In fact, kamikaze operations had been studied, debated, and planned for more than a year prior to their first appearance in the Pacific. Captain Eiichiro Jo, a carrier commander who had previously served as the emperor Hirohito’s naval aide-de-camp and as a naval attaché in the Washington embassy, had proposed a “Special Attack Corps” in a plan circulated in June 1943.48 In March 1944, before his fall from power, Prime Minister Hideki Tojo had approved preliminary plans for dedicated suicide units. Admiral Koshiro Oikawa, who served as chief of the Naval General Staff in late 1944, pushed to institutionalize such tactics throughout the naval aviation corps.49 References to “sure victory weapons” and the “body crashing spirit” were common in newspapers and radio broadcasts after the fall of Saipan in July 1944. On October 6, several weeks before the first suicide air corps was organized in the Philippines, a Japanese admiral told a radio interviewer that the naval air corps would shortly commence “body-crashing” tactics to “ram an enemy plane or ship.” He expected such attacks to turn the tide of the war: “This method of warfare, I am sure, will never become ineffective. On the contrary, its possibilities are inexhaustible—it will become better and better.”50
By the fall of 1944, an arsenal of purpose-built suicide weapons was in advanced production. These included a manned rocket, the Oka (“cherry blossom”), which was dropped from a larger aircraft and dove on enemy ships at velocities approaching the speed of sound. A one-man suicide submarine called the Kaiten (“heaven shaker”) was released by a larger “mother” submarine; its pilot would drive it into an enemy hull like a torpedo. A small wooden speedboat called the Shinyo (“ocean shaker”) carried a two-ton warhead, and could charge into the midst of an enemy fleet at 50 knots. Fukuryus, “crawling dragons,” were scuba divers who would carry mines underwater and attach them directly to the hulls of American ships. There were others as well, including gliders that could be launched from mountain peaks, and explosive vests redolent of a more recent era. Some such weapons and vehicles would prove more effective than others in combat. But the time and resources dedicated to these programs belied the myth that the kamikaze era began as a spontaneous, grassroots movement in October 1944.
Some scholars, both Japanese and Western, have argued that the kamikaze phenomenon was an innate expression of Japanese ideologies and traditions, including bushido (the way of the samurai), State Shinto, Zen Buddhism, and the custom of suicide to expunge shame. In a rival view, the kamikaze was a grotesque perversion of Japanese ideals, foisted upon a bewildered and prostrate people by the militarist regime and its propagandists. Elements of truth are probably found in both views. Shinto and Buddhism held that the self was an illusion, and therefore death was not to be feared. Shinto’s myriad gods (kami) revolved around the divine emperor, with whom every individual Japanese was said to be essentially cosubstantial. To die in combat was a purifying rite, burning or washing away the detritus and corruption accrued in earthly life. Only the slain warrior’s undefiled essence remained, and it was subsumed into the emperor’s divine essence. Practitioners of Zen and other schools of Buddhism offered a harmonious theology rooted in the precept that life and death were essentially one and the same. Meditation tended toward the annihilation of the ego. According to Goro Sugimoto, an army officer and influential writer: “Egolessness and self-extinction are most definitely not separate states. On the contrary, one comes to realize that they are identical.”51 A Buddhist scholar linked kamikaze tactics to the revealed truth of Zen: “The source of the spirit of the Special Attack Forces lies in the denial of the individual self and the rebirth of the soul, which takes upon itself the burden of history. From ancient times Zen has described this conversion of mind as the achievement of complete enlightenment.”52
To die by one’s own hand had long been associated with samurai ideals of honor and fidelity. Suicide offered a solution to the loss of face (giri, or honor). That was a chief theme of Japan’s national epic, the story of the 47 Ronin. As defeat loomed in late 1944, the entire nation was poised to suffer a cataclysmic loss of face. The combat-suicide of the kamikaze pilots, the flower of Japanese youth, could be seen as a ritualistic collective sacrifice that redeemed some portion of the national giri.
