Trial of the Seventh Carrier

by Peter Albano

  To enhance its watertight integrity, Fujita had Fukuda design a longitudinal bulkhead that ran from bow to stern and from the third deck to the keel. In addition, a steel box Fujita called the “citadel” was installed to protect the very heart of the ship. Made of 8-inch steel plate, it extended from frames 70 to 185 and from beam to beam. It housed essential equipment: boilers, engines, steering equipment, electronic and communication gear, and the magazines. Fujita even added additional fuel tanks that gave the carrier a cruising range of 10,000 miles. When he and Fukuda planned the aviation fuel tanks, they surrounded them with armor and circumferential tanks filled with seawater for added protection. The weight of the steel installed for defensive purposes alone totaled 19,600 tons — more than the tonnage of a heavy cruiser. In all, fully loaded, Yonaga displaced 84,000 tons. She was even larger than the largest American nuclear carrier, the USS Nimitz, which displaced 82,000 tons and was commissioned thirty-six years after Yonaga.

  Brent’s reminiscences were broken by Williams’ shouted command to Boatswain’s Mate Motoshima, “Bring aboard the shore power, phone, and water lines.” Into the speaker. “Corpsman Chisato Yasuda, prepare the wounded for transfer ashore immediately. Lieutenant Dunlap, report to the bridge on the double. Prepare to jury-rig shore pumps to Main Ballast Tank Number One.” Then straightening, he waved at the carrier and said to Brent, “Get your gear, XO. We have a date with the boss.”

  Chapter Five

  Crossing the accommodation ladder onto a small section of Yonaga’s third deck, which served as the quarterdeck, Brent was filled with an ineffable joy, a feeling of euphoria a man knows when he finally returns home after a long, perilous journey. And Commander Yoshi Matsuhara was alive. Immediately after securing the Special Sea Detail, Brent and Captain Willard-Smith had stood anxiously over Todd Doran as the signalman flashed inquiries in the form of greetings to Yonaga’s signal bridge. Both Matsuhara and Pilot Officer Elwyn York answered the greetings with calls of, “Welcome home.”

  Now with two seaman guards leading, the group from Blackfin crossed the gangway that led to the heart of the monstrous carrier. Crewmen standing on scaffolding and chipping paint and rust turned from their work to shout “Banzai!” Others leaned precariously from the gun galleries high above on the flight deck to add their own cries of “Banzai!”

  Williams, his hat squared precariously on top of his bandaged head, led the group, saluting and nodding carefully. Brent walked close behind his captain, followed by the Englishman and two wounded on stretchers. Prodded by four seaman guards, the two prisoners came last. Hauptmann Schachter muttered oaths constantly at his guards, sometimes shouting obscenities in German. “Verfluchte scheisse” (“damn shit”) was his favorite appellation for the most aggressive guard, a big chief boatswain’s mate who periodically rammed the butt of his Arisaka into the German’s ample buttocks when the fat pilot lagged. But the German was filled with a venomous hatred that could not be squelched. “Banzai! Banzai!” Schachter jeered, waving a single finger at the cheering Japanese. A particularly vicious blow from the rifle butt knocked the wind from the German and silenced him temporarily. Feldwebel Haj Abu al Sahdi looked around like a frightened cur and held his tongue.

  Stepping onto the quarterdecks, the officers first saluted the stern where the battle ensign flew and then saluted the junior officer of the deck, a young, eager-eyed junior lieutenant named Asaichi Kubo whom Brent had met just before he had been detached to Blackfin. Kubo had been an ensign then. “Welcome aboard, sir. Welcome aboard,” the young lieutenant said, saluting and greeting each officer in turn. He stared long and curiously at Williams’ black skin as the captain of Blackfin was introduced. Brent smiled, realizing most of the Japanese had never seen a Negro before. This was going to be interesting.

  Lieutenant Kubo turned to a rating standing at attention next to a table with the log. Just above the table were a half-dozen bulkhead-mounted phones and rows of switches. “Yeoman, inform the admiral that the party from Blackfin has reported aboard and as per his orders, and are on their way to Flag Plot.” The rating threw a switch and spoke into a phone.

  Williams gestured to the wounded. “Sick bay,” he said, the urgent timbre of his voice indicating more of an order than a request.

