Okinawa’s large civilian population was a complicating factor. During the war, the prefectural government had first encouraged, and then compelled, mass evacuations to Formosa and the Japanese home islands. But those measures were unpopular, and resisted by many Okinawans, especially after a ship loaded with hundreds of evacuees was sunk while en route to Kyushu in August 1944. In March 1945, the Japanese army issued orders to evacuate most remaining Okinawan civilians to the northern part of the island, but that measure was also resisted. Writing in the Okinawa Shinpo, the island’s daily newspaper, General Cho warned that all civilians must act as members of a militia, following the army’s orders. In the event of invasion, each civilian should try to kill ten enemy soldiers before being killed in turn. Cho added that all women and children should “move to a safe area so that they will not be operational obstacles,” because it was “not acceptable to lose in battle to save civilian lives.”34 Hundreds of middle school and high school students, boys and girls, were mobilized as a student corps, serving as messengers, cooks, laborers, or nurses. As for the men, a general call-up was announced on the first day of 1945. All Okinawan males aged 17 to 45 were conscripted directly into a local “defense corps.” Most would never be seen by their families again.
In the last weeks before the invasion, the army and the government continued efforts to relocate noncombatants to northern Okinawa. But many civilians had been frightened by Japanese propaganda, which had asserted that any who fell into American hands would suffer death by torture. As the American fleet appeared offshore in the last week of March, about 300,000 civilians remained in the southern half of the island, and many were desperate to get behind Japanese lines. Without sufficient food stockpiled to feed them, a humanitarian catastrophe was set in motion even before the battle was joined.
AT IMPERIAL HEADQUARTERS IN TOKYO, army and navy staff officers hammered out an agreement on their air strategy for the Ryukyus and the East China Sea. Navy planes would target enemy warships, and army planes would go after the transport convoys. Both services would launch conventional bombing and kamikaze attacks, but the “emphasis will be placed on build-up and use of the special attack strength.”35 Flight cadets would be rushed through training programs and sent directly to active striking units, where they would be invited to volunteer as kamikazes. With ground forces on Okinawa engaged in a prolonged campaign of attrition, the Allied fleet would be forced to remain in the area for several weeks, where it could be attacked repeatedly from the air. Japan’s last hope was to degrade the enemy’s “preponderance in ships, aircraft, and men, to obstruct the establishment of advanced bases, to undermine enemy morale, and thereby to seriously delay the final assault on Japan.”36
Most of the work would be done by the Fifth Air Fleet, headquartered at Kanoya Air Base in southern Kyushu. This “fleet” was a heterogeneous assortment of naval air units, including many types of aircraft, scattered across two dozen airbases on Kyushu and Shikoku. The Fifth Air Fleet mustered about six hundred planes, including about four hundred in dedicated kamikaze units. Under constant threat of B-29 and U.S. carrier airstrikes, personnel at Kanoya and other air bases were working to move the repair shops, ammunition dumps, and fuel reserves to underground bunkers and tunnels. Excavations were underway in fields around the runways. As on Okinawa, much of the work was done with picks and shovels, and even the aviators lent a hand. Smaller airfields were disguised as simple rural dirt roads. Abandoned barracks and hangars were left standing to serve as decoys for the American bombers. As for the Fifth Air Fleet’s airplanes, “emphasis will be laid on the thoroughgoing dispersal, protection and camouflage of the planes and on the setting up of dummy planes and revetments.”37
