ON APRIL 14, THE IMPERIAL GENERAL HEADQUARTERS in Tokyo had announced that air attacks on the Allied fleet off Okinawa had sunk or crippled 326 ships. Among the “fully confirmed” sinkings were six aircraft carriers, seven battleships, thirty-four cruisers, forty-eight destroyers, and various auxiliary vessels. According to the official communiqué, the true figures were thought to be even higher—but out of an abundance of caution, in order to avoid haste and error, unconfirmed claims were being withheld pending “further checkup.”11 A week later, Radio Tokyo reported that the enemy had lost half of the 1,400 ships he had brought to Okinawa, including four hundred sunk, with casualties of no fewer than 800,000! These shocking losses, the announcer declared, had driven the Americans “into the black depths of confusion and agony.”12
The reports made Tokyo’s earlier flights of hyperbole seem picayune by comparison. Ugaki’s second-in-command, Admiral Toshiyuki Yokoi, later explained that air commanders in Kyushu felt pressure from down the ranks to certify the grossly exaggerated claims. When Yokoi cast doubt on one such report, a kamikaze squadron commander told him: “If the results achieved are going to be so underestimated, there is no justification for the deaths of my men. If headquarters will not acknowledge these achievements at full value, I must commit hara-kiri [suicide] as an expression of my disapproval and by way of apology.”13
Yet it seems that leaders in Tokyo really did believe that the kamikazes might be winning the fight for Okinawa. The Naval General Staff estimated that the U.S. fleet was in “an unstable condition and the chance of winning now stands fifty-fifty.”14 IGHQ ordered more Kikusui operations, in hopes of scoring a knockout blow. Time was of the essence; the suicide planes must strike quickly, before the amphibious fleet had unloaded the bulk of its cargo and retired to Ulithi or Leyte. A steady stream of replacement airplanes and pilots flew south from Honshu, into the Fifth Air Fleet’s staging bases in Kyushu.15
At Kanoya Air Base, the kamikaze pilots lived in the finest barracks on the base. Their quarters stood on the bank of a burbling stream that meandered through a verdant bamboo forest and a meadow dotted with wild roses. Living in the shadow of imminent death, they strolled contemplatively through these pastoral surroundings. They wrote letters and poetry. Local citizens brought them gifts, including sake, liquor, and food that could hardly be spared in those famished times. Farmers donated eggs, chickens, pigs, and even cattle to be slaughtered for their last feasts. Teenaged girls of the local labor service corps looked after their laundry, cooking, and housekeeping. These “labor service maidens” became emotionally bonded to the kamikaze pilots—in a chaste sense, it seems—revering them as “the older brothers,” and calling themselves “the younger sisters.” Before a mission, the maidens worked all night to decorate the kamikaze planes with cherry blossoms, and left cloth dolls and origami figures in the cockpits. They attended the send-off ceremonies on the flight line, tearfully waving cherry blossom boughs or Rising Sun flags to the departing aircraft. They collected the pilots’ hair and fingernail clippings and mailed them to the families with letters of gratitude.
In the early days of the kamikaze corps, there had never been a shortage of volunteers. But in the spring of 1945, air commanders noted a shift in attitudes among the new crop of suicide pilots. Many had been “asked” to volunteer in circumstances that made it impossible to refuse. According to a naval staff officer, “there developed a pressure, not entirely artificial, which encouraged ‘volunteering,’ and it is understandable that this change in circumstance would effect a change in the attitude of the men concerned.” He added that many of the new arrivals “appeared to be disturbed by their situation.”16 An entire class of flight cadets at an army training base in Mito was asked by the commanding officer to volunteer for suicide assignments. “I don’t even remember telling my feet to move,” a cadet later said. “It was like a strong gust of wind whooshed up from behind the ranks and blew everyone forward a step, almost in perfect unison.”17
About half of the kamikaze pilots of 1945 had been drawn from the ranks of university students. Many were cosmopolitan intellectuals who had been exposed to foreign ideas and influences, including Western philosophy and literature. These traits had not endeared them to their officers and NCOs in military training camps. Many young scholars had been singled out for special abuse, including vicious beatings—leaving them with feelings of contempt and loathing for military authority, and for the tyrannical regime that held the nation’s fate in its grip. In diaries and letters, many of these future kamikazes identified themselves as political liberals and democrats. Some found much to admire in the American model of society and government. Others harbored radical, utopian, pacifist, or even Marxist views.