  Kubo pointed up the passageway and shouted an order. The stretcher bearers hurried past with their burdens. Staring at the prisoners, Kubo said to Williams, “The admiral wishes to see the prisoners. They are to be taken to Flag Plot.” Then, condescending to superior rank, “With your permission, Lieutenant.”

  “Very well,” Williams said, gesturing to the guards. “Flag Plot.”

  Passing Williams, Schachter spat, “Blackamoor scheisse.”

  “Up yours, asshole,” Williams retorted, cracking the German’s buttocks with the toe of a boot.

  The pilot squealed in pain and shouted more obscenities as he was pushed and prodded down the passageway. Hunching over, as if he were trying to withdraw into himself and not be noticed, Haj Abu al Sahdi scurried past.

  Brent quipped, “Great soccer-style kick, Mister Williams — a real sidewinder.” Everyone laughed.

  Then there were shouts in the passageway and the sounds of boots pounding on steel. Yoshi Matsuhara and Elwyn York rushed up. The air-group commander grabbed Brent’s hand and pounded him on the back at the same time. “Banzai! Great work! Well done. Thanks to the gods, you are back. I was sure you had entered the gates of Yasakuni, Brent-san...”

  Brent muttered his own greetings through a tight throat, unable to take his eyes from his friend’s face. The man’s defiance of time was astonishing. His coal-black hair glistened as if lacquered, his black eyes glowed with vigor and vitality, and only a few incipient wrinkles that fanned downward from the corners of his eyes hinted at his six decades. Although the pilot was at least five inches shorter than Brent, his shoulders were broad, his chest full, and his waist small: the physique of the trained athlete, a man addicted to weights and long runs on the vast flight deck.

  “I’da bet a quid to a pinch of dung you’ad bought it, Capt’n,” Elwyn York said, gripping Willard-Smith’s hand. “Good show, Guv’nor.”

  “Quite right, old boy. Thought I’d bought the whole bloody farm, too,” Willard-Smith replied. “And a good show yourselves — both you chaps.”

  Brent introduced the two pilots to Reginald Williams. Lieutenant Kubo interrupted, “Please, gentlemen. The admiral and his staff are waiting, and as you well know, the admiral is not a patient man.” He gestured forward. “Please take the elevator.”

  *

  Flag Plot was located in the aft part of the flag bridge next to Admiral Fujita’s cabin. It was the largest room in “Flag Country.” Long and narrow, it was dominated by a highly polished oak table that ran its length and appeared massive in the narrow confines of the room. A dozen chairs surrounded the table. Next to the door a rating manned communications gear. Overhead two blowers and a speaker were mounted in the usual maze of conduits and cables. A dozen lightbulbs shining from their fixtures like wire cages lighted the room. At the far end a picture of Emperor Akihito had replaced the equestrian of a young Emperor Hirohito that had hung in the same place for over forty years. To the right of the picture a small pauiownia wood shrine was attached to the bulkhead. Filled with icons, talismans, and holy relics of both Shinto and Buddhist origins from the shrines at Minatogawa, Kochi, and Yasakuni, it looked much like a small log cabin with one wall removed to show rows of shiny metal markers. Charts covered most of the remaining space on the bulkheads. The room was a place for plotting, scheming, arguing, praying, and hopefully, wise decisions.

  There were seven men in the room, their dress blues contrasting with the tans worn by the submariners. All were on their feet. None saluted because following the tradition of England’s Royal Navy, the Japanese Imperial Navy had considered this area “below decks,” and the crew of Yonaga still observed the customs of the long-dead Imperial Navy. However, standing rigidly, they bowed a
nd shouted “Banzai!” over and over as Reginald Williams, Brent Ross, Colin Willard-Smith, and Pilot Officer Elwyn York entered. Ordinarily Pilot Officer York’s low rank would have excluded him, but his presence had been commanded by the admiral. Brent guessed Admiral Fujita wished to honor the young Cockney. He needed more flyers like his Englishmen; that was obvious.

  Brent stared down the length of the table at the tiny figure at the far end. More than a foot and a half shorter than Brent, Admiral Fujita had a body deeply eroded by time, leaving only sagging and folded skin, stringy sinew, and brittle bones. However, the ancient sailor’s diminutive size belied his great strength of character, the steely resolve of command that had hardened his spine like the fine-tempered steel of his sword. No one was sure of his age, but Brent knew he had seen more than a century. Sea, wind, and sun had hardened the skin of his face like saddle leather while the years had ravaged it with long furrows and creases that crossed-hatched his face like a latticework. Notwithstanding, the black eyes were alert, and pierced everyone and everything with a perceptiveness that bordered on the supernatural.

