The Conquering Tide

by Ian W. Toll

  Regime-sanctioned slogans and themes extolled the indomitable power of Yamato Damashii—the collective Japanese fighting spirit. Even if the enemy possessed material superiority—and in 1943, hints of America’s enormous industrial output were seeping into news accounts—Japanese workers and warriors were capable of arousing themselves to new peaks of devotion and self-sacrifice. In the end, no matter what the cost, the transcendent spirit of the Japanese must prevail. When American forces stormed the Aleutian island of Attu in May 1943, a Japanese garrison of 2,650 soldiers fought a savage battle and died almost to the last man. Their cause had been hopeless—General John L. DeWitt’s 7th Infantry Division assault troops had outnumbered the defenders by five to one—but they chose collective death over the ignominy of surrender. In Japan, the annihilation of the Attu garrison was inscribed as an important moral victory. It had proved that the Japanese warrior was willing to give everything for his country. The term gyokusai, first coined to describe the mass combat deaths and suicides at Attu, became increasingly familiar as one Japanese island garrison after another perished in similar fashion. Leading Japanese newspapers reported that “the heroic spirits of Attu” literally rose from the dead, took corporeal form, and renewed the fight against American forces when they landed on Kiska island three months later. “Foreign reports reveal that the American forces fought intensely and bitterly against this army of spirits over a period of three weeks,” the Japan Times and Advertiser reported on August 24, 1943. “In the South Pacific sector, too, spirits of the Japanese troops have tangled with the enemy, causing many of them mental derangements and others to kill themselves as a result of nervous breakdown and morbid fear.”41

  By contrast, noted the Japanese commentators, the individualistic and luxury-loving Americans could never hope to emulate Japan’s feverish devotion to victory in the Pacific. They wanted only to survive and go home alive. Long before they reached Japanese shores, the Americans would tire of the war and ask for terms of peace. So it was said. The chief of the Board of Information made the case at a speech in Yokohama in May 1943: “Soldiers are not tools but spirit! They are souls! American soldiers are crudely made and over-produced.”42 When General George S. Patton slapped an American soldier in Sicily in August 1943, the incident prompted excited commentary in the Japanese press. Here was incontrovertible proof that the enemy’s fighting spirit was flagging! Since the United States was a democracy, its people would sooner or later bring pressure to bear on their leaders to seek a peaceful accommodation with Japan. Time was on Japan’s side, because “conditions within America do not allow for a long drawn-out war.”43

  Homefront civilians were forever being exhorted to arouse themselves to greater efforts, to unite and summon their collective spiritual strength for an impending decisive confrontation with the enemy. “The present situation is truly grave,” the Showa emperor told them, in an Imperial Rescript opening a special session of the Diet on October 26, 1943. “The Japanese people must fully display their total strength and thereby destroy the evil ambition of the enemy nations.”44 The people replied with exceptional fervor. That fall, apparently without a word of complaint, the Japanese government abolished holidays and weekends. There would be no more days of rest; the people would “return their holidays to the emperor.”45 Labor drafts were steadily expanded into new categories. Unmarried women and university students were conscripted into civil defense work and war industries. Progressively younger children were drafted into the workforce: in September 1943, all girls over the age of fourteen; the following April, all children of both genders over the age of ten. Although the American air raids were still more than a year away, measures to evacuate children from the cities were initiated in October 1943. Military conscription was expanded. In the fall of 1943, college students aged nineteen or older (except those majoring in science or engineering) were called to service. Middle-aged men as old as forty-five were inducted. The send-off ceremonies were every bit as elaborate and well attended as those of 1941, but the mood had turned perceptibly darker. People had seen too many wooden boxes wrapped in white cloth, containing the cremated remains of dead soldiers and sailors repatriated from the war zones. Aiko Takahashi, the young woman in Tokyo, told her diary that the send-off processions had become “rather pathetic affairs. . . . As I look at them, I have the wrenching thought that today once again, a funeral of living people is passing and youngsters with their sleeves rolled up are being sent off to die.”46

