Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (26 page)

The next major setback was strategic rather than technical. A few days after Kariya’s crack-up, a technical team figured out that the trainer mishap had been due to a problem of frozen lines preventing the proper distribution of water ballast during flight. Sand was exchanged for water in a new mock-up and this was successfully tested.
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The training drops resumed, and new pilots were checked out daily. The Ōka design had been vindicated – at least for now –and as preparations for the Jinrai to come online moved into the final stages, Imperial General Headquarters was eager to get it into action to see what kind of damage it could do. By the end of November 1944, the Americans were in the process of chewing up His Majesty’s armed forces in the Philippines, and every bit of available firepower was needed to remedy this situation, especially after the surface fleet debacle at Leyte. Ōnishi’s tokkō tactics – the only happy news to come out of the theater in weeks – had shown what one little Zero with a 250kg bomb could do to an American carrier. Now it was time to see what 1.2 tons of TNT moving nine hundred kilometers an hour could do to one.

First order of business was to get the initial production run of factory-fresh Ōkas from the Yokosuka Aircraft Works (attached to the Navy’s Aerial Weapons Research Lab) to suitable forward area naval installations. It was decided that the huge base at Kure, with its extensive arsenal facilities and torpedo storage capabilities, would be the ideal staging point for stockpiling Ōkas. Although the navy could not be certain where the Allies next big push on the home islands would be made, it seemed reasonable that large caches of stand-by Ōkas stored in Taiwan and on the southern tip of Kyūshū would pretty well cover the most likely sea approaches, and Kure’s location in Hiroshima Prefecture would be convenie
nt for keeping Jinrai elements in either one or both of these potential campaign theaters logistically supported. 

On November 27, the supercarrier
Shinano
– so new her hatches had to be kept open to ventilate drying paint fumes – left her berth in the Yokosuka Naval Yard for the first time and moved across the harbor to dock at Yokosuka Arsenal. There she was loaded with a consignment of fifty Ōkas, support technicians, and six Shin’yō suicide motorboats bound for Kure.
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The
Shinano
’s keel had originally been laid as a sister ship to the superbattleships
Yamato
and
Musashi
, but a prudent mid-construction conversion to compensate for the navy’s disastrous losses at Midway resulted in the world’s largest aircraft carrier being built instead over her massive frame. At nearly seventy thousand tons, she dwarfed her largest American counterparts, and held the record as the largest warship ever built until the debut of the giant American flattops of the 1950s.
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After taking on her precious cargo, the
Shinano
left Yokosuka with an escort of three destroyers to begin her maiden voyage to Kure. Unbeknownst to the officers and crew of these ships, their convoy had been spotted almost as soon as it had gotten underway. Its spotter – and now stalker – was the USS
Archerfish
, a submarine originally posted outside the entrance to Tokyo Bay on lifeguard duty for downed air crews from the war’s first B-29 raid on the capital three days earlier. Having completed this assignment uneventfully, and with no rescued airmen to bring back to safety, the
Archerfish
was free to lurk and pick up targets of opportunity. But no one on the boat had expected something as juicy as a Japanese supercarrier.

The
Archerfish
trailed the southwesterly zigzagging
Shinano
with great caution for several hundred kilometers before putting four fish into her off the coast of Wakayama Prefecture on November 29. The great gray maiden slipped under the waves eight hours later, taking most of her crew and passengers and all of her top-secret cargo to a watery tomb. Survivors were picked up by the
Shinano
’s escort destroyers and quarantined for security reasons on Mitsuko Island in Kure Bay, Hiroshima Prefecture until January 1945.
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Operating from the stance of “what the pilots don’t know can’t hurt them,” K
ōnoike command made sure news of this latest catastrophe was kept strictly need-to-know, and it never left the HQ shack. But the loss of the Ōkas – while painful and demoralizing – was not irreplaceable. The Yokosuka works would have another large batch of the structurally simple aluminum and wood craft ready within a couple of weeks.

