Ripples of Battle

by Victor Davis Hanson

  The destruction of a brief constitutional government in Japan during the 1930s by militarists, of course, also had provided a necessary ingredient for contemplating such drastic measures. The plotters were not merely thugs who wanted power. Instead, the more extreme men like the fiery Isamu Cho of the “Cherry Society” (Sakura-kai)—a prominent butcher in the Nanking Massacre to come—were far more systematic and sinister revolutionaries who sought to craft an entirely new Japanese identity cast in reactionary terms.

  In this vein, the armed forces’ nationalist ideology added a novel wrinkle to traditionally conservative Japanese culture. The generals now preached that Western technology, when married to spiritual purity, could create a Japanese warrior far superior to his more decadent European or American counterpart—pampered Occidentals who relied on material wealth and machines rather than the primacy of innate courage. This “spiritual mobilization” (Seishin Kyoiku)—fed by the resentments of nearby colonialism and nursed by the old slights of racist Western condescension—was then grafted by the new ultranationalists onto traditional emperor worship (kodo). The result was an entire citizenry indoctrinated in the belief in racial purity and national destiny that demanded the absolute allegiance of every Japanese.

  Youth in schools were now taught by rote—in eerie forerunners to the present-day fundamentalist Islamic madrassas that now turn out suicide murderers in the Middle East—that they must make sacrifices in their daily lives for their emperor, the personification of the divine destiny of a racially superior Japanese people. An increasing emphasis was put on the glories of dying in combat—especially the avoidance of surrender and killing enemy soldiers in the bargain. In early 1941, General Tojo issued an official military “code of ethics” that called upon every Japanese soldier not “to fear to die for the cause of everlasting justice. Do not stay alive in dishonor. Do not die in such a way as to leave a bad name behind you.” Such sacrifice would ensure that Japanese warriors would become divine, and perhaps live an eternal spiritual existence at “The Patriots’ Shrine” (the Yasukuni Temple on Kudan Hill in Tokyo), which had been founded in 1868 as home for the heroic souls of dead veterans.

  In this multifaceted context of past Japanese cultural practice, the desperation of 1944–45, and the propaganda of the authoritarian generals in Tokyo, the conditions for suicide attacks on a grand scale arose that would have been impossible in the democratic West or among the totalitarian murderers of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Yet even with all that, the kamikazes might well have been a passing phenomenon. The final ingredient was some sporadic success in sinking or damaging American ships during their first haphazard attacks in autumn 1944 at the battle of Leyte Gulf. Suicide bombing in any era continues only because it is for a time deemed tactically or strategically effective.

  Just as important as their actual results, both the zeal and the successes of the kamikazes were always exaggerated. In a society with a state-controlled media and an effective propaganda ministry, Japanese planners could argue to the masses that suicide tactics alone promised salvation from the Americans—or at more bleak times deny their presence altogether. Had the truth of the enormous losses been told, coupled with the reality that not a single American battleship or carrier was ever sunk by kamikazes alone, problems of morale might have thinned the suicide-pilot ranks from the very beginning in 1944.

  After all, suicide attacks in any context would soon have ceased if the architects of such special corps had learned that their bombers were doing little long-term harm to the enemy, whether material, psychological, or political. Instead, there were at least some early reports that the kamikazes were achieving results in a way traditional aerial bombing attacks had not. Moreover, the steady attrition in army and naval aircraft by summer 1944 far outweighed the Japanese government’s ability to replace planes or train new pilots. So the apprehension grew that if some new tactic was not discovered rather quickly, the dwindling arsenal of resistance was soon to be obliterated altogether. If a pilot was going to be shot down anyway, why not instead take some of the enemy with him—especially since being captured as a prisoner-of-war was a worse disgrace than simply dying without killing the enemy?

