2. At Sea

USHIJIMA’S 32nd Army represented the static defence of Okinawa. The hub of Japanese strategy, however, was an air assault upon the invasion fleet on a scale hitherto unseen in the Pacific theatre. The Americans were almost entirely dependent on carriers for fighter cover—the airfields captured ashore remained for weeks within range of Japanese artillery, and could handle few planes. Marc Mitscher’s task groups could sustain combat air patrols of not more than 60 to 80 fighters. Against these, the Japanese launched a succession of strikes of which the first, on 6 April, numbered 700 planes, 355 of them kamikazes.

From the destroyer Howorth, Yeoman James Orvill Raines wrote one of many passionate letters to his wife, Ray Ellen, back home in Dallas. “We are back up at Okinawa now, we came back very fast (can’t tell why yet). Anyway its colder than a well-digger’s seat in Montana but everything is OK. No sleep last night due to Bogies but things are squared away now. Bye darling. More later. Poppie.” Raines, twenty-six years old, had been a somewhat rootless child of the Depression who settled into a career as a journalist just before the war came. On 6 April, a kamikaze ploughed into Howorth’s gun director, killing sixteen men and blowing Raines, badly burned, over the side. He died in the water, in another man’s arms. “Your husband,751Howorth’s captain wrote later to Ray Ellen, “was very popular among officers and men on board this ship. There certainly was no finer bluejacket to be found anywhere.” It is to be hoped that Mrs. Raines never knew these were the same phrases offered to the families of every one of Howorth’s dead. Yet how could a captain personalise such missives, when they had to be dispatched wholesale?

About four hundred Japanese aircraft broke through the CAP on 6 April. Six ships, including two destroyers, were sunk. Eighteen more were damaged, almost all by kamikazes. This was only the first round of a struggle which persisted throughout the ground campaign for Okinawa, and indeed after its ending. Radio warnings of imminent enemy attack announced “skunks” by sea, “bogies” by air. Thus, perhaps: “Bogey raid four, estimated fifty, bearing 185, distance 30 course 110, speed 300, estimated high, 1114, apparently circling fleet, out.”

American defences inflicted fearsome losses. Balloons held aloft a forest of cables over the anchorage, to impede the enemy’s approach. Each attack was met by a barrage of fire. Ships’ five-inch batteries, firing shells detonated by radio-guided proximity fuses, were joined by massed 40mms and 20mms, filling the sky with black smoke balls, littering decks with mountains of spent cases. Often, the gunners engaged at point-blank range. By scores, Japanese planes collapsed into the sea. But some always escaped, to crash onto their targets with appalling effect. Fighter direction had become a sophisticated art, yet it was also an imperfect one. Cmdr. Bill Widhelm752, operations officer of a carrier task group, described how radar detected one Japanese bomber a hundred miles out, at 22,000 feet, and tracked it to forty-three miles. The plane then vanished from every screen in the fleet, was briefly picked up again at sixteen miles, and thereafter only when “about fifteen feet off the stern of the ship.”

Tens of thousands of American seamen who badly wanted to live were stunned by the onset of hundreds of Japanese pilots who seemed happy to die. “I don’t believe I’ll ever forget753 the noise a plane made as it came racing in,” wrote an officer on the carrier Bennington, “something like when a plane flat hats a field or a house. But instead of trailing away in the distance, it ends with a sudden startling ‘splat!’” An officer watched one Japanese pilot fall without a parachute: “He seemed to float down754, arms and legs extended like a sky-diver, his flight jacket puffed out by the air, falling at such a slow rate that we wondered if he might be able to survive.” The destroyer Luce found itself with three Japanese aircrew prisoners, of whom one proved to be an ex-Berkeley student who spoke fluent English. An officer told a Japanese still eager to commit suicide: “You’re out of the war now, you know,” but the man seemed obsessed with the loss of his family honour. Another prisoner was Korean, a most reluctant kamikaze conscript, who had successfully averted his intended fate. Luce’s crew were wryly amused to find themselves spoon-feeding enemies on whom they had lavished so much verbal hatred. When the prisoners were collected by Marines, however, they received much rougher treatment.

An awed sailor gazed on a destroyer grievously mauled by air attack: “Bombs and shells755 and even a suicide plane had plowed into her. Her entire superstructure was a mangled mess of melted steel except for the bridge and radio shack. She was crying and bleeding like a dog set upon by a pack of wolves. She needed blood…her men were burned, shot, cut, torn and shocked. To me, sitting there so apart from everything but my imagination, she took on human nature. She was a good ship. She was hurt badly and was ashamed but yet proud that she had stood up under all the beating they had given her.”

As kamikazes circled Luce, her crew saw “meatwagons” closing in—rescue ships anticipating the worst. Cook Freeman Phillips froze at his 20mm gun position. Virgil Degner, his “oppo,” holding an ammunition canister, started to say something: “His lips were moving756—I had the earphones on—and I didn’t know what he was trying to say…Then the explosion came…a piece of metal flew by and decapitated him. Just like that, his head fell off at my feet. I looked down…and I believe his mouth was still trying to tell me something. His body was still up, holding onto that magazine for what seemed like thirty minutes, but I know it was just a few moments. Then the body began to shake, and it just fell over. Soon it just floated away as the water came up.”

