Kamikaze

by Michael Slade

  What greater glory is there than to give your life for your country? To die for your emperor, a god in human form, and in so doing become a god yourself? If you perish as a kamikaze, you’ll be revered as a hero at the Yasukuni Shrine. The desperate odds only enhance your death, for the more obvious the futility, the greater the glory of your sacrifice. And why die in the coming invasion when you can sink an American ship and take all those Yankees with you?

  “Hissatsu!”

  And so they gathered in secret at a vast network of underground hangars, tunnels, and barracks scattered about Formosa and Kyushu to launch a great kamikaze offensive—code-named Ten-Go (Heavenly Operation).

  “If I go away to sea, I shall return a brine-soaked corpse.”

  That was their anthem.

  The strategy was simple: The Japanese troops on Okinawa—more than a hundred thousand of them—would dig in and pin down the invading Marines in a costly war of attrition. Anchored just offshore, the ships of the American fleet would be forced to act as bodyguard and lifeline for their troops inland. They would be sitting ducks for a series of mass-formation kamikaze attacks.

  Wipe them out, and there’d be no invasion of Japan.

  “Hissatsu!”

  So now they stood among their bomb-laden planes, these young heroes in their baggy flying suits, with aviation helmets sheathing their heads and goggles pushed up on their brows to bare their eager faces.

  To prepare himself for his watery sepulcher, each pilot wrote farewell letters and poems to loved ones at home. “I have been given a splendid opportunity to die. I shall fall like a blossom from a radiant cherry tree.”

  Some enclosed relics, like a lock of hair.

  Then, to emulate the samurai, each pilot was given a folded white scarf to tie around his head. The hachimaki would keep his eyes clear of sweat and hair. Around his waist was knotted a thousand-stitch sash, a belt pieced together with one stitch from each of a thousand women to symbolize union with the kamikaze.

  Then came a final salute and, for “spiritual lifting” before liftoff, a purifying cup of sake.

  “Floating chrysanthemums,” they were called, the men who flew the successive waves of Ten-Go. “Purify your heart and be cheerful,” each human bomb told himself as he took flight. “Every deity and the spirits of your comrades are watching intently.”

  As he began his dive toward his offshore target, each pilot would shout at the top of his lungs:

  “Hissatsu!”

  “Sink without fail!”

  “Hell birds!” yelled the Yankee lookouts, to warn their shipmates as the suicide squadron zoomed in.

  From the high, thick walls of Shuri Castle, a fifteenth-century fort that had been home to the feudal kings of Okinawa, Genjo Tokuda watched the battle rage at sea. Five days ago—April Fool’s Day for America—the fleet had disembarked four divisions of soldiers and Marines. Because no opposition had met them on the beach or in the fields of white winter barley and colorful flowers, the Marines had turned north while the army headed south.

  It was time to spring the trap.

  One low and one high, the first pair of kamikazes came screaming out of the clear afternoon sky. The ships below opened up with everything they had: five-inch guns, 40mms, 20mms, even rifles. Shining like single grains of rice, both planes rode the Divine Wind through the storm of steel, the edges of their wings cutting through the assault like swords. The sky filled with so much ack-ack that daylight disappeared in a million black puffs. Down, down, down came the plane from above, trailing a banner of smoke and flames as it took hit after hit. Suddenly, the Zero exploded in a ball of fire, and what was left showered down on a Yankee ship.

  Meanwhile, the other plane skimmed across the churning sea as spouts of water spewed up from low-level shots. Like a surface torpedo zipping through the air, the kamikaze struck a destroyer amidships at the waterline. The impact crumpled the fuselage like a scrambled egg, popping the cap off its fuel tank and hurling it a hundred feet into the air. The exploding bomb blew a huge hole in the destroyer’s hull, which set off its stores of munitions and oil products. A geyser of gas from the plane’s ruptured tank ignited with a whoosh, sending flames high enough to char sailors on the bridge, fifty feet above.

  The warship was dead in the water.

  Damage enough.

  Then the bow drifted one way and the stern the other.

  The destroyer was cut in two.

