Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (2 page)

Now going on an hour and ten minutes after their deliverance from near-certain death, Crawforth and his shipmates are still on a high. But their jubilation will be short-lived. The man on the air search radar – who already has a screen full of friendly blips from the Taffy planes overhead coming in for landings from the morning’s missions – is reporting unidentified contacts on his screen. The plot room springs into action again as the men begin hurriedly checking IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) on the bogies. Suddenly, the busy dialogue in the room is ripped in half by the General Quarters gong, followed a beat or two later by the ship’s anti-aircraft batteries opening up.

“My God,” Crawforth mutters. “They’re coming back…”

*****

Back on the bridge of Fannie Bee, a loud chorus of “Ohh”s and “Oh my God”s rings out, followed by an explosive
whap
a few seconds later – more wallop of air than sound – that rattles the portholes on the bulkheads and the big plate glass windows in front of the Air Boss chair.

“It’s
Kitkun Bay
!” someone shouts.

Admiral Sprague instinctively snaps a look due south just in time to see a cascade of flaming aviation fuel and debris pouring off
Kitkun Bay
’s flight deck and into a large geyser of water on the port side of the stricken ship.

Before anyone has time for an emotional reaction, black smudges of exploding AA rounds are darkening the sky between
Kitkun Bay
and the Fannie Bee and lookouts are frantically shouting out Japanese Zero fighters as they see them.

Whap, whap
. Two Zeros have just slammed into
Kalinin Bay
, which is already walking wounded from this morning’s battle with Kurita. There’s no way she can survive a pounding like this.

A lookout is calling out a Zero due south, headed for
White Plains
.

Whap
.
White Plains
is sprouting an orange and soot fireball near her fantail the size of a Manhattan office building.

Admiral Sprague is frozen for a moment, watching in stunned silence as his heroic little task force appears to be in the process of being decimated before his eyes. But he quickly throws off his initial shock and begins shouting orders. In another few seconds, reports start coming in over the radio from the other jeeps. The damage is bad, but not as bad as it had looked from the bridge of the Fannie Bee.

*****

When all hell begins breaking loose at 1052,
St. Lo
has a flight deck full of glossy dark blue planes that have just landed from the morning’s missions. There are more being loaded out and gassed up for new sorties forward of the crash gate and down below on the hangar deck.
St. Lo
has been lucky this morning – incredibly lucky – and now, two minutes into the Japanese fire and brimstone show over the rest of Task Unit 77.4.3, it seems that she has also been rendered invisible. “Suiciders” are hitting every other flattop in the force but her.

But it is too soon to feel safe. Something is wrong. Past the aft end of the crowded flight deck, black AA blossoms appear around a green plane about 500 yards out coming in low, almost as if it’s lining up for a landing. There are orange flashes on its wings, pieces falling off of it as it gets too big way too fast. A bomb is seen falling from under its fuselage as the plane inverts in a slow roll. The bomb penetrates the wood planking of the
St. Lo
’s flight deck a split second before the plane itself plows into the ship, smashing men and machine alike, spraying everything in its path with flaming aviation fuel.

The impact of this crash is the loudest sound Holly Crawforth has ever heard, and for a second or two of sheer terror, he expects that it will be the last. But as he shakes off the shock, the receding echoes of the initial explosion are slowly replaced with a sound that is even worse – the screams of mangled
St. Lo
crewmen being burned to death. Smoke is billowing everywhere, some of it a sickly yellowish color, but mostly a sooty, impenetrable black.

St. Lo
is a brave ship; veteran of the Marianas Turkey Shoot and Molotai air strikes. Her sailors pray that she can pull through this, and swear that the bad guys cannot be allowed to do her in. Not like this. Perhaps there is still hope. Burning planes can be pushed off into the sea, the fires can be stopped through well-coordinated teamwork, ordnance can be secured, and that gaping hole in the flight deck can be patched over in an hour or two. In the meantime, the dead, dying and wounded can be tended to as best as possible.

But all of these hopes are put on hold when a sudden, sickening lurch from the first round of secondary explosions rocks the ship. Orange flames and smoke pour through and out from under the flight deck, which has been lifted up and knocked crooked by the force of the blast. In addition to the mangled, flaming Wildcats and Avengers on the flight deck, fires have reached more planes being gassed up underneath on the hangar deck.

A few seconds later, an even more violent explosion pulverizes the section of flight deck aft of the initial impact. Yet another blast yet seconds after this tears a chunk out of the forward section in a shower of wood planking and metal railings. Then, to the incredulity of all who witness the scene, another blast blows the entire forward elevator out of its shaft like a rocket, high into the air on a column of smoke and flames.

Now the explosions come with heartbreaking regularity as ordnance and fuel is set off by flames reaching ever deeper into the bowels of the ship, fingering and worming toward the aviation fuel tanks and the main bomb magazine. Firefighting efforts will be meaningless.
One of Henry J. Kaiser’s cost-cutting measures was to use cast iron instead of steel for the
St. Lo
’s fire mains. When the “suicider” hit, the impact shattered the pipes like so many terra cotta flowerpots. Now there is no water for fighting the spreading fires.
[4]
Despite the best efforts of her crew, her fire hoses are limp and useless. The fate of the
St. Lo
is sealed.

Seven minutes after the initial hit, Captain Francis J. McKenna gives the painful but necessary order to abandon ship. Explosions are blowing off structural, load-bearing sections of the ship by now, shaking her like a child’s bathtub toy as officers and men go over the sides, some clambering down lines with wounded shipmates over their shoulders, others jumping into the water to save themselves. At 1115, after a quick, final sweep of the ship with Lieutenant Commander Richard L. Centner and Buglemaster Stuart A. Neale to look for survivors, the Captain is the last living man over the side.