With so many U.S. fighters airborne, radar operators were often unable to distinguish enemy planes slipping in towards the fleet from every point of the compass. “They scatter like quail757,” said U.S. fighter pilot Ted Winters of Lexington, “and come in from wherever they are staying in the clouds.” Anti-aircraft gunnery, especially from transports, was wildly undisciplined, and resulted in frequent “friendly fire” mishaps. When a plane struck a ship, its detonation was often followed by a gusher of flaming gasoline, exploding munitions, carnage among sailors protected by nothing more than helmets, goggles and anti-flash hoods. Hands working below suffered some of the most terrifying experiences. A few minutes after a series of devastating detonations overhead, on 6 April, William Henwood in the engine room of the minesweeper Emmons heard the stop bell: “Someone yelled down the hatch758 and told us to secure and get the hell out. We secured the fires, stopped the fuel oil pump and left. When I first came out of the hatch I was shocked and scared. I saw men swimming in the water and I thought we were going down.” The ship had been hit by five kamikazes.

A second big attack on 12 April, by 185 enemy aircraft, resulted in the destruction of almost all the Japanese planes for the loss of two ships sunk and a further fourteen damaged, including two battleships. A flock of kamikazes picked a victim, then launched a coordinated assault of the kind which struck the destroyer Abele. Her crew shot down two of twenty attackers, but suffered a suicide strike and a jet-propelled bomb hit, which caused the ship to break in two and sink. After Douglas H. Fox was also hit, Cmdr. Ray Pitts wrote: “The first instinct of a destroyer skipper759 who has been blitzed on radar picket station is to…feel that something is fundamentally wrong with the picture. He looks down into the smouldering ruins of his new ship, sees the dead lying in mute rows along the passageways, and wonders if perhaps he has failed either the ship or the dead.”

On 16 April, during another mass onslaught, the destroyer Laffey was pinpointed by thirty enemy aircraft. Four kamikazes struck her and two planes dropped bombs. The ship survived, but suffered ninety-four casualties. Later that day the carrier Intrepid was hit. Between big attacks, smaller-scale raids were mounted, which cost the Americans extravagant quantities of ammunition, and kept weary crews hour after hour at quarters, adding sunburn to the troubles of those on upper decks. Denied hot food, they chewed candy, nursed their bladders—no man could leave his post at Quarters—prayed that today it might be another ship’s turn and not their own. James Phillips said: “I was so tired760 I thought death would be a relief, it would be over. I had the thought, ‘Well look, man, just don’t shoot at me no more and you can have this whole thing.’” At nightfall it became routine for destroyers to ask permission to sail at flank speed into the wind with all doors and scuttles open for a few minutes, to blow swarms of accursed flies out of the messdecks.

An assault on 4 May resulted in five ships sunk and eleven damaged, all save one by suicide planes. Between the eleventh and the fourteenth, three flagships were damaged—the carriers Bunker Hill and Enterprise, together with the battleship New Mexico. “The fighting off Okinawa became routine761,” wrote an American carrier commander, “but it was probably the most dangerous brand of routine to be found in the history of WWII.” “Jocko” Clark’s flag lieutenant sometimes removed bad news from the overnight “Ultra Board” on the bridge until his admiral had eaten breakfast. Suicidal courage was not the exclusive prerogative of the Japanese. On 10 May, two Corsairs intercepted a twin-engined enemy “Nick” at 35,000 feet. One was unable to get within range, and the other’s guns froze. Rather than lose his quarry, the American pilot deliberately drove into the Nick’s rudder and stabiliser, causing it to crash. The Corsair made an emergency landing without its propeller. The pilot survived to receive a Navy Cross.

When the kamikaze offensive began in October 1944, most of the Japanese pilots were trained and experienced aircrew. Six months later, “special attack unit” commanders had perceived the folly of sacrificing such men. Most suicide pilots were now tyros, trained only to fly a course to a target. More experienced fliers either attempted conventional bombing missions, or provided fighter cover for the kamikazes. Lt. Toshio Hijikata, eldest son of a post office official, had joined the navy from university as a volunteer in 1943. Mocked by elite career officers as a mere hired gun, he rejoined by asking defiantly which of them could fly better than himself. Thanks to a long spell as an instructor in Korea, Hijikata joined 303 Squadron on Kyushu in April 1945 with the benefit of some four hundred hours on Zeroes already in his logbook, a preparation which did as much as luck to keep him alive through the months which followed.

The unit’s principal task was to fly high cover for the Okinawa kamikazes. They took off from Kagoshima, rendezvoused with attack planes from nearby Kanoya, and settled down to conserve fuel as best they could on the 350-mile run south. At best, they could achieve only ten minutes’ endurance over the battle area. Careless fuel-users found themselves ditching in the sea on the way home. Hijikata had few illusions about his own prospects. “I expected to die762. I knew we were going to lose the war—so did everybody. Nobody said it aloud, everybody thought it.” He loved flying his Zero, but was acutely conscious that it was outclassed by the American Hellcats. Hijikata was credited with shooting down one enemy fighter, but on most missions he and his comrades could hope only to buy time and airspace for the kamikazes to do their business. Often, his eyes misted with tears as he gazed down at the doomed men flying below him. A significant number were his own former flight students.

Some kamikazes at Kanoya, waiting to sortie, passed their last days on earth helping local peasants with the harvest. Once, a mother and daughter arrived from Tokyo to visit the girl’s fiancé. Base officers disingenuously told the women that her young man had already left for deployment to a forward air base near Okinawa. She was obliged to content herself with touching the bamboo bed on which the young pilot had slept. The girl was not informed that he would not be returning from his only operational flight. Petty Officer Hachiro Miyashita, an aircraft maintenance specialist, spent the spring and summer of 1945 at the base of 601 Naval Air Squadron, a kamikaze unit. Pilots’ parting instructions decreed blandly: “Once you take off from here, you will not be coming back; you must leave your effects in an orderly state, so that you will not make trouble for others, or invite mockery. You must arrange matters so that after your deaths, people will say: ‘As you would expect from a member of the suicide force, he left everything in perfect order.’” So precious were planes, however, that pilots were instructed to return to base if they could not identify a worthwhile target. A significant number turned back with engine trouble, real or imagined. That the pilots were to die was not in doubt, but some received a rain check.