  Now the sky was scattered with many grains of rice. Explosions from the battle brought Japanese defenders to the mouths of their hillside caves. The men with Genjo Tokuda let out a cheer. Swords and bayonets were raised in triumph behind the ramparts of Shuri Castle.

  The Special Attack Squadron hit the Yanks with a vengeance. One after another, in wave upon wave, the planes rushed in, like giant bullets fired from a massive machine gun in the sky. Most blew apart and crashed into the water, but that was no triumph for the Yanks if even one got through. A shell exploded underneath a kamikaze’s belly, lifting it clear of the masthead below, but its bomb went down the destroyer’s forward stack and turned it into a giant blowtorch.

  “He did it!” roared a soldier in Shuri Castle.

  Tokuda swept his binoculars from ship to ship to ship, focusing in on the faces of the men under attack. Not since the days of grappling hooks and hand-to-hand swordplay on men-of-war had sailors faced such a personal ordeal. Every Yank was afraid the kamikazes were aiming for him.

  Pandemonium was rife on the targeted ships. Here, there, and everywhere, plummeting planes slammed home. Deck guns were firing so furiously that their barrels glowed. Tracers by the thousands tore through the puffs of flak as—bam, bam, bam, bam—gunners kept up an unflinching barrage. Tokuda watched as a wheel bounced off the wreckage of one plane and decapitated a flak thrower.

  “Sayonara!” he shouted.

  Fire crews struggled to douse the raging infernos. On the ships with lost power and useless hoses, the Yanks were forced to lug water in bucket brigades. Men shored up bulkheads, plugged leaks, and jettisoned anchors, torpedoes, and other weight to try to save their sinking wrecks. Medics rushed to help the severely injured, and some got burned to death in fire traps. Decks grew so hot that men ran to the toilets to cool their feet. Those catapulted overboard or forced to abandon ship dog-paddled frantically to stay afloat in a sea of sludge, oil, and blood. Castaways got crushed by downed planes or squeezed between the hulls of rescue boats. Many were drowned by high seas, and the worst of the burned survivors simply gave up, wriggling out of their life jackets because they could no longer stand the agony of salt in their wounds.

  “Die, Yankee, die,” cursed Tokuda.

  Pilots killing themselves in order to kill Yanks—this was a new kind of warfare the Americans couldn’t comprehend. It was written all over the dumbfounded faces Tokuda saw in his binoculars. Were these diving madmen religious fanatics? Drunks? Drug addicts? Hypnotized robots? What macabre evil subverts human nature and turns men against their instinct toward self-preservation?

  It’s alien to Western values.

  It’s inhuman.

  It’s weird.

  It’s bushido, thought Genjo Tokuda.

  Even more spectacular were the night attacks in the weeks that followed. The greatest seaborne battle in the history of warfare climaxed off Okinawa. Almost three hundred ships were hit and five thousand Americans killed by floating chrysanthemums sacrificing themselves to defend the Chrysanthemum Throne.

  Twilight was the best hour for kamikaze raids. Radar warnings did little to help the Yankees see. The prelude—a chorus of air-raid sirens from the ships—signaled to the Japanese that it was time to scramble to the hillsides to witness the fireworks. The sight reminded Tokuda of Ryogoku, a Tokyo district known for its annual pyrotechnics over the Sumida River.

  “Hell birds!”

  All eyes scanned the sky.

  When the sirens blared, the searchlights of the ships went on and began trying to pick out the
oncoming suicide wave. Out blinked the non-essential lights of the fleet. The kamikazes thundered in with a metallic roar and were met by the booms of pom-pom guns flashing on the sea. Anti-aircraft fire gushed into the sky, lighting it up like a Roman candle. Bursts of flak above, high-caliber explosions below—what a magnificent festival the battle was tonight. It seemed inconceivable that anything could penetrate such a barrage, but just then a single plane hurtled down like a brilliant meteorite from space.

  “Keep going!” Tokuda urged.

  And keep going it did, slamming into a munitions ship as an oily fireball of bombs, fuel, and the pilot himself. A multi-colored fan of flames lit the horizon, and a thunderclap shook the island. Burning fiercely, the ship split in two, then sizzled in billows of steam as both sections sank with the crew.

  The soldier beside Tokuda fell to his knees.

