Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (4 page)

That evening, day shift munitions plant workers file out past the night shift punching in. Office workers and school children hurry home before sunset and the nightly blackout. A reasonably well-to-do family is lucky to be having a dinner of barley rice and burdock root tonight, and truly blessed to have a slice or two of pickled radish and a few flakes of fish meat to go with it. The less fortunate scrounge – sponging from relatives or, in the saddest cases, rifling through garbage. Others, still few but increasing daily, steal what they need for themselves and their families, regardless of the heavy penalties and humiliation they face if caught. 

Weary from yet another day of life during wartime, parents tuck small children into their futon bedding, lighting mosquito coils and whispering promises to keep the nightmares away. Before turning in themselves, they check the door latch and the status of the rice jar in the kitchen, perhaps wondering where tomorrow’s meals will come from and how fast an American incendiary bomb can burn through a tight row of wooden houses. They try to get some rest before the next eighteen-hour sleepwalk through the grind of their daily routines, pretending to be brave and cheerful for their neighbors and co-workers and loved ones. But bone-tired or not, they find that sleep does not come easily when they are beginning to doubt what they hear on the radio and read in the papers. And if they suspect that their harsh lives are about to get even worse, they are right, for the three-year-long Battle of the Pacific is now over, and the ten-month-long Battle of Japan is about to begin.

*****

Manila, Occupied Philippines, the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere

October 19, 1944

The CO’s sleek black Packard limousine pulled out of the 1st Air Fleet HQ compound with an urgent hiss of driveway gravel, a vice admiral’s pennant on the front fender bright yellow in the late afternoon sun, snapping smartly despite the humid Manila air. The sentry saluting the limo through the gates could not have been blamed for thinking how ordinary the passenger in the back seat looked. A different breed altogether from the stream of Brahmin brass that regularly passed through these gates, the kind who might have been politicians or bankers or intellectual types back in Japan. No, the new CO of the 1st Air Fleet was not one of those fancy fellows, and did not look the part of an admiral at all. In fact, he did not even look like an officer. With his course facial features, buzz cut, short, stocky build, and overall scruffy appearance, he could have easily passed for a capable if somewhat boozy NCO. A craftsman type, perhaps, with a quick temper, a sharp Osaka tongue and sure hands who fixed aircraft engines or rewired radio equipment or performed some other skilled but nonetheless dirty-fingernailed job, biding his time and waiting for the war to end so he could go home to his stonemasonry or furniture reupholstering business.

It was only when you got close enough to see the fire in his eyes that you knew you were in the presence of a man who was anything but ordinary. Many saw in those eyes the stern, far-seeing gaze of a visionary genius and paragon of samurai virtue – just the type of decisive leader the nation was sorely in need of at the moment, not afraid of rattling a few cages to get results. More the eyes of a self-aggrandizing bully – a geisha-slapping pubcrawler, tantrum thrower and compulsive gambler
[10]
who could do serious damage to the nation’s war efforts if given free reign to act on his dangerously unconventional ideas. But whatever the veracity of various critiques upon his character, nobody ever accused Vice Admiral Takijirō Ōnishi of being ordinary.

Patience was not one of his virtues, either. True to character, he felt fidgety riding in the back seat of the limo, as he a
lways did when his range of physical movement was limited and he found himself in a situation in which he was forced to wait for something he wanted. In this case, he found himself stuck in the back seat of some long-skedaddled American big shot’s Packard and he wanted to get to Mabalacat Naval Air Station in the Clark Field complex northwest of Manila as soon as possible, preferably before sundown. They would be cutting it close, but by his calculations, which were almost always flawless, the fifty-mile drive could be covered in about two hours. That would be just enough time to get them there before dark.

