Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (60 page)

For the next two months, simultaneously burdened and inspired by such thoughts, Konada and his classmates trained under the personal guidance of Kaiten co-inventor Sekio Nishina, dedicating all of their energies and waking moments to learning everything they could about the craft and mastering its operation. Their focus, frugal lifestyle, self-sacrificial mindset and unwavering faith in the justice of their cause almost had more in common with a monastic order than a military organization.

From a metaphysical standpoint, the comparison is not too much of an exaggeration, for the capabilities and possibilities of the Kaiten gave every indication that the weapon was going to live up to the theological affectation of its name after all. Putting this much power into the hands of a single human being was akin to a process of semi-deification, a matter bordering on the supernatural. The symbolic and psychological implications of this were never lost on the Kaiten program’s chain-of-command.

R
oughly concurrent with Ensign Toshiharu Konada’s near-religious experience at Ōtsushima during his initial encounter with the Kaiten, Petty Officer Third Class Harumi Kawasaki and his Nara classmates were getting their own orientation briefing seventy kilometers to the east at “Q-base” on the island of Kurahashijima. The basics of the message were the same – Japan’s war situation was desperate enough by now to merit human torpedoes of enormous destructive capability, and the navy needed men to pilot them.

There were several fundamental differences, however, between the Special Base Unit One and Q-base briefings. First of all, the Q-base version for the enlisted men did not go into as much strategic and philosophical profundity as the lecture Special Base Unit One’s ensigns received. Also, the Q-base talk was given in the format of a call for volunteers – the new petty officers were told that they could duck out of the duty if they felt that, for whatever reason, they would not be able to carry it out when the time to do so came. Lastly, there was a considerable difference in the two groups’ collective reactions to their respective briefings. While none of Kawasaki’s classmates had raised their hands to say “I quit” when the opportunity presented itself, neither were many of them exactly bubbling over with enthusia
sm. Unlike their commissioned Kaiten counterparts at Ōtsushima, the Nara Yokaren boys at Kurahashijima did not float back to their barracks on a heady wave of
dulce et decorum
self-sacrificial beatitude after breaking ranks. In fact, as Kawasaki-san recalls, there was a considerable volume of bitching and moaning of the “I didn’t go through nine months of Yokaren for this crap” variety that night, not to superiors, of course – perish the thought – but amongst themselves. During the ensuing weeks, while the Nara group trained at Kurahashijima and waited for assignment to operational Kaiten units
[293]
, the more persistent self-preservationists in the group were able to finagle medical discharges from the program or assignments to different duties. The vast majority of the boys, however, stayed the course, and after their assignment to Kaiten units, their training as pilots began in earnest.

The steepest learning curve in Kaiten training, not surprisingly, was required for mastery of the machine’s quirky handling characteristics and complex onboard systems, which it was said a pilot “needed six hands and eyes” to keep under control.
[294]
Also, no one clambering down the hatch of a Kaiten for the first time ever got the impression that the weapon had been built with crew comfort as a crucial design consideration. The vessel’s interior was a claustrophobe’s worst nightmare – dark, dank, cramped, with the bulkheads and deck almost completely obscured in a Gordian knot of knobs, dripping pipes, valves, and pressurized canisters. It was so cramped, in fact, that the pilot could not even extend both of his legs. Because of the positioning of a large stabilizing gyro, the pilot would have to sit with his left knee jammed up against his chest.  

While explaining this arrangement, Kawasaki-san does something I could not imagine Konada-san doing in a million years. He pushes his chair away from the table, and right here in the lobby of Kudan Kaikan, demonstrates the cramped sitting posture and hand gestures of a busy pilot at the controls of a Kaiten. With his left knee to his chest, his right foot working phantom rudder pedals and both hands going through a flurry of knob-turning, handle-pumping and lever-pulling motions, the effect is of a man operating a steam-operating flying machine – a contraption, perhaps, out of a Jules Verne story.

