Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942

by Ian W. Toll

  Kasumigaura aimed to create a cadre of super-athletes, men endowed with superior physical traits honed in a punishing training regimen. The students trained in gymnastics and acrobatics to improve strength, balance, coordination, and physical reaction time. They walked on their hands and balanced on their heads for five minutes; they ran for miles in full gabardine flight suits in the sweltering heat of high summer; they leapt from a tower, somersaulted in the air, and landed on their feet. They were required to hang by one arm from an iron pole for ten minutes. Those who could not swim had a rope tied around their waists and were thrown into the lake; if they sank, they were finally hauled to the surface. Every man was eventually required to swim 50 meters in less than thirty seconds, to swim underwater for a distance of at least 50 meters, and to remain underwater for at least ninety seconds.

  Men were pitted against one another in vicious wrestling matches. After each round, the victor was permitted to walk away, while the exhausted loser was required to remain on the mat to take on the next man. A weak or undersized trainee, losing three or four consecutive contests, might be drained of all his remaining strength; nonetheless, he was obligated to continue until he had pinned a man to the mat, or had been pinned in turn by every man in the class. If the unlucky perpetual loser could not get back on his feet, he was dismissed from the program. “With every pilot-trainee determined not to be expelled from the flyer’s course, the wrestling matches were scenes of fierce competition,” recalled Sakai. “Often students were knocked unconscious. . . . They were revived with buckets of water or other means and sent back to the mat.”

  They trained to improve their eyesight. They were required to identify objects and symbols that were flashed before their eyes for a fraction of a second. They learned to recognize and describe objects in the outermost corners of their peripheral vision. Sakai writes that he and his fellow students were taught to find and identify stars in broad daylight. “Gradually, and with much more practice, we became quite adept at our star-hunting. Then we went further. When we had sighted and fixed the position of a particular star we jerked our eyes away ninety degrees, and snapped back again to see if we could locate the star immediately. Of such things are fighter pilots made.” Reaction times were shortened by such exercises as sitting still while a fly was buzzing in a room; the student was expected to reach out and seize it in his fist. At first, Sakai recalled, few could do it, “but after several months a fly which flew before our faces was almost certain to end up in our hands.”

  Instructors used the ancient principles of kendo, or Japanese swordsmanship, to teach the trainees how to attack and defeat an opponent. The aviators sat through long and mostly silent sessions with Zen priests, in which they were instructed to set their attention in the lower abdomen, to evacuate the mind, to experience combat as a series of effortless acts, in which the hands and feet on the cockpit controls moved without the intrusion of conscious thought.

  A year after having entered basic training, the trainees reached a milestone that none would ever forget. They left the earth for the first time in a Type-3 Primary Trainer—a two-seat, dual-control, open-cockpit biplane, powered by a 130-horsepower, five-cylinder engine. An instructor sat in the forward cockpit, the trainee behind. A voice tube ran from the forward seat back to the trainee’s flight helmet, allowing for one-way communication. Once the aircraft was aloft, the trainee was tested for basic flight aptitude. How was his hand-eye coordination? How confidently did he take the controls? Could he maintain straight and level flight? The most natural flyers were permitted to handle the aircraft in takeoffs and landings, and a select few were even permitted to solo for the first time. Based on those first assessments, the class was subdivided and the future course of each man’s aviation career was decided. Some would become pilots, some aircrew; some would be sent into land-based aircraft, others into floatplanes.

