A World at Arms (169 page)

Some of the Japanese military plans were offensive in nature. The balloons, sent aloft with incendiaries attached to burn out American and Canadian forests as they landed in North America after being carried across the Pacific by the prevailing winds, have already been mentioned. As these began to land in the United States and as the Americans learned at least some details of Japanese experiments with biological warfare agents, there was initially great concern in the American government.
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These worries quickly ended as the balloons failed to start the great fires they were supposed to bring and it turned out that they were not carrying disease germs.

On a more dangerous note, the Japanese began in December 1944 with the training of a special outfit, the Yamaoka Parachute Brigade, of about 300 men who were to be landed on the California coast near Santa Barbara and were expected to shoot their way to the Douglas and Lockheed aircraft factories in the Los Angeles area to destroy these before being killed.
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In May of 1945, this project for a submarine-carried operation in California was altered to an airborne assault on the Marianas. A massive attack involving some 2000 men carried on several hundred planes was to be mounted against the B-29 bases in the Marianas with the objective of destroying the planes and facilities there in an operation somewhat similar to, but far larger than, the one aimed at Tacloban airfield in the Leyte campaign. Codenamed “Damocles,” this project became known to American intelligence because the destruction of Japanese land communications by bombing obliged the Japanese to send messages by radio and these were intercepted and read.
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Just before the operation was to be launched, Admiral Halsey with the 3rd Fleet was ordered north for a special attack operation on August 4, 1945, in which almost 400 Japanese planes were destroyed or damaged.
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The Americans did not want to risk having a Japanese suicide squad seize the atomic bombs being assembled on Tinian.

The projects for assaults first on Los Angeles aircraft factories and subsequently on American air bases in the Marianas involved a suicide formation. It was only one of a very large number of suicide projects which the Japanese military developed from the fall of 1944 until the end of the war. The special air attack tactics, generally referred to as kamikaze, have already been mentioned. Though not much employed in the defense of Iwo Jima, they were to play a major role in the Okinawa
campaign; but the largest number–over 5000 airplanes–was being held back and readied for the American invasion of the home islands.
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In addition, two other types of suicide weapons were being designed and built especially for the last-ditch defense of Japan, the oka (or ohka) guided bomb and the kaiten suicide assault torpedo.
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Accepted by the naval staff already in February 1944, the kaiten was a modification of the very powerful Japanese naval torpedo generally referred to as the “long-lance.” Stretched out, the torpedo was fitted with a tiny conning tower and held one man who was to steer the torpedo into the target. Originally brought to the scene of action by submarines especially fitted to carry two to six attached to the outside of the hull, the kaiten were later to be used from land against invaders. Never very effective in their first configuration, they might indeed have proved a most dangerous weapon against .ships off–loading landing craft near an invasion beach.

The ohka was a steered mini–plane carried to the vicinity of a target by a two-engined bomber, released in the air, and aimed by its own pilot, who activated rocket engines which gave the ohka such speed in the last moments of flight that it could in practice not be shot down. The problem with this device–after the first fifty had gone down with the carrier
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-was that the airplanes which carried the ohka were generally so slow and had to come so close to Allied ships to release their ohkas that most were shot down on the way by the experienced American and British pilots.

The major reliance was, however, on the suicide airplanes which were to have such an impact on the Okinawa battle and which were expected to play an even greater role when the Allies tried to land on the home islands of Japan. In any consideration of their pilots–as well as those for the kaiten and ohka–one must remember that this was no sudden decision immediately implemented; but that in most cases weeks and even months intervened between the voluntary or coerced decision to participate in such an operation and the final action, with the latter not infrequently preceded by missions recalled or aborted because of weather conditions or changed orders. Those who were to die had to steel themselves more than once. There were no signs of a break in morale in either navy or army–about half of the suicide candidates came from each–and as yet no willingness to surrender at the top.

Why were the Japanese still fighting and to what end? The series of defeats in February and March followed by the American landing on Okinawa and the Soviet denunciation of the Neutrality Pact led to the fall of Prime Minister Koiso Kuniaki. His successor, Admiral Suzuki Kantaro, was a man whose heroic role in the Russo-Japanese War of
1904–5 made him immune to charges of cowardice if he steered the country toward peace; and this may well have been a contributing factor to his selection. But Japan was not ready to end the war; Suzuki expected it to last several more years.
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The Tokyo government was being urged by some of its diplomats in Europe to end the war by whatever means it could and as soon as possible. The example of Germany in April and May of 1945 was, in the eyes of some, hardly one that Japan should emulate.
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The response of Tokyo, however, was that war would continue after Germany’s surrender. The treaties with Germany, which the latter had broken by giving up, were null and void, but Japan would fight on.
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Some rumors of peace negotiations via Stockholm and Switzerland, with the American OSS chief Dulles involved in the latter, were cut off by the Japanese government.
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The key point was that, whatever the interest in peace, the idea of surrender was as yet unacceptable.
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Even such a strong advocate of ending the war as Marquis Kido, the Lord Privy Seal, drew up peace terms on June 8, at a time when he expected an early collapse of the last Japanese resistance on Okinawa, which assumed that there would be no occupation of Japan and which were predicated on a procedure involving detailed negotiations, not a surrender.
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If in private there was as yet no disposition to surrender, in public the process of mobilization for defense against invasion continued apace. The kamikaze were the heroes of the hour, and on June 12 the Diet passed legislation requiring all males 15–60 and all females 17–40 years old to join the Peoples’ Volunteer Fighting Corps. Simultaneously, an equivalent of martial law was declared as the nation prepared to ward off the anticipated assault.
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By mid-June, both the Japanese and the Americans had obtained at great cost a small preview of what it would all be like in the bloodiest campaign of the Pacific War; the fight for Okinawa.
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The Japanese expected an American invasion of Okinawa, which with its large airfields within easy range of the home islands and its excellent harbor was an obvious target for an operation preliminary to the assault on Japan itself. The 32nd Army under General Ushijima Mitsuru had over 100,000 men to defend the island. His strategic concept, coordinated with that of army and navy headquarters, was simple. There would be no attempt to defend the beaches of the long, narrow island or its relatively flat central and northern portions. Instead, three defensive lines had been established and were being developed in the mountainous
southern portion of the island which had been under Japanese control since 1895. Once the Americans were stalled in front of these lines–in which the Japanese would be practically immune to naval gunfire–the expenditure of supplies and ammunition needed for any attack on them would make the Americans wholly dependent on their great ship-borne supply system. This was to be decimated by massive suicide attacks from several hundred kaiten and even larger numbers of kamikaze planes flown from Kyushu. Weakened by loss of supplies and deprived of full air support by destruction of their aircraft carriers, the American landing force would succumb to a counter–attack from the Japanese garrison which had husbanded its strength in the south of the island.

