Kamikaze (10 page)

Floating Chrysanthemums

Okinawa, Japan

April 6, 1945

Pearl Harbor was nothing like this!

The knights of
bushido
had launched the opening attack of the Pacific War to bring glory to Japan, and all had yearned to see the Rising Sun at high noon. But now, these modern samurai teetered on the knife-edge of shameful defeat, with Okinawa the last island in the path of the Yankee avengers before they set foot on Nippon’s sacred soil. As it had during the Mongol invasion of 1281, survival of the Chrysanthemum Throne depended on the Divine Wind’s sinking of the enemy’s fleet, which was now hovering just 240 miles south of the home islands and 550 miles from Tokyo itself. Surrender was unthinkable, so the call went out for pilots willing to make the ultimate sacrifice. These men—these kamikaze—would be sent on a mission from which they’d never return, in planes fueled for a one-way trip and loaded down with five hundred pounds of explosives.

“If in doubt whether to live or die, it is always better to die.”

“One life for many.”

“Death simultaneously with a mortal blow to the enemy.”

“To die while people still lament your death; to die while you are pure and fresh; this is truly
bushido.
”

So many young men had applied to die for their emperor that there weren’t enough flying coffins to meet the demand. Some showed their commitment by writing their applications in blood. They were sent off in aircraft so obsolete they looked like paper planes. Some of the planes were designed to drop their landing gear on takeoff so it could be picked up and reused for other suicide runs.

What greater glory is there than to give your life for your country? To die for your emperor, a god in human form, and in so doing become a god yourself? If you perish as a kamikaze, you’ll be revered as a hero at the Yasukuni Shrine. The desperate odds only enhance your death, for the more obvious the futility, the greater the glory of your sacrifice. And why die in the coming invasion when you can sink an American ship and take all those Yankees with you?

“Hissatsu!”

And so they gathered in secret at a vast network of underground hangars, tunnels, and barracks scattered about Formosa and Kyushu to launch a great kamikaze offensive—code-named Ten-Go (Heavenly Operation).

“If I go away to sea, I shall return a brine-soaked corpse.”

That was their anthem.

The strategy was simple: The Japanese troops on Okinawa—more than a hundred thousand of them—would dig in and pin down the invading Marines in a costly war of attrition. Anchored just offshore, the ships of the American fleet would be forced to act as bodyguard and lifeline for their troops inland. They would be sitting ducks for a series of mass-formation kamikaze attacks.

Wipe them out, and there’d be no invasion of Japan.

“Hissatsu!”

So now they stood among their bomb-laden planes, these young heroes in their baggy flying suits, with aviation helmets sheathing their heads and goggles pushed up on their brows to bare their eager faces.

To prepare himself for his watery sepulcher, each pilot wrote farewell letters and poems to loved ones at home. “I have been given a splendid opportunity to die. I shall fall like a blossom from a radiant cherry tree.”

Some enclosed relics, like a lock of hair.

Then, to emulate the samurai, each pilot was given a folded white scarf to tie around his head. The
hachimaki
would keep his eyes clear of sweat and hair. Around his waist was knotted a thousand-stitch sash, a belt pieced together with one stitch from each of a thousand women to symbolize union with the kamikaze.

Then came a final salute and, for “spiritual lifting” before liftoff, a purifying cup of sake.

“Floating chrysanthemums,” they were called, the men who flew the successive waves of Ten-Go. “Purify your heart and be cheerful,” each human bomb told himself as he
took flight. “Every deity and the spirits of your comrades are watching intently.”

As he began his dive toward his offshore target, each pilot would shout at the top of his lungs:

“Hissatsu!”

“Sink without fail!”

“Hell birds!” yelled the Yankee lookouts, to warn their shipmates as the suicide squadron zoomed in.

From the high, thick walls of Shuri Castle, a fifteenth-century fort that had been home to the feudal kings of Okinawa, Genjo Tokuda watched the battle rage at sea. Five days ago—April Fool’s Day for America—the fleet had disembarked four divisions of soldiers and Marines. Because no opposition had met them on the beach or in the fields of white winter barley and colorful flowers, the Marines had turned north while the army headed south.

It was time to spring the trap.

One low and one high, the first pair of kamikazes came screaming out of the clear afternoon sky. The ships below opened up with everything they had: five-inch guns, 40mms, 20mms, even rifles. Shining like single grains of rice, both planes rode the Divine Wind through the storm of steel, the edges of their wings cutting through the assault like swords. The sky filled with so much ack-ack that daylight disappeared in a million black puffs. Down, down, down came the plane from above, trailing a banner of smoke and flames as it took hit after hit. Suddenly, the
Zero exploded in a ball of fire, and what was left showered down on a Yankee ship.

Meanwhile, the other plane skimmed across the churning sea as spouts of water spewed up from low-level shots. Like a surface torpedo zipping through the air, the kamikaze struck a destroyer amidships at the waterline. The impact crumpled the fuselage like a scrambled egg, popping the cap off its fuel tank and hurling it a hundred feet into the air. The exploding bomb blew a huge hole in the destroyer’s hull, which set off its stores of munitions and oil products. A geyser of gas from the plane’s ruptured tank ignited with a whoosh, sending flames high enough to char sailors on the bridge, fifty feet above.

