Blossoms In The Wind: Human Legacies Of The Kamikaze

by Sheftall, M. G.

  When Fukagawa flew down to Chita Peninsula in southern Aichi Prefecture for two weeks of live-fire gunnery range training at the end of June, he brought along the new dress uniform and sword he would need for his July 1 commissioning ceremony and formal commemorative photograph. Intensive training continued throughout the summer, but there was considerable free time between flights and technical seminars, and as lieutenants, the trainees were free to do as they pleased after instruction every day. All of this freedom of movement was a bit of a culture shock for the IMA graduates, and this was especially true for Yōnen Gakkō products like Fukagawa, who had only recently emerged into the daylight of reality and hormones after a total of six years in the monastic He-man Woman-haters Club of army cadet life. Perhaps wishing to insure that this newfound freedom did not go to the trainees’ heads, the Akeno administrators were careful to make sure there were plenty of wholesome, stress-releasing outlets for their charges’ excess energies. Group trips to the seaside – usually nearby Yokkaichi Beach in Aichi Prefecture – were one form of activity organized for this purpose. Other amenities included excellent chow, a well-stocked PX and other concessions on the base.

  Officers’ privileges meant that the lieutenants – if not on duty – were able to venture off post each weekend from Saturday afternoon to Sunday evening. One such excursion that is particularly fresh in Fukagawa-san’s memory was a late summer day trip he made with several classmates to Kameyama, Mie Prefecture, a nearby town famous for its pleasant weather and beautiful scenery. Stepping off the wood-burning bus at their destination, the lieutenants were intrigued to see two beautiful and well-dressed young women standing ankle-deep in a small river running past the bus stop. Judging from their clothing and light complexions, they appeared to be from the city – Fukagawa guessed Nagoya. In any case it was clearly evident that they were not local farm girls, and were thus eligible candidates, under army social conventions, for some harmless flirtation with dashing young officers. Excitedly expecting some rare female conversation and at least a nice leg show for their troubles, Fukagawa and his buddies walked over to investigate and make their move, then were stunned into silence to see that rather than bathing their tootsies in the water, the girls were washing yams they had just pulled out of a field somewhere and were eating them raw, on the spot. As for the obviously famished girls, they were either too busy gnawing away at their rude morsels to realize that they were being watched, or they were merely ignoring their audience out of shame for their own less-than-elegant situation. Whatever the case, the young officers walked away without saying a word, although the encounter was the subject of concerned conversation on the bus back to Kita Ise that night.

  “That was a real eye-opener. We didn’t realize things on the outside had gotten that bad,” Fukagawa-san remembers. “We had always gotten plenty of food at the academy and at Akeno, and the farmers around the base seemed to have enough for themselves, but we were completely clueless about the food shortages that were beginning to hit the cities by then. We all said to each other ‘We can’t let things get any worse than this’.

  17 Fighter JockBy September 1944, the Akeno Fighter School administrators – under pressure from higher-ups to deliver new pilots to the front as soon as possible – were beginning to screen talented trainees for accelerated graduation and immediate posting to the elite 200th Fighter Regiment in the Philippines, where combat was expected to be imminent. Fukagawa and his classmates were by then learning to fly the army’s mainstay Nakajima Ki-43 Hayabusa fighter and were well aware of the evaluation process underway. Everyone knew that the number of students selected would be small, and competition was as fierce as spirits were high. The pilots’ motivation was also stoked by knowledge that a posting to the 200th FR would mean stick time on the Ki-84 Hayate, the hot new next-generation Nakajima design. All of the pilots dreamed about flying the machine, so there were a lot of long faces at Kita Ise when the very short list of senbatsu (“final cut roster”) pilots to be sent into combat ahead of schedule was posted on the Flight Ops bulletin board.

  “I was crushed when orders didn’t come through for me,” Fukagawa-san recalls. “And extremely envious of the boys who got picked. I would have given anything to have gotten to go with them, and still regret to this day that I didn’t.”

