Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (5 page)

Uplifting speeches aside, Ōnishi’s mission was clear: turn the flight decks of the American escort carriers in Leyte Gulf into matchsticks, by any means available, clearing the way for Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita’s and Vice Admiral Shōji Nishimura’s battleship squadrons to sweep in and wreak havoc on the Allied fleet unharried by American airpower. Turn back the invasion and send MacArthur and Halsey skulking back to th
eir lairs in New Guinea and Ulithi with their tails between their legs. With five hundred planes and veteran aviators to fly them, yes, maybe it could be pulled off. But even Ōnishi, inveterate optimist though he was, had to face the fact that he did not have five hundred planes to put in the air. He had only thirty Zero and Shidenkai fighters and a smattering of operational bombers, transports and recon planes with which to stop the greatest carrier armada the world had ever seen. And though he was a Japanese warrior – a spitirual (if not biological) descendant of samurai with supernatural, superhuman fighting spirit – he was not omnipotent. He could not bring back to life all of the veteran pilots lost in the Marianas and during the disastrous air battles off Taiwan in early October; even if he had the luxury of a thousand of the world’s best fighter planes at his disposal, there was nobody left to fly them. The Americans had shot all but a handful of the Emperor’s finest Sea Falcons out of the sky in flames, never to return.

In the meantime, flying corps entrance requirements back in Japan had been drastically relaxed and flight school curricula had been slashed in desperate attempts to meet the Navy’s aerial combat needs. Although the Army had been doing this for years – and never had anything near the Navy’s demanding standards for its air cadets even in the best of times – the fact that Naval Aviation now had to stoop to this level invited only the grimmest sense of foreboding.

Salient in Ōnishi’s long list of concerns, however, was something that would literally change history – something that, at present, he and a handful of officers at 1st Air Fleet HQ were the only people in the entire Philippine archipelago privileged to know. Tokyo had given him carte blanche to employ any tactical expedient he deemed necessary to ensure the success of his mission, and he was personally convinced that nothing less than supreme sacrifice from all concerned could turn the tide of the war they had been losing for the last two years. During change-of-command orientation sessions in Manila two days earlier, his predecessor Vice Admiral Kimpei Teraoka had agreed.
Tokubetsukōgeki
(“Special Attack”) or
tokkō
, in the abbreviation rapidly gaining widespread usage, was going to be the way to go. Interservice dialogue with Lieutenant General Kyōji Tominaga and the Army people confirmed that the Fourth Air Army covering the Philippines was leaning in this direction, too, although they were typically stingy with operational details
[14]
.

Army or Navy, no one with gold on their shoulders back in Japan seemed to have any better ideas, either, and the
taiatari
seishin
(“body crashing spirit”) central to tokkō was already attaining servicewide recognition at the field- and company-grade officer level in both branches. Taiatari was being promoted by right-wing firebrands such as Captain Ei’ichirō Jō in the navy and Colonel Masanobu Tsuji in the army not only as a legitimate tactical expedient for desperate times, but also as an exciting new philosophical development in the Japanese warrior ethic that would make fundamental and heroic changes in the psychological landscape of the Japanese national character as a whole. Prime Minister Hideki Tōjō had agreed with this concept in principal as early as March 1944, issuing a top-secret memorandum to both services that “informal” studies should be made as soon as possible, so that procedures would be ready if and when the tactics became necessary.

Taiatari had a fine “no guts, no glory” feel to it that went over well with middle-aged career men sitting around conference tables and gambling with other people’s lives. Although there was no Japanese historical precedent for organized “suicide” tactics, per se, the idea
seemed
like something that warriors of old might have done, and it could be sold along those lines; invent some convincing traditions, their origins shrouded in mystery, playing up the usual
yamato damashi
angle. If it was done well, the public would drink it up. Of course, it remained to be seen what the young men who flew the planes would do when the actual orders were cut, but their courage and fine sense of self-sacrifice had never come into question before. There was no reason to fear any wavering on their part now. They knew what had to be done, and did not need balding armchair warriors to tell them why. Just when, where, and how.

