Fire From the Sky: Surviving the Kamikaze Threat

FIRE

FROM THE

SKY

A ‘Zeke’ dives out of the smoke in a kamikaze attack on the escort carrier White Plains (CVE 66), 25 October 1944.

FIRE

FROM THE

SKY

Surviving the Kamikaze Threat

Robert C Stern

Copyright © Robert C Stern 2010

First published in Great Britain in 2010 by

Seaforth Publishing

An imprint of Pen & Sword Books Ltd

47 Church Street

Barnsley S70 2AS

www.seaforthpublishing.com

Email [email protected]

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 84832038 3

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

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without prior permission in writing of both the copyright owner and the

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The right of Robert C Stern to be identified as the author of this work has

been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents

Act 1988.

Typeset by Mac Style, Beverley

Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Group

Contents

Dedication

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED to the memory of my father-in-law, Samuel Edgar Varner, who, as a young man from Ohio, served his country aboard the escort carrier Munda (CVE 104) in the Pacific. Like most American sailors in the war, he was never the target of a kamikaze.

Acknowledgements

IT GOES WITHOUT SAYING that no-one writes a book like this without assistance from a great many people. This work is no exception. Many people have helped in ways small and large whose contributions I failed to note. To them I offer my sincerest apologies and gratitude. Those whose help I made the effort to record are listed here:

Dave McComb, who runs the Destroyer History Foundation and its indispensable website – www.destroyerhistory.org;

Rick E Davis, who helped with photo identification and generally useful information;

Richard Worth, who generously shared a number of documents, including the ORG reports, which helped immeasurably in the tactical analysis;

Rich Tetrault, who runs the USSLipan website (http://usslipan.com), for the kind permission to use Fred Kimball’s story of the loss of USSBarry (ex-APD 29) and LSM 59;

Michael Mohl, for permission to use photographs found at the NavSource Naval History site (www.navsource.org), most of which are USN photographs, but some are from private sources; and

Pete Wasmund and George E Stewart, for permission to use photographs and information from the VW-1 website (http://vwiassoc.tripod.com).

More anonymously, but no less importantly, I wish to thank the staffs at the US National Archives, College Park, MD and the British National Archives, Kew, Richmond, Surrey.

Photo Credits

Almost all the photographs used in this book were copied by the author from the several imagery sources at the US National Archives. Most are from the US Navy’s Second World War photography collections: Record Group (RG) 80, the Bureau of Aeronautics (BuAer) collection, and RG 19, the Bureau of Ships (BuShips) collection. Some were found appended to action reports found in the Modern Military Records section, also at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) facility in College Park, MD.

The other primary source is the Naval History & Heritage Command (NHHC – formerly the Naval Historical Center), the US Navy’s repository of all Second World War photography not at NARA.

The few photos that are not from NARA or NHHC are credited as appropriate. If a photo has no credit, it simply means I failed to record or have lost the record of the source of the photo. I apologize to any who are thus unacknowledged by my sometimes poor record-keeping.

Introduction

THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT what was in 1944 a new kind of war. One that, at least for those on the receiving end, had never been seen before. Men have been fighting each other in an organized fashion since before there was writing to record the event, but the Ancient Egyptians or Chinese would not have felt too out of place on a Napoleonic battlefield, despite the technological advances in the intervening years. Even a hundred years later, when the Allies and the Germans practiced wholesale slaughter on the Western Front, the ideologies that drove those men to war would have felt familiar. Despite the sheer butchery of the First World War, the issues being decided weren’t much different than those fought over thousands of years earlier. Emerging nationalism and widespread industrialization made the weapons deadlier and the emotions stronger, but the First World War ended like so many earlier wars, with exhaustion on both sides and the transfer of some land and money to the victors.

But something seismic changed in the years immediately following the Treaty of Versailles. The peace that was supposed to follow the ‘War to End All Wars’ failed catastrophically. Fiercely ultra-nationalist factions came to power in a number of countries, and similar ideologies gained strength in the liberal democracies of the West. Aided by new communications technologies and armed with ever more destructive weaponry, these regimes acted against enemies internal and external with unparalleled savagery. The most extreme examples of this rise of nationalism occurred in Germany and Japan. Certainly, the re-emergence of Germany as an aggressor state so soon after the end of the First World War surprised few. The emergence of an aggrieved, aggressive Japan as a world power was less expected.

