East Wind Returns

by Grasso, William Peter

  “Nonsense,” Toyoda replies. “The American people and their new, guileless president are tired of war. An attack of this magnitude on their homeland would finish off their will to fight.”

  There is silence as Prime Minister Suzuki considers those words, but after a moment, he shakes his head in rejection. “Admiral, I fear the only thing that would be finished off is the Americans’ reluctance to totally incinerate us.” Gesturing toward the window, Suzuki continues: “Look upon the burned-out heart of Tokyo. Imagine 1000 fire-bombers doing the same to every Japanese city.”

  It is the admiral’s turn to shake his head. But before he can say another word, General Umezu asks, “Admiral, perhaps you would share with us the details of your plan?”

  Toyoda looks offended by the request. “The details of the Navy’s plan are of no concern to the Army.”

  “I beg to differ, Admiral,” War Minister Anami says. “I believe all present have a right to hear those details.”

  A large map of the Pacific hangs on the wall. Less than pleased, the Admiral approaches it with pointer in hand. “Very well. The weapon is to be mounted to the deck of our one remaining I-15 Class submarine at the Hungnan Weapons Development Facility in Korea, under the direction of Professor Inaba and his staff. This submarine will, of course, be manned by a special crew, who will bring honor to the Emperor and themselves with their deaths. The submarine will cross the Sea of Japan, enter the Sea of Okhotsk, and cross the northern Pacific.” Pausing for a moment to shoot a defiant glance at the Prime Minister, he continues: “…following the route of our fleet’s great victory in December 1941.”

  Toyoda pauses again to savor his reclamation of the Navy’s honor, but the delay is met with nothing but impatient faces and a chilling silence. Defiantly, he launches back into his monologue.

  “It will pass north of the Hawaiian Islands and continue to the western coast of America. Once near the Golden Gate, it will submerge and enter the bay when the submarine nets are open for other maritime traffic. Our spies have been very successful obtaining shipping information of this sort. Once inside the harbor, it will surface adjacent to the San Francisco docks and the crew will detonate the weapon.”

  “How far is the voyage?” Umezu asks.

  “9000 kilometers.”

  “And what is the range of an I-15 submarine?”

  Toyoda is getting testy. “More than sufficient for a one-way journey.”

  “And how do you propose to do this on an ocean you no longer control, Admiral? Your victorious navy now litters the seabed.”

  “General, may I remind you that nautical matters are best left to the Navy. Besides, all US naval victories have been the product of luck. We will yet turn the tide.”

  “Will this submarine’s performance be degraded by its external cargo?” the general asks, ignoring the admiral’s bravado.

  “No, General, the I-15 was designed to carry an attack float plane on its foredeck. Transporting the weapon will pose no impediment… even when submerged.”

  General Umezu has saved his most critical question for last. “Admiral, how long will it take to detonate the weapon after surfacing? And why must it surface at all? Wouldn’t a detonation while submerged at a shallow depth be just as devastating?”

  Toyoda smirks confidently. The general is speaking from ignorance--a position of weakness. It is time for me to put him in his place once and for all. Like a headmaster disciplining a student, he says, “We must surface, General, to connect the electrical power for the detonator. The weapon would not be watertight otherwise--”

  Umezu interrupts. “I ask you again, sir… how long?”

  How dare this Army toad interrupt me? If this pointer was a sword…

  “Kindly allow me to finish, General… We estimate five minutes to complete the preparations for detonation.”

  Waves of astonishment and disapproval wash through the chamber.

  General Umezu shouts above the discord. “They will not survive five seconds, let alone five minutes, on the surface of an American harbor, even with the bold assumption that they arrive undetected!”

  War Minister Anami raises his hands for quiet. “Admiral, I am sure the Emperor applauds your determination, but I fear your plans will not alleviate our most immediate problem. The Americans are sitting on our doorstep and we are almost powerless to stop them. The Russians may join them at any moment. We possess only one nuclear weapon. If we are to employ this terrible device at all, logic dictates that it must be used against the American invasion force directly. I suggest that the Army and Navy consider this and be prepared to present other proposals in one week’s time.”

