Taiatari had a fine “no guts, no glory” feel to it that went over well with middle-aged career men sitting around conference tables and gambling with other people’s lives. Although there was no Japanese historical precedent for organized “suicide” tactics, per se, the idea seemed like something that warriors of old might have done, and it could be sold along those lines; invent some convincing traditions, their origins shrouded in mystery, playing up the usual yamato damashi angle. If it was done well, the public would drink it up. Of course, it remained to be seen what the young men who flew the planes would do when the actual orders were cut, but their courage and fine sense of self-sacrifice had never come into question before. There was no reason to fear any wavering on their part now. They knew what had to be done, and did not need balding armchair warriors to tell them why. Just when, where, and how.
Ozawa’s Marianas debacle – what the Western press was still trumpeting as “The Marianas Turkey Shoot”[15] – had proven once and for all, at least for the duration of the current conflict, that the once invincible Imperial Japanese Navy could no longer dare to stand toe-to-toe with the Allies like the good old days, when they could duke it out and win using conventional weapons and tactics. No, those snapshots were already yellowing and curling at the edges. The current situation called for unconventional ideas from unconventional men, and Takijirō Ōnishi was the man of the hour. Should his efforts come to naught, he knew he would most likely be vilified by generations of his countrymen to come. As painful as this was to acknowledge for an egotist of Ōnishi’s magnitude, he knew that the distance of time would someday ensure that he would be remembered for his loyalty, dedication and sacrifice. It might take centuries, but a grateful nation would someday honor him as he wanted to be remembered. As a patriot.
His eyes still fixed on the yellow rice paddies and jade mountains rolling by the window, a landscape vaguely reminiscent of his home village in late summer, the admiral noted mean black clouds menacing the horizon behind Mount Arayat, inviting comparison both with his own mood and with the relentless dark armada closing in from across the Leyte Gulf. How many more of Japan’s finest young men would die trying to stop this human tidal wave of defiling Americans? All of them? Was that the catch? Was that the burnt offering required this time? It was possible that an entire generation would have to be sacrificed to save the Empire. Failing that, these young heroes would be in the vanguard for the national death leap – the ichioku gyokusai (“honorable death of the one-hundred million”), as the papers would soon be calling it – painting a wide-brushed, blood red swath of Japanese pride, honor and virility on the pages of history in indelible glory. It would be a fitting epitaph for the proudest race the world had yet known. The entire nation would go down in flames, standing on its feet, with its gene pool intact, its women pure and its civilization unsullied. It would die unconquered and unbowed, steadfast in its resistance to the White Man’s juggernaut of world domination and soulless rationalism.[16] Perhaps other non-Anglo-Saxon nations would take up the struggle in the future, and Japan’s historical example could inspire other races of color to fight on. It would be a good death.
Educated Japanese males of Ōnishi’s generation who had spent time living and studying in the West – especially America – tended to harbor extreme feelings at both ends of a love/hate continuum toward their former hosts and teachers, ranging from unabashed schoolboy hero worship to utter repulsion fueled by a desperate need to believe in their own racial and cultural superiority. The emotional packages of most comprised a tortuous Freudian mélange of admiration and inferiority complex: a healthy respect for the Westerners’ technological prowess, material abundance and sheer physical size; disdain for their shameless materialism, their smug, easy pride, their maddeningly nonchalant tolerance of disorder, their racist immigration legislation and the woeful history of the American Negro. Not to mention poisonous, half-buried memories of patronizing cocktail party slights (“Oh, your English is excellent. Were you taught by missionaries?”), sneering hotel clerks, withering locker room anxiety and the impotent rage of coming home to see giggling Japanese girls on the arms of strapping white men in the streets of the larger port cities. Just as everyone tapping pointers on maps in the war rooms of Tokyo and cutting orders for young men to die at the front carried his own personal portfolio of similar psychological baggage regarding Westerners, none of them had ever really expected the nation to win its duel to the death with the West – win, that is, in the sense of Japanese troops marching up Pennsylvania Avenue and pitching their tents on the White House lawn.[17] Nor did they see the war as being pursued primarily for the practical strategic objectives of securing vital industrial resources and fuel. Seeing things in such simple terms was to confuse means with ends.