  ALMOST EXACTLY A YEAR after Isoroku Yamamoto’s aircraft was shot down over Bougainville, his successor as commander in chief of the Combined Fleet met a similar fate. Wary of Mitscher’s rampaging carrier task force, Admiral Koga had made up his mind to transfer his headquarters ashore, from the battleship Musashi (then at Palau) to the town of Davao on Mindanao. On the night of March 31, Koga and most of his senior staff officers and cryptographers boarded three Kawanishi flying boats off Babelthuap and took off for the 650-mile flight. The big four-engine planes flew into a tropical witches’ brew off Cebu, and two of the three went down. Koga’s plane simply disappeared, and none of the aircrew or passengers was ever seen again. A plane carrying Vice Admiral Shigeru Fukudome, Koga’s chief of staff, ditched at sea about six miles off the coast. The vice admiral survived and managed to get ashore, where he was promptly taken prisoner by Filipino guerrillas. His captors found a cache of highly classified documents on his person. These included a signal book, an updated codebook, and a copy of “Plan Z,” the Combined Fleet’s master operational plan for a fleet action in the western Pacific. Fukudome was returned unharmed to local Japanese army forces under circumstances that remain obscure, but the captured documents were handed over to the Americans. A submarine spirited the precious intelligence to MacArthur’s general headquarters in Brisbane.

  Realizing that the crown jewels had fallen into the enemy’s hands, the Imperial Japanese Navy moved quickly to promulgate a new edition of the codebook and to write a new operational plan for the looming battle. Koga’s death was hushed up until May, when a new commander in chief was appointed. This was Admiral Soemu Toyoda, a torpedo specialist who had graduated from Etajima in 1905. Toyoda established his headquarters in an anchored flagship (the light cruiser Oyodo) in Tokyo Bay. A new plan of battle, designated “A-Go,” was prepared in Tokyo by the Navy General Staff and distributed the same week.

  A month earlier, Tokyo had ordered another major fleet reorganization, the fourth since the attack on Pearl Harbor. The main striking force of the Japanese navy was redesignated the “First Mobile Fleet” (Dai Ichi Kido-Kantai). Its two principal elements were the Third Fleet, which included nine aircraft carriers arrayed in three task groups; and the Second Fleet, consisting of most of the navy’s major surface warships, including the battleships and heavy cruisers. Vice Admiral Ozawa was “fleeted up” to command the entire force, while simultaneously retaining direct command of the Third Fleet, with Taiho as his flagship. The Second Fleet, commanded by Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita, was to function as a subordinate screening force, although Ozawa might send it to engage the enemy in a conventional naval gunnery battle if and when opportunity offered. The Combined Fleet had been reshuffled several times before, but the creation of the First Mobile Fleet took the unprecedented step of placing the carriers at the nucleus of the force, with the battleships relegated to a subsidiary role. For the first time in the history of the Imperial Navy, a carrier admiral would exercise tactical command over the battleships.

  Traditions, dogmas, and cultural norms had long stood in the way of this necessary reform. Apart from the fixed ideas of the battleship adherents, it was simply not the way of the Imperial Navy to place a junior admiral over a senior admiral in the command chain. Before August 1943, when Kurita relieved Vice Admiral Nobutake Kondo in command of the Second Fleet, Ozawa (Etajima class of 1909) could not be placed above Kondo (class of 1907) without causing severe loss to the latter’s “face.” It was necessary that Kondo be retired or transferred to ot
her duties before Ozawa took command of the mixed force. Kondo was given command of the China Area Fleet, and he held that position until May 1945.

  Throughout the spring of 1944, Ozawa’s fleet moved between Singapore and anchorages in the southwestern part of the Sulu Sea (between the Philippines and Borneo). His movements were largely dictated by three considerations, all markers of the Japanese navy’s deteriorating fortunes. First, he needed to keep his flight decks in close proximity to terrestrial airfields, because his inexperienced pilots could not always be trusted to land safely on the carriers. Second, the fuel shortage, which had been exacerbated by the sinking of tankers, forced the fleet to operate near its sources of oil in Borneo and Sumatra. Third, the escalating threat posed by Pacific Fleet submarines kept Ozawa’s fleet besieged in shallow and enclosed waters.

