Crucible of Hell

But as the tide of war turned against Japan in May 1942, with defeat at the naval battle of Midway (the first of many at American hands), and rationing was introduced, her ardour began to cool. By the summer of 1944, with the war creeping ever closer, Okinawan housewives had been herded into ‘Japanese Imperial Women’s Defense Associations’, and everyone, bar young children and the elderly, was put to work constructing tunnels and fortifications. As a middle-school student, Yoshiko was sent to build air-raid shelters and artillery emplacements at nearby Oroku and Urasoe. ‘Soldiers dug with picks’, she wrote, ‘and put the dirt into small baskets. The first girl in a line handed each basket to the next girl, and then to the next.’ It was back-breaking work, and the girls’ soft hands quickly ‘became as coarse as those of construction workers’. When the soldiers signalled a break, they sat under pine trees and ‘licked small pieces of seaweed and cubed black sugar’.1

To reduce the size of the population on Okinawa, and therefore its pressure on ‘precious foodstuffs’, civilians were encouraged to evacuate to the home islands. More than 80,000 were moved to Kyushu, mostly in 1944, on ‘munitions vessels that were otherwise returning to Japan empty’. The evacuees included Tsuru Uezato, the 18-year-old daughter of a family who lived near the Sakumotos, and who was like a sister to Yoshiko. Two days before her departure, Tsuru asked Yoshiko to spend the afternoon with her. As they lay side by side on a futon, talking, Yoshiko thought she saw a figure appear in the doorway, with water dripping from her hair. ‘I was so scared,’ she wrote, ‘I thought I would faint, and I screamed … They looked under the floor and behind the back door, but found no one.’

Two days later, on 21 August 1944, Tsuru boarded the Tsushima Maru for her new life working in a parachute factory on the mainland. She never arrived. The ship was torpedoed en route by the US Navy submarine Bowfin and sank with the loss of more than 1,500 lives. The dead included Tsuru and 765 of the 834 Okinawan schoolchildren on board. One of the survivors, 13-year-old Tsuneko Miyagi, was on deck when three torpedoes struck at 10:00 p.m. on the 22nd and was blown overboard by the explosion. She counted twenty-five people clinging to debris near her. But as the hours passed, many gave up and slipped under the water. She might have done the same had a soldier not slapped her. ‘Don’t sleep,’ he told her. ‘If you sleep you die.’ For four days Tsuneko struggled to survive, fighting off sharks and rescuing a 4-year-old boy she discovered floating beside her. Finally she and the boy were rescued by Japanese patrol boats and taken to the mainland. ‘I was angry,’ she said. ‘Angry. I wanted to kill ten American soldiers for what they did.’2

Yoshiko felt much the same as she watched American bombs rain down on Naha six weeks later. She arrived home to find her mother emptying the house of furniture and clothes; her father had been sent to the Ryukyuan island of Miyako to build ships, and Yoshiko had ‘never felt so helpless’ in his absence. Gathering up her younger brothers and as many valuables as they could carry, they headed for a nearby cave that had been designated as an evacuation shelter. Once Yoshiko and her brothers were safely inside, their mother returned twice to their house to collect food and even the family shrine.

Soon many of the city’s mostly wooden buildings were burning, and the fires were approaching Tomari. Watching awestruck from the mouth of the cave, Yoshiko saw ‘Higa’s Barber Shop near the Tomari Bridge’ go up in flames. ‘After that the fire spread rapidly and the wind blew sparks on to houses along the shore. Once the houses caught fire, they collapsed one by one with a roaring sound. Finally my house started burning. My mother and I watched in tears. All the furniture and other things that had been left inside were lost.’

As the fires raged ‘ever more furiously’, Yoshiko could see residents trying to escape along the shoreline. ‘Long lines of hundreds, maybe thousands, of people were running, but many did not survive … The city of Naha was destroyed easily by just a few enemy planes.’3

In fact, the dawn attack on Naha and other targets on Okinawa was one of the heaviest delivered by a US carrier task force to that date in the war. It involved 1,356 strikes, in which 652 rockets and twenty-one torpedoes were fired, and 541 tons of bombs were dropped on airfields, harbour facilities, shipping and other strategic targets. The resultant fires destroyed four-fifths of the city. According to an American report, Japanese losses were twenty-three planes shot down and a further eighty-eight destroyed on the ground; and twenty cargo ships, forty-five smaller vessels, four midget submarines, a destroyer escort, a submarine tender, and a mine sweeper were sunk. Japanese sources added a destroyer and another mine sweeper, 5 million machine-gun rounds and 300,000 sacks of unpolished rice. ‘The enemy’, noted a Japanese soldier, ‘is brazenly planning to destroy every last ship, cut our supply lines and attack us.’4

