Crucible of Hell

Tamai and Inoguchi then chose Lieutenant Yukio Seki, a 23-year-old Naval Academy graduate of the ‘highest character and ability’ to lead the new unit. Originally trained on carrier-based bombers, Seki had been with the 201st for only a month. But in that time he had impressed Tamai with his energy and fervent patriotism. Woken and told that he was being considered for the command of a new suicide unit, Seki paused for a full five seconds, eyes closed and head in hands, before replying: ‘You absolutely must let me do it.’

‘Thank you,’ replied Tamai, tears in his eyes. ‘You’re a bachelor aren’t you?’

‘No, I have a wife, sir.’

It was a shame, but not enough to disqualify Seki. All that remained was to choose a title for the new unit. ‘Since this is a special mission,’ said Inoguchi, ‘we should have a special name. How about Shimpū Unit?’‡

Tamai thought it was an excellent idea. Shimpū was, he knew, another name for kamikaze (or ‘divine wind’), the term used to describe the fierce typhoons that had destroyed the Mongol fleet of Kublai Khan in the thirteenth century, thus saving Japan from invasion. ‘That’s good,’ he replied. ‘After all, we have to set a kamikaze in motion with it.’1

Seki, meanwhile, had returned to his quarters to pen farewell letters to Mariko, his wife of five months, and his parents. ‘I am very sorry’, he wrote to her, ‘that I must “scatter” [a reference to the scattering of cherry blossoms, or dying in battle] before I could do much for you. I know that as a spouse of a military man, you are prepared to face such a situation.’

With his parents, he was more candid. ‘At this time the nation is at the crossroads of defeat, and the problem can only be resolved by each individual’s repayment of the Imperial Benevolence.’ He would, therefore, ‘carry out a body-crashing attack on an aircraft carrier’. He added: ‘I am resigned to do this.’

As his deadly mission drew closer, however, Seki seemed to have questioned its rationale. ‘Japan’s future is bleak’, he told a journalist, ‘if it is forced to kill one of its best pilots – myself. I am confident that I can deliver a 500-kilogram bomb on the flight deck of an enemy aircraft carrier and come back alive!’ There was, he knew, no backing out now. But he wanted to explain that – contrary to what he had told his parents – the real reason he was going on the mission was not ‘for the emperor or for the empire’, but rather for his ‘beloved wife’ and because he was ‘ordered to’. He added: ‘Should Japan lose the war, only the gods know what the enemy would do to my dear wife. A man dies for the lady he loves most. That’s glorious.’2

To many of the Allies, steeped in the Judaeo-Christian tradition of the sanctity of life, the apparent willingness of Japanese servicemen like Seki to carry out suicide attacks was profoundly shocking. But then, as scholars of the kamikaze point out, the word suicide in Japanese does not always have the same ‘immoral connotation’ that it has in English. Two versions – jiketsu (self-determination) and jisai (self-judgement) – ‘suggest an honourable or laudable act done in the public interest’. There is, moreover, no ethical or religious taboo regarding suicide in Japan’s traditional religion of Shintoism. Instead, the Japanese samurai warrior code of ‘bushido’ – heavily influenced by Shintoism, as well as Buddhism and even Confucianism – revered self-sacrifice and fighting to the bitter end for emperor and country. To surrender, on the other hand, was seen as dishonourable, hence the contempt the Japanese felt for prisoners of war. Japanese soldiers believed that when they fell on the field of battle they would become kami, or gods, and join the nation’s guardian spirits at the Shinto shrine of Yasukuni in Tokyo. Hence the typical farewell from members of the Shimpū Special Attack Corps: ‘I’ll meet you at the Yasukuni Shrine!’3

The Shimpū Unit’s first mission was on 25 October 1944, during the Battle of Leyte Gulf, when Lieutenant Seki led five Mitsubishi Zeros, each carrying a 250-kilogram bomb, against a cluster of US Navy escort carriers. Two planes were shot down by anti-aircraft fire, but the other three got through, damaging two carriers and sinking a third, the USS St Lo, after fires caused the ship’s magazine to explode. It is believed that Seki hit the St Lo. By the end of the following day, further kamikaze attacks had struck a total of seven carriers and forty others ships (sinking five, badly damaging twenty-three and moderately damaging twelve).