With shock waves from the
Shinano
loss still reverberating in the cloistered top floor offices of the Navy Ministry, a veritable stream of brass made morale visits to Kōnoike during the first few days of December, indicating the vital importance of the Jinrai in upcoming campaigns and the high expectations IGHQ had for the unit. The black limousine parade began on December 1, when Combined Fleet C-in-C Admiral Soemu Toyoda (INA ’05) arrived for an overnight stay with crates of ceremonial headbands and
tanto
shortswords for the Jinrai pilots. He was also bringing perhaps the best possible morale booster: a sense of purpose. This came in the form of an attaché case full of orders and maps for Captain Okamura outlining the Jinrai’s first scheduled operational deployment.

Before attending to ceremonial duties, Toyoda and Okamura went to the latter’s office in base HQ, drew the blinds, and went over the details of the Jinrai debut m
ission. IGHQ wanted sufficient numbers of pilots, support personnel and Ōkas on standby in Takao, Taiwan and the Clark Airbase complex in Luzon in time for the Jinrai to hit American capital ships in Leyte Gulf on December 23. Okamura assured the admiral that his men and equipment would be up to the task.

That afternoon, the four Ōka pilot sections – a group of about 200 men in total
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– were assembled in a hangar and addressed by a visibly emotional Admiral Toyoda. Tears brimmed in the admiral’s eyes as he spoke, then ran down his cheeks for all to see as the pilots were called up one-by-one to receive their headbands and shortswords. Suzuki was one of the first to be called front and center. The admiral shook his hand and thanked him. Next, an aide handed the admiral a white cotton headband stenciled with a red Hinomaru circle in the center and flanked by the kanji characters
jin
(“god”) and
rai
(“thunder”) penned in black. In an oddly intimate posture – almost an embrace – Toyoda tied the headband on Suzuki’s bare head. The men then stepped back from each other, exchanged deep bows, and the admiral handed over a ceremonial shortsword in a handsome orange and gold brocade pouch.

Deeply moved as everyone else had been by the weight and dignity of the ceremony, Suzuki went back to the barracks uplifted, full of purpose and eager to examine the treasure he had received from the admiral. The shortsword was an elegantly minimalist piece of Japanese craftsmanship. Both scabbard and haft appeared to be carved from the same block of blond, unfinished wood, wound at both ends with swordguards of coiled rattan strip. The haft of the weapon was inscribed with the kanji characters
go
and
koku
(“defend” and “country,” respectively) and the scabbard bore Toyoda’s signature, all in the admiral’s accomplished “grass hand”
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brush calligraphy. Judging from the elegant outward appearance of the item, Suzuki expected to find the fine handiwork of a traditional swordsmith inside the scabbard. But when he drew the blade, he found that it was just shiny stainless steel, like a parade bayonet, all flash and useless for anything but a fancy letter opener.

“It was obviously mass-produced,” Suzuki-san recalls. “Many years later I found out that the swords we got were from the same batch
given by Admiral Miwa to the Kaiten human torpedo pilots at Ōtsushima a few weeks earlier.”

Visits to Kōnoike by Admiral Koshirō Oikawa, Chief of Naval General Staff and Navy Minister Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai followed in rapid succession. There were the pr
erequisite speeches, proclamations and citation presentations, and the dignitaries got to see some training drops (successful this go around). Morale was up, especially with rumors of upcoming action making the rounds in the pilots’ barracks.

By mid-Decemb
er, one new batch of thirty Ōkas had been successfully run from Yokosuka to Kure, while another fifty-eight had made it to Sasebo in Nagasaki Prefecture. The next step necessary for the December 23
combat debut to be kept on schedule was to move the Ōkas to forward deployment areas, and the carriers
Unryū
and
Ryūho
were slated for this ferrying mission. The
Unryū
headed for Manila Bay on December 16 with the Kure Ōkas. The
Ryūho
, which had originally been scheduled to ferry the Sasebo Ōkas to Takao, Taiwan, was instead ordered to head directly to the Philippines in light of the rapidly souring situation in the Leyte region.

On December 19, the
Unryū
was sunk with her cargo of thirty Ōkas about one-third of the way through her journey to Luzon by torpedoes from the USS
Redfish.
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This prompted emergency orders from the Navy Ministry for the
Ryūho
to change her destination back to Taiwan to unload her Ōkas at Takao, where they languished unused for the remainder of the war.

