Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (62 page)

Neither was the
Mississinewa
. At 0830, after two and a half hours of brave but fruitless salvage efforts, the ship rolled and sank, coming to rest where she trickled diesel oil until 2003
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and still lies peacefully to this day – under twenty-three fathoms of water on the sandy bottom of Ulithi lagoon.

*****

Before being chased into a crash dive by the sight of American destroyers approaching at flank speed, submarine
I-47
had spent most of the early morning hours of November 20 at periscope depth so that her skipper, Lieutenant Commander Zenji Orita, could watch for distant fireballs from the direction of Ulithi after launching his sub’s four Kaiten. Orita logged entries for two large explosions in quick succession at 0545, then recorded numerous smaller explosions throughout the morning. These observations were duly reported at the big Kikusui debrief held at Kure on November 24.
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Also present at the Kure debrief was the commander of
I-36
, Lieutenant Commander Iwao Teramoto, who confirmed Orita’s log entries with his own observations of explosions in the Ulithi anchorage. No doubt much to Teramoto’s chagrin, however, he also had to report the disappointing fact that three of
I-36
’s four Kaiten had lodged in their deck braces or proved otherwise inoperable, preventing their use in the mission. In the end, only one of his Kaitens had been able to join in the attack.

Notably absent from the Kure proceedings was anyone from
I-37
, which had followed a slightly different mission profile that called for its Kaiten to be deployed against American shipping in the Kossol Passage to the northwest of Ulithi. Neither hide nor hair had been seen of the sub since sallying forth from Ōtsushima, and it was not until many years after the war that a team of Japanese researchers (including Konada-san) were able to conclude from Department of Defense records that the
I-37
had been sunk on station at its mission objective by American destroyers on November 19, 1944. It never had a chance to loose its Kaitens, and went down with all hands. 

During discussions following Orita’s and Teramoto’s reports, the sub skippers made the tactical suggestion that the Kaiten could probably be employed more effectively on the high seas, where the formidable anti-sub measures available to the enemy in a harbor or anchorage-type situation could not be brought to bear. The brass in attendance were hearing none of this, however, and remained convinced of the merit of their original concept of the Kaiten as a weapon to be deployed against shipping at anchor. Orita and Teramoto were thanked for their input, and their observations of November 20 were freely interpreted by command as an indication that the brave pilots of the illustrious Kikusui Unit had sunk three aircraft carriers and two battleships at Ulithi.
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So it was written, so it was done, and glowing reports of the mission and of the new superweapon’s capabilities were delivered in a Tokyo audience with His Majesty on December 12.
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The general public would have to wait a while longer for the good news.

Understandably high up on the Kaiten program’s need-to-know food chain – higher even than His Majesty – Konada and the other pilots bac
k at Ōtsushima were let in on the contents of the Kikusui after action report soon after it was written up. Despite literary interpretations to the contrary in various books about the Kaiten, Konada-san does not remember the Kikusui news as being greeted with any particular enthusiasm or rejoicing at Ōtsushima. For one thing, a report of successful deployment of the Kaiten also meant, by necessity, that friends and comrades were dead. Decorum alone in such a situation demanded a respectful response to such news, no matter what combat successes might have been brought about by these sacrifices. Second of all, as far as the pilots were concerned, there was no reason to register surprise at a report of three carriers and two battleships being sent to the bottom. Rather, considering the fact that twelve Kaitens and their brave pilots were sent out on the sortie, the report numbers seemed a little on the low side. Konada himself felt such supreme confidence in the Kaiten that he expected to bring down nothing less than a fleet carrier when his own moment of truth came. 