Tadao Hayashi, for example, had been drafted out of Kyoto University. In his writings, Hayashi disavowed the war aims of the imperialist regime; he even held that Japan’s defeat was both necessary and desirable. Yet he was determined to die for his country: “The situation is tense indeed. But for me, it is all right for Japan to be destroyed. . . . Historical necessity led to the crisis of our people. We rise to defend our people in the land we love.”18 Hayashi died at age twenty-four, less than three weeks before the end of the war. Hachiro Sasaki, drafted out of Tokyo Imperial University, believed that Japan had been hopelessly corrupted by capitalism, and that its pending defeat would give way to revolution. This learned young communist died in a suicide mission off Okinawa on April 14, 1945, aged twenty-two. He left behind a personal library that included works of history, science, philosophy, economics, and literature in German, English, French, Russian, Italian, and Latin.19 Ichizo Hayashi, from Fukuoka, Kyushu, was a devout Christian who carried a bible on his final flight, along with a copy of Kierkegaard’s Sickness Unto Death and a photograph of his mother. “I will put your photo right on my chest,” he wrote to her, in a last letter from Kanoya. “I shall be sure to sink an enemy vessel. When you hear over the radio of our success in sinking their vessels, please remember that one of them is the vessel I plunged into. I will have peace of mind, knowing that mother is watching me and praying for me.”20 Ensign Hayashi, aged twenty-three, died in the second Kikusui operation on April 12, 1945.
Some did not want to go. Gestures of defiance, overt and covert, became more common as the conflict wore on. Admiral Yokoi recalled attitudes ranging “from the despair of sheep headed for the slaughter to open expressions of contempt for their superior officers.”21 On the night before embarking on a last mission, the kamikaze squadrons held riotous bacchanals, guzzling sake and vandalizing their furnishings. A witness recounted one such scene: “The whole place turned to mayhem. Some broke hanging light bulbs with their swords. Some lifted chairs to break the windows and tore white tablecloths. A mixture of military songs and curses filled the air. While some shouted and raged, others cried aloud. It was their last night of life.”22 After taking off, mutinous pilots sometimes flew low over the quarters of their superior officers, as if to crash or strafe them. If they went on to fulfill their mission, the offense could not be punished.
Increasingly, in the later phases of the Okinawa campaign, kamikaze planes turned back and returned to land at their bases. The pilots reported baffling engine malfunctions, or claimed that they had been unable to locate enemy ships. Others ditched their planes at sea, near islands between Kyushu and Okinawa, hoping to get ashore and survive until the end of the war. Pilots were known to sneak out to the flight line in darkness, on the night before a scheduled departure, and sabotage their own planes. They might simply unscrew the gas cap, intending to run low on fuel, an excuse to turn back. After returning to base nine consecutive times, one pilot (a graduate of Waseda University) was executed by firing squad. In another infamous case, a kamikaze dove his plane into a railroad embankment near his family’s neighborhood in Kagoshima, apparently choosing to die close to home.
