BY A CHARACTERISTIC irony of war, American victory at Leyte Gulf exercised far less influence upon the last phase of the struggle than another, at first apparently marginal, series of events. On 15 October 1944, five days before MacArthur landed on Leyte, Rear-Admiral Masafumi Arima removed his badges of rank and clambered into the cockpit of a plane at Clark Field on Luzon. He then took off at the head of his fliers to attack Halsey’s fleet off Formosa. The commander of 26th Naval Air Flotilla, Arima was an impeccably dignified figure who defied the clammy Philippine heat to wear full uniform at all times. A slender, gentle, soft-spoken warrior, he came from a family of Confucian scholars. He cherished a book on tactics written by his own grandfather, which had become a minor military classic. That morning of the fifteenth, he sought to make a personal contribution to the art of war by crashing his plane into an American aircraft carrier. He left Clark untroubled by the apprehension, common to most pilots, that he might not come back. He intended not to do so.
Arima’s melodramatic gesture ended in bathos. He plunged into the sea alongside a carrier, without damaging it. But he was one among many desperate men who concluded in those days that new methods were required to offer the Japanese any possibility of overcoming their enemy’s overwhelming might. Two army fliers based on Negros Island had already made a suicide attempt on 13 September, meeting the same fate as Arima before they reached a target. Several Japanese fighter pilots314 deliberately rammed American bombers in what were known as tai-atari—“body-bashing” attacks. Since the Marianas disaster, many Japanese officers, including a naval aide to the emperor, had discussed the possibilities of launching a systematic suicide campaign. Captain Renya Inoguchi, senior air staff officer of 1st Air Fleet on the Philippines, wrote gloomily in his diary: “Nothing is more destructive to morale than a belief that the enemy possesses superiority.”
Conventional Japanese air forces were being devastated by the Americans. Haruki Iki and his squadron landed at Clark on 14 October to find that a sister unit which arrived only the previous day had already lost its commanding officer and most of its planes. “In the Philippines, every day315was desperate,” said Iki. “At night, the work of the ground crews preparing aircraft for next day’s strikes was constantly interrupted by American bombing. Even when we drove from the mess up to the strip in darkness, if we showed headlights we were liable to be shot up by American night-fighters, which was no fun at all.” Every time Iki flew out, he penned a last letter for his wife, Yoshiko, living with their two children at her parents’ house on Kyushu. “If I did not leave a letter, she might never even have known where I died, because nobody would have told her,” said the pilot. When the decision was made to launch suicide missions, Iki welcomed it: “At the time, this seemed the only option we had.”
A Japanese instructor wrote of his efforts to train pilots: “Everything was urgent316. We were told to rush men through. We abandoned refinements, just tried to teach them how to fly and shoot. One after another, singly, in twos and threes, training planes smashed into the ground, gyrated wildly through the air. For long, tedious months, I tried to create fighter pilots. It was a hopeless task. Our resources were too meagre, the demand too great.” Before entering combat, American pilots had received two years of training and flown at least three hundred hours, often many more. In 1944, Japanese fliers’ previous hundred hours of pre-operational experience was cut to forty. Navigation training was abolished. Pilots were told simply to follow their leaders. A Japanese after-action report on the poor performance of their fliers in the Marianas declared: “Chapter 49 of the Combat Sutra says that ‘Tactics are like sandals. Those who are strong should wear them’…[The consequence of lack of pilot training, however, is that] it looks…as if good sandals were put on the feet of cripples.”
Suicide attack offered a prospect of redressing the balance of forces, circumventing the fact that Japanese pilots were no longer capable of challenging their American counterparts on conventional terms. Instead, their astonishing willingness for self-sacrifice might be exploited. Here was a concept which struck a chord in the Japanese psyche, and caught the Imperial Navy’s mood of the moment. Officers cherished a saying: “When a commander is uncertain317 whether to steer to port or starboard, he should steer towards death.” An alternative aphorism held that “One should take care to make one’s own dying as meaningful as possible.” The suicide concept appeared to satisfy both requirements. Four days after Arima’s death, Vice-Admiral Takijiro Onishi, new commander of 5th Air Base on the Philippines, held a meeting with Captain Inoguchi, his staff and some fliers. They agreed that Zeroes fitted with five-hundred-pound bombs and crashed headlong into targets could achieve much greater accuracy than conventional bombing. A one-way trip also doubled the range of a plane. Inoguchi proposed calling the movement shimpu, a word for “divine wind.” Another word of much the same meaning, however, soon passed into the vernacular of the Second World War: kamikaze.