In his private diary, Ugaki often lamented the deplorable state of his air forces. He lacked the pilots, planes and fuel even to conduct sufficient daily air patrols over the waters south of Japan. Crashes and other operational losses were distressingly frequent, and he was forced to cancel many training exercises due to weather and other factors. His Fifth Air Fleet was receiving priority allocations of aviation gasoline, but no more than a trickle of oil imports was reaching Japan, and the parsimonious fuel budget was beginning to impinge on operations. On February 27, Ugaki had received a briefing on the process of extracting biofuel from pine roots: Japanese schoolchildren were being sent into the country’s forests to forage for pine cones, roots, and needles by the bushel. This effort was ingenious but futile, requiring more than a thousand labor-hours to produce enough fuel for a single hour of flight. The headquarters at Kanoya, in a barracks building near the runway, was deemed too vulnerable to air raids, so on February 28, Ugaki and his staff moved into an underground bunker. There was even talk of transferring airplanes to Korea or Manchuria, to prevent their being destroyed on the ground. A March 17 entry in the Fifth Air Fleet war diary reflected the staff’s darkly pessimistic outlook: “In our attack against the enemy task force, the picked strength of our air units will be lost immediately.”38
Spring came early in southern Kyushu, and short walks in the woods and fields around the base lifted Ugaki’s spirits. On quiet afternoons he took his shotgun and hiked alone up into the hills, hunting the green pheasants native to that region. After one outing, he told his diary, “Nature’s great progress in a few days’ time seem to laugh pityingly at the silly little human world, where we were making a fuss about war and enemy task forces and so on.”39
In the actions of March 18 and 19, the Japanese conventional dive-bombing squadrons had performed unexpectedly well. As usual, however, the estimated results were grossly exaggerated. On March 21, after a conference at the Kanoya headquarters, it was announced that the Americans had lost five aircraft carriers, two battleships, and four cruisers.40 These reports were trumpeted in the headlines with the customary rhapsodies. The loss of an entire flight of G4M bombers carrying Oka manned suicide missiles was withheld from the press, and Fifth Air Fleet analysts concluded that such an attack could not possibly succeed unless the Japanese were first able to obtain temporary air supremacy over the objective. Given the state of Japanese air forces, the only method that might succeed was to overwhelm the U.S. air defenses with sheer mass, which meant launching hundreds of airplanes at once, in the hope that at least a few would get through the fighter and antiaircraft defenses to score.
On March 25, as the U.S. invasion force gathered off Okinawa, Combined Fleet headquarters in Hiyoshi issued orders to initiate the “Ten-Go” Operation. This plan called for all-out massed suicide and bombing attacks on the U.S. fleet. After the heavy losses suffered during the recent carrier raids over Japan, time was needed to move the forces into position. New kamikaze squadrons and planes were flown to Kanoya and other airfields in preparation for the first full-scale Kikusui (“floating chrysanthemums”) attack. After delays in moving the air and naval forces into position, the date chosen was April 6. On that same day, the Japanese army on Okinawa would launch a counterattack on American lines, and the last remaining Japanese surface warships (including the superbattleship Yamato) would sortie from the Inland Sea in a naval banzai charge. Several hundred suicide gods would take off from Kyushu airfields, with orders to “exterminate the enemy ships off Okinawa.”41 In his diary, Admiral Ugaki confessed feeling wretched and guilty about sending so many flyers to their certain deaths, and he swore to “follow the example of those young boys someday. I was glad to see that my weak mind, apt to be moved to tears, had reached this stage.”42
TASK FORCE 58 HOVERED IN THE OFFING southeast of Okinawa, providing continuous daily and nightly air support for the troops ashore and the amphibious fleet on the other side of the island. It was hard going for all concerned, airmen and crewmen alike. Gale-force winds and rough seas interfered with flight operations. On the gray, misty morning of April 4, an officer on the Yorktown recorded that the carrier had “bucked like a rogue stallion all night long. When I shaved this morning, I had to hold on to the basin with one hand; and when I crossed the
compartment, half the distance was a climb, the other half a charge.”43 The previous night, blinded by foul weather, the battleship New Jersey had collided with a screening destroyer, the Franks. Given the mismatch in size and mass, the battleship was barely scratched while the Franks was smashed and gutted along the length of her port side, and her skipper was severely wounded.44 Enemy air attacks were few and far between during this period, a blessing that Spruance attributed to the air raids against Kyushu two weeks earlier. Each carrier group conducted flight operations for three days, and on the fourth day retired some distance to the southeast to rendezvous with the refueling and replenishment ships.
