George Blair was a U.S. Navy fighter pilot aboard the USS Essex: “In mid-February 1944 our air group was involved in the first strike against the Japanese at Truk. We were expecting fierce opposition, but it did not occur. After destroying the few enemy aircraft there, our main objective was the bombing and strafing of shipping and shore installations. While engaged in strafing I was hit by anti-aircraft fire at about 400 feet and had to ditch in the lagoon. Fortunately, others in my flight remained over me for a while and were able to intercept an enemy destroyer that was coming to pick me up. They set it afire and caused it to beach on the reef. When I had landed, my F6F Hellcat sank so fast that I was unable to deploy my raft, and was floating about in my life jacket for three hours after my companions were forced to leave me due to fuel shortage. Then I looked to the north and saw an OS2U float plane from the USS Baltimore. It had been dispatched to retrieve me. The pilot, Lieutenant Denver Baxter, made a landing in very rough water, and the rescue was complete.” This was one of the first rescues of a downed U.S. pilot from the midst of a Japanese stronghold in the Second World War.
Don McMillan, former U.S. Navy torpedo bomber pilot: “My day began with breakfast, getting into flight gear, a navigation and intelligence briefing. Along with a complement of fighters and dive-bombers, we took off into a good weather day. Lieutenant Prater brought us into the Jap fleet area and the fighter escort kept what few enemy fighters there were at bay as we approached the carrier Zuikaku which was at full speed and fleeing north, trying to get to safety with the rest of the Japanese diversionary force. Prater put us into our standard torpedo plane attack formation, a ‘cut-the-pie’ attack which, despite intensive manouvering by the intended victims, still resulted in some attackers getting hits. I was one of the last in, as my assigned approach was to have been a port beam shot. As Zuikaku manouvered in an S-shaped path, I was to have a bow shot. After releasing my torpedo at about 1,500 yards and an altitude of about 300 feet, I barreled on in and flew down the starboard side of the ship. We flew through falling streams of phosphorus shot at us as we reformed to head back to the Lexington. Our group had made several hits on the Japanese carrier, leaving her smoking. Later, another attack finished her off and by later in the afternoon she was no more.”
Ensign George Gay.
It is absolutely out of the question for you to return alive. Your mission involves certain death. Your bodies will be dead, but not your spirits. The death of a single one of you will be the birth of a million others. Neglect nothing that may affect your training or your health. You must not leave behind any cause for regret, which would follow you into eternity. And, lastly: do not be in too much of a hurry to die. If you cannot find your target, turn back; next time you may find a more favorable opportunity. Choose a death which brings about a maximum result.
—from The First Order to the Kamikaze
DIVINE WIND
IN WHAT MAY HAVE BEEN AN INCIDENT created by the Japanese military as an excuse for mounting an offensive campaign against the Chinese, an explosive device damaged a vital Japanese rail link in 1931, leading to their incursion into Manchuria, the taking of Peking, and the sacking and burning of Nanking. By 1936 the Japanese Cabinet was dominated by military figures and several senior government officials had been assasinated. A new order had taken control in Japan and the Japanese Imperial Army was on the march through Indo-China. It proceeded to drive the British from Shanghai and the Dutch from the East Indies as the Great East Asia Co-Existence Sphere, the Japanese euphemism for their newly-occupied territories, was being formed.
By early December 1941 Japanese militarists had decided that the time had come to implement a bold surprise attack on warships of the U.S. Navy at anchor around Ford Island in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The raid came in the early hours of 7 December in an attack by carrier-based aircraft of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Their bombs and torpedos sank the U.S. battleships Arizona, California, Oklahoma, Utah, and West Virginia, and damaged the Maryland, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee. Of these California, Nevada, and West Virginia were later salvaged. In a great irony, the Japanese had unwittingly committed an act which would lead to their ultimate destruction as a military power and to their defeat in World War Two. Their attack at Pearl Harbor came at a moment when the principal battleships of the U.S. fleet lay at anchor there, but none of the American aircraft carriers were present. Thus the Japanese virtually forced the U.S. Navy to rely heavily on its aircraft carriers throughout the course of the war, the majority of its battleships being unserviceable. Traditionally, the U.S. Navy had led with its big stick, the battleship, but now it would be the aircraft carrier that would form the nucleus of its task force groups.