Hachiro Miyashita and his comrades found kamikaze take-offs unfailingly emotional. Ground crews paraded beside the runway, waving caps as the pilots taxied forward with open cockpits, the white scarves that signified their sacrifice fluttering in the slipstream, hands outstretched in farewell. After the engines faded, those left behind drifted uneasily away, sometimes chatting tersely about the departed pilots, already in the past tense: “He was a good chap”…“What a naughty boy so-and-so was.” The ground crews found it hard to work closely with pilots through a few weeks of training, then launch them to death. A snapshot which Miyashita himself took, of a young airman standing on the wing of his plane as the ground crew fuelled it for the last time, shows a face tense and drawn, as well it might be.

“The whole thing was very moving,” said Miyashita. “Once, just as the pilots boarded their aircraft to start up, one shouted in dismay: ‘My watch isn’t working!’ For a flier, a watch is as indispensable as a compass. The man shouted to the group gathered to watch their take-off: ‘Who’ll lend me a watch?’ There was a moment of embarrassed hesitation. Watches were precious. The loan would not be repaid. Then the base commander broke the tension, shouting, ‘Take mine!’” He ran to hand up this parting sacrifice to the young man’s cockpit.

Vice-Admiral Ugaki, now commanding all navy “special attack” forces, inspected a kamikaze unit on 27 February. He recorded in his diary with grotesque banality: “I was perspiring in the spring warmth, while warblers sang in the bushes and larks twittered. Whatever is happening to the war, nature comes and goes as always.” The admiral often professed to be moved to tears by the kamikazes. Yet he was unembarrassed by dispatching them to die, because he had committed himself to follow them at an appropriate moment. His diary entries leapt from strategic fantasy to humdrum personal detail, in a fashion which invites the derision of posterity. “11 April…in the light of so many reported crashes on enemy carriers, there can’t be many undamaged ones still operating.” Ugaki spent hours cantering across the countryside on horses lent to him by the army, or wandering the fields with a shotgun in search of game. On 13 April he was so irked by his own poor marksmanship that he wrote crossly: “Maybe it is time for me to give up shooting.”

Ugaki, like Onishi and others responsible for the kamikazes, had convinced himself that this manner of making war represented an acceptable norm. “By the spring of 1945763, there seemed nothing unusual about the idea of suicide missions,” said fighter pilot Kunio Iwashita, who flew over Okinawa. “It was a desperate situation. We were losing the war, and pilots were constantly being killed in combat. We felt that a man might just as well sacrifice his life deliberately as lose it in an air battle.” Yet Iwashita’s view was far from universal. It would be mistaken to suppose that all young Japanese were eager to follow this path to death, or applauded it. Most of those who flew suicide missions to Okinawa had been drafted, accepting the assignment with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

One night a young pilot wandered into the barrack room of Lance-Corporal Iwao Ajiro, with whom he had shared army basic training. “You’re a lucky guy764, working in signals,” said the young man gloomily. “I’m supposed to fly tomorrow.” Ajiro sought to console him with a shrug and the familiar catchphrase of the Japanese soldier: “We’ll meet again soon enough at Yasukuni.” As it happened, Ajiro noted later, “That boy survived. But he did not expect to, and he did not want to die.” Toshio Hijikata and his squadron held their CO, Kigokama Okajima, in deep respect, partly because he refused to nominate his own fliers for kamikaze duty. “The job of fighter pilots is to fight,” Okajima growled. Senior officers said harsh things to the squadron commander about letting down the navy and the country, but his view prevailed, and his pilots were grateful. Their own duties continued to offer a likelihood of death, but not its certainty.

Most Japanese formations approached Okinawa as high as they could fly, maybe 20,000 feet, but American combat air patrols were always above them. As the sky grew black with the puffballs of massed anti-aircraft fire from the fleet, the suicide bombers dived steeply. Once Hijikata saw a dogfight developing below, and was looking for an opportunity to join it when, without warning, enemy bullets raked his wing. Seized by a moment of naked fear, he pushed the plane into a banking descent and drove towards the sea with a Hellcat on his tail. He was almost in the water when the American broke away. Atsuo Nishikane and Hamashige Yamaguchi, two of the squadron’s best fliers, had chased him off. “In the air, they saved my neck again and again,” said Hijikata. “We were real soulmates. Like most of the best pilots, on the ground those two were quiet men, but in the sky they were sensational.” He nursed his damaged plane carefully home to Kyushu.

Between 6 April and 22 June, the Japanese mounted ten big suicide attacks by day and night, involving 1,465 aircraft, together with conventional air attacks by a further 4,800. About four-fifths of these flew from Kyushu, one-fifth from Formosa. George Kenney, MacArthur’s air chief, rejected repeated requests from the navy for increased effort against the Formosan bases, because SWPA’s intelligence officers refused to accept that these were being used against Okinawa. The kamikazes sank 27 ships and damaged 164, while bombers sank 1 and damaged 63. A fifth of all kamikazes were estimated to have hit a ship—almost ten times the success rate of conventional attacks. If suicide operations reflected Japanese desperation, it could not be claimed that they were ineffectual. For the sacrifice of a few hundred half-trained pilots, vastly more damage was inflicted upon the U.S. Navy than the Japanese surface fleet had accomplished since Pearl Harbor. Only the overwhelming strength of Spruance’s forces, together with the diminishing skills of Japanese aircrew, enabled the Americans to withstand losses on such a scale. Many of those who attacked the American fleet were barely capable of keeping their planes in the air until they found a target. Once an American fighter pilot made an interception, so poor was the enemy’s airmanship that it was not unusual for a single Hellcat to shoot down four, five, six Japanese aircraft. Added to that, now that so many kamikaze planes were crewed by pressed men, their spirit and determination visibly diminished. The British naval staff analysis of the campaign said: “What in the Philippines had been765 a crusade was at Okinawa deprived of all humanity and the virtue went out of it.”

