Zero

by Masatake Okumiya

  Second, there were few officers in the Ozawa Force with experience in carrier-vs.-carrier warfare, and this lack of familiarity with this type of conflict was clearly evident. Vice-Admiral Ozawa, his chief of staff, his entire senior, operations, and air staffs had never participated in a battle against enemy aircraft carriers. Moreover, with the excep­tion of only two air staff officers, Vice Admiral Ozawa and his supporting staffs knew little about the problems of air groups. They had only the barest knowledge of aviation problems. Even Rear Admirals Jojima and Obayashi, who both had participated in combat as the captains of aircraft carriers, knew little about the intrinsic problems of general aircraft operation. With myself as the sole exception, the immediate staffs of Jojima and Obayashi all lacked carrier battle experience. As the Marianas conflict was to be waged against an American task force under command of Rear Admiral Raymond A. Spruance, the talented leader at Midway, I could not help but feel, prior to battle, that we suffered from a severe handicap in leadership.

  Third, Ozawa lacked a sufficient number of high-perfor­mance aircraft, so necessary against the effective American defenses. We still employed as our first-line carrier-based fighter plane the aging Zero; there did not exist in the Navy another plane with performance superior to that of the fighter which had fought in China in 1940. The six aircraft carriers under command of Jojima and Obayashi were slow and hampered by short carrier decks. It proved difficult, under ordinary conditions, to launch from these carriers the new Suisei (Judy) dive bombers brought into service after the Battle of Midway. The nine Judy’s aboard the Junyo could not even be used for training purposes for the month while the fleet was anchored at Tawitawi; the car­rier was too slow in the limited training area to launch its planes. Even the new Tenzan (Jill) attack bombers were dif­ficult to use efficiently when aboard the small aircraft car­riers.

  Faced with these operational difficulties, and also searching for increased escort fighter coverage, the Navy experimented with the Zero fighters as dive bombers, carrying a 550-pound bomb. Nine modified Zero fighter-bombers went aboard each carrier of the Jojima Force, and each of Obayashi’s three carriers received twelve Zero fighter-bombers. A total of sixty-three modified Zero fighters were placed aboard Ozawa’s six carriers, and these planes were broken up into two special attack groups.

  Led by the Tenzan attack bombers, which provided nav­igational direction, the two Zero fighter-bomber groups left their ships on June 19 to attack the enemy task force. Our hopes for the new planes’ victory were fruitless. Our Zero pilots, covering nearly three hundred and fifty nauti­cal miles to the enemy fleet, arrived in exhausted condi­tion, unable to fly with their usual skill. Nearing the American carriers, they ran into an effective defensive screen of Hellcat fighters and suffered severe losses. This final effort dropped the curtain on our Navy’s complete defeat at the Mariana Islands.

  It was evident, however, that although the Zero fighter-bomber required assistance in long-range navigation, it achieved better results against enemy carriers than did any of our dive bombers. This sudden increase in bombing accuracy was the greatest single cause of the sudden rise of the famous Kamikaze suicide squads which participated in the hopeless sea battle off Leyte Island in the Philippines, four months later.

  Thus the Zero fighter plane which once had been the undisputed master of fighter-plane combat in the western Pacific and the Indian Oceans, seemed destined to play a further leading role in the Pacific air war. Not, however, any longer as the champion of air combat, but as the main character in the mounting tragedies which prophesied only the total defeat of Japan.

  If the war leaders of our nation had at that time realized the true condition of our naval air force, they would cer­tainly have made a serious effort to conclude the war as rapidly as possible. Had such negotiations been undertaken, the Kamikaze suicide attacks would never have occurred, and much loss of life, both Japanese and Ameri­can, could have been averted. In this sense, especially, our failure to defend successfully the Marianas played a signif­icant role in the history of the Pacific War.