The Pearl Harbor attack brought the U.S. into the war when President Franklin Roosevelt addressed the Congress a day later to ask for a declaration of war against the Empire of Japan. In the months to follow, Japanese troops moved to capture the Philippines, Burma, and Singapore.
In 1942 the U.S. Navy maintained an airfield and a refuelling station on the island of Midway located 1,136 miles west of Hawaii. In June of that year Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto made a plan to eliminate the U.S. carrier threat by drawing the big American ships out for battle at Midway. The Japanese naval force of eight carriers, eleven battleships, eighteen cruisers, and sixty-five destroyers significantly outnumbered the American fleet of just three carriers, no battleships, eight cruisers, and fifteen destroyers. Still, the Japanese were defeated in the Battle of Midway, 4–6 June (their first naval defeat since 1592), owing largely to the Americans having cracked the Japanese naval codes. The Japanese Navy’s failure at Midway marked the turning point of naval power in the Pacific War. Japanese carriers would never again pose quite the threat to the U.S. fleet, and the U.S. Navy was, from that point, able to go on the offensive. In the Battle of Midway no gunfire was exchanged between the warships. It was an air battle between planes of the two carrier forces, and the Japanese lost four of their carriers, Akagi, Kaga, Hiryu, and Soryu, while the Americans lost the carrier Yorktown.
I was walking across the flight deck in the still half-dark dawn to man my plane. I had reached the middle of the deck when I heard the very loud sound of 20mm cannon fire coming from astern the Randolph. Almost immediately, huge red tracers began coming up from astern, from below the port edge of the flight deck and parallel to the ship. As I hastily dropped to the deck wishing I could dig a foxhole, a kamikaze Zero arced up alongside the flight deck with its guns still firing, and flashed by less than fifty feet from me. The Zero then nosed down and turned in an attempt to crash into the carrier. Fortunately, he had misjudged his speed and passed just in front of, and under the bow of the ship, crashing and exploding in the water on the starboard side. The carrier got quite a jolt from the bomb explosion and lots of shrapnel on the flight deck, with little damage.
—Hamilton McWhorter, former U.S. Navy fighter pilot.
A miscalculated final plunge and this kamikaze aircraft narrowly misses the crowded flight deck of the escort carrier USS Sangamon in the spring of 1945.
In the final months of 1944, Imperial Japan was losing the war, and some of its military leaders began to express the belief that desperate times called for desperate measures. The notion of self-sacrifice for Emperor and country was commonly accepted among the Japanese, and suicide per se was not alien, and was honored for its purity by many who had been raised on tales of samurai warriors. Thus, it was a short step to the concept of suicide as a weapon, i.e. the kaiten (turning the tide) human torpedo. The kaiten, fifty-four feet long, carrying a 3,000- pound warhead, had a range of thirty miles at slow speed or twelve miles at a top speed of forty knots. It was designed around the Japanese Type 93 torpedo, primarily by naval architect Hiroshi Suzukawa. Launching the kaiten meant a one-way trip for the crew, who could not get out. Only one U.S. ship was sunk by a kaiten, the tanker USS Mississinewa, and most kaitens proved unstable, killing their “pilots” before reaching their targets.
Gen
eral Yashida of the Japanese Army Air Force, meanwhile, was advocating suicidal air attacks, and ramming techniques were being secretly included in the pilot training syllabus. Army General Yoshiroko, in command of units in the Solomon Islands, was particularly frustrated by the ineffective anti-tank weapons in his arsenal, and called upon his troops to make the supreme sacrifice by strapping satchels of explosives to their bodies and diving under the tanks of the American enemy. The effort was mostly without result and the general was the subject of severe criticism from Tokyo before being transferred to another post. The concept and use of “human bullets” by the Japanese continued, however.