The cardinal Japanese misjudgement was target selection. Although the kamikazes achieved notable successes—for instance, sinking two ships loaded with ammunition for the shore battle—many contented themselves with falling upon radar picket destroyers covering the island. These were much easier to reach, since their function demanded lonely station-keeping, far forward of the carrier task forces or transports. Destroyer losses cost seamen’s lives, but the ships were almost infinitely replaceable. For all the trauma of those weeks of incessant alerts, infernos on stricken vessels, at no time did it seem plausible that the kamikazes could reverse the dogged American advance to victory.

INSHORE, the Japanese navy’s only contribution to the campaign was made by scores of suicide boats, kindred of Yoshihiro Minamoto’s, launched against American ships in the anchorage. A handful inflicted damage, pinpricks by comparison with the aerial onslaught. Just once, in the first week of the campaign, did the Imperial Navy’s surface forces attempt to join the battle. On the evening of 6 April off Kyushu, the U.S. submarine Threadfin reported a sighting of two large warships and eight destroyers, beyond torpedo range and heading south. By this stage of the war, Magic intercepts were diminishing. Close to home, whenever possible the Japanese communicated by landline rather than radio. Yet it was not hard to guess where this force was probably heading. At 0815 on 7 April, a reconnaissance aircraft from Essex spotted the Japanese squadron again, this time heading west across the East China Sea. It was composed of the great battleship Yamato, undistinguished veteran of Leyte Gulf, with an accompanying cruiser. It seemed overwhelmingly likely that the enemy intended to turn south in time to approach Okinawa at first light next day.

Through the next four hours, the force was tracked. At 1017, as expected, it turned south. At first, Spruance proposed to hold back his carrier aircraft to maintain their kamikaze watch, and dispatch American battleships to deal with Yamato—a strange, possibly romantic notion, never explained. Carrier commander Marc Mitscher successfully argued, however, that the Japanese squadron should be targeted by his strike aircraft, even at the cost of weakening the CAP over the fleet. Soon after 1000, the first of 280 planes took off from the flight decks of Mitscher’s Task Force 58: San Jacinto, Bennington, Hornet, Belleau Wood, Essex, Bataan, Bunker Hill, Cabot and Hancock. There were 132 fighters, 50 bombers, 98 torpedo-carriers, launched in successive waves. Fifty-three planes from Hancock lost their way, and did not attack. Nonetheless, the Americans were able to send more planes to address the Yamato group than the Japanese had deployed against Pearl Harbor. “We looked like a giant crop of blackbirds hunting for Farmer Ito’s granary,” said Lt. Thaddeus Coleman of Essex. The sky was murky—flying conditions were so poor that on Kyushu, kamikaze operations had been cancelled for the day. At 1220, after a difficult flight through rain squalls, the American air fleet found the Yamato group. “Sugar Baker Two Charlies,” the air group commander called to Bennington’s Helldivers as he surveyed the pattern of fast-moving ships below, “you take the big boy.”

Below them lay the largest fighting vessel in the Japanese navy and the world, sister ship of Musashi, sunk at Leyte Gulf. “We took a chance and launched766 where we would be if we were the Yamato,” wrote Mitscher’s chief of staff, Commodore Arleigh Burke. “The Yamato thought the same thing—she was there.” The battleship displaced 72,000 tons and was protected by armour up to two feet thick. She was served by a crew of more than 3,000 men, boasted a main armament of nine 18.1-inch guns, and possessed as much relevance to the last year of the Second World War as Nelson’s Victory. Now flying the flag of Vice-Admiral Seiichi Ito, fifty-four-year-old commander of 2nd Fleet, and accompanied by the cruiser Yahagi, the huge ship had been dispatched to Okinawa on the most ambitious kamikaze mission of all. The ship was not intended to return, even in the implausible event that it survived the attentions of the enemy. Her orders demanded that she should beach herself after doing her worst to the American fleet, landing surviving crew to join the defenders ashore. Her sailors had been instructed to sharpen bayonets, in anticipation of an infantry role. The squadron was denied air cover, on the grounds that every plane was needed to support kamikaze operations.

The men aboard Yamato shared none of their commanders’ fantasies. Though Ito and his senior officers accepted their fate in the spirit of samurai, they were privately disdainful of the waste of ships and lives. In an unusual moment of mercy before the ship sailed, fifty newly embarked cadets, fresh from the naval academy, were sent ashore along with the sick. Although those leaving Yamato expressed formal regrets, few of their shipmates were fooled. They perceived the sense of reprieve among those who boarded launches for the pier. Some sailors, especially older ones, dispatched their possessions home. Almost all wrote a parting letter. In Yamato’s gunroom, at sea on the night of 6 April, an ironic voice demanded: “Which country showed the world what aircraft could do, by sinking the Prince of Wales?” There was a vogue for Tolstoy among the battleship’s officers, and Ensign Sakei Katono was reading War and Peace. Ensign Mitsuru Yoshida, assistant radar officer, sat deep in a biography of Spinoza, haunted by thoughts of all the other books he would never live to read—he was a former law student at Tokyo University. Yoshida, twenty-two, had a friend aboard serving as an interpreter, monitoring American voice transmissions. Kunio Nakatani was a nisei—Japanese-American—from Sacramento, caught by the war at a Japanese university. Two of his brothers were serving with the U.S. Army in Europe, and in consequence Nakatani was considerably bullied by shipmates. The young man showed Yoshida a letter from his mother in the U.S., which had reached him via Switzerland: “How are you? We are fine767. Please put your best effort into your duties. And let’s both pray for peace.” Nakatani now sobbed as he recoiled from the irony of facing death at the hands of fellow Americans.

