Blossoms In The Wind: Human Legacies Of The Kamikaze

by Sheftall, M. G.

  “It was then that I finally had the honor of meeting Lieutenant Kuroki,” Konada-san says in utmost sincerity, using the formal keigo language the Japanese reserve for occasions of deepest solemnity. “Meet”?! I think. Surely Konada-san must be speaking figuratively or sarcastically. I pause for a moment, studying his bronze statue face for some trace of irony. But I find none, and the qualifying follow-up remark I wait for does not come. In my peripheral vision, I sense Kawasaki-san checking out my reaction. When I return his glance he replies by closing his eyes, raising his eyebrows and giving the slightest, barely perceptible shrug.

  In a clear if somewhat monotone basso profundo, Konada-san retrieves the conversational ball and continues with his account of September 6, 1944, telling me that after the salvaged craft was brought back to the base, an inspection of its interior shed some light on the circumstances of the accident. While Kuroki and Higuchi slowly asphyxiated in a craft hopeless mired in muck at the bottom of the lagoon, they kept copious instrumentation notes as well as detailed physiological descriptions of the effects of the ordeal on their own bodies and mental capacities. Their last log entries – written in a shaky, obviously oxygen-starved hand – were recorded some fourteen hours after their first. In the agony of their final moments, they had even managed to scrawl farewell notes to their mothers.

  The officers’ deaths were mourned, but even though they had not died in the kind of glorious combat mission they had worked so long and hard for, everyone on the island agreed that their deaths had been honorable. There was not a man on Ōtsushima who did not share the sentiment that the accident and its consequences were more than anything a proud affirmation of the young officers’ bravery and dedication, for the notes Kuroki and Higuchi had kept in the last hours of their lives provided invaluable data on the capabilities and limitations of Japan’s new superweapon. The officers were duly enshrined both in the Shinto altars and in the collective memory of Special Base Unit One, becoming something akin to patron saints for the human torpedo corps for the rest of the war.

  From Konada’s perspective, the incident provided exemplary role models in the deceased persons of Kuroki and Higuchi, but it also whispered sobering intimations of the hazards his new duties were going to entail. Training on Metal Fixture Number Six, he thought, was going to be just as dangerous as being a test pilot on experimental aircraft. Perhaps his new job would be even more dangerous, for at least a test pilot had a chance to bail out in the event of catastrophe. A submariner trapped fathoms beneath the surface in a floundering craft had no such option.

  *****

  Once the commotion in the wake of the accident subsided, Konada and his classmates were taken to a sub hangar for their belated orientation briefing. A senior officer began his presentation with a rundown of the general concept and construction of something he called Kaiten. The weapon had been developed, he explained, by bisecting a Type 93 torpedo, connecting the sixty-centimeter-wide halves with a one-meter-wide one-man crew compartment, then widening the front half of the weapon with a one-meter-wide “sleeve” to compensate for the width of the crew compartment and to carry additional fuel and oxygen tanks. The most crucial function of the forward area, of course, was that it would also house the weapon’s whopping 1,550kg warhead. With more than three times the explosive charge of a standard Type 93, the ensigns were told, the Kaiten would be able to break the back of anything afloat with a single hit.

  In addition to overwhelming destructive power, the Kaiten’s stealth, maneuverability, speed and range were also going to be crucial elements in its performance portfolio once the weapon went operational. Inheriting the Type 93’s gasoline/pressurized liquid oxygen propulsion system meant that the Kaiten – like its technological parent – would be wakeless (i.e. no tell-tale bubble stream left in its wake as it ran underwater) and relatively quiet. Piggybacked on the top deck of a mother sub and connected to the same by releasable bolts and a tubular access hatchway, the weapon would be ferried to the objective and released far enough away to escape early detection yet close enough to keep targets within operational range. At a submerged cruising speed of twelve knots, this range was about eighty kilometers. At flank speed of thirty knots, the Kaiten could turn on a dime as new targets presented themselves, and run circles around pursuers while still providing a range of over twenty kilometers. Most of the Kaiten’s navigation would be done by stopwatch and compass reckoning, with a periscope provided for quick pop-ups to assess the surface situation and to allow the pilot to steer the Kaiten into the target on the final attack run.

