Blossoms In The Wind: Human Legacies Of The Kamikaze

by Sheftall, M. G.

  The Tenri compound itself was comprised of fifty or so two-story long wooden dormitories, each capable of lodging 250 people. The layout of the factory-like structures was uniform: at both ends of the second floor, there were communal day areas for gatherings, feedback on training, relaxation, etc. The rest of the interior space on both floors was taken up by tatami-floored rooms on either side of a long corridor that ran from one end of the building to the other.

  Living conditions were cramped, but perhaps more in a psychological than a physical sense. To facilitate the snooping eyes of inspecting NCOs patrolling the corridors at night, the sliding paper shōji doors had been removed from all rooms, so there was no privacy whatsoever. Seven or eight boys slept to a each eight-tatami-sized room, right on the floormats. In the winter, when the interior of the unheated, drafty buildings differed little from the temperature outside, the boys would sleep in two groups of four under their piled up government issue blankets, lined up like spoons in a pantry drawer to share body warmth.

  For most of the nine months they spent in the Nara compound, Kawasaki and his classmates went through their Yokaren course with dreams of glorious aerial combat lightening all of the privation and slog they knew they had to endure on their way to winning naval aviator’s wings. But things did not quite work out as they expected. Less than one month from graduation for the Nara Kō-13 class, the cadets were told that due to the dwindling number of aircraft now available for training and a nationwide surplus of new Yokaren graduates, it was unlikely that more than a handful of them would ever see flight school.

  Given no time to absorb the bombshell of having just been told that all of their blood, sweat and tears of the previous nine months was basically for naught, the cadets were next told that volunteers for a “Special Weapons Project” were needed. Kawasaki wrote his name down when the the paper slips were handed out, and after graduation on September 1, 1944, he and a group of about 650 other boys were marched to Nara Station and put on an official navy train. Nothing was said about the westbound train’s destination, but when they passed Kobe without stopping, rumors began circulating through the passenger cars that they were all headed for Submarine School at Kure.

  When the group arrived at Kure, the boys were ordered to get off the train and form up on the platform. Here, 250 cadets were called out of ranks – including Kawasaki – and told to stay put on the platform while the remaining four hundred new petty officers were marched off to another platform for a train to Ōtake. Kawasaki learned after the war that this latter group was trained at the Enlisted Submariner’s School there as Kairyū two-man and Kōryū five-man midget sub crewmen.

  In the meantime, Kawasaki and his group were marched from Kure Station to temporary barracks in the Kure naval complex, where they were told that they would soon be shipping out to an installation with the mysterious designation of “Q-base.” No one was told where Q-base was, or given any details about its function.

  32 Rearranging the Firmament In the years following the First World War, Japanese naval strategists began planning in earnest for the possibility – if not probability – of an all-out naval clash with the United States, by then Japan’s premier strategic rival in the Western Pacific. Chillingly prescient wargame simulations included scenarios for fleet-sized “decisive engagements” in the waters off Midway or Saipan, as well as surprise attacks on Pearl Harbor, all decades before the pasteboard gaming models and dice throws became burning ships and casualties.

  The salient problem facing the IJN’s war planners was the superior strategic strength of their hypothetical (if likely) foe. America’s overwhelming industrial capacity, coupled with naval arms limitations treaties that favored American interests at Japan’s expense, meant that at least for the foreseeable future, no matter how the wargaming dice rolled, the fact of that superiority was inescapable. The IJN always conceded this disadvantage in their simulations, and formulated strategic and tactical doctrine accordingly.

  The keystone of IJN doctrine was the concept of whittling down piecemeal a U.S. fleet barreling westward across the Pacific through a long range running attrition campaign of hit-and-run engagements, then taking on the weakened American force in a final toe-to-toe winner-take-all brawl to be fought on more favorable terms closer to Japanese home waters. The Japanese had understandably fond memories of a similar engagement in 1905, when Czar Nicholas II’s journey-wearied and storm-battered Baltic Fleet was trounced at Tsushima, effectively ending the Russo-Japanese War.

