Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (21 page)

The convoy eventually came to a halt at a sentry gate, where a large wooden sign read:
Kaigun Jinrai Butai
(“Navy Divine Thunder Unit”), 721
st
Kōkūtai (KKT). A smaller, more clerically lettered metal sign over the gate read “Kōnoike Naval Air Station.” Tokurō and his fellow truck passengers exchanged looks. Kōnoike? No one had have heard of it. And what in the world did “Divine Thunder” mean? Was it some sort of Shinto reference? Did the name have something to do with the prayer visit to Meiji Shrine the day before? No one knew a thing, and answers would have to wait until the Jinrai NCO who ordered them off the trucks stopped yelling at them for showing up still wearing their old seven-buttoned navy blue cadet uniforms. They were not at Yokaren or flight school anymore.

After calisthenics and chow the next morning, the newest petty officer pilots of the Jinrai Unit began inprocessing. They were issued with new fatigues and flight suits, then assembled in a large wooden hangar, where a lieutenant gave the group a long, detailed and brutally frank assessment of the current status of the Japanese war effort. The briefing ended with the officer expressing the notion that no one currently in uniform – and certainly not qualified naval aviators – should expect to survive the war. Maximum effort and supreme sacrifice might just be poster slogans for civilians, they were reminded, but they were words that navy men lived and died by, and it was time for all of them to show their families, their country, and above all, their Emperor, that they were worthy of this honor and men of their word.

The collective mood of the chattering, chipper group of fifteen and sixteen-year-olds who had filed into the hangar just a few moments before expecting to get Zero assignments now bordered on the morose. For most of the boys, this was the first time they had heard anything but pumped-up enthusiasm about the war coming from an authority figure, and they were visibly shaken by the talk. In addition to being told that their country was losing the war, they had also just been given what amounted to death sentences.

Tokurō and his old Yokaren squadmates still with the group had
been clued in for almost a year now on the general gist of this talk, thanks to the Midway and Solomons revelations they had heard at Matsuyama back in early ’44, but the newest awful details were still sobering nonetheless: the bloodletting in the Marianas; the loss of the last carrier task force in the IJN at Cape Engano during the Leyte Campaign; the impending fall of the rest of the Philippines; the inability to put up effective resistance against the B-29s… Everything the lieutenant told them spelled doom and defeat for Japan.

In spite of the gloomy mood he had just created, the young officer’s expression seemed strangely expectant. It was obvious that he was waiting for the right timing to lay on a punch line he knew was going to knock everyone back on their
heels. Tokurō braced himself for the worst.

“I realize that what I have just told you may tempt you to lose hope in our war effort,” the lieutenant said, clasping a lecturer’s pointer in both hands behind his back. “Don’t let that happen. What I am about
to tell you should help make sure that it doesn’t.”

The lieutenant paused for effect, looking at the serious faces in the group while several noncoms started handing out small blank sheets of paper and pencils.

“The navy’s weapons technicians have perfected the design of a top secret super-weapon that may very well turn around the course of the war,” the lieutenant said, pausing briefly as a murmur buzzed through the assembly. “The navy needs volunteers to pilot this weapon. And that’s why you are here. But I must tell you that nobody who sorties in the weapon will come back alive. Am I making myself understood? No one comes home alive. Before we go any further with this briefing, write your names on the pieces of paper you have just been given. If you agree to volunteer for the program, draw a circle under your name. If you would like to be excused and reassigned to other duties, leave this space blank.”

The boys began scratching away on the memo papers, using each others’ backs as writing surfaces. As they
were all standing while they did this, it was easy to see what everyone else was writing. Tokurō saw the boys to his left and right draw large double circles – one inside the other
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– so he did the same, mimicking the devil-may-care flourish they made as they signed their lives away. The brisk, almost nonchalant way Tokurō signed his own paper, however, was not a matter of post-pubescent bravado or stiff upper lip resignation to his fate. Rather, if was more an expression of mild annoyance at being made to play along with what he felt to be a redundant – even insulting – gesture. The boys of Flight School Cycle 38 were still only in their mid-teens, but they were also Yokaren graduates, non-commissioned officers of the Regular Navy and qualified naval aviators. What was going to be asked for next, a letter of permission from their mothers? Enough formality nonsense, speeches, and shrine visits, Tokurō thought. Just point the planes in the direction of the enemy and give the orders. Get on with it already.