  At the end of the briefing, the officer gave an order, the doors of a storage shed opened, and a fifteen-meter-long black Kaiten was rolled out on dollies by a team of sailors. Konada and his classmates were floored by what they saw, and let out gasps of admiration when they were allowed to examine the machine up close.

  “I thought This is it! This is the weapon that will save Japan!” Konada-san recalls of the experience.

  In the book Gyokusaisen To Tokubetsukōgekitai (“Gyokusai {No Surrender}Warfare and Special Attack Units”) Konada-san describes his thoughts and feelings that day sixty years ago:

  (The Kaiten) was the first bright light on the horizon for Japan that any of us had seen in a long time…In my mind’s eye, I envisaged a hundred Kaiten’s sneaking into the enemy’s anchorage, laying waste his entire fleet…Even before the war started, Japanese newspapers carried articles about how the Americans boasted that, if hostilities ever began, they would burn our cities of wood and paper to cinders. We knew that this was a foe we could not afford to let anywhere near our homeland…American ostracism of and prejudice toward Japanese were truly awful in the prewar era. When they fought, their attitude toward us was just the same as their attitude toward Indians that you can see in any Western shoot’em-up: wholesale butchery…The only option left to us to prevent the invasion of our homeland by this enemy was to transform ourselves into human bombs. At the time, this was the reasoned, objective thought of almost all young Japanese men. We saw this as the most effective use of the sacrifice of our individual lives. Given the war situation at the time, this was a completely logical conclusion…’One life for one enemy ship’ – it did not get any more effective than that…Self-preservation is a primal instinct of any living organism…but anyone who qualifies as a human being is capable of sacrificing himself to save the lives of others or to protect loved ones in danger. It is just the same as jumping into a river to save a drowning child. That is human nature.[292]

  For the next two months, simultaneously burdened and inspired by such thoughts, Konada and his classmates trained under the personal guidance of Kaiten co-inventor Sekio Nishina, dedicating all of their energies and waking moments to learning everything they could about the craft and mastering its operation. Their focus, frugal lifestyle, self-sacrificial mindset and unwavering faith in the justice of their cause almost had more in common with a monastic order than a military organization.

  From a metaphysical standpoint, the comparison is not too much of an exaggeration, for the capabilities and possibilities of the Kaiten gave every indication that the weapon was going to live up to the theological affectation of its name after all. Putting this much power into the hands of a single human being was akin to a process of semi-deification, a matter bordering on the supernatural. The symbolic and psychological implications of this were never lost on the Kaiten program’s chain-of-command.

  34 Enter The KaitenRoughly concurrent with Ensign Toshiharu Konada’s near-religious experience at Ōtsushima during his initial encounter with the Kaiten, Petty Officer Third Class Harumi Kawasaki and his Nara classmates were getting their own orientation briefing seventy kilometers to the east at “Q-base” on the island of Kurahashijima. The basics of the message were the same – Japan’s war situation was desperate enough by now to merit human torpedoes of enormous destructive capability, and the navy needed men to pilot them.

  There were several fundamental differences, h
owever, between the Special Base Unit One and Q-base briefings. First of all, the Q-base version for the enlisted men did not go into as much strategic and philosophical profundity as the lecture Special Base Unit One’s ensigns received. Also, the Q-base talk was given in the format of a call for volunteers – the new petty officers were told that they could duck out of the duty if they felt that, for whatever reason, they would not be able to carry it out when the time to do so came. Lastly, there was a considerable difference in the two groups’ collective reactions to their respective briefings. While none of Kawasaki’s classmates had raised their hands to say “I quit” when the opportunity presented itself, neither were many of them exactly bubbling over with enthusiasm. Unlike their commissioned Kaiten counterparts at Ōtsushima, the Nara Yokaren boys at Kurahashijima did not float back to their barracks on a heady wave of dulce et decorum self-sacrificial beatitude after breaking ranks. In fact, as Kawasaki-san recalls, there was a considerable volume of bitching and moaning of the “I didn’t go through nine months of Yokaren for this crap” variety that night, not to superiors, of course – perish the thought – but amongst themselves. During the ensuing weeks, while the Nara group trained at Kurahashijima and waited for assignment to operational Kaiten units[293], the more persistent self-preservationists in the group were able to finagle medical discharges from the program or assignments to different duties. The vast majority of the boys, however, stayed the course, and after their assignment to Kaiten units, their training as pilots began in earnest.