  Having mastered the rudiments, the trainees were introduced to a more powerful intermediate trainer known as the Type 93 biplane, or Akatombo, the “red dragonfly.” The Akatombo was powered by a 300-horsepower, nine-cylinder radial engine. Here the trainee sat in the front cockpit, providing an unobstructed view forward but also allowing the instructor to clout him on the back of the head. (Takeshi Maeda recalled that his instructor often shouted through the voice tube, “You’re so stupid!” and walloped him with a wooden stick. To protect his skull, Maeda wrapped a towel under the lining of his leather flight helmet. Realizing he was being cheated, the instructor waited until the plane had landed, ordered Maeda to stand at attention with head uncovered, and meted out the accumulated backlog of punishments.) In the Akatombo, the student mastered basic flight aerobatics: rolls, spins, loops, stalls. He took his first long overland solo flight, cruising in his open cockpit at an altitude of 15,000 feet or higher: he often found his way home using Mount Fuji’s majestic cone as his point of orientation. He would be introduced to the art of formation flying in a three-plane shutai, then in a nine-plane chutai. He learned to fly using his instruments alone, in a cockpit covered by a canvas hood.

  At the end of this intermediate training period, the trainee was subjected to a grueling battery of tests. If he passed, he was awarded his coveted “wings,” an insignia patch sewn on the left sleeve: a pair of wings superimposed on an anchor under a cherry blossom. Although his training was far from complete, he could now call himself a naval aviator.

  Five or six months of “extended education” followed in operational aircraft, usually obsolete models that had been taken out of front-line service. (Mercifully, men with aviator’s wings rarely suffered beatings. Not so mercifully, the newly minted flyers were entitled to beat others junior to themselves, and often did.) The men were divided into carrier and twin-engine land-based programs, and the carrier men were further subdivided into fighter, dive-bomber, and torpedo bomber units. Now their training would emphasize gunnery, bombing, dogfighting, formation flying, and over-water navigation. Fighter pilots practiced firing at drogues towed behind another plane, with results captured by a gun camera. Bombers attacked targets on the ground, with the results measured and scored vigilantly. Pilots destined for carrier squadrons progressed from practice landings on short segments of a runway, to low-speed, low-altitude approaches over an aircraft carrier, to “touch and go” landings (touch the deck and take off without cutting the engine). Finally, they were cleared to lower their tailhooks and put their birds down on a carrier flight deck for the first time.

  Having logged an average of about 500 flight hours, they were assigned to a front-line unit, either an air base or an aircraft carrier. Non-commissioned officers and enlisted airmen were promoted to the rank of airman first class; officers were promoted to lieutenant. Here they completed the last phase of their training side by side with veteran aviators. Training schedules were intense. The new flyboys flew constantly: morning, afternoon, sometimes at night. A popular song celebrated the navy’s intense pace of training in the years leading up to the war with Britain and the United States. Weekends were a thing of the past, went the refrain; now the days of the week were “Monday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Friday.”

  “You can’t go home again,” wrote Thomas Wolfe, and he might as well have been writing about the newly minted Imperial Japanese Navy aviator, resplendently clad in blue and brass, returning home to visit his family. Of course his parents and siblings were overjoyed to see him, and he them. He had done them a great honor, lifting the status of his entire clan in the eyes of neighbors, colleagues, and friends. He was bigger, stronger, tougher, older, wiser. But his homecoming was inevitably poignant, and more than a little strange. He might have dreamed of home every night he was away, clasping it in his imagination as a sanctuary from the brutality of his tormentors and the unremitting toil of his training. Once there, however, he was inevitably taken aback by the comfort, the ease, the disorder, the aimlessness. The reality of home had steadily diverged from the image he had carried in his mind. It contrasted to
o sharply with the harsh, purposeful life to which he had grown accustomed. He loved his family as much as he ever had, and they loved him as much as they ever had, but he was aghast at how much space had grown between them. They could never fully understand what he had done and endured, or what he had become. That was a secret known only to his classmates, his fellow survivors, who had shared in the long crucible of his training—the fatigue, the humiliations, the beatings, the deprivations, the chronic dread of expulsion, the ecstasy of flight, and the inconceivable joy he had felt upon receiving those blessed wings. He might never admit it, but his fellow airmen were closer to him now than his own kin. He belonged with them. He could not go home again because now the navy was his home.