The Jinrai NCOs collected the papers, and huddled in front of the group as they tallied the responses. Several boys had th
eir names called, were pulled off to the side and whisked away with palpable scorn by a disgusted looking petty officer, never to be seen again. A moment later, the remaining boys were called to attention, and an important looking older officer introduced as a naval aide to the Imperial Court read out a proclamation penned in His Majesty’s own hand, exhorting the new pilots to do their utmost for the nation.
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With some of the boys still sniffling with pride and emotion in the wake of the impromptu proclamation ceremony, the group was marched out to the flight line, where they were halted in front of a large canvas tent open on one side. Inside, visible through the opened tent flap, was something that looked like a torpedo about six meters long with stubby wings, twin tail rudders and a large wooden skid affixed to the underside. The wings and tail surfaces appeared to be made of fabric-covered plywood, with aileron and rudder control surfaces like those on their old Akatonbo trainers – cellulose-doped canvas
stretched over a wooden framework. A cluster of three rocket nozzles was housed in the tail of the aluminum fuselage. Tokurō was probably not the only boy whose Adam’s apple twanged once, hard, when he noticed that the “torpedo” also had a cockpit.

“This
is the secret weapon that is going to save Japan,” the lieutenant said, now using the lecturer’s pointer. “The Project
Marudai
special attack craft. It’s what you will be riding into battle as Jinrai pilots.”

There were whispers and murmurs among the group:

The lieutenant waited for the murmuring to quiet down before continuing, explaining that Project
Marudai
had been so named in honor of the initiator of this project, Lieutenant Masakazu Ōta, a former transport pilot.
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Approximately nine months earlier, after Lieutenant Ōta rotated back to Japan from duties in the Southwest Pacific, he approached the Aeronautics Research Laboratory at Tokyo University with a proposal for a dedicated tokkō weapon. Rough plans were drawn up, then sent to the navy’s top technicians at the Aerial Weapons Research Lab in Yokosuka, where the engineering was hammered out, blueprints drawn and prototypes built for testing. Since then, numerous test and training flights have been made, and the lieutenant could say from experience that the flying characteristics of the Marudai were excellent.”

This remark garnered more murmurs and raised eyebrows.

Obviously, the craft he flew – and that the new Jinrai pilots would soon fly – did not contain actual explosives. Sand was used for ballast where the explosives would normally be loaded in the warhead, which contained one-point-two tons of TNT in a combat configuration. It would be more than enough to take out an aircraft carrier or battleship in a single blow.”

The weapon would be delivered to the area of operations slung under the belly of an Isshiki R
ikkō mother plane. Released from an altitude of 6,000 meters, the Marudai had an operational gliding range of thirty-five kilometers at full combat weight. If there was a sudden need for a boost in speed – for example, if pursued by enemy fighters over the target area – or if an extra two or three kilometers of range was needed when unpowered gliding range appeared insufficient to reach the target, these needs could be provided for by the pilot pressing ignition switches on the instrument panel in the cockpit either in sequence or in tandem to engage the three solid fuel
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rocket boosters located in the tail of the craft. Speeds up to four hundred sixty kilometers per hour were attainable by gliding alone, but if the rocket bottles were ignited sequentially, giving a total burn time of up to thirty seconds, that top speed could be boosted up to seven-fifty in level flight or even higher in a steep dive. Far faster than anything the Americans had in the air. Once within two or three kilometers of the target with rockets engaged, no fighter could catch the craft, and nothing but a lucky AA hit would be able to stop it. And seeing how the frontal silhouette of the craft was only about the size of a beach ball, that would have to be a shot from a very lucky and very skillful AA gunner, indeed.