The goal, really, had always been, first and foremost, to humble the West – to daub the teacher’s face with mud – by kicking the white man out of Asia and bringing about the end, once and for all, win or lose, of what former Prime Minister Fumimarō Konoe had so aptly termed Anglo-Saxon global hegemony.[18] The Caucasian bogeyman – and the unspeakable fear that he might really be the superior being he seemed to think himself – had whispered in the ear and haunted the nightmares of the Japanese psyche for the last ninety years, since Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s Black Ships first fouled the waters of Uraga Bay, humiliating the nation by forcing it to accommodate the Americans and their insulting demands. Whipping Russia had been a promising start toward righting old wrongs, but holy war with the United States – inevitable, really, since that dark day at Uraga in 1853 – had given Japan the chance to silence the unsettling murmurs in the nation’s troubled conscience and the mocking laughter of that blue-eyed blight once and for all. The white man had been swallowing cultures and civilizations for too long. Now it was time for him to choke on one.
If inconceivable carnage was what was called for to achieve this, then so be it. Ōnishi had the will to both give and follow the appropriate orders, and the courage to face the consequences of his actions after his duty had been performed. He was comforted by the knowledge that the worst possible personal consequence – his own death – was something he had resigned himself to years ago. Now, as his country faced almost certain defeat, it was a fate he welcomed. Whether his mission was successful or not, he would die either in combat or by his own hand when his death would cause the least worry for his superiors, and only after a suitable replacement had been found to relieve him of his command duties. In a neat, twentieth century populist turn on the traditional Japanese warrior ethic, this time it would be the lord following his loyal retainers in death rather than vice versa.
In coming months, the Japanese public at large would be called upon to make unimaginable sacrifices while maintaining the will to fight to the end – literally to the last man, woman and child, fighting off the white barbarians at the landing beaches with bamboo staves if it came to that.[19] Sooner or later the Imperial War Council would have to begin planning how to sell this idea, and what the admiral had in the works right now was just the kind of PR needed for such a campaign. And mission gloriously accomplished or nobly failed, a conscious act of atonement on his part – something dramatic yet elegant – would be the perfect final touch. The nation would be that much stronger knowing that its leaders were as committed to making supreme sacrifices as they were to ordering them.
Ōnishi continued to stare at the smothering black clouds on the horizon, which now seemed so close they could have been images in an imported brass stereoscope he had once marveled at as a child in Hyōgo.
“I’m off to form a suicide squad,” he muttered aloud to no one in particular, still staring off at Mount Arayat[20]. These words were the first and last spoken until the limo reached Mabalacat nearly an hour later.
4 Ōnishi’s GambleStartled-looking sentries were still fumbling to straighten their caps and button their jackets when the yellow-flagged limo sped by on its way to Mabalacat airfield. The car drove up to the base
flight ops shack, a rough canvas tent with an open flap under which officers, some in fatigues, others in flight suits, could be seen sitting around a folding table. A tattered windsock next to the tent hung limply from its pole, dyed a pale salmon pink in the setting sun.
“Stop here”, Ōnishi ordered the driver in his second and last intelligible comment of the journey. He was already out of the limo giving his khakis a peremptory straightening and walking toward the tent before the driver could come around to open the door for him. The group of officers around the table, jolted out of their sunset lull by this unexpected visitation from on high, nearly knocked over their chairs as they scrambled to attention. Ōnishi returned a road-weary salute and motioned for the men to sit back down. He joined them in a chair vacated by a quick-thinking clerical type, darting assessing glances over maps for upcoming operations spread on the table with a few nods of his head as he sat down, still without a word of greeting or explanation for his visit. Of course, as a vice admiral, he was under no obligation to explain anything to anyone present, or for that matter, to say anything at all if he did not wish to. And no one else would speak until he did. This was basic bushidō senior/subordinate protocol.