Barely 60 years after being ‘opened’ by an American squadron under Matthew Perry, the Japanese had become a power in the western Pacific strong enough to merit the attention of American war planners. (The first War Plan Orange, anticipating a war in the Pacific against Japan, was created in 1919 but less formal planning had begun as early as 1897.) Having emerged victorious in wars against China and Russia, the Japanese signed on to the Allied cause in the First World War only to be shocked and angered at their shabby treatment at the Paris Peace Conference which produced the Treaty of Versailles. They responded to this perceived slight with renewed determination to become a major power in global politics. Inevitably this put them on a collision course with the established colonial powers in the Pacific: Great Britain, France, the Netherlands and especially the other power expanding its influence in the region, the United States.

Just as the Nazi state used racism to define its world view – touting the virtues of Aryan blood while demonizing Jews, Slavs, Gypsies and other ‘inferior races’ – the Japanese also saw the world in starkly racial terms. There were, however, important differences between Nazi racism and that of the Japanese. It is absolutely true that the Japanese, like the Germans, considered themselves a superior race. They looked down on other Asian peoples, considering the Koreans and Chinese to be inferior both physically and mentally. Their attitudes towards the West were more ambiguous. They recognized that Western technology paved the way to future power, but saw Europeans and Americans as spiritually weak. The persistence with which the Japanese and all Asians were looked down on by Western societies, particularly in the US, was a constant source of irritation.

There are many examples of discrimination against the Japanese in the US in the years leading up to the First World War. Just one example was the Alien Land Law of 1913 passed by the California State Legislature, which prohibited all aliens ineligible for citizenship from owning land in the state. This cryptic language masks the fact that the only people specifically excluded by federal law from obtaining citizenship were Asians.

But it was the Paris Peace Conference and its aftermath, including the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, that doomed the Japanese and the West to inevitable conflict. At the beginning of the war, the Japanese had joined the Allied side and took over a number of German colonies in Asia and the Pacific. While the Paris peacemakers readily agreed to Japan’s retention of the seized island territories, there was resistance to her keeping the Chinese province of Shandong, which deeply displeased the Japanese. To make matters worse, an important initiative by the Japanese was unceremoniously rebuffed. In an attempt to formally establish their equality on the world stage, the Japanese delegation proposed an amendment to Article 21, which was an innocuous one-sentence article stating that the League of Nations Covenant would not supersede existing regional understandings, such as the Monroe Doctrine. The Japanese amendment would have added the following language:

The equality of nations being a basic principle of the League of Nations, the High Contracting Parties agree to accord, as soon as possible, to all alien nationals of States members of the League equal and just treatment in every respect, making no distinction, either in law or in fact, on account of their race or nationality.

This was language aimed directly at discriminatory laws such Australia’s Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 and the California land law. It has been claimed that the Japanese did not fully think through the implications of this amendment, which would have invalidated much of the colonial system that allowed a small number of ‘advanced nations’ to rule large parts of Africa and Asia. In fact, it would have done no such thing, and indeed Japan had no particular interest in destroying the colonial system. Quite the opposite: Japan simply wanted to be accepted as an equal member of the ‘club’. However, it was easy to convince the other colonial powers, who just happened to be entirely white, that their grip on the world was under dire threat by the rising assertiveness of the yellow, brown and black peoples of the world, which seemed to be epitomized by Japan’s desire to be treated as an equal partner.¹

Needless to say, the Japanese amendment, as originally drafted, never came to a vote of the League Commission. The staunch opposition of Great Britain and the US doomed this version of the amendment to failure. A much watered-down version, which simply declared the ‘principle of equality of nations and just treatment of their nationals’ was brought to a vote on 11 April 1919. It received the support of eight countries at the Conference, including France and Italy as well as Japan among the major powers. Great Britain and the US, along with Portugal and Romania, abstained. The American President Woodrow Wilson, acting as chairman, ruled that, despite the support of a majority of nations present, a matter of this significance required a unanimous vote and that the amendment had therefore failed.²