  Sentimental regrets aside, Fukagawa-san, after a long career in business management and personnel administration, is a sharp judge of character and thus able to be objective about his disappointment. Regarding his elite senbatsu classmates, he remembers them as a breed apart in terms of flying ability, and also distinctly separated into two general personality types. One group – probably the numerically dominant of the two – were of the rather standoffish, athletically talented, narrow-eyed killer Chuck Yeager type most people have in mind when they conjure up imagery of hotshot fighter jocks. The other group, interestingly enough, were of what might be called a “performing artist” temperament – good-natured, extreme extroverts who were clearly in their element in the air and eager to show off their breathtaking flying talents at any and all opportunities.

  Fukagawa-san’s close friend “Shin-chan” Ishiyama was of the latter type, but his natural talents at the stick were not enough to keep him alive for long once the bullets started flying in the Philippines. Out of nineteen pilots in the senbatsu group, seventeen others were to share Shin-chan’s fate before the Leyte campaign was finished.

  “Experience is as important for a fighter pilot as natural ability,” Fukagawa-san reasons, “because it makes you cagey. If you go into combat with just ability alone, like the situation the senbatsu pilots were thrown into, you are made quick work of by experienced enemy pilots. And the Americans the 200th FR faced in the Philippines were the best in the world. They knew all the tricks.”

  After the senbatsu send-off at the end of September, the remaining trainees spent their last month of Fighter Basic on TDY at Miyakonojo Airbase in southeastern Kyūshū, where there would be a final round of evaluations by the Akeno cadre. The training itself concentrated on technical points such as formation flying and combat tactics, and when it was over, the trainees were assigned wherever and however the army felt their individual talents could best be applied. For most of the 338 IMA ’44 pilot trainees, this meant a front line unit assignment. Nearly half of them would die by war’s end.[164]

  In Fukagawa’s case, however, his evident leadership abilities had been recognized early on in the program and were evidently considered more important than the contribution his piloting skills could make to the war effort. Instead of being sent to front line units with other classmates, he and a select group of similarly evaluated graduates were given slots for enrollment in the next three-month Flight Leader School cycle at Akeno, which would start at the beginning of December. Normally, postings to this program were reserved for captains with several year of line – and preferably combat – experience, but such personnel were in woefully short supply in IJA aviation by the fall of ’44. Combat losses at the captain and major levels meant that in coming months, green second lieutenants would be leading flights and even squadrons into battle. The army had no other choice but to let lambs lead other lambs to the slaughter.

  Given this crisis in junior leadership, the least the army could do was give the Akeno pilots as much stick time as possible before sending them into the fray. During the month long lull before the beginning of Flight Leader School, Fukagawa and his classmates were put to work as ferry pilots while they waited for their training cycle to begin. This duty consisted of flying fighters that had passed final army evaluation at Akeno to front line units around the country and in forward areas like Taiwan and the Philippines. From a training perspective, the flights had the side benefits of providing the pilots with valuable experience in long-range/over-water navigation and formation flying.

  By late November, Fukagawa had several successful domestic overland shuttle hops under his belt, and was deemed ready to participate in an over-water mission to
ferry a large formation of Hayabusas to the Philippines. The flight plan called for rest and refueling stopovers at Miyakonojo, Yontan Airbase at Okinawa and Taichū, Taiwan before reaching the final destination at Clark Airfield complex. The flight itself was tiring but uneventful until the planes were taxiing to begin the hop for the last leg from Taiwan to Clark. Fukagawa’s engine started spewing oil, and was soon putting out so much smoke that it completely obliterated all forward and lateral vision. Correctly judging that the best course of action was to get his stricken plane out of the way as quickly as possible, Fukagawa nonetheless failed to notice the proximity of another aircraft to his port wingtip. When he swung his Hayabusa around to pull it off the runway, he put his port wingtip directly into the spinning prop of another aircraft. Both planes were total write-offs.