  In early March, the Japanese carriers anchored off Singapore and their air groups dispersed to the region’s various airfields for training exercises. The early results were not encouraging. Many of the new pilots had first climbed into the cockpit of a trainer aircraft less than six months earlier. The powerful new Suisei and Tenzan bombers were a bit too hot for many of the green pilots to handle, even from terrestrial airfields. They had received little or no gunnery or navigational training, and were obligated to follow a squadron or division leader who knew where he was going. “The training was intense, and almost every day there was an accident,” said maintenance officer Hiroshi Suzuki of the Zuikaku. “There were a lot of crashes because the pilots and mechanics were mostly rookies, and they were flying new aircraft. Besides that, the weather in Singapore was usually very bad, and we had a lot of rain.”47

  In the second half of March, Carrier Division 1 and two divisions of the Second Fleet moved about a hundred miles south to Lingga Roads, off the coast of Sumatra. This anchorage, near the Palembang oilfields, was spacious enough for the carriers to conduct basic flight operations. Its narrow entrance channels could be policed against submarine infiltration. Here the rookie pilots would practice their carrier landings, but when the planes moved from airfields to flight decks, operational losses rose to fearsome proportions. Minoru Nomura, air officer on the Zuikaku, recalled watching as a Tenzan dropped a dummy torpedo and roared low over the carrier’s bow, just clearing it. As the crew heaved a sigh of relief, “the pilot began to bank for a right turn. At that instant his right wingtip made contact with the water. Plane and crew disintegrated instantly. It was over in a moment.”48 The powerful new torpedo bombers and dive-bombers were unforgiving when flown at low speeds. Many dropped into the sea astern of the carriers as they made the final turn in the landing approach. Planes failed to snag an arresting wire and went careening into the island or over the side. Midair collisions occurred directly overhead. “This is self-destruction air warfare,” a Junyo pilot ruefully commented.49

  Admiral Shimada issued the revised Plan A (“A-Go”) in Directive No. 373 on May 3. The plan envisioned a fleet battle in one of two “decisive battle” zones—in waters off Palau or the western Caroline Islands. The First Mobile Fleet would be supported by nearby elements of the shore-based First Air Fleet. If the Americans attacked the Marianas, Ozawa would remain in local waters in the hope of “luring” the enemy fleet south. Thus the plan depended on the Americans’ accepting the proffered bait. “The decisive battle,” Shimada wrote, “will be fought as close as possible to the forward base of our mobile fleet.”50

  The battle must be fought in those southern waters because the fuel situation required Ozawa to stay within easy reach of Dutch East Indian oilfields. The relentless attrition of oil tankers, chiefly credited to the American submarines and their now-reliable torpedoes, had chained the fleet to the refineries at Tarakan, Balikpapan, and Palembang. The immediate fueling situation could be alleviated by allowing the ships to take on unrefined Borneo petroleum, which was pure enough to drive the engines, but volatile and dirty. Ship’s engineers detested the stuff because it left layers of filthy sediment in the boilers, and it greatly increased the risk of explosions and fires.

  Until mid-May 1944, therefore, orders issued by Admiral Toyoda pursuant to A-Go did not admit the possibility of a fleet battle off the Marianas. If the Americans attacked Saipan and its neighbors, land-based naval air forces on the islands must attack and destroy the enemy fleet. These air units could be reinforced from the homeland, by sending planes to stage through the “Jimas” (the Bonin Islands, including Iwo and Chichi). Meanwhile, ground forces on Saipan were being strengthened and reinforced, and the local army commander, Lieutenant General Yoshitsugu Saito, had confidently pledged to repel any amphibious invasion. Still, uneasy questions remained: What if the Fifth Fleet declined to chase the enemy into the southwest? Could Japan risk the loss of territory so near the homeland without committing its fleet to make a stand?

  The answer was given on May 11, when the Naval General Staff rescinded its prohibition against pumping crude oil directly into Japanese ships. In the third week of May, most of the First Mobile Fleet anchored at Tawi Tawi in the Sulu Archipelago, between Mindanao and Borneo, and shuttle tankers from Tarakan filled every ship to capacity. But Tawi Tawi was no good for flight training because there were no suitable airfields in the area. Ozawa, appalled by the deadly losses incurred during carrier flight operations, had decided not to continue such training exercises: “I cannot bear to lose the lives of any more of my men in these accidents.”51 Though urgently in need of more preparation, the air groups were largely idled in the last month before the Japanese fleet was compelled to give battle. According to Lieutenant Commander Zenji Abe, air group leader on the Junyo, the prevailing breeze was not strong enough to get the Suisei carrier bombers aloft even at the ship’s maximum speed. “So we couldn’t take off,” said Abe, “and had no training after we left Japan from early May until 19 June, when the big American task force came over to the Marianas to attack Guam and Saipan. . . . So for forty or fifty days, we had no training flights at all.”52