On hearing of these first suicide attacks, the 43-year-old Emperor Hirohito, who had ruled Japan since the death of his father in 1926, asked: ‘Was it necessary to go to this extreme?’ But, he added, ‘They have certainly done a good job.’4

These early successes caused an immediate expansion of the kamikaze programme to include all types of planes – fighters, bombers and even training aircraft, many flown by inexperienced pilots – as well as piloted flying bombs (Ōhkas),§ motorboats packed with explosives (Shinyō), and human torpedoes (Kaiten). One of the earliest volunteers for the Kaiten Corps was Naoji Kōzu, a former student at the Tokyo Imperial University who had been conscripted into the Japanese Imperial Navy. Unlike the early members of the Shimpū Unit, he was never told he would be going to a place ‘from which I’d have absolutely no chance to return’. He found out the truth only when he was assigned to Hikari, the Kaiten base in southern Honshu, and saw the craft for himself.

‘The body’, he recalled, ‘was painted flat black. It overwhelmed a man. A small sail and a tiny periscope located at its centre seemed to disturb the harmony of the whole. The rear third was a Type-93 torpedo. A maintenance officer described it to us dispassionately. “The total length is fourteen point five metres. Diameter, one metre. The crew is one man. Explosive charge one point six metric tons. Navigation range seventy-eight thousand metres. Maximum speed thirty knots.”’

The details aside, Kōzu had only to look at the position of the pilot, in a tiny cockpit in the centre of the Kaiten, to know it was a suicide weapon from which there would be no escape. Overcome with emotion, he could not speak. ‘I felt’, he wrote, ‘that I myself turned into something no longer human.’ There was, he discovered, a way out of the corps: by failing to operate the Kaiten properly during test runs. But he never seriously considered that option because it would have meant someone else taking his place. ‘I couldn’t bear the idea of sacrificing someone else by quitting. I knew if I did, I’d regret it for the rest of my life.’5

By January 1945, the kamikaze (or special attack) units were at the centre of IGHQ plans – codenamed Operation Ten-Go – to defeat the next phase of the American advance in the Pacific, probably against Okinawa. ‘I firmly believed’, said Rear Admiral Sadatoshi Tomioka, chief of operations at the Naval General Staff, ‘that Okinawa alone was the decisive battleground where we would be able to reverse the war situation.’ The navy’s strategy was to deliver such a severe blow to the attacking American forces that it would force them to the negotiating table. But the problem for the IJN – which was expected to do the bulk of the fighting both on the sea and in the air – was that its surface force was down to just a handful of battleships and no aircraft carriers, while its depleted stock of planes and pilots, particularly its special attack units, would need to be replenished before it could carry out a large-scale air operation. That was unlikely to be before May 1945.6

But the navy’s warnings were ignored and on 6 February 1945, IGHQ issued the Ten-Go Air Operations Agreement for the navy and army to provide 2,000 and 1,350 planes respectively – those numbers to include 740 special-attack planes – to hurl against the advancing US fleet. With the die cast, the IJN stepped up its preparations. ‘Although the training could not be completed,’ recalled Commander Yoshimori Terai, the air operations chief on the Naval General Staff, ‘we intended to carry out the operations forcibly by employing special-attack tactics.’7

The navy’s intention was to slow down the American advance on Okinawa by launching a kamikaze attack against the carriers of the US 5th Fleet in their anchorage at Ulithi atoll in the Caroline Islands, the so-called Operation Tan No. 2, on 11 March 1945. But only two of the twenty-four twin-engine bombers, each carrying 800-kilogram bombs, made it as far as Ulithi: one struck the stern of the aircraft carrier USS Randolph, just below the flight deck, killing twenty-seven sailors and wounding 105; the other crashed into a road on the small island of Sorlen, mistaking a signal tower for a ship. As a result of this largely failed mission, noted Commander Terai, the IJN was ‘forced to face the Okinawa operations unprepared’.8

* After preliminary operations against three small islands in Leyte Gulf, the main landings on Leyte by General MacArthur’s forces began on 20 October 1944.

† Operation Sho (or ‘Victory’) was a defensive–offensive plan, formulated after the fall of Saipan, that declared the Americans’ next major target as the ‘theatre of decisive battle’ to which all available forces would be rushed to defeat the enemy. The plan was activated by IGHQ on 18 October. (Inoguchi and Nakajima, The Divine Wind, p. 6n.)

‡ The official name for the new suicide unit was Shimpū Tokubetsu Kōgekitai (Divine Wind Special Attack Units), often shortened to Shimpū Tokkōtai. The alternative word ‘kamikaze’ was only used informally in the Japanese press after the Second World War.

§ The largest Ōhka attack – featuring small single-seated wooden aircraft, laden with almost 4,000 pounds of explosives, and carried to within thirteen miles of the target by a twin-engined bomber – was made against US aircraft carriers on 21 March 1945. All sixteen bombers and their Ōhka missiles were either shot down or lost before they reached their target.