  Somberly, Prime Minister Suzuki nods in agreement and closes the meeting.

  As the War Council departs the chamber, each member knows that despite the War Minister’s polite and diplomatic language, the San Francisco plan would never be adopted. What they do not know is that it would have failed for a totally unanticipated reason.

  The secrecy and isolation in which Professor Inaba and his scientists had been forced to work allowed a conspiracy to blossom undetected. When told of the San Francisco plan, they had agreed among themselves to sabotage the weapon.

  Inaba’s device was not originally designed to be submerged. All such weapons require an electrical source to set off the high explosives that initiate the nuclear reaction. Inaba’s successful test weapon had used a simple battery and timer. The submarine crew, however, would have to connect the electrical source after surfacing by first removing a bolted-on, watertight hatch, then connecting the requisite wiring. They would then play out their final act in this world by triggering the explosion with a hand-operated generator.

  Inaba and his staff installed defective seals on the hatch. When the submarine submerged, the interior chamber of the device would flood, ruining the high-explosive charge. Their atomic bomb would become nothing but a soggy piece of radioactive junk.

  Chapter Four

  They say flying is hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. This is true of civil aviation. For combat flying, it is hours of intense apprehension punctuated by moments of sheer terror.

  John Worth is in the apprehension phase of his first mission from Kadena, north-northeast of Toko-no-Shima approaching 10,000 feet. This puts f-stop just above a deck of patchy cumulus clouds, making her easily visible only from above. At least the threat of ground fire from the islands below, still held by the Japanese, is minimized. But ground fire is the least of John’s concerns. Enemy fighters are still the biggest threat. Mechanical problems with his aircraft follow a close second. At least the weather is cooperating. No storms today, so far.

  Today’s mission is to get pictures of the northern seaport areas of Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s four home islands and, by consensus of US and Japanese strategic analysis, the next logical place for the US forces to invade. MacArthur’s Intelligence Staff (G-2) would use these photos and the many that would follow from future missions to assess the defensive build up they felt sure was well underway. John is the leader of “B” Flight, one of three flights with four aircraft each in his squadron. Flight Leader is something of an administrative title, as recon pilots usually work alone.

  Other pilots from John’s unit are flying elsewhere over Kyushu, as well as over Shikoku and Southern Honshu. A few of the squadron’s pilots are not flying due to medical reasons, real or concocted.

  Flight surgeons had learned to accept the occasional faked maladies--migraines, earaches, stomach problems and the like--just as commanders had learned to overlook the occasional maintenance problems that caused mission aborts yet could not be verified. The doctors were more concerned with the far less frequent occurrences of medically unfit airmen who insisted they were ready to fly. John Worth had never faked a medical problem to avoid flying. In his words, that just wasn’t right.

  Leveling off, John trims the aircraft and sets power for fuel-efficient cruise. Kyushu is 350 miles from Okinawa, str
aight up the Ryukyu Island chain, about an hour and a half flying time in the F-5. His left hand lightly plays the levers that control the engines: throttle, mixture, RPM. The sound from the two 1400 horsepower Allisons settles into a synchronized drone. He doesn’t need to check the engine gauges: his senses, sharpened by much experience, tell him that they are running just as he wants. But he takes a peek, anyway.

  His head moves constantly, scanning the instrument panel, then swiveling to the sides and rear, checking the sky for other aircraft, especially those that might want to kill him. Even without the deck of clouds below him, he lacks downward visibility in level flight. The wings and engines block most of that. Sliding his backside around on the parachute that served as his seat cushion, he settles his body in for the mission, which will take almost five hours, and all that time he’ll be staring at the remains of insects on the windshield, splattered there during takeoff. He wonders how many more are lodged in his radiators and air intakes or plastered on the props and leading edges of the wings and stabilizers.