*****

For Konada, waiting for that moment of truth was an existence of time passed in a gray zone somewhere between life and death. This was an experience common to all tokkō personnel and generally measured in days or weeks for aircraft pilots, but in the case of the Ōtsushima Kaiten pilots, this period of psychological limbo had to be endured for eight or nine months or more. Life was lived on borrowed time with death lurking just close enough to deny a pilot the closure of knowing if any given sunset watched from the beach, or a game of chess enjoyed with a friend, or even just a nice meal in the mess hall would be one’s last. It was an existence every Kaiten pilot learned to deal with in his own way. Some drank, others slept whenever they could, still others – like Konada – poured everything they had into every minute detail of their duties. Anything to keep their minds off the infernal waiting, which had to be endured with the unbearable knowledge that friends and loved ones were dying – under the Americans’ guns at sea and under their bombs in the burning cities. As the war ground on, many came to believe that comrades given attack orders were deserving not only of respect, but of envy.

Konada w
ould go on to spend eleven months in this purgatory. The vagaries of attack roster selection meant that he was the only INA graduate pilot in the original Ōtsushima group not to sortie from the island. Fate intervened in May 1945 – at the most furious stage of the Okinawa combat that had claimed so many Etajima buddies – when Konada was posted to the new Kaiten base on Hachijōjima Island, a rough volcanic outcropping in the Pacific Ocean three hundred kilometers south of Tokyo.

IJN planners had ordered Kaitens to Hachijōjima after deeming that the island’s strategic location in the middle of sea-lane approaches to the Japanese capital made it a likely next target for the American juggernaut after Okinawa’s inevitable loss. Of course, historical hindsight shows that further American incursions into Japanese territory were unnecessary after Okinawa – but such developments were not anticipated by the Kaiten men of Hachijōjima, who were on constant standby for attack orders that could come at any time virtually
from the moment they set foot on the island. As the Americans tightened their noose on the home islands, this death-shadowed expectation only grew in intensity, peaking but not necessarily subsiding completely on August 15.

Like every other Japanese of hi
s generation still with us, Konada-san has vivid memories of that day – few of them happy. Following orders posted earlier in the morning, all of the Hachijōjima personnel formed up in front of the HQ building a few minutes before twelve noon for “an important announcement from the Emperor.” When the radio was turned on, the static was very bad. Konada-san suspected then – and has since always believed – that someone was trying to jam the signal.
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Only bits and snippets come through, and what did make it through was so garbled in transmission that no one could make heads or tails of it. At the end of the broadcast, the radio was switched off and the base CO, blinking rapidly and literally scratching his head, turned to his men. He had decided to look on the bright side, he said, and interpret the message as yet another fight-to-the-finish speech from Tokyo. The assembly was dismissed and all personnel were ordered to return to their posts and remain on standby.  

Lieutenant Konada, however, had doubts about the accuracy of the CO’s interpretation of the Imperial broadcast. After the formation broke ranks, he decided to visit the enlisted men running the radio relay station on top of the island’s main mountain to see if they had had any better luck with their antenna’s reception. Konada soon ascertained that they had not, although they had been able to pick up a transcript of the message sent out over military frequencies in naval code a few minutes after the voice broadcast. The courtly medieval Japanese text the Emperor’s scribes had prepared for the broadcast was a devil to try to muddle through in plain
katakana
phonetic transcription, but the gist of the message was clear enough – Bear the unbearable, endure the unendurable. The war was over, and His Majesty had just said so.   

Konada returned to the main base to pass on his message from the mountaintop. The CO acknowledged the need to modify his earlier interpretation of the broadcast, but he saw no need to modify the standing orders for the base to remain on full alert. Until they got a better picture of what was happening in the outside world, they would have to assume that attack orders were imminent.

In the meanwhile, during breaks from his duties, Konada kept vigil in front of a radio he had set up in the hallway of the officer’s billets, switching back and forth between Japanese military radio frequencies and American Japanese-language propaganda broadcasts beamed at Japan from Saipan (think Tokyo Rose in reverse). Gradually, the picture began coming together, and it seemed that the island HQ radiomen were correct in their interpretation of the Emperor’s broadcast. Konada felt that it was intrinsically wrong to take the American broadcasts at face value, but when he compared and contrasted this information with the bits and pieces he was gleaning from uncoded Japanese military traffic, the Americans appeared to be telling the truth when they reported that the war was over. Konada continued his radio monitoring over the next few days, interspersing this activity with frequent visits to the mountain radio shack to look at their decoded messages log.