The actions of American submarines had by now resulted in the first 138 Ōkas off the assembly lines being removed from the war effort – either collecting dust in Taiwan or barnacles at the bottom of the Pacific. The Japanese Navy could not afford any more losses like this, so the decision was made that from here on in, Ōka surface transport operations would be confined to overland rail and truck hauling and quick cargo ship dashes through the relative safety of Japanese home waters. The Jinrai’s combat operational range would be limited by how far their Isshiki Rikkō mother planes could fly from home island bases, so this meant that the plan for seeing what the Ōkas could do in the Philippines would die as an unrealized pipe dream. But from a strategic viewpoint, this new deployment picture wa
s not necessarily an entirely undesirable development. When the American invasion fleets eventually showed up off the Japanese coast – and no one in His Majesty’s Navy higher than an ensign now doubted that they would – it would be best to have the as-of-yet untried superweapons close at hand.

*****

Word about the carrier sinkings, Ōka shipment losses and the cancelled combat debut gradually filtered down through the ranks during the last dark weeks of December, and by the end of a markedly subdued New Year’s ‘44/’45, morale at Kōnoike was bottoming out. Spirits picked up some, however, in the flurry of activity on the base that followed orders for Captain Okamura and Commander Nonaka to take the first detachment of Ōka pilots and Isshiki Rikkō mother planes to Kanoya N.A.S. in Kyūshū. Kanoya was the location of the 5th Air Fleet HQ of Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki, and Nonaka’s 711
th
KKT would be operating there as an elite independent command answerable only to Captain Okamura and the admiral himself.

There was a big flagwaving sendoff for the Kyūshū-bound detachment on January 20, 1945. After speeches, songs, handshakes and backslaps for the departing heroes, the big, lumbering Isshiki Rikkōs and their Zero escorts climbed up and away into the cold, clean Ibaragi air and the hearts of every man left behind on the tarmac went with them. As the droning of the engines faded away into the cold, brackish Pacific breeze, gloom once again descended on Kōnoike.

The Jinrai orphans stranded at Kōnoike slowly settled back into a comforting – if dull – routine. Hideo Suzuki tried to stay busy organizing R+R trips for the officers and spent a lot of time shooting the bull with his best buddy, Saburō Dohi. Tokuji Naitō was still learning his way around the unit after a month on base and, like the batch of fresh-faced teenaged petty officers who had also just arrived on the scene, getting used to the feel of a Zero control stick in his hands. During downtime – which was plentiful – pilots could drink and smoke if they wanted to and stuff their faces with chocolates, caramels and canned goods when not chowing down on three squares a day from the excellent Jinrai kitchen. All creature comforts, including sleep, were well taken care of. Things were so cushy, in fact, that a pilot might almost forget there was a war on.

But the war had not entirely forgotte
n Kōnoike.

The one hundred or so Jinrai personnel still left on the base had become accustomed to B-29 activity overhead in the two months since raids out of Saipan by the big bombers began hitting targets on military and industrial targets in the Tokyo area. The American bomber formations often passed over southern Ibaragi and the vicinity of Kōnoike in their egress from Tokyo area bomb runs. But until the afternoon of January 27, the planes were no more than faint engine noise and orange contrails in set
ting sunlight, and the men who flew them were faceless.

At about two in the afternoon on January 27, B-29 V-Square-27 “Rover Boys Express” of the 499
th
Bomb Group, 73
rd
Bomb Wing out of Saipan had just passed over Mt. Fuji at an altitude of thirty thousand feet and was headed for the day’s target, the Nakajima aircraft engine factory in Musashino, Tokyo.
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The bombardier had assumed his customary squat at the Norden bombsight and was just beginning to nudge his fly-by-wire toggle to line up for the bomb run when his Plexiglas office in the B-29’s distinctive “greenhouse” nose disintegrated in a hail of 37mm cannon-fire from an IJA twin-engined
Ki
-45 high altitude fighter.
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Three other crewmen were killed in subsequent
Ki
-45 passes. With cabin pressure thus catastrophically compromised, the surviving crewmen were exposed to 250mph airspeed fed winds at minus fifty degrees Fahrenheit. The remaining seven crewmen managed to keep “Rover Boys” aloft long enough to fly clear across the Tokyo metropolitan area and out into the Ibaragi countryside before the plane began to break up.