Finally the Americans appeared to be tiring from the daily barrage. On May 11 the Japanese hit Admiral Mitscher’s flagship itself, the carrier Bunker Hill, and left it a burning wreck, and also hit again the battleship New Mexico. American officers by the end of May calculated that if the kamikazes continued to score at the present rates, the entire fleet would have to withdraw by the middle of June—or acknowledge that some of their key capital ships would be crippled and the majority of their destroyers sunk or damaged, and thousands of sailors killed and wounded at an unsustainable rate. American navy personnel by now had been fighting daily kamikaze attacks for nearly two months. They had seen their best vessels hit and their friends blown apart and still were without any sure method of stopping the attackers. Given the nature of the kamikazes’ determination, even a smaller sortie of some 30 or 40 planes—otherwise hardly a threat as conventional fighters and bombers—could spell catastrophe.
Perhaps the most disheartening air attack came late in the battle on June 5, nearly sixty-five days after the initial invasion and at a time when the Americans were beginning to believe the enemy had lost his initiative. First kamikazes hit the battleship Mississippi, the cruiser Louisville, and assorted destroyers and minesweepers. Then later on, an enormous storm caught the recoiling Americans, further damaging carriers and battleships, wrecking 142 planes, and sending dozens of ships back to the United States for major repairs—even as the suicides returned the next day to augment the toll from the weather damage. Fortunately, by mid-June the near capitulation of Okinawa, the destruction of hundreds of Japanese planes in the air and at their bases in Japan, and the first signs of some pilot reluctance in pressing home the attacks caused the suicide bombers to taper off.
Altogether, the combined kikusui campaign had sunk eleven destroyers, one minesweeper, and assorted other auxiliary craft, but damaged—and in some cases disabled for the rest of the war—four fleet carriers, three light carriers, ten battleships, five cruisers, sixty-one destroyers, and countless other support ships. Based on exaggerated reports and propaganda, the Japanese high command reported losses ten times the actual American numbers, which had the effect for a time of neutralizing the growing doubt among new squadrons of pilots that they were being arbitrarily recruited to die for a lost cause.
The record of the size and number of actual kamikaze attacks at Okinawa remains somewhat unclear as Japanese and American figures are not in agreement on either the number of planes involved or the precise figure of damaged and destroyed targets. We should assume, however, that at least 2,000 Japanese pilots were lost in sorties that killed almost 5,000 American sailors. The Americans, in fact, believed that they had shot down over 7,000 planes. To obtain some idea of the deadly nature of the kamikazes, contrast the inverse ratio of fatalities of their suicidal army counterparts on Okinawa, who sacrificed 100,000 men to kill 7,000 Americans—2 dead Japanese pilots for every 5 American sailors versus 100 imperial infantrymen needed to kill 7 Marines and GIs. Since prior to the inauguration of kamikaze tactics, neither the Japanese navy nor air force in 1945 had been able to inflict any major damage on the American fleet, the kamikazes represented a counterassault well beyond the expectations of even the most optimistic supporters of the new squadrons. And when the attacks ceased on June 22, a battered American fleet realized that there were supposedly thousands more of such weapons less than four hundred miles away on the mainland ready to renew their attacks.
What, then, is the legacy of the kamikazes—a brilliant and malevolent tactic of neutralizing the edge in material power and technology of the Americans, or a resounding Japanese defeat that only helped prompt a murderous response in the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? The answer is ambiguous, since the kamikazes in a sense succeeded and failed—by inflicting unimagined damage in their inability either to save Okinawa, destroy the American fleet, or break the will of their enemies. After all, while the Americans suffered dreadful naval losses, not a single fleet carrier or battleship was sunk. Planes continued to attack Okinawa daily despite kamikaze targeting of their home carriers. If anything, the Americans proved that they could beat off the suicides, repair damaged craft, and replace their lost ships faster than the Japanese could make up their own losses in planes and fanatical pilots. So the ever more shrill boasts of tens of thousands of suicide killers waiting to attack in planes, boats, and submarines would finally prove hollow—both because of a shortage of delivery systems and the reality that there were fewer suicide volunteers and eager draftees than publicly proclaimed.