On 20 October, Onishi addressed men of the first designated “special attack” unit: “Japan is in grave danger318. The salvation of our country is now beyond the power of the ministers of state, the general staff and humble commanders like myself. It can come only from spirited young men like you. Thus, on behalf of your hundred million countrymen, I ask this sacrifice of you, and pray for your success.” A few months and several hundred suicide attacks later, genuine kamikaze volunteers became hard to find. But in those first weeks, a substantial number of Japanese aircrew eagerly embraced the concept, offering themselves for “useful death.” When an officer flew to the Philippines base of Cebu and invited applicants for suicide missions, the entire unit came forward except two pilots in the sickbay. One flier, Uemura, had just written off a precious aircraft in an accident. He acknowledged miserably that he was the worst pilot in the squadron. His commander reassured him: “Don’t worry, Uemura, I’ll find a chance for you. Stop worrying and go to bed.” The pilot bowed deeply, saying, “Thank you sir. I shall be waiting.”
When Commander Tamai of the 201st Air Group put the idea to his twenty-three pilots, all professed enthusiasm. Lt. Yukio Seki said: “You’ve absolutely got to let me do it.” Seki was just three months married, after a correspondence romance. He had received a random parcel from a girl, one of many dispatched by civilian well-wishers to Japan’s soldiers, sailors and airmen. This one, unusually, contained the sender’s name and address. The officer began exchanging letters with her. They met on his leave, fell in love, married. Before Seki left on his last mission, instead of asserting that he was sacrificing himself for his country, he told war correspondents: “I’m doing this for my beloved wife.” To a Western mind, self-immolation in such circumstances is incomprehensible. To some Japanese of the time, however, it seemed intensely romantic.
On 21 October 1944, as the first suicide section took off from Luzon, their comrades stood by the flight path singing, “If duty calls me to the mountain, a verdant greensward will be my pall.” The mission ended in anticlimax, for the planes returned without finding a target. But that day a Japanese aircraft from another field crashed into the cruiser HMAS Australia off Leyte, killing thirty men and inflicting major damage. On 25 October, in the aftermath of the Leyte Gulf naval battle, kamikazes led by Seki achieved their first important successes, sinking St. Lo, damaging Santee and Suwanee. The carrier Intrepid was struck off Luzon four days later. Onishi now secured the consent of his superior, Admiral Fukudome, to recruit kamikaze volunteers in large numbers. Fukudome had at first resisted, arguing that suicide missions would not play well with aircrew. Most of 2nd Air Fleet’s 24 and 25 October attacks on the American fleet employed conventional tactics. Only after these resulted in further disastrous losses did suicide assaults become institutionalised.
Captain Inoguchi flew into Manila on 26 October to confer with Onishi about expanding “special attack” squadrons. The staff officer was dismayed by the squalor of the Philippines’ capital: “People in the streets319 appeared haunted and nervous; many were leaving the city, carrying huge bundles on their shoulders. Heavy smoke…hung over the harbour. At AA positions along the waterside, soldiers were busy clearing shell cases and debris from the last raid…I was shocked to see so many sunken vessels, only their mast tips showing above the surface.” The two Japanese officers found themselves meeting in an air-raid shelter. With bleak understatement, Onishi observed: “This is certainly an unorthodox command.” A young suicide volunteer arrived at naval air headquarters to say farewell, greeting the admiral with the words: “Hello, uncle.” In truth there was no blood relationship, but Onishi was his father’s closest friend. In this strange, indeed ghastly little world, death was everywhere around them. Inoguchi’s brother had been lost two days before, commanding the battleship Musashi. His nephew died a week later as a kamikaze.
Onishi’s vision for achieving Japan’s salvation through the “divine wind” soon attained demented proportions: “If we are prepared to sacrifice twenty million Japanese lives in ‘special attacks,’” he said, “victory will be ours.” Not all officers shared his enthusiasm. Lt. Cmdr. Tadashi Minobe, who led a night-fighter group in the Philippines, was transferred back to Japan after openly denouncing the kamikaze concept. Propaganda, however, immediately set about ennobling this new ideal. The last letters of suicide pilots passed into Japan’s national legend. Petty Officer Isao Matsuo wrote on 28 October: “Dear parents, please congratulate me. I have been given a splendid opportunity to die. This is my last day.”