  However, Fujita was no mystic. Indeed, he was the most pragmatic man Brent had ever known. He had an uncanny awareness of other men’s motives and how they could be levered to suit his own purposes. He exercised absolute power, yet his Oriental sense of self-irony focused a wary, testing eye on himself, searching for his own failings which apparently did not exist. Never would a man like this succumb to the vanity and corruption of power.

  He was the consummate commander, fitting all the requisites proscribed in Brent’s classes at the Naval Academy. With his determination and the sharing of mortal dangers with his men, he projected the heroic style of Alexander the Great. Ulysses S. Grant, too, came to mind, riding into battle with a cigar clenched in his teeth. Fujita’s planning was intricate and exhausting in its detail, equal to that of the Duke of Wellington and Field Marshal Bernard L. Montgomery. Both leaders had been meticulous planners; Wellington carefully crafted tactics defeating Napoleon at Waterloo, Montgomery declawing the “Desert Fox” Rommel at El Alamein after months of careful planning. Fujita was all of them and more.

  Instinctively, Fujita showed a mastery of the imperatives of command, his men knowing he understood them and cared for them. He had a numinous knack for defining tactical and strategic problems precisely and conveying to each man what was expected of him and why. Every man from watertender to squadron commander was convinced he would be rewarded if he fought well, punished if he failed, especially if Fujita believed Yonaga had been dishonored by cowardice.

  In battle the old admiral intuitively sensed the most propitious moment to attack, committing his air groups and escorts like a master chess player who had access to his opponent’s mind and could checkmate the best-planned strategies. And he always commanded from the exposed flag bridge during the most intense bombing and torpedo attacks. In fact, once, caught by enemy cruisers in the Mediterranean and under heavy bombardment from big guns, the old man had refused to take his command into the safety of the conning tower and the protection of its foot-thick steel. No, indeed, if the peril was there, the tiny old mariner defied the fates with the men he had sent out to fight and often die.

  As an aide to Admiral Mark Allen, Brent Ross had debriefed Admiral Fujita in 1983. He knew the old man’s antecedents and personal history better than anyone alive except the admiral himself. He had it all on tape.

  Admiral Hiroshi Fujita’s tenure in the Japanese Navy had endured longer than the life expectancy of most men. The son of Seiko Fujita, who had been a professor of mathematics at Nagoya University, Hiroshi Fujita was born in Sekigahara, a suburb of Nagoya. He had one sibling, an older brother, Hachiro. A proud family deeply rooted in samurai tradition, the Fujitas had a centuries-old tradition of service to the emperor — a lineage extending back to the Heian period and the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1600. Honoring their samurai roots, Hachiro joined the army and Hiroshi entered Japan’s naval academy at Eta Jima. Both were sixteen years old when they enlisted.

  On February 10, 1904, war broke out with Russia, and Hachiro was killed in a fruitless assault on the Russian works at Mukden. Hiroshi’s mother, Akemi, was shattered. Hiroshi gained a measure of revenge in the Korean Straits in the massacre of the Russian Fleet that would forever be known as the Battle of Tsushima. Here, as fire control officer of the after turret of the battleship Mikasa, Lieutenant Hiroshi Fujita had the satisfaction of finding the enemy in the cross-hairs of his range finder and of personally firing the two twelve-inch guns. He killed hundreds. His joy was unbounded as he reveled in the samurai’s most valuable commodity, revenge — the classic revenge of the fabled Forty-Seven Ronin.

  Because the Imperial Navy was modeled after the British Navy and the language of the fleet English, hundreds of officers were sent to English and American universities for advanced studies. In 1919 Fujita enrolled in the University of Southern California, where he distinguished himself in graduate studies in the English Department. He was deeply impressed by America. He agreed with his friend Isoroku Yamamoto, who was a student at Harvard and would one day command the fleet in the war against America, that the United States showed the latent power of a sleeping giant.