Despite attempts to mollify the Japanese by granting them possession of Shandong over the strong objections of the Chinese, they left the Conference convinced they had been treated unfairly. There is no doubt that their treatment in Paris was as significant a factor in the rise of ultra-nationalism in Japan in the 1920s and 1930s as it was in Germany during the same period. The West, particularly the US, and Japan were set on a collision course that neither side seemed willing or able to alter. Each side looked at the situation in the Pacific through a lens of attitudes and prejudices that could hardly have been more different. It is entirely fitting that the war in the Pacific began with an attack, seen by the Japanese as a bold stroke, which was regarded by the Americans as an act of ‘infamy’.

Indeed, these diametrically-opposed views of the Pearl Harbor attack offer an insight into the very different psychologies of the Japanese and the Western nations attacked in 1941. For the European nations who became embroiled in the Pacific, this was just another front in a war to which they were already fully committed. To those European powers whose colonies were seized in the initial Japanese onslaught, the losses were galling, but not disastrous, and, in the short term, did little to change the way they were fighting the war. On the other hand, most Americans had been quite happy staying out of what was, between September 1939 and December 1941, a purely European war. The attack on Pearl Harbor changed everything. Suddenly, the Americans were not only in the war, but were in it with the determined fury of a nation that believed itself the victim of unprecedented treachery. That there was a strong racial element to the American reaction to the Pearl Harbor attack is undeniable. From the beginning, the Japanese were referred to openly as ‘Japs’, ‘Nips’ and much worse.

Regardless of the motive, the Allies – for much of the war in the Pacific that meant mainly the Americans – had decisively turned the tide of the war beginning in August 1942. Two years later, the Japanese had been pushed out of large areas they had controlled from early in the war. In the south, the Japanese had been systematically evicted from the Solomons and, while a sizable force remained on New Guinea, it was isolated and impotent. Similarly, the major naval bases at Rabaul and Truk had been bypassed, and the Marianas and Peleliu lost. It was obvious to all that the Philippines were the next target. The only question was exactly when they would be invaded and which of the nine main islands would be the first target. It had to be equally obvious to any Japanese aware of the true situation, which was only a small circle of military and political leaders, that the vast Allied superiority in population, industrial capacity and technology must inevitably lead to the defeat of Japan.

It was at just this critical point in the war that a trait deeply ingrained in the Japanese psyche came to the fore. To an extent unique in the world, the Japanese have always been attracted to failed heroes.³ From the beginnings of their history as a people, the Japanese have displayed a tendency towards hoganbiiki. The term literally means ‘sympathy for the lieutenant’, referring to a well-known character from the 12th century, Minamoto no Yoshitsune. As lieutenant to his older brother, he had led the forces that defeated his family’s enemies, but he was then betrayed by the same brother who now saw him as a rival. Yoshitsune went from acclaimed hero to fugitive in a matter of weeks, finally being hunted down with a small band of followers. His loyal retainers sold their lives dearly, delaying an overwhelming attack long enough for Yoshitsune to commit ritual suicide. Over the years since Yoshitsune’s time, the concept of hoganbiiki was generalized to ‘sympathy for the loser’, somewhat similar to the common habit of ‘rooting for the underdog’ found in many Western societies, but more profound and with far-reaching implications.

Failed heroes like Yoshitsune and Kusunoki Masashige, a 14th-century samurai who supported the Emperor Go-daigo in a vain attempt to reestablish direct Imperial rule, served as important role models in a society where sincerity (makoto) and nobility of purpose are valued more than success and wealth, and a solitary suicide after the failure of a noble effort is seen as a fitting end to an admirable life. Masashige, in particular, was extolled by both the Shoguns of the Edo period, and then by the Imperial Government after the Meiji Restoration, as a prime example of loyalty and obedience, even if it led to certain death.

