For That One Day: The Memoirs of Mitsuo Fuchida, Commander of the Attack on Pearl Harbor

by Tadanori Urabe

  I thought again, “This cannot be happening,” observing the situation at Combined Fleet Headquarters. I thought they were a group of escort carriers of the Seventh Fleet led by Vice Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid. It was confirmed later by the US side that the Kinkaid Fleet, which had escorted the main body of the Army convoy led by Army Lieutenant General Walter Krueger, was on a separate mission after the convoy arrived safely at Leyte Gulf.

  Indeed, given this situation, unless we stormed into Leyte Gulf before engaging the escort carriers, the US Army convoy would complete its landing. And it would do no good for us to sink empty ships after they landed their soldiers. The main objective was to inflict high casualties and wipe out as many enemy soldiers as we could. I was absolutely disgusted.

  At that time, I was not aware that Kurita’s intention was to engage in a once-in-a-lifetime decisive battle once he encountered the enemy’s main fleet. I just thought that, following the instinct of all naval officers, he was automatically attacking at the sight of the enemy fleet. It is just like a hunting dog that jumps at the sight of a rabbit. By the way, Combined Fleet Headquarters was also filled with this instinct common to naval officers. The Kinkaid Fleet that received the shots from the Yamato’s big guns retreated to the northeast as fast as it could, signaling the Halsey Fleet for help in uncoded radio messages. Commander Toyoda himself was all smiles listening to the report. In this emotional atmosphere, a radio order telling them to take any corrective action was not forthcoming.

  The enemy bolted, extending a smoke screen. As the Kurita Center Force chased after them, frequent squalls shielded the enemy from sight. In this manner, the battle continued for three hours. According to the report from Kurita Center Force Headquarters, they sank an enemy carrier, inflicted heavy damage on another carrier, and sank a destroyer. According to later US reports, two escort carriers (the USS Gambier Bay and USS St. Lo) and two destroyers were sunk. As a result, since the Americans claimed that the escort carrier, St. Lo, was sunk by a kamikaze attack, the Kurita Central Force was credited with sinking only one escort carrier and two destroyers. However, around this time, an enemy air squadron quickly flew out and began to strike the Kurita Main Force.

  Given the situation, Commander Kurita abandoned his dash to Leyte Gulf at 1030 and headed back to Brunei Bay. However, the enemy air squadron continued its pursuit, sank Chikuma and Chokai, two heavy cruisers, and inflicted enough damage to two other heavy cruisers, Tone and Haguro, that they were unable to move under their own power.

  That was how the Sho-Ichi-Go Operation ended up in failure despite the achievements brought about by the sacrifice of the decoy operation as ordered by the Combined Fleet Command Center. As a result of this Sho-Ichi-Go Operation, the fundamental organization of the Combined Fleet was demolished, forcing them to move to a special attack operation that required inflicting significant casualties on the enemy.

  34

  Guts in Battle

  As I witnessed, in battle, Japanese admirals lacked guts. To put it differently, they did not have the necessary tenacity. Commander Nagumo did not dare order a repeat attack on Pearl Harbor, and in the night battle of the Solomon Islands Campaign, Admiral Gunichi Mikawa returned quickly after a resounding victory, although the enemy could have been completely wiped out only with one more push.

  In every theater of operations in the Pacific, our admirals lacked the guts to go one more step in a victory-or-defeat situation. In the action at Leyte Gulf, once again, I saw it in the behavior of Admiral Kurita. I got extremely irritated.

  People inevitably come to have rich experiences as they get older. However, if you look more precisely into the nature of experience, useful experience, of course, can be accumulated, but substantially harmful—as opposed to simply useless— experience is also accumulated. In particular, in an abnormal situation like war, these harmful experiences can bring about misfortune.

  “If you know the enemy and thyself, you will not lose in 100 battles,” is the lesson from Sun Tzu’s Art of War. However, nowadays, it is not an easy task to know your enemy. It is a commonplace in a battle situation that the enemy’s condition is unknown. However, if we wait until the enemy’s condition is clarified, we will surely lose the fighting opportunity. This is exactly the point where military strategy requires speed before quality. As we get older, it is inevitable that we will escape to quality, like tapping a stone bridge before crossing it.

