Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (22 page)

When the plane reached the release altitude of approximately 3,500 meters, it maneuvered toward the optimum drop point. A minute or so out, a crewman helped Akinori into the Marudai, strapped him in and gave the boy pilot a sharp salute before buttoning up the Plexiglas canopy. The apple-green cockpit of the trainer was a suffocating fit even for a modestly-sized boy like Akinori, with a lingering smell of paint, plywood and the sour adrenaline sweat of other pilots who had already taken their own wild rides in the craft.

With the Marudai banging around in the propwash and turbulence, the shrill whistle of wind around the canopy and the throb of the mother plane’s engines were so loud Akinori could hardly hear himself being scared shitless. Strapped into this sensory overload chamber, he focused his attention on the craft’s spartan instrument panel, which consisted of a compass, airspeed indicator, altimeter, a rudimentary wing turn-and-bank indicator and a signal lamp that would flash a “dot-dot-dot-dash”
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signal before the Marudai was released on a final “dot.”

The dark ruby signal lamp became Akinori’s mandala as he tried to keep his mind from flip-flopping off into decidedly unhappy landing scenarios. He sucked in one last long breath, grabbed the stick in a death grip and braced himself for the shock of release as the lamp glowed vermilion and the flash sequence began.

Dot-dot-dot-dash… … …

The explosive bolt tethering the Marudai to the mother plane blew with a sharp, jarring
crack!
in synch with the last lamp flash “dot” and Akinori’s breakfast slammed hard into his diaphragm. The dark interior and skull-rattling roar of the Isshiki Rikkō whooshed up and away and the world was suddenly all blue and white and bright light, the only sounds now a soft whistle of wind poking through the joints in the canopy Plexiglas and Akinori’s heartbeat in his throat. As the gravity acceleration of the drop leveled off into a constant velocity, riding in the craft gave less of a sensation of plummeting than it did of level flight, although repeated glances at the landscape coming up fast below reminded Akinori that he was falling almost as rapidly as he was flying, and that he had less than two minutes in the air before he had to figure out how he was going to put the Marudai on the ground in one piece.

Sobering reminders of time and gravity aside, the trainer was a joy to fly. The stubby wings gave it a roll rate like a fighter, but the twin rudder arrangement afforded excellent stability and minimal yaw. Akinori put the craft through its paces, making the most of his two minutes of airborne freedom rolling, banking, and lining up various imaginary targets on the ground through the ring and post in front of the windscreen that served as the Marudai’s sighting system. The craft flew straight and true toward anything he aimed at. When the moment of truth came, he could put this thing right down the funnel of a ship if he wanted to.

By the two-minute mark, altitude was less than 1,000 meters but airspeed was a blistering 460kph. Akinori banked the trainer through a series of turns to bleed off some speed before settling into a glide path for the tree-bordered patch of grass on Kōnoike Auxiliary Field 2 that served as the special Marudai landing strip.
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This was the most crucial