The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945 (Modern Library War)

by Toland, John

  † Another assassination attempt by an elite group of fifty aviation technocrats had already failed. These young men dealt with the research and production of Army planes. Just before Pearl Harbor they had sent an appeal to Tojo to delay war for twenty years, until Japan would be properly prepared to engage a major power. Tojo listened to their arguments in a private meeting and promised to give them two decades to build up the air force.

  Consequently, when war came they held Tojo personally responsible. Within six months their fears about the issue of the war were confirmed by technical setbacks: for example, machine tools were losing their precision, and defects in plane design would take years to correct. During the battle for Guadalcanal, Tojo told these technical experts to devise some way to fly planes without gas, suggesting they use “something like air.” They laughed aloud until they realized he was serious, then unanimously pledged themselves to a program for peace. They went to Prince Konoye with their demands and later to Tojo himself. The subsequent reprimand incited the fifteen most headstrong to vow to assassinate Tojo. One evening their leader, First Lieutenant Hiroshi Sato, after drinking too much sake, quarreled with their commanding officer and blurted out, “A man like Tojo should be killed.” Kempei investigated the group, but the only one punished was Sato; he was given a week’s confinement on a drunk charge. The ringleaders, however, were all sent to the front.

  ‡ There are several theories about Koga’s death. One is that he was ambushed, like Yamamoto; U. S. Navy planes shot down his plane and the dying Koga was picked up by an American submarine. There are no available American records of such an ambush or the recovery of the Koga plane. It could have crashed on some island, but it seems far more likely that it was lost at sea, victim of the storm.

  § Due largely to the efforts of General Courtney Whitney, head of the Allied Intelligence Bureau, Cushing was reinstated. After the war he was awarded a substantial cash bonus for his contributions to victory. It should have been enough money to last Cushing for life in the Islands, but he spent it all in a few months on a series of celebrations that ranged across the Pacific to California. He died in the Philippines twenty years later, beloved by the men who had fought with him, but still a confirmed individualist to the end.

  On Cebu there persists the belief that it was Koga who had been held by Cushing, and that he later committed suicide in Manila. The Japanese commander on Cebu, Colonel Onishi, also believed it was Koga he had rescued and that he subsequently committed hara-kiri.

  Admiral Fukudome is still alive and spoke of his captivity but was reluctant to go into detail. Most of the information about this event came from Cushing and his comrades.

  ǁ These American suspicions helped give rise to sensational stories involving the last flight of Amelia Earhart. Miss Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, took off from Lae, New Guinea, on a July morning in 1937, in a twin-engine Lockheed, and disappeared. After the war, rumors persisted that the two had purposely veered off course to spy on military installations on Saipan and had crashed near the seaplane base. They were supposedly imprisoned and then either died of injuries or were executed. Tony Benavente, a police official on Saipan, helped two American officials investigate the case. They interviewed some fifteen men and women (later characterized by Mr. Benavente as “reliable witnesses”) who identified the pictures of Earhart and Noonan as “two American prisoners” they had seen in the summer of 1937, and one said he had noticed two blindfolded Caucasians answering descriptions of Earhart and Noonan in the sidecar of a Japanese motorcycle near the seaplane base. A Japanese told him they were American spies who had been picked up offshore.

  Nevertheless, there is no conclusive evidence as to the fate of Amelia Earhart, nor is any confirmation on the subject available from official Japanese sources.

  20

  “Seven Lives to Repay Our Country!”

  1.

  Word of American landings on Saipan brought a swift reaction from Admiral Soemu Toyoda. He radioed Admiral Ozawa to “attack the enemy in the Marianas area and annihilate his fleet.” Five minutes later Toyoda sent a second message, which repeated Togo’s famous words at Tsushima Bay:

  THE RISE AND FALL OF IMPERIAL JAPAN DEPENDS ON THIS ONE BATTLE. EVERY MAN SHALL DO HIS UTMOST.