Through the weeks that followed, as Onishi and Inoguchi mustered more volunteers, suicide attacks and American losses in the seas around the Philippines mounted dramatically. On 30 October, a hit on the carrier Franklin killed fifty-six men. Vernon Black, manning a .50-calibre machine gun on Belleau Wood, watched a green-nosed Japanese attacker diving on his own ship: “He was afire in the engine320, then something hit me. Burning gasoline sprayed all over. It got awfully hot…my clothes began to burn.” Black, like many others, leapt into the sea to escape the flames: “There was a lot of screaming in the water and whistles blowing.” His life jacket immediately burst, burnt through. He scrambled onto a raft with a dozen other men, and forty minutes later was picked up by a “merciful can”—a destroyer. Down in Belleau Wood’s engine room, at first news of the strike “nobody got particularly excited as flight-deck fires were no novelty, and none of us up to that time had heard of the word ‘kamikaze,’” in the words of Ensign Bob Reich. But the damage was grave: the carrier lost twelve planes, ninety-two crew killed and fifty-four seriously injured. Like Intrepid, Belleau Wood was forced to withdraw to Ulithi for repair.
Many Japanese attackers were shot down, but an alarming number broke through to the fleet. The balance of the air battle seemed to be tilting in favour of the enemy. Some U.S. carriers were obliged to leave station for rest and resupply. More Japanese planes arrived from Formosa and Kyushu. Tacloban airfield was still only marginally operational for U.S. fighters. Escorts began to take heavy punishment. When a kamikaze hit a destroyer’s hull, a Brooklyn sailor said wonderingly: “You could of drove a Mack321 truck tru duh hole.” “This type of attack is quite different322from what we have been combating before,” said Cmdr. Arthur Purdy of the destroyer Abner Read, lost at Leyte on 1 November. “This Japanese needs merely to get up there and get into his power dive with fixed controls to solve a very simple problem, because a ship’s ability to turn during a thirty-or forty-second approach is so limited.” Purdy argued that nothing smaller than five-inch gunfire could stop such a plane. He urged the need for increased fire protection on upper decks. Blazing fuel, rather than the initial explosion, doomed his own ship. Three other destroyers were damaged in the same series of raids.
The Americans quickly perceived that the attacks represented a systematic campaign, rather than the whim of individual pilots. The enemy was also mounting conventional fighter, bomber and torpedo attacks against troops, airfields and ships by day and night. A smokescreen was laid across the San Pedro anchorage whenever an air threat was identified—in 1945 this became a navy SOP, Standard Operating Procedure. The light cruiser Honolulu survived a torpedo hit which killed sixty men as a result of heroic exertions by her crew, but mechanic Leon Garsian found himself trapped alone far belowdecks in a radio compartment. Watertight doors protected his own position, but those above were flooded. Garsian used mattress padding to check water trickling in, and at last attracted attention by shouting through a ventilation duct. Rescuers had to cut through four inches of armour with acetylene torches before he was finally rescued, after sixteen hours in what he feared would prove his tomb. More Japanese raiders approached while the crew was labouring to save Honolulu. Reckless anti-aircraft fire from neighbouring ships killed a further six of the cruiser’s men and wounded eleven. Off Leyte, promiscuous American shooting became almost as alarming a hazard as the Japanese, with thousands of nervous gunners striving to engage low-level attackers.
Admiral Kinkaid signalled Nimitz, asking for urgent carrier strikes against the kamikaze bases: “Air situation now appears critical.” He also pressed Kenney, in a stream of messages: “If adequate fighter cover not maintained323 over combatant ships their destruction is inevitable. Can you provide the necessary protection?” No, Kenney could not. The lack of usable fields on Leyte, together with steady losses to Japanese strafing, rendered the U.S. Army’s airmen incapable of deploying sufficient force to stave off attacks, as well as providing support for Krueger’s ground forces. Before commencing the Philippines operations, MacArthur assured the chiefs of staff that Kenney’s squadrons, together with the aircraft of Seventh Fleet under his own command, would easily be able to handle the air situation after the first few days ashore. Instead, in early November the general found himself obliged to ask for the return of Halsey’s carriers. Third Fleet’s aircraft rejoined the battle, and inflicted a level of attrition quite unsustainable by the Japanese. But in the first weeks of the Leyte campaign, the Americans suffered more heavily from enemy air power than at any time since 1942.
On 27 November, kamikazes struck the light cruisers St. Louis and Montpelier and the battleship Colorado. By some freak, as a Japanese plane on its death ride streaked between the foremast and forward stack of Colorado, blood from its wounded pilot showered down on sailors manning 20mm gun tubs. “I was standing in the open324 and was so scared I was paralysed,” wrote James Hutchinson. “I couldn’t come to my senses enough to move until it was all over.” Two days later, kamikazes got to the battleship Maryland and the destroyer Aulick, inflicting major damage and casualties, and hitting another destroyer. Third Fleet’s fast carrier force was attacked on 25 November. Two suicide aircraft inflicted fresh damage on Intrepid, another struck Cabot, yet another Essex. The Japanese sneaked in amidst a cloud of American aircraft returning from a mission, becoming indistinguishable on saturated radar screens.