The bombing of Naha had two immediate consequences for the island’s defenders: the loss of most of the island’s stockpile of gasoline, which meant, in turn, the rationing of motorised transport for the movement of men and supplies; and the decision to relocate General Ushijima’s command post from Tsukazan to a system of caves beneath Shuri Castle which were enlarged and filled with beds, office equipment and communication systems.

But it was the withdrawal of the veteran 9th Infantry Division – the best on the island – from Okinawa to the Philippines in November 1944 that forced General Mitsuru Ushijima, commanding the Japanese Thirty-Second Army, and his chief of operations Colonel Hiromichi Yahara to review both their defence plans and their operational doctrine. Now, with far fewer reliable combat soldiers, Yahara chose to defend only the strategically critical bottom third of the island. He assigned his force as follows: the 24th Division would guard the extreme south, including the towns of Itoman and Minatoga; the 62nd Division was given the vital central isthmus sector where the main line of defences would be sited, and which extended from Naha–Yonabaru to Chatan–Toguchi further north; beyond that, defending the Yontan and Kadena airfields, was the 44th Independent Mixed Brigade (IMB). The only significant force in the north of the island was the Kunigami Detachment of two infantry battalions on the Motobu Peninsula.

The plan at this stage was for the enemy ‘to be contained by a strategic delaying action’, and not openly attacked in a ‘decisive battle’. But Yahara also had to take account of pressure from the IGHQ in Tokyo which wanted a vigorous defence of all the airfields on Okinawa. The theoretical task of the 44th IMB was to protect the Yontan and Kadena airfields for as long as possible in the event of a major American landing at Hagushi, and to counter-attack if the opportunity arose. In reality, Yahara wanted the 44th merely to harass the invaders before falling back on the lines of the 62nd Division to the south.

The role of the 62nd, meanwhile, was to prepare to fight on a line facing north if the Americans landed at Hagushi, and to join the 24th Division if the landing was near Itoman or Minatoga. It was also expected to repel any landings on the beaches near Machinato airfield, north of Naha. The 24th Division would do likewise: defend its sector on the coast and reinforce the 62nd if the direction of attack was from the north. So the plan was clear: the Americans would be attacked immediately if they landed anywhere on the rugged central isthmus or the southern landmass; but an assault any further north, particularly against the open Hagushi plain, would be largely uncontested. Either way, the Americans would ‘eventually come up against the Shuri defences, where the main battle would be fought’.5

In January 1945, Ushijima sent his chief of staff, the bullish Major General Isamu Chō, for a conference at IGHQ in Tokyo to discuss the overall strategy for Okinawa’s defence. Incredibly Japan’s military leadership was still clinging to the belief that suicide weapons alone would be enough to deter a successful invasion. According to Chō’s civilian secretary Akira Shimada,* his boss was told by senior officers at the conference that ‘Thirty-Second Army units were not to fire on [American] shipping in the event of an attempted landing on Okinawa’ because ‘kamikaze suicide planes and similar units’ would alone destroy ‘the greater part of [American] naval forces, without forcing shore batteries to give away their positions by premature firing’.6

Dismissing such talk as wishful thinking, Yahara went on a tour of his units and concluded that they were too thinly spread to repel a concentrated attack. Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) doctrine recommended a defensive front of six miles per division; whereas at Okinawa the Thirty-Second Army’s two and a half divisions were spread over thirty-six miles of front, of which twenty-four miles had to be actively defended. So he shortened the division fronts by withdrawing the 44th IMB from the Hagushi plain to share some of the area that had been covered by the 62nd Division; and by transferring the defence of the Oroku Peninsula, south of Naha, from the 24th Division to a 3,000-strong Naval Base Force under Rear Admiral Minoru Ōta. Now the only force guarding the Yontan and Kadena airfields was a weak regiment of Boeitai (Home Guard).7

