Every ominous development in the war to date had occurred when the Japanese people were hungry, but not yet starving. In the fall of 1944, the food situation looked to be on the verge of becoming much more serious. Domestic rice production had declined by more than 10 percent since the start of the war, even though the homeland had not yet been subjected to heavy bombing. Food imports had declined, and were likely to shrink further as Japanese merchant shipping succumbed to the depredations of American airpower and submarines. An internal government report in July 1944 warned that production of nearly every category of food was on the decline, and “the national standard of living in 1944 will become a good deal more stringent compared with last year.”29 That left a smaller margin for bad weather, and the 1944 rice harvest was threatened by persistent strong driving rains. Moreover, domestic food production might suffer a catastrophic decline in 1945, due to a foreseeable combination of shipping losses, an energy crisis, and the disruption of road and rail transportation by aerial bombing.
Hunger was one thing; famine was another. Famine, the Japanese leadership feared, might cause a breakdown in civil order and threaten the foundations of its authority. The Japanese people had supported overseas imperialist aggression with the understanding that it promised a higher standard of living at home. But life had grown much harder since the attack on Pearl Harbor, and it remained to be seen how much deprivation they would endure. In the prewar era, young officers of the army had threatened to take direct action to alleviate the economic suffering of the Japanese people, and had nearly achieved a coup d’etat in 1936. Some in the ruling circle pointed to the example of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, which had likewise been fueled by empty stomachs and the disruptions of a catastrophic foreign war. Keeping a lid on internal tensions became a prime consideration of all Japanese policy-making—domestic, political, diplomatic, and strategic—right up to the hours before the surrender in August 1945.
IN SEPTEMBER 1944, Hirohito reviewed and approved military plans for the next stage of the war. These were designated “Sho,” after an old Chinese ideogram meaning “victory.” Plan Sho (“Sho-go”) came in four versions, based on four contingencies thought most likely after the American conquest of the Marianas. Sho-1 through Sho-4 would counter amphibious landings against targets in four zones stretching in an arc from south to north: the Philippines; Formosa and the Ryukyu Islands; Honshu; and Hokkaido. From the beginning, however, Japanese planners considered the Philippines the most likely target of the next major operation, and gave the most thought and planning to Sho-1. Their thinking on this score was influenced by MacArthur’s famous public pledges to return to the Philippines.30
Sho-1 bore many of the familiar hallmarks of previous Japanese naval operations. It was intricately choreographed, with widely separated forces approaching the enemy from several directions. It relied on precise timing between different fleet elements, and was therefore vulnerable to disruption. Many previous Japanese campaign plans had included feints, lures, and other acts of deception: likewise, Sho-1’s only real hope of success depended upon a ruse de guerre. Admiral Takeo Kurita’s “First Striking Force,” comprising most of the surface strength of the Combined Fleet, would start north from Borneo. Off the island of Palawan, in the southwest Philippines, one part of the fleet would break away and head southeast, under the command of Admiral Shoji Nishimura, while the main force continued north under Kurita. The two subdivided fleet elements would pass through the Philippine archipelago by two different straits, Surigao in the south and San Bernardino in the north. Meanwhile, Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa’s “First Mobile Force,” comprising all of Japan’s remaining aircraft carriers, would sortie from the Inland Sea and descend on the battle zone from the north, in hopes of luring the bulk of Halsey’s Third Fleet away from the beachhead. If all went as hoped, Kurita and Nishimura’s columns would debouch from the straits and attack MacArthur’s invasion fleet in a naval pincer movement. This force, the Japanese knew, would include some 100,000 enemy troops and hundreds of cargo ships loaded with weapons, equipment, and supplies to support the invasion. The crux of the Japanese plan was to get Kurita’s battleships, cruisers, and destroyers into short-range action against this amphibious fleet as it lay off the invasion beaches.