5

‘More concerned with furlough than fighting’

At 8:10 a.m. on Thursday 18 January 1945, a four-engine Douglas C-54 Skymaster transport plane lifted off from Hickam Field, near Pearl Harbor, and set a course for Tarawa atoll in the Gilbert Islands. The plane had been specially adapted to carry VIPs, and was fitted with upholstered seats, a washroom and a small pantry, complete with ‘an electric warmer for heating coffee and food’. It even had an Air Transport Command officer on board to ensure that the four passengers had everything they needed. They were Lieutenant General Simon B. Buckner Jr, and three members of his staff: Brigadier General Oliver P. Smith, Colonel Louis B. Ely (his G-2, or chief of intelligence), and Major Frank Hubbard (his aide).1

Buckner had spent the last few months assembling the troops of his Tenth Army – a total potential force of 375,000, of whom 175,000 were to take part in the assault of Okinawa – on paper; now he wanted to see them in the flesh. So once the final draft of the operation plan had been distributed in mid-January, he was free to ‘visit the major combat units, observe the condition of the troops, and personally discuss the operation plan with the corps commanders’.

After an eleven-hour flight from Pearl Harbor – during which they crossed the date line – Buckner and his party reached Tarawa, the site of a vicious seventy-two-hour battle in November 1943 that had cost the US 2nd Marine Division more than 3,000 casualties; of the 4,800 Japanese and Korean defenders, only 136 surrendered (including just one Japanese officer and sixteen men). The plan was to stay the night in Tarawa before continuing on to Espiritu Santo the following day. But as they had got in early enough, they went on a tour of the island and found ‘evidences of the bitter battle which took place there, in the form of ruined Japanese bunkers and blockhouses and a scattering of abandoned amphibious tracked vehicles and tanks. And, of course, the cemeteries were still there.’2

Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides, the first proper stop on the tour, was reached during the afternoon of Saturday the 20th. They were met by Major General George W. Griner Jr, commanding the 27th Infantry Division, the formation that had performed so poorly on Saipan. Buckner and his staff knew all too well the controversy concerning the 27th Division – particularly the Smith vs Smith imbroglio – and were hopeful that Griner had put matters right. But it did not seem that way when Oliver Smith heard from Griner’s artillery chief, Brigadier General Ferrin, that the division ‘was beaten down and did not know whether or not it wanted to fight’. Griner and his senior officers were doing their best to rectify this – to ‘instil in the men a desire to prove that the division was really a good division’ – but the jury was still out.3

Next day, during his tour of inspection, Buckner spent time asking individual soldiers who ‘look well’ what they ‘wanted to do most’. He was hoping to hear they were thirsting for combat. But most were more concerned, as Buckner put it in his diary, ‘with furlough than fighting’. The island was very hot and the men seemed to spend their time swimming, fishing and sailing; the only evidence of training that Smith saw was ‘a rifle range’. The net result of the visit was to ‘lessen’ Buckner’s confidence in the 27th. ‘He did not say this,’ noted Smith, ‘but I could feel it. I know I was not impressed with this division and this was not simply because it was an Army division. The difference between the 27th and the other Army divisions we saw later was very apparent.’4

The first point of comparison was during the next stop at New Caledonia, ‘a very rugged and beautiful island’ where the 81st Infantry Division, part of Buckner’s floating reserve, was stationed. Smith thought the division’s training area – located on rolling hills overlooking the sea – the best he had seen in the Pacific. ‘I had’, he remembered, ‘served with a part of the 81st Division (321st RCT) on Peleliu, and at that time did not consider the troops to be of the first order, but after seeing the 27th they looked very good.’5

A couple of days later they arrived in Guadalcanal where Major General Roy S. Geiger, commanding the III Amphibious Corps (or III Phibcorps), had his headquarters. Born in Florida in 1885 – and therefore a year senior to Buckner – Geiger would celebrate his 60th birthday during the visit. Unusually he had earned a law degree before enlisting in the US Marine Corps as a private at the age of 22. During the First World War, by then an officer, Geiger was just the fifth Marine Corps aviator, leading bombing raids for which he was awarded the Navy Cross. The bulk of his service since then – apart from attending courses at the Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, and the US Army War College – had been in Marine aviation. During the early part of the Guadalcanal campaign, for example, he had led the legendary Cactus Air Force, earning a Gold Star in lieu of a second Navy Cross. In 1943 he commanded I Amphibious Corps at Bougainville, and a year later led III Amphibious Corps in the Guam and Palau islands campaigns. His capable leadership had earned him the equivalent of three Distinguished Service Medals.