  The best minds in the IJN agreed that in order to win a similarly decisive victory against the U.S. Pacific Fleet, the prerequisite attrition campaign would require superior surface and submarine-launched torpedo tactics.[285] During the interwar years, the IJN put maximum effort into developing and/or otherwise acquiring the new weapons technology necessary to support their new tactical portfolio, paying special attention to large diameter ship-launched torpedoes with unprecedented range and one hit/one kill stopping power. Following the classic Japanese technological learning curve, the navy copied and adopted what it could from the West – in this case, the innovations of industry leading Italian naval munitions firm Whitehead of Fiume[286] – then tweaked and improved on the design to meet its own specific needs. By 1933, IJN technicians were putting the finishing touches on what would be the finest ship-launched torpedo in the world until the end of World War II: the Type 93 “Long Lance.”[287]

  Although Japan was already embroiled in open warfare on the Asian continent by the time the Type 93 was ready for deployment, the lack of significant naval engagements against their Chinese foe meant that the Japanese were unable to demonstrate their new ship-killer to the world for the next eight years. But with the opening salvos of World War II, the Allied naval forces in the Pacific theater got more demonstration of the capabilities of the Japanese torpedo than they needed. The Long Lance wreaked havoc on American, Dutch, British and Australian warships in the early stages of the war, most notably at the Battle of the Java Sea and at Savo and the other drubbings the IJN handed the Allies in a series of infamous battles in and around the Guadalcanal “Slot” in late 1942 and early 1943.

  Changes in Japan’s war fortunes and in the nature of Pacific naval combat, however, meant that the Long Lance’s reign of terror was – at least from the Allied perspective – mercifully brief. Even as munitions manufacturers worked around the clock to keep up production of the peerless torpedo, the warships necessary to deploy it were becoming an increasingly endangered species as Japan’s war rapidly deteriorated into a grim defensive struggle. Moreover, the mid-war paradigm shift in Pacific theater naval tactics brought about by the coming-of-age of carrier-based airpower also greatly diminished the weapon’s relevance. Most naval combat was now conducted without surface forces seeing any more of their opponent than green blips on a radar screen – if even that much – and the ship-killers of choice had become bombs and torpedoes dropped from aircraft. Even for the Americans – with near complete air supremacy everywhere they went – the main contribution of their battleships, cruisers and destroyers had been relegated to the roles of beachhead prep and ground support fire for amphibious operations, anti-submarine warfare and as floating flak towers to protect the now all-important carriers. The days when the outcomes of naval engagements were determined by battlewagon salvos and torpedo spreads launched by squadrons of swift destroyers were all but over.

  With Japan’s war prospects heading south at flank speed, the IJN was becoming increasingly desperate and frustrated by a logistical situation in which it had vast warehouses full of technologically superlative but now tactically redundant torpedoes. As is so often true in the decision-making processes of large organizations, the best thinking regarding the conundrum came from the lower ranks. In late 1943, two junior officers stationed at Ōtsushima, a top-secret island sub pen in Japan’s Inland Sea, were discussing possibilities for the Type 93 when they hit on a revolutionary idea: the effectiveness of the torpedo could be increased e
xponentially if it was given a larger warhead, modified to accommodate a human pilot and capable of being launched in stealth, underwater, from a submarine mother ship.

  Lieutenant Hiroshi Kuroki and Ensign Sekio Nishina had just conceived Japan’s first tokkō weapon.