  When I was engaged in planning the Pearl Harbor attack, I studied past cases of battles utilizing the tactic of surprise attack. One of them was the Battle of Okehazama during the Sengoku or Warring States Period in Japan. Before the assault on Imagawa Yoshimoto, Oda Nobunaga performed his favorite Atsumori dance, reciting, “Human life lasts only 50 years. Compared with life under heaven, it is only a dream and an illusion. Once you have given life, there is no life that will not perish.” As he ended his dance, he jumped on his horse and rode out from the main gate, followed by his men. They took advantage of the unpredictable stormy weather, and managed to kill his far more powerful rival of the time, even though Nobunaga’s army was outnumbered more than ten to one.

  Before the war, hanging on a wall at the Yokosuka Suikosha, a club for naval officers, there was a calligraphy scroll painted by Admiral Hikonojyo Kamimura, one of the pioneers of the Imperial Japanese Navy. It read, “A water stream does not compete to be ahead.” It was the motto of the personnel office of the Japanese Navy, and what counted was what they called the “hammock number” or the academic ranking at graduation from the Naval Academy. However, looking back on the development of the Pacific War since its inception, all the leaders of the IJN were too old to cope with the epoch-making changes in the concept of operations, only proving themselves to be mediocre admirals in the battle theater, and oddly conservative within the organization. In terms of personnel management, I was convinced that the Japanese Navy badly needed to be rejuvenated by lowering the average age by 10 years.

  Back then, Admiral Shigetaro Shimada was the Minister of the Navy and Head of the General Staff, and he was the person who had all the power. I might have been quite insane in those days. I went to the Ministry of the Navy and barged into the Minister’s office, rushing past his adjutant and staff. I tried at great length to persuade him of the need to rejuvenate the Navy by 10 years. Finally, the Minister said, “If the Japanese Navy should be rejuvenated by 10 years, you will probably be Commander of the Combined Fleet.”

  I gave a cheeky response, “For that, I am prepared.”

  He thundered, “Baka! [You fool!]” a sign that he did not agree with my argument

  However, as the battle situation we were facing in those days was already nearing catastrophe, any rejuvenation of the Japanese Navy by 10 years would no longer have made any difference. It was too late anyway.

  35

  The Day After in Hiroshima

  I usually do not talk about the episode that I am about to discuss now, because there may be people who might feel annoyed that I alone am like a good child, implying that those who died in the bombing of Hiroshima were excluded from the grace of God. I do not mean that at all, of course. However, for me, what I experienced at that time was an overflowing of God’s embrace, which eventually led me to my belief in Christianity.

  As a matter of fact, in 1945, I stayed in Hiroshima City until August 5th, the day before the atom bomb was dropped. My job was Group Commander, Aviation Staff of the General Navy Headquarters (established in April 1945 to control the entire navy after the obliteration of the Combined Fleet) as well as the Staff of the Southern Naval Headquarters. I often visited its Second Headquarters in Hiroshima.

  We had already finished meetings on combined operations and map exercises regarding the defense of Kyushu. We then held a meeting to discuss the Sei-Go Operation, drafted by General Aviation Headquarters, trying to offset the intolerable and indiscriminate bombings by the enemy’s B-29s. At that time, General Navy Headquarters was preparing what we called the “Ken Oper
ation.” It was a sort of suicide attack to send naval brigades by forced landing on the B-29 bases in the Mariana Islands, Saipan, Tinian and Guam, and blast the B-29s one by one with a specially designed bomb called the turtle-shell bomb. This was the theme of the meeting, and the Army was ready to cooperate.

  It was a three-day meeting, ending before noon of August 5th. I loosened my collar with relief, and I returned to my room at the Yamato Inn, which was located in Saiku-cho. I intended to stay at the inn that night. When I lay down to take a short nap, the telephone rang. I picked up the phone. The call was from Combined Fleet Headquarters in Hiyoshidai, a suburb of Tokyo, and the voice at the other end belonged to Chief of Staff Shikazo Yano.