Sitting in his office just a few minutes before, he had watched the sun getting low, felt one of his hunches and suddenly decided that he could not wait
for Captain Sakae Yamamoto to come down to Manila for their prearranged meeting. Instead, Ōnishi would make the trip to Mabalacat himself to meet with the 201
st
Air Group CO. It would be better than sitting in his office, twiddling his thumbs and waiting for his tardy subordinate. Besides, the long drive would give him some quality thinking time away from the many distractions in the HQ office. He needed this time to mull over how he was going to say what had to be said when he got to Mabalacat. And given the nature of what he was going to lay on the table, it was looking like a hard sell was going to be the way to go. He was not going up to the 201st tonight to make speeches. He was ordering men to their deaths. The speeches could come later, for the send-offs. An
d　
the eulogies.

Security considerations warranted an armed escort for the trip, but he had passed on the suggestion. There was no time to put an escort together. And even if there had been, it would only have slowed them down and made a more temptin
g target from the air, where American Hellcats, Corsairs, Avengers and Helldivers from Admiral William Halsey’s Task Force 38 and Admiral Thomas Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet escort carriers were now ranging over the entire Philippine archipelago with increasing impunity, utterly disdainful of Japanese anti-aircraft capability (what little was left), basically chewing up anything that moved. There were reports of American pilots waving to people on the ground as they pulled out of their attack runs, flying so low you could see them through the cockpit Plexiglas, chewing gum and grinning as they bombed and strafed.

A night drive would give the admiral’s entourage protection from these prowling American cowboys, but the downside was that it would also leave them vulnerable to ambush by resistance fighters, who could be lurking behind any patch of tall grass or copse of banyan trees or bend in the road after dark, watering at the mouth for the chance to bag a choice target like a Japanese flag officer. Guerrillas fro
m the American-supported resistance groups as well as the communist Hukbalahap independence movement infested the region, growing bolder by the day as the Allied forces made their presence felt.

Ōnishi preferred to take his chances with impudent American
naval aviators than with Huk guerrillas. He had not clawed and blazed his way up and out of the boondocks of Hyogo prefecture, graduated from the Imperial Naval Academy at Etajima and risen to flag rank just to be shot through the window of his limousine by some savage in chopped Goodyear tire sandals with a Spanish-American War muzzle-loader. With all due apologies to his Filipino brothers of the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere, there would be no honor in such a fate for Takijirō Ōnishi. He was a hero – a man who had helped build Japanese naval aviation from a collection of rickety canvas-skinned seaplanes into what had until recently been the most powerful carrier navy in the world
[11]
; he was a courageous bomber of Chinese cities; the tactical mastermind of the sinking of the British battleships
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
off Malaya; and the genius behind the shallow-run torpedoes used at Pearl Harbor. Such a man was destined to die as a samurai, when and where he chose, with honor.

The Americans we
re quite generous in providing chances for such honorable deaths of late. It was fast becoming a trend in the Imperial Navy. And there would be even more opportunities for noble self-sacrifice in the very near future. In fact, Ōnishi himself was hand delivering some choice ones fresh from 1st Air Fleet headquarters at this very moment.

As the limo made the turn onto the Lingayen Road, the national highway that would take them to Mabalacat, the admiral broke the heavy silence in the car with a long, worn-out sigh recognizable as “Why me?” in any language. Adjutant Yoshinori Moji and the enlisted driver stirred a bit in the front seat, then settled back into their road trance when it was evident that there would be no follow-up comment. The atmosphere in the car resumed its reflection of the CO’s determined, silent, somber mood.

The admiral stared out of a side window in the rear of the Packard, watching the wet green and yellow monsoon season landscape whip by while the men in the front seat stared straight ahead, motionless except for the driver’s occasional wheel adjustments, the only sound in the car the hypnotic throbbing of the painstakingly maintained Detroit horsepower under the hood and the hum of the tires grabbing kilometer after kilometer of highway, click-clacking over divider lines in the macadam.

