Blossoms In The Wind: Human Legacies Of The Kamikaze

by Sheftall, M. G.

  Understandably high up on the Kaiten program’s need-to-know food chain – higher even than His Majesty – Konada and the other pilots back at Ōtsushima were let in on the contents of the Kikusui after action report soon after it was written up. Despite literary interpretations to the contrary in various books about the Kaiten, Konada-san does not remember the Kikusui news as being greeted with any particular enthusiasm or rejoicing at Ōtsushima. For one thing, a report of successful deployment of the Kaiten also meant, by necessity, that friends and comrades were dead. Decorum alone in such a situation demanded a respectful response to such news, no matter what combat successes might have been brought about by these sacrifices. Second of all, as far as the pilots were concerned, there was no reason to register surprise at a report of three carriers and two battleships being sent to the bottom. Rather, considering the fact that twelve Kaitens and their brave pilots were sent out on the sortie, the report numbers seemed a little on the low side. Konada himself felt such supreme confidence in the Kaiten that he expected to bring down nothing less than a fleet carrier when his own moment of truth came.

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  For Konada, waiting for that moment of truth was an existence of time passed in a gray zone somewhere between life and death. This was an experience common to all tokkō personnel and generally measured in days or weeks for aircraft pilots, but in the case of the Ōtsushima Kaiten pilots, this period of psychological limbo had to be endured for eight or nine months or more. Life was lived on borrowed time with death lurking just close enough to deny a pilot the closure of knowing if any given sunset watched from the beach, or a game of chess enjoyed with a friend, or even just a nice meal in the mess hall would be one’s last. It was an existence every Kaiten pilot learned to deal with in his own way. Some drank, others slept whenever they could, still others – like Konada – poured everything they had into every minute detail of their duties. Anything to keep their minds off the infernal waiting, which had to be endured with the unbearable knowledge that friends and loved ones were dying – under the Americans’ guns at sea and under their bombs in the burning cities. As the war ground on, many came to believe that comrades given attack orders were deserving not only of respect, but of envy.

  Konada would go on to spend eleven months in this purgatory. The vagaries of attack roster selection meant that he was the only INA graduate pilot in the original Ōtsushima group not to sortie from the island. Fate intervened in May 1945 – at the most furious stage of the Okinawa combat that had claimed so many Etajima buddies – when Konada was posted to the new Kaiten base on Hachijōjima Island, a rough volcanic outcropping in the Pacific Ocean three hundred kilometers south of Tokyo.

  IJN planners had ordered Kaitens to Hachijōjima after deeming that the island’s strategic location in the middle of sea-lane approaches to the Japanese capital made it a likely next target for the American juggernaut after Okinawa’s inevitable loss. Of course, historical hindsight shows that further American incursions into Japanese territory were unnecessary after Okinawa – but such developments were not anticipated by the Kaiten men of Hachijōjima, who were on constant standby for attack orders that could come at any time virtually from the moment they set foot on the island. As the Americans tightened their noose on the home islands, this death-shadowed expectation only grew in intensity, peaking but not necessarily subsiding completely on August 15.

  Like every other Japanese of his generation still with us, Konada-san has vivid memories of that day – few of them happy. Following orders posted earlier in the morning, all of the Hachijōjima personnel formed up in front of the HQ building a few minutes before twelve noon for “an important announcement from the Emperor.” When the radio was turned on, the static was very bad. Konada-san suspected then – and has since always believed – that someone was trying to jam the signal.[308] Only bits and snippets come through, and what did make it through was so garbled in transmission that no one could make heads or tails of it. At the end of the broadcast, the radio was switched off and the base CO, blinking rapidly and literally scratching his head, turned to his men. He had decided to look on the bright side, he said, and interpret the message as yet another fight-to-the-finish speech from Tokyo. The assembly was dismissed and all personnel were ordered to return to their posts and remain on standby.

