Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (40 page)

After lining up and singing “Umi Yukaba” en masse, the girls were told to run back home, change out of their beat-up work shirts and into their normal school uniform sailor middy blouses, and then come back on the double. When everyone had formed up again, the teachers and liaison officer marched the squad of eighteen students down a path through the woods behind the school. None of the girls had ever taken the route before, so they had no idea where they were being led, outside of a vague directional awareness that they were walking toward the southwestern corner of the airbase. But that was impossible. Everyone knew the base was strictly off limits – even as army volunteer workers, the girls had never set foot inside its gates. Yet as they continued their walk through the woods, they were led past an AIRBASE PERSONNEL ONLY sign without breaking stride. Just as the girls were beginning to look at each other quizzically, the drone of a large number of engines, faint at first, could be heard overhead. The sound got louder, quickly.

“Take COVERRRR!!!”, Mr. Yamaguchi shouted.

Already seasoned air raid veterans by now, the girls knew what to do without further explanation, and they instinctively darted off into the trees and bamboo on either side of the path. As Reiko a
nd Shōko huddled together in a thicket, they both penciled “SAYONARA” on a bamboo trunk. They had no idea where they were being taken, or if they were going to get bombs dropped on them at any moment. Maybe they were being taken off to be shot for stumbling onto some big army secret. For all they knew, this really was “sayonara.”

The engine drone from above became loud enough for the girls to feel in their chests. Looking up, they watched as a silver-glinting, contrail-streaming flight of twenty or thirty B-29s passed over.
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As they watched the malevolent beauty of the bomber formation, they heard another loud engine sound, much closer and moving toward them on the ground. Just then, a big army truck rumbled down the forest path. Riding in back was a group of pilots in Hinomaru headbands who smiled and waved as they passed, jostled as the flatbed bumped along toward the airfield. The girls had no way of knowing it at the time, but the pilots they had just seen were on their way to the flight line to take part in the first tokkō sortie from Chiran.

“I remember the look Reiko and I exchanged at that moment,” Shōko-san says. “Living in Chiran, we had seen plenty of pilots before, but never pilots with headbands like that. We had only seen pictures of them in the newspaper, in articles about tokkō.”

When the high altitude B-29 formation was gone, the girls and their escorts continued walking deeper into OFF LIMITS territory, following the path in the direction the truck had come from. After a few minutes, they arrived at the bottom of a long, curving rise of packed-dirt-and-log steps. Climbing these, they reached a tranquil forest clearing domed with tall-trunk pine boughs softly rustling in the breeze. Mr. Yamaguchi halted the group in front of what looked like a small hamlet of half-buried log cabins, each with a few steps leading down to entrances below ground level. These structures were what the army called
sangakuheisha
(literally “triangle barracks”), so named because the sleeping quarters were sunken for defilade against flying bomb shrapnel and the only portion poking up over ground level were the sloped roofs.

A sergeant standing in front of the entrance to one of the sangakuheisha explained that taking care of this barracks area and whoever happened to be staying in it would be the girls’ responsibility until further notice. Their main duties would consist of doing laundry in the nearby river, cleaning and sweeping, bed making, meal and tea serving, and making sure that the foliage used for camouflaging the sangakuheisha was kept fresh and green. If the need for other duties arose, these would be explained as necessary. Finally, it was stressed that under no circumstances were the girls to tell anybody else – not even their own mothers or other family members – about the nature of their duties on the base.

In a little while, another truck came along the forest road from the direction of the airfield, but this was full of mattresses and blankets, rather than pilots. A scrappy supply corporal put the girls to work immediately, trundling the bedding from the road up to the pine clearing, then down into the damp, dark, unpainted interior of the sangakuheisha. The mattresses and blankets were laid out on tatami sleeping shelves lining both sides of the slat-floored corridors running the length of the barracks. There would be very little storage space for personal effects and no privacy at all for the pilots who had to sleep down here. There would not be much fresh air, either, as the only ventilation came from the sunken entranceways at either end of the hut. Steel helmets and canteens – presumably one set per sleeper – lined the walls, hanging on wooden pegs. The overall effect was like a slave ship with clean sleeping linen.

