All Hell Let Loose (104 page)

But the Superfortresses’ main effort was directed against cities. Some daylight raids against aircraft factories provoked a strong response – one formation was met by 233 fighters. But so poor was the performance of both Japanese planes and their pilots that the bombers sustained a loss rate which never rose above 1.6 per cent, negligible by European standards. After one raid the Japanese claimed twenty-eight B-29s destroyed, when the real figure was five. In their desperation, the defenders also adopted kamikaze tactics, with Japanese fighters ramming American bombers. Even this expedient was not always successful against the huge, heavily armoured Superfortresses: one plane returned after suffering a suicide attack with the loss of only an engine. Its flight engineer, Lt. Robert Watson, said, ‘There was surprisingly little jolt when the Jap hit us, and our navigator didn’t even know we’d been rammed.’ Weather and atmospheric conditions troubled crews more than did the enemy defences: thermals created freak effects – one Superfortress landed on Saipan in July with a section of tin roof flapping from a wing leading edge.

Much historical attention has focused upon the willingness of Japan’s pilots to sacrifice themselves, but by this stage of the war few of those who flew conventional fighters showed much appetite for the fray: American aircrew often remarked upon their lack of aggression. Tokyo was attacked again and again. On 5 June, when Kobe suffered once more, defending aircraft made their last significant appearance; the enemy had decided to husband his dwindling aircraft and crews to meet American invasion, when it came. On the night of the 15th, a raid on Osaka destroyed 300,000 homes and killed thousands of people. The USAAF found itself struggling to identify worthwhile targets still intact: oil refineries were bombed, though these were marginal when the Japanese had little oil left to process; bomber losses fell to 0.3 per cent.

Moral issues troubled the Superfortress crews no more than their commanders: with characteristic youthful facetiousness, every member of the 330th Bomb Group was presented with a certificate declaring that he, ‘having visited the Japanese emperor a total of … times to pay his respects with H.E., incendiaries and C-ration cans, having helped to clear the Tokyo slums and having aided in the spring plowing is hereby inducted into the royal and rugged order of EMPIRE BUSTERS’. In the fourteen months of the USAAF bombing campaign against Japan, 170,000 tons of bombs were dropped, most of them in the last six months; 414 B-29s were lost and 3,015 crew killed; about a hundred Japanese died for each American flier, and sixty-five Japanese cities were reduced to ashes. The 1944–45 air offensive took place chiefly because the B-29, conceived in the very different circumstances of 1942, had been created to carry it out – the Superfortress programme cost $4 billion, against $3 billion for the Manhattan Project. America’s airmen were determined to demonstrate their ability to make a decisive contribution to victory. The fire-raising attacks did not match the impact on Japan’s economy of the submarine blockade, because they took place when industry had already been crippled by lack of fuel and raw materials; but they convinced all but the intractable militarists in the Tokyo leadership that the war was lost. LeMay’s role in punishing Japan for launching a war of aggression was more significant than his contribution to enforcing its surrender.

The American landing on Okinawa was designed to pave the way for what threatened to be the bloodiest battle of the Asian war – invasion of the Japanese mainland. The island, a sixty-mile sliver of fields and mountains, lay midway between Luzon and Kyushu. Okinawa was inhabited by 150,000 people who had Japanese nationality, though they were culturally distinct. The assault that began on 1 April, Easter Sunday, after days of intense bombardment, was under Nimitz’s overall command. More than 1,200 vessels offloaded 170,000 soldiers and Marines of Tenth Army, while a vast covering fleet of aircraft carriers, battleships and lesser warships cruised offshore. To the Americans’ surprise, the initial assault was unopposed. The Japanese had learned the lessons of earlier island battles, and withdrawn beyond range of the naval bombardment; only after a week of skirmishing inland did advancing US troops meet fierce machine-gun and artillery fire. The south of Okinawa had been transformed into a fortress, successive lines of positions deeply dug on high ground. In the first twenty-four hours thereafter, the US XXIVth Corps received 14,000 incoming shells.