It is important to note that the Japanese hero always had chances to compromise and go on living. The hero never set out to seek his own death; he just did not avoid it when it became the only noble resolution. Masashige, in particular, had many opportunities to change sides in a civil war during which many others frequently did just that. Masashige refused, a choice which had the double effect of putting him on a trajectory that led to his death and, at the same time, assuring his place in the pantheon of Japanese heroes.

The West has its failed heroes, though the number is much smaller and their place in history much less significant than their Japanese counterparts. Roland at Roncesvalles and Davey Crockett at the Alamo are two examples. Both died in battle against desperate odds, assuring their place in history in a way that might seem similar to Yoshitsune or Masashige. However, there are important differences. Roland and Crockett died at the height of their strength and fame; these Japanese heroes both experienced a dramatic reversal of fortune and had become outcasts and fugitives before their deaths. Roland and Crockett died fighting for a cause that was ultimately victorious; Japanese failed heroes are consistently found fighting on the losing side. In most cases, these Japanese heroes were not only on the losing side, but knew their death would not turn loss into victory. For a hero to go to his death with foreknowledge of the futility of his sacrifice only adds to his appeal to the Japanese. On the other hand, it is difficult to find many examples of a popular hero in the West who died fighting for the side that ultimately lost, much less for a cause known to be lost at the time of the sacrifice. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Western failed heroes die fighting; the Japanese hero almost always takes his own life.

Ultimately, the Japanese failed hero, when faced with defeat, saw death as the only acceptable end. Surrender and capture were seen as the ultimate humiliation. The Americans who fought on obscure islands such as Guadalcanal and Tarawa quickly learned that the Japanese would rarely surrender, even when defeat was unavoidable. Probably the most extreme example before the war came to the Philippines was at Saipan. The Americans put three divisions ashore, 71,000 soldiers and Marines, starting on 15 June 1944, on an island of slightly more than 44 square miles (115km²), defended by a single reinforced Japanese division. That the defenders would fight with fanatical courage was expected. What made Saipan different from previous invasions of Japanese-held islands was the presence of a large Japanese civilian population. As the Americans advanced from the south, the battered remnants of the Japanese 43rd Infantry Division and most of the civilians were compressed in a small pocket at the northern end of the island. On 7 July, some 3000 Japanese soldiers made a final desperate suicide charge at the American lines, including waves of already-wounded soldiers hobbling to their deaths rather than surrender. In the end, less than 1000 of the more than 31,000 Japanese soldiers were taken alive. But far more appalling to the Americans was the sight of entire civilian families blowing themselves up with grenades or leaping to their deaths off the high cliffs at the north of the island. Approximately 15,000 Japanese civilians surrendered to the Americans out of a pre-invasion population of 23–25,000.⁴ Most of the 8–10,000 civilians who died in the battle were unintended victims of the heavy air and naval bombardments. It is impossible to know how many committed suicide, but it estimated that between 1000 and 1500 threw themselves off the northern cliffs.

Thus it cannot be a surprise, with a vast Allied invasion fleet approaching the Philippines, that the Japanese resorted to organized suicide attacks. The naval aviation units on Luzon had a significant percentage of veteran pilots, many of them having fought over the Solomons and New Guinea. It is hardly surprising for these men to volunteer for suicide missions, men who had years of military indoctrination and who knew first-hand the slim odds facing even the best-trained aviator against the overwhelming numerical and material superiority of the Allied fleets. But as the first waves of suicide attacks thinned the squadrons’ ranks of experienced pilots, they were most often replaced by young draftees with only minimal training who nevertheless chose to become suicide pilots. It is these men who represent the kamikaze in its most elemental form.

These young men were not samurai. To a surprising extent, they were university students, often from liberal arts curricula, whose draft deferments were rescinded in 1943. Most were between 20 and 25 years of age.⁵ All were volunteers, meaning they had been requested, but not ordered, to join a Special Attack Unit. However, the voluntary nature of this decision must be understood within the context of the times and of Japanese society. The difficulty in determining how free pilots were to decide whether to volunteer can be seen from this example, describing the actions of a group of Imperial Army pilots who had been asked to volunteer for a Special Attack Unit. The commanding officer, specifically to remove the possibility of social pressure forcing a reluctant pilot to volunteer, told his men that they were to come to his office singly to announce their decision.