The admiral rubbed his eyes with his stubby stonemason’s fingers and turned his attention to the activities on the airfield. Maintenance crews casting long shadows on the muddy ground bustled around parked aircraft, performing last-minute repairs in the dying light, preparing the planes for the next day’s missions and towing them to their camouflaged revetments to hide them from the marauding Americans, covering anything and everything else with bundles of tree branches and mats of high grass sod ripped up from the ground. Other groups cleaned up debris from damage the base had suffered from the morning’s Hellcat sweep, a courtesy call from Rear Admiral John McCain’s Task Group 38.1.[21] Several men with long poles poked through the smoldering, twisted skeletons of a row of Zeros that had been caught in the open in the raid. Nothing would be salvaged from these forlorn wrecks.
A seasoned military eye could tell in a single glance that this was a fighting force that, at least physically and logistically, was on its last legs. Running on fumes. Even the functional aircraft looked like scrapheap material, weathered and battleworn, many of the planes with nearly half of their paint finish scoured off by heat, propwash, runway gravel and combat, rectangles of fresh hunter green paint betraying patched-over shell and shrapnel damage. Their engines sounded rough, belching intermittent puffs of sooty black smoke, suffering from the crappy turpentine and alcohol-spiked low-octane fuel the navy was now forced to use. With the surface fleet unable to safeguard the sea lanes from the major oil sources in Borneo and the Dutch East Indies in the wake of the Marianas and Taiwan disasters, Allied subs and bombers had virtually free rein to litter the seabed with hundreds of thousands of tons of Japanese oil tanker and merchant marine shipping each month.[22] Loss of the Philippines would completely shut off the fuel spigot. The nation would have to go on what little reserves it had in domestic tank farms, and conservative estimates gave them no more than a few months worth at current consumption rates. After that, the choice would be simple: capitulation to the Allies, or national suicide.
Even if a tenuous hold on the southwest oil routes could somehow be maintained, it was clear that the fuel situation was only going to get worse from here on in. Reports were endemic of aircraft engines in all commands breaking down due to the new fuel mix, which both naval aviators and army pilots were referring to as “Marianas Gas.” If engine failure occurred in the midst of combat – which was now happening with alarming frequency – at least veteran pilots had a fighting chance of surviving such a calamity. Provided, of course, that they could survive the numberless swarms of expertly piloted Hellcats and Corsairs. But rookies – who now made up the greater portion of the flyers in both services – had little or no training for such contingencies, and were usually made quick work of by the Americans.
Quality control on the manufacturing end was suffering, too, both in engines and airframes. But with the best of the nation’s mechanics and skilled labor now being squandered in combat duties, stranded on remote island outposts behind enemy lines or already dead, and strategic materiel quickly running out, it was unreasonable to expect anything better than what they were getting. The industry was doing the best it could with what it had on hand, and doing a commendable job of it, at that, given the circumstances. Monthly production numbers were now at record levels.
But now, even women and children were being pressed into service. The nation’s aircraft plants now largely relied on mobilized teenage schoolgirls to toil away on the assembly lines, working brutally long hours with no pay. Dressed in dowdy gray padded pajamas with Rising Sun headbands over their uniformly pigtailed black hair, they left their little wooden geta clogs in neat rows on the factory floor and scurried barefoot over the airplanes that would carry their young war gods into battle, the wings of Zero fighters as sacred for them as the inner sanctum of a Shinto shrine. Riveting airframes with undying love, devotion, and hope, they cheered electrifying reports from the front (“American forces in full retreat on all fronts! Our forces victorious!”) and sang along with strident military marches played around the clock over tinny loudspeaker systems as they worked. Mechanics in frontline units told of often finding brightly colored origami cranes tucked away into recesses of the airframes for good luck, and exhortations to “Fight to the end!” or “Exterminate the white swine for us” grease-penciled in a childish, feminine hand on the insides of inspection access hatches or landing gear wells. The girls were the best the Japanese race had ever produced, enduring atrocious conditions and great physical danger without complaint, ever cheerful, with hearts as pure and brave as that of any fabled samurai. They were resourceful under duress, beautiful in adversity, proud and undefeated in body and mind.