Beginning in the early 1930s, with the start of the era the Japanese call their “dark valley,” an increasingly repressive ultranationalist regime choked off dissent and took control of all sources of information. In this benighted environment, academic charlatans were encouraged to conjure up a self-serving mytho-history that fit the domestic and foreign priorities of the imperial militarist agenda. For centuries of Japanese history, the samurai had ruled the country and its people. Even more than in medieval Europe or other feudal societies, the elite warrior caste had dominated and shaped the nation’s culture. After the Meiji Restoration, and especially in the decades before the Second World War, it was thought that samurai ideals might serve as a template for national development, and the nation transmuted into a master race of warriors—thus giving Japan hegemonic strength among nations, just as the samurai had once wielded uncontested power over their fellow Japanese. But bushido had always been an elite, class-bound creed, and was not necessarily suited to mass adoption across the population. In the transition, it underwent subtle but significant distortions. The ancient bushido of the sword-bearing samurai had emphasized zealous loyalty to a local feudal lord—but not to the emperor, who had been an obscure and little-thought-of figure before the Meiji era. Bushido meant stoicism, self-discipline, and dignity in one’s personal bearing; it emphasized mastery of the martial arts through long training and practice; it lauded sacrifice in service to duty, without the slightest fear of death; it demanded asceticism and simplicity in daily life, without regard to comforts, appetites, or luxuries. The samurai was “to live as if already dead,” an outlook consonant with Buddhism; he was to regard death with fatalistic indifference, rather than cling to a life that was essentially illusory. Shame or dishonor might require suicide as atonement—and when a samurai killed himself, he did so by carving out his own viscera with a short steel blade.
But traditional bushido had not imposed an obligation to abhor retreat or surrender even when a battle had turned hopeless, and the old-time samurai who had done his duty in a losing cause could lay down his arms with honor intact. That was the last of the Thirty-Six Strategies, a Chinese classic studied by twenty generations of Japanese warriors: “When overwhelmed, you don’t fight; you surrender, compromise, or flee. . . . As long as you are not defeated, you have another chance to win.”53 Nor had suicidal tactics played an important role in previous eras of Japanese warfare. After the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05), the Japanese army had implemented sweeping changes in its culture and doctrine. The infantry manuals were rewritten to emphasize the importance of “fighting spirit” over such factors as technology and mechanical power, and the massed fixed-bayonet banzai charge was adopted as a preferred tactic in close combat. The “no surrender” ethos was codified after the First World War, and later amplified into an absolute injunction in the Japanese army’s revised field manual of 1928. The army and its publicists did not explicitly glorify suicide tactics until the fighting in and around Shanghai in 1932, when reports of “human bombs” and “human bullets” received headline coverage in Japanese newspapers. In the middle years of the Pacific War, this evolved into an exaltation of death in defeat, embodied in the expression gyokusai, “smashed jewels.” The lyrics of “Umi Yukaba,” which became tantamount to a national anthem, even seemed to celebrate death for its own sake, quite apart from the question of victory or defeat:
If I go away to sea,
I shall return a corpse awash.
If duty calls me to the mountain,
A verdant sward will be my pall.
Thus for the sake of the Emperor,
I will not die peacefully at home.54
Frequent repetition on the radio and at patriotic rallies might have left the impression, especially to younger J
apanese, that “Umi Yukaba” and the sentiments it contained had an ancient lineage. Actually, the lyrics dated back to an eighth-century poem, but that poem had previously been obscure, and had only been set to music in 1937. The explicit glorification of death in battle—death as an end in itself—was a recent phenomenon in Japanese culture, as were the “no surrender” principle, massed suicide attacks, and the master race ideology of imperial bushido. None of those ideas was anchored in the samurai tradition. The pre-Meiji samurai had fought only his fellow Japanese. He had no occasion to indulge in racial chauvinism, and he did not think at all of foreign conquest. He would have been puzzled by the suggestion that he and other Japanese were somehow cosubstantial with the divine emperor. Traditional bushido extolled humility, and the virtues of knowing and respecting one’s enemy. It did not preach an attitude of thickheaded truculence, or an expectation of heaven-sent victory. But those elements of the ancient warrior codes did not serve the purposes of the ultranationalist junta, so they were simply whitewashed out of history, education, and civic discourse.