Southern Kyushu was in full spring bloom. For hours each afternoon, Admiral Ugaki hunted pheasants through the hills
and countryside around his headquarters at Kanoya. On April 13, he noted that the wheat was “pretty high” and the trees were “vividly green.”23 The cherry blossoms were at the height of their grandeur. Local civilians had planted vacant lots with potatoes and vegetables, and the admiral was pleased to see these fresh plantings thrive. He noted that the wheat had “grown to full length with its ears all pointing upward like spearheads as if calling the whole nation to arms.”24 When the spring hunting season ended on April 21, Ugaki turned in his hunting license and placed his shotgun in storage. He told his diary that he did not expect to be alive when the shooting season resumed in the fall.25
The Kyushu airfields came under near-daily attack by B-29s and U.S. carrier planes. Hellcats and Corsairs flew low over the airfields, strafing parked planes and ground crews. Superfortresses soared high overhead, dropping sticks of 1,000-pound high-explosive bombs to fall across the heart of the runways. Some bombs exploded instantly, while others—armed with delayed-action fuses—buried themselves in the asphalt and lay doggo. The main runways at Kanoya were decorated with small red flags marking the locations of timed bombs that had not yet blown. Admiral Ugaki considered them “quite troublesome. . . . They can’t be disposed of as duds too soon, for some are timed with as long as a 72-hour fuse.”26
At Chiran Airfield on Kagoshima Bay, the labor service maidens were put to work repairing the runways. They shoveled dirt and gravel into the bomb craters, until their palms blistered and their backs ached. One day in early May, their work was interrupted by an air-raid siren, and they ran to the trenches by the side of the runway. A file of F6F Hellcats flew low over the field, strafing parked planes and ground installations. “The Americans flew so low you could see their pink faces and blue eyes and those big, square, white-framed goggles they wore,” said Reiko Torihama. “We hated to admit it, but we admired their cockiness, flying in so low like that. I’m still not sure if they were either very brave or just thought so little of us that there was nothing to be afraid of.”27
On the morning of a scheduled kamikaze attack, the ground crews, the local headquarters staffs, and the labor service maidens attended an elegiac send-off ceremony on the flight line. The pilots, acclaimed as “divine eagles who will attack and not return,” wore white scarves and rising sun headbands. Some had shaved all of their body hair for the occasion. With their unit commander, they raised their cups in a last toast. Then they climbed into their cockpits, which had been scrubbed clean and decorated by the maidens, started their engines, and taxied out to the runway. One by one they took off, and then banked south for the two-hour flight to the enemy fleet off Okinawa. They flew low over the rice terraces, wheat fields, and hills of southern Kyushu. “We’d go outside and wave flags, or just our hands,” a local woman recalled. “One plane, perhaps the leader’s, would fly low and dip its wings in greeting. We cried and cried. We knew that would be the last we saw of them. We’d wave frantically until they disappeared, then we’d pray for them.”28
FOR CREWMEN ON THE WARSHIPS OFF OKINAWA, the days and nights passed in a mind-numbing cycle of attacks and false alarms. Whenever the divine wind began to blow, the ear-splitting buzzer alarms sounded, calling men to their battle stations. The smoke generators exuded an opaque chemical haze, the 5-inch antiaircraft guns began firing with deep, repeating blasts (boom! boom! boom!), and dark flak bursts dirtied the sky. When fired at a low trajectory, flak posed a lethal hazard to neighboring ships, and friendly fire claimed untold hundreds of casualties over the course of the Okinawa campaign. The seemingly endless blast concussions made by the guns wore the sailors down and set them on edge. But no matter how much 5-inch, 40mm, and 20mm fire the gunners threw up, there was always more ammunition waiting in the storeships at Kerama Retto—so they kept firing, without concern for thrift. Off the Hagushi beachhead, the volume of antiaircraft fire was incredible. One witness recalled watching a battleship at night, under air attack, as her batteries spat out an uninterrupted stream of incandescent tracer fire: “I never saw so much fire and tracers coming from one place in my entire life. . . . It just made a big cone up there, and the cone would move around. Then you’d see a plane light up at the tip of the cone and go down, and the cone would just keep moving. It was a spectacular sight.”29
Blasted, scorched, and crippled ships crowded into the repair anchorage at Kerama Retto, which the Americans had nicknamed “Busted Ship Bay.” Kelly Turner’s earlier decision to seize the archipelago had been handsomely vindicated. If the fleet had not possessed a protected anchorage so close to Okinawa, many more of the stricken ships would have had to be scuttled. As it was, repair ships and floating drydocks could handle minor repairs, and the more badly damaged ships could be patched up and dispatched to Ulithi or even to Pearl Harbor under their own steam. Between April 6 and June 22, more than two hundred Allied ships and support vessels were hit by kamikazes or conventional bombing attacks, or damaged by near misses—but only thirty-six were sunk or scuttled.