  Admiral Matome Ugaki, the erstwhile Combined Fleet chief of staff, who had functioned as Yamamoto’s right hand and had survived the aerial ambush that killed the former commander in chief in April 1943, had recovered from his wounds and was back in the fleet. He had been appointed commander of the First Battleship Division of the Second Fleet, a command that included both the Yamato and the Musashi. He was glad to be back at sea but was discouraged by the state of training, both in his own battleships and throughout the fleet. In the privacy of his diary, Ugaki wavered between despondency and mystic appeals to bushido, the warrior spirit. He regarded the strategic plans to be basically sound, but doubted that the First Mobile Fleet possessed the means to execute them. Meeting the enemy at sea seemed a daunting prospect because “the only possible consequence is to become easy prey to enemy planes and submarines. The further we venture out, the more we shall be beaten. It’s like one can’t help getting soaked if one goes out in the rain without a coat or umbrella.”53 But the fleet could not afford to procrastinate, he observed a few days later, because the Americans were gaining strength all the time.54 On April 27, he went aboard Ozawa’s flagship, the Taiho, to participate in tabletop war-gaming exercises. In Ugaki’s judgment, the game supervisors allowed assumptions that were unrealistically favorable to the Japanese side. He judged that the navy’s fixation on a decisive battle amounted to an irrational obsession, and wondered why “they don’t give enough consideration to attacking enemy elements easy to destroy.”55

  Ugaki’s entries in April and May 1944 are filled with conflicting judgments and sentiments. The tone leaves no doubt that he knows his country is defeated, but he will not say so outright, even in his diary. On April 24: “The enemy’s present strength is just like a raging fire, so irresistible that a small amount of water can hardly put it out.”56 His pessimistic insights ring true, while his efforts to arouse his own spirits are feeble and half-hearted: “However, at the same time the enemy, too, may not be as good as we think. It may turn out all righ
t, if and when we fight with them.”57

  If the decisive battle was to be fought off the Marianas, a scenario made feasible by the Tarakan crude, Ozawa would launch his strike at very long range, 300 miles or more to the westward of the enemy. The Japanese planes would attack the American fleet and then land on airfields in Guam. There they would replenish fuel and ammunition and continue flying sorties until the enemy fleet was annihilated. This use of “shuttle-bombing” from shore bases was at the heart of A-Go. Successive aerial hammer blows would fall on the American fleet from Ozawa’s carriers and the Marianas airfields. Ozawa would then unleash all his forces, including the battleships and other surface warships, to pursue the cripples and wipe them out. Shimada’s directive put across Tokyo’s absolute conviction in the plan: “Complete success is anticipated.”58

  Keeping the First Mobile Fleet out of the enemy’s reach appealed to the logic of “outranging,” a guiding tactical principle in Japanese planning and weapons systems. Outranging was a theme found in the design of the Imperial Navy’s many long-ranged aircraft, including the Zero and the G3M and G4M medium bombers. For all the problems and challenges of the Japanese aircraft industry in wartime, the new-generation carrier dive-bombers and torpedo bombers had significantly greater range than their American counterparts. (The Suisei flew so far that it was often configured as a reconnaissance plane, and had been employed on ultra-long-range missions since 1942.) Outranging had been employed to good effect in surface naval actions by the Type 93 (Long Lance) torpedo. The superbattleships, with their 18.1-inch guns, were designed to strike an enemy from beyond his effective range. Outranging and shuttle-bombing offered some theoretical promise of rectifying the disparity in force between the two opposing fleets. The Japanese were well aware that they were outnumbered. A May 9 intelligence estimate distributed by the Naval General Staff predicted that the U.S. fleet would sail with sixteen battleships, including eight of the fast new types. As for carriers, the estimate was eight large fleet types, ten light carriers, and approximately twenty jeep carriers.59 Those figures were close enough to the mark.