Blossoms In The Wind: Human Legacies Of The Kamikaze

by Sheftall, M. G.

  Tokurō Takei was milling about with squadmates near the base HQ trying to get a glimpse of action when one of the Americans – a tall man – was brought in. Unlike the reactions of the villagers, the boy NCOs displayed more of an excited fascination than any personal animosity toward the Yankee (who may or may not have been Hap Halloran), and there was more gawking and nervous tittering over the man’s large frame and long nose than there were vengeful remarks. For some of the pilots, especially the ex-farmboys in the unit from deep rural areas, the crewman was the first Caucasian they had ever seen who was not on a movie screen or in a magazine spread.

  The mapcase the crewman still had strapped to his leg was even more of a jaw-dropper than its owner, but not for its contents. Rather, the material it was made out of was what made it an item of such dumbfounded scrutiny. No one at Kōnoike – top-secret, high tech weapon base that it was – had ever seen anything made out of clear PVC before. The case was passed around for the rubberneckers to inspect. Although Takei marveled at the texture and characteristics of this amazing – almost otherworldly – material, he also remembers experiencing a worrisome sense of technological inferiority as he handled it.

  “I thought ‘Wow, these guys are really way ahead of us’,” Takei-san recalls. “Just a little thing like a flexible transparent plastic pouch. But it said a lot about the relative strength of our two countries. I think we all felt some of that.”

  A few hours later, Kempeitai military police[134] arrived at Kōnoike to round up the mapcase crewman and his surviving comrades and whisk them off to Tokyo for interrogation and imprisonment. The evening’s excitement soon faded from memory, and Kōnoike returned once again to its routine of training drops and abundant free time.

  *****

  The haruichiban[135] blew its annual single loud trumpet blast to herald the arrival of spring weather a few weeks earlier than usual in 1945 – always the sure sign of a long, hot summer just a couple of more months down the road. Following behind the high-pressure pocket pushing this messenger wind was a thousand kilometer-long mass of warm, wet air roughly paralleling the coastline of Honshū. This low-pressure front promptly parked itself right over the Pacific coast of the Japanese home islands in mid-February, bringing with it days of rain and mist.

  In the dreary pre-dawn of February 17, more than just bad weather was lurking off the coast of Japan. Cloaking his armada in this fog and drizzle with the guile and cunning of a ninja assassin, Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher had brought the full striking power of Task Force 58[136] to within 100 kilometers of the Bōsō Peninsula and 220 kilometers of Tokyo without being spotted by Japanese patrol planes. And in a double stroke of pure luck for the Americans, radar facilities in Chōshi, Chiba Prefecture, and Shirahama, Shizuoka Prefecture, that were responsible for guarding the southeastern air and sea approaches to the capital were both temporarily inoperable due to technical malfunction on this particular morning.[137] Japanese air defense had been caught with its pants down.

  At 0600 hours, when Mitscher gave the nod for the first attack wave of rocket- and bomb-armed Hellcats and Corsairs to be launched, the entire island of Honshū was laid open like a banquet spread for the American marauders. It must have been a moment of sweet revenge for the curmudgeonly vice admiral, who in this most definitely non-PC era was both famous in the American media and beloved in the navy as an inveterate, unforgiving and utterly unabashed Jap-hater, whose colorful and often anatomically graphic racist epithets in regards to his foe were perhaps rivaled only by those of his sometimes-boss, Admiral William Halsey.[138]

  Outside of the mission objective of temporarily sating the wrath of Mitscher, the raids now on their way to Honshū had strategic and tactical aims as well. Strategically, it was hoped that they could achieve a psychological effect along the lines of the Doolittle raid nearly three years earlier[139] – panicking the residents of the Japanese capital and stirring up the IGHQ like a smoked-out beehive. This would not be another antiseptic raid by massed B-29s bombing from altitude, but real in-your-face, barnstorming aggression – single-engined fighter-bombers buzzing the rooftops, clipping clotheslines and shooting up anything that moved. It was hoped that the shock value of the raid would create enough anger and chaos to divert Japanese attention from the American surface fleet movement and buildup presently under way in the Bonins in preparation for the Iwo Jima invasion that would kick off in two more days.