While Konada-san gives a slow-motion
huh-huh-huh
chuckle at his partner’s pantomimed interpretation of Kaiten piloting, I comment that the arrangement inside the vessel looks to have been pretty uncomfortable.

“It wasn’t so bad, really,” Kawasaki-san says. “(In combat) pilots were in their Kaitens for four or five hours. And by the point where (the Nara
Kō-
13 group’s) missions would have become necessary, the targets would have been so close to our coastline that we wouldn’t have had to sit in the Kaitens very long (as the Kaitens would have been launched straight from Ōtsushima and later bases).”

Surely
there must have been
some
discomfort involved, I insist. Noise? Some bad smells, perhaps?

Konada-san recalls that the dominant smells inside the Kaiten were strong odors of rust, lubricant oil and bilge water. The latter
bouquets
were a given in any submersible vehicle, but rust problems were especially intense on the Kaiten on account of the pure compressed liquid oxygen used as an oxidant for its propulsion system. The tanks containing this oxygen leaked constantly whether the Kaiten was in operation or in storage, and as a result, rust ate away at the steel components inside the vessel at an unnaturally voracious rate, making for major maintenance headaches in addition to giving the interior of the vessel its distinctive odor. 

Not surprisingly for a vehicle in which the passenger/pilot shared space inside a hollow metal tube with a 550-horsepower internal combustion engine, noise came with the territory. Konada-san and Kawasaki-san recall the experience of riding in a Kaiten as being loud, but not painfully so. The sound was not the throb or hum of a normal gasoline-powered engine, but more like a steam locomotive – a gaseous
shoo-shoo-shoo-shoo
as the pistons pumped and drove the propeller shaft around. As throttle was applied, the sound rose in pitch and frequency to a hypnotic whirr.

“After a while,” Konada-san says, “the sound became almost soothing.”

The reward for enduring the cramped space and noise of the Kaiten was a thoroughly enjoyable piloting experience – that is, as long as the vessel did not fall prey to its disquieting and fairly frequent habit of suddenly zooming away into the depths out of control, its pilot never seen alive again. Although it was cumbersome at low throttle, it picked up a graceful agility at high speed. With higher velocity water flow over the control surfaces, the craft became so responsive that pitching and yawing through three-dimensional underwater space was more akin to flying a high-performance aircraft than to steering a naval vessel. Another feature that helped in no small way to make the Kaiten pilot’s life easier was an autopilot mechanism that could be used to set speed, depth, and heading for a lengthy, stealthy incursion into the objective area, then manually overridden by the pilot during the final attack run, when only the finesse of a human hand could provide a reasonable chance of putting the warhead on a target.

In addition to speed, another factor in the Kaiten’s responsiveness was its pneumatically-assisted rudder and diving controls. This power was provided by a compressed air canister that leaked during operation, causing the Kaiten’s cabin pressure to gradually build up during the course of a run. When the conning tower hatch was unlocked at the end of a training mission, it hissed like a gigantic bottle of Coca-Cola being opened.

Training runs at Ōtsushima were time-consuming enterprises involving considerable personnel and resources. At the beginning of a run, a pilot – armed with his orders, a map with heading notations, and a full canteen – would board the Kaiten in one of the torpedo sheds on base. After this, the Kaiten would be towed down to the quay, lowered into the water by crane, then towed out to the training range by a motor launch that would double as an escort boat once the actual run began. The range itself was similar in concept to a very large-scale version of the old “20,000 Leagues Under The Sea” ride at Disney World, involving the negotiation of obstacles and the simulated engagement of targets
[295]
arranged along a set course in relatively shallow water.

Since Kuroki and Higuchi’s mishap, the tops of the training Kaitens were painted white for visibility. This scheme served two functions, one being to assist search efforts in the event of another accidental sinking, the other being to allow the escort boat to track the Kaiten visually during its training runs. Small signaling charges were thrown into the water to warn the pilot if the Kaiten was headed for hazards like shoals or coming too close to the targets. Collisions with underwater obstacles or the target barges were the leading cause of training deaths in the Kaiten program, so the escort’s job was vital.