It was a grand and glorious vision. But in fact, as all senior officers knew, Sho was really shaped by the mobility and range limitations imposed by the stringent fueling situation, and the difficulty in keeping the fleet properly supplied. The fuel supply was far to the south, in the oil fields of Borneo and Sumatra—but the shipyards and repair facilities were in the Japanese home islands, as were the myriad provisions, ordnance, ammunition, and reserve manpower required to keep the fleet in fighting trim. It was no longer possible to transport enough oil to Japan to meet the thirsty fleet’s needs, and the shortfall was growing steadily worse as American submarines and airplanes hunted down and sank the country’s remaining oil tankers. The bulk of the fleet must therefore remain in anchorages far to the south, near the empire’s fueling wellspring. But Ozawa’s carriers had been almost entirely denuded of airplanes and trained carrier aviators at the Battle of the Philippine Sea (June 19–20, 1944), and he needed to acquire and train replacement air groups. Given the pitiable state of Japan’s flight-training pipeline and aviation plants, he would need to keep his flattops in Japanese waters for some time, probably at least three or four months.
Since it was necessary for these fleets to be separated by thousands of miles, Kurita was detached from Ozawa’s command and placed under the direct control of the commander in chief of the Combined Fleet, Admiral Soemu Toyoda, who had recently moved his headquarters from a command ship anchored in Tokyo Bay to a bunker under Keio University’s Hiyoshi campus in Yokohama. Ozawa and Kurita would now receive their orders separately, by long-range radio broadcast from Hiyoshi. This scattershot deployment of Japan’s major fleet elements was far from ideal. Given the retrograde logistical situation, however, it was inevitable.
If MacArthur’s amphibious force could be attacked at all, it would have to be attacked by surface warships and land-based air forces, because no one expected much of Ozawa’s neutered aircraft carriers or the much-reduced Japanese submarine fleet. Plan Sho’s chief concern was to move Japan’s widely separated naval and air forces into position to give battle. Twelve fleet oilers had been assigned to fuel Kurita’s fleet. This fueling group had planned to conduct underway replenishment exercises that October, but those exercises had been cancelled. Every single remaining oil tanker was important now; there was no room for error in the management of the fuel situation. It was not even certain that Kurita’s ships would have enough fuel remaining at the end of the battle to withdraw to safety. Ozawa’s contribution to the battle would depend on the state of his carrier air forces at whatever moment the Americans chose to make their next move. No one expected the Japanese carrier forces to meet their adversaries on anything like equal terms, and Ozawa knew he was likely to suffer another mauling while inflicting scant punishment in return. Given that dismal outlook, it was decided that the once-mighty Japanese carrier striking force should function as a lure, to provide Kurita with an opening to get at the invasion fleet. Ozawa was willing to serve in this lowly role. “A decoy, that was our first primary mission, to act as a decoy,” he said. “The main mission was all sacrifice. An attack with a very weak force of planes comes under the heading of sacrifice of planes and ships.”31
After July’s political upheaval, army and navy leaders had pledged to work more closely together. But as late as the third week of October, when MacArthur’s invasion fleet was underway for Leyte, the two services were reading from different playbooks. Japanese army commanders had still not decided whether to move troop reinforcements to the island. Some wanted to concentrate the army’s strength on Luzon, even if that meant conceding Leyte to the Americans.
On October 18, at the Officers Club in Tokyo, a group of four officers (one each from the army and navy ministrie
s and the army and navy general staffs) met to hammer out a joint strategy for the defense of the Philippines. Having reviewed Sho-1, General Kenryo Sato of the army ministry raised an eleventh-hour objection. Acknowledging that the Japanese people were “crying” for the fleet to do battle with the enemy, Sato insisted that the high command must keep its “coolness” and not act rashly to appease public opinion. If the Combined Fleet fought now, he said, it was likely to suffer an annihilating defeat. Better to keep Ozawa’s ships in port, where they would have some deterrent value in simply keeping the enemy from approaching the home islands. Moreover, Sato pointed out, the fleet would have to burn a lot of precious fuel just to get into battle. At that moment, a column of six oil tankers was inbound from the south, carrying about 60,000 tons of oil. That fuel was needed to keep the Japanese war economy running. Sato asked his navy counterparts, “What can the Combined Fleet do going out for battle now? The 60,000 tons of oil is more important.”32
The speech brought the entire room, including Sato, to the brink of tears. He had put Japan’s predicament into stark relief. The honor of the once-mighty Imperial Japanese Navy now mattered less than six tankers and the oil they carried. Even a general could see that the fleet’s diminished status was a portent of doom. “This was the saddest feeling I had ever experienced,” Sato wrote.