  THE NAVEL AIR CORPS demonstrated its growing range and power over the skies of China between 1937 and 1941. For four years it maintained air supremacy over a vast expanse of southern China. With growing confidence, aviation officers argued that the Japanese navy should reduce its emphasis on battleships and devote the bulk of its resources to building more airplanes and aircraft carriers. Minoru Genda, a head-turning fighter pilot who made a name for himself by leading a barnstorming air circus, was a persistent critic of the “big gun club.” In mock air battles Genda and his team routinely trounced the planes and pilots of the Japanese army, a source of immense pride in a service that tended to regard the army as an insufferable rival. He had helped perfect the deadly “turning in” maneuver that the Japanese Zeros would use to kill so many opponents in the opening months of the Pacific War.

  While on a tour of duty at the Naval General Staff in Tokyo in 1936, Lieutenant Commander Genda wrote a paper brusquely asserting: “The main strength of a decisive battle should be air arms, while battleships will be put out of commission and tied up.” Genda wanted not only to stop building new battleships but to get rid of existing ones, provocatively suggesting that they “should be either scrapped or used as hulks for jetties.” That was heresy, sacrilege, profanation. It contradicted the master strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan. It flew in the face of the navy’s basic Battle Instructions: “The battleship squadron is the main fleet, whose aim is to attack the enemy’s main fleet.” Genda’s rivals spread the rumor that he had literally lost his mind.

  Blunt criticism was unusual in Japan, but it was also typical of the culture of Japanese aviation. In the mid-1930s, few aviation-minded officers occupied senior posts in the naval command structure, and not a single qualified aviator had reached flag rank. The prime movers were younger and lower-ranking men, who found that they could not make themselves understood except by resorting to “un-Japanese” modes of forcefulness and candor. (Perhaps frank criticism directed upward in the ranks was a trait common to naval aviators of all nations. They, more than their ship-bound brothers, were compelled to rely on themselves at an early age.) Genda found a patron and partner in Admiral Yamamoto, who made sure that the younger man was given the assignments he wanted, and brought him into the Combined Fleet as one of his principal staff officers in 1940. Yamamoto also picked up the cudgels of the anti-battleship campaign. He rejected the notion that there was any such thing as an unsinkable ship, and argued that the longer range of aircraft, and their steadily growing offensive striking power, would sooner or later put an end to the reign of the battleship. “I don’t want to be a wet blanket, and I know you’re going all out on your job,” he told Rear Admiral Keiji Fukuda, a battleship man, “but I’m afraid you’ll be out of work before long. From now on, aircraft are going to be the most important thing in the navy; big ships and guns will become obsolete.”

  Of course, the gun club had no intention of letting a mob of impertinent flyboys take control of the Japanese navy. Anticipating that Japan would abrogate the London Naval Treaty upon its expiration in 1936, the Naval General Staff planned to build and launch a fleet of “superbattleships.” These leviathans would weigh some 64,000 tons, about 50 percent larger than the largest battleships in the U.S. Fleet. They would mount a main battery of monstrous 18.1-inch-caliber guns. With weapons of such power and range, they argued, superbattleships would dominate any fleet engagement no matter how many ships were arrayed on either side. If the keels were laid immediately upon expiration of the treaty, and the ships built in closely guarded secrecy, perhaps the Japanese could gain a four- or five-year lead on their American and British rivals. Moreover, even if the United States built battleships of matching dimensions, they would be too broad-beamed to pass through the locks of the Panama Canal. The Americans would be thrown back on the horns of the same dilemma that Theodore Roosevelt had faced thirty years earlier. Setting out from Yokosuka or Kure, the Japanese superbattleships could be in San Francisco Bay before their Atlantic-based American counterparts had even rounded the Horn.