  CHAPTER 24

  The Kamikaze Suicide Attacks

  DURING THE GREAT AIR battles of the Pacific War, many pilots while directly over enemy war ships or land installations were caught in situations in which either they were seriously wounded or their aircraft became disabled. Under such conditions, not a few pilots chose, while it was still possible to maneuver their airplanes, to meet their end in a final suicide dive against the enemy objective. These occasions, not at all rare in air assaults, were not “suicide attacks” in the true sense of the word, since the pilot stood almost no chance of survival. There were instances, of course, when certain individuals elected to sacrifice their lives in order to accomplish their missions, but these were isolated cases.

  The Kamikaze attack, however, was an entirely different matter. In this operation the pilot, or the entire crew, of an attacking aircraft, eliminated even the remotest opportu­nity for survival once committed to the final dive against the enemy. Death was the companion of the Kamikaze pilot, as it was of the Kaiten, the human torpedoes employed in the war’s latter stages.

  There has been, and there will continue to be, much criticism of the Japanese Navy for adopting for the first time anywhere the deliberate mass suicide method of attacking the enemy. The Kamikaze operations have evoked much dissension among our own people, for such tactics cannot help but to be accompanied by incompara­ble mental anguish and sacrifice on the part of all con­cerned. I neither condemn nor condone the decisions which led to, and maintained, the Kamikaze flights, but present here the developments leading up to, and follow­ing, the decision finally to launch the suicide attack.

  The Zero fighter, long the Navy’s mainstay against enemy air operations, again played a leading part in our military activities through its position as the most widely used Kamikaze aircraft. There were good reasons to employ the Zero fighter for this role, all of which were necessitated by combat inadequacies. Despite the severe losses sus­tained by the Navy in the Marianas Sea Battle (often described by the Americans as the Battle of the Philippine Sea), in which three large aircraft carriers went to the bot­tom, despite the fact that we no longer had available the air crews to man the remaining six carriers, and despite the fact that we could no longer reorganize a balanced fleet with our remaining vessels, Tokyo still elected to continue the war. After the Marianas debacle, the Zero still remained as the mainstay of the Navy’s air fleets, outnumbering by a considerable margin any other type of plane. If the Kamikaze attacks were to be instituted, then the Zero, by virtue of its available numbers and also because its perfor­mance made it the most likely airplane to break through the defending screen of Hellcat fighters, was the logical choice for the Kamikaze groups.

  The human element, of course, contributed much to the final decision. Members of the Navy and the Army had been raised in an environment startlingly different from that of our enemies. The time-honored custom and senti­ment of the Japanese people would not recognize existence as a prisoner of war; capture by the enemy was to be feared even more than death, for such capture was always accom­panied by disgrace to one’s family and homeland. Rather than to surrender to the enemy and spend a life of shame, our men naturally considered, once they had been confronted with repeated and chaotic defeats, means of achieving an honorable and a glorious death.

  It was but a matter of time before the American fleet, incredibly powerful and now clearly the master of the Pacific, launched the final all-out assault against the Philippine Islands. Our defending officers in the Philippines were faced with a problem apparently without solu­tion. With a Navy air force comparable in strength to only one large American aircraft carrier, it was impossible to hurl back the colossal attack which the enemy clearly would soon begin. If we could not entertain the possibility of surrender, and if accepted means of defense obviously would be impossible, the Philippines’ Navy air command­ers could not help but turn to tactics whic
h until then had never been employed.

  Under these circumstances, then, the Japanese Navy Air Force planned and finally executed the Kamikaze suicide attack.

  With all the air bases in the Mariana and Caroline islands and along the northern coast of New Guinea in the hands of the enemy by early September of 1944, the rich prize of recapturing the Philippines tantalized the Ameri­cans. Before they could dispatch even their formidable fleets, with the thin-hulled and vulnerable transport ships, to the shores of the islands, they must first destroy or ren­der inoperative the air bases from which our fighters and bombers could strike out at any invasion force. We could expect, then, first an attack by carrier task forces, which would be followed by a mass troop assault. The Navy air force received the responsibility for defending the Philippines, and upon our success or failure rested control of the great island group. With these assumptions as the basis for action, the First Air Fleet, with land-based aircraft, estab­lished its headquarters at Davao, and began the reorganiz­ation of its units with those planes permanently assigned to the Philippines, as well as the surviving aircraft from the Mariana Islands.