In 1944, there was a simple, pragmatic case for aerial suicide tactics. The new crop of Japanese aviators was simply not good enough to hit the enemy fleet using conventional bombing or torpedo attacks. Air formations dispatched to hit American ships offshore were suffering disastrous losses, and enemy carrier planes were roaming the skies over the Philippines unchallenged. The Japanese had lost nearly a thousand airplanes in October alone, and the replacement aviators flying into Philippine airbases had only rudimentary skills. Pilot cadets were being rushed through truncated programs and sent to frontline units having logged just a few dozen hours of flight time. Most received no formal gunnery or navigation training. If these new aviators were going to die in their cockpits anyway, as seemed inevitable, perhaps suicide tactics offered the only realistic hope of scoring a valedictory blow against the enemy.
Captain Inoguchi, in charge of training the new aviators for kamikaze attacks, said that the problem was essentially spiritual—to inculcate the will to carry it out. As for tactics, he said, “the ordinary technique of the pilot is sufficient; no special training methods are necessary.” Compared to dive bombing, torpedo bombing, or dogfighting, diving a plane into a ship was a relatively simple maneuver. Even pilots with only basic flying skills should be able to manage it. Therefore, said Inoguchi, it was possible to use aviators “who have had short training and least flight experience.”55 Moreover, as the revised Sho plans were distributed to commanders throughout the region, it was evident that if the Japanese stood any hope of repelling MacArthur’s landings, their air forces must knock out at least a portion of the American fleet. They were under intense pressure to deliver results in the impending battle.
The kamikaze corps was inaugurated on October 20, 1944, on the same day (virtually in the same hour) that General MacArthur waded ashore on Leyte behind his amphibious invasion forces. The catalyst for this momentous development was Vice Admiral Takijiro Onishi, who flew in from Japan to take command of the First Air Fleet on October 19. Onishi was a fierce-looking character—moonfaced, with close-cropped hair and an athlete’s wiry physique. He was an intimidating figure, with a reputation among his colleagues for sudden rages; as a younger man he had often been reprimanded for lashing out violently at colleagues and others, especially after he had been drinking. He had risen from humble provincial origins in Hyugo Prefecture, near Kobe, and spoke in the round vowels of the regional Kansai dialect. Like Isoroku Yamamoto, his late friend and mentor, Onishi had cast his lot with naval aviation early in his career. He had held a series of important aviation jobs, ashore and afloat, since the pioneering days of the early 1920s, and he deserved an important share of the credit for building the naval air corps that had launched a successful aerial blitzkrieg across a 6,000-mile front in December 1941. Onishi had opposed the decision to attack the United States (as had Yamamoto), but he had helped to plan the attack on Pearl Harbor, and he had personally commanded the Formosa-based air groups that had decimated American airpower in the Philippines in the first week of the war.
When suicide tactics were first proposed in 1943, Onishi had sharply opposed the concept, and for more than a year he had maintained his opposition to this “heresy.”56 Undoubtedly, the subject was personally trying for Onishi, whose first team of aviators had worn the laurels of so many remarkable victories just two-and-a-half years earlier. As he assumed command of the First Air Fleet in October 1944, however, he was obliged to face up to the grave realities in his new command. Philippine air bases could muster only about fifty planes in flyable condition. Reinforcements would soon be pouring in from China and the homeland, but the enemy fleet was already in the offing. Except for a handful of veterans, his pilots were greenhorns. Conventional bombing tactics were ineffective, and most airplanes sent out on such missions did not return to base.
On October 19, the night after his arrival in Manila, Onishi was driven in a black Packard limousine to the main air complex on the island of Luzon—Mabalacat Airfield, which the Americans had called Clark Field. Because American fighters sometimes made strafing attacks on roadways, it was thought safest to make the two-hour-long drive after dark. On the other hand, driving at night could also be dangerous, because anti-Japanese guerillas sometimes staged roadside attacks. Even now, when the Americans had not yet landed forces in the Philippines, the Japanese must have had the distinct sense that they were already losing control of the islands.
