Last to Die

by Stephen Harding

  By the time the young major made his way back to Mori’s office it was nearly 2 A.M. on August 15 and, though Hatanaka didn’t know it, Hirohito had long since concluded the recording of the imperial rescript. The commander of the Imperial Guards Division had not yet left to visit the shrine, and when Hatanaka and Koga pressed him for a decision about lending his division’s support to the coup, Mori responded that he could not, and would not, act in defiance of the emperor’s expressed will. As the general was speaking, Captain Shigetaro Uehara, an army aviation officer and coup conspirator, rushed into the office past Shiizaki, pushed Ida and Koga aside as he approached Hatanaka, and asked if “the matter” was settled.

  When the young major replied that it was not, Uehara looked pointedly at Mori and, speaking to Hatanaka, said that time was running out. The Guards Division commander, though almost certainly aware that the atmosphere in his small office had suddenly changed for the worse, looked directly at Uehara and shouted that he would not support the coup no matter how long the conspirators might plead with him to do so. Without warning, Uehara drew his sword and rushed toward Mori. When the general’s brother-in-law stepped forward to protect him, Uehara plunged his razor-sharp blade into Shiraishi’s chest, then yanked it free, reversed his hold and with a powerful sideways blow nearly severed the man’s head from his body. Uehara then pivoted toward Mori, but before he could strike the fatal blow Hatanaka pulled his 8mm Nambu automatic pistol from its holster and shot the general squarely in the chest. Mori staggered sideways and collapsed atop Shiraishi’s body, and Uehara brought his blade down into the back of the general’s skull in an almost certainly unnecessary coup de grâce.

  With the problem of General Mori definitively “settled” in the most brutal way, Hatanaka and Uehara saluted the bodies and walked calmly out of the blood-spattered office. The two officers dispatched Ida to the Eastern District Army headquarters to convince its commander, General Shizuichi Tanaka, to support the coup. That done, they conferred with Ishihara and Koga, who had falsified an operations order directing the entire Guards Division to secure the grounds of the imperial palace and the areas immediately surrounding it. The order bore Mori’s signature block, and after the others had set off for the palace Ishihara and Koga stamped the document with the general’s official seal and began distributing it to the division’s field commanders. Within forty-five minutes the entire imperial closure and all its residents—including Hirohito, his family, and the majority of the “defeatist traitors” the coup’s conspirators so loathed—were completely cut off from the outside world.

  Yet one very powerful man—at that point potentially the most powerful man in Japan—was both free and at peace. After participating in the drafting of the imperial rescript at Suzuki’s office, War Minister Anami had spoken briefly with the prime minister and Foreign Minister Togo, assuring both men that his stubborn opposition to the nation’s acceptance of the Allied surrender conditions stemmed solely from his desire to protect the emperor and the nation from dishonor and shame. Anami had then returned to his official residence, taken a bath, and retired to his bedroom with several bottles of sake. Just after 1 A.M. his brother-in-law arrived at the house and found Anami preparing to commit seppuku.

  That the general was about to kill himself did not surprise Takeshita. Indeed, anyone who knew Anami well was aware that he was a Japanese of the old school, a man who believed with every fiber of his being that the only way in which he could atone for his part in Japan’s defeat—and, quite likely, for his opposition to the will of his emperor—was by taking his own life in the traditional samurai way. Takeshita realized that his brother-in-law was completely at peace with his decision, and rather than attempt to dissuade him the younger man decided to share the war minister’s last hours. Takeshita therefore seated himself on a tatami mat next to Anami, and the two men settled down companionably to drink away the war minister’s last night on earth.