  In the early twenties, Commander Hiroshi Fujita attended the Kasumigaura Air Training School, where he earned his flyer’s patch. He was over forty years old. A month after his assignment as Air Operations Officer to the new carrier Akagi, he married Akiko Minokama. They established their home in Hiroshima, where the carrier was based. Their first son, Kazuo, was born in 1926, their second, Makoto, in 1928.

  The decade of the thirties found Fujita and Yamamoto viewing the army’s growing ambitions in China with alarm. After the Kwangtung Army seized Manchuria, the Russian bear growled its disapproval and bared its claws in bloody clashes along a 2100-mile front that sent the Kwangtung’s best divisions reeling. Eighteen thousand Japanese troops were killed. It was obvious to Fujita and Yamamoto that a war with the inexhaustible manpower of both China and Russia was unwinnable. Expansion was possible only to the south, where the raw materials of Malaya and the priceless oil fields of Sumatra and Java in the Dutch East Indies beckoned irresistibly.

  By the middle of the decade, Fujita had risen to the rank of rear admiral and was on the staff of Isoroku Yamamoto, a full admiral. Then the murders began; the army openly assassinated politicians who opposed expansionism in China. It culminated in 1936 in the Koda-ha action when the First Infantry Division rebelled and murdered some of the nation’s most prominent politicians. By pure chance, the prime minister escaped. Although the mutiny was suppressed and the leaders executed, the army emerged with control of the cabinet. The march toward war accelerated.

  The war with China accelerated, and Japanese divisions bogged down in the Chinese quagmire of numbers just as Fujita had expected. Demanding Japanese withdrawal from China, the Americans, British, and Dutch imposed sanctions, the most crippling of which were the embargoes on scrap iron and oil. Japan produced a mere dribble of oil and had only an eighteen-month supply in storage. It was submission or war. Submission was surrender, and surrender was unthinkable to the samurai. War became inevitable.

  The Naval General Staff sent word to Admiral Yamamoto to draw up plans for a sneak carrier attack on the American fleet based at Pearl Harbor. It was to be patterned after the devastating British attack on the Italian fleet at Taranto in November of 1940 when twelve antique Swordfish torpedo bombers launched from the carrier Illustrious sank the Italian battleship Cavour and damaged battleships Littorio and Caio Duilio. Yamamoto was opposed, considered a war with America national suicide. Fujita agreed. However, the consummate professional Admiral Yamamoto assigned his most competent planners — Admiral Hiroshi Fujita, Captain Kameto Kurashima, and Commander Minoru Genda — to the task.

  In November of 1941 Admiral Hiroshi Fujita stood rigidly as Akiko and his two sons, Kazuo and Makoto, bowed, clapped, and implored the gods to smile on
husband and father. Yonaga was waiting for him in the roadstead off Hiroshima. His last remembrance of his family was a picture in his mind’s eye of his wife, flanked by the boys, waving as he entered his staff car. They would all be vaporized in 1945.

  Yoshi Matsuhara was the first to point out to Brent that Kazuo Fujita was a giant for a Japanese: six feet tall and weighing perhaps 180 pounds. “You remind the admiral of his son, I’m sure of it. I met the boy in 1940, just after I was assigned to Yonaga. I knew him well. Your size, build, mannerisms, your walk, even the way you speak and your awful temper are just like Kazuo’s. Mark me, Brent-san, you’ve taken Kazuo’s place with him, and he does not even know this himself.” Brent had only shrugged skeptically.

  Brent was jarred back to the present by the admiral’s voice. “Welcome gentlemen,” Admiral Fujita said in a low voice that rasped with age yet carried with it the unmistakable timbre of authority. He focused his remarkable eyes on Brent Ross. “Before introductions are made — before any reports and business are discussed — I wish to say I regret the loss of Admiral Mark Allen, who has added his life to the sum of life as all men do. He was a brilliant tactician and is a irreplaceable loss to all of us.” He turned to the shrine and clapped twice to attract the attention of the gods. Brent Ross along with every Japanese in the room also clapped.

  “Oh, Ninigi,” Fujita said, calling on a powerful Shinto god who was Amaterasu’s grandson and the founder of the Imperial Dynasty, “honor the kokoro (heart and spirit) of our fallen comrade, who challenged his enemies with a constantly believing heart and fought with the Yamato damashii of a samurai. We call on you to help our honored Admiral Mark Allen find the peace and contentment in whatever paradise or nirvana he seeks.”