  The tactical objective was to neutralize as much enemy air strength as possible in order to downgrade counterattack capability available for the Japanese to send south when the invasion actually started. The more Japanese aircraft left in smoking heaps on Honshū bases this morning meant that many fewer planes available for suicide attacks on carriers and packed troop ships off Iwo Jima two days from now. There was not a single Leyte and Lingayen Gulf veteran in TF 58 who had to be sold on that arithmetic, or who was not praying Godspeed and good hunting for the glossy dark blue fighter-bombers now heading northwest at five hundred kilometers an hour.

  *****

  Thirty minutes after Mitscher’s launch order and 250 kilometers northwest of the wet flight decks of Task Force 58, Tokurō Takei and three other squadmates were lugging Ōka Pilot Section One’s empty aluminum mess pails back up to the Jinrai kitchen when Kōnoike’s air raid siren ripped open the dawn calm with a long, climbing wail. Having only ever heard the siren during drills, for a few moments the boys stood frozen in place with their pails by their sides, looking at each other while they waited for their brains to work and tell them what to do next. But when a gull-winged Corsair emerged from the slate-gray morning mist with a sinister whine of whistling superchargers and began to let loose with its .50 caliber machine guns, the mess pails hit the ground and the boys made a mad dash for the nearest treeline.

  Their hiding place was on a slight rise, so it afforded a panoramic view of the airfield, where all twelve of Kōnoike’s remaining Isshiki Rikkōs were lined up like tombstones, fully fueled and ready to go for the morning’s scheduled formation flight training. Panting from fear and their hundred meter dash to safety, the boys watched in slack-jawed disbelief as one of the bombers went up in a spectacular orange fireball under the Corsair’s guns.

  “The flames lit up everything,” Takei-san remembers. “Everything that had been bluish-gray a second before was now yellow and orange. If the scene hadn’t been so horrible, I would be tempted to call it beautiful.”

  A second Corsair motored in, guns-ablaze, followed by a long succession of others that formed a kind of Lufbery circle doing laps around the field, their pilots apparently paying little or no mind to the few stingy tracer streaks of small caliber AA fire the base managed to put up. One Corsair at a time would drop out of the loop, swoop down to strafe the Isshiki Rikkōs on the flight line, then climb back up to join formation before the next plane came strafing in behind him. The process looked so leisurely and routine it could have been a gunnery range training session.

  After ten or twelve passes, Kōnoike’s flight line was a wall of towering flame. The Corsairs stuck around to shoot up a few buildings on base before winging off back into the morning mist from whence they came. As the base air raid siren wound down from its frenzied, undulating shriek to one last melancholy, dying moan, a sad, chaotic cacophony could be heard wafting up from the airfield. There were hoarse shouts for firefighting details to be formed, and anguished cries as the dead and wounded were tended to.

  Still hunkered down in the scrub pines and trembling with fight-or-flight adrenaline, Takei and his friends watched the scene wordlessly, sniffling back tears of shock and rage.

  “I’ve never forgetten the bitter frustration of that moment,” Takei-san says. “And never experienced anything like it since.”

  Takei was not alone in his chagrin. But the operational and logistical repercussions of the raid were even worse than the emotional and morale damage it caused. The Americans had destroyed every last one of Kōnoike’s twelve Isshiki Rikkō mother pla
nes. Replacing them would not simply be a matter of placing an order with Mitsubishi or borrowing bombers from other units. The planes they had lost were specially modified for carrying Ōkas, and the only mechanics and technicians capable of making the conversions from stock Isshiki Rikkōs were all down in Kyūshū with the combat detachment and could not be spared. With no mother planes, the Kōnoike detachment could no longer make Ōka trainer drops.

  It was a bitter setback for the Jinrai. Not only had the American raid ripped the heart out of Kōnoike by taking out its facilities, but in stomping its training capacity so decisively, it had really taken away its very raison d’etre. Captain Okamura eventually sent two reserve Isshiki Rikkōs back up to Kōnoike so that training drops could resume, but the gesture was really more symbolic than practical. Two mother planes were only enough to restore the trainer drop rotation to a fraction of its former pace. This meant that the Jinrai could no longer count on the kind of replacement pilot numbers they had planned on being able to get from Kōnoike once combat operations started.