What most struck Nagatsuka at the moment was that his commanding officer had used the word ‘ask’; for, as he points out, ‘in the army a superior always ordered, never requested.’ On the following morning, when Nagatsuka was in the canteen eating breakfast with his companions, one of them blurted out, ‘We’re all of us ready to accept the mission, aren’t we? So let’s go at once and give him our answer!’ The men all nodded in agreement, but one of them lightheartedly suggested they might at least finish their meal.⁶

Thus, despite the care taken by this commanding officer to allow each man to make his own decision, the impetus to conform to the group was strong. It would have taken a very brave young man to stand up to that kind of social pressure. The men described in this excerpt were, like the first wave of Navy pilots, for the most part veterans of multiple campaigns, but, based on most contemporary reports, a similar unanimity of purpose ran through the barely-trained recruits who made up the majority of the Special Attack Units by mid-1945.⁷ Letters home and final testaments, often in the form of poetry, uniformly talk of the sense of obligation (on) these young men felt, mainly towards their parents and by extension to their nation. A commonly repeated theme was the hope that, by going to their death in defense of their homeland, they were in some small way repaying the debt they owed to parents and nation.

There is no question that the first wave of kamikaze pilots were volunteers in the sense that anyone would understand, but when tokko attacks became the primary defensive weapon of the Japanese in 1945, the number of pilots needed increased dramatically and it became necessary to gather them into organized units ready to deploy at a moments notice. Simply lining up a squadron of well-trained pilots and asking for volunteers would no longer provide the numbers needed.⁸ Therefore, the Japanese turned to the numerous aviation training schools and made a formal request for volunteers to fill out the ranks of the tokkotai. These requests came in two forms. Most units were simply supplied with application forms which students could fill out or not as they chose. The amount of privacy each student had to make his choice without the knowledge of his peers must have varied considerably from unit to unit, but most accounts report that there was no overt pressure to apply. A different method was used to recruit pilots from the accelerated training units set up especially for those college students whose exemptions had expired. Because these young men were presumed to be more sophisticated and cosmopolitan in outlook, it was feared they wouldn’t volunteer in sufficient numbers. Therefore, student-pilots in these units were each given a survey form in which they were asked about their desire to join a tokkotai and asked to select from the choices ‘desire earnestly’, ‘wish’ and ‘do not wish’. They were told they could also not mark a choice. However, each survey form had to be signed and handed in, which obviously increased the pressure to volunteer. Regardless of how a young pilot might be induced to volunteer, there was never a shortage of pilots in the tokkotai. If anything, the opposite problem existed. During the period between April and June 1945, when kamikaze attacks on the Allied fleet off Okinawa reached a crescendo, it was not unusual for pilots not chosen for a particular mission to protest at being passed over. Many more pilots trained to fly kamikaze missions than actually died on such missions. Most who survived did so because the war ended before their turn had come up. More than one account by a tokko pilot who survived the war mentions a lingering sense of disorientation, as if they felt they had already died and now had to learn all over again how to be alive. Some never made a complete readjustment.⁹

It is illustrative to look at what happened when the Mitate No. 2 tokkotai flew its mission against the Allied fleet at Iwo Jima on 21 February 1945. Most of that unit’s aircraft were two-seat dive-bombers and three-seat torpedo-bombers. These aircraft could have been flown by a pilot alone, but on this mission, every seat in every aircraft was occupied.¹⁰ Not only were individual pilots flying to their death, but they were often doing so with other men who equally had chosen to die for family and Emperor.

True to the tradition of the failed hero, few kamikaze pilots expressed the belief that their sacrifice would change the course of the war. They accepted that Japan would lose the war, but it mattered greatly to them how the war was lost. Central was concern that the ineffable essence of the nation, most often described as the ‘Yamato Spirit’ (Yamato-damaishii), should survive.¹¹ A commonly-expressed sentiment among pilots was the hope that their sacrifice would give the nation the moral strength to survive the coming defeat and re-emerge stronger.

