389 and 396 men died, by the Navy’s different counts, the heaviest toll of any kamikaze attack on a single ship (Chapter 6). NHHC puts the American dead of the raid at more than 463.

The next evening, 12 May, two aircraft attacked the battleship New Mexico, Adm. Raymond Spruance’s Fifth Fleet flagship. One, an army Ki-84, struck amidships and its bomb exploded in the funnel; 54 men were killed and 119 wounded. Spruance himself was briefly missing and was found manning a fire hose. Two days after that, on 14 May, off Kyushu, Lt. (jg) Tomiyasu Shunsuke, alone of 26 Zeros sent from Kanoya to get through the combat air patrol and the guns, dived into the flight deck of the carrier Enterprise (CV-6) just aft of the forward elevator, killing 14 men and wounding 68. Enterprise was out of the war, and Mitscher shifted his flag a second time in four days, to Randolph.

Kikusui No. 7, on 23–25 May, was the Army’s largest effort: 100 of its 165 aircraft. It sank the destroyer transport Bates (APD-47) and LSM-135. On the night of 24 May the Army flew its Giretsu airborne commandos onto Yontan airfield to attack the aircraft parked there; the raid is counted among the special attacks, with 88 Japanese dead. Kikusui No. 8, on 27–29 May, was the last with more than 100 aircraft. On 28 May the picket destroyer Drexler (DD-741) was hit and sank in under a minute, with 164 men lost; the destroyer Braine was hit with 67 dead. NHHC counts more than 250 sailors killed in the raid.

June: The Last Kikusui

By June the Japanese air forces in Kyushu were running out of aircraft and pilots, and many of those left were being held back for the defence of the home islands. Kikusui No. 9 (3–7 June) sent 50 aircraft; Kikusui No. 10 (21–22 June) sent 45. The attacks still sank ships. On 10 June the picket destroyer William D. Porter was sunk by a Val that crashed alongside and exploded beneath her hull; every man aboard survived. On 21 June the landing ship LSM-59 was sunk, and so was the damaged destroyer transport Barry (APD-29), which was being used as a decoy. On 22 June the American command declared Okinawa secure.

The kamikazes kept coming after the last Kikusui. The Army and Navy sent smaller groups, often of trainers and obsolete types, against the picket line through July and into August. On the night of 28–29 July a wood-and-fabric biplane trainer sank the destroyer Callaghan (DD-792) on her picket station, with 47 dead, the last U.S. destroyer lost in the war. On 13 August, two days before the surrender, two kamikazes hit the attack transport LaGrange at anchor off Okinawa, killing 21 men, the last U.S. ship hit by a kamikaze, according to NHHC.

Kerama Retto: Busted Ship Bay

The ships that survived came to the Kerama Retto. The anchorage seized on 26 March became the fleet’s emergency repair base, with tenders, salvage ships and tugs, and the Navy’s sailors gave it the name NHHC records: “Busted Ship Bay”. Destroyers with their bows or sterns blown off, their superstructures burned out and their masts down were patched there well enough to make the voyage to Ulithi, Pearl Harbor or the West Coast. Laffey was towed in after her battle of 16 April and left for Seattle under her own power on 22 April; Aaron Ward and Bowers, among many others, were patched there (Chapter 6).

The ships at Kerama Retto were, by the end of the campaign, the visible measure of what the Kikusui had done: dozens of destroyers and smaller ships that were not sunk but would not fight again in this war. The Navy’s count of 368 ships damaged at Okinawa from all causes, many of them repaired at the Kerama Retto, is the other half of the 36 sunk.

The Men in the Aircraft

Behind each bar in the Kikusui chart were individual men, most of them between eighteen and twenty-five, and some of their last words survive. Their letters were written under military censorship and in the formal language expected of men about to die for the Emperor, and most express resolve, gratitude to their parents and concern for those left behind; a few say more. Two examples from the Army’s side of the campaign, in Bill Gordon’s translations, show the range.

Sgt. Yoshihara Shigenori of an Army Shinbu reconnaissance squadron, aged 22, died on 7 April 1945, the second day of Kikusui No. 1, flying from Kanoya. His letter to his younger brother is typical of the hundreds collected at Chiran. Second Lt. Uehara Ryōji, a Keiō University economics student in the 56th Shinbu Squadron, flew from Chiran on 11 May 1945, during Kikusui No. 6, at the age of 22. His farewell writings are among the most quoted of all, because he set down plainly, in a militarist state, his belief that freedom would win the war.