At the point of collision between the rival armies, the island was only three miles wide. Gen. Mitsuru Ushijima had concentrated his 77,000 Japanese and 24,000 Okinawan auxiliaries where they were almost impregnable to frontal attack, as the Americans discovered in the weeks that followed. Heavy rain set in, churning the battlefield into a sea of mud. Again and again, US soldiers and Marines thrust forward – and were repulsed. Their generals demanded that they try harder: on 6 May a corps commander visited a divisional command post and said he noted its units had suffered fewer casualties than any other formation. Officers interpreted this as a compliment until he added, ‘To me, that means just one thing – you’re not pushing.’ In its first twenty-four days on Okinawa, the division had advanced 25,000 yards and reckoned to have killed almost 5,000 Japanese; in the succeeding sixteen days,, it gained only 2,500 yards.

With the war in Europe coming to an end and the power of the United States everywhere triumphant, it seemed to Americans at home intolerable that their boys should die in thousands to wrest from fanatics a remote and meaningless piece of real estate: there was intense public anger, directed less against the enemy than towards their own commanders. By May 1945, with Hitler vanquished, Americans took for granted impending victory in the Pacific, and were increasingly cynical about the war. To prick public complacency, the US Navy urged people to take a vacation on the west coast and visit the dockyards where lay crippled and blackened warships brought back from Okinawa. But the American Red Cross found itself struggling to muster volunteers to prepare surgical dressings, and there was a chronic shortage of manpower to work in weapons plants. War weariness was a dignified phrase to describe the American domestic mood: it might instead have been categorised as boredom, the disease of democracies, whose patience is always scarce.

The men fighting on Okinawa shared the American people’s frustration. They demanded: why not stage an amphibious assault to outflank the defences? Why not use poison gas? Why fight this war, in its last phase before inevitable victory, in a fashion that suited Japanese suicidalists? None of these questions was satisfactorily answered. The officer commanding Tenth Army was the unimaginative Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner. For more than two months he conducted a campaign which seemed to its participants close kin to those of the First World War in Flanders. He launched repeated frontal attacks on fixed positions which slowly gained ground, but cost heavy casualties. The US Marine Corps fared no better on Okinawa than the army units to which it liked to condescend. For once, MacArthur was probably right when he argued that the best course would be to seal off the Japanese garrison in the south of the island, leaving it to rot while US forces addressed mainland Japan.

The Japanese never supposed that their stand on the island would achieve decisive results. They placed faith, instead, on an air assault of devastating intensity against the US fleet, in which the key role was played by kamikazes. Suicide planes had been used with some success in the Philippines since October 1944. Though the Allies found this method of war-making repugnant, from their enemies’ standpoint it was entirely rational. A post-war Japanese historian commented impatiently: ‘There have been innumerable Japanese critics of the kamikaze attacks. Most of them, however, seem to have been made by uninformed people who were content to be mere spectators of the great crisis which their nation faced.’

Against overwhelming US air power, poorly trained Japanese pilots employing conventional tactics suffered punitive losses. By planning for their deaths as a certainty rather than a mere probability, fuel loads could be halved and destructive accuracy much increased. The resultant air campaign off Okinawa inflicted heavier losses on the US Navy than had been contrived by the capital ships of the Combined Fleet at any moment of the war. In its closing months, Spruance’s ships were obliged to fight some of their toughest and most prolonged actions.

Cmdr. Fitzhugh Lee, executive officer of
Essex
, described his experience of monitoring the Japanese bomb and torpedo strikes from the huge carrier’s Combat Information Centre:

The image of Japan’s kamikazes taking off to face death with exuberant enthusiasm is largely fallacious. Among the first wave of suicidalists in the autumn of 1944, there were many genuine volunteers. Thereafter, however, the supply of young fanatics dwindled: many subsequent recruits were driven to accept the role by moral pressure, and sometimes conscription. Their training was as harsh as that of all Japanese warriors, and attended by the same emphasis on corporal punishment. Kasuga Takeo, a mess orderly who served at Tsuchitura, a kamikaze base, testified to the melancholy and sometimes hysteria which attended the pilots’ last hours. Some smashed furniture or sat in mute contemplation, others danced in frenzy. Takeo spoke of a mood of ‘utter desperation’. Peer pressure, a dominant social force in Japan since time immemorial, achieved its apogee in the kamikaze programme.