Even when enemy planes were identified, their pilots were taught to veer constantly, so that American gunners remained uncertain which ship was targeted. “You just don’t know which one’s325 coming at you,” said Louis Erwin of the cruiser Indianapolis, a turret gunner. A destroyer of Desron 53 rammed a sister ship while taking drastic evasive action, one of several such incidents. Crews learned to curse low cloud, which shielded suicide attackers from combat air patrols. “The first thing I saw that day326 was a plane with meatballs on the wings just rolling into a dive,” wrote a destroyer crewman on 29 November. For a dismaying number of Americans serving in the ships off Leyte, such a sight was their last.
Fire, always fire, was the principal horror unleashed by a kamikaze strike on an aircraft carrier, laden with up to 200,000 gallons of aviation gas. An airman on Essex “rushed over to help get a man327 out of a 20mm gun mount. I tried to pull him out of the fire but part of his arm came off…I got sick.” Another ran onto the flight deck: “I seen these fellows with short sleeves328, the flesh hanging. I grabbed a big tube of Ungentine and tried to rub it on one guy’s arms. The skin came off in my hands.” In action, men learned to ensure that every possible inch of their flesh was covered by anti-flash hoods, rolled-down sleeves, denims. Yet still men burned. “We buried fifty-four people, mostly officers, the same day, and several each day for almost a week who died from burns,” wrote Cmdr. Ted Winters of Lexington, which was hit on 5 November. “Seven of our bomber pilots329 were up there [on the bridge island] watching us come in and five were blown off the ship. Part of the Jap pilot was hanging from the radar…it was rugged.”
For the loss of ninety aircraft, the Japanese had put three carriers out of action. Suicide missions inflicted far more damage upon the U.S. Navy in their first weeks than had been achieved by the Shogo operation of the Combined Fleet. The emperor was told of the “special attack force’s” achievements. Hirohito said squeamishly: “They certainly did a magnificent job. But was it necessary to go to such extremes?” When his words were reported to Onishi, the admiral was crestfallen. He himself was now convinced that, because of the desperate shortage of planes and pilots, only suicide tactics could make a serious impression on the Americans, and he was surely right.
The kamikaze squadrons evolved procedures as they went, or rather as they died. Initially, commanders dispatched attackers in threes, each flight escorted by two fighters, which were intended to return to report results. Later, when sufficient planes were available, pack tactics were adopted, to swamp the defences. Fliers were urged to take time, to ensure that they impaled themselves on a suitable ship: “An impatient pilot is apt to plunge into an unworthy target.” The forward elevator of an aircraft carrier was defined as the ideal aiming point. It was too dangerous for aspirant pilots to practice a steep dive onto their targets. They were invited to perform this manoeuvre just once, in the last seconds of their lives.
A squadron officer said: “There were new faces and missing faces at every briefing…The instructor and the mission remained the same, but the audience constantly changed…There were no theatrics or hysterics—it was all in the line of duty.” Ground crews polished planes almost obsessively. “It was [one technician’s] theory that the cockpit was the pilot’s coffin, and as such should be spotless,” said an officer. It was a point of honour among the suicide crews themselves that they should take off laughing. Tears were deemed appropriate for spectators watching take-offs, and the doomed pilots seemed to agree. One kamikaze wrote crossly in his diary how irked were he and his companions when they glimpsed staff officers exchanging jokes as planes started up.
The most difficult problem for the Japanese in the last months of 1944 was not to find volunteers for suicide missions, but to convey them alive to the Philippines despite American fighters and the poverty of trainees’ airmanship. Of the first 150 homeland aircrew assigned to the islands, only half arrived. Among one group of fifteen, just three reached the battlefield. Planes remained desperately short. By mid-December, Inoguchi’s unit possessed twenty-eight pilots, but only thirteen Zeroes. Crews worked day and night to make them more airworthy.