  The steepest learning curve in Kaiten training, not surprisingly, was required for mastery of the machine’s quirky handling characteristics and complex onboard systems, which it was said a pilot “needed six hands and eyes” to keep under control.[294] Also, no one clambering down the hatch of a Kaiten for the first time ever got the impression that the weapon had been built with crew comfort as a crucial design consideration. The vessel’s interior was a claustrophobe’s worst nightmare – dark, dank, cramped, with the bulkheads and deck almost completely obscured in a Gordian knot of knobs, dripping pipes, valves, and pressurized canisters. It was so cramped, in fact, that the pilot could not even extend both of his legs. Because of the positioning of a large stabilizing gyro, the pilot would have to sit with his left knee jammed up against his chest.

  While explaining this arrangement, Kawasaki-san does something I could not imagine Konada-san doing in a million years. He pushes his chair away from the table, and right here in the lobby of Kudan Kaikan, demonstrates the cramped sitting posture and hand gestures of a busy pilot at the controls of a Kaiten. With his left knee to his chest, his right foot working phantom rudder pedals and both hands going through a flurry of knob-turning, handle-pumping and lever-pulling motions, the effect is of a man operating a steam-operating flying machine – a contraption, perhaps, out of a Jules Verne story.

  While Konada-san gives a slow-motion huh-huh-huh chuckle at his partner’s pantomimed interpretation of Kaiten piloting, I comment that the arrangement inside the vessel looks to have been pretty uncomfortable.

  “It wasn’t so bad, really,” Kawasaki-san says. “(In combat) pilots were in their Kaitens for four or five hours. And by the point where (the Nara Kō-13 group’s) missions would have become necessary, the targets would have been so close to our coastline that we wouldn’t have had to sit in the Kaitens very long (as the Kaitens would have been launched straight from Ōtsushima and later bases).”

  Surely there must have been some discomfort involved, I insist. Noise? Some bad smells, perhaps?

  Konada-san recalls that the dominant smells inside the Kaiten were strong odors of rust, lubricant oil and bilge water. The latter bouquets were a given in any submersible vehicle, but rust problems were especially intense on the Kaiten on account of the pure compressed liquid oxygen used as an oxidant for its propulsion system. The tanks containing this oxygen leaked constantly whether the Kaiten was in operation or in storage, and as a result, rust ate away at the steel components inside the vessel at an unnaturally voracious rate, making for major maintenance headaches in addition to giving the interior of the vessel its distinctive odor.

  Not surprisingly for a vehicle in which the passenger/pilot shared space inside a hollow metal tube with a 550-horsepower internal combustion engine, noise came with the territory. Konada-san and Kawasaki-san recall the experience of riding in a Kaiten as being loud, but not painfully so. The sound was not the throb or hum of a normal gasoline-powered engine, but more like a steam locomotive – a gaseous shoo-shoo-shoo-shoo as the pistons pumped and drove the propeller shaft around. As throttle was applied, the sound rose in pitch and frequency to a hypnotic whirr.

  “After a while,” Konada-san says, “the sound became almost soothing.”

  The reward for enduring the cramped space and noise of the Kaiten was a thoroughly enjoyable piloting experience – that is, as long as the vessel did not fall prey to its disquieting and fairly frequent habit of suddenly zooming away into the depths out of control, its pilot never seen alive again. Although it was cumbersome at low throttle, it picked up a graceful agility at high speed. With higher velocity water flow over the control surfaces, the craft became so responsive that pitching and yawing through three-dimensional underwater space was more akin to flying a high-performance aircraft than to steering a naval vessel. Another feature that helped in no small way to make the Kaiten pilot’s life easier was an autopilot mechanism that could be used to set speed, depth, and heading for a lengthy, stealthy incursion into the objective area, then manually overridden by the pilot during the final attack run, when only the finesse of a human hand could provide a reasonable chance of putting the warhead on a target.