The Americans expected a bitter fight and were prepared for some of it, but once again intelligence substantially underestimated the strength of the Japanese army to be fought.
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Anew army, the 10th, under General Simon B. Buckner, the former commander in Alaska, was organized to control the army and marine divisions assigned to the operation. Wide-ranging preliminary air operations against bases in Kyushu were provided, and a prior landing on the Kerama Islands off the southwest coast of Okinawa was to provide a base for repairing naval ships damaged in the operation and long-range artillery support for the fighting on the island itself. This operation, successfully carried out on March 26–27, turned out to be even more important than anticipated. On Kerama Retto the Americans found and seized about 300 suicide boats designed for use against the landing craft in combination with the kamikazes from the air–a welcome and easy victory but one which pointed to dangers ahead.
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A tremendous naval bombardment was to precede a four–division landing on the western beaches of central Okinawa, selected for their general suitability and closeness to two of the airfields on the island. Supported by a vast naval array and backed up by further marine and army divisions in reserve, the landing force was to seize the airfields and cut the island in two. The marine divisions would head north and the army divisions head south. It was hoped that after a hard battle in the beachhead area, the over 150,000-man attacking force could defeat the Japanese garrison, estimated at less than half this strength, in a fairly short time.

An enormous armada of American and British warships preceded the
invasion, launching sweeping raids over southern Japan in late March 1945. Numerous Japanese planes were destroyed in the process, but others survived, having been carefully dispersed and concealed. Japanese attacks on the Allied task forces included large numbers of kamikaze, which put three American carriers out of action, and ohka bombs which proved useless when the planes carrying them were shot down. The kamikaze proved much more effective against American carriers with their thin decks than the British carriers with their heavy steel decks. The latter carried fewer planes but proved much more resistant to the planes which crashed themselves onto their superstructure. The B-29s of the 21st Bomber Command in the Marianas also flew support missions instead of urban air raids. For days preceding the landing itself, the landing area was bombarded in a manner that would have been most effective had it been applied to Iwo Jima. Then, on L-Day, April 1, 1945, operation “Iceberg” began as a fleet of over one thousand ships stood off the invasion beaches.

The initial landings proved both easier and simpler than anticipated. There was practically no resistance, and the two big airfields in central Okinawa were captured on L-Day. The island was quickly cut in two, and the marines turned north while the army divisions headed south. The former had little opposition as they cleared the whole of northern Okinawa by April 13; only small Japanese units had to be destroyed. The push south quickly ran into trouble.

From their initially seized portions of central Okinawa, the XXIV Corps quickly came up against the Machinato line, Ushijima’s first defensive position anchored on the west coast town of Machinato and taking advantage of the rugged ridges crossing the island to its east coast. In three weeks of bitter and costly fighting, the army divisions, soon reinforced by an additional division, battered their way forward. By April 25, Ushijima decided to abandon the Machinato line and draw back to his most heavily defended position, the Shuri line, across the island in the mountain ridges covering the capital of Naha on the west coast and the old fortifications of Shuri in the center.
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The 10th Army battered its way into the outlying portions of the Shuri Line in the last days of April and early May. Ushijima, who may have thought the Americans more weakened by the fighting than they really were, launched a major counter-offensive on May 4 which was repulsed with heavy casualties and deprived him of reserves. It also forced him to reveal many of the hitherto concealed artillery positions. In the following weeks, the Americans went back to the offensive, fighting against a determined enemy and relying on superior fire–power and large-scale use of flame throwers to crush one position after another.

While this battle was raging, another one was taking place on and over the seas around Okinawa. In periodic waves, hundreds of Japanese planes attacked Allied naval ships in conventional or more often kamikaze attacks. In this fighting, in which almost two thousand planes hurled themselves at their targets, the American navy suffered its heaviest casualties of the war and lost a number of ships. The morale effect of these attacks was also considerable, but there were critical shortcomings on the Japanese side. The planes tended to concentrate on the destroyers and destroyer escorts which were out on picket duty to warn of approaching planes. Often kamikazes continued attacking such ships obviously already disabled instead of heading for the larger units these pickets were protecting. The Allies; did what they could to cope with what most American naval leaders considered Japan’s most effective weapon of the war. Air strikes were flown against the bases of the kamikaze from land bases and carriers; a complicated picket system of warships and submarines was established; evasion tactics for ships under attack were developed; but the most important and effective defenses were always the same. Carrier planes tried to shoot down as many of the attacking planes as they could; the crews on the ships stood to their guns, putting up tremendous volumes of fire which destroyed many of the kamikazes; and the crews, especially the damage control parties, tried their best to cope with the terrible damage often caused by the planes which exploded on and in the ships.