The warship was dead in the water.

Damage enough.

Then the bow drifted one way and the stern the other.

The destroyer was cut in two.

Now the sky was scattered with many grains of rice. Explosions from the battle brought Japanese defenders to the mouths of their hillside caves. The men with Genjo Tokuda let out a cheer. Swords and bayonets were raised in triumph behind the ramparts of Shuri Castle.

The Special Attack Squadron hit the Yanks with a vengeance. One after another, in wave upon wave, the planes rushed in, like giant bullets fired from a massive machine gun in the sky. Most blew apart and crashed into the water, but that was no triumph for the Yanks if even one got through. A shell exploded underneath a kamikaze’s belly, lifting it clear of the masthead below, but its bomb went
down the destroyer’s forward stack and turned it into a giant blowtorch.

“He did it!” roared a soldier in Shuri Castle.

Tokuda swept his binoculars from ship to ship to ship, focusing in on the faces of the men under attack. Not since the days of grappling hooks and hand-to-hand swordplay on men-of-war had sailors faced such a personal ordeal. Every Yank was afraid the kamikazes were aiming for
him.

Pandemonium was rife on the targeted ships. Here, there, and everywhere, plummeting planes slammed home. Deck guns were firing so furiously that their barrels glowed. Tracers by the thousands tore through the puffs of flak as—
bam, bam, bam, bam
—gunners kept up an unflinching barrage. Tokuda watched as a wheel bounced off the wreckage of one plane and decapitated a flak thrower.

“Sayonara!” he shouted.

Fire crews struggled to douse the raging infernos. On the ships with lost power and useless hoses, the Yanks were forced to lug water in bucket brigades. Men shored up bulkheads, plugged leaks, and jettisoned anchors, torpedoes, and other weight to try to save their sinking wrecks. Medics rushed to help the severely injured, and some got burned to death in fire traps. Decks grew so hot that men ran to the toilets to cool their feet. Those catapulted overboard or forced to abandon ship dog-paddled frantically to stay afloat in a sea of sludge, oil, and blood. Castaways got crushed by downed planes or squeezed between the hulls of rescue boats. Many were drowned by high seas, and the worst of the burned survivors simply gave up, wriggling out
of their life jackets because they could no longer stand the agony of salt in their wounds.

“Die, Yankee, die,” cursed Tokuda.

Pilots killing themselves in order to kill Yanks—this was a new kind of warfare the Americans couldn’t comprehend. It was written all over the dumbfounded faces Tokuda saw in his binoculars. Were these diving madmen religious fanatics? Drunks? Drug addicts? Hypnotized robots? What macabre evil subverts human nature and turns men against their instinct toward self-preservation?

It’s alien to Western values.

It’s inhuman.

It’s weird.

It’s
bushido,
thought Genjo Tokuda.

Even more spectacular were the night attacks in the weeks that followed. The greatest seaborne battle in the history of warfare climaxed off Okinawa. Almost three hundred ships were hit and five thousand Americans killed by floating chrysanthemums sacrificing themselves to defend the Chrysanthemum Throne.

Twilight was the best hour for kamikaze raids. Radar warnings did little to help the Yankees see. The prelude—a chorus of air-raid sirens from the ships—signaled to the Japanese that it was time to scramble to the hillsides to witness the fireworks. The sight reminded Tokuda of Ryogoku, a Tokyo district known for its annual pyrotechnics over the Sumida River.

“Hell birds!”

All eyes scanned the sky.

When the sirens blared, the searchlights of the ships went on and began trying to pick out the oncoming suicide wave. Out blinked the non-essential lights of the fleet. The kamikazes thundered in with a metallic roar and were met by the booms of pom-pom guns flashing on the sea. Anti-aircraft fire gushed into the sky, lighting it up like a Roman candle. Bursts of flak above, high-caliber explosions below—what a magnificent festival the battle was tonight. It seemed inconceivable that anything could penetrate such a barrage, but just then a single plane hurtled down like a brilliant meteorite from space.

“Keep going!” Tokuda urged.

And keep going it did, slamming into a munitions ship as an oily fireball of bombs, fuel, and the pilot himself. A multi-colored fan of flames lit the horizon, and a thunderclap shook the island. Burning fiercely, the ship split in two, then sizzled in billows of steam as both sections sank with the crew.

The soldier beside Tokuda fell to his knees.

“Well done. Thank you.” He worshipped toward the sea.

“Each soldier will kill at least one American devil.”

That was the order from Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima, the officer in command on Okinawa.

And to make sure the Yanks got the point, Radio Tokyo broadcast propaganda using the American nicknames for
the Japanese strongholds of the Shuri Line, the eight-mile arc that spanned from Yonabaru, on the east coast, through the town of Shuri to the port of Naha, on the west coast.