‘In the eyes of IGHQ’, noted a study of the Japanese view of the battle, ‘Okinawa was part of a multitheater, technology-intensive strategy in which Thirty-Second Army’s specialised role was to defend the Yontan and Kadena airfields. The Thirty-Second Army staff members’ perceptions were simpler: Thirty-Second Army was about to be attacked and needed defensible positions to survive. The staff members had no confidence that air forces could interdict the Americans … Even so, the staff’s final operational plans amounted to nothing more nor less than denying the enemy the ground, foot by foot.’8

For a brief moment in late January 1945 it looked as if help was on its way. IGHQ messaged that the 84th Infantry Division would be sent to Okinawa as a replacement for the 9th. But later that day the order was rescinded because IGHQ had had second thoughts about denuding Japan’s home islands of troops when they might soon be under attack. To raise spirits, Yahara wrote and disseminated a pamphlet titled ‘The Road to Certain Victory’ in which he argued that defensive fortifications would counteract the Americans’ marked advantage in troop numbers and firepower.

Seemingly convinced, soldiers and civilians carried on with great enthusiasm the work of expanding existing caves, and building a network of tunnels and concrete machine-gun posts. Lacking specialised tunnelling equipment, they used entrenching tools, picks and shovels to hack into the tough coral rock. Once through the outer crust, however, the soil was a soft red clay, and relatively easy to dig into. With no cement or iron to shore up the tunnels, each unit cut wooden beams from pine forests in the mountainous north, and moved them south in native boats called sabenis, often at night to avoid American air raids. By late March, more than sixty miles of underground fortifications and command posts had been constructed, as well as anti-tank minefields and gun emplacements.9

Efforts had also been made from January onwards, recalled Chō’s secretary Shimada,

to mobilise virtually the entire civilian manpower of Okinawa for use as Army auxiliaries. Additional Home Guard levies were made, designed to supplement the earlier conscriptions of the fall of 1944. Almost the entire student body of the Middle Schools, the Vocational Schools and the Shuri Normal School was organised into guerilla units, the most prominent of which was the celebrated Blood-and-Iron-for-the-Emperor Duty Unit (Tekketsu Kinno Tai). The students were trained in infiltration tactics by a Capt[ain] Hirose, an expert on guerilla warfare who had been sent to Thirty-Second Army from Imperial HQ for the express purpose of coordinating the activities of infiltration groups and similar irregular forces.10

Among the 2,000 Okinawan schoolboys, aged 14 to 18, who were recruited into the Blood and Iron Student Corps was Shigetomo Higa, a fourth-grader from Sikiyama in Shuri who attended the Okinawa First Prefectural Middle School. When Shigetomo joined the school in 1941, it was ‘quite free and relaxed’. But with the arrival of Principal Norio Fujino a year later, the atmosphere became more militarist. In 1944, Shigetomo’s five-year programme of study was cut short by a year as part of the Emergency Student Mobilisation Outline: most classes were cancelled and Shigetomo – like his female contemporary Yoshiko Sakumoto – spent most of his time on labour details constructing airfields and gun emplacements.

After the fall of Saipan in the summer of 1944, Shigetomo attended a lecture given by General Watanabe, Ushijima’s predecessor as Thirty-Second Army commander. ‘There is no doubt’, declared a tearful Watanabe, thumping the desk before him, ‘that the enemy will land in Okinawa and, when that happens, every civilian must share the same fate as our soldiers, so I am asking you to be ready to die a glorious death in the name of the emperor.’ Shigetomo was shocked by both the general’s appearance and message. He had always assumed that Japan would win the war. Now, one of the country’s senior generals was admitting that defeat was all but inevitable.

In late February 1945, Shigetomo’s father was conscripted into the Boeitai, and attached to the 24th Division. A month later, on 27 March 1945, Shigetomo graduated from middle school and was recruited into the Blood and Iron Student Corps in an evening ceremony that was held in the garden of his school dormitory. As American shells exploded in the distance, he and his 253 fellow graduates stood in rows, facing their principal Norio Fujino, his teaching staff and two VIP guests, governor of Okinawa Akira Shimada and a colonel from the 5th Artillery Command.

Suddenly, a shell landed with a resounding ‘thump’ close to where they were standing. The instinct of Shigetomo and his colleagues was to run. They were stopped by the booming voice of Lieutenant Yashushi Shinohara, the officer attached to the school. ‘Don’t move!’ yelled Shinohara. ‘Nobody is to move!’