Out of all of the messages he read during this time, none was more disturbing than the news that the feared and hated Soviets had at last entered the war. Konada could only read with helpless rage reports from points north that the Russians were at this very moment pouring armored divisions into Manchuria and threatening Hokkaido after rolling up the Kuriles like a cheap carpet. Losing to the Americans was bad enough, but the thought of the Soviets running riot over the country with no way of stopping them was absolutely unbearable.

*****

Hachijōjima’s remote location in the middle of the ocean may have made it vulnerable to radio frequency jamming by holdout fanatics in the IJN’s chain of command, but this was not the case for naval bases in the home islands. Despite His Majesty’s medieval
vocabulary, the officers monitoring a shortwave radio at the 23
rd
Totsugeki Unit Kaiten base at Susaki, Kōchi Prefecture knew as soon as the broadcast was over that they had just been told to lay down their arms. Japan had just surrendered.

After being t
old that the war was over and given orders to “Stand by for further instructions,” Petty Officer Harumi Kawasaki spent the rest of the day as many of his fellow 23
rd
Totsugeki pilots did – staggering around the confines of the base as a sotted, sullen pistolero, with a saké bottle in one hand and a pilot’s service revolver in the other, shooting at signs, windows, into the dunes or simply straight up into the air. Too ashamed to share their tears with each other, the pilots wandered off singly to sob with grief, howl with rage or just stand stonily silent and numb with shock, staring blankly out at the summer sea and hoping that this was all a bad dream.

The next day, the pilots awoke to pounding hangovers and the grimmest morning-after imaginable as the bleak reality set in that yesterday had not been just a bad dream after all. Then, with everyone expecting that the day would see a repeat of more saké-drenched tantrums thrown on top of jangled nerves and bad adrenaline, a glimmer of hope appeared in the form of an oddly uplifting piece of scuttlebutt making its way around the base. The latest interpretations of His Majesty’s broadcast were that maybe it had just been an order for a temporary ceasefire, and that the nation’s armed forces were to remain on full alert to be ready to attack if attacked first and/or if American invasion landings seemed imminent.

The rumor breathed new life into the unit, and spirits rebounded even further when, later that morning, reports came in that an American fleet was approaching nearby Tosa Bay. This was enough to convince the Susaki commander that the rumor was true. Standby orders were issued, and the base kicked into high gear to prepare the Kaitens for attack missions. 

In the nearby fishing village of Tei, where the 23
rd
Totsugeki had an annex base, a different type of tokkō weapon was being readied. The
Shin’yō
(“Ocean Shaker”) was a ten-meter long plywood motorboat carrying a 300kg warhead in the bow. Usually powered by old automobile engines pressed into maritime service, the boats tended to be rather slow and extremely vulnerable to the batteries of 20 and 40mm guns most American vessels carried for air defense. To give the Shin’yō pilot at least a slim chance of getting in close enough to his target to do damage, the boat was also armed with two forward-firing one-shot-only 12cm rocket scatter guns that could be used to try to keep the American gunners’ heads down during the attack run.
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Considering the numbers of boats built and pilots sacrificed during missions in the Philippines and Okinawa, the Shin’yō had a less than glowing performance record, but the pilots trained in the weapon’s use were as motivated as the crewmen in any of the IJN’s other tokkō programs. The Shin’yō pilots of the 23
rd
Totsugeki were no exception. In their haste and excitement after hearing the reports of approaching American ships earlier in the morning, the Tei personnel had been only too happy to interpret the subsequent “standby” notice from Susaki HQ as actual attack orders. By early evening, maintenance crews were practically falling over each other as they rushed to arm and gas up the unit’s twenty-three boats, lined up nice and tight along the Tei beach cove.