  When all was said and done, it had taken only a few minutes of enemy strafing runs and Kōnoike was now effectively out of the war.

  “You’ve got to watch out for those early morning air raids,” Takei-san says with a barely perceptible smirk. “Remember Pearl Harbor.”

  14 Flight Of The Thunder GodsWhile Okamura, Nonaka and the others at Kanoya were concerned about Kōnoike’s predicament, they had more pressing concerns. First and foremost, they had to prepare for their combat debut, which nobody doubted was imminent. The Americans had now taken Iwo Jima, and either Okinawa or Taiwan would be their next logical target. But in either case, as a visibly excited Admiral Ugaki constantly reminded Okamura, the enemy would at last come within striking range of the Jinrai, and he and everyone else in naval high command were expecting big, big things from the Ōka.

  When American movement in the third week of March made it clear that the next big push would be coming in Okinawa, Ugaki and Okamura began brainstorming the appropriate deployment scenarios. Recon aircraft were constantly kept aloft scouring the East China Sea looking for a target valuable enough to stake the Jinrai’s all-important debut on. After several false alarms and flying starts, recon planes made a solid contact on the morning of March 21, spotting an American force of three carriers and support ships 350 kilometers south of Kyūshū on a heading of about 145 degrees.[140]

  The ships were TF 58 elements that had participated in the massive March 18-19 raids that had clobbered Kyūshū and Inland Sea region air bases – including Kanoya – in preparation for the upcoming Okinawa invasion. Some of the vessels had sustained tokkō aircraft and conventional weapons damage during the raids, most notably the carrier Franklin, when a Zero crashed through her flight deck and exploded amidships, causing over a thousand casualties. Tokkō escorts and conventional attack planes had returned to their Kyūshū bases after their counterattacks with electrifying (if inaccurate) reports of carriers sunk and others with shattered, useless flight decks. Ugaki, in yet another disastrous example of his characteristically wishful thinking, bought everything he was told at face value and grossly over-estimated the damage the Americans had suffered. He was under the impression that the force spotted on the twenty-first was a column of crippled stragglers, and would thus be unable to mount a combat air patrol in strength sufficient to stop a Jinrai raid. If this were indeed the case, the Isshiki Rikkōs, even with a modest escort of Zeros, would be able to ingress close enough to release their Ōkas and score crushing hits on the Americans. There might never be another opportunity this good to send the Ōkas into battle. The time to strike was now. Ugaki believed that today was going to be the day of the big payoff, and expected nothing less than a brilliant victory to be able to report to Toyoda.

  Okamura and Nonaka did not agree with the admiral’s assessment of the American combat air patrol capabilities, and thus, could not share any of his optimism for the chances of the mission’s success. Topping the list of reasons not to be cheerful was that 5th Air Fleet Flight Ops had told them that there were only going to be fifty-five Zeros available for the escort[141] – thirty-two of the Jinrai’s own fighters plus another twenty-three from other units in southern Kyūshū that would rendezvous with the main force en route.[142] Moreover, many of these planes were in various states of disrepair and most were going to be flown by green pilots just out of flight school. They would be useless if the force ran into determined American CAP. Unless they could achieve near total surprise, the 711th HKT was going to be flying into its own massacre.

  Okamura and Nonaka were painfully aware of the potential disaster that lay ahead, and had laid out good reasons for postponement during the staff meeting that had just finished, but their honor as officers meant that they had no choice but to follow Ugaki’s orders and go through with the mission when he dismissed their misgivings as unfounded. For the last item during a hurried session at the planning tables to go over the final operational details of the mission, Okamura – with reservations – yielded to Nonaka’s insistence on flying the lead Isshiki Rikkō into battle. Neither of the men, by this point, doubted that the assignment would be fatal. They shook hands, then left the ops shack and walked down to the flight line, where Nonaka had choreographed in advance a scene taking place that must go down in history as one of the classic moments in gloriously doomed military exploits, right up there with the Foreign Legion’s bayonet charge at Dien Bien Phu, the Light Brigade at Balaclava and Pickett’s Charge.