  Once it crossed the Rubicon of accepting state-organized suicide as a legitimate military tactic, the Japanese command learned that it might well regain some of its lost ability to strike the Americans and perhaps stave off an unconditional surrender. Its frontline bombers and fighters were, of course, too few and outclassed by 1945 to mix it up against the air combat patrols of new Hellcats and Corsairs in conventional attacks on American ships and bombers. And aviation fuel was in such short supply that the inflight training necessary to prepare capable pilots was nearly impossible. But Japan nevertheless still possessed thousands of antiquated Zeros and dive- and torpedo-bombers—26,000 produced in 1944 alone—as well as apparently thousands more eager and patriotic conscripts.

  How then might they even the odds? In conventional practice it could take a year to train an effective pilot—two or three more still to produce in large numbers any of the new prototype aircraft that Japan hoped could at least match the latest American designs in conventional dogfights. Thus, the trick was to find a tactic in the here and now of late 1944 and early 1945 to impart to thousands of outmoded planes and green pilots the ability to destroy the most sophisticated military in the world. Suicide bombers seemed to have solved the dilemma quite well. The Zero, after all, was still a relatively reliable plane. If it could no longer be flown by seasoned pilots to even the odds against more advanced Grumman F6F-5 Hellcats, it might nevertheless make a deadly cruise missile—especially in headlong dives from high altitudes in which there was no worry about pulling out. And when Zeros were not available, anything that flew, from lumbering trainers to obsolete dive-bombers, at least would be put to better use in killing Americans than in sitting unused and discarded in hangars, especially when employed in mass attacks—again, as long as the life of the pilot was no longer a paramount concern.

  If a man did not plan to live through his attack, then worries about full gas tanks, clear weather on the way home, radio contact with his base, sophisticated aerial tactics, and the top performance of his plane began to fade. By strapping a young zealot to the seat of a bomb-carrying plane, the Japanese had in effect nullified a two- or three-year American edge in technology: what the delivery vehicle lacked in speed and performance, it now gained in near superhuman accuracy. The kamikaze pilot was an early smart bomb—and its guidance system was far more sophisticated than any computer in its ability to hunt down and find a mobile enemy.

  Since kamikazes cared only to target the enemy and destroy him, a man’s brain was concerned with using all its skill to hit a ship or large bomber—not to protect friends, evade fire, return home, or save his plane. And out of that single-minded concentration on death, the Japanese in their eleventh hour for a time found a mechanism to transform second-rate planes and third-rate pilots into first-rate guided missiles far more effective than German V-1 rockets or any missile weapons in either the American or British arsenal that could not alter their trajectory or general course once launched.

  The use of kamikazes in the last months of World War II would result in real but unforeseen ripples both short-term and with us still. As we shall see, the astounding damage they inflicted against the American fleet between April and June 1945 purportedly taught students of conflict that death cadres could be great equalizers for any power that had access to technology and was willing to marry it to an ideology—or religion—that could tolerate or even foster suicide.

  The ostensible lesson of the suicides on Okinawa was that a willingness to die might result in military parity for a time against a technologically superior foe; and that Western sophistication in arms—whether that be self-sealing gas tanks, onboard radio and radar communications, armor plating, ejection seats and parachutes, or elaborate sea search-and-rescue infrastructures—was in large part designed to protect the combatant as
much as to injure the enemy. But if the life of the warrior was to be sacrificed in the moment of his attack, then much of what was deemed progress in war was rendered instantly superfluous.

  Thus it is no accident that well after the defeat of the Japanese off Okinawa, the basic principles of suicide attack are still with us today—giving hope to any militarily backward and technologically inferior foe that with the proper propaganda, ideology, or religion to indoctrinate a cadre of suicide bombers, the supposedly sophisticated and advanced infrastructure of the West could still be vulnerable. If one lacks an F-16 or B-52, a hijacked and fuel-laden jet airliner might be just as effective—as long as the pilot and his accomplices have every intention of steering the plane and themselves into its target. In turn, those who seek to live can be deemed weak by those determined to die in killing them. And better quality weapons that are designed to protect the user as well as kill the target can be neutralized by inferior models employed only to destroy, not survive the ordeal.