  His right hand gently grips the control yoke, the left hand free for reaching levers, knobs and switches as necessary. John is at one with f-stop. He knows all too well that airplanes are machines that happen to fly, a complicated collection of mechanical devices moving through the sky in close formation, needing the pilot only to suggest it move fast enough and point it in a safe direction.

  More islands slip past as John follows the Ryukyu chain north to Japan. Now less than 15 minutes from the southern tip of Kyushu, he has yet to see another aircraft, friend or foe. f-stop is behaving herself. The clouds below are beginning to thin, and in a moment he should see the mountains looming out of the distant mist. His drop tanks would be empty very soon. He would not release them unless forced to by the need for a speedy escape. Even though they are streamlined and weigh practically nothing empty, the aerodynamic drag of the tanks slows the plane down a bit. Besides, the fighter boys have plenty of spare drop tanks; recon squadrons do not.

  Right on schedule, the drop tanks empty and the mountain peaks appear. He begins climbing to 20,000 feet and skirts the east coast of Kyushu, heading north, staying a few miles offshore. There are few clouds now; he can see some of Admiral Nimitz’s warships below, further offshore. Eastern Kyushu, to his left, seems to be all narrow, coastal plains with waves of rippling mountains inland, their grayish-brown peaks topping out at 5000 feet, shrouded in mist. The bases of the mountains are also shrouded in mist; just hints of green glimmer through.

  Passing 15,000 feet, he suddenly has company: distant specks growing larger off his left wingtip, slightly higher, moving south. Despite the growing coldness in the cockpit, he feels sweat in his helmet and oxygen mask. His gloved hands grip the controls tighter.

  Directly abeam, their silhouettes are unmistakable: Japanese fighters.

  An experienced voice deep within John begins to bark commands as if coaching some rookie:

  “Gotta see what they’re gonna do…”

  “Keep scanning! Don’t get jumped from behind!”

  “Fly the airplane, idiot! Don’t let it get ahead of you.”

  But the Jap planes never change course. They have not seen John’s airplane because it is between them and the morning sun.

  They become bright pinpoints, quickly fading and vanishing in the clear blue sky at altitude…and then they are gone.

  The whole encounter has taken just 5 seconds. That’s how the moments of sheer terror happen.

  f-stop reaches the Bungo Channel, the wide strait separating Kyushu and Shikoku. “Let’s get to work, ol’ girl,” John says aloud, and deploys the dive brakes. Rolling the aircraft left past 90 degrees with a smooth turn of the control wheel, he pulls back a bit on the yoke, retards the throttles and sends his aircraft plummeting downward and turning to the northwest.

  Once on the northwesterly heading, he continues the steep descent to 5000 feet, then stows the dive brakes. As he approaches Beppu Bay, his first objective, he drops smoothly to 500 feet and opens the throttles.

  He passes over several Japanese airfields crowded with aircraft along this northern coast, but no enemy rises to meet him; the Japs just don’t have enough fuel left to be chasing lone intruders across the sky. They don’t even have enough fuel to conduct proper training flights; best to save it for Kamikaze attacks against high value targets, like troop ships and aircraft carriers.

  There is always the chance, though, that somebody would suddenly be on your tail.

  Of course, it hadn’t always been like this. Not so long ago--although it already seemed like another lifetime--swarms of Japanese fighter aircraft roamed the sky above New Guinea, piloted by very experienced and very deadly warriors. Speed and surprise had been the only weapons John possessed. Even more recently over the Philippines, although fewer in number and with pilots of lesser experience and abilities, Jap fighters had still been a terrifying menace.

  There hadn’t been any anti-aircraft fire, either. At low altitude, traveling at over 350 mph, people on the ground don’t hear the aircraft until it’s right on top of them. Then, it’s too late: you’ve already missed your shot.

  The pictures from Beppu Bay would not be very informative; there was little going on there, just a few barges at the docks. The pictures from his next objectives, Kokura and Shimonoseki, would also be uninteresting. B-29’s of Major General Curtis LeMay’s 20th Air Force had mined the Shimonoseki Straits, the narrow, twisting passage between Kyushu and Honshu that linked the Sea of Japan with the Inland Sea as well as the adjacent ports. Some estimates put the resultant maritime traffic reductions at 90%. It certainly looked that way, from John’s vantage point.