The sixth of April was a cool and windy day, with choppy seas. Arthur Radford’s Task Group 58.2 was refueling and replenishing, so Sherman’s Task Group 58.3 and Clark’s 58.1 were the only ones on the line. An hour after dawn, picket destroyers north of Okinawa detected radar bogeys inbound from the north. Japanese planes in the vanguard of the attack scattered copious amounts of “window”—aluminum strips—to confuse the U.S. radar systems, but the raid was too big to hide. Mitscher sent word to the carriers to stow all bombers in the hangars, freeing the flight decks for fighter operations. More Hellcats and Corsairs were launched to fortify the CAP, and others were vectored on a course to intercept. The fighter control circuits rang with chatter. The American fighters tore into the Japanese air formations, sending at least sixty planes down in flames in the first stages of the long day’s battle. But given the size of this first “floating chrysanthemums” attack—about seven hundred planes, of which more than half were kamikazes—more than two hundred got through the fighter screen to attack the American fleet.
They came in waves, morning through dusk, with the heaviest strikes arriving in the late afternoon. “How they came!” a junior officer aboard a transport recalled, “in singles, twos and bunches, gliding, diving, swooping, some hugging the water. . . . It seemed they never stopped coming.”45 Admiral Clark called the swarming attacks “almost overpowering.”46 The sky was mottled with the bursts of antiaircraft shells, and tracers cut across the twilight sky, making red and yellow lattices of light. On many ships, the radio transmissions between the fighter control officers (FDOs) and fighter pilots were transmitted through the loudspeakers, leaving the crew with the uncanny sense that they were listening to the live broadcast of an athletic competition. The Time and Life correspondent Bob Sherrod, on Admiral Turner’s command ship Eldorado, watched a Japanese plane dive on an LST off the Hagushi beachhead. “Terrific streams of ack-ack poured toward the plane from every ship within two miles,” he wrote. “When the Jap was 300 feet from his target he flamed, winged over, and fell into the shallow water.”47
By the end of the day, twenty-six American ships had taken kamikaze hits. Six had been sunk, including two Victory ships; a minesweeper; an LST; and two destroyers, the Bush and the Colhoun. Others were badly mauled and suffered heavy casualties, including by friendly antiaircraft fire striking nearby ships in formation. Critically, however, the sacrifice of picket destroyers and other ships in the outer screens had helped shield the aircraft carriers at the heart of Task Force 58. A few flattops took some nerve-racking near-misses, but none was hit or damaged. The carrier air groups, working with FDOs on the picket destroyers, had shot down more than two hundred planes during the day. The Essex air group nearly broke the single-day carrier air-kill record by shooting down sixty-five planes.48
Earlier that day, an American submarine on patrol off the Bungo Suido (the channel between Kyushu and Shikoku) had detected a column of Japanese warships headed out to sea. This was the battleship Yamato with her screening group of one light cruiser and eight destroyers, the last seaworthy remnant of the Imperial Japanese Fleet. The Yamato force had been under regular aerial observation for the past week, with B-29 and U.S. carrier planes reconnoitering and photographing the ships at anchor south of Kure, and tracking their progress down the Inland Sea, so their sudden appearance at sea was no surprise. Before dawn on April 7, PBM seaplanes lifted off from the Kerama Islands and flew north to track the enemy ships. At 8:23 a.m., search planes from the carrier Essex spotted the Yamato force at 30°44´ north by 129°10´ east, traveling at 12 knots on a course of 300 degrees. The formation had rounded the southern tip of Kyushu and was now headed west-northwest, almost as if bound for Korea.49
Spruance, Mitscher, and Turner each separately deduced that the Japanese were attempting to evade detection and interception. The Yamato and her escorts hoped to take a roundabout course through the East China Sea, doubling back to sneak up on the U.S. fleet from the west. Spruance detached a powerful battleship-cruiser-destroyer squadron under Admiral Deyo, and sent it to intercept. But Mitscher and the Task Force 58 aviators wanted to finish the Yamato with carrier air power, and their airplanes could get there faster. Their range to the target was 238 miles, a flying time of less than ninety minutes. Sherman’s Task Group 58.3 had rejoined the two others, so the Americans had plenty of air-striking power to spare. Beginning at 10:18 a.m., three carrier task groups launched an armada of 386 planes, including 180 fighters, 75 dive-bombers, and 131 torpedo planes. Jocko Clark told his Avenger pilots that he expected them to sink the supposedly unsinkable Yamato, because their torpedoes would rip open the mighty battleship’s hull and “let the water in.”50