The stress of prolonged operations was wearing on the navy crews, but the Fifth Fleet boss remained as stoic and unflappable as ever. Raymond Spruance had been forced out of his first flagship, the Indianapolis, by a kamikaze attack on March 31, before the assault troops had even set foot on Okinawa. His second flagship, the old battleship New Mexico, fought off near-daily aerial attacks throughout April and May. Yet the slender, deeply tanned four-star admiral appeared no worse for wear. As usual, he took his daily exercise by pacing around the forecastle for hours each day, and slept soundly even while the New Mexico’s guns blazed through the night. David Willcutts, the Fifth Fleet naval surgeon, recalled an incident toward the end of April 1945. Admiral Spruance was on the quarterdeck with several other officers, watching a swarm of Japanese planes approach from the northwest. A lone kamikaze commenced a steep diving attack on the New Mexico. The other officers withdrew and took cover, but Spruance remained at the rail, erect and unflinching, with his binoculars trained on the charging plane. The 40mm batteries finally destroyed the kamikaze, which “disintegrated and plunged into the sea, really a matter of feet from the New Mexico.”
Dr. Willcutts ventured to reprimand the chief for exposing himself unnecessarily. Spruance replied: “If you were a good Presbyterian you would know that there is no danger unless your number is up.”30
As always, the destroyers and gunboats at the fifteen outlying radar picket stations got the worst of it. After three or four days of continuous duty at one of these “windy corners,” the crews began to show signs of acute fatigue. They remained at battle stations day and night, eating sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, and coffee distributed from the galleys. “The strain became almost intolerable,” recalled the skipper of an LCS(L) gunboat. “We were gaunt and filthy, red-eyed and stinking. The ship was a mess, with empty shell casings everywhere. My face was pockmarked with particles of burned gunpowder, since one Oerlikon antiaircraft gun fired as close as three yards from my battle station. We prayed for bad weather, which was about the only thing that slowed down the stream of Japanese planes.”31 A sailor on another gunboat wrote that the entire crew was at “a breaking point.” Nerves were brittle, and shipmates snarled at one another over petty annoyances. When someone dropped a heavy wrench on the deck, “I jumped like I had been jolted with high-voltage electricity.”32
A typically desperate action was fought at Radar Picket Station No. 10 on May 3, 1945. It was sunset, just after the Hellcats and Corsairs of the CAP had departed to return to their carriers. The destroyers Aaron Ward and Little, accompanied by four gunboats, were attacked by about fifty Japanese planes. The Aaron Ward was hit by seven kamikazes. She was badly flooded, to a near-sinking condition, and fierce fires spread through her lower decks. Forty-five of her crew were killed, forty-nine injured.33 After a long, gallant firefighting and salvage effort, the stricken ship was towed into Kerama Retto. Meanwhile, the Little was targeted by at least eighteen suicide planes, and hit by four, including one that made a near-vertical dive
and crashed her after-torpedo mount. The penetrating impact broke the Little’s keel, and her main decks were awash within two minutes. A member of the crew, emerging on deck, was shocked by the carnage: “Officers walked briskly about the decks silently drawing gray blankets over still warm and bleeding bodies . . . in many respects the dead were the luckiest of us all. They neither had to abandon nor to remember.”34 Just twelve minutes after the first kamikaze had hit her, the Little was gone. Thirty of her crew were dead, seventy-nine injured.
Task Force 58 kept station to the east of Okinawa, constantly patrolling in an area of about 60 square miles. Admiral Mitscher had hoped to be released from the duty to protect the amphibious fleet and the island by the end of April, if not earlier—but the army and marine air units were unable to assume this responsibility until the last week of May. The delay was caused by a combination of factors. Airfield development on Okinawa lagged behind schedule, because the terrain was soft and wet, and grew more so as the spring rains began falling in May. As on Leyte, the island lacked ample sources of coral rock to be used in paving the airfields. The Japanese-built airfields at Yontan and Kadena were rough and muddy, and at night they were lighted by burning pits of gasoline and kerosene dug along the margins of the runways. The pilots and ground crews were quartered in tents that had been shredded by falling flak fragments.
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