Ozawa’s Marianas debacle – what the Western press was still trumpeting as “The Marianas Turkey Shoot”
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– had proven once and for all, at least for the duration of the current conflict, that the once invincible Imperial Japanese Navy could no longer dare to stand toe-to-toe with the Allies like the good old days, when they could duke it out and win using conventional weapons and tactics. No, those snapshots were already yellowing and curling at the edges. The current situation called for unconventional ideas from unconventional men, and Takijirō Ōnishi was the man of the hour. Should his efforts come to naught, he knew he would most likely be vilified by generations of his countrymen to come. As painful as this was to acknowledge for an egotist of Ōnishi’s magnitude, he knew that the distance of time would someday ensure that he would be remembered for his loyalty, dedication and sacrifice. It might take centuries, but a grateful nation would someday honor him as he wanted to be remembered. As a patriot.

His eyes still fixed on the yellow rice paddies and jade mountains rolling by the window, a landscape vaguely reminiscent of his home village in late summer, the admiral noted mean black clouds menacing the horizon behind Mount Arayat, inviting comparison both with his own mood and with the relentless dark armada closing in from across the Leyte Gulf. How many more of Japan’s finest young men would die trying to stop this human tidal wave of defiling Americans? All of them? Was that the catch? Was that the burnt offering required this time? It was possible that an entire generation would have to be sacrificed to save the Empire. Failing that, these young heroes would be in the vanguard for the national death leap – the
ichioku gyokusai
(“honorable death of the one-hundred million”), as the papers would soon be calling it – painting a wide-brushed, blood red swath of Japanese pride, honor and virility on the pages of history in indelible glory. It would be a fitting epitaph for the proudest race the world had yet known. The entire nation would go down in flames, standing on its feet, with its gene pool intact, its women pure and its civilization unsullied. It would die unconquered and unbowed, steadfast in its resistance to the White Man’s juggernaut of world domination and soulless rationalism.
[16]
Perhaps other non-Anglo-Saxon nations would take up the struggle in the future, and Japan’s historical example could inspire other races of color to fight on. It would be a good death.

Educated Japanese males of Ōnishi’s generation who had spent time l
iving and studying in the West – especially America – tended to harbor extreme feelings at both ends of a love/hate continuum toward their former hosts and teachers, ranging from unabashed schoolboy hero worship to utter repulsion fueled by a desperate need to believe in their own racial and cultural superiority. The emotional packages of most comprised a tortuous Freudian mélange of admiration and inferiority complex: a healthy respect for the Westerners’ technological prowess, material abundance and sheer physical size; disdain for their shameless materialism, their smug, easy pride, their maddeningly nonchalant tolerance of disorder, their racist immigration legislation and the woeful history of the American Negro. Not to mention poisonous, half-buried memories of patronizing cocktail party slights (“Oh, your English is excellent. Were you taught by missionaries?”), sneering hotel clerks, withering locker room anxiety and the impotent rage of coming home to see giggling Japanese girls on the arms of strapping white men in the streets of the larger port cities. Just as everyone tapping pointers on maps in the war rooms of Tokyo and cutting orders for young men to die at the front carried his own personal portfolio of similar psychological baggage regarding Westerners, none of them had ever really expected the nation to win its duel to the death with the West – win, that is, in the sense of Japanese troops marching up Pennsylvania Avenue and pitching their tents on the White House lawn.
[17]
Nor did they see the war as being pursued primarily for the practical strategic objectives of securing vital industrial resources and fuel. Seeing things in such simple terms was to confuse means with ends.

The goal, really, had always been, first and foremost, to humble the West – to daub the teacher’s face with mud – by kicking the white man out of Asia and bringing about the end, once and for all, win or lose, of what former Prime Minister Fumimar
ō Konoe had so aptly termed Anglo-Saxon global hegemony.
[18]
The Caucasian bogeyman – and the unspeakable fear that he might really be the superior being he seemed to think himself – had whispered in the ear and haunted the nightmares of the Japanese psyche for the last ninety years, since Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s Black Ships first fouled the waters of Uraga Bay, humiliating the nation by forcing it to accommodate the Americans and their insulting demands. Whipping Russia had been a promising start toward righting old wrongs, but holy war with the United States – inevitable, really, since that dark day at Uraga in 1853 – had given Japan the chance to silence the unsettling murmurs in the nation’s troubled conscience and the mocking laughter of that blue-eyed blight once and for all. The white man had been swallowing cultures and civilizations for too long. Now it was time for him to choke on one.