  Both officers had sound engineering backgrounds, Kuroki a graduate of the prestigious Naval Engineering College at Maizuru[288], Nishina a Class of ’42 Etajima man.[289] Working the nuts and bolts problems of their concept in their free time – often at the expense of sleep – they had drawings and numbers good enough to write up in a formal proposal to send up the chain of command by December 1943. On the twenty-eighth of that month, the paperwork reached the Ministry of the Navy.[290]

  Tokyo’s response to the manned torpedo proposal was a firm but nonetheless appreciative “No.” The admirals admired the fighting spirit and patriotism of the young sub officers and praised the ingenuity of their engineering work, but neither the service nor the nation was ready to accept the concept of organized taiatari tactics – at least not yet. The officers were thanked for their efforts and told to continue having these good thoughts, but to consider the matter of human torpedoes closed.

  But Kuroki and Nishina were not to be deterred. According to IJN legend, the young submariners wrote up a second appeal – this time inked in their own blood. Neither the display’s militant determination nor the possible morale damage of rejecting such an obviously sincere request were lost on the brass hats in Tokyo. This time, whether out of appreciative sentimentality, political considerations, pragmatic assessments of a deteriorating tactical situation or some combination of the three trains of thought, the Navy Ministry gave the nod to the human torpedo project with the cosmetic codicil that provisions for pilot survival would at least be considered.[291] On February 28, 1944, memoranda were issued for R+D to begin at Kure Arsenal for a project to be given the metaphysically intriguing name of Kaiten.

  Kaiten – which can be inelegantly but adequately translated as “heavens rearranger” or “fate reverser” – was a mildly blasphemous metaphor from a strict Buddhist standpoint, implying as it did the notion that something wrought by mere mortals could alter divinely preordained destiny. From a morale standpoint, however, the naming was brilliant, expressing both in its dash and desperation the hope that the new superweapon was going to reverse the nation’s star-crossed war fortunes by rearranging with boldness and high explosive the very firmament itself if necessary. Fate would be cheated. Japan’s bad luck stopped here.

  33 Metal Implement Number SixThe day before the scheduled September 5 start of their instruction at Submarine School in Ōtake, Ensign Toshiharu Konada and six other INA ’43 classmates were told that there had been a sudden change in their orders, and that effective immediately, they were all assigned to a unit called “Dai’ichi Tokubetsu Kichitai” (“Special Base Unit One”). No further explanation was given about what “Special Base Unit One” was or even where it was located. The assignment change was in the form of an order, not a request for volunteers, and as INA graduates, Konada and his classmates were not in a position to ask questions for clarification – just to get their gear together and prepare to ship out immediately.

  The next morning, Konada and his group found themselves on a fast motor launch headed for Kurahashijima, an island in Kure Bay. The passengers spent the thirty-minute trip in relative silence, no doubt mulling over possible scenarios for whatever it was that awaited them at their destination. Watching the rocky shore of Kurahashijima get larger on the horizon, Konada recalled a snippet of conversation between officers he had heard while still aboard the Ashigara some weeks before, when the cruiser was passing this very spot. One of the officers had said something about a top secret and incredibly powerful “nation-saving weapon” being developed on the island, then confessed to knowing nothing more than that it was code named “Maruroku Kanamono” (“Metal Fixture #6”). “Top secret” and “incredibly powerful” were certainly promising descriptions for a superweapon, but what about “Metal Fixture #6”? Could something that sounded like a column entry in a quartermaster’s manifest of plumbing supplies really save the country?

  After the launch moored at the island base, Konada and the others were escorted to the officers’ billets. There, the group met up with an INA ’43 classmate who had finished the sub course at Kure some months earlier, and was now stationed here on Kurahashijima. While the old friends were catching up on what they had been doing over the past year, someone mentioned the assignment to “Special Base Unit One,” assuming that the base and Kurahashijima were one and the same entity.

  “This is Special Base Unit One,” the Kurahashijima officer said, his expression suddenly serious. “But you fellows are going to the annex base at Ōtsushima. And you know what they’re doing out there, right?…They’re getting taiatari weapons ready…The human torpedoes.”

  Sixty years later, Konada-san describes the combination of surprise, pride and elation he felt when he first heard the phrase “human torpedo.”