The ripples of the “Floating Chrysanthemums,” then, were more psychological and ideological—and so remain today as such across time and space. The metaphysics of air suicide attacks only confirmed in the Western mind the fanaticism of the imperial military, making it clear that extreme measures would be necessary to break their hold on the citizens of Japan. If a foe wished to crash himself in order to kill—and had plenty more planes and pilots to come—why worry about the magnitude of the retaliatory response? The American navy left Okinawa convinced that warfare in the Pacific had to continue to be far more harsh and terrible than what had transpired in Europe. They concluded that Asians in their caves, holes, and suicide ships and planes were a different—usually thought to be a more fanatical—foe than Germans or Italians, and so were deserving of even more extreme treatment. And that conjecture would have consequences in American thinking in the decades to come in the bombing campaigns ahead in Korea and especially Vietnam, where massive caves and underground fortifications were eerily reminiscent of Okinawa and likewise virtually impregnable to occasionally mindless American carpet bombing.
But more important, the sacrifice of some 3,913 American-documented successful kamikaze attacks during the war set a paradigm of asymmetrical warfare whose antidotes are also with us still. Airplanes are not merely the carriers of bombs, missiles, and guns, but if piloted by suicides can become forces of sheer destruction themselves. The kamikazes naturally resonated with the terrorists of September 11—and will continue to hold out false hope for future guerrillas to come, by offering to those with less power the specter of destroying enormous assets of American power, whether large ships or urban skyscrapers.
But again, what those who crash airplanes in the past and present alike failed to grasp was also the nature of the deadly repercussions that arose from their explosions. Suicide bombings strike at the very psyche of the Western mind that is repelled by the religious fanaticism and the authoritarianism, or perhaps the despair, of such enemies—confirming that wars are not just misunderstandings over policy or the reckless actions of a deranged leader, but accurate reflections of fundamental differences in culture and society. In precisely the same way as kamikazes off Okinawa led to A-bombs, so too jumbo jets exploding at the World Trade Center were the logical precursors to daisy-cutters, bunker-busters, and thermobaric bombs in Afghanistan—as an unleashed America resounded with a terrible fury not seen or anticipated since 1945. The Western world publicly objected to the Israeli plunge into the Jenin refugee camp in April 2002 and its purported destruction of the civilian infrastructure—but much of it also privately sighed, “Such are the wages for suicide-murderers who blow up children in Tel Aviv.” If it is true that moral pretensions at restraint are the ultimate brakes on the murderous Western way of war, it is also accurate to suggest that such ethical restrictions erode considerably when the enemy employs suicide bombers.
The Japanese also had an array of other suicide plans of attack by sea and air that were astounding both in their variety and desperation. As the campaign wore on, the Americans discovered literally dozens of new Japanese suicide weapons, specialized death battalions, and a generally shared commitment among former civilians and draftees to fight to the death. The most sophisticated of the one-way weapons was the so-called Okha (“exploding cherry blossom”) flying bomb. With the capture of the Mariana Islands in June and July 1944 and the accompanying slaughter of hundreds of Japanese bombers and
fighters—445 planes shot down—imperial planners realized that their once unrivaled planes were now too slow, their pilots too inexperienced, and their bombs too light to destroy the American fleet. Out of that desperation arose the Okha (called a Baka, or “idiot,” bomb by the Americans), a one-way piloted rocket that in theory could neutralize all of the Americans’ advantages in naval defense.
The missile-planes were cheap to build, constructed of low-quality metal and wood, simply designed, and only twenty feet long, with stubby wings and two vertical stabilizers. The nose cone was filled with an armor-coated charge of 2,640 pounds of TNT, over five times more destructive power as that which was carried in most kamikaze suicide planes. Five small rockets—adapted from German designs—gave a nine-second propellant burst that thrust the descending gliders to speeds of 600 mph.