  In addition to speed, another factor in the Kaiten’s responsiveness was its pneumatically-assisted rudder and diving controls. This power was provided by a compressed air canister that leaked during operation, causing the Kaiten’s cabin pressure to gradually build up during the course of a run. When the conning tower hatch was unlocked at the end of a training mission, it hissed like a gigantic bottle of Coca-Cola being opened.

  Training runs at Ōtsushima were time-consuming enterprises involving considerable personnel and resources. At the beginning of a run, a pilot – armed with his orders, a map with heading notations, and a full canteen – would board the Kaiten in one of the torpedo sheds on base. After this, the Kaiten would be towed down to the quay, lowered into the water by crane, then towed out to the training range by a motor launch that would double as an escort boat once the actual run began. The range itself was similar in concept to a very large-scale version of the old “20,000 Leagues Under The Sea” ride at Disney World, involving the negotiation of obstacles and the simulated engagement of targets[295] arranged along a set course in relatively shallow water.

  Since Kuroki and Higuchi’s mishap, the tops of the training Kaitens were painted white for visibility. This scheme served two functions, one being to assist search efforts in the event of another accidental sinking, the other being to allow the escort boat to track the Kaiten visually during its training runs. Small signaling charges were thrown into the water to warn the pilot if the Kaiten was headed for hazards like shoals or coming too close to the targets. Collisions with underwater obstacles or the target barges were the leading cause of training deaths in the Kaiten program, so the escort’s job was vital.

  Every night at around 1800 hours, after evening mess, there were debriefs and feedback sessions between instructors and trainees to discuss results and observations from the day’s training runs. In a typical session, trainees would stand in turn in front of a blackboard to give detailed self-evaluation reports of their runs complete with figures and diagrams. This was followed by a fire hose stream of aggressive questioning from the cadre, and woe unto the trainee who could not answer each and every item satisfactorily. Punishment for an unsatisfactory presentation was a thoroughly humiliating hazing in front of the group, and even more painfully, a precipitous drop down the
training order roster. In rare cases of clearly hopeless incompetence, a pilot could suffer the ultimate humiliation of being dropped from the roster altogether and permanently relegated to maintenance duties.

  After the debrief sessions – which rarely ended before midnight and sometimes lasted until one or two in the morning – the trainees would stagger to their bunks emotionally and physically exhausted. And they would need every minute of sleep they could manage, for another day of more of the same would start with reveille a few hours later at 0500.

  *****

  While life as a human torpedo was certainly no day at the beach, it was not without its share of comforts and amenities. Similar to its treatment of Ōka personnel, the Navy Ministry thought that nothing was too good for the Kaiten boys in terms of rations. Sailors and officers with a taste for the bottle could drink their fill of high-grade saké during their rare spells of downtime, Kinshi, Homare and Cherry brand cigarettes were always plentiful, and the larders in the mess hall were almost always full. When not, there was always good fishing to be had in the sea around Ōtsushima. One of the benefits of being stationed on a top-secret island base surrounded by waters off-limits to civilian fishermen was that bountiful catches were virtually guaranteed.

  The enlisted men soon learned to fish with the dynamite left behind by naval engineers who had built the base. A lit stick or two tossed into the lagoon was usually sufficient to stun and float enough fish to feed a platoon. Signaling rounds could also be used. These had an explosive charge roughly equivalent to an M-80, and were activated by peeling back a piece of electrical tape over one end and tossing the round into the water. Though results were not as spectacular as those obtained from TNT trawling, they were good enough to snare a quick snack of small fish. Sardines speared on twigs and cooked over a little driftwood fire made for surprisingly good eating and a nice way to pass the time on boring sentry duty.