  “Of course such a weapon seemed desperate and drastic to me, but I could accept that, because it was already apparent by this point in the war that nothing less than drastic measures were going to save Japan,” he says. “I was not afraid, as I knew that the very survival of the Japanese race itself was at stake. My own life seemed unimportant compared with a duty of that magnitude. If, by giving up my life, I could fulfill my duty and help save the country, that act would make me happier than anything I could accomplish living. Everyone else in my group felt the same way, too…We were so excited by what we had just heard that we spent all of that night talking about it.”

  *****

  The Kurahashima sojourn was a short one. The next morning, the group boarded an oceangoing tugboat for Ōtsushima, an island off the coast of Yamaguchi Prefecture about seventy kilometers to the west. After threading the innumerable islets and myriad channels of the Inland Sea, the tugboat arrived at its destination to enter a cliff-ringed, beachless lagoon with no level shoreline to speak of beyond a stone quay and concrete piers crammed with gear and wooden sheds. The rest of the base was arrayed up and down the densely foliated rockface, like a habitat for maritime cliff-dwellers. From the looks of it, a stiff breeze could send the whole place crashing into the sea.

  On the cramped and busy waterfront, sailors in summer khaki workclothes operated cranes and assembled machinery right on the docks. Others manhandled hand trolleys carrying what appeared to be swollen Type 93 torpedoes, one of which was being lowered down into the water at the end of a chain from a swing-armed gantry.

  Special Base Unit One’s Ōtsushima annex had inherited a base perfectly suited to their mission, with infrastructure designed specifically for torpedo work already in place from the days when the facility had been used in the development of the Type 93 in the 1930s. Gantries and cranes lined the quay, torpedo and sub pens were built right out over the water, and the surrounding cliffsides were honeycombed with new deep storage tunnels that were virtually impregnable to shelling or bombardment. A James Bond fan twenty or thirty years later would recognize the milieu immediately – it was Blofeld’s island lair being built with 1940s technology.

  Konada’s group was met by an orderly at the quay, and led up a winding footpath carved into the cliff face that led to the top of the promontory, where the large clapboard HQ building was located. After signing in on the duty roster and offering formal greetings to the base CO, legendary sub captain Lieutenant Commander Mitsuma Itakura, the ensigns were escorted to their new communal home in the island’s officers’ billets, which were located on a level outcropping about halfway back down the cliff face path to the waterfront. The slapped-together plywood and corrugated tin accommodations were crude but adequate. They had Western style beds, and the tatami flooring in the sleeping quarters was a nice touch of hygienic, homey comfort much appreciated after the steel decks of the Ashigara, which had been microbial breeding grounds for the itchy miseries of athlete�
��s foot and impetigo.

  The trip-weary ensigns had barely put their seabags down and begun field-testing their new bunks when an out-of-breath orderly flew through the front door of the billets.

  “Shitsurei shimasu!” the clerk yelled between gasps, using the stock Japanese apology for intruding on a superior’s territory. “Lieutenant Higuchi and Lieutenant Kuroki have been in an accident. All personnel are to report to the quay immediately to form search parties.”

  There was a rush for the door as everyone followed the haggard orderly down to the waterfront at a full run. When the ensigns reached the quay, they were sent out into the training area of the lagoon with every other able body on the island in launches, patrol boats, rowboats, rafts and anything else that could float. “We’re looking for the Maruroku prototype…Looks like a big black torpedo,” they were told, and they followed this standing order as long as daylight allowed. As afternoon became evening, flashlights were distributed so the search could continue through the night.

  “We even tried using a trawler to dredge the bottom of the lagoon, but that didn’t work, either,” Konada-san says. “Then around dawn, someone spotted bubbles and the divers went down to look.”

  A salvage boat arrived at the scene, and tow cables were sent down with the divers to raise what had been found. Konada watched as whining salvage cranes brought a long black craft to the surface. A hatch in its manhole-sized conning tower was opened with an insistent hiss of escaping bad air, revealing two slumped bodies in the crew compartment.