Geiger enjoyed, therefore, a deserved reputation as an unflappable commander who could be relied on in a crisis. Buckner certainly had a high opinion of him and, shortly after this tour of inspection, tried to get Nimitz to nominate the Marine general as his successor if he was a casualty. The letter was sent via General Richardson, Buckner’s immediate superior, who returned it with a note stating that only the War Department had the authority to make such a decision and that, henceforth, ‘no member of the Tenth Army staff’ would even mention it to Nimitz. Buckner ‘was considerably put out, but let the matter rest, with the idea of making the designation after landing on Okinawa, over which General Richardson had no control’.6

Buckner’s first inspection was of units of the 6th Marine Division under Major General Lemuel C. Shepherd, who had fought with the 5th Marines at Belleau Wood in 1918, receiving two wounds and three gallantry medals (including the Navy Cross and the French Croix de Guerre). More recently he had served as the 1st Marine Division’s assistant commander at Cape Gloucester, and led the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade – the formation out of which the 6th Division grew – at Guam.

For Buckner’s visit, Shepherd had provided a guard of honour in full combat equipment: utility clothing, combat packs and helmets with covers. ‘They looked very well’, noted Oliver Smith, ‘and very businesslike.’ Buckner then inspected some of the 29th Marines’ quarters and watched the 4th Marines demonstrate a firing problem. ‘It involved’, recalled Smith, ‘the attack of a hill, using all infantry weapons: tanks, mortars, machine guns, flamethrowers, grenades, demolition charges, rifles and carbines. No punches were pulled and no blank ammunition was used. It was a very impressive demonstration of the [regiment’s] state of training … The men knew what they were about.’7

They then moved up the beach to observe the gunners of the 15th Marines (Artillery) firing their 155 mm howitzers directly at the mouth of a cave, a technique developed on Peleliu to soften up defenders of fixed positions before the infantry moved in. Buckner – who had received a traditional training in artillery techniques at Leavenworth and the Army War College – was expecting the Marine gunners to bracket the cave mouth before getting on target. When they instead ‘crept’ rounds towards the cave, he accused them of being ‘slow in getting on target in direct anti-cave fire’. This irritated Smith who felt that Buckner, with no practical experience of either direct or indirect artillery fire, should have held his tongue. ‘I explained to him the value of direct fire as demonstrated at Peleliu,’ wrote Smith, ‘but I do not know whether or not I convinced him.’8

After lunch they witnessed a rifle platoon from the 29th Marines assault three caves with live ammunition. First they fired machine guns and rifles to cover the approach, then a bazooka and a white phosphorus grenade, and finally a flamethrower followed by a demolition charge. ‘It was’, thought Smith, ‘a very realistic demonstration and gave the men a very accurate idea of what they would be up against in the actual reduction of cave positions.’ Buckner and his staff, he believed, ‘were thoroughly impressed’.

That was only partially true, as Buckner’s diary entry makes clear. ‘29th Regiment’, he noted, ‘had sloppy q[uarte]rs & apparently poor discipline but splendid weapon teamwork.’ The battalion exercise by the 4th Marines, on the other hand, ‘got out of hand’ as tanks and men ‘exposed themselves instead of using cover’.9

Next day, Buckner moved on to the veteran 1st Marine Division, commanded by Major General Pedro Del Valle, the son of the former Spanish governor of Puerto Rico, who had become a US citizen only in 1917.* A Marine artilleryman, Del Valle had commanded the 11th Marines at Guadalcanal and the III Phibcorps artillery at Guam, before taking over the 1st Marine Division from Major General William H. Rupertus after Peleliu. Stationed on Pavavu in the Russell Islands, Del Valle regularly brought his rifle regiments – the 1st, 5th and 7th Marines – over to Guadalcanal where there was more room to train. Buckner watched one of them conduct an exercise with artillery and tanks, and again thought the latter were ‘too much exposed’.10

The tour continued on to the Philippine island of Leyte, via the island of Biak (off the northern coast of New Guinea), where they were met by the commander of XXIV Corps, Major General John R. Hodge, a former teacher at Mississippi State whose men were still reducing the final pockets of Japanese resistance. As they travelled the island, meeting the commanders and men of the 7th (‘Hourglass’), 77th (‘Statue of Liberty’) and 96th (‘Deadeye’) Infantry Divisions, Oliver Smith noted the lack of evidence of ‘bitter fighting’. He wrote: ‘I saw no caves or pillboxes and no pockmarked terrain. There were burned or destroyed villages, but most of the buildings were of wooden construction and were not suitable for a stubborn defense.’ Of more concern, however, was the state of Hodge’s men. ‘They were excellent divisions,’ noted Smith. ‘However they had been in action on Leyte for three months and two … were still engaged in active operations. The divisions were understrength and adequate replacements were not in sight. There was considerable dysentery and skin infection. Living conditions were very bad.’11

