Blossoms In The Wind: Human Legacies Of The Kamikaze

by Sheftall, M. G.

  However enthusiastic the cadets may have been about the start of their new careers as heroic aviators, they found out soon after arriving at their destination that it may have been a bit hasty to break out the white scarves and start growing handlebar mustaches. Although they had graduated from Yokaren, they had yet to graduate from hazing like “Human Seabag” and “The Paddle.” New rank as Petty Officers 3rd Class notwithstanding, Tokurō and his classmates were about to begin another seven months of dreary same-old-same-old – haymakers to the unsuspecting and headgames as usual for everyone. One significant difference between here and Yokaren, of course, was that this time the drudgery would be broken up into digestible chunks, with the exhilaration of stick time in the Akatonbos to look forward to in between.

  The Akatonbos certainly lived up to the cadets’ expectations as far as excitement went. There was never a dull moment in the two-seater biplane trainers – especially when sitting in the observer seat with a nervous classmate soloing[87] for the first time in the rear pilot’s seat – and the danger the pilot candidates now faced daily was no longer just the NCO variety that put dental work, seating comfort and young egos in jeopardy. There were flying accidents with alarming regularity, many of them fatal. One of the more horrific, which several Cycle 38 cadets witnessed from the ground, occurred when a pilot trainee was soloing with a classmate in the forward observer seat.

  After a few circuits around the airfield, the bright orange trainer had climbed high in an Immelman turn. Onlookers from below saw a black object fall from the now-inverted plane at the top of the turn, and there were shouts and gasps when everyone realized that the falling object was the plane’s observer, flailing his arms as if some vestigial avian instinct was telling him to flap phantom wings. Whether through sheer panic or mere lack of time, the observer failed to deploy his parachute, and was dead before people on the ground reached his shattered body. When the understandably shaken cadet at the stick brought the Akatonbo down, he told his superiors that he had merely wanted to surprise his passenger with some aerobatics, but in his enthusiasm, he had failed to notice that his passenger was not strapped in to the cockpit.

  *****

  As flight school entered its final weeks at Ōmura in late 1944, cadets of Cycle 38 had to start thinking about the post-graduation assignments they would formally request. Paradoxically, given this relatively advanced post-Marianas stage in the war, Japanese naval aviation offered a more bountiful variety of potential aircraft-type specialties for its fledgling pilots than ever before: there were medium bombers like the Isshiki Rikkō[88] (“Betty”) and the venerable China War veteran Mitsubishi Type 96; many new types of high performance attack planes, with the best examples being the Tenzan and Ryūsei torpedo bombers and the Suisei dive bomber; single-engined seaplanes like the Kyōfu and giant flying boats like the Kawanishi Type 2; the high-tech, radar-equipped Gekkō nightfighters; hot new recon planes like the Saiun – said to be able to outrun a Hellcat in level flight; and last but not least, the mounts of the navy’s formerly hemisphere-dominating fighter branch, the legendary Zero and its superlative up-and-coming successor, the Kawanishi Shidenkai[89]. But despite this cornucopia of jobs and machines to choose from, the choice was a no-brainer for Tokurō and his classmates. They had not come this far to puddle-jump around the backwaters of the dwindling Empire in seaplanes, or to languish in landlocked torpedo and dive bomber units with the nation’s carrier fleet now turning into extremely expensive coral reef at the bottom of the Pacific. As for an assignment to heavy bombers, well, that was about as exciting as being asked to drive buses. And who wanted to fly into combat with ineffective escort in large, slow targets whose only contribution to the war these days was to fatten American kill tallies? With B-29s now beginning to grind the nation’s population centers into bone meal, there was only one kind of airplane that mattered anymore – the fighter.

  Anticipating the overwhelming popularity of fighters as the most hotly sought-after assignment with the Cycle 38 cadets, the Ōmura faculty made every effort to ensure that sufficient numbers of candidates also opted for the less glamorous assignments. These units, after all, were suffering just as many casualties as the fighter jocks, and were thus just as desperate for replacements. While the administration of course had the authority to assign personnel as the service’s needs dictated, common sense and experience said that it was better from a morale standpoint for the cadets to get assigned to their first choices whenever possible. In light of this consideration, something had to be done to lessen the appeal of the fighter branch for all but the most dauntless and motivated cadets.