  In 1936, the navy placed initial orders for two superbattleships, to be built at Kure and Nagasaki; two more were to be built later at Sasebo and Yokosuka. The shipbuilders were astounded by specifications they received. “We’ve got to go through with it,” said one of the Nagasaki ship architects. “The Navy trusted our engineering expertise enough to give us this project.” The ships were to be 263 meters long, 38.9 meters on the beam, and displace more than 72,000 tons when fully loaded. Their massive steam-turbine engines, housed in cavernous 640 square-meter boiler rooms, would develop 150,000 horsepower, driving the great vessels through the sea at a peak speed of more than 27 knots. They would have an effective action radius of 7,200 nautical miles, requiring them to carry 6,300 tons of fuel. Their crew would number 2,500 men. They would be “unsinkable” (or so it was often said, until they were sunk in 1944 and 1945). Shells fired by an enemy ship, or bombs dropped from above, would make no impression on their 40-centimeter-thick “honeycomb” steel armor plating. Their hulls would contain 1,147 separate watertight compartments, all capable of being sealed off to contain flooding. If they took ten torpedo hits, or twenty, or thirty, the damage could be contained, and judicious counterflooding would keep them on an even keel.

  So it was said.

  The ships, which would be named Yamato (built in Kure) and Musashi (Nagasaki), were shrouded in obsessive secrecy, because it was feared that if the Americans learned of them they would immediately begin construction on similar lines. On the other hand, it was no simple task to conceal projects of that scale on the teeming urban waterfronts of Kure and Nagasaki. Large fences were erected around the shipyards, but nothing could be done about the new gantry cranes that towered over the surrounding rooftops. The navy was so touchy about security that it refused to allow any plans or documents to leave its offices. Engineers were not permitted to look at blueprints; contracts had to be settled with a handshake; mock-ups of any kind were strictly forbidden. Engineers who asked too many questions were singled out for police interrogation. In Nagasaki, a city of hills, the entire shipyard was plainly visible from any one of a thousand vantage points. Police swarmed the streets, threatening to arrest any person who seemed to cast a glance in the direction of the elephantine Musashi. Watch posts were erected within the yard itself, and guards posted on them with high-powered binoculars to scan the hills. Ferry windows were painted over so that commuters crossing the harbor could not peer into the yard. Eventually, the shipyard hung vast hemp-rope screens, 75,000 square meters altogether, to shield the great ship from prying eyes.

  The interior of the Musashi was a vast maze, a seemingly endless progression of passageways, ladders, and warrens, and very few men actually knew their way around the ship. No plans were provided to the workers by the security-obsessed architects, so they had to make do with their own crude hand-drawn maps, which had to be destroyed at the end of each work day. Many were reluctant to descend too deeply into the obsidian labyrinth, fearing they might never again emerge. The fear was well placed, for shipyard workers often did lose their way. Some carried pieces of chalk to leave trail marks, and the working parties took roll calls at quitting time to be sure than none was missing. Electrical engineers were brought in to install eight
600-kilowatt generators and a network of electrical cables that could have carried electricity to a large portion of rural Japan.

  The Yamato was launched without incident on August 8, 1940. The launch of the Musashi, three months later, was a more difficult and dangerous proposition. Nagasaki’s harbor was small and narrow, surrounded on all sides by steeply ascending land. When the ship entered the water she would be traveling at about 15 knots, and unless her momentum was checked she would run into the opposite shore, only 740 yards away, destroying an entire neighborhood and possibly herself. The problem was solved by running steel cables from harbor moorings to her hull, and dragging heavy chains on one side to turn her once she entered the harbor. Her launch was so secretive that only thirty guests were invited to witness it, all high-ranking officials of the navy and government. The residents of Nagasaki were ordered to stay inside their homes until given an all-clear. Curtains were to be drawn across all harbor-facing windows. Even the police officers who were sent to patrol the streets were ordered to turn their own backs at the moment of launch.

  As the hull moved down the slipway, blue sparks leapt up from the concrete, the rails under the hull emitted white smoke, and the onlookers shouted: “Banzai! Banzai!” As the vessel plunged into the water, it raised a wave that traveled across the harbor and crashed on the opposite shore, flooding several of the buildings along the waterfront and capsizing dozens of boats. But the launch had succeeded; the great battleship was afloat and in one piece. The engineers and workers fell to the ground, laughing and weeping and shouting thanks to the heavens.