Buckner worried in his diary that the men of XXIV Corps would get ‘no real rest’ before the Okinawa campaign, and had equipment ‘badly in need of repair’. He considered them ‘good fighters’ and had ‘great confidence in both my corps’. But he was relieved when the staff of MacArthur’s South-west Pacific Command assured him on 29 January that their first priority ‘above everything else’ was to get XXIV Corps ready for the next campaign.12

One of the low points of the tour was when Buckner was shown pictures by Hodge of the remains of US soldiers who had been ‘butchered and eaten by Japs’. Human flesh, said Hodge, had been found in Japanese officers’ ‘mess pans’. He also had pictures of Filipino men, women and children who had been ‘machine-gunned to death’ in a church. Buckner was disgusted.13

On 1 February, they flew on to Guam in the Marianas and, the following day, held a conference with Admiral Nimitz in his new headquarters on the slopes of Mount Tenjo. ‘The XXIV Corps situation was discussed,’ recorded Buckner, ‘and it was decided that no present action would be taken in view of the SW Pac[ific Command]’s promises but that the latter would be watched closely … and action taken if any promises were not lived up to. I expressed myself as preferring to enter the campaign on time but not entirely ready rather than postpone D-Day and give the Japs more time to prepare defenses. In other words, time is working for the Japs, therefore hurry.’14

That afternoon Buckner’s party left for the island of Saipan, just half an hour’s flying time from Guam, to visit Major General Thomas E. Watson’s 2nd Marine Division. En route, Buckner instructed the pilot to fly via Rota which was still held by the Japanese.† As he entered the cockpit to get a better look, however, Buckner was shocked to find the plane ‘heading for the center of the island at a very low altitude’.

‘You do realise’, said Buckner, ‘that there are 5,000 Japs on the island armed with anti-aircraft guns?’

‘No, sir,’ responded the white-faced pilot. He changed course, noted Buckner, ‘just in time’.15

On 3 February, safely on Saipan, Buckner spent the day with the 2nd Marine Division. The highlight was a divisional parade on a ‘fairly level’ piece of ground. Watson had ordered all uniforms, cartridge belts, canteen covers and packs to be ‘washed and rewashed until they fairly sparked. Rifles were absolutely spotless.’ The lead unit was Able Company of the 8th Marines. As it reached the first marker on the parade ground, its commander Captain Fred Haley should have called out, ‘Left flank – march.’ Instead he shouted ‘Column left – march’, and chaos ensued. Eventually the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hayward, stepped in, ‘halted the entire Parade, shifted gears into reverse and marched the 1st Battalion off the parade ground in the direction whence it had come’. After some choice profanities by Hayward, the parade was resumed and, this time, Haley issued the correct command. He was told later by Marines in the makeshift reviewing stand that the ‘faintest shadow of a smile’ had crossed Buckner’s features as the drama unfolded. All Haley noticed was that Buckner had ‘command presence’ and was wearing a steel helmet with three stars that glittered in the sunlight.16

Haley’s faux pas aside, Buckner was impressed. ‘Spent the whole day with General Watson inspecting the 2nd Mardiv [Marine Division],’ he wrote in his diary. ‘They appear well trained and well disciplined. I was greatly impressed with the quality of his battalion commanders.’ He told Oliver Smith that he had ‘never before had the privilege of meeting such an alert group’.17 They finally arrived back at Pearl Harbor at midnight on 4 February, having flown 14,000 miles and criss-crossed most of the Pacific, including eighteen battlefields. Overall, Buckner was ‘well satisfied with the trip’. He was now ‘familiar with the tools with which he was going to work’, and any qualms about the quality of the Marine divisions had been dispelled. His chief of operations (or G-3), Brigadier General Walter A. Dumas, would later describe the Marine divisions as ‘in magnificent condition and splendidly trained’. Bucker’s chief concern, therefore, was for his army divisions: he worried that the 27th lacked the stomach for the fight, and that Hodge’s XXIV Corps would be under-resourced when it was finally released from MacArthur’s command. But, with no time to rectify matters, he would simply hope for the best.18