  ON THE GROUNDS OF the palace things were certainly neither as calm nor as companionable as they were at General Anami’s home. Troops of the Guards Division had occupied the sprawling imperial compound and closed all of the gates leading into it. Acting in accordance with the falsified orders produced by Ishihara and Koga, soldiers had begun systematically searching the various buildings for the recordings of Hirohito’s rescript. The hunt was led by Hatanaka, Uehara, and Shiizaki, who had arrived at the palace just minutes after the murder of General Mori and his brother-in-law. The conspirators were determined to find and destroy the recordings to prevent their broadcast, thereby also preventing Japan’s surrender, and they knew that they were running out of time. Their assassination of the Guards Division commander would inevitably come to light sooner rather than later, and when it did the falsified orders would be immediately rescinded by officers loyal to the government. If Ida were unable to convince General Tanaka of the Eastern District Army to join the conspiracy, the revolt would have little chance of success.

  In point of fact, though Hatanaka and his fellow plotters didn’t know it yet, two significant failures had already doomed their coup. First, although Guards Division troops had detained Information Bureau director Shimomura, the NHK technicians, and various other officials who had been present for Hirohito’s reading of the rescript, the vinyl recordings themselves had not been found, despite an exhaustive search. Because the radio technicians had clearly understood how valuable the disks were and that the anti-surrender faction would likely kill anyone possessing them in order to prevent their broadcast, the men gave the recordings to a palace chamberlain for safekeeping rather than attempting to take them directly to the NHK studio. The man had then hidden the disks in the back of a tiny, concealed cupboard in the Household Ministry building, itself a rabbit warren of small offices packed with innumerable file cabinets, and they had remained undiscovered.

  Second, and more important, Lieutenant Colonel Ida had failed miserably in his attempt to enlist General Tanaka’s help with carrying out the coup. Indeed, upon being told what was happening, the Eastern District Army commander ordered the by-now thoroughly dispirited Ida to return to the imperial palace and attempt to talk Hatanaka out of continuing his treasonous actions. Tanaka then directed that all regimental commanders within the Imperial Guards Division come immediately to Eastern District Army headquarters, where they were told that their earlier orders to quarantine the palace complex were false and that all of their troops on the palace grounds should immediately withdraw. Any that failed to do so, he said, would be treated as traitors and would be fired on.

  The attempted coup unraveled quickly following Tanaka’s refusal to throw in his lot with the conspirators. Faced with the Eastern District Army’s overwhelming force—and finally convinced that they’d been misled by forged orders—the commanders of the Guards Division units that had taken control of the palace complex and other key facilities throughout Tokyo withdrew, without having found the recordings and without having captured Prime Minister Suzuki or any other leading members of the peace faction. Tanaka himself faced down the key leaders of the conspiracy—Hatanaka, Koga, Shiizaki, and Uehara—on one of the bridges leading into the palace complex and in no uncertain terms told them they had betrayed their emperor and their nation, and had brought shame upon the armed forces. Tanaka also made it very clear that there was only one way in which the traitors could atone for their actions: suicide. All four ultimately complied using either pistol or sword, thereby joining in death the far more august, and arguably less guilty, General Anami, who disemboweled himself at his home just after dawn on August 15.28

  HIROHITO AND HIS FAMILY had remained safe throughout the attempted coup and, according to some sources, were completely unaware of the revolt until after it had ended. At noon, local time, on August 15 the emperor’s recorded rescript was broadcast throughout Japan, shocking the vast majority of the emperor’s subjects both with its indirect announcement of defeat and its even more frightening implication of impending foreign occupation. T
housands—indeed, perhaps tens of thousands—of Japanese reacted to the devastating news by killing themselves.

  Within Japan’s armed forces the broadcast of the rescript elicited decidedly mixed reactions. Though the vast majority of officers and enlisted members of the navy and army throughout Japan and across Asia and the Pacific swallowed their shame and bent themselves to their emperor’s will, there were diehards in both services who fervently vowed to keep fighting. Some of these dissenters believed that the sentiments the emperor had voiced in his broadcast had been coerced and the surrender decision was thus invalid. So, therefore, were the subsequent orders issued by both army chief of staff General Umezu and his navy counterpart, Admiral Yonai, that all Japanese military forces immediately cease offensive action and prepare to lay down their arms. These “disbelievers” further argued—as had Kenji Hatanaka and his fellow conspirators—that the nation should fight on tenaciously in the emperor’s name and inflict such grievous losses on the Allied invaders that they would agree to a negotiated settlement.