Through their last days afloat, the crew continued to exercise energetically, especially in damage control. On the night of 6 April, throughout the ship there was heavy drinking and some dancing, a carouse of the damned. In several messes there was folksinging, emotional renderings of “Kimigayo,” the national anthem. The captain, Rear-Admiral Kosaku Ariga, visited the gunroom bearing a large flask of sake for his young ensigns. There were ritual choruses of “Banzai!” Yet for all the fatalism on Yamato, there was scant enthusiasm. Amid the chronic stench of humanity in closed compartments, some men wondered aloud why, if this was indeed so noble a voyage, Combined Fleet commander Admiral Toyoda had not sailed with them. They debated whether American submarines or planes would send them to the bottom: “We shall be as vulnerable as a man walking alone on a dark night carrying only a lantern.” Rice balls were served for breakfast on the morning of 7 April, with the promise of bean soup and dumplings, their favourite battle rations, at supper.

Twenty officers and ratings, stiff with tension, clustered on the bridge. Admiral Ito sat in his high chair with arms folded, a posture he retained through the hours that followed. When they heard that an American sighting of the squadron had been radioed in plain language, rather than encoded, the little command group was irked by the casualness with which the enemy was treating them. At noon, as sailors ate rations at their stations, Ito said with a broad smile: “We got through the morning all right, didn’t we?” Forty-one minutes later, under intermittent rain and a sky empty of protective Japanese aircraft, the opening wave of Mitscher’s armada struck.

The first American bomb destroyed Yamato’s air-search radar, leaving the ship’s guns dependent on visual direction. “Using tracer to correct fire,” wrote Ensign Yoshida bitterly, “is like trying to catch butterflies in one’s bare hands.” Yamato’s gunnery had never been impressive—at Leyte Gulf the ship failed to score a hit. Now, while every weapon was in action, the relentless concussions of the main armament and clatter of light AA accomplished little. Again and again, bombers pounded the battleship and her escorts as they steered on southwards, while fighters strafed their upper decks. The curtain of Japanese fire scarred many American aircraft milling overhead, but downed pathetically few. On the ship, however, the carnage was appalling. Inspecting the radar compartment after an explosion beneath the bridge, Yoshida found only unrecognisable wrecked equipment and human body parts.

Torpedoes began to slam into Yamato’s hull, causing massive damage below. Soon a stream of men were emerging onto the upper deck. Those above were reluctant to slam hatches on the “black gang” still trapped in the engine rooms, but the order was given to flood some compartments anyway. Turrets were traversed by hand when power failed. Exposed light AA-gun positions were strewn with dead and wounded. Yoshida remembered reading a training manual which stated that “a poor ratio of hits is due to human error768 and inadequate training.” An officer had scrawled beside those words: “This is nonsense. Lt. Usubuchi.” The upper decks were deluged with water from near misses, and blood from shattered bodies. Half Yamato’s bridge crew was dead. Yoshida found most of the survivors, some crudely bandaged with towelling, lying prone at their posts as a third wave of American attackers struck.

Belowdecks, the wardroom crowded with wounded suffered a direct hit from a bomb which wiped out its occupants. The upper works were reduced to twisted wreckage. Wide-eyed men stumbled in the midst of the steel shambles, helpless to aid the maimed and dying. Yoshida slapped the face of a seventeen-year-old rating, to stop his convulsive shaking. Far belowdecks, storeroom clerks gorged themselves on sake. What else could they do, and what was the liquor to be saved for? Ito, the admiral, remained in his chair on the bridge even as a fresh explosion hurled flying bodies against him. At the helm was Chief Quartermaster Koyama, an elderly prodigy. Koyama had served as a sailor at Japan’s great victory of Tsushima, against the Russians more than forty years earlier. Now, in the last minutes of his life, he witnessed a historic Japanese defeat. Ito’s chief of staff, Rear-Admiral Nobii Morishita, a famously brilliant staff officer and poker player, said sardonically of the American assault: “Beautifully done, isn’t it?”

The torpedo-carrying Avengers pressed their attacks with great courage. They customarily attacked at three hundred feet, but that afternoon many crews flew much lower, braving the ships’ fire to release torpedoes well inside the usual fifteen hundred yards. One of the pilots, Lt. John Davis of Bunker Hill, said afterwards: “On the way in I was working for the navy, and on the way out I was working for myself and the crew.” Later waves of American attackers were poorly directed and coordinated, because radio communication became confused. Pilots simply chose their own targets, with the Avengers concentrating torpedoes on the biggest. Yamato pumped thousands of gallons of seawater into a hull bulge to correct a list. The ship maintained way, and continued to fire her main armament, but was drastically slowed. Four destroyers and the cruiser Yahagi were already wrecked or sunk, while those American pilots with fuel to spare machine-gunned survivors in the water. At 1410, a bomb jammed Yamato’s rudder and all power failed. The huge ship swung impotent, listing steeply, her port side awash.