  “Aviation Staff Commander, can you drop in to Yamato Base on your way back after you finish your work in Hiroshima? Deputy Chief of Staff Hisayasu needs your advice regarding the communications facility at General Aviation Headquarters. He wants you to arrive tonight as the construction team will be there tomorrow morning.”

  “Alright. Whatever you request, Sir,” I responded, feeling that a troublesome request had just been made of me. In preparation for the decisive battle on the mainland, Hisayasu was going to visit a site to supervise some construction work. General Aviation Headquarters was to be moved to the Yaso Base, and the facility was needed to maintain close communications between both headquarters. I thought that installing a single telephone would be sufficient and that it was not such a big matter that required the advice of the Aviation Staff Commander. Muttering to myself about this trifling job that would interfere with my plan to stay one more night in Hiroshima, I nevertheless took a car immediately to Iwakuni Base and flew to Yamato Base on a communications plane. That night, I shared lodging with Hisayasu in a farmhouse in Takenouchi Hamlet.

  Early the next morning, I met the construction team and was having an early lunch after I finished my meeting. Around 11 o’clock, there was a call once again from Yano. I was overwhelmed with shock by what he told me. According to Yano, around 8:15 in the morning, something like an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and the city was completely devastated. He added that a fact-finding group would be dispatched immediately from Imperial Headquarters and that I should return to Iwakuni to join the fact-finding group. In response, I flew the communications plane from Yamato Base to Iwakuni Base in the afternoon and stayed overnight at Iwakuni Base. The next morning, August 7th, I joined the fact-finding group, which had arrived from Tokyo, and entered Hiroshima on the second day after the atomic bomb was dropped. The mission of the fact-finding group was to confirm if it actually was an atomic bomb that had been dropped and to report the extent of the damage to Imperial Headquarters immediately.

  As a consequence, our group consisted of only high-ranking individuals from key government departments and agencies. Those who claimed to be technical experts were specialists in the areas of poisonous powder or poison gas and had absolutely no practical knowledge regarding the atomic bomb. Therefore, they did not care at all about the radioactivity, and, without any protective measures, they strode down into the city that was completely reduced to rubble. I was one of them. Later, most of the group’s members died of radiation sickness. As I suffered no after-effects, Yano suspected that I was never with the fact-finding team.

  As far as the eye could see, the city was desolate, and piles of embers in the midst of endless rubble continued to smolder. Here and there, the occasional skeleton of a storehouse or ferro-concrete structure stood amid the wreckage. It was dim with smoke and dust. From time to time, there were large drops of rain accompanied by a small whirlwind.

  Dead bodies were scattered everywhere. Some still had remnants of their burned clothes, but most were naked, their badly burned and inflamed skin exposed, lying either on their backs or face-down. Their burned skin was covered with purplish blisters, hanging like torn rags. Along the riverside, the dead were piled one on top of the other in a heap. They all had inflated bellies, distended like drum skins, with squashed eyes, bald heads, sometimes with a few strands of burned hair, and faces that were baggy and inflated. The burned flesh was already producing a foul smell. There were many who were still alive, and they were groaning in pain from their terrible burns, continuously crying out for water. More than anything else, they seemed to require water. The rescue teams had not arrived yet. Gasping, some survivors crawled into the river, groaning, dying.

  The brutal cruelty unleashed by an atomic bomb has been talked about extensively, but the hell-on-earth reality is far beyond what anyone can imagine—unless one has actually seen it.

  One little boy who was badly burned was carrying water from the river in a broken bowl for his infant sister. She was crying for water. She tried to hold the bowl, but all of her fingers were swollen, and she could not bend them. So her brother poured the water between her swollen and inflamed lips, and she gulped it down with relish. Through her swollen eyelids, she stared at her brother and nodded, “Thank you, thank you.”

  Every time I remember that day, the heartache returns. When the bomb exploded, many people died instantaneously without knowing what actually happened. But this infant girl, comforted by her brother, survived overnight. Because of her suffering, she knew vaguely what had happened. And she wanted revenge. Shortly before she died, she whispered, “Brother, get revenge.” Damn it all!