  What were the long-term lessons of the response to the suicides at Okinawa? As we shall also discover, at Okinawa the use of kamikazes and an entire array of death bombers unshackled the Americans in both their thinking and practice of war. What the Japanese started, the Americans had even more terrifying ways of finishing—then and now.

  Divine Wind

  A divine wind (kamikaze) twice, in 1274 and 1281, had blown away Kublai Khan’s Mongol armada—sudden and unexpected typhoons that saved Japan from sure invasion by an overwhelmingly superior foreigner. Nearly seven hundred years later, man and machine would purportedly do again for Japan against the Americans what nature apparently this time would not.

  Throughout the earlier part of World War II, some soldiers and pilots in the Japanese military were prone to near-suicidal tactics in confronting the greater numbers and material edge of the Americans. During the savage fighting on Guadalcanal (summer and fall 1942) and on the Aleutians (May 1943), hundreds of desperate Japanese soldiers rushed heedlessly into entrenched American artillery and machine gun positions in human-wave or so-called “banzai charges.” In all cases the sacrifices led to horrendous casualities without changing the course of battle. Japanese pilots—when wounded or on the verge of crashing—sometimes steered their planes into American ships. Such desperate attacks, for example, may have helped sink the aircraft carrier Hornet off Guadalcanal in October 1942.

  Yet the first organized and successful large-scale kamikaze missions did not take place until the desperate defense of the Philippines as part of the Sho (“Victor”) plan of integrated air, sea, and ground counterattacks against the American invasion. Vice Adm. Takijiro Onishi purportedly crafted the first successful kamikaze assault of his newly created Yamato and Shikishima units on October 25, when they damaged a number of American ships and sank the escort carrier St. Lo. Just as important, the Japanese felt that the newly formed kamikazes could serve as a frightening terror weapon: once enemy sailors realized that approaching planes meant to crash into their ships and that brave Japanese pilots were willing to die in order to kill them, the Americans would become unnerved and lose heart at fighting such audacious and desperate enemies who would do what they themselves could not. Rikihei Inoguchi and Tadashi Nakajima, who helped command the kamikaze attacks, remarked of the generally held Japanese belief that such corps were absolutely unique:

  History provides many cases of individual soldiers who fought under certain-death circumstances, but never before was such a program carried out so systematically and over such a long period of time. In the case of do-or-die action, however great the risk involved, there is always a chance of survival. But the kamikaze attack could be carried out only by killing himself. The attack and death were one and the same thing.

  From October 25, 1944, until the April 1945 sorties against Okinawa, the Japanese made a series of suicide attacks on American shipping as they sought to refine their weapons and tactics—the most practicable weapon emerging as a Zero carrying a five-hundred-pound bomb. Sometimes a plane skimmed the waves in order to avoid radar and crashed into the vulnerable waterline of a ship. More often they came in at high altitudes and dived from nearly twenty thousand feet to lessen their window of vulnerability to antiaircraft fire and enemy fighters. Dawn and sunset were the preferred times to launch the attacks—as the rising and setting sun allowed better identification of enemy vessels than was possible during the night, without the vulnerability of flying in full daylight. In addition, ritual funerals, public ceremony, and occasional media attention romanticized the kamikazes in hopes of increasing recruitment and gaining acceptance among an initially wary Japanese high command and skeptical citizenry at large. Close group interaction, discussion, and constant indoctrination were critical in preventing any faint-hearts from having second thoughts about killing themselves. The result was that during the autumn and winter of 1944 off the Philippines, the kamikazes damaged and sank more American ships than in any three-month period of the entire war since Pearl Harbor. And by early 1945, increased numbers of suicide bombers attacked the Americans off Formosa and Iwo Jima, again damaging dozens of destroyers and light carriers.

  Unlike conventional attacks, the destructive power of desperate Zeros involved more than the dropping of bombs. In addition to the power of a five-hundred-pound explosive device, the weight, density, and size of the plane coming in at speeds of up to 300 miles per hour could easily tear apart wooden carrier decks and even their steel superstructures. Then gallons of aviation fuel, in the manner of napalm, would be ignited on impact, spreading fire beyond the explosion. Finally, the architects of suicide felt that terror was an ally as well: they figured (erroneously as it turned out) that American sailors might quickly become disheartened when they learned that their new enemies were not merely bombs and bullets, but entire planes and their pilots as well.