Yoshida noticed a man-sized strip of human flesh hanging from a range finder. Another procession of American planes swung in to attack. On Yamato’s bridge Ariga kept repeating monotonously: “Don’t lose heart. Don’t lose heart.” Ito said abruptly, gratuitously: “Halt the operation.” His chief of staff saluted. Ito returned the compliment, then shook hands with several officers before leaving the bridge for his quarters, never to be seen again. His adjutant began to follow, only to be restrained by others who said: “Don’t be a fool. You don’t have to go.” The captain ordered all hands on deck, then lashed himself to the chart table. Two navigating officers did likewise. The survivors on the bridge cried “Banzai!” thrice. Then Yoshida and several others left the bridge for the last time. Hundreds of men began to seek safety from the foundering ruin of their great ship, still subjected to strafing. No vessel of the Japanese navy carried rafts or lifebelts, for such accessories might suggest that it was desirable to survive defeat.

Dazed, shocked, blackened figures thronged Yamato’s deck, where a half-naked officer stood gazing up at their American tormentors. Hysterical, waving a sword, he cried “Banzai!” again and again. Another officer was amazed and irked to see some sailors sitting on the foredeck, eating hardtack or smoking, passively awaiting their fate. The ship tilted more steeply still, causing men in scores to fall or jump into the sea, while gun mountings and great fragments of twisted metal broke loose and tumbled overboard. Yoshida wrote: “At the instant Yamato, rolling over, turns belly up and plunges beneath the waves, she emits one great flash of light and sends a gigantic pillar of flame high into the dark sky…Armour plate, equipment, turrets, guns—fragments of the ship fly in all directions. Soon, thick dark brown smoke, bubbling up from the ocean depths, engulfs everything.”

“The prettiest sight I’ve ever seen,” said American Avenger gunner Jack Sausa. “A red column of fire shot up through the clouds, and when it faded Yamato was gone.” Fires are thought to have triggered a huge magazine explosion as the battleship turned turtle. The smoke pall was visible on Kyushu, a hundred miles distant. It was 1423, less than two hours after the first American attack. Groaning, choking men struggled through the oil coating the sea, “like thrashing around in honey.” Some used their last strength to drown themselves. A few sang. As smoke cleared and the sky brightened, an officer cried: “Hooray! We’ve arrived in the next world!”

The last American attackers departed at 1443, leaving just two Mariner reconnaissance floatplanes circling the battle scene. One of these, defying the nearby enemy, landed to rescue a downed American pilot. The surviving Japanese destroyers were much slower to pick up their countrymen struggling in the water. They awaited formal orders from the mainland to break off the Okinawa operation, which were received only at 1750. Some 269 of Yamato’s men were then recovered, while 3,063 perished, along with 1,187 of the escort crews. After the war, Yoshida wrote to the mother of Nakatani, his dead nisei friend from Sacramento. She answered: “Nothing gives me greater joy770 than to know that Kunio fought to the very end…and that he attained a death of which, as a Japanese, he need not be ashamed.” Mothers need to believe such things to make their losses endurable, yet this was the most futile of all kamikaze operations. The only consolation for the Japanese was that during the American planes’ absence from the fleet, a suicide plane hit and badly damaged Hancock, killing seventy-two men and injuring eighty-two. Yet by the time the carrier’s aircraft returned at 1830, having missed the Yamato battle, thanks to effective damage control the ship was able to receive them. The destruction of Ito’s squadron771, still 250 miles north-west of Okinawa, cost Mitscher’s squadrons just ten planes and twelve men killed. Back on the Yorktown, Air Group 9 sang: “Yamato been a beautiful BB, but BB, you should see yourself now!” It had been a turkey shoot. Mitscher was irritated that four Japanese destroyers escaped.

THE DESTRUCTION of Yamato was a mere sideshow, alongside the continuing battle of attrition between kamikazes and American ships. A major attack by 115 aircraft on 27 April disappointed the Japanese. Only ten ships were damaged. The attackers did better on 3 and 4 May, sinking three vessels and killing 450 sailors. At 1005 on 11 May, the first of two Zeroes ploughed into the flight deck of Mitscher’s flagship, Bunker Hill, starting devastating fires which raged through the ship. Thirty planes on deck carried 12,000 gallons of fuel, all of which burned or exploded. In a succession of skilful manoeuvres, Captain George Seitz saved Bunker Hill from absolute destruction by swinging her broadside to the wind, to prevent smoke and flame from engulfing the hull. A steep turn caused tons of fuel to spill harmlessly overboard, but fires burned for hours, asphyxiating scores of men belowdeck, including many firefighters. In the engine and boiler rooms, miraculously undamaged, crews laboured to maintain power in temperatures of 130 degrees. The Bunker Hill attacks cost 396 men killed and 264 injured. One of them might have been the post-war movie star Paul Newman. He was ordered to the ship as radioman/gunner in an Avenger with a draft of replacements shortly before the attack, but by a fluke of war was held back because his pilot had an ear infection. The rest of his detail died. As with Franklin, hit on 19 March with the loss of 798 lives, on Bunker Hill brilliant damage control kept the hulk afloat, but removed Mitscher’s carrier from the war.

Just three days later, when another wave of twenty-six kamikazes descended, nineteen were shot down by fighters, six by gunfire. Yet one got through, exploding beneath the forward elevator of the admiral’s new flagship, Enterprise, and inflicting damage which required her to withdraw from operations. The Americans were fortunate that this was their last fast carrier loss. The overall cost of kamikaze operations to the U.S. fleet off Okinawa was appalling: 120 ships hit, of which twenty-nine were sunk.