Ōnishi was only two days in-country but he was already exhausted. He had hardly warmed the wicker executive chair under the lazy ceiling fans of his Manila command post and he was already on “Ōnishi time
”, out running around with the troops, pushing himself like a twenty-three-year-old ensign in a fifty-three-year-old body. In yet another variation upon a theme in the lifelong see-saw struggle for possession of his soul, the rational strategist side of his character urged that he could keep this up only for so long, while the samurai poet-warrior in him was desperate to believe otherwise, militant in a cherished faith that what was right in the great scheme of the universe was stronger than what was real. He wanted to believe that, in the Fatherland’s hour of need, his
yamato damashi
[12]
  (“fighting Japanese spirit”) would push on, mind over matter, and he would perform his duties as his nation required. There were six million other Japanese men in uniform ready to do exactly the same thing. Ready to go all the way.

But then, the vast majority of them were not fifty-three.

Physical manifestations of the whining demands of mortal flesh were becoming urgent of late. He had started passing blood in his urine, but had yet to tell any of the corpsmen in headquarters about it. More worrisome still, at least from a quality of life viewpoint, was his nervous stomach, which had afflicted him since the Battle of the Philippine Sea and the fall of Saipan four months earlier. But that miserable fact, too, was kept to himself. A warrior suffered in silence, shunning sympathy and succor from others; a commander who had to keep an anxious eye peeled for the nearest latrine or suitable clump of bushes everywhere he went did not exactly instill confidence in his men. How could he be expected to keep control of an organization of thousands of men and complicated machinery under the stress of combat if he could not even control his elimination urges?

Tied in with the gut problem, and of considerably more serious health consequences, was an absolute, utter loss of appetite that he had also taken great care to conceal from his men, especially his orderlies. Proffered meals could usually be evaded with something gruff (and painfully ironic) like “Who can think of his stomach at a time like this?”, but there were times when this would not do. Dining with fellow flag officers and Tokyo political types, he would have to rally every ounce of physical courage and willpower in his body to go through the motions of pleasurable dining – raising his chopsticks to his mouth, shoveling the food in, chewing it and, worst of all, having to swallow the stuff down, which always brought on instantaneous and hair-raising howls of protest from his digestive tract. At such times it was difficult to even comment on the food in front of him without a commensurate lurch in his guts. Sometimes he went days without partaking of any more sustenance than a few forced bowls of rice gruel washed down with weak green tea.   

How he had pushed himself this far at his age without succumbing to a more serious illness was, he liked to think, a testament to his tough Japanese constitution and warrior’s capacity for hardship. But his nagging conscience was right. This could go on only for so long. Combined with the chronic insomnia that had plagued him for the last three years, the eventuality of malnutrition and stress laying him out on a hospital cot sooner or later was a foregone conclusion. The goal would be to keep this inevitability at bay long enough to carry out his mission. For the time being, he could stay fueled and operational on adrenaline, nerves and green tea alone. Ailments and physical fears could be subsumed by will power. This was not the time for weakness. He had to be a rock. He was Vice Admiral Takijirō Ōnishi, dispatched to the Philippines to pull another miracle out of his hat. That was a direct order from Imperial General Headquarters. He was to provide air support for Operation Shō, the last ditch Japanese naval plan for the “decisive battle” that would save the Philippines and stop the Allied advance in its tracks or, in the most conservatively optimistic scenario, at least bloody the Americans badly enough to bring them to the peace table with favorable terms, Roosevelt’s “unconditional surrender” declaration at Casablanca be damned.

This would be the most crucial naval engagement for Japan since Admiral Heihachirō Tōgō stopped the Russians in the Tsushima Strait in 1905
[13]
, and like that fateful sea clash thirty-nine years earlier, failure to achieve the assigned strategic objectives would spell the doom of the Japanese Empire. Of course, Ozawa had used this line when addressing his fleet before the Battle of the Philippine Sea the previous June, repeating Tōgō’s famous command verbatim. Twenty-four hours later three of his carriers were at the bottom of the Pacific, along with irreplaceable veteran aircrews and over three hundred aircraft. But there was no need for burdening the rank-and-file or the folks back home with such depressing figures, and one had to admit that Tōgō’s words made for great motivational speeches. Four decades of Japanese schoolboys had learned them by heart, and they would no doubt be brought out, brushed off and used again to send thousands more off to their deaths before the war was finally and irretrievably lost.