Arriving in Mabalacat, he found the local air staff of the 201st Air Group in a command tent alongside a pockmarked airstrip and a row of dilapidated airplanes, which were kept in barely flyable condition by the efforts of the ground crews. Spare parts had been scavenged from the junked planes that littered the edges of the field. Local staff officers and squadron commanders were rounded up and convened at the headquarters building in town. According to a flight officer who was there, Onishi’s pitch was succinct, impassive, and matter-of-fact: “In my opinion, there is only one way of assuring that our meager strength will be effective to a maximum degree. That is to organize suicide attack units composed of Zero fighters armed with 250-kilogram bombs, with each plane to crash into a carrier. What do you think?”57
At first, no one uttered a word in response: the inner turmoil and confusion can only be imagined. No one raised an objection, however, and the only questions had to do with the tactical niceties of converting a Zero fighter into a man-guided missile. The aviators and their officers agreed that the suiciders should approach the enemy fleet at high altitude, about 18,000 feet. When the American radar detected them, they would descend quickly to about 200–300 feet in hopes of slipping under the radar screen. They would drop “window”—aluminum strips—in order to thwart the radar operators. On the final approach to their targets, the pilots would drop the noses of their planes and descend in a 45-degree dive.58
When the assembly broke up, the various squadrons huddled and conferred among themselves. One by one, the leaders came back and reported that their flyers were unanimous: they would do it. Many were inspired by the example of their recently deceased base commander, Admiral Arima, who had sacrificed himself just five days earlier. They were likewise spurred to action by the news that the entire Japanese navy was charging toward Leyte Gulf at risk of total annihilation. Their collective mood was resolute and even giddy. “At the time,” remarked one pilot ruefully, “this seemed the only option we had.”59 It was thought best to name a Naval Academy graduate as leader of the new corps. After some discussion among the staff and commanders, Lieutenant Yukio Seki was nominated for the job. When the idea was put to him, Seki responded without hesitation: “You absolutely must let me do it.”60
The newly formed suicide air group comprised only twenty-six Zero fighters, divided into four sections. Three sections were based at Mabalacat; the fourth was on the island of Cebu, to the south. One-half of the planes were designated as escorts and observers; the others would crash-dive the enemy. Thu
s, this first kamikaze unit amounted to only thirteen aircraft slated for an actual suicide dive. The command staff gave a name to this corps: “Shimpu,” an archaic pronunciation of the Chinese ideographs for “god” and “wind.” An alternate vernacular pronunciation was “kamikaze,” but that term did not come into common currency until later; the original name of the suicide corps was Shimpu Tokkotai, or “Divine Wind Special Attack Force.”*
Upon these thirteen suicide planes, the Japanese high command hung great hopes. It was even thought that they might all score, perhaps sinking as many as thirteen American aircraft carriers, a blow devastating enough to repel the coming invasion of the Philippines. Thus, this new Shimpu outfit, as small as it was, hoped to make a major contribution to the impending confrontation.
However, there was another dimension to this first introduction of organized suicide plane tactics, which does not always receive the emphasis it deserves. The kamikaze program was at the heart of a public relations and propaganda campaign aimed at Japan’s fighting forces and simultaneously at the Japanese population. On October 21, and again in subsequent days, Admiral Onishi presided over a lugubrious send-off ceremony in which the departing suicide pilots stood to attention as he bid them good-bye, then raised cups of ceremonial sake in a final toast. They sang “Umi Yukaba,” saluted the admiral, and climbed into their cockpits. The ceremony was attended by a platoon of war correspondents, photographers, and motion picture crews, leaving no doubt that the new kamikaze tactics were to receive wide publicity at home. The purpose of this public relations offensive was much the same as that of the pretended victory off Formosa the previous week. It was propaganda aimed at shoring up the self-confidence of the air groups themselves, who had begun to despair of doing anything to contest American air supremacy—for as Inoguchi remarked, “Nothing is more destructive to morale than to learn of the enemy’s superiority.”61
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