  Toward the end of Yokaren half a year earlier, the Kō-13 cadets had begun to overhear the expressions tokkō and taiatari at Matsuyama with increasing frequency. While the boys had a general idea that the tactics involved extreme danger, no one at their security clearance level in May 1944 was aware that they inevitably called for self-immolation. But the media blitz about Lieutenant Seki and the Shikishima Flight at Leyte Gulf six months later finally brought all the dropped hints and snippets of scuttlebutt together, and what were formerly vague theoretical concepts and rumors now had a palpably grisly immediacy.

  On the day in January 1945 when the cadets of Ōmura Cycle 38 were to submit their formal requests for assignment, the flight school commandant told the candidates that it was virtually guaranteed that anyone who volunteered for fighters was going to go “into tokkō units from which there is a zero percent chance of returning home alive.”[90] But threats or not, nothing was going to change Tokurō’s mind, and sixty out of his 170 classmates shared his convictions. The personnel office staff, shaking their heads with equal parts exasperation at the boys’ stubbornness and admiration for their courage, eliminated first sons[91] and only children from the batch, whittling the original sixty down to thirty-eight. On January 11, after a short graduation speech by the Ōmura commandant, the fighter group boys bade farewell to their other classmates, gathered their gear, and spent most of the rest of the day going through tiresome outprocessing procedures like cleaning and returning gear to the quartermaster, and filling in combat insurance forms and next-of-kin notification cards with the HQ pencil pushers. That night, they rode flatbed trucks to Ōmura Station. The boys were told nothing about their destination when they arrived, and still nothing when they boarded specially reserved passenger cars on an eastbound express train that night.

  Once seated on the train, Tokurō nodded off quickly. When he opened his eyes again, it was morning and the train was just passing through Hamamatsu. The buildings were as drably industrial as always, but to Tokurō at that moment, savoring the scenery through the condensation-misted window glass, they were as breathtaking as a snowcapped Mount Fuji bathed in dawn sunlight. Realizing that he was probably looking at his hometown for the last time in his young life, he wished that the train would at least slow down enough to give him a longer look. But he was on an express, hurtling for points east. He craned his neck out the window to get as long a look as he could at Hamamatsu, getting small and sinking away into the crossties.

  The train pulled into Tokyo Station about three o’clock that afternoon. The new pilots were marched with their gear to the main gates of the Imperial Palace, stopped to bow in greeting, then moved on to pay their respects at Yasukuni Shrine, where they were reassured that they would “soon be resting for all eternity.”[92] The march then continued through a couple of kilometers of downtown Tokyo to Meiji Shrine in Harajuku, where there was another group prayer at the Shinto altar there.

  As Tokurō had not grown up in a religious household, he was not particularly comforted by this detour pilgrimage, which smacked as much of self-administered funerary rites as it did of the invocation of divine providence. The ritual was the first of its kind he had experienced in his sixteen months of naval service, and the notion that the people in charge thought it important enough to take time out of a busy transportation schedule did not seem to forebode well for the unknown as
signment that awaited the newly graduated pilots of Ōmura Cycle 38.

  After a comfortable night’s sleep on fluffy civilian futon mattresses in a Tokyo inn – perhaps the last time in their lives they would enjoy such luxurious sleeping arrangements – the boy petty officers were given a few hours of leave to sightsee in Tokyo. They were then marched back to Tokyo Station, where they boarded a train that took them to Sawara, a nondescript burg in Ibaragi Prefecture about fifty kilometers from the eastern edge of the Tokyo metropolis. From Sawara, navy flatbeds drove them deeper into the boondocks, where civilization’s only toehold was a string of anonymous fishing villages dotting the Pacific coastline. As night fell, the small convoy negotiated unpaved dirt roads through an unappealing landscape of sand flats and scrub pines. If the navy had decided to build a secret base here for security measures, they couldn’t have picked many places in Central Japan more remote than this.