The admiral shifted his gaze to the ground crews. They looked as rough and ramshackle as the planes they were servicing. Their uniforms were threadbare and patched, some bleached off-white from years of wear and tropical sunlight. Their faces showed the strain of months of sleep deprivation, combat fatigue and their miserable diet of mashed taro roots and green bananas. You could count the ribs of the men working bare-chested. And yet there was a spring in their sinewy frames as they performed their tasks. There were smiles on their haggard faces. Their voices were hoarse but cheerful, their speech peppered with laughter and encouragements, still full of fight. Like the girls in the aircraft plants, they would work and fight until they dropped. They, too, were undefeated.
A lifetime of indoctrination and thirty years as an officer of His Majesty’s Imperial Navy told the admiral that with such spirit, anything was possible. Military history showed that with the right combination of motivation and courage, even the direst circumstances could be overcome. Miracles could occur. Everyone knew that the Americans were spiritually weak – that one Japanese soldier had the guts and will power of ten of the cursed Yankees. Perhaps a miracle could happen here, too. A divine wind could blow again, like the fabled kami kaze that swept away a Mongol armada menacing Japan some seven centuries past. The odds were daunting, but not impossible. It was worth a try.
After nearly ten minutes of silence, the admiral cleared his throat to speak.
“I have come here to discuss with you something of great importance. May we go to your headquarters?”[23]
The men around the table gathered their maps and gear and prepared to shut down the shack for the night. The admiral was joined in the backseat of his limo by Commander Rikihei Inoguchi[24], a pleasant, self-effacing staff officer from 1st Air Fleet sent down to assess the situation at the 201st Air Group some days before, and Commander Asaichi Tamai, the bull-necked but mild-mannered XO of the 201st standing in for the absent unit CO, Captain Sakae Yamamoto. The other officers got in a truck and led the way for the entourage to the HQ compound, located in the town of Mabalacat in an old plantation-style house requisitioned from a Filipino fru
it company, which had once used it as an executive residence.
The house, which also served as the air group’s officer billets, was a tile-roofed two-story structure with warm cream-colored stucco walls and green trim on the windows and doorways. There were half-rotted wicker chairs on the veranda and makeshift laundry lines in the backyard hung with uniforms, flying suits, long mustard brown gaiter strips and off-white fundoshi loincloth underwear. A rusty fifty-five gallon drum was placed at one corner of the house to collect rainwater from the roof gutters. A low stone fence wall enclosing the compound gave it a distinctively Western appearance incongruous with the landscape – a decaying Californian land baron’s mansion plunked down on the outskirts of this dingy old Filipino banana town, slowly succumbing to undergrowth, overrun by chirping lizards and cigar-sized cockroaches.
Inside, with the exception of the CQ desk in the foyer and an orderly room in an old butler’s pantry, most of the space was devoted to billeting. The main living room smelled like sour flying boots and wet canvas, its wide expanse of teak parquet floor filled nearly wall-to-wall with steel-framed folding cots strewn with gear and uniforms, map cases, rabbit fur-lined flying helmets and the occasional comatose aviator sleeping off the day’s combat.
Commander Tamai led the group to the back of the room, where he switched on a naked light bulb over a small conference table. The officers spread out their operations maps and took seats.
The overhead light gave the men around the table a sallow, unhealthy color, deepening shadows under intense eyes looking down at the table or gazing off at some distant, imaginary horizon rather than directly at the senior officer present. Ōnishi looked at the drawn faces one by one, measuring the men behind them, timing the impact of what he was about to say for maximum effect.
Blossoms In The Wind: Human Legacies Of The Kamikaze Page 4