  Now he turns his aircraft to the southwest and heads directly to Fukuoka, about 30 miles distant, descending even lower and following the contours of the land between the low hills on either side.

  OK, girl…we’ve got one more job to take care of.

  That job was to photograph bomb damage from a B-24 strike that should have occurred about an hour before. The four-engined B-24’s had come, dropped their bombs on Fukuoka’s port facilities and were heading back to Okinawa, but they were behind schedule on target. The smoke rising from their targets is still fresh; the anti-aircraft gunners are still on alert. Four Japanese fighter aircraft, of a type code named “Tony” by the Allies, hurtled past f-stop, slightly above and in the opposite direction. They had risen to challenge the B-24’s and might have had some luck: one of the B-24’s was trailing smoke as she flew away to the south. Seeing f-stop clearly below, the Tonys roll on their backs and dive in pursuit.

  John gets a little help from an unexpected source. The anti-aircraft gunners, trying to get a bead on the low-flying bullet that is f-stop at this moment, actually are shooting behind the F-5. The tracers weave their bright arcs well aft of her tail, directly into the path of the pursuing Tonys. The Jap fighters have to break off the attack to escape the “friendly” fire. They would not have caught up to f-stop, anyway; she had too much speed and too great a lead.

  Nevertheless, John is soaked with sweat and tense as a banjo string. If he had to make a radio transmission right now, his voice would be a tell-tale sign of fear, an octave higher than normal.

  He has gotten the pictures, though, and after anxious seconds that seem like hours, is climbing over the Sea of Japan, heading south, back to Okinawa. A moment of relief engulfs him like a fresh breeze.

  “Welcome to Japan, ol’ girl,” he says, patting her throttles before resuming his scan for adversaries.

  But he sees no one. They are alone in the sky again.

  Chapter Five

  John’s fuel and oxygen supplies are in good shape, so he climbs back to 20,000 feet for the trip to Okinawa. Far below, the wispy smoke trail from the wounded B-24 grows more dense. After about 15 minutes, he catches up with the crippled bomber – she has two engines shut down and a third trailing smoke--and the two P-51’s that had lagged behind to protect her. The fighters orbit above the
stricken, slow-flying aircraft as their pilots worry about fuel.

  John chats with the P-51 leader on the standard hailing frequency.

  “We figure it’s gonna take them another two hours to make Okinawa,” the fighter pilot says with a heavy drawl. “We’ve got about enough gas for another 30 minutes of this ring-around-the-rosy shit. Hey, Kodak, you ain’t doing anything much… you’ll be in radio range of home way before us… How about giving bomber command a heads-up about this busted dump truck?”

  “No problem, little buddy,” John says. “Wilco…You take care now.”

  The P-51 leader is in a chatty mood.

  “You can bet on that, Kodak…Sure would be nice if the Marines mopped up some more of those islands down there. We could use the extra landing strips.”

  John could not agree with him more. Those rugged green islands--the Ryukyu chain–were just jagged mountain tops sticking out of the sea. And they were teeming with airstrips. It looked like they carved one out of the trees and foliage everywhere there was a piece of flat ground. They would make wonderful emergency landing fields for American planes in trouble.

  John checked his navigation charts. Even with the slight headwind, f-stop is making good time. No sooner does that comforting thought pass than she lurches, yawing hard right, then drops her right wing. The smooth, muffled drone suddenly sounds labored – the right engine is losing power. “Shit! Damned supercharger’s acting up!” John mutters as he scans the engine instruments. They tell the same tale as the seat of John’s pants: manifold pressure on the right engine is dropping erratically. He pulls both engines back and descends.

  The trip home just became longer and more dangerous. They will be lower, slower, and more vulnerable to fighters. And now they just might run out of gas.