  Our groups worked with feverish haste, but the mount­ing power of the Americans allowed them to strike with greater speed and effectiveness than we had anticipated. On September 9, 1944, their task force closed in on the Philippines and blasted Davao for its first air raid of the war. The following day, with many of our ground installa­tions already in wreckage, the carrier-based planes returned again to bomb and strafe the airfield.

  As the Davao attack raged, the Zero fighters then undergoing training at Clark Field on Luzon Island were hastily fueled and armed, and ordered to transfer immedi­ately to our base at Cebu Island in the central Philippines. The fighters arrived too late to participate in Davao’s defense, for the Americans had completed their attack and withdrawn to the open sea. Or so we thought. Two days later the carrier task force steamed under full speed for Cebu and launched an all-out aerial effort against our planes. Something happened to snarl our communications and for some unknown reason Cebu Field failed to receive the proper notification of the attacking planes which our outposts had sighted on their way. The communications mix-up was fatal, for the arriving American pilots came upon a scene which not even they had hoped for. About one hundred Zero fighters sat on the Cebu runways, ripe and helpless for an air attack. The Americans did not for­feit the rare opportunity; when the nightmare of screaming dive bombers and strafing fighters was over more than fifty Zero fighters either were charred wreckage or had been blown to pieces. It was a loss of great magnitude; in a single stroke the enemy had destroyed nearly two thirds of our entire serviceable fighter-plane force in the Philippines, and had left in damaged condition many other Zeros.

  By late August of 1944 I had returned to Japan as the air staff officer attached to the Naval General Staff of the Imperial Headquarters. As the American carrier force raided Cebu, I was flying under orders from Davao to the Cebu air base; my transport plane arrived on the scene almost simultaneously with the first wave of enemy fight­ers and bombers. Our pilot swung clear of the field lest we be caught by the Hellcats, which would quickly have shot us out of the sky. We were able to see, before the transport fled the area, the dive bombers plunging from the sky, and the fighter planes as they screamed back and forth over the field, their wing guns spitting tracers into the parked Zeros. Within minutes Cebu became utter confusion. The Ameri­can pilots were remarkably accurate, and the flames and black smoke boiling from the burning Zeros reminded me of a crematorium . . . ours.

  That evening I returned to Manila and conferred with the pilots whose Zeros had been gunned and bombed into wreckage. The pilots were enraged at their helplessness, and talked heatedly of revenge against the Americans at any cost. It was obvious that there would soon be radical changes in our battle tactics.

  In an attempt to overcome the effects of the devastating Cebu airfield attack, the Zeros were transferred from Cebu to Clark Field and Manila. Under the highest priority Tokyo dispatched aircraft replacements, spares, fuel, and other material to rebuild the shattered fighter-plane force. Even as the groups reformed, the American carrier planes struck again; on September 21 and 22 enemy fighters and dive bombers strafed and bombed the fields, once again break­ing up the Zero groups. Another attempt to establish a powerful fighter defense in the Philippines had failed.

  Even as the American carrier planes swept over the Philippines, other large formations pounded our air bases on Okinawa on October 10 for the first raid against that island. From the twelfth to the fourteenth the irresistible American carrier-based planes thundered against Formosan air bases; on the fifteenth they returned to Luzon Island to sweep our airfields into burning, tangled wreckage.

  Again the carrier attacks frustrated our attempts to reestablish a defensive fighter-plane force. Not only did we fail in every attempt to reinforce our fighter groups in the Philippines, but we could not even maintain our minimum strength. Every additional day meant a further drain on the planes which would be called on to defend the Philippines when the American troops first stormed ashore; exactly when and where, however, was a matter yet to be determined. On October 17 enemy troops invaded and secured their position on Suluan Island, east of Leyte. The situation in the Philippines was no longer merely serious; it had become critical.