  The convoy eventually came to a halt at a sentry gate, where a large wooden sign read: Kaigun Jinrai Butai (“Navy Divine Thunder Unit”), 721st Kōkūtai (KKT). A smaller, more clerically lettered metal sign over the gate read “Kōnoike Naval Air Station.” Tokurō and his fellow truck passengers exchanged looks. Kōnoike? No one had have heard of it. And what in the world did “Divine Thunder” mean? Was it some sort of Shinto reference? Did the name have something to do with the prayer visit to Meiji Shrine the day before? No one knew a thing, and answers would have to wait until the Jinrai NCO who ordered them off the trucks stopped yelling at them for showing up still wearing their old seven-buttoned navy blue cadet uniforms. They were not at Yokaren or flight school anymore.

  After calisthenics and chow the next morning, the newest petty officer pilots of the Jinrai Unit began inprocessing. They were issued with new fatigues and flight suits, then assembled in a large wooden hangar, where a lieutenant gave the group a long, detailed and brutally frank assessment of the current status of the Japanese war effort. The briefing ended with the officer expressing the notion that no one currently in uniform – and certainly not qualified naval aviators – should expect to survive the war. Maximum effort and supreme sacrifice might just be poster slogans for civilians, they were reminded, but they were words that navy men lived and died by, and it was time for all of them to show their families, their country, and above all, their Emperor, that they were worthy of this honor and men of their word.

  The collective mood of the chattering, chipper group of fifteen and sixteen-year-olds who had filed into the hangar just a few moments before expecting to get Zero assignments now bordered on the morose. For most of the boys, this was the first time they had heard anything but pumped-up enthusiasm about the war coming from an authority figure, and they were visibly shaken by the talk. In addition to being told that their country was losing the war, they had also just been given what amounted to death sentences.

  Tokurō and his old Yokaren squadmates still with the group had been clued in for almost a year now on the general gist of this talk, thanks to the Midway and Solomons revelations they had heard at Matsuyama back in early ’44, but the newest awful details were still sobering nonetheless: the bloodletting in the Marianas; the loss of the last carrier task force in the IJN at Cape Engano during the Leyte Campaign; the impending fall of the rest of the Philippines; the inability to put up effective resistance against the B-29s… Everything the lieutenant told them spelled doom and defeat for Japan.

  In spite of the gloomy mood he had just created, the young officer’s expression seemed strangely expectant. It was obvious that he was waiting for the right timing to lay on a punch line he knew was going to knock everyone back on their heels. Tokurō braced himself for the worst.

  “I realize that what I have just told you may tempt you to lose hope in our war effort,” the lieutenant said, clasping a lecturer’s pointer in both hands behind his back. “Don’t let that happen. What I am about to tell you should help make sure that it doesn’t.”

  The lieutenant paused for effect, looking at the serious faces in the group while several noncoms started handing out small blank sheets of paper and pencils.

  “The navy’s weapons technicians have perfected the design of a top secret super-weapon that may very well turn around the course of the war,” the lieutenant said, pausing briefly as a murmur buzzed through the assembly. “The navy needs volunteers to pilot this weapon. And that’s why you are here. But I must tell you that nobody who sorties in the weapon will come back alive. Am I making myself understood? No one comes home alive. Before we go any further with this briefing, write your names on the pieces of paper you have just been given. If you agree to volunteer for the program, draw a circle under your name. If you would like to be excused and reassigned to other duties, leave this space blank.”

  The boys began scratching away on the memo papers, using each others’ backs as writing surfaces. As they were all standing while they did this, it was easy to see what everyone else was writing. Tokurō saw the boys to his left and right draw large double circles – one inside the other[93] – so he did the same, mimicking the devil-may-care flourish they made as they signed their lives away. The brisk, almost nonchalant way Tokurō signed his own paper, however, was not a matter of post-pubescent bravado or stiff upper lip resignation to his fate. Rather, if was more an expression of mild annoyance at being made to play along with what he felt to be a redundant – even insulting – gesture. The boys of Flight School Cycle 38 were still only in their mid-teens, but they were also Yokaren graduates, non-commissioned officers of the Regular Navy and qualified naval aviators. What was going to be asked for next, a letter of permission from their mothers? Enough formality nonsense, speeches, and shrine visits, Tokurō thought. Just point the planes in the direction of the enemy and give the orders. Get on with it already.