Sobbing freely, Rear Admiral Tasuku Nakazawa of the Naval General Staff replied on behalf of the navy. He was grateful to the general for his kindness, but “now the Combined Fleet of the Empire of Japan wishes to be given a place to end her life.” Because of the oil shortage and the enemy’s growing dominance in the air, Plan Sho offered the “last chance” for the fleet to “die a glorious death.” Nakazawa concluded: “This is the navy’s earnest wish.”33
After a choked silence, with tears streaming down his face, Sato agreed that the 60,000 tons of oil should be offered as a “parting present” to the navy. As the meeting broke up, an air-raid siren wailed in the streets outside, and he prayed silently for “the heroic end of the Combined Fleet.”34
The moving scene underscores a point often neglected in western histories of the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Plan Sho was virtually a naval banzai charge. Its unstated purpose was to ensure that the Japanese fleet put up one last good fight before the war came to an end. According to Rear Admiral Toshitane Takata of the Combined Fleet staff, “questions were beginning to be asked at home as to what the navy was doing after loss of one point after another down south, such as Marianas and Biak.”35 Japan’s surface warships had done barely any fighting since the previous year’s action in the Solomons. Its splendid line of battleships had seen no surface action at all since the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, a full two years earlier. The superbattleships Yamato and Musashi had never come within gunshot range of an enemy ship. The sister behemoths had been built at monumental expense, in Kure and Nagasaki; they were the two largest warships in the world, and Japan had invested great hopes in their war-winning potential. But they had spent most of the war at anchor, mainly because they required so much fuel to operate at sea. Both had served as sumptuous floating headquarters for fleet commanders and their staffs. Their inactivity and virginal combat status had provoked grumbling in the ranks of the fleet, where they were derisively tagged as “Hotel Yamato” and “Hotel Musashi.” To end their careers at anchor, without having once fired their 18-inch main guns at an enemy ship, would be an intolerable disgrace. Admiral Kurita, whose command included both of the great ships, asked his officers on the eve of the battle for the Philippines, “Would it not be shameful to have the fleet remain intact while our nation perishes?”36
In postwar interrogations, naval leaders confirmed that they had not entertained any real hope of saving the Philippines, and expected to suffer cataclysmic losses, perhaps even a complete wipeout. They chose to fight anyway, because they judged that nothing could be gained by saving the fleet to fight another day. If and when the Americans took the Philippines, they would strangle the sea routes linking Japan to its oil supply. In that case, said Takata, “even though the fleet should be left, the shipping lanes to the south would be completely cut off so that the fleet, if it should come back to Japanese waters, could not obtain its fuel supply. If it should remain in southern waters, it could not receive supplies of ammunition and arms.” With no good options, they decided to “take the gamble,” understanding that “if the worst should happen, there was a chance that we would lose the entire fleet.”37 Admiral Kurita said he was prepared to lose half his ships in exchange for “damaging one-half of all your ships in Leyte Bay.” Even that result, he added, would not defeat MacArthur’s invasion but only “delay the landing for two or three days. . . . It was then a limited objective, to delay that particular landing for two or three days. We could do nothing about succeeding landings, not having enough strength.”38 As for Ozawa, whose defanged carriers would be offered as bait for Halsey, “we expected complete destruction.”39
ONE INCIDENT DURING THE AERIAL FIGHT off Formosa was singled out for special attention in the Japanese news media. It had occurred on October 15, when Halsey was withdrawing to the east, and the crippled Canberra and Houston were in slow retreat. Rear Admiral Masafumi Arima, commander of the Twenty-Sixth Air Flotilla on Luzon, had removed his rank insignia, climbed into the cockpit of a Mitsubishi G4M bomber, and led a one-way suicide crash attack against the enemy fleet. His airplane was either lost at sea or destroyed in a failed attack on the carrier Franklin; at any rate, it did not return to base. But Tokyo reported that the “hero god” Arima had deliberately crash-dived into an American aircraft carrier, and that the target had been sunk. Fulsome media coverage of the flight signaled that the regime was preparing to launch suicide tactics on a mass scale. The curtain had been raised on the last act of the Pacific air war, when Japanese planes would become deadly missiles piloted by men resolved to die in a ball of fire.