On 15 June an invasion force of U.S. Marines landed on the island of Saipan in the Marianas chain, as long-range American B-29 Superfortress bombers were attacking the Japanese mainland. The bombers frequently flew well beyond the range of both anti-aircraft and defending fighters, further frustrating the Japanese High Command who were shocked to witness the enemy planes operating, seemingly with impunity, over their sacred homeland.
The instant of a kamikaze strike on the flight deck of an American aircraft carrier.
The First Battle of the Philippine Sea took place on 19 June with Japanese carriers and battleships engaging U.S. naval forces off Saipan. Within this pivotal clash, aircraft of both sides met in what has ever since been referred to by U.S. naval aviators as “The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.” When it was over, the Japanese had lost 328 carrier-based planes, 50 land-based planes, three more carriers, and the last of their best pilots. The Americans lost just twenty-nine aircraft. After this engagement Japanese naval power was largely neutralized for the remainder of the war.
Vice-Admiral Takejiro Onishi, Imperial Japanese Navy, Chief of the Ministry of Munitions, Arms, and Air Control Bureau, was a principal advocate of the kamikaze idea. It was he who originated the name kamikaze, which means “divine wind” and is believed to be a reference to the ancient winds that sank the threatening Mongol fleet in the late thirteenth century. Kamikaze pilots were members of special attack units. Their mission was to become human bombs, one with their airplanes, and sacrifice themselves by diving their planes into enemy ships with the goal of sinking them. In an effort to instill high morale among his airmen, the vice-admiral introduced some ceremonial aspects to the kamikaze units, including the pre-flight toast of sacred water, later changed to sake, and the wearing of a decorated white headband called a hachimaki, a touch of samurai indicating that the warrior was prepared to fight to the death. The majority also wore a sennin-bari, a silk cloth band stitched with red threads that was said to have the power of a bullet-proof vest. Most kamikaze pilots carried a personal flag, usually a small square of white cloth with a red hinomaru circle in the center and calligraphy encouraging “a suicide spirit.” Kamikaze pilots and their families received privileges, including extra food rations, as well as “very honorable” status. By some, the kamikaze were referred to as “the black-edged cherry blossoms.”
Admiral Onishi was painfully aware of the shortage of truly skilled Japanese pilots, but he still believed that his aircraft were a potent weapon. “If a pilot facing a ship or plane exhausts all his resources, he still has his plane left as a part of himself. What greater glory than to give his life for emperor and country?”
In his book Kamikaze—Japan’s Suicide Samurai, Raymond Lamont-Brown states that “the Kamikaze pilots evolved from four main sources of recruitment. First came the ‘patriotic crusaders’ who were all volunteers, usually from daimyo or samurai families; they were motivated by nationalistic fervour, military ideals and the concept of chivalry upon which their ancestors had based personal sacrifice to fulfil perceived duties to the State. From this group evolved the ritualization of the kamikaze before suicide flights (i.e. the wearing of samurai symbols, singing patriotic songs, writing poetry glorifying kamikaze action, composing testamentary last letters home, distributing personal effects, and so on).
“Next came the ‘nation’s face savers.’ These were recruits who did volunteer, but often for negative reasons, to avoid personal shame in not emulating the deaths of the patriotic crusaders, or to espouse military heroism in order to save the Kami land of Japan from humiliating defeat. Like the patriotic crusaders, they too were conformists to the traditions of Japanese society. As the kamikaze Susumu Kitjitsu (1923–1945) wrote to his parents: ‘I live quite a normal life. Death does not frighten me; my only care is to know if I am going to be able to sink an aircraft carrier by crashing into it.’
“By the last few months of the war the third category of recruits emerged: these were the ‘young nationalists.’ They came mostly straight from higher education, went through hurried training and died to sustain the war effort and to keep Japan free from foreign taint. As Bernard Millot wrote: ‘With a very few rare exceptions, they were the most affectionate, well-educated, least troublesome sons who gave their parents the greatest satisfaction.’