The rocket planes were dropped a safe distance from their targets by twin-engine Betty bombers at an altitude of twenty thousand feet, ensuring that the Okhas roared out of the sky unannounced at unbelievable speeds—while in theory at least requiring little skill to aim them at the large and relatively slow-moving American ships. Without many worries about taking off, landing, or missing such large targets—in these respects the thinking was similar to that of the unskilled pilots who rammed jumbo jets into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001—the so-called “Thunder Gods” who navigated the Okhas could be trained quickly and cheaply.
Still, operational and tactical problems emerged immediately—besides premature explosions, crashes of the bombers, and an inability to transport the rockets to their bases due to American bombing. The short-ranged Okhas had to be dropped fairly close to the American fleet. But such requisite proximity ensured that the slow-moving and encumbered mother Betty bombers—that scarcely managed 150 knots when loaded—were then themselves easy targets. Although 56 of the Thunder Gods were killed, 372 Betty bomber crewmen perished just in nearing the American ships. And once sent off, the rocket bombs proved nearly impossible to control with any precision. Altogether only one American destroyer was sunk and another five were damaged—despite the launching of some 185 Okhas in the battle for Okinawa alone.
Besides the rocket bombers, the Japanese built a series of suicide midget submarines, one-way motorboats, and human torpedoes—precursors of the suicide boat that nearly sank the USS Cole in Yemen on October 12, 2000. Yet the combined results of all such special weapons were the sinking of less than a half dozen American landing craft, oilers, and destroyers. Perhaps the most famous and least successful of all suicide missions was the final voyage of the world’s largest battleship, the famed Yamato that steamed out of Kure naval harbor on March 28, 1945, on a mission of no return. Along with its escort ships, the Yamato planned to plow into the American fleet off Okinawa in hopes that its massive 18.1-inch guns could blast away the thin-skinned carriers before it was spotted and sunk—or at least draw off enemy carrier-based planes so that simultaneous kamikaze attacks might more easily hit their targets. In fact, the Yamato never got close to Okinawa. It was blasted apart by American carrier planes on April 7—taking over two thousand crewmen to the bottom scarcely halfway to its target.
But suicide was no stranger to the actual land battle itself on Okinawa and usually occurred on the island in a variety of guises. As had been true of earlier fighting in the Pacific, there were a number of sudden death charges by hundreds of Japanese. In this regard General Cho especially bristled at the continual defensive tactics of Colonel Yahara and was finally given the go-ahead for an offensive on May 4 to coincide with kamikaze attacks on the fleet and proposed amphibious landings behind American lines. Some fifteen thousand of the Japanese 32nd Army struck out at the Americans at daybreak, small units carrying food and ammunition for ten days of independent operation with orders “to kill one American devil for every Japanese.” Convinced that the temporary halt of the Americans at the Shuri line signaled weakness, the Japanese abandoned the very tactics that had brought them success and thereby helped accelerate their own defeat.
By midnight of the next day the offensive was proving to be a tactical disaster. Not only did the Japanese lose five thousand soldiers and over nineteen key heavy artillery pieces, they inflicted just over a thousand casualties on the American XXIV Corps. Throughout the two-day attack there were impromptu banzai charges, their aim simply to kill Americans. At other times infantrymen volunteered to infiltrate into American lines at night to slit Marine throats—even though such stealthy actions usually meant death by alert American lookouts.
Other suicide attackers adopted a different and more dangerous tactic of carrying satchel charges and grenades—or even wiring such explosives to their bodies—so that they might get close enough to American soldiers, trucks, tanks, jeeps, and almost anything imaginable and blow themselves up, taking dozens with them. Two Japanese soldiers, on one occasion, strapped explosives to their backs and blew up a footbridge that had been built to allow the 22nd Marines to cross the Asa River. Such suicide bombing rapidly became the only possible way of fulfilling General Ushijima’s initial boast of one man for each tank.