  Lieutenant Konada, however, had doubts about the accuracy of the CO’s interpretation of the Imperial broadcast. After the formation broke ranks, he decided to visit the enlisted men running the radio relay station on top of the island’s main mountain to see if they had had any better luck with their antenna’s reception. Konada soon ascertained that they had not, although they had been able to pick up a transcript of the message sent out over military frequencies in naval code a few minutes after the voice broadcast. The courtly medieval Japanese text the Emperor’s scribes had prepared for the broadcast was a devil to try to muddle through in plain katakana phonetic transcription, but the gist of the message was clear enough – Bear the unbearable, endure the unendurable. The war was over, and His Majesty had just said so.

  Konada returned to the main base to pass on his message from the mountaintop. The CO acknowledged the need to modify his earlier interpretation of the broadcast, but he saw no need to modify the standing orders for the base to remain on full alert. Until they got a better picture of what was happening in the outside world, they would have to assume that attack orders were imminent.

  In the meanwhile, during breaks from his duties, Konada kept vigil in front of a radio he had set up in the hallway of the officer’s billets, switching back and forth between Japanese military radio frequencies and American Japanese-language propaganda broadcasts beamed at Japan from Saipan (think Tokyo Rose in reverse). Gradually, the picture began coming together, and it seemed that the island HQ radiomen were correct in their interpretation of the Emperor’s broadcast. Konada felt that it was intrinsically wrong to take the American broadcasts at face value, but when he compared and contrasted this information with the bits and pieces he was gleaning from uncoded Japanese military traffic, the Americans appeared to be telling the truth when they reported that the war was over. Konada continued his radio monitoring over the next few days, interspersing this activity with frequent visits to the mountain radio shack to look at their decoded messages log.

  Out of all of the messages he read during this time, none was more disturbing than the news that the feared and hated Soviets had at last entered the war. Konada could only read with helpless rage reports from points north that the Russians were at this very moment pouring armored divisions into Manchuria and threatening Hokkaido after rolling up the Kuriles like a cheap carpet. Losing to the Americans was bad enough, but the thought of the Soviets running riot over the country with no way of stopping them was absolutely unbearable.

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  Hachijōjima’s remote location in the middle of the ocean may have made it vulnerable to radio frequency jamming by holdout fanatics in the IJN’s chain of command, but this was not the case for naval bases in the home islands. Despite His Majesty’s medieval vocabulary, the officers monitoring a shortwave radio at the 23rd Totsugeki Unit Kaiten base at Susaki, Kōchi Prefecture knew as soon as the broadcast was over that they had just been told to lay down their arms. Japan had just surrendered.

  After being told that the war was over and given orders to “Stand by for further instructions,” Petty Officer Harumi Kawasaki spent the rest of the day as many of his fellow 23rd Totsugeki pilots did – staggering around the confines of the base as a sotted, sullen pistolero, with a saké bottle in one hand and a pilot’s service revolver in the other, shooting at signs, windows, into the dunes or simply straight up into the air. Too ashamed to share their tears with each other, the pilots wandered off singly to sob with grief, howl with rage or just stand stonily silent and numb with shock, staring blankly out at the summer sea and hoping that this was all a bad dream.

  The next day, the pilots awoke to pounding hangovers and t
he grimmest morning-after imaginable as the bleak reality set in that yesterday had not been just a bad dream after all. Then, with everyone expecting that the day would see a repeat of more saké-drenched tantrums thrown on top of jangled nerves and bad adrenaline, a glimmer of hope appeared in the form of an oddly uplifting piece of scuttlebutt making its way around the base. The latest interpretations of His Majesty’s broadcast were that maybe it had just been an order for a temporary ceasefire, and that the nation’s armed forces were to remain on full alert to be ready to attack if attacked first and/or if American invasion landings seemed imminent.

  The rumor breathed new life into the unit, and spirits rebounded even further when, later that morning, reports came in that an American fleet was approaching nearby Tosa Bay. This was enough to convince the Susaki commander that the rumor was true. Standby orders were issued, and the base kicked into high gear to prepare the Kaitens for attack missions.