THE CAMPAIGN was the first of the Pacific war to which the Royal Navy made a modest contribution. Hitherto, the British Eastern Fleet had merely conducted tip-and-run raids against Japanese installations in the Dutch East Indies and Malaya. Now four British carriers, along with two battleships, five cruisers and escorts, began to operate against Japanese airfields on Formosa, and suffered their share of assaults from kamikazes. “Task Force 57,” as Vice-Admiral Bernard Rawlings’s force was known, represented an attempt to satisfy Winston Churchill’s passionate desire for Britain to play a visible part in the defeat of Japan. Its beginnings were inauspicious. Admiral King was bitterly hostile to any British presence in the Pacific, on both nationalistic and logistical grounds. It required the president’s personal intervention to force the U.S. Navy to accede to the prime minister’s wishes.

Thereafter, in the first months of 1945 it proved embarrassingly hard to muster a British fleet for Pacific service. The Royal Navy, like its parent nation, was overstretched and war-weary. Australia’s shameless dock labour unions delayed the deployment of both warships and the fleet train of supply ships. When Rawlings’s ships finally joined Spruance, they were hampered by design unfitness for tropical conditions, which inflicted chronic hardship on crews. British Seafire and Firefly aircraft were too delicate for heavy labour, and British carriers embarked far fewer planes than their American counterparts. Ships like Illustrious had been fighting since 1939, and were troubled by old wounds—in mid-April, the carrier was obliged to sail home. Rawlings’s fleet struggled to keep up with its vastly more powerful allies. In an early series of air strikes, the British lost forty-one aircraft in 378 sorties, a casualty rate which would have been deemed disastrous even by Bomber Command. Sir Bruce Fraser wrote later in his dispatch: “There can be little doubt772 that the Americans are much quicker than we are at learning the lessons of war and applying them to their ships and their tactics…As a result the British fleet is seldom spectacular, never really modern…”

A British war correspondent, David Divine, joined the battleship King George V after weeks aboard Lexington, which refuelled and resupplied at sea in winds of up to Force 6, in a fashion reflecting the superb professionalism of the 1945 U.S. Navy. Now, Divine watched in dismay as “KGVwent up astern of one rusty old tanker, which appeared to be manned by two Geordie mates and twenty consumptive Chinamen, and it took us, I think, an hour and a half to pick up a single buoyed pipe-line, fiddling around under our bows.” Replenishment operations at sea remained an embarrassment for the British. In a placid sea, an American carrier refuelled in two hours. A British one required all day. A proud service found itself struggling to play a bit part in a vast American drama. Vice-Admiral Rawlings wrote later of the “admiration and…it must be admitted…envy” with which he followed the sinking of Yamato. Flying mishaps inflicted an alarming rate of attrition—in their first twelve strike days, nineteen British planes were lost to flak, twenty-eight in accidents.

The Royal Navy discovered that its most significant assets in Pacific combat were its carriers’ armoured flight decks. The extra weight reduced their complement of aircraft, but rendered them astonishingly resistant to kamikazes, in contrast to their fir-decked American counterparts. When a Zero dived vertically onto the carrier Indefatigable on 1 April, its aircraft were able to resume landing within an hour. Though HMS Formidable suffered damage and fifty casualties when it was hit on 4 May, the ship was soon operational again. On 9 May, Victorious was hit twice and Formidable a second time, by kamikazes which eluded patrolling British fighters. Here too, the Royal Navy found that inexperience cost dear. Fraser’s Seafires and Hellcats shot down a steady stream of intruding Japanese, but lacked the mass which the Americans possessed, together with the refined fighter-direction skills. There was a further twist to British tribulations when the Canadian government announced that only those of its citizens who chose to do so need continue to serve against the Japanese once the war against Germany was over. Despite offers of increased pay, 605 ratings of Rawlings’s Canadian-crewed cruiser Uganda insisted upon exercising their right to go home. Only with difficulty was the ship persuaded to stay on station until a relief arrived.

The British Pacific Fleet’s difficulties mounted with every week of operations. Crew morale suffered from the heat, discomfort and overcrowding: “Except for those engaged774 in flying operations, it was proving to be a dull war.” At the end of April, Admiral King renewed his efforts to remove the Royal Navy from operations against Japan by dispatching Fraser’s ships to support the Australian landings on Borneo. This proposal was defeated only by direct British appeals to MacArthur and Kinkaid. At the end of May, to the acute embarrassment of Fraser and the British government, battle damage, crew exhaustion and mechanical failures obliged Rawlings’s squadron to withdraw to Sydney for extended repairs. When TF57 departed, it had completed just eleven air-strike days, dropping 546 tons of bombs and firing 632 rockets. It claimed 57 enemy aircraft destroyed, for the loss of 203: 32 to suicide attacks; 30 in a hangar fire; 33 to enemy flak or fighters; 61 in deck landing accidents; and 47 to “other causes.” It was a sorry story, indeed one of the most inglorious episodes of the Royal Navy’s wartime history. The misfortunes of the fleet reflected the fact that Britain, after almost six years of war, was simply too poor and too exhausted to sustain such a force alongside the United States armada. A British squadron returned to Halsey’s command only in the last days of July.

OKINAWA was declared secure on 22 June, eighty-two days after the landings of Buckner’s assault force. The U.S. Navy had lost 4,907 men killed, the army 4,675, the Marines 2,928. Another 36,613 men had been wounded ashore, over 8,000 at sea. A further 36,000 soldiers and Marines became non-battle casualties, many of them combat-fatigue cases. Buckner was unable to celebrate the victory he had yearned for. A Japanese shell killed him, unmourned, in the last days. His Japanese counterpart, Gen. Misomu Ushijima, also perished. He and his chief of staff committed ritual suicide in their headquarters cave on 22 June. Nine of his staff officers shot themselves. Dispute persists about how many Okinawan civilians died, because it is uncertain how many were evacuated before the battle began. Estimates range from 30,000 to 100,000, together with around 70,000 of the island’s defenders. About 1,900 kamikazes died in their assaults on the U.S. fleet off the island. A total of 7,401 Japanese surrendered, almost half of these local Okinawan conscripts.