  For us, there was no way to provide emergency treatment to these pitiful victims. All medical institutions in the city had been totally destroyed. The atomic bomb brought such a degree of cruelty that even mercy killing did not seem possible.

  Our fact-finding group was not a rescue team, so we moved around in the devastated area that extended 2.5 kilometers. The city’s streets were completely devastated, but we occasionally saw stone remnants, and the explosion’s blast lines were imprinted on their surface. We measured them in order to estimate the explosion’s epicenter and the altitude. Our conclusion was that the bomb exploded 500 meters above the ground, and the epicenter was Saiku-cho.

  I was looking at the burnt ruins in Saiku-cho with great grief. There was not even a single splinter remaining of Yamato Inn, where I was staying until the day before yesterday. If I had stayed just one more night, I would have been eating breakfast there at 0815. As I thought about it, I shook with fear. I was murmuring, “The day before yesterday, I left Hiroshima for Yamato Base in the afternoon.” But it was far from a murmur. What happened was good luck. No, it was exceedingly good luck. At the time, I solemnly looked up at the sky and felt that I had been kept alive by the grace of the gods. It was the seed of my faith in Jesus Christ.

  Our fact-finding extended to the following day, August 8th. Around noon, we received serious news. There was an unexploded atomic bomb in the mountains near Kameyama Village, to the north of Hiroshima City. The frightened villagers had all fled, and no one volunteered to guide us to the site. I spotted it with my binoculars. It was not so big, and there was a parachute attached it. The object was half-buried in the ground. It did not look like an atomic bomb, but there was still the danger that it might explode. As a Staff Officer of General Navy Headquarters, I had an obligation to do something. Duty would not allow me to flee, so I pulled myself together like a kamikaze pilot, and I advanced alone carrying a branch from a hazel tree. When I reached the bomb, I first poked at it with the branch to make sure that it would not explode, and then I placed my hands around it and lifted it up. The body was 15 centimeters in diameter and 80 centimeter long. Inside the body, there appeared to be radio communications equipment, with an area for a battery and another for a vacuum tube. We concluded that this was an observation communications device that was parachuted down at the same time as the atomic bomb. In total, three similar devices were later found in the area.

  The following day, August 9th, news arrived that another atomic bomb had been dropped on Nagasaki. Our fact-finding team stopped all activity in Hiroshima and headed for Nagasaki.

  Incidentally, on the monument to the atomic bomb victims i
n Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, the following phrase is inscribed: “Let all the souls here rest in peace, for we shall not repeat this error.”

  However, who made this promise? I do not think that anyone can believe this. A brutally cruel weapon tore their bodies to shreds, so how can we simply offer such an indulgent consolation to ask these people, who died in agony, to sleep in peace? Those are only the soothing words of a poet. They may pretend to appeal to the wisdom of human beings, but the wisdom of human beings is not something worth admiring.

  The situation today is that the proliferation of nuclear weapons is a severe problem, so who on earth can swear not to repeat the error? Truly, the word “Hiroshima” makes us lose hope for the future of human beings. After the war, because of John Hersey’s book, Hiroshima, the slogan, “No more Hiroshimas,” echoed throughout the world. However, the fact is that the United States, proud to be a leader among civilized nations, demonstrated the shameless and barbarous precedent that anything is justified during time of war, and this is a stain of spiritual defeat which can never be removed.

  Whatever the situation, many people stand in front of the monument and think that peace must be maintained to avoid repeating such a tragedy. Then, you may notice aggressive demonstrators, wearing red sashes with the slogan, “Society to Preserve Peace,” who will ask for your signature. They mean to secure peace in this manner.

  However, peace is not something that is obtained by using human power in a fight. Peace is something that is granted from above. Based on this belief, the phrase on the monument’s plaque is a prayer pleading to God, not talking to the atomic bomb victims. In other words, the spirits of those who died tragically are in God’s hands, and we are pleading to God that he not let us human beings commit the same error. The God is Jesus Christ, and there could be no other God. What are you supposed to do standing in front of the monument? There is only one answer to this: “Believe in Jesus Christ.”