  In the nearby fishing village of Tei, where the 23rd Totsugeki had an annex base, a different type of tokkō weapon was being readied. The Shin’yō (“Ocean Shaker”) was a ten-meter long plywood motorboat carrying a 300kg warhead in the bow. Usually powered by old automobile engines pressed into maritime service, the boats tended to be rather slow and extremely vulnerable to the batteries of 20 and 40mm guns most American vessels carried for air defense. To give the Shin’yō pilot at least a slim chance of getting in close enough to his target to do damage, the boat was also armed with two forward-firing one-shot-only 12cm rocket scatter guns that could be used to try to keep the American gunners’ heads down during the attack run.[309]

  Considering the numbers of boats built and pilots sacrificed during missions in the Philippines and Okinawa, the Shin’yō had a less than glowing performance record, but the pilots trained in the weapon’s use were as motivated as the crewmen in any of the IJN’s other tokkō programs. The Shin’yō pilots of the 23rd Totsugeki were no exception. In their haste and excitement after hearing the reports of approaching American ships earlier in the morning, the Tei personnel had been only too happy to interpret the subsequent “standby” notice from Susaki HQ as actual attack orders. By early evening, maintenance crews were practically falling over each other as they rushed to arm and gas up the unit’s twenty-three boats, lined up nice and tight along the Tei beach cove.

  In the midst of all this frenzied activity, an errant sailor spilled a sizable amount of gasoline on a boat that, for some reason, already had its engine running. There was a spark in the wrong place at the wrong time, and before anyone knew it, the boat was up in flames. No one needed a lengthy lecture about the dangers of combining fire with overflowing gas tanks and high explosives, and as the flames rose higher, there was a tangled khaki gaggle of asses and elbows as the maintenance crews and boat pilots scrambled for cover in the dunes behind the cove.

  At one point, the flames seemed to subside. A couple of brave souls ventured back down to the boats to investigate. The all-clear was given, and with sweaty brows and a few nervous laughs, the rest of the sailors returned to work. A few minutes later, the still-smoldering boat and its warhead blew sky-high, touching off a domino run of explosions in either direction along the row of boats ringing the cove. It was all over in a matter of seconds.

  Hearing the explosions and seeing the thick black smoke rising from the direction of the cove, radiomen from a nearby army unit got onto the national command grid and began screaming to high heaven and anyone else still listening that the Shin’yō boys of the 23rd Totsugeki were giving hell to an American invasion force in Tosa Bay. Air units were scrambled and naval elements began racing to the area before the error was realized and urgent bulletins denying the reports of combat in Shikoku were flashed to bases around the country. But while the combat may have been specious, the reports of mass destruction were not. The explosions had reduced the Shin’yō boats to piles of smoldering ash and twisted metal, and 111 sailors were dead.

  After killing 6,310 Japanese and killing or maiming over 15,000 Allied servicemen, Japan’s tokkō program had just claimed the last of its victims. But there was yet one more blood sacrifice to be made before a bloody and unprecedentedly horrific chapter in Japanese history could be finally closed.

  36 Going HomeAfter hosting a small party for loyal staff members and trusted confidantes at his Tokyo home late into the night of August 15, 1945, Admiral Takijirō Ōnishi retired to his tatami-floored study to write letters until some time in the wee hours of the following morning. One of the letters he wrote was an apologetic farewell to his wife. A second letter was addressed to “Heroic Souls of the Tokkō-tai.” Despite its title, this seems more likely to have been written with the admiral’s place in history in mind. In it, Ōnishi accepts personal responsibility for the sacrifice of the tokkō thousands. In closing, he exhorts the Japanese race to maintain its pride, even in defeat, and to do its utmost “in the best tokkō tradition” for the common good of the nation and world peace.