THE OFFICERS AND CREW OF THE YAMATO and her nine escorts held no illusions. Their mission was a naval banzai charge, a futile suicide rush that served no real tactical purpose. Without air cover, they would be left to fight off waves of American planes with their antiaircraft guns alone. Just as in the earlier case of Sho, the Japanese “victory” plan for the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the fleet was being asked to immolate itself for abstract considerations of honor. Unlike in the earlier battle, however, there was not the slightest hope of surprising the U.S. fleet. One senior officer remarked that it was “not even a kamikaze mission, for that implies the chance of chalking up a worthy target.”51
This operation, like Plan Sho, was ordered by Admiral Toyoda, commander in chief of the Combined Fleet, from his command bunker at Hiyoshi. Now, as before, Toyoda chose not to lead the mission in person, a failure that inspired quasi-mutinous grumbling among the cynics on the Yamato’s bridge. Vice Admiral Ryunosuke Kusaka, Toyoda’s chief of staff, had flown into Kure with a mission to sell the plan. Vice Admiral Seiichi Ito, who had succeeded Takeo Kurita as commander of the Second Fleet, was stiffly opposed to the suicidal assignment, and he did not hesitate to say so. The one-way sortie was a pointless sacrifice of ships, fuel, ammunition, and trained fighting men who were needed to defend the homeland. Tamechi Hara, skipper of the light cruiser Yahagi, called it a “ridiculous operation . . . just like throwing an egg at a rock.”52 Kusaka countered that the plan was a “decoy mission,” whose real purpose was to divert the attention of the American aircraft carriers while hundreds of kamikazes attacked the enemy fleet from airfields on Kyushu. But Kusaka also admitted that the Imperial Headquarters was keen to avoid the disgrace of seeing the Yamato end the war at anchor. After long discussion, it became clear that no matter how gently Kusaka presented his case, the suicide mission was an order, not a request.
The night before the Yamato put to sea, a generous ration of sake was distributed to the entire crew, and each division held its own riotous bacchanal. The executive officer bellowed through the ship’s loudspeakers, “Kamikaze Yamato, be truly a divine wind!”53 In the first wardroom, Captain Kosaku Aruga stood at the center of a packed crowd of lieutenants and ensigns, drinking sake directly from a large bottle. Amidst “boisterous singing and wild dancing,” with empty sake bottles rolling around on the deck underfoot, many hands reached in toward the skipper and patted his bald head. Some even gave it a hard whack. The executive officer, locked in a wrestling scrum with other officers, tore his uniform jacket.54
The next day, as the crew nursed hangovers and wrote final letters to their families, the Yamato sucked every last remaining drop of bunker oil out of
the fuel depot at Tokuyama. All cigarettes and other treats remaining in the canteen were distributed free to the crew. At 6:00 p.m., a general assembly was convened on the foredeck. The Yamato broke out the flag of the Second Fleet. As evening fell, the cruiser Yahagi led the formation into the Bungo Suido. The column slipped down the coast of Kyushu at 12 knots. In the gathering dusk, crewmen noted that some of the cherry trees along the coast had blossomed. Officers sipped from illicit flasks of liquor. The antiaircraft gunners ate at their posts, rice balls washed down with green tea. On deck, sailors were sharpening bayonets and assembling combat gear to be distributed to the crew, in case they managed to beach the ship on Okinawa and join the army forces on the island.
A waning crescent moon rose in the east, ahead of the sun. Dawn broke shortly after the column rounded the southern tip of Kyushu. The green mountains of Kagoshima receded into their wakes. A few Japanese fighters were seen patrolling overhead, but they soon returned to their bases on Kyushu. Ensign Mitsuru Yoshida, a radar officer stationed on the Yamato’s bridge, noted grimly that “not a single escorting plane could be seen; nor was one to be seen from this time on. We were literally abandoned.”55
The Yamato’s radio monitors had intercepted transmissions, some in plain English, reporting the task force’s position and progress. As expected, they had been reconnoitered by enemy submarines off the Bungo Suido. PBM seaplanes circled high above the Yamato, tracking her progress. They were careful to remain just beyond the range of the antiaircraft guns. Occasionally one of the ship’s main guns fired a salvo, and flak bursts appeared overhead, but always well below and behind the American planes.
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