If inconceivable carnage was what was called for to achieve this, then so be it. Ōnishi had the will to both give
and follow the appropriate orders, and the courage to face the consequences of his actions after his duty had been performed. He was comforted by the knowledge that the worst possible personal consequence – his own death – was something he had resigned himself to years ago. Now, as his country faced almost certain defeat, it was a fate he welcomed. Whether his mission was successful or not, he would die either in combat or by his own hand when his death would cause the least worry for his superiors, and only after a suitable replacement had been found to relieve him of his command duties. In a neat, twentieth century populist turn on the traditional Japanese warrior ethic, this time it would be the lord following his loyal retainers in death rather than vice versa.

In coming months, the Japanese public at large would be called upon to make unimaginable sacrifices while maintaining the will to fight to the end – literally to the last man, woman and child, fighting off the white barbarians at the landing beaches with bamboo staves if it came to that.
[19]
Sooner or later the Imperial War Council would have to begin planning how to sell this idea, and what the admiral had in the works right now was just the kind of PR needed for such a campaign. And mission gloriously accomplished or nobly failed, a conscious act of atonement on his part – something dramatic yet elegant – would be the perfect final touch. The nation would be that much stronger knowing that its leaders were as committed to making supreme sacrifices as they were to ordering them.

Ōnishi continued to stare at the smothering black clouds on the horizon, which now seemed so close they could have been images in an imported brass stereoscope he had once marveled at as a child in Hyōgo.

“I’m off to form a suicide squad,” he muttered aloud to no one in particular, still staring off at Mount Arayat
[20]
. These words were the first and last spoken until the limo reached Mabalacat nearly an hour later.

S
tartled-looking sentries were still fumbling to straighten their caps and button their jackets when the yellow-flagged limo sped by on its way to Mabalacat airfield. The car drove up to the base flight ops shack, a rough canvas tent with an open flap under which officers, some in fatigues, others in flight suits, could be seen sitting around a folding table. A tattered windsock next to the tent hung limply from its pole, dyed a pale salmon pink in the setting sun.

“Stop here”,
Ōnishi ordered the driver in his second and last intelligible comment of the journey. He was already out of the limo giving his khakis a peremptory straightening and walking toward the tent before the driver could come around to open the door for him. The group of officers around the table, jolted out of their sunset lull by this unexpected visitation from on high, nearly knocked over their chairs as they scrambled to attention. Ōnishi returned a road-weary salute and motioned for the men to sit back down. He joined them in a chair vacated by a quick-thinking clerical type, darting assessing glances over maps for upcoming operations spread on the table with a few nods of his head as he sat down, still without a word of greeting or explanation for his visit. Of course, as a vice admiral, he was under no obligation to explain anything to anyone present, or for that matter, to say anything at all if he did not wish to. And no one else would speak until he did. This was basic
bushidō
senior/subordinate protocol.

The admiral rubbed his eyes with his stubby stonemason’s fingers and turned his attention to the activities on the airfield. Maintenance crews casting long shadows on the muddy ground bustled around parked aircraft, performin
g last-minute repairs in the dying light, preparing the planes for the next day’s missions and towing them to their camouflaged revetments to hide them from the marauding Americans, covering anything and everything else with bundles of tree branches and mats of high grass sod ripped up from the ground. Other groups cleaned up debris from damage the base had suffered from the morning’s Hellcat sweep, a courtesy call from Rear Admiral John McCain’s Task Group 38.1.
[21]
Several men with long poles poked through the smoldering, twisted skeletons of a row of Zeros that had been caught in the open in the raid. Nothing would be salvaged from these forlorn wrecks.