  “Well done. Thank you.” He worshipped toward the sea.

  “Each soldier will kill at least one American devil.”

  That was the order from Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima, the officer in command on Okinawa.

  And to make sure the Yanks got the point, Radio Tokyo broadcast propaganda using the American nicknames for the Japanese strongholds of the Shuri Line, the eight-mile arc that spanned from Yonabaru, on the east coast, through the town of Shuri to the port of Naha, on the west coast.

  “Sugar Loaf Hill ... Chocolate Drop ... Strawberry Hill,” teased the propagandist. “Gee, these places sound wonderful! You can just see the candy houses with their white picket fences and the candy canes hanging from the trees, their red and white stripes glistening in the sun. But the only thing red about those places is the blood of Americans. Yes sir, those are the names of hills in southern Okinawa, where the fighting’s so close that you get down to bayonets and sometimes”—the announcer paused—“bare fists.”

  And so it was.

  American GIs and leathernecks died by the thousands in a drive to give meaning to Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr.’s, toast about walking “in the ashes of Tokyo.” Three thousand more crumbled from “battle fatigue”—nervous breakdowns that sent them to hospital. But still the Yanks kept coming. It was a relentless tide from blockhouse to blockhouse, pillbox to pillbox, bone vault to bone vault, across Cactus Ridge and then Kakazu Ridge, where twenty-two of thirty tanks were destroyed by mines, anti-tank guns, artillery, and mortar fire. The Americans withstood a banzai counterattack and kept on the move, as the fighting grew more hellish per man, per yard, per however you want to measure it.

  Their gains averaged 163 yards a day.

  The defenders let the rumbling tanks pass through their concealed positions, then they cut down the supporting troops with flank fire, attacking the armor with satchel charges and flaming rags that forced the crews to bail out to be spiked by bayonets. “You can’t bypass a Jap,” the Yanks were heard to yell by those who grasped English, “because a Jap doesn’t know when he’s bypassed.”

  Pocked with caves and strongly held by the defenders, the slopes of the Shuri Line became known as forbidden land. It was here that the Yanks—exposed to the big guns and mortars on the heights of Shuri Castle—had the most hellish time. Ishimmi Ridge, Dakeshi Ridge, Wana Ridge, and Wana Draw—they were the battlefields by mid-May. On Ishimmi Ridge, the defenders had two hundred isolated GIs pinned down in a last stand. For seventy hours, the Yanks had battled without sleep. Riflemen got blown to bits by mortars or were struck in the head by machine-gun fire. Blood was everywhere—in the weapons, on the still living, splattered all around. The dead lay where they fell, putrefying in the broiling heat. Wounded men, groaning because the morphine was gone, were propped up with rifles in their hands. Their grenades depleted and short of ammunition, the few unscathed GIs searched their dead buddies for cartridges and clips, and laid out all the bayonets for the hand-to-hand fight that was sure to finish them off.

  The Marines on the ridge above Tokuda’s cave were ground down to human wreckage. You could smell the battle line before you could see it. Amid bandages, blood, and mangled flesh, men writhed in agony and died, whole chunks ripped out of them. Now was the time for a banzai charge, so Tokuda drew the samurai sword his father had given him at the start of the war. He wormed through the bowels of the cave toward the jagged oval of daylight ahead, and that’s when he heard—rumble, rumble, rumble—the sound of one ... then two ... then three Sherman tanks nearing the hillside.

  “Corkscrew and blowtorch.”

  That’s what the Americans called the new technique they had developed to kill the Japanese in their caves.

  One of the tanks was armed with the usual 75mm cannon. It made up the corkscrew part of the “blowing” party. As Tokuda closed on the cave’s exit, a blast from the cannon hurled a shell down the tunnel. Narrowly missing Tokuda as it screamed past, the shell exploded with such force that it slammed him into the rock wall. The guns of the other two tanks had been adapted to squirt a mixture of gasoline and napalm. These flame-throwing tanks were the blowtorch team. The last thing Tokuda saw before it all went black was a tongue of yellow fire streaming past his right flank, and the last thing he heard was his own shriek of pain as that half of his face got cooked alive.