  As the Mobile Fleet moved closer to the Marianas, Ozawa and his staff completed plans for the battle. The admiral was tall and stocky. A cool, reticent man, he moved and thought with deliberation. Trained in torpedo warfare, he had assiduously studied carrier tactics and was confident he could beat the Americans, even though he was outnumbered 2 to 1 in flattops. His aircraft had longer range and could attack from as far out as three hundred miles, almost a hundred miles beyond American capabilities. He could also utilize Guam for refueling and rearming in a sort of shuttle operation. Consequently, he could stay out of range of the enemy while attacking; moreover, he would have support from the 500 planes based in the Marianas. Along with his own 473 planes, that should give him as many as Spruance had.

  But plans are only as good as the information they are based on and already, unbeknownst to Ozawa, a large portion of the land-based planes had been destroyed by marauding American carrier pilots flying the new Hellcat fighter.* It could outclimb and outdive the Zero and was heavily armed. The pilot was protected by heavy armor plating behind, and a thick, bulletproof wind shield ahead. “I love this airplane so much,” said one Navy pilot, “that if it could cook I’d marry it.”

  The pilots themselves were better prepared than their predecessors. Each had at least two years’ training and over 300 flying hours, whereas their antagonists were faint copies of those who had fought at Pearl Harbor and Midway. They had six months’ training at the most and many had logged few hours in the air. And they were called upon to fly a somewhat improved version of the Zero of Pearl Harbor days that was now so outclassed.

  On the afternoon of June 18 one of Ozawa’s search planes discovered “an enemy force, including an unknown number of carriers” west of Saipan. Forty miles away from this first sighting another search plane reported “unknown number of carriers, plus ten other ships.”

  This was Spruance’s striking power, Task Force 58, commanded by Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher, who had skippered Hornet in the Doolittle raid and the Battle of Midway. He was small, taciturn, hard-bitten. Usually he sat at the after end of his flag bridge in a steel armchair facing the stern, his bald head covered by a duck-billed lobster-man’s hat. His was a formidable aggregation, almost twice the size of the Mobile Fleet: seven big carriers, eight light ones, seven battleships, eight heavy cruisers, thirteen light cruisers and sixty-nine destroyers.

  Rear Admiral Sueo Obayashi, commander of the three Japanese carriers nearest Mitscher, was tempted to attack at once. The basic principle of air battle was to strike first. After informing Ozawa, he ordered an immediate assault.

  Some of his planes were in the air before a message arrived from Ozawa requesting all ships to retire and prepare for a massive aerial battle the next morning. Obayashi recovered his planes. “Let’s do it properly tomorrow,” he told his staff, but privately he feared that such a “golden opportunity” would not present itself again.

  Mitscher still had no warning that the Mobile Fleet was approaching. He had been cautioned by Spruance not to sortie in search of the enemy—the main assignment of Task Force 58 was to “cover” Saipan—but when direction-finding apparatus detected Ozawa in the area he told his chief of staff, Captain Arleigh Burke, “It might be a hell of a battle for a while, but I think we can win it,” and asked permission by voice radio just before midnight to “come to a westerly course at oh-one-thirty in order to commence treatment of the enemy at oh-five-hundred.”

  Like Mitscher, Spruance wanted to destroy Ozawa’s carriers, yet was bound by definite orders to “capture, occupy and defend Saipan, Tinian and Guam.” Allowing Mitscher to be lured away from the Marianas, therefore, would be too much of a “gamble”; he remembered, moreover, how Admiral Togo had wa
ited at Tsushima Strait for the Imperial Russian Fleet to come to him (“We had somewhat the same situation”), and he answered: “Change proposed does not appear advisable.… End run by other [enemy] carrier groups remains possibility and must not be overlooked.”

  At four-forty-five on June 19 Ozawa again launched search planes, but it was a cloudy, squally morning and it wasn’t until seven-thirty that Task Force 58 was finally discovered southwest of Saipan. On the bridge of the flagship—the newly commissioned 33,000-ton 800-foot-long carrier Taiho—there was no doubt that this would be a historic day for the Imperial Navy, perhaps another Tsushima. Before the first wave of seventy-one planes took off, flight leaders reported to the bridge vowing to avenge the shame of Midway.