Last letter · Kanoya, April 1945

“I apologize that your older brother will no longer be alive, but I will watch over your future from the skies.”

— Sgt. Yoshihara Shigenori, Shinbu special attack squadron, killed 7 April 1945, aged 22; trans. Bill Gordon, from Konpaku no kiroku (Chiran Tokkō Irei Kenshō Kai, 2005), via kamikazeimages.net

Farewell writing · Chiran, May 1945

“I think liberty’s victory is evident.”

— 2nd Lt. Uehara Ryōji, 56th Shinbu Special Attack Squadron, sortied from Chiran 11 May 1945, aged 22; trans. Bill Gordon (2024), from Fukano and Kadota, Tokkō kono chi yori (2016), via kamikazeimages.net

How freely such men had volunteered, and what their letters can and cannot tell us about what they thought, is discussed in Chapter 3.

Who Flew, and How Many Came Back

The numbers of aircraft in the Kikusui table are not the numbers of men who died. Many aircraft turned back with engine trouble, bad weather or no target; many pilots who returned flew again later. D. M. Giangreco, writing in Naval History in 1997, cites Japanese records showing that of 1,809 sorties logged by the 3rd, 5th and 10th Air Fleets, 879 special attack aircraft and escorts returned to base. Others were shot down long before reaching a ship. The CominCh analysis of February to May 1945, made from American action reports, estimated that about 45 per cent of the suicide aircraft it could account for were shot down or turned away by fighters, and NHHC’s summary is that about one in six of the kamikazes sent at Okinawa hit a ship.

The airmen who died flying from Kyushu to Okinawa are commemorated at the bases they flew from. The Chiran Peace Museum honours 1,036 Army special attack airmen of the Okinawa campaign; its own table gives the base each flew from. The Navy’s dead are counted by the Kanoya base museum, which lists 829 from Kanoya alone, 334 from Kushira and 354 from the two Kokubu fields, many of them in the Okinawa campaign. Who these men were, how they were chosen and what they wrote before they flew is the subject of Chapter 3.

The Cost to the Navy

Okinawa was the deadliest campaign in the history of the U.S. Navy. The Navy’s message to the fleet on the 80th anniversary, in March 2025, put its losses at more than 4,900 sailors killed and more than 4,800 wounded, 36 ships sunk and 368 damaged, and more than 760 aircraft lost. Morison’s often-quoted figures, 4,907 killed and missing and 4,874 wounded, fall within those totals but could not be checked against his text for this chapter. NHHC notes two comparisons that make the figure concrete. For the first time in the Navy’s history, more men were killed in a campaign than were wounded, a reflection of ships sinking in minutes and of men trapped below decks or burned. And nearly one in seven of all U.S. Navy deaths in the Second World War occurred off Okinawa.

Not every one of those deaths was caused by a kamikaze. The Navy figure includes losses to mines, conventional bombs and torpedoes, shore batteries, suicide boats and accidents, as well as the dead of Franklin on 19 March, which are sometimes included in the campaign and sometimes not. But the special attack aircraft caused most of them. The heaviest single days, the deadliest raids and the worst-hit ships were all kamikaze events.

The fleet held. The landings were never cut off, and the Navy did not withdraw. Ships were rotated, the picket stations were reinforced, Marine and Army fighters ashore took over much of the air defence, and shore-based radar on the outlying islands reduced the need for the most exposed stations. But the cost was high enough that the commanders planning the invasion of Kyushu took it as a measure of what lay ahead.

Why Okinawa Mattered

The Kikusui raids failed in their military purpose. They did not drive the fleet away, did not save the 32nd Army, and did not prevent the capture of the island that would have been the main base for the invasion of Japan. But they succeeded in the second purpose that Ten-gō had set: they showed what an invasion of the home islands would cost. American planners, studying the figures in the summer of 1945, expected thousands of special attack aircraft over the Kyushu beaches, along with boats, Kaiten and other weapons, and the losses at Okinawa were part of the background to the decisions of July and August 1945, discussed in Chapter 8 and in the collection’s chapter on the 509th Composite Group and the decision to use the bomb.

For the men on both sides the meaning was simpler. For the Japanese airmen the Kikusui were a series of departures from Kanoya and Chiran from which most did not return. For the American sailors they were eighty days of general quarters, broken sleep and fire, on ships that could be hit at any hour by an enemy who did not intend to survive, an experience NHHC’s historian Guy Nasuti has described as the deadliest engagement ever fought by the U.S. Navy. The ships where that experience was most intense, the destroyers of the picket line, are the subject of the next chapter.