  Admiral Soemu Toyota, Commander in Chief of the Combined Fleet (Admiral Mineichi Koga was lost at sea in a Kawanishi flying boat on March 31) judged that the Americans were making their all-out bid for the Philippine Islands and, acting on plans long before prepared, started in motion his powerful defensive fleet. On the seventeenth he ordered every warship in the entire Philippines area to proceed under full steam for the southeastern area of the island waters, there to assemble in battle formation. Simul­taneously, he issued orders to his other fleet units, which included the Second Fleet under Vice-Admiral Takeo Kurita, then in Singapore waters and consisting of the two 74,000-ton battleships Yamato and Musashi, five addi­tional battleships, nine heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, and twenty-three destroyers; Vice-Admiral Kiyohide Shima’s Fifth Fleet of two heavy cruisers, one light cruiser, and seven destroyers then in the Formosa area; and Vice-Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa’s Third Fleet of four aircraft carri­ers, two battleships, three light cruisers, and eight destroyers, then in Hiroshima Bay. It was an imposing force, with seven battleships (two of them the world’s most powerful), eleven heavy cruisers, six light cruisers, thirty-eight destroyers, and four aircraft carriers. On the same day there arrived at Manila Headquarters the new naval com­mander of the First Air Fleet, Vice-Admiral Takijiro Onishi.

  Onishi was a capable veteran pilot who had assisted the late Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto over a period of many years. Onishi was personally responsible, along with Yamamoto, for the buildup of our naval air arm. As a rear admiral he commanded the first air flotillas with Zero fighters in the Sino-Japanese Incident. Assisted by Com­mander Minoru Genda, he drew up the original plans for the Pearl Harbor attack and, when the war began, as the Chief of Staff to Vice-Admiral Nishizo Tsukahara, Com­mander in Chief of the Navy Land-Based Air Force, he dis­tinguished himself in the extensive aerial operations which extended from the Philippines to the Dutch East Indies. Now he returned to the battlefield where once he had led the attack, only this time his opponents thundered toward the Philippines with the greatest massed carrier air power in history. Ironically, the planes which he would order into combat were chiefly the familiar Zero fighters with which he had fought some four years before.

  Vice-Admiral Onishi’s hands were literally tied even before he made his first official move. Not only were his fighter planes primarily the all-too-familiar Zero, but he could not scrape together from every field in the Philippines more than thirty serviceable fighters. By patching up every remaining Type 1 Betty bomber on the islands, he managed to increase his defensive force of operational aircraft to the pitiful total of only sixty planes. Onishi realized the futility
of his task: that not even by the wildest stretch of the imagination could be hope, through orthodox meth­ods of attack, to inflict heavy damage upon or to destroy the American carriers so well guarded by the Hellcat fighter planes. Without fighter-plane escort, Onishi mused, even the mighty battleships Yamato and Musashi, despite their eighteen-inch guns and slabs of armor plating, would be destroyed by American carrier bombers long before they would have the opportunity even to see the enemy fleet, let alone engage it in combat.

  Since orthodox methods of attack could no longer be pursued to carry out his mission, Onishi turned to the pos­sibility of Kamikaze attacks—suicide dive bombing with Zero fighters carrying 550-pound bombs. The airplane most likely to break through the defending cordon of Hell-cats, and the most accurate of all our dive bombers, the Zero was the only logical choice for the suicide missions.

  However, the admiral could not simply order his subor­dinates to commit suicide in mass numbers, not even in the Japanese Navy where surrender could not be tolerated. Suicide attack on a mass, calculated scale was unknown to war, and Onishi knew that he would have to make the request to his pilots personally. On the evening of October 19 the admiral arrived at Clark Field on Luzon Island, the major Zero fighter base in the Philippines, to confer with the executive officers of the Zero Fighter Corps. At the meeting he made his formal request for the Kamikaze attacks.