For the remainder of the war, kamikaze attacks represented by far the gravest threat faced by U.S. forces in the Pacific. In Samuel Eliot Morison’s words, “The Japanese had perfected330 a new and effective type of aerial warfare that was hard for the Western mind to comprehend, and difficult to counteract.” A British Royal Navy staff study, drafted in 1945, observed: “Logically, suicide attack331 in any of the forms, air or sea, practised by the Japanese, differed only in kind from the last-ditch defence enjoined upon the British after Dunkirk, and only in degree from such missions as the [RAF’s 1943] air attack on the Moehne Dam.” Yet Americans were bewildered, indeed repelled, by the psychology of an enemy capable of institutionalising such tactics. “I could imagine myself in the heat332 of battle where I would perhaps instinctively take some sudden action that would almost surely result in my death,” wrote a destroyer officer, Ben Bradlee. “I could not imagine waking up some morning at 5 a.m., going to some church to pray, and knowing that in a few hours I would crash my plane into a ship on purpose.”
It was never plausible that suicide attacks could alter the outcome of the war, but American casualties increased as tactics were refined. The Japanese noted that their own losses were no worse than those incurred by conventional bombing or torpedo missions. Between October 1944 and August 1945, 3,913 kamikaze pilots are known to have died, most of them navy pilots, in a campaign that peaked with 1,162 attacks in April. Around one in seven of all suicidalists hit a ship, and most inflicted major damage.
Some Japanese were deeply dismayed by the kamikaze ethic. The letters and diaries of more than a few pilots reveal their own reluctance. Yet the young men who agreed to sacrifice themselves became celebrated as national heroes. One day the wife of a high court judge, whose pilot son had fallen ill and died in training, appeared at Kijin base. She brought a lock of the boy’s hair and a scarf, and asked that these should be carried as mementoes by a kamikaze on his mission. She had inscribed the scarf with the words: “I pray [that you will achieve] a direct hit.” A group leader duly carried the relics to his own death. Mamoru Shigemitsu, one of the more rational among Japan’s political leaders, nonetheless wrote in stubborn admiration after the war: “Let no man belittle333 these suicide units and call them barbaric.”
The cultural revulsion which kamikazes inspired in Americans was intensified by sailors’ bitterness at finding themselves exposed to increased peril of mutilation or death, when the war was almost won. “If you were below decks, you could tell when the fight moved in closer by the type of gunfire,” wrote Emory Jernigan. “First the five-inch, then the 40mm, and then the 20mm would cut loose. When the 20mm fired all sixty shots and stopped for a second to reload, you could tell the fight was close and getting closer. There was nothing to do except suck your gut and, in my case, I would recite my own little motto from boyhood: ‘I don’t give a damn if I do die, do die; just so I see a little juice fly, juice fly.’”
It can be argued, in the spirit of the Royal Navy’s staff study, that only a narrow line separated the deeds of Japan’s suicide pilots from the sort of actions for which the Allies awarded posthumous Medals of Honor and Victoria Crosses. A significant number of American and British sailors, fliers and soldiers were decorated after their deaths for hurling themselves upon the enemy in a fashion indistinguishable from that of the kamikazes. But Western societies cherish a distinction between spontaneous individual adoption of a course of action which makes death probable, and institutionalisation of a tactic which makes it inevitable. Thus, the Allies regarded the kamikazes with unfeigned repugnance as well as fear. In the last months of the war, this new terror prompted among Americans an escalation of hatred, a diminution of mercy.
Rear-Admiral Robert Carney, Third Fleet’s chief of staff, shared Halsey’s disdain for wasting humanity on the enemy: “We ran afoul of Japanese334 hospital ships, some were sunk, some couldn’t be identified, some were adjacent to proper military targets and suffered as a result…It would seem to be an unnecessary refinement to worry too much over these incidents. The Japanese hospital ships have undoubtedly been used for illegal purposes and they are caring for Nips which we failed to kill in the first attempt. Every one who is restored to duty potentially costs the life of many of our people.”
Captain Tom Inglis of the cruiser Birmingham glimpsed enemy sailors in the water off Mindanao: “I was somewhat puzzled335 as to the proper treatment to accord these Japanese. I suggested that some should be taken prisoner. The admiral told me that would be done after we were sure the ships had been sunk, and I understand that a destroyer did pick up at least two of these Japanese sailors as samples of the rest. I guess I asked a very embarrassing question in my action report, as I remarked that it would be helpful if a definite policy would be enunciated concerning the treatment of Japanese merchant sailors, suggesting that it should be stated whether they should be left swimming in the water or whether they should be taken prisoner or killed. I have received no answer to that question.” A seaman wrote of his own attitude to the enemy: “We came to believe336 he was slime…not worthy of life; seeing dead Japanese in the water was like making love to a beautiful girl.” As the kamikaze offensive intensified, the concept of offering quarter to an enemy who waged war in such a fashion came to seem to the Allies not merely inappropriate, but redundant.