Some Japanese officers, including Kouichi Ito, retained a lifelong conviction that Ushijima had been mistaken to allow the Americans an unopposed landing on Okinawa. Yet, given the overwhelming power of the amphibious force, it is hard to believe that any Japanese deployment could have prevented American assault units from getting ashore, or indeed from conquering the island. The defenders could aspire only to what they accomplished—the extraction of a bitter price for American victory. The only tactical option which Buckner never explored, and which might have enabled his forces to prevail more quickly, was that of launching attacks in darkness. The difficulty, however, is that night operations demand exceptionally high motivation and tactical skills, to prevent those carrying them out from simply disappearing, “going to ground,” rather than pressing home an assault. It is doubtful that Tenth Army possessed such qualities.

Photo Insert Two

KAMIKAZE

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A Japanese pilot prepares for his final mission.

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A suicide plane narrowly misses the U.S. carrier Sangamon off Okinawa.

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The USS Franklin afire.

ASHORE ON OKINAWA

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Marines in one of the innumerable bloody assaults.

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Civilians await their fate.

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A Marine helps a woman and her baby to safety—most often, such people died.

JAPANESE SAMURAI, EAGER AND OTHERWISE

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Toshio Hijikata.

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Yoshihiro Minamoto.

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Haruki Iki.

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Renichi Sugano on a locomotive of the notorious Burma Railway.

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Harunori Ohkoshi as a teenage volunteer on his way to Iwo Jima, amid a grave but proud family group.

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Kisao Ebisawa, the frustrated Okinawa suicidalist.

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Toshiharu Konada, who hoped to pilot a kaiten human torpedo against the allied invasion fleet.

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Yoshiko Hashimoto (second row, right) with her family, who paid a terrible price for the 9 March 1945 USAAF firebombing of Tokyo. With their parents are Chieko (second row, left), Hisae ( front row, centre) and Etsuko ( front row, right).

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Hachiro Miyashita, who dispatched many suicide missions.

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One of Miyashita's own photographs of a sombre young pilot watching the fuelling for his plane’s last flight.

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USAAF B-29s release incendiaries over Japan in May 1945.

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USAAF B-29s formidable commander, Major-General Curtis LeMay.

CHINESE

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Bai Jingfan, her husband and other guerrillas.

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Li Guilin.

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Zhuan Fengxiang and her husband.

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Liu Danhua.

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Weng Shan, proud in his American uniform.

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“Tieizi”—Li Dongguan.

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Australians search enemy corpses for documents in northern Borneo, June 1945.

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Mountbatten, astride a captured Japanese gun, addresses British troops in Burma.

THREE OF SLIM’S SOLDIERS

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John Randle.

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Brian Aldiss ( far right).

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Derek Horsford.

KEY FIGURES IN THE FINAL ACT

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The Big Three at Potsdam.

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Henry Stimson.

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Leslie Groves and Robert Oppenheimer.

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Hirohito.

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Anami.

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Marquis Kido.

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For Japan, the distinction between the carnage wrought by the Tokyo firebomb attacks.

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The atomic bomb on Hiroshima was less decisive than it has seemed to posterity.

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Distraught Japanese hear the emperor’s broadcast on 15 August 1945.

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The surrender ceremony in Tokyo Bay aboard the battleship Missouri.

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American sailors celebrate victory on board the USS Bougainville.

At every level, from high command to fighting soldiers, sailors and Marines, Americans emerged from the battle shocked by the ferocity of the resistance they had encountered, the determination of Japanese combatants to die rather than accept defeat. “People out here attach more importance to the Kamikaze method of attack as an illustration of the Japanese state of mind than as a weapon of destruction,” New York Times correspondent William L. Laurence wrote from the Pacific. “Considered carefully, the fact that literally thousands of men, many young and in their prime, will go out alone on missions of certain death…is not one calculated to breed optimism.” Some historians, armed with knowledge of subsequent events, argue that the capture of Okinawa was unnecessary. It did not bring Japan’s surrender a day closer. Yet to those directing the operation at the time, it was perceived as an indispensable preliminary to invasion of the Japanese home islands. Okinawa exercised an important influence on the development of events thereafter, through its impact upon the civilian, military and naval leadership of the United States. To capture an outpost, American forces had been obliged to fight the most bitter campaign of the Pacific war. The prospect of invading Kyushu and Honshu in the face of Japanese forces many times greater than those on Okinawa, and presumably imbued with the same fighting spirit, filled those responsible with dismay. At the end of June 1945, staff planners assumed that Operation Olympic, the invasion of Kyushu, would take place four months thence. To the U.S. chiefs of staff, however, any alternative which averted such necessity would be deemed welcome.

So dramatic was the succession of events which crowded into the last months of the war that it is hard to grasp the notion that, in June, the prospect of the atomic bombs did not loom foremost in the consciousness of the U.S. chiefs of staff. At that stage, their hopes of achieving victory without Olympic rested chiefly upon blockade, incendiary air bombardment and Russian entry into the Japanese war. All of these represented more immediate realities and more substantial prospects than the putative fulfilment of the Manhattan Project. The course of the Second World War had so often astonished its participants that no prudent men, even those at the summits of Allied power, could feel assured of how its last acts would play out.

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