Although Reiko and Shōko had already surmised from their morning truck-sighting that the “guests” who would be staying in these dank barracks were tokkō pilots, the girls could not confirm this until that afternoon, when a formation of Hayabusa fighters landed at the base and the men who had flown th
em in arrived at the sangakuheisha compound. But as these “men” jumped from the back of the truck, still in their flight suits and carrying small canvas kitbags, the girls were surprised – shocked, even – to see that the pilots were in fact boys of seventeen or eighteen and not the hardened professionals they had always assumed were flying the nation’s warplanes into battle. The boys did not really seem heroic or dashing at all. Rather, they had a kind of innocent purity about them, free of worldly contamination. They were almost glowing – as if they were already halfway to heaven and happily resigned to their fate, answering the girls’ whispered queries about their mission with beaming smiles.

This particular group of pilots was only the first of many that the girls would serve at the sangakuheisha compound. The normal rotation of groups through Chiran could be anywhere from one or two nights to up to a week if attack sorties and/or incoming flights were delayed by bad weather or other unforeseen problems.
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Although both the pilots and the Nadeshiko Unit members were under strict orders forbidding fraternization, it was only natural that with adolescent boys and girls thrown together in a stressful environment redolent with pathos, danger and constant reminders of mortality, some measure of emotional bonding was going to occur. These bonds grew stronger the longer a particular group stayed at Chiran, reinforced by long and languid interludes of downtime when the girls finished their chores early and were free to socialize with their “guests” for the rest of the day until the truck came along to take them home in the evening.

Statistically, the pilots broke down into two basic demographic groups – commissioned ex-college students in their early to mid-twenties from urban backgrounds, and mostly rural, working class enlisted men in the eighteen-to-twenty range. Many members of the former group were accomplished intellectuals and budding literary talents straight out of liberal arts programs in the best universitie
s of the land. They often had their own reading material, preferring to keep their faces buried in their books the entire time they were in the barracks. Shōko had a temperamental affinity for these types, and liked to read her own favorite books – usually poetry – aloud for them. Some of these brainy young men were also trained teaching professionals fond of gathering the girls under the pine arbors to give lectures – not without some measure of show-off involved in their performances – on subjects like medieval Japanese literature or European modern art that left their captive audiences scratching their heads but deeply impressed nonetheless. However, the majority of the girls tended to bond with the enlisted men, who were closer to their own age and social background. The teeneaged pilots liked to sing and play games and were more interested in spending their last hours and thoughts with a soft, winsome face and a sympathetic feminine ear than in holding forth in weighty conversations about the meaning of it all.

Although the girls were aware of the importance of the pilots’ missions, and felt an enormous responsibility to help these young men and boys be as happy and comfortable as possible in the last days and hours of their lives, it was impossible to be completely objective about their work in a situation this emotionally loaded. As time went on, and the girls became quicker at making friends, feelings of sympathy and duty became complicated with the wrenching pain of knowing that they would have to say farewell to each new group of friends who briefly flitted in and then back out of their lives forever.

And in the meantime, out of earshot of anyone who was not a Nadeshiko Unit member, the girls would pray for rain. But no matter how heartfelt and earnest their pleas for inclement weather, the inevitable hour of sad parting would arrive when the attack orders came down and it would be time for the current group of tokkō
boys to leave. On the morning of a sortie, the girls, many holding bunches of wildflowers to press into the hands of their favorite pilots, would go down to the airfield flight line. There, they were often accompanied by pilots’ family members who had traveled to Chiran and received special permission from the base commander to see off their sons, brothers and – on rare occasions – husbands. Although all onlookers and well-wishers – including family members – were under strict orders not to shed tears under any circumstances, these orders proved impossible to enforce, and the sobbing and crying out of the names of loved ones would always rise to a crescendo as the engines of Hayabusa fighters or
Ki-
51 assault planes gunned up for take-off.