The critical point often misunderstood by Western observers is that these men weren’t automata mindlessly volunteering for these missions. Their letters and testaments confirm that they were mainly intelligent young men fully aware of the choice they were making. Nor is there much evidence that they were motivated towards suicide by any strong religious belief that their death would be followed by a personal reward in an afterlife.¹² Very few expressed such a belief. The young Japanese pilots who made up the tokkotai were no more ‘brainwashed’ than were the young Americans who flocked to recruiting centers after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The difference was the extreme to which their sense of patriotism and obligation led them.

It would be inaccurate and unjust to state that all of these young men went to their deaths enthusiastically. They were after all young and many had wives or girlfriends. Additionally, many had been university students, a position of rare prestige and potential in Japan at the time. They, more than the average Japanese, had been taught to think critically and independently. So it is not surprising that some expressed regret and sometimes anger at the fate that required them to die.¹³ Yet they flew to their deaths, regretful or not.

It should also be noted that taking off on a kamikaze mission did not require the pilot to die. His mission was to crash-dive into an enemy target, and if unable to do so due to mechanical failure or inability to find a target, he was expected to make every effort to return safely to a friendly airbase. Undoubtedly, some who returned to base may not have really been forced to return, but this did not alter the pilots situation. Ultimately, once a pilot entered the pipeline that led from flight school to tokkotai to a kamikaze mission, there was no escape without unbearable shame.

* *  *

This introduction has been an attempt to explain, at least in part, how the whole idea of suicide attack, which was and still is so foreign to the West, can be seen as consistent with the history and traditions of the Japanese. The rest of this book is an attempt to study the impact of the kamikaze weapon. It will be analyzed much as any other weapon might be, by looking at its origins and its employment, and by asking whether it was effective in achieving its mission goals. To answer this question, it is necessary to look beyond the cockpit of the aircraft as it dove on its intended target, and to consider the effect it had on the sailor staring up at the dark specks against the sky so clearly intent on doing him harm.

The effect was profound, to say the least. One articulate observer noted:

There was a hypnotic fascination to a sight so alien to our Western philosophy. We watched each plunging kamikaze with the detached horror of one witnessing a terrible spectacle rather than as the intended victim.¹⁴

Certainly not all observers felt as detached, and while some expressed a sense of admiration for the desperate courage of the pilots, many more expressed incomprehension and more than a little fear. Some ridiculed the kamikaze pilot as cowardly or stupid, but this was an obvious psychological mechanism for dealing with the fear of a kamikaze attack. Being hit by a fast-diving bomb-laden aircraft was likely to be far more devastating than a conventional attack by bomb or torpedo. Much like an attack by a contemporary anti-ship cruise missile, it was often the physical impact of the airframe weighing a ton or more and the burning of unspent fuel in that airframe that caused damage far beyond that caused by the explosion of the aircraft’s payload.¹⁵

It is critical in looking at the kamikaze as a weapon and in assessing its effectiveness, to judge its impact on the morale of the defenders. To a great extent, a kamikaze was a psychological weapon, perhaps even a spiritual weapon. To the Japanese who flew these aircraft and the senior officers who sent them to their deaths, the main value of the kamikaze weapon was in its demonstration of the superiority of the Japanese national spirit to what was believed to be the weak and corrupted spirit of the enemy, as if the beauty and sincerity (makoto) of these deaths would overawe the enemy and cause them to hesitate.