  The real test, however, would be Okinawa itself. There the army under the veteran General Ushijima and the fanatical General Cho were resolved to die with their entire commands as the price of killing thousands of Americans. By March hundreds of kamikazes, based on the mainland at Kyushu, organized the so-called kikusui force or “floating chrysanthemums,” named for the traditional pure flower that would symbolize the combined air-and-sea operation. At Okinawa the Japanese felt that they had much better opportunities to destroy American ships than was true at either the Philippines or Iwo Jima. The island was too far distant for land-based American aircraft to attack. Until bases could be established on the newly conquered island, almost all American air support for the amphibious assault had to come from the carriers themselves—whose limited numbers of floating wooden runways in theory could be put out of commission for days by just a few kamikazes.

  In other words, the American fleet more or less was stationary and posted permanently off Okinawa, without the umbrella of the Army Air Force, all the while in easy range of thousands of enemy planes from the mainland. Normally that extended deployment would not have troubled American planners, who were confident that their new carrier fighters and highly trained pilots would make short work of both conventional and occasional suicide attacks.

  But the Japanese were planning something on a scale entirely unforeseen in preparing some 4,000 planes for suicide attacks, commencing their sorties immediately after the initial landings. In all there would be roughly ten mass kikusui attacks. The most dramatic was perhaps the first on April 6, when for the entire day and early evening some 223 planes dived on Task Force 58, the American invasion fleet stationed off the landing beaches, and various radar picket destroyers northeast of Okinawa. Despite inadequate cover from Zero fighters and poorly trained pilots, the unprecedented number of planes allowed the kamikazes to hit at least fourteen ships. The Americans had never seen anything quite like it.

  More important, 15 percent of the original force inflicted some damage—a far higher figure than obtained by past traditional Japanese naval aviators. The only consolation to the Americans was that the bulk of the p
lanes bombed distant destroyers acting as radar pickets. Perhaps the suicide planes deliberately wished to disrupt early warnings to the core of the American fleet; or they were satisfied that they could at least sink a smaller destroyer with one crash; or the Japanese pilots realized they would probably be shot down venturing over the cruisers and battleships on their way to the carriers in the middle of the armada and so attacked the first targets in sight. Although in this first attack the Japanese had hit only the fleet carrier Hancock and the light carrier San Jacinto, the Americans immediately realized that should they lose their picket destroyers, minesweepers, and supply craft at such an alarming rate, eventually their capital ships could fall prey as well.

  The kamikazes returned on April 12 in even greater numbers. Some 350 bombers and fighters took off from Kyushu. They were intermingled with escort fighters and a few more experienced and valuable pilots who planned to make conventional attacks. This time the Japanese dropped “chaff” (thin foil strips) to confuse radar, attacked near dusk, and came in at all altitudes and directions. The Zeros heavily damaged some of the largest ships in the fleet—the carriers Enterprise and Essex, the battleships Missouri, New Mexico, Tennessee, and Idaho, and the cruiser Oakland as well as dozens of ancillary destroyers, gunboats, and minesweepers.

  Shocked American sailors tried everything to prevent such unforeseen mayhem. They bombed the Japanese bases in Kyushu where camouflaged and scattered planes proved difficult to detect. They tried redirecting carrier planes from sorties over Okinawa to fleet defense, and added dozens of antiaircraft batteries to escort ships—eventually naval gunfire would down 70 percent of the attackers. And still the kamikazes came with a third large attack of 155 planes on April 16. Once again they managed to hit a carrier, the Intrepid, as well as more destroyers, minesweepers, and tankers. Then for the next three weeks the Japanese were diving continuously, damaging and sinking American ships almost daily before sending another massive concentrated flight on May 3 and 4, when 305 planes—at least 280 were lost—damaged nearly a dozen of the picket destroyers and support ships.