“The last group of recruits were also mostly young, the ‘appointed daredevils,’ who emerged right at the end of the war. It may be noted that among their numbers were do-or-die delinquents, hell-raisers, and those of shady moral reputation and social deviation who, through the drastic measure of suicide, were escaping the legal, civic and social consequences of their behavior.”
In his official code of ethics of January 1941, then Army Minister of Japan Hideki Tojo stated: “Do not think of death as you use up every ounce of your strength to fulfil your duties. Make it your joy to use every last bit of your physical and spiritual strength in what you do. Do not fear to die for the cause of ever-lasting justice. Do not stay alive in dishonor. Do not die in such a way as to leave a bad name behind you.”
Dear Parents,
Please congratulate me. I have been given a splendid opportunity to die. This is my last day. The destiny of our homeland hinges on the decisive battle in the seas to the south where I shall fall like a blossom from a radiant cherry tree.
—from a last letter home of a kamikaze, in The Divine Wind by Captain Rikihei Inoguchi and Commander Tadashi Nakajima, with Roger Pineau
In pre-war Japan, naval pilots were required to log a minimum of 400 flying hours before they qualified to train for carrier operations. They then had to accrue an additional 400 hours on carriers before being considered combat ready. As the war situation worsened for Japan, its pilot training was reduced to a maximum of 200 hours with virtually no navigation, aerobatics, or combat technique included. These poorly-trained student pilots quickly became easy prey for U.S. carrier aviators.
Now the American B-29s were based on Saipan, posing a far greater threat to the Japanese home islands. Japanese High Command, in a progressively more desperate mindset, ordered a dramatic, large-scale, three-pronged battleship and cruiser attack (which did not involve its own carriers) against the U.S. fleet. The plan called for a diversionary force to draw the U.S. carrier-based planes far away from the U.S. fleet. When it failed, the High Command immediately dispatched Vice-Admiral Onishi to the Philippines to take command of the First Air Fleet. U.S. carrier planes, meanwhile, were busy bombing the Japanese airfields there—Clark, Negros, and Cebu—causing extensive damage.
Onishi could not actually order his pilots to fly the special suicide attacks—they had to volunteer, and with no expectation of survival, they did so almost unanimously. On 20 October 1944 he addressed twenty-six fighter pilot volunteers who were to comprise the Shimpu (God and wind) force. “My sons, who can raise our country from the desperate situation in which she finds herself? Japan is in grave danger. The salvation of our country is now beyond the power of the Ministers of State, the General Staff, and lowly commanders like myself. It can come only from spirited young men such as you. Thus on behalf of your hundred million countrymen, I ask you this sacrifice, and pray for your success. You are already gods, without earthly desires. But one thing you want to know is that your own crash-dive is not in vain. Regrettably, we will not be able to tell you the results. But I shall watch
your efforts to the end and report your deeds to the Throne. You may all rest assured on this point. I ask you to do your best.”
Soon after Onishi’s address, 201st Air Group Chusa Tadashi Nakajima was sent to Cebu in the central Philippines to organize a new kamikaze unit, and told the pilots on his arrival: “I have come here to organize another Special Attack Unit. Others will want to follow in the footsteps of the first pilots charged with this mission. Any non-commissioned officer or enlisted flyer who wishes to volunteer will so signify by writing his name and rate on a piece of paper. Each piece of paper is to be placed in an envelope which will be delivered to me by 2100 hours today. It is not expected, however, that everyone should volunteer. We know that you are all willing to die in defence of your country. We also realize that some of you, because of your family situation, cannot be expected to offer your life in this way. You should understand also that the number of volunteers required is limited by the small number of planes available. Whether a man volunteers or not will be known only to me. I ask that each man, within the next three hours, come to a decision based entirely upon his own situation. Special attack operations will be ready to start tomorrow. Because secrecy in this operation is of utmost importance, there must be no discussion about it.” All of the pilots volunteered.
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