Every night at around 1800 hours, after evening mess, there were debriefs and feedback sessions between instructors and trainees to discuss results and observations from the day’s training runs. In a typical session, trainees would stand in turn in front of a blackboard to give detailed self-evaluation reports of their runs complete with figures and diagrams. This was followed by a fire hose stream of aggressive questioning from the cadre, and woe unto the trainee who could not answer each and every item satisfactorily. Punishment for an unsatisfactory presentation was a thoroughly humiliating hazing in front of the group, and even more painfully, a precipitous drop down the training order roster. In rare cases of clearly hopeless incompetence, a pilot could suffer the ultimate humiliation of being dropped from the roster altogether and permanently relegated to maintenance duties.     

After the debrief sessions – which rarely ended before midnight and sometimes lasted until one or two in the morning – the trainees would stagger to their bunks emotionally and physically exhausted. And they would need every minute of sleep they could manage, for another day of more of the same would start with reveille a few hours later at 0500.

*****

While life as a human torpedo was certainly no day at the beach, it was not without its share of comforts and amenities. Similar to its treatment of Ōka personnel, the Navy Ministry thought that nothing was too good for the Kaiten boys in terms of rations.
Sailors and officers with a taste for the bottle could drink their fill of high-grade saké during their rare spells of downtime, Kinshi, Homare and Cherry brand cigarettes were always plentiful, and the larders in the mess hall were almost always full. When not, there was always good fishing to be had in the sea around Ōtsushima. One of the benefits of being stationed on a top-secret island base surrounded by waters off-limits to civilian fishermen was that bountiful catches were virtually guaranteed.

The
enlisted men soon learned to fish with the dynamite left behind by naval engineers who had built the base. A lit stick or two tossed into the lagoon was usually sufficient to stun and float enough fish to feed a platoon. Signaling rounds could also be used. These had an explosive charge roughly equivalent to an M-80, and were activated by peeling back a piece of electrical tape over one end and tossing the round into the water. Though results were not as spectacular as those obtained from TNT trawling, they were good enough to snare a quick snack of small fish. Sardines speared on twigs and cooked over a little driftwood fire made for surprisingly good eating and a nice way to pass the time on boring sentry duty.   

Due to security issues, Ōtsushima was closed to all non-essential personnel – even, with the exception of special occasions, to the ubiquitous PR and Nichiei reporter types one normally found on most army or navy tokkō bases. For the first few months after the Kaiten Unit’s activation, its perso
nnel could leave the island only for special cases such as treatment for serious injuries or illnesses that could not be handled by the base’s very modest infirmary, for family emergencies, or in the case of the higher ranking officers, for official navy business. Things gradually loosened up after the base was running smoothly, and short leaves were available, but Konada and most of the other commissioned pilots were far too busy to take advantage of this privilege. Instead, they were dependent on what minor provisions for entertainment command had deemed fit for the isolated base. Most often, this involved not much more than availing themselves of one of the
shōgi
chessboards at the officer’s liaison room for an hour or two between training, duty officer stints and debriefing sessions.

Options for organized athletics were extremely limited, as there was not enough flat space on the island to accommodate sports such as rugby, soccer or baseball. However, there was just enough space on the waterfront for
bōtaoshi
(“pole-toppling”), a sport in which one team would attempt to knock over a caber-like pole defended by an opposing team. The sport – possibly of British Royal Navy origin and a time-honored tradition at Etajima since the academy’s inception – was encouraged by base command as it was thought to foster close-knit teamwork, leadership and aggressiveness. The best tactic for the attackers was to have a first line run up to the defenders, then crouch down to form human steps so others behind them could get height advantage and leverage when grabbing onto the pole to knock it over. No holds were barred and kicking, punching and gouging were allowed, so not surprisingly, injuries such as busted noses and broken teeth were frequent.