The result, according to Shigetomo, was ‘quite amazing’. All the officials and students were ‘trembling’ but ‘nobody moved a muscle, not even the governor’. Another two or three shells landed ‘almost on top of us’ before the ceremony was over, ‘but not a single soul had moved’. Finally, Shinohara introduced the artillery colonel and said that, henceforth, the boys would come under his command.

The following day they were issued with patched-up military uniforms – each with a floating chrysanthemum badge† on its breast – and told they were part of the Blood and Iron First Middle School Unit. Shigetomo was assigned to No. 2 Platoon. But their lowly status as privates second class was soon confirmed when regular soldiers called them ‘little pricks’ and slapped them for failing to salute their superiors. ‘Just a while ago’, remembered Shigetomo, ‘we were all digging shelters together and the next thing they were looking down on us because of our lower rank.’

Told to pen farewell letters to their parents, Shigetomo wrote:

Dear Mother and Father – You have looked after me for sixteen years but now the time has come for me to leave. Even if you hear that I have been killed in the fighting, please do not feel sad. As your only son, I will be sorry to die without repaying the debt I owe you … I am so grateful to you both and thank you from the bottom of my heart for all you have done for me.

Shigetomo chose not to write the sort of propaganda statements that his superiors expected, and that many of his fellow students produced. One told his parents that he wanted ‘to die a glorious death for my country’, and if they heard of his demise they should ‘smile’. But Shigetomo understood why his comrade did it. ‘We were’, he noted, ‘only sixteen but the militarist education we had received had gone to the depths of our very souls.’11

* Not to be confused with his 43-year-old namesake who was governor of the Okinawa Prefecture. Chō’s secretary was eight years younger.

† This insignia for a Blood and Iron Student unit was later removed.

4

The Divine Wind

‘The late afternoon sun’, recalled Captain Rikihei Inoguchi, ‘was about to sink below the crest line of the mountains to the west of Mabalacat airfield, which formed part of the sprawling Clark Base complex, some fifty miles north-west of Manila. Ground crewmen wearing the work uniform of the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Forces [IJNAF] scurried here and there like ants, hurrying to conceal planes in revetments before dusk and to carry out attack preparations for the following morning.’

It was 19 October 1944, and Inoguchi was sitting in the airfield command post, a tattered old tent, talking with the XO (executive officer) of the IJNAF’s 201st Air Group, Commander Asaichi Tamai. Inoguchi had come from Manila, where he was senior staff officer of the 1st Air Fleet, to discuss with Tamai the 201st’s attack plan for the following day. Two days earlier, a huge US naval force had appeared off Suluan Island, at the mouth of Leyte Gulf, and it was obvious that a large-scale invasion of the Philippines was imminent.* ‘Yet’, noted Inoguchi, ‘the Japanese air forces in the entire Philippines area had fewer than one hundred planes still in operational condition to throw into the breach. What could we do?’

Friends since their naval academy days, Inoguchi and Tamai ‘spoke frankly’ of the difficulties confronting the Japanese defenders, but were ‘at a loss to hit upon any plan that might offer a way out of the desperate situation’. As they talked, a black limousine drove up to the command post, flying the yellow pennant of a flag officer. A stocky figure got out, accompanied by a single aide. It was Inoguchi’s new boss Vice Admiral Takijiro Ohnishi who, just two days earlier, had arrived in Manila from Tokyo to take command of the 1st Air Fleet.

The two officers sprang to their feet and offered Ohnishi a chair. He sat down and, for a few minutes, watched silently as ‘the airfield crews worked feverishly in the fading daylight.’ Eventually he turned to the officers and said, ‘I have come here to discuss with you something of great importance. May we go to your headquarters?’

Ohnishi gave them a lift in his limousine back to the dusty town of Mabalacat where the 201st Air Group’s headquarters were located in a cream-coloured house with a green trim that ‘gave a pleasing, homey effect’. Inside, however, most of the regular furniture on the ground floor had been replaced with folding canvas cots for the thirty officer fliers who lived in the building. Scattered throughout were their flight gear, towels, washing kits and personal possessions.