  Twenty-six minutes later the second wave—128 planes—lifted from the decks. A dive-bomber pilot, Warrant Officer Akio Komatsu, noticed a torpedo (it had come from the U. S. submarine Albacore) plowing directly at Taiho. Without hesitation he rammed his stick to the side and forward, and his bomber arced in a suicide dive at the running torpedo. His plane intercepted it a hundred yards short of the carrier. From the bridge Ozawa and his staff watched as plane and torpedo were both destroyed in one thundering geyser. Then they saw the track of another “fish.” The big carrier began a turn but the second torpedo smashed into her starboard side. The damage seemed of slight consequence. What could a single hit do to a ship that was “unsinkable”?

  Aboard Oyodo, the flagship of the Combined Fleet, which was just weighing anchor at Yokosuka harbor, Vice Admiral Kusaka was not as confident of the day as Ozawa. He had reservations about the Mobile Fleet’s long-range attack; it was like a boxer reaching too far out. But he became infected by the optimism around him—the staff gave Ozawa four out of five chances for victory. He started to call his steward to prepare sake cups for a celebration, but decided not to tempt fate; he could wait until the first wave had contact with the enemy. Two hours passed without a report. Confidence on the bridge was replaced by uneasiness and then doubt. At last a message arrived: Taiho had been “somewhat damaged.” Toyoda was silent but the staff exchanged perturbed looks; Kusaka had a sickening premonition that worse news was coming.

  At ten o’clock American radar picked up Ozawa’s first wave. Mitscher personally sounded the alarm over the radio with a “Hey, Rube!”—the signal for all Hellcats to return to their ships and prepare for battle. By the time the raiders were within seventy-two miles of his flagship, the new Lexington, fighters began taking off from her flight deck. The first to see the enemy was Lieutenant Commander C. W. Brewer. He rolled over, and followed by his eleven men, streaked toward the enemy. He blew up a Japanese bomber, blasted the wing off another, then shook off a Zero and set it afire—and moments later gunned down another.

  Now Hellcats from three other carriers joined the fight. They viciously ripped into the oncoming Japanese formation, sending at least twenty-five spinning into the sea. The rest pressed on toward the carriers—but encountered a second wave of Hellcats. Sixteen more tumbled down. A single Japanese penetrated the defense line to hit the battleship South Dakota.

  The second wave was sixty miles from target when a dozen Hellcats from Essex swept in on them. Fighters from other carriers quickly closed in and in a few minutes had shot down almost seventy planes. Ozawa’s third wave, forty-seven planes, was given the wrong co-ordinates and only twelve were diverted in time to the battle area. Seven of these were shot down. The eighty-four planes of the fourth wave were also misdirected. Six finally reached the carriers but did no damage. The main group, after a futile search for American carriers, jettisoned their bombs and headed for Guam. As they were making their final approach on Orote Field, twenty-seven Hellcats on the prowl hurtled down and destroyed thirty planes—those that landed were so badly shot up that they could not be repaired. In a few hours Ozawa had lost 346 planes while shooting down 15. Japanese naval air power had been crippled, and permanently.

  Although not a single American bomb or torpedo had been launched against the Mobile Fleet, it too had been dealt a devastating blow. Just before noon the skipper of the submarine Cavalla, Commander Herman J. Kessler, raised his periscope to behold a picture “too good to be true”: Shokaku—a veteran of Pearl Harbor, Coral Sea and Santa Cruz—was recovering planes. But Kessler couldn’t make out what kind of flag she was flying; it might be an American ship. He took another look: God damn! there was the Rising Sun, big as hell. He moved in and at 1,000 yards loosed a spread of six torpedoes. Three hit, setting off a series of internal detonations. Flames enveloped the carrier. As her bow settled, water poured through the No. 1 elevator into the hangar. She turned over heavily and sank just after three o’clock.

  Taiho, hit by the single torpedo from Albacore at the beginning of the battle, had inadvertently become a floating bomb; a damage-control officer had ordered all ventilating ducts opened on the theory that this would clear gasoline fumes. Instead, his action caused the vapors to permeate the ship. Half an hour after Shokaku went down, a shuddering explosion wracked Taiho. From her bridge the senior staff officer, Captain Toshikazu Ohmae, saw the armored flight deck suddenly “blossom up like Mount Fuji.” The hull on the hangar level blew out and the carrier began to settle rapidly.