  Finally, in beautiful calligraphy, the admiral wrote the following haiku:

  Oh how uplifting

  The moon shining so clearly

  Now that storms have passed[310]

  After setting down his calligraphy brush, the admiral picked up a shortsword, shoved the blade into the left side of his abdomen and drew it as far across his torso as he could before pain paralyzed his hand. The wound was fatal, but unfortunately for Ōnishi, it did not sever any of the major arteries whose rupture would have mercifully hastened the inevitable.[311] When his house servant discovered him still very much alive and conscious around dawn, he was curled up in agony on the blood-soaked tatami of his study, holding his shredded guts in with his bare hands. Refusing medical assistance, the admiral stayed in this position for another twelve hours before finally succumbing to his wounds on the evening of August 16, 1945.

  Media handling of the incident was respectful, treating the admiral’s death as the passing of a modern-day hero in the best samurai tradition. Few Japanese at the time disagreed with the semantic implications when front-page headlines in the nation’s major dailies referred to Ōnishi’s decision to take his own life using the heroic term jiketsu (“self-determined final judgment”) rather than the usual jisatsu (generic term for “suicide,” which would be used under less honorable circumstances). The incident was one of the more sensational topics of nationwide discussion in the otherwise stunned and stupefied early aftermath of the surrender broadcast.

  While the nation was abuzz with news of the Ōnishi incident mere hours after the fact, it would be several months before Konada, still stranded on Hachijōjima, would learn of the demise of the visionary firebrand he and so many other young naval officers had idolized during the war. But even if he had heard the news when everyone else did, he would have had little time to mourn the admiral, for he was busy attending to last rites of a more immediate nature – burying the Kaiten, and on an even more personal level, bidding sad farewell to his own identity as an officer in His Majesty’s Imperial Navy.

  In no particular hurry to go home and face an unknown future in which the only certainty was scarred pride, Konada stayed on at Hachijōjima for several months after the war to help oversee the work crews dismantling the Kaiten stockpiles and facilities on the island. Most of the heavy lifting had been done by early autumn, but Konada stayed on with the skeleton cadre remaining on Hachijōjima that would oversee the official handover of the base to Allied occupation forces.

  The mission of the American inspection teams that arrived on October 30 was to ensure that the Kaitens and any equipment that could be used to deploy or maintain them were permanently denied to the Japanese. Konada, as one of the most experienced Kaiten men still left on the base, was put in charge of liaising with the Americans and coordinating the scrapping operations. Of utmost priority was the extremely hazardous task of disarming and separating the huge warheads from the bodies of the Kaitens. Disposing of the warheads themselves was an even touchier job, and at first no
one on the base was quite sure what to do with them. Their immense explosive yield meant that simply detonating them in a ditch somewhere like dud artillery shells was out of the question, and attempting to cut them open and remove the unstable explosive charge inside was, for the same reason, an even less appealing option. It was finally decided that the best solution was to dump them at sea, and local fishermen familiar with the surrounding waters were hired for this task. Whether or not the fishermen were fully aware of the danger involved in this temporary work is not known, but their ability to find the dumping grounds at a later date could not have been better with GPS technology at their disposal; some five years later, when the value of scrap steel in Japan shot through the ceiling at the height of the Korean War, they went back to their explosive stash, raised the warheads from the seabeds, and sold them on the scrap market for a tidy profit.[312]

  The Kaiten fuselages left over from the disarming operation were trucked by hand trolley into one of the deep storage tunnels dug into the cliffs of Hachijōjima. TNT was rigged among the machines and around the entrance of the tunnel. The subsequent blast buried the remnant of the Kaiten forever under thousands of tons of rock.

  “I’ll never forget that final explosion,” says Konada-san. “That was when it really hit me that this was the end. It was all over.”

  The Kaiten would now live on only in the history books, and in the dreams and memories of men like Toshiharu Konada and Harumi Kawasaki. While the courage and dedication of the Kaiten pilots was never in question, the legacy of the weapon itself left much to be desired. From an operational standpoint, the Kaiten had performed no more impressively than the IJN’s other flopped wonder weapon, the Ōka. With all of the herculean effort and sacrifice in human lives and materiel involved in the Kaiten program, only one Allied ship – the USS Mississinewa – had been sunk, with another – the destroyer USS Underhill – damaged severely enough to require later scuttling.