  But there was also another category of military men who had decided that their war was not quite over. Although they had heard and believed the emperor’s broadcast, these men had also determined that until the surrender had become a reality no one could be sure that the Americans would refrain from dropping more of their horrible new bombs. The men therefore determined, like the diehard fanatics but for significantly different reasons, that they would do all in their power to defend the sacred soil of Japan vigorously, right up to the moment of the nation’s official capitulation.

  Unfortunately for the B-32 crews of the 386th Bomb Squadron, both categories of Japan’s holdouts—the diehard fanatics and the determined defenders—were well represented within the one group of Japanese military personnel that could actually transform martial zeal into potentially devastating practice long before Allied ground forces set foot on the Home Islands: the fighter pilots who defended the nation’s airspace.

  CHAPTER 4

  CEASEFIRE, OR NOT?

  WHEN CAPTAIN YASUNA KOZONO leapt behind the wheel of his staff car just after noon on August 14 he was a man in a fever, both literally and figuratively. The decorated naval aviator—known as the “Father of Japanese Night Fighters” for his pioneering efforts in that nocturnal form of aerial combat—was in the first, febrile stages of a relapse of the malaria he’d first suffered while stationed at Rabaul some two years before. But it wasn’t just the disease that made him sweat and tremble as he gunned the car out of the Navy Ministry parking lot in Tokyo and headed out of the city along rubble-strewn streets. Kozono had just hours before been told of Emperor Hirohito’s decision to accept the Allied surrender terms, and his face was crimson with the heat of shame.

  For a man like Kozono, the idea of surrender was quite simply unthinkable. He was a career officer who lived and breathed the Bushido values and the traditions of the Japanese navy. He had participated in the arc of his nation’s military operations from the early victories in China, Southeast Asia, and the East Indies to the seemingly endless defeats that began with the 1942 battles of the Coral Sea and Midway. He had watched as his beloved navy had been steadily reduced from a magnificent and mighty fleet to little more than a coastal defense force, its few remaining warships unable to sortie from harbor without being ruthlessly hunted down by the overwhelmingly powerful enemy that even now was preparing to land on the sacred shores of the Home Islands. Yet despite the reversals, the defeats, and the retreats, Kozono had never lost faith in his service, his nation, or his emperor. He had fought on regardless of the odds, and now—firmly convinced that Hirohito had somehow been coerced or misled by his weak-willed and traitorous advisers—Kozono was entirely prepared to keep fighting, to die gloriously in the defense of his nation, and to kill as many of the enemy as possible in the process. And unlike many other officers in Japan’s armed forces, the veteran forty-three-year-old aviator still had enough men and matériel to turn his dreams of honorable and glorious resistance into something approaching reality.

  FROM EARLY 1944 ONWARD the primary responsibility for the air defense of the seven prefectures that make up the greater Tokyo metropolitan area—traditionally referred to as the Kanto Plain—rested with the Japanese Army Air Forces’ 10th Air Division, officially part of General Shizuichi Tanaka’s Eastern District Army. At the time of its formation the organization fielded between 350 and 400 aircraft, primarily single-engine day fighters supplemented by twin-engine night fighters, though the latter were not generally equipped with radar and thus had to rely on both their own and ground-based searchlights to locate their prey.

  The 10th Air Division’s aircraft were organized in three lines of defense, all over land and all oriented toward the southeast. The first line was anchored in the north on Choshi, then ran parallel to the coastline for some seventy miles south through Katsuura to Shirahama, on the Boso Peninsula; the second covered the area from Kisarazu to Chiba; and the third was the city of Tokyo itself. Operating from seven main and some twenty-five secondary airfields, the defending pilots initially relied on such tactics as random airborne patrolling of given sectors or, occasionally, the blanket coverage of a particular zone by all available interceptors. Although these methods took their toll on raiding Allied aircraft—both bombers and, following the arrival off Japan of U.S. Navy surface task forces, carrier-based fighters and attack machines—the army squadrons were losing men and aircraft faster than they could be replaced. By the time the 10th Air Division gained operational independence in March 1945 under the command of Lieutenant General Kanetoshi Kondo, the number of airworthy interceptors had shrunk to fewer than 100. In order to preserve his remaining aircraft while still being able to respond to Allied attacks, Kondo introduced such innovations as cancelling the requirement to provide near-constant patrolling over such strategic facilities as harbors and factories and instead ordered his fighters to concentrate on hitting targets of opportunity. The 10th Air Division commander also sought to improve the number and quality of his early-warning radars, and also set about providing his anti-aircraft units with newer, larger-caliber, and longer-range guns.1