  All 160 pilots and aircrew who would be participating in the main attack element were standing tall in formation along the flight line under the late morning sun as jindaiko war drums, which Nonaka had borrowed from a local Shinto shrine just for the occasion, thundered out martial rhythms dating from antiquity. Nonaka’s beloved reproduction samurai banners – Masashige Kusunoki’s Hirihokenten pennant from the Battle of Minatogawa in 1336 and the Nanmu Hachiman Daibosatsu Minamoto clan battle flag immortalized in the medieval Genpei War – trailed multicolored streamers in a stiff breeze. Front and center in the place of honor, the fifteen Ōka pilots who would be flying the mission were wearing spotless uniforms and the pristine white headbands they had received from Admiral Toyoda in December. At their head was the ranking Ōka pilot, Lieutenant Kentarō Mitsuhashi (INA ’42), with a white pouch around his neck containing some of Lieutenant Ben Kariya’s ashes.[143] The Ōka’s first victim would also be participating – at least in spirit and corporeal dust – in its first combat sortie.

  After Admiral Ugaki emerged from his fortified command bunker to join the ceremony, Okamura gave the 711th the most rousing send-off speech he could muster without breaking down in tears. Still, there were few dry eyes when the Jinrai CO gave a final salute and the pilots and crews broke ranks to run to their aircraft with loud and lusty warrior yells, exchanging shouted farewells and encouragement with the throngs of onlookers who lined the field. Nonaka’s last words as he headed off for his command plane referred to the battle that resulted in the defeat and death of his personal hero, the legendary samurai Masashige Kusunoki.

  “This is Minatogawa,” a glassy-eyed, glowing Nonaka had been heard to say to no one in particular, already half-slipped into a state of pre-self-sacrificial beatitude. No one who witnessed the scene would ever forget that he made the remark with a smile on his face.[144]

  At 1135 hours, sixty-six twelve-hundred-horsepower Sakae engines in a total of forty-eight aircraft coughed to life on a signal from the control tower. The Zeros – now whittled down to thirty from thirty-two by engine failures – took off first to wild cheers. But the biggest roars from the onlookers were reserved for the take-offs of the three command Isshiki Rikkōs and the fifteen mother planes with light gray Ōkas slung under their bellies. When the final lumbering bomber crawled into the air, the massive formation circling the field straightened out and headed south. The cheering continued until the last echo of droning thunder from the formations engines faded away. As th
e crowd broke up and other personnel returned to their duties, Ugaki and Okamura walked off in the direction of the command bunker to begin their long day’s vigil in the radio shack.

  *****

  Approximately three hours later, radarmen in the American carrier group picked up the first contacts of a large formation of unidentified aircraft approaching from the direction of Kyūshū. The carriers Hornet and Belleau Wood wasted no time putting up a CAP of forty-eight Hellcats split into high and medium altitude elements to meet the bandits.[145] When the Jinrai planes finally came into view, the Hellcats already had the tactical picture sewn up. While the medium altitude Hellcats waded into the ranks of the top cover Zero escorts – which had been even further depleted by engine failures on the way down from Kyūshū – the high altitude CAP element peeled off into long, diving attack runs on the Isshiki Rikkōs farther below.

  Anyone who has watched a History Channel documentary or two on World War II air combat has most likely seen at least a few seconds of American gun camera footage from the slaughter that ensued. I would imagine that documentary editors favor this particular collection of footage for the almost Hollywood quality of its pyrotechnics. The photographic record has left us with some grainy imagery of cool explosions, but film cannot begin to evoke the feeding frenzy of devastation the Hellcats wrought on that March afternoon so long ago.

  Fire belched from the engine nacelles of the Isshiki Rikkōs almost the instant the first .50 caliber rounds began perforating the aluminum airframes of the Jinrai planes and the flesh of their crews. Unarmored, non-self-sealing fuel tanks exploded, turning aircraft into giant torches within seconds. Catastrophic structural failures led to wings collapsing and tumbling away. The big bombers lurched at sickening angles with the dead weight of the useless Ōkas still slung under their bellies, shuddering under hits before disintegrating in midair.