  To the pilots’ surprise and immeasurable relief, no one got particularly angry with them for pranging their kites. After a mild dressing-down and some resigned head-shaking, they were told to find their own transport back to Akeno and sent on their way. They ended up hopping a Ki-67 heavy bomber back to Japan a few days later, laden down with souvenirs of Taiwan bananas and brown sugar rock candy that were much appreciated by their comrades at Akeno.

  Although Fukagawa-san still blushes a bit whenever he recalls the accident, he has also taken some comfort over the years in thinking that the mishap may have saved the lives of two pilots waiting to make attack sorties in the Philippines. Moreover, Fukagawa’s life was probably saved as well – the Leyte campaign was raging unabated at the time, and many of the other pilots on the ferry flight to Clark were ordered to stay on with fighter units in-theater as replacements, only to die in combat. Others were killed when their transport plane back to Japan was jumped by Hellcats and sent into the South China Sea.

  In the final days of November 1944, Akeno was abuzz with the latest news and rumors from the Philippine front. Not surprisingly, most of the scuttlebutt was troubling, and although the press was trumpeting Leyte as a stunning Japanese victory,[165] Fukagawa and his classmates were given fairly accurate accounts of the swan song of Japan’s surface fleet in the October 25-26 battles. The news was enough to convince all but the most unhinged optimists that any chance of winning the war was gone, and that “winning the peace” – i.e., fighting the Americans to an honorable stalemate – was the best that could now be hoped for.

  News of the navy’s Shikishima Flight taiatari attacks during the Leyte battles provided one spark of hope in all of the doom and gloom. The pilots had first heard about taiatari tactics as official army policy in early November, after the Fugaku and Banda tokkō bomber units were dispatched to the Philippines and squandered in under-escorted attacks. Although that particular piece of news had been disheartening, the navy “special attacks” were showing promise. Fukagawa was convinced of the basic merit of the taiatari concept, and in discussions on the topic, he and his fellow pilots at Akeno felt that tokkō was atarimae – perfectly understandable, given the circumstances – and they were eager to kick in and do their part, especially after hearing that IMA classmates at the other army fighter school in Mito, Ibaraki Prefecture were already being organized into tokkō squadrons.

  The Akeno pilots would not have to wait long to prove their enthusiasm. One night in late November, an impromptu formation was called in the IMA ’44 officers’ quarters. Forming a long file in the narrow corridor of the single-story wooden structure, Fukagawa and the other thirty or so residents of the barracks were addressed by the Akeno CO.

  “Things have not been developing well for us on the war front,” the CO said, pacing up and down the line, the floorboards creaking in the silence between his words. “Therefore, High Command sees no choice but to employ body-crashing tactics against the Americans. Anyone who wants to volunteer for this, take one step forward.”

  Despite all of Fukagawa’s mental preparation in previous weeks for the eventuality of such a moment, the suddenness of its arrival left him momentarily blank. There was no time to mull over a response, and in any case, the atmosphere in that tight hallway was too tense for anyone to speak up even if they had made up their mind not to go. In such a situation, standing in ranks and in full sight of one’s peers, it was absolutely inconceivable that a Japanese officer – especially an IMA graduate – could have ever stood fast and refused to “volunteer.”

  “I don’t even remember telling my feet to move,” Fukagawa-san recalls of the moment, “It was like a strong gust of wind whooshed up from behind the ranks and blew everyone forward a step, almost in perfect unison.”

  Satisfied with the response, the CO nodded with a kind of grim relief, informed the pilots that their names would be added to official tokkō rosters, then turned on his heel and walked out into the night. The episode was never mentioned again, and Fukagawa was soon too busy training to think much about the ceremony’s significance during the next few months.

  *****

  The Flight Leader course at Akeno officially started on December 1, 1944, with instruction concentrating on formation flying, bomber interception and other aerial combat tactics. Also included in the training regimen – somewhat ominously – were simulated diving attacks on stationary ground objects. But while the tokkō runs were only simulated, the bomber interception drills were most decidedly intended to be on-the-job training, and for the task, the pilots were given their first rides in the highly touted Hayates.