At 1120, the bomb magazine goes for the eighth and fatal explosion. Five minutes after that, what remains of
St. Lo
slips beneath the waves, still rumbling with underwater secondaries as she takes 114 Americans with her.
[5]

Back on
Fanshaw Bay
, the panic and confusion of the last half hour has subsided into a painful reality of grieving losses, cleaning up the wreckage, and trying to come to rational and emotional terms with the horror the suiciders have wrought. There are no doubts in the minds of the men still standing that they are at war with the most determined and fanatical foe the nation has ever faced – the Marines on Tarawa a year earlier could have told them that much – but what they have no way of knowing as the reeking smoke of the suicide attack still lingers in the air, and the groans of the dying and wounded still echo in their ears, is that what they have just witnessed is only a prelude to the horrors the United States Navy will have to endure over the next ten months.

*****

Holly Crawforth was one of the 775
St. Lo
crewmen rescued by Taffy 3’s remaining destroyers and destroyer escorts. Fifty-nine years after that terrible day, I ask him to recall his feelings at the time toward the men who almost killed him: “I think there was some hatred of the Japanese,” he writes, “but with time, most of us felt there was a job to do and we wanted to get it finished and go home…After we were sunk (and rescued)…I think we were so happy to be alive, we didn’t think of hating anybody.”

“The Kamikaze tactics were obviously a desperation move,” he continues. “But, we always felt that if the invasion of Japan had occurred, the Kamikazes would have done terrible damage, as demonstrated at Okinawa and Iwo Jima. Even though many of my friends and shipmates were killed by the action of Yukio Seki (commander of the kamikaze flight that attacked Taffy 3 - author), I feel that he was doing what his country asked him to do – right or wrong. I also feel that the war was a terrible waste of human lives and resources. I’m proud of my part in it and think, given the same set of circumstances, I would do it again.”
[6]

Reading the thoughts and sentiments of a man who experienced the receiving end of a kamikaze attack prompts questions about the nature of the men on the other side – the ones who flew the planes Holly Crawforth and his comrades faced. What kind of society, education, and culture could have sanctioned such tactics and produced the fighting men needed to carry them out? Was their conduct due to a uniquely Japanese context, or are there identifiable universals that can shed light on our modern day era, when the hijacked airliner is the deadliest non-nuclear guided missile ever devised? When the suicide bomber is the preferred weapon of resistance throughout much of the developing world?

My search for answers to these questions began in January 2002. I thought it only appropriate that my first step be taken at the spiritual center of the kamikaze legacy – the great Shinto shrine of Yasukuni in downtown Tokyo.

I
n winter, air masses from Siberia sit over Tokyo, pushing out the cloud cover and humidity that make the megalopolis feel like a giant armpit the rest of the year. Brisk westerly winds smelling of dry foliage and faraway soil keep a crisp snap in the breeze, pumping in frigid air faster than car exhausts and BTU-hemorrhaging buildings can heat it up, blowing the normally lethal smog away before it can stain the sunny blue skies.
Native residents, with their higher tolerance for heat and muggy air, usually complain about the cold temperatures and short daylight hours of this season, but for most anyone else born and raised in a temperate zone, this is a one of the few times of the year when the weather here can be called pleasant.

One weekday afternoon in January 2002, I am enjoying some of this rare vintage “champagne weather” as I walk the tree-lined, flagstone-paved promenade of Yasukuni, the sanctum sanctorum of extinct Japanese martial machismo. Modern Shinto tradition holds that the souls of some 2.5 million Japan
ese servicemen who died in the service of Meiji, his son Emperor Taishō and grandson Emperor Shōwa (Hirohito) lay in peaceful repose here. A variation of this traditional belief popular with old veterans is that the spirits of these fallen soldiers, sailors and airmen gather in this placid Valhalla to mingle amidst the branches of the carefully pruned cherry arbors, drinking heavenly saké poured by nubile
tennyo
angels in flowing silk robes, reunited with their old comrades in wholesome masculine companionship for eternity.

Less romantic interpretations of Yasukuni’s
raison d’etre
– especially prevalent in Asian countries victimized by Japan in the Second World War – tend to see the shrine as an unrepentant, in-your-face manifestation of poisonous nostalgia for Japanese militarism. These criticisms were only exacerbated when the souls of Class A war criminals hung by the Allies after the Tokyo Tribunals were welcomed to the shrine in a formal Shinto ceremony in 1978.
[7]
Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone then pulled the issue out of the frying pan and tossed it into the fire with an official (and possibly illegal) prayer visit in 1985, and international controversy has surrounded the institution ever since.

But I am not here this morning to pass judgment on the moral implications of Yasukuni’s existence. I am here to observe and record, and to visit the shrine’s library. I have arrived before the library opens, so I decide to pass the time with a little exploration of these hallowed premises. Perhaps the walk will help me focus my thoughts, despite the feeling I cannot quite seem to shake that something – or someone – in the cherry branches is watching my every move here.

The first thing that strikes me about the shrine is the sheer size of the land it occupies, which would be exceptional in any other world-class city, but is downright mind-boggling to behold in the center of the capital of this space-starved nation. Yasukuni sits on about ten acres of astronomically expensive real estate in Kudan, Tokyo, located on a gently rising slope that faces the northern border of the giant moat surrounding the Imperial Palace grounds (an even more astounding piece of land – worth more than the combined public and private real estate value of the entire state of California during the heady days of Japan’s Bubble Economy in the late Eighties). The shrine was originally built on the orders of Emperor Meiji to honor Imperial troops fallen in the Restoration campaign that wrested political sovereignty from the Tokugawa Shogunate, but it is currently maintained by funding from the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, generous private donations, and collections from a large tithing box in front of Yasukuni’s altar that is kept filled with coins and cash by daily throngs of worshippers and tourists.