The lieutenant pointed at the venturi nozzles in the tail of the craft, explaining that these canisters were rocket-assisted take-off boosters originally designed for the new, larger attack planes like the Ryūsei to be able to
operate from short carrier decks. Since His Majesty’s Navy is not, at the present time, conducting carrier-based flight operations, there are large stocks of these RATO bottles available for immediate use with Project
Marudai
.”

The briefing ended with the new pilots being toldthat their flights in Marudai trainer craft like this would begin after
sufficient orientation in tokkō tactics and practice flights in conventional aircraft. Said training was to begin immediately.

*****

Flight attack training began as soon as inprocessing was completed. Ironically, Tokurō’s dreams of becoming a fighter jock had finally come true, in a sense. The Jinrai’s simulated tokkō dives were run in banged up old Zero Model 21s, survivors from the early war years that had long since been relegated to home island training units. But despite the war-weary Zeros, it was obvious that the unit’s mission was getting high priority, as it was being provided with enough gas to keep aircraft in the air almost constantly, and this at a time when other training units around the country were having to scale operations way back. From mid-January until well into late spring of 1945, Tokurō and his fellow pilots were in the air almost daily, logging more flight time than they could have ever dreamed of getting in a conventional outfit.

Tokurō made his first few attack simulation flights in a special two-seater Zero “Type K” trainer wit
h an experienced pilot on the other stick in the back seat. After a few of these chaperoned runs, he began flying the practice dives solo. Standard procedure was to take a Zero up to about 3,000 meters, then cut throttle, nose over into a dive and buzz a designated “target” area of the airfield, where a junior officer would be sitting in a lawn chair with a notepad and binoculars, grading the runs. Angle of dive was generally between thirty and forty-five degrees, but with gravity and a three-bladed variable pitch propeller pulling twenty-seven hundred kilograms of airplane toward trees, buildings and an ensign in a lawn chair getting very large very quickly in the windscreen, forty-five degrees felt more like ninety. At the last possible second – preferably knocking the officer off his chair in the process – the pilot would pull back on the stick, slam the throttle forward and power zoom up and out of the dive to corkscrew around the field for altitude and another go. After landing, the pilots would assemble for a debriefing, where their diving approach techniques would be critiqued by senior pilots and officers in the training cadre.

While the Zero runs were breathtakingly dangerous, the single Marudai training drop each Jinrai pilot had to complete for full certification was the ultimate white-knuckler. Even with carrier-qualified, experienced pilots at the stick, the accident rate in the trainers was less than confidence-inspiring, with about one in ten drops ending in broken bones at best, or a dead qualified naval aviator at the worst.
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After all of the officers and senior NCO pilots had been cycled through the training, the 105 junior Yokaren graduate pilots on the began checking out on the craft. The training mission roster then followed date of arrival by group, and Akinori Asano, Tokurō’s Matsuyama and Ōmura classmate, was one of the first of the Cycle 38 pilots to ride the Marudai, although even he had quite a bit of a wait before the pilots scheduled for the first combat drops were all checked out.

On the day of his training drop, Akinori was given one final briefing on the flight line before boarding the specially modified Isshiki Rikkō bomber “mother plane” that would take the Marudai trainer up. The pointers were basic but vital:

Remember, you’re in a glider, not an airplane. The RATO bottles in the tail are empty, so you have no way of getting a power boost if you need it. Watch your airspeed, and don’t stall out. Don’t pull back on the stick. You’ll be coming at extreme speed, even with flaps down, so make sure you touch down soon enough that you don’t run out of runway.

Inside the mother plane, Akinori sat on his parachute pack facing forward, with the open canopy of the Marudai cockpit poking up through a bathtub-sized hole in the floor at his feet. This aperture was by no means airtight, and the sound added by the wind screaming through the opening as the bomber throttled up and went airborne only exacerbated the sixteen-year-old’s anxiety at sitting on the edge of what was basically a trap door to precipitous oblivion.