The term kamikaze, “divine wind,” was not yet associated with suicide planes—it was still reserved for the mythological heaven-sent typhoon that had destroyed a Mongol invasion fleet seven centuries earlier. Instead, the Japanese spoke of “sure-hit weapons” and “body-crashing” tactics to be carried out by “special attack” (tokko) corps. These tokko operations would include aviators and aircraft, but also a range of other purpose-built suicide weapons including speedboats, scuba divers, manned rockets, and small submersibles.
Pacific War histories have tended to underplay the controversy created in Japan, and even in the military ranks, by the introduction of organized suicide tactics. Many Japanese resisted strongly, arguing that it misconstrued traditional samurai warrior ideals (bushido). Some naval officers associated the concept with a pathological “death cult” that held sway in the Japanese army, and they argued that it had no place in the navy. Veteran aviators, recalling the victories they had won in the skies earlier in the war, tended to regard kamikaze attacks as essentially defeatist. Now and again, Japanese pilots had crash-dived into Allied ships, or rammed Allied bombers in flight—but before the fall of 1944, such attacks had been sporadic and opportunistic, often occurring when an airplane was damaged and could not return to base. When first ordered by a unit commander to fly a suicide mission, the great fighter ace Saburo Sakai was stunned. “A great roaring sounded in my ears,” he recalled. “What was he saying? I was in a turmoil. I had a cold, sinking feeling of revulsion in my brain.”40 A pilot must always be ready to die in battle, said Sakai, but that did not include “wantonly wasting one’s life.”41
After the war, a damaging charge was leveled against Japan’s military leaders. They were accused of luring thousands of young men into flight training under false pretenses. It was suggested that by early 1944, the military secretly planned to train most of its new pilots as kamikazes, but concealed the fact until it was too late for the trainees to back out. Potent taboos governed (and still govern) discussion of the subject. The historical record is spotty—especially concerning the question of who knew what, a
nd when—but there appears to be considerable evidence behind the charge. In the early stages of the kamikaze recruitment program, no references to suicide tactics were permitted to appear in writing; only verbal orders were given. Naoji Kozu, a reserve naval ensign, agreed to volunteer for the manned torpedo program before he knew that it was a suicide weapon. He and his fellow recruits were told only that they must be “willing to take on a dangerous job” and “willing to board a special weapon.” Looking back on the episode after the war, Kozu concluded: “Today, I know they deceived us! I know it with all my heart!”42
In postwar interrogations, several senior Japanese naval officers falsely asserted that kamikaze tactics were first proposed and championed by pilots in front-line fighting squadrons. Captain Rikibei Inoguchi, chief of staff of the First Air Fleet, said that the idea had arisen spontaneously among airmen based in the Philippines, and was “purely and simply a policy of that base.”43 Confronted with evidence that kamikaze operations had been planned in Tokyo well before MacArthur’s landing on Leyte, Inoguchi remained adamant: “This sort of thing has to come up from the bottom and you can’t order such a thing. At no time were kamikaze tactics ordered . . . initially the kamikaze concept was a method of coping with local situations and not the result of an overall policy handed down from GHQ.”44 The record shows those claims to be false. Similarly, Admiral Toyoda told his American interrogators that the first kamikaze flights were an “unexpected result of the decision to send the Second Fleet into Leyte Gulf.”45 He credited the idea to local air commanders in the Philippines, who argued “that if the surface units are taking such desperate measures we too must take similarly desperate measures, and started the first operation of the so-called Special Attack Force.”46 That was false: Toyoda’s Combined Fleet staff had been debating and planning suicide operations long before the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Admiral Ozawa’s account was equally shifty. At first he maintained that “the first time I heard of kamikaze attacks was when Kurita’s fleet went through San Bernardino Strait.” Confronted with contrary evidence, he suddenly remembered that in June 1944 “it was recommended to Toyoda. Toyoda said that the time wasn’t ripe yet, it was too early to use it.”47
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