  Beginning in January 1945, the anti-B-29 patrols were flown mainly over the Nagoya area, as this was the metropolitan area closest to Akeno. While the trainees never ran into any Americans during these patrols, the missions gave them much needed stick time on the new Hayates.

  The Hayate was a quantum leap in Japanese fighter design – a beautiful airplane that more than lived up to all of its hype to deliver as advertised. Powered by a Nakajima Ha-45 engine delivering up to eighteen hundred horsepower on a War Emergency Power setting, the plane was fully 100km/h faster than its Hayabusa predecessor, and more importantly, had an almost 20km/h edge on the American Hellcat. Highly maneuverable, with excellent climb rate and diving speed (crucial for prudent escape from an unfavorable combat situation), the plane also provided decent armor to protect its pilot, which was a rarity in Japanese military aircraft at the time. Another confidence-instilling feature of the design was its main armament of two 12.7mm (equivalent to American .50 caliber) and two wing-mounted 20mm cannon, which gave it enough firepower to knock anything up to and including the mammoth B-29 out of the sky. For the Akeno trainees, their introduction to the plane was something akin to a religious experience.

  “I’ll never forget the first time I opened up the throttle all the way and heard the take-off roar of that big engine,” Fukagawa-san recalls with a distinct gleam in his eyes. “There was nothing like it. We felt omnipotent in that plane. Everyone was saying ‘Bring on the Hellcats!’.”

  As Fukagawa and his classmates accumulated flight hours in the Hayate, most of them seem to have conveniently forgotten about their tokkō pledge, instead believing that they were destined for post-graduation assignments to lead fighters into combat with line units. Reality for most turned out to be distinctly less glamorous. In Fukagawa’s case, orders were cut for him to return to his old barracks at Kita Ise Field to begin duty as an instructor on Akatonbos at Flight Basic. No previous teaching experience was necessary – the sheer numbers of college student volunteers the army was beginning to push through its Tokubetsu Sōjū Minarai Shikan flight program[166] were beginning to swamp the regular cadre there, and they needed all of the qualified pilots they could get to help pick up the instruction slack.

  The Tokubetsu Minarai program – or Tokusō, as it was usually abbreviated – was created in late 1943, when the official cancellation of college draft deferments presented the army with a tempting new pool of potential flight candidates to compensate for the alarming attrition of pilots it had suffered over the previous year of combat in the Southwestern Pacific. A two-birds-with-one-sto
ne combination of OCS and rudimentary flight training, the four-month crash course (too often literally so) was designed to produce combat-ready Army Reserve officer pilots from students straight out of civilian universities, teachers colleges and higher-level vocational schools. Not surprisingly, its graduates were notorious for their often less-than exemplary piloting skills, and experience soon proved the majority of them to be little more than cannon fodder when sent out on conventional combat missions. By early 1945, as Japanese air doctrine shifted decisively toward tokkō tactics, most Tokusō graduates were being sent directly to tokkō units. Many hundreds died during the Iwo Jima and Okinawa campaigns, and the vast majority of those not sacrificed in these battles were pooled as reserve tokkō pilots for the apocalyptic “Hondo Kessen” battle to come when the Americans invaded the home islands.

  During his three-month stint as a flight instructor at Kita Ise, Fukagawa did his best to keep his mind on the task at hand and off of the post-graduation fate that probably awaited most of his students. In this sense, the workload was mercifully busy, and by the end of a typically exhausting and often terrifying training day of student stall-outs and lousy landings, it usually took all of the strength he could muster just to climb out of the observer’s cockpit of the Akatonbo.

  Late in the afternoon of May 3, 1945, Fukagawa finished a hair-raising day of wingtip-bumping formation flights with his students and went back to the barracks even more exhausted than usual. He had just stretched out on his bunk in his favorite post-training posture when his roommate Shigeharu Arai poked his head in the doorway and told him that their CO, Major Kanezawa, wanted to see him immediately. He bolted upright and ran to the HQ shack as quickly as he could, still in his sweaty flight suit.