As in the case of the kamikazes, zeal could in theory often make up for both the dearth of heavy weapons and the inadequacy of lethal antitank rockets, in effect creating the 1945 equivalent of laser-guided artillery projectiles. A suicide bomber can be every bit as effective as a “smart” shell, using his senses and intelligence to zero in on the target—with the added advantage of not being wed to a predetermined trajectory. How many of the some seven thousand American infantrymen killed on the island itself fell to suicide attackers is unknown, but the discipline and firepower of Marine units usually meant that such exposed suicidal charges were in fact often to be welcomed over more lethal sniper attacks and shelling from well-fortified caves.
Sometimes Japanese soldiers deliberately holed up in subterranean chambers, hoping that the attacking Americans would have to descend in small groups of twos and threes and then be blown up as the defenders killed themselves. In response, the Americans learned to torch such strongholds first and ask for surrender later. In five days, for example, between June 13 and 17, the flame-shooting tanks of the 713th Armored Flamethrower Battalion poured 37,000 gallons of gasoline into Japanese caves and bunkers.
Col. Hiromichi Yahara, who had designed much of the Japanese resistance and was often at odds with his more fiery superiors, recalled after the war a conversation with another officer about the dramatic—but also self-serving—efforts of the militarists to sacrifice thousands of Japanese soldiers:
I then explained the all-out suicide attack plan in which our soldiers would charge down the hill to Mabuni. The generals would witness this scene just before they died peacefully on the hilltop. I was glad to hear Sunano add, “Our artillery can’t contribute much to such a finale, but somehow we should move some guns to Odo village. From there they can contribute to the scene, by firing guns like fireworks. It will be spectacular.” I was heartened to hear his plan. We went on to discuss Japan’s future, about which we were deeply concerned. It was clear that Japan would inevitably fall after Okinawa. Our leaders had chosen this path to destruction. They did not care that hundreds of thousands of soldiers would die. They seemed to care only about the preservation of their own status, prestige, and honor.
Equally disturbing to Americans, however, were the occasional suicides of Okinawan civilians, who were told by the Japanese that conquering GIs and Marines would torture and kill them upon capture—in the very manner that veterans themselves of the 32nd Army had mutilated Chinese civilians for years in Manchuria. Junkyo Isa, who was treated humanely after falling into American hands, recalls that Japanese soldiers had told her earlier that “women who’d been captured in the central areas of the island were being raped by American soldiers and that these Americans were killing children by ripping them apart at the crotch. Of course these were just tall tales meant to scare us and convince us not to let ourselves be captured by the enemy. But I was still
afraid to be caught.”
During the capture of the Kerama Islands off the coast of Okinawa, dozens of Japanese civilians killed themselves rather than fall into American hands. The official history of Okinawa records a ghastly scene of when army troops came upon a small valley:
In the morning they found a small valley littered with more than 150 dead and dying Japanese, most of them civilians. Fathers had systematically throttled each member of their families and then disemboweled themselves with knives and hand grenades. Under one blanket lay a father, two small children, a grandfather, and a grandmother, all strangled by cloth ropes. Soldiers and medics did what they could. The natives, who had been told that the invading “barbarians” would kill and rape, watched in amazement as the Americans provided food and medical care; an old man who had killed his daughter wept in bitter remorse.
No tallies exist of the actual numbers of civilian suicides on Okinawa proper during the three-month ordeal; but anecdotal accounts suggest that thousands may have taken their lives. Even so-called civilians remained a danger after capture; one veteran, Thomas Hannaher, remarked, “In the later stages of the campaign, I was assigned to guard a large compound of prisoners. It was boring duty. The inmates were behind barbed wire. Most were civilians but it was hard to tell. One of them blew himself up with a hand grenade.” Frank Gibney, an intelligence officer on Okinawa, who wrote a commentary on Colonel Yahara’s postwar memoirs, concluded:
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