A Japanese historian wrote later, with a lyricism incomprehensible to most Westerners, about the doomed fliers of this period: ‘Many of the new arrivals seemed at first not only to lack enthusiasm, but indeed to be disturbed by their predicament. With some this condition lasted only a few hours, with others for several days. It was a period of melancholy that passed with time and eventually gave way to a spiritual awakening. Then, like an attainment of wisdom, care vanished and tranquillity of spirit appeared as life came to terms with death, mortality with immortality.’ He cited the example of one Lt. Kuno, who arrived unhappy at his operational airfield, but before his last flight became positively jaunty, and insisted on stripping his plane of all non-essential equipment. The writer expressed regret, however, that ‘a few of these pilots, unduly influenced by a grateful and worshipping public, came to think of themselves as living gods and grew unbearably haughty’.

Most were merely distressed. One young trainee mused grimly as his country’s plight became plain: ‘Now the wholesale attack by the enemy with enormous material superiority begins. The last
katastrophische
stage described in
All Quiet on the Western Front
is soon to approach.’ Likewise a twenty-year-old bomber pilot, Norimitsu Takushima, wrote in his diary: ‘Today the Japanese people are not allowed freedom of speech and we cannot publicly express our criticism … The Japanese people do not even have access to enough information to know the facts … This is just one example of the routines and demagoguery that have become the moving forces of our society … We are going to meet our fate led by the cold will of the government. I shall not lose my passion and hope until the end … There is one ideal – freedom.’ On 9 April 1945, Takushima’s plane vanished on an operation.

Yet some such young men professed that they went willingly: Lt. Kanno Naoishi, regarded by his peers as one of Japan’s most colourful fighter pilots, had rammed a B-24 and escaped with his life, but did not expect to survive for much longer. Aircrew travelled between postings with a small bag of personal effects, chart pencils, underwear, bearing their names; his was jauntily inscribed ‘personal effects of the late Lt. Cmdr. Kanno Naoishi’, for he assumed his own death, and the consequent posthumous promotion granted to every flier who fell. In one of innumerable last letters left behind by kamikazes for their families, Hayashi Ichizo wrote in April 1945: ‘Mother, I am a man. All men born in Japan are destined to die fighting for the country. You have done a splendid job raising me to become an honourable man. I will do a splendid job sinking an enemy aircraft carrier. Do brag about me.’ Ichizo died off Okinawa on 12 April 1945, aged twenty-three. Nakao Takenonori wrote likewise to his parents on 28 April: ‘The other day I paid my visit to Kotohira Shrine and had a picture taken. I told them to send the finished photo to you. Just in case, I enclose the receipt … Please do not get discouraged, and fight to defeat America and Britain. Please say the same to Grandmother. I will leave behind my diary. Although I did not do much in my life, I am content that I fulfilled my wish to live a pure life, leaving nothing ugly behind me … I wish to express my thanks to my uncle and many other people … Wishing you the best for your future.’

The US Navy found the experience of combating the kamikazes among the bloodiest and most painful of its war. Japanese airmen carried out almost 1,700 sorties to Okinawa between 11 March and the end of June 1945. Day after day, ships’ crews manned their guns to mount continuous barrages against diving, twisting attackers. Most of the pilots perished under the American fire, but a few always got through to immolate themselves on the flight decks and superstructures of the warships, with devastating effect as gasoline ignited, munitions exploded and sailors protected only by anti-flash hoods and gauntlets found themselves caught in blazing infernos. On 12 April, almost all of 185 attackers were destroyed – but the Americans lost two ships sunk and fourteen damaged, including two battleships. On the 16th, the carrier
Intrepid
was hit. On 4 May, five ships were sunk and eleven damaged. Between the 11th and 14th, three flagships were badly damaged, including the carriers
Bunker Hill
and
Enterprise
. From 6 April to 22 June, throughout the theatre of war there were ten major suicide attacks by day and night involving 1,465 aircraft, plus a further 4,800 conventional sorties. Kamikazes sank twenty-seven ships and damaged 164, while bombers sank one and damaged sixty-three. About 20 per cent of kamikaze assaults scored hits – ten times the success rate for conventional attacks. Only the overwhelming strength of the US Navy enabled it to withstand such punishment.