  These innovations helped improve the performance of Kondo’s division against Allied aircraft attacking targets in the Kanto Plain, but the sheer number of those enemy machines—coupled with the increasing number of poorly trained and inexperienced army pilots arriving to replace dead or wounded veterans—ensured that the 10th’s assets continued to dwindle. Indeed, barely sixty interceptors were flyable by the time Kondo’s organization was subsumed into General Masakazu Kawabe’s Air General Army on April 15, 1945.

  Given the battering being inflicted on the army fighter units attempting to defend the Kanto Plain, it was fortunate that the navy provided air-defense help, albeit only grudgingly and in a remarkably uncoordinated and startlingly haphazard way. Though both the army and navy were steeped in the Bushido traditions and staunchly supported the imperial system, their relationship had long been riven by the same sort of interservice rivalries and jealousies that remain all too common in twenty-first-century militaries. So parochial had each organization become that they separately pursued the development of aircraft, tactics, and such vital systems as airborne search and early warning radars. Although a formal agreement signed by both services in 1943 vaguely stated that defending the homeland was a joint obligation, it stipulated that the navy would be responsible for the air defense of naval bases and installations and the areas immediately adjacent to them, whereas the army would defend the national airspace as a whole.2

  Even after the Home Islands began coming under regular Allied air attack from November 1944 onward the two services failed to integrate their real-time air-defense efforts in any meaningful way, agreeing only that navy aircraft based to the south and east of Tokyo would be responsible for engaging enemy aircraft headed toward the Kanto Plain before they penetrated the army’s first defensive perimeter. Each service organized and used its own radar-and obser
ver-based alert systems, and the only form of communication between the two regarding their respective air-defense plans and operations was a decidedly inefficient system of liaison officers who used telephones—and even couriers on motorcycles—to relay information that was often hopelessly out of date by the time it reached its intended recipient.3

  The navy built its Kanto Plain air-defense efforts around three air stations—Kisarazu, on the east shore of Tokyo Bay in Chiba Prefecture; Oppama, adjacent to the sprawling Yokosuka naval base on the southwest shore of the bay in Kanagawa Prefecture; and Atsugi, some fifteen miles west of the bay and also in Kanagawa. Each airfield was home to both operational squadrons and specialized support or training organizations, and while each was defended by its own navy-manned anti-aircraft guns by August of 1945 all three had been heavily battered by Allied air attacks. Moreover, as part of Ketsu-Go (Decisive Operation), Japan’s belatedly formulated plan to defend key areas of the Home Islands against an almost certain Allied amphibious invasion, from April 15 on the navy’s remaining frontline squadrons had been told to conserve fuel, ammunition, and pilots for “the last great struggle.” This meant, in effect, that the three bases would normally only launch interceptors when enemy aircraft were directly overhead or actually threatened the bases themselves.

  Yasuna Kozono was well aware of the restrictions placed on the navy, both by its lack of coordination with the army and by senior commanders seeking to husband the nation’s remaining military forces for the final battle. Yet he was also in a unique position to disregard those restrictions and do what he deemed necessary to prevent Japan’s humiliation. For the veteran aviator was far more than a mere staff officer; he commanded what until just months before had been one of the most potent military organizations in Japan, the navy’s 302nd Kokutai (Air Group) at Atsugi. Kozono’s wild, malaria-hazed ride on the afternoon of August 14 had but one purpose: to force his beloved emperor to restart the war.