While pilots’ family members who made it to Chiran had to endure the agony of a send-off only once, the Nadeshiko Unit girls had to go through a barely less devastating version of it over and over again, day in and day out, without rest or reprieve. And no matter how often they participated in these farewell rituals, they never became inured to the pain. Things could have been a little easier to bear, perhaps, if there had been any time to grieve together as a group, but this was impossible, because they would have to go back to the sangakuheisha immediately after each send-off to get the barracks ready for the next group coming in. The floors would be swept, new bedding laid out, tears wiped dry and best smiles put on before the next trucks bumped down from the airfield and another ten or twenty beatific boys in flight suits would amble up the dirt trail to the barracks compound with innocent smiles of their own.

For most of the girls, the real grieving didn’t come until years later. And every one of them still has dreams and the occasional crying jag about it to this day.

“If fourteen or fifteen-year-old girls in this day and age experienced the kind of long-term grief and stress we went through that spring they would be getting psychological counseling right now,”
Shōko says. “But we didn’t get anything like that. People didn’t think like that back then. That doesn’t mean the scars aren’t there, though.”

*****

During the last days of March and the first days of April, the Imperial Army and Navy joint tokkō command finalized preparations for Operation Ten-Gō. While the Nadeshiko girls were sending their young heroes off in flights of ten or twelve at a time with flowers and song, hundreds of new tokkō pilots and aircraft from around the country streamed into Chiran and every other army air base and naval air station in southern Kyūshū to go on immediate standby for “Kikusui 1” – the first attack wave of Operation Ten-Gō.

Meanwhile, 500 kilometers to the south, on and under the decks of Admiral Spruance’s Fifth Fleet
warships, a different group of young heroes went about the business of their war with the same resolution as their Japanese counterparts, albeit without the benefit of bouquet-bearing teenaged cheerleaders. Spruance’s men had long since become experts at the job invasion support, and for the first five days of the Okinawa operation, it was looking like things here were not going to be any better or worse than anything else they had faced to date. Of course, there had been a steady stream of a dozen-odd suicider attacks a day ever since they had arrived off Okinawa, but these were spread pretty thin over an armada the size of the Fifth Fleet. And the fact that no ships had been lost so far during the course of the operation was reassuring proof not only that the Fifth’s luck seemed to be holding out, but more importantly, that its sailors and airmen had become highly proficient at protecting themselves as well as they looked out for the men on the beach.

Over the last six months, the Japanese suicide tactics had become a regular feature of life on an American warship in the Central Pacific, and while the latest attacks were not to be underestimated in their potential for destruction and mayhem, they were nothing to make the sailors feel any less sorry for the guys they all knew were getting the crummiest deal in this operation – the poor Army and Marine dogfaces having to slog, slash and shoot their way through the honeycombed Jap defenses ashore. Never forgetting to feel thankful for their own relative comfort (if not safety), the aviators and sailors of Fifth Fleet kept their well-oiled machinery of war and destruction humming in support of the people who had to earn their combat pay humping a rucksack and an M-1 through the jungle. And if the boys ashore did their jobs as well as the Fifth Fleet was doing its own, it was looking as if this could all be wrapped up in another couple of weeks.

No doubt many American sailors in the vicinity of Okinawa were entertaining such reassuring thoughts and hopes as April 6 dawned. Perhaps some of the crew of the radar picket destroyer
Colhoun
did, too, even after an unusually busy pre-dawn morning of near-miss conventional bombing attacks by Japanese raiders. Things had quickly returned to normal after the raids, and the
Colhoun
spent the rest of the forenoon watch performing her usual duties, steaming in a ten kilometer-wide circle on Radar Picket Station 2 about 75 kilometers NNE of Okinawa to provide CAP vectoring and early warning info for the rest of the fleet.