  Thunder God

  Vancouver

  October 31, Now

  Three days a week, Chief Superintendent Robert DeClercq was up before dawn for a six-thirty fencing workout with an old Hungarian master. Swordplay is ideal for keeping the body in shape. The classic fencer’s position—weight balanced between flexed legs, the hand with the foil feinting, thrusting, and parrying—mimics a yoga stance. And because swordplay is performed at lightning speed, it requires quick reactions and superb hand-eye coordination.

  Three days a week, days he didn’t fence, the chief met the forensic pathologist, Gill Macbeth, after work for swordplay of a different—but no less vigorous—kind.

  DeClercq was in as good a shape as he had ever been.

  “What do you think of that?”

  “Nevermore,” said Binky as the Mountie left the bedroom to wend his way out to the hot tub on the deck.

  “A lot more,” DeClercq taunted, “if I have my way.”

  “Ditch him, Gill,” Binky said. “He’s not good enough for you.”

  “Srrit ... srreeew!” whistled Gabby as Macbeth came naked out of the bedroom.

  “Where’s the Viagra?”

  “Ruffle my feathers, baby!”

  “Your birds need a new shtick,” complained DeClercq.

  “They have one,” Gill said, “for Halloween.”

  The West African gray parrot and the green-winged macaw shared a roomy aviary-cum-solarium in the cedar-and-glass architectural marvel that Gill—thanks to a generous inheritance—called home. On her way to the fridge for a bottle of champagne, she peered in at Binky on his perch and quoted:

  “Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!” I shrieked, upstarting—

  “Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!

  Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!

  Leave my loneliness unbroken!—quit the bust above my door!

  Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!”

  Quoth the Raven, ...

  “Nevermore,” said Binky.

  DeClercq laughed. “Binky’s a bad omen. But he doesn’t look like Poe’s raven to me.”

  “I’ll paint him black,” said Gill.

  While the cop fetched a pair of champagne flutes from the bar, the pathologist slid back the glass door to the deck, where a pool and a hot tub overlooked the Lions Gate Bridge and Stanley Park. As Macbeth stepped out into the chilly autumn night, her skin puckered with goosebumps and her nose wrinkled from the smell of cordite wafting up from the fireworks on the beach.

  Pausing in the doorway, Robert felt the embers of lust getting stoked again. Gill had bent over the hot tub to crank the knob, and now, as steam rose from the bubbling water
, she circled around to the far side and stood face to face with him, her sexy silhouette outlined against the panorama of all those city lights.

  What a woman! thought DeClercq.

  When the lights shine on her, the stars shine on me.

  With her eyes smoldering with mischief, she made a show of stepping into the tub. One foot, the other foot, and a shimmy down into the water as her convex hips, her concave waist, and her breasts sank beneath the frothy foam.

  “Want to play footsie?”

  “You bet,” he said.

  She held the bottle of champagne above the water. “Let’s pop the cork and see how high it’ll fly.”

  “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t—”

  Suddenly, a blinding explosion seared the night sky beyond her, and a fireball plummeted to the earth.

  “What was that?” exclaimed Gill, standing up and splashing water as she looked behind her.

  “Whatever it was—” the cop began, but he didn’t finish the sentence.

  From the aviary, Binky finished it for him.

  “Nevermore,” squawked the bird.

  “He got chocolate raisins!”

  “Lucky me.”

  “He won’t share, Daddy!” bawled the wicked witch.

  “Share with your sister, Stuart.”

  “All gone,” mumbled the Frankenstein monster through a mouthful of marbles.

  “Big jerk!” cried the witch.

  “Dad, she snapped off one of my neck bolts!”

  “Sarah—”

  “Daddy, he broke my witch’s hat!”

  Pete knew he shouldn’t take his eyes from the road, but he chanced a peek in the rear-view mirror. Sure enough, one of the two collar bolts beneath the green face of the monster had been snapped off, and the pointed hat of the wicked witch drooped like erectile dysfunction.

  “You’re a deadbeat dad,” Alice had bitched when he’d phoned last week to tell the wickedest witch of all that his child-support check would be late. “If the kids end up on crack, I’ll blame you. Get off your lazy ass and be a dad for Halloween.”