* *  *

Note #1: ‘Kamikaze’ was not a pronunciation commonly used by the Japanese during the Second World War to describe suicide attacks. It is a valid pronunciation of the kanji characters which were used from the beginning to describe this method of attack, but was not the one used most frequently by the Japanese during the war. (The Japanese have multiple ways of pronouncing most kanji [Chinese-derived] characters – as many as four possible Chinese-derived [on’yomi] pronunciations and often also one or more Japanese-derived [kun’yomi] pronunciations.) The pronunciation most used by the Japanese at the time was shinbu, an on’yomi pronunciation;¹⁶ kamikaze is a valid kun’yomi pronunciation of the kanji, but was considered at the time to be an insufficiently reverent reading of the characters. The mistake in the pronunciation of the kanji was made by American translators during the war, most of whom were nisei – second-generation Japanese-Americans – for whom the nuances of pronunciation may have been a mystery. However, this pronunciation has since been adopted, even in Japan, as standard. The English translation of the words as ‘divine wind’ is basically correct, though ‘spirit wind’ might be more technically correct.

With this understanding, I use the term kamikaze in this book because it is well understood by readers where shinbu would not be. I use the term interchangeably with tokko to describe the planned and deliberate tactic of crashing an aircraft into a target. I use the term tokkotai to designate the units that carried out kamikaze (or tokko) attacks.

Note #2: This book focuses on the most common form of suicide attack used by the Japanese, the attempted crash of a piloted aircraft into a ship. This focus includes the use of the specially-designed ‘flying-bomb’ christened Ohka (Cherry Blossom). Ohkas were used in very limited numbers and with little success, but they fall within the category of piloted flight into a target. There were, however, other suicide attack methods which will not be covered in this book. The best known of these was the so-called ‘banzai charge’, so named because the attackers came on in a heedless assault most often yelling ‘Tennoheika banzai!’, which means ‘Long live the Emperor!’. Referred to by the Japanese most often as gyokusai totsugeki, meaning literally ‘charge of the shattered jewels’, they were attacks made in desperation by Japanese troops when cornered and facing certain defeat. The aim was to meet death in battle rather than accept surrender or commit suicide. The soldiers who took part in such charges, most famously on Attu, Saipan and Okinawa, did not expect to survive the attack. Perhaps the earliest recorded example of a ‘banzai charge’ was the final attack by the defenders of Attu on 29 May 1943.

As the war turned irrevocably against the Japanese, and planned suicide operations took the place of impromptu actions such as a ‘banzai charge’, the Japanese, particularly the Imperial Navy, came up with a number of suicide-attack weapons. Probably the best known was the kaiten (Destiny Changer) manned torpedo, based on the highly successful Type 93 ‘Long Lance’ torpedo. Some 400 were produced and approximately 100 actually sent on missions against Allied targets. The number of acknowledged successes was very few. The US Navy officially credits kaitens with the sinking of one tanker and one destroyer escort. A persistent theory states that the heavy cruiser Indianapolis (CA 35) was sunk by a kaiten with terrible loss of life soon after delivering parts of the first atomic bombs to Tinian, although this was denied by the captain of the submarine credited with her sinking and by the US Navy. The Japanese also designed and built two other larger suicide submarine types, the kairyu (Sea Dragon), of which over 200 were built, and the somewhat larger koryu (Rain Dragon), of which more than 100 were built. These boats were being prepared to repel the expected Allied invasion of Japan; in the event, none saw operational use.

A small explosive motor boat, named shin’yo (Sea Shaker), was built in enormous quantities, over 6000 being assembled before the end of the war. Most were kept in home waters for use against the Allied invasion fleet, but approximately 400 were sent to Okinawa and the Philippines, and some of these were used against the Allied shipping there. Again, successes were few. It is believed that seven ships, all auxiliaries, were sunk by shin’yos and several others damaged. The largest ship damaged by shin’yo attack was the destroyer Hutchins (DD 476) off Okinawa on 27 April 1945.

Note #3: This war was fought in a part of the world mainly controlled by colonial powers – European, American or Japanese. Places of interest – islands, cities, etc. – were either given names in the language of the colonial masters or names that approximated the local name as filtered through the ears and mouth of the colonizers. The years since the Second World War have brought independence to this region and with it, a widespread process of renaming of locations in native languages. The place names used by the people who made this history would, for the most part, not be found on a map today. In this book, I have used the names for locations that would have been used by an educated English-speaker of 1944–5. For example, the island now known as Taiwan was called Formosa at the time. Where I felt it necessary, I have noted the modern name the first time a location appears in this text.