After Vice Admiral Ohnishi had taken a phone call, they gathered in a room on the second floor with another staff officer and two squadron leaders. The only notable absentee was the commander of the 201st, Captain Sakae Yamamoto, who had been called to a meeting with Ohnishi in Manila and, unknowingly, the two cars had passed each other en route. Once all six were seated round a small table, Ohnishi began speaking. ‘As you know,’ he said in a low voice, ‘the war situation is grave. The appearance of strong American forces in the Leyte Gulf has been confirmed. The fate of the empire depends upon the outcome of the Sho operation,† which Imperial Headquarters has activated to hurl back the enemy assault on the Philippines. Vice Admiral Kurita’s 2nd Fleet, containing our main battle strength, will advance to the Leyte area and annihilate the enemy invasion force. The mission of the 1st Air Fleet is to provide land-based air cover for Admiral Kurita’s advance and make sure the enemy air attacks do not prevent him from reaching Leyte Gulf. To do this, we must hit the enemy’s carriers and keep them neutralised for at least one week.’

Inoguchi was at a loss to know how this could be done. Recent American carrier strikes had crippled Japanese air strength in the Philippines, reducing the 201st Air Group’s fighter strength to just thirty operational planes. But sensing that Ohnishi had come to Mabalacat for a reason, he waited for him ‘to provide the answer’. When it came, it caught Inoguchi by complete surprise.

‘In my opinion’, said Ohnishi, ‘there is only one way of ensuring that our meagre strength will be effective to a maximum degree. That is to organise suicide attack units composed of Zero fighters armed with 250-kilogram bombs, with each plane to crash-dive into an enemy carrier.’ He let the words sink in, before adding: ‘What do you think?’

It seemed a shocking suggestion, but not one that floored Inoguchi and his comrades. Instead, he recalled, it ‘struck a spark in each of us’. Such ‘body-crashing’ (tai-atari) tactics were not unique. They had already been used by navy pilots in air-to-air combat against enemy bombers, and there were, Inoguchi knew, ‘many fliers in the combat air units who had urged that the same tactics be employed against the carriers’. They did not welcome death; but found it easier to contemplate in the dark days of late 1944 when, as Inoguchi put it, the ‘chance of coming back alive from any sorties against enemy carriers was very slim, regardless of the attack method employed. If one is bound to die, what is more natural than the desire to die effectively, at maximum cost to the enemy?’

The silence that followed Ohnishi’s words was, therefore, neither ‘consternation nor dread’, but calm contemplation. Commander Tamai spoke first. ‘Yoshioka,’ he asked the staff officer, ‘just how effective would it be for a plane carrying a 250-kilogram bomb to smash bodily into a carrier’s flight deck?’

‘The chances of scoring a hit’, replied Yoshioka, ‘would be much greater than by conventional bombing. It would probably take several days to repair the damage to the flight deck.’

Nodding, Tamai turned to Ohnishi and said: ‘As executive officer I cannot decide a matter of such gravity. I must ask our group commander, Captain Sakae Yamamoto.’

There was, said Ohnishi, no need. ‘I have just spoken on the phone with Captain Yamamoto in Manila. His leg was broken in a plane crash and he is in hospital. He said that I should consider your opinions as his own, and that he would leave everything up to you.’

After a pause, Tamai asked for a few minutes to consider the matter with one of his squadron commanders. When Ohnishi gave his approval, the pair left for Tamai’s room where they discussed the pilots’ likely reaction to the news. Soon they returned and Tamai said: ‘Entrusted by our commander with full responsibility, I share completely the opinions expressed by the admiral. The 201st Air Group will carry out his proposal. May I ask that you leave to us the organisation of our crash dive unit?’

Ohnishi nodded his assent, his face bearing ‘a look of relief coupled with a shadow of sorrow’. He then left to get some rest and the momentous meeting was over.

Tamai’s task now was to consider which pilots to choose for the mission. Most had only completed half of their combat training when they were posted to the Marianas for active duty. They had, since that time, ‘fought continuously, and against terrible odds’. In early August the survivors had been sent to the southern Philippines and incorporated into the 201st Air Group, down to about a third of its original strength. ‘They were now steel-fibred veterans and their morale was high,’ recalled Inoguchi. ‘Commander Tamai, who had inspired them during their training period and had shared the hardships of uphill battles … was as deeply attached to these men as a father to his children.’

After consulting with his squadron commanders, Tamai held a parade of his remaining twenty-three non-commissioned pilots at which he explained Admiral Ohnishi’s proposal. ‘In a frenzy of emotion and joy’, wrote Inoguchi, ‘the arms of every pilot in the assembly went up in a gesture of complete accord.’