  The Jinrai NCOs collected the papers, and huddled in front of the group as they tallied the responses. Several boys had their names called, were pulled off to the side and whisked away with palpable scorn by a disgusted looking petty officer, never to be seen again. A moment later, the remaining boys were called to attention, and an important looking older officer introduced as a naval aide to the Imperial Court read out a proclamation penned in His Majesty’s own hand, exhorting the new pilots to do their utmost for the nation.[94]

  With some of the boys still sniffling with pride and emotion in the wake of the impromptu proclamation ceremony, the group was marched out to the flight line, where they were halted in front of a large canvas tent open on one side. Inside, visible through the opened tent flap, was something that looked like a torpedo about six meters long with stubby wings, twin tail rudders and a large wooden skid affixed to the underside. The wings and tail surfaces appeared to be made of fabric-covered plywood, with aileron and rudder control surfaces like those on their old Akatonbo trainers – cellulose-doped canvas stretched over a wooden framework. A cluster of three rocket nozzles was housed in the tail of the aluminum fuselage. Tokurō was probably not the only boy whose Adam’s apple twanged once, hard, when he noticed that the “torpedo” also had a cockpit.

  “This is the secret weapon that is going to save Japan,” the lieutenant said, now using the lecturer’s pointer. “The Project Marudai special attack craft. It’s what you will be riding into battle as Jinrai pilots.”

  There were whispers and murmurs among the group:

  The lieutenant waited for the murmuring to quiet down before continuing, explaining that Project Marudai had been so named in honor of the initiator of this project, Lieutenant Masakazu Ōta, a former transport pilot.[95] Approximately nine months earlier, after Lieutenant Ōta rotated back to Japan from duties in the Southwest Pacific, he approached the Aeronautics Research Laboratory at Tokyo University with a proposal for a dedicated tokkō weapon. Rough plans were drawn up, then sent to the navy’s top technicians at the Aerial Weapons Research Lab in Yokosuka, where the engineering was hammered out, blueprints drawn and prototypes built for testing. Since then, numerous test and tr
aining flights have been made, and the lieutenant could say from experience that the flying characteristics of the Marudai were excellent.”

  This remark garnered more murmurs and raised eyebrows.

  Obviously, the craft he flew – and that the new Jinrai pilots would soon fly – did not contain actual explosives. Sand was used for ballast where the explosives would normally be loaded in the warhead, which contained one-point-two tons of TNT in a combat configuration. It would be more than enough to take out an aircraft carrier or battleship in a single blow.”

  The weapon would be delivered to the area of operations slung under the belly of an Isshiki Rikkō mother plane. Released from an altitude of 6,000 meters, the Marudai had an operational gliding range of thirty-five kilometers at full combat weight. If there was a sudden need for a boost in speed – for example, if pursued by enemy fighters over the target area – or if an extra two or three kilometers of range was needed when unpowered gliding range appeared insufficient to reach the target, these needs could be provided for by the pilot pressing ignition switches on the instrument panel in the cockpit either in sequence or in tandem to engage the three solid fuel[96] rocket boosters located in the tail of the craft. Speeds up to four hundred sixty kilometers per hour were attainable by gliding alone, but if the rocket bottles were ignited sequentially, giving a total burn time of up to thirty seconds, that top speed could be boosted up to seven-fifty in level flight or even higher in a steep dive. Far faster than anything the Americans had in the air. Once within two or three kilometers of the target with rockets engaged, no fighter could catch the craft, and nothing but a lucky AA hit would be able to stop it. And seeing how the frontal silhouette of the craft was only about the size of a beach ball, that would have to be a shot from a very lucky and very skillful AA gunner, indeed.