  Ozawa wanted to stay with the ship. He would listen to no one until Ohmae, who had been his close subordinate for years, said, “The battle is still going on and you should remain in command for the final victory.” Ozawa silently followed his senior staff officer into a cutter. Fifteen minutes after they had transferred to a cruiser there was a second thunderous detonation. Taiho tilted sharply to port and slid into the water stern first.

  At Combined Fleet headquarters, aboard Oyodo, there was no longer any doubt that A-Go had failed. The staff debated whether the Mobile Fleet should be ordered to fall back at once. Kusaka didn’t think the decision should be left up to Ozawa. From personal experience at Midway he knew how difficult it was for a commander to retire on his own from a losing battle. He got Toyoda’s approval to dispatch an order to withdraw.

  Ozawa had already pulled back to the northwest under cover of darkness to refuel in order to resume the battle the next morning. His opponent, Mitscher, had recovered his planes, and with Spruance’s concurrence, started after the Mobile Fleet with three of his four carrier groups. But he headed southwest, the wrong direction, and it wasn’t until three-forty the following afternoon that a search plane finally located Ozawa some 275 miles away. Though dusk would fall in a few hours, Mitscher decided to gamble: the target was barely within range of his planes; they would have to strike in the fading light of day; and, finally, try to find their way home in darkness. He turned Task Force 58 into the wind and launched 216 planes. The sun was low as the attackers sighted half a dozen enemy oilers. A few planes peeled off and sank two of these ships while the rest, with orders to concentrate on carriers, fanned out to the northwest.

  The clouds above the Mobile Fleet were brilliantly colored in the sunset. Ozawa managed to get seventy-five planes into the air, and these, with the help of antiaircraft fire, knocked down twenty Americans but the others broke through the screen. Bombers hit Ozawa’s new flagship, Zuikaku (sister ship of Shokaku), the light carrier Chiyoda, a battleship and a cruiser, but inflicted no serious damage.

  Then four torpedo planes from Belleau Wood dropped out of the clouds and swept in low on another carrier, Hiyo. They were led by Lieutenant (j. g.) George Brown, who had vowed at takeoff to get a carrier no matter what. His plane was set on fire but he came in relentlessly and dropped his torpedo.

  At his machine gun in the stern of Hiyo, Chief Petty Officer Mitsukuni Oshita heard the cry “Torpedo coming!” He began to count. At 12 he knew the torpedo had missed, and relaxed. An explosion jarred Hiyo. Oshita had counted too fast.

  A second torpedo rocked the carrier. Fires spread from deck to deck and all power went off. Dead in the water, she began listing to port and the word went out to abandon ship. At the extreme stern, Oshita and a d
ozen others heard nothing and refused to leave Hiyo without a definite order. The ship settled rapidly. Water gurgled up to Oshita’s machine gun and he, along with his comrades, started for the rail.

  “Wait!” Their commander, a young ensign, drew his sword threateningly. “Sing ‘Umi-Yukaba’!” They hurried through the traditional song, but the ensign continued to restrain them with his sword. “Now sing ‘the Naval March,’ ” he ordered. The cowed men sang until the water reached their knees, then broke past the officer and over the side.

  Oshita looked back. Fire belched out of the carrier. Spotlighted in the red glare, the ensign clung to the stern rail, sword in hand, still singing. He disappeared as the great bow reared high, and Oshita had to swim desperately to avoid the suction. “The ship is going down!” someone shouted. Oshita turned around. Hiyo was sticking up like the finger of a giant. She plunged out of sight with “a horrible sigh” as if, thought Oshita, she were saying, “This is the end.”

  The long trip home for Mitscher’s fliers had turned into a nightmare. Pilot after pilot reported he was running out of gas. “I’m going in while I’ve still got power. So long,” called one. “Where’s somebody? I’m lost,” radioed a second. Sending out these men had been a daring decision and Mitscher now made another. He ordered the lights on his carriers turned on even though it made them glaring targets for prowling submarines. “The effect on the pilots left behind was magnetic,” Lieutenant Commander Robert Winston recalled. “They stood open-mouthed for the sheer audacity of asking the Japs to come and get us. Then a spontaneous cheer went up. To hell with the Japs around us. Our pilots were not to be expendable.” Fortunately for the Americans, there were no enemy submarines in the area, and all but thirty-eight of the returning pilots were saved.