–

1 –

Portents and Precursors

(October 1942–June 1944)

FROM ITS BEGINNING in the skies over Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, Americas involvement in the Second World War had a character different from all previous wars.¹ Righteous indignation hardened the nations will to fight and win a war most had hoped to avoid. But steely resolve couldn’t alter the fact that the nation was hardly ready to fight this war, and the news from across the Pacific was dominated by reports of Japanese victories. Kowloon was rapidly occupied, cutting Hong Kong off from the mainland. Japanese troops had landed at several points along the Malayan Peninsula and were driving south towards Singapore against light resistance. Air raids on Clark Field in the Philippines had largely destroyed what American air power there was west of Hawaii. Three days after the Pearl Harbor raid, amidst this steady stream of bad news, the Americans found a hero, except that, just as this war was very different than those of the past, so was the hero.

Capt. Colin P Kelly Jr USAAC was barely 29 years old, but he was the pilot in command of one of the Boeing B-17 (Flying Fortress) bombers of the 19th Bomb Group that had survived two days of Japanese air raids which had started on 8 December.² Kelly’s bomber had survived the devastation at Clark Field because his squadron, the 14th Bomb Squadron (BS) had been transferred to Del Monte airfield in northern Mindanao as part of a dispersal plan. Beginning at dawn on 10 December, Japanese forces began attempting to land troops at Aparri in the far north of Luzon, the main Philippine island, and at Vigan further south along the west coast of the island. By this time, some at least of the B-17s from Del Monte had returned to Luzon, because the primitive airstrip at Del Monte lacked all but the most rudimentary maintenance facilities and had no ordnance to rearm the bombers. Eight B-17S of the 14th BS spent the night of 9–10 December at an improvised strip at San Marcelino, 50km west of the main base, because of continuing concerns about a repeat Japanese air raid on Clark Field. Before dawn the next morning, two of the 14th’s bombers flew to Clark, one for repairs, the other carrying the squadron’s CO. Informed of the Japanese forces off Luzon, the six remaining bombers at San Marcelino were ordered to proceed to Clark for fuel and bombs. The base commander agreed to allow only three of the six to land, again from fear of air attack; the other three were instructed to circle east of the field while the first three were serviced. One of the three allowed to land was Kelly’s B-17C (40–2045).

The base commanders fears were well-founded. At 0930, incoming enemy aircraft were reported and the three bombers were ordered into the air, despite the fact that only one of them had received a full load of eight 600lb (272kg) bombs. Kelly’s had been loaded with only three bombs. A fourth bomber, the one that had arrived earlier for repairs, also took off and joined the three. Two bombers, Kelly’s and another piloted by 1st Lt. George E Schaetzel, headed towards Aparri; the other two went towards Vigan. The two B-17S heading towards Aparri flew separately and attacked individually. Schaetzel started bombing the transports off the beach and then, running into Japanese Mitsubishi A6M Type 0 Carrier Fighters (‘Zekes’), broke off the attack and dove into nearby clouds, which allowed him to nurse his damaged bomber back to San Marcelino.³

Kelly arrived while Schaetzel was being chased by the Japanese fighters and was able to choose his target without interference, except for ineffective anti-aircraft fire from the enemy warships. He opted to ignore the transports, instead aiming his bombs at the warships further offshore providing fire support. The bombardier reported that one of the three bombs hit its target amidships and another just missed astern. As the bomber turned and headed back towards Clark Field, the navigator got a good look at the target and reported a noticeable oil slick forming around the ship and seeing the crew abandoning ship. The belly gunner had the best view from his ‘bathtub’. He reported: ‘The fire seemed to be spreading all the way to the water, and the ship had stopped moving altogether.’⁴

Unbeknownst to the B-17’s crew, ten ‘Zekes’ had followed Kelly’s bomber back towards the shore. One was piloted by Petty Officer l/c Sakai Saburo, one of the most successful Japanese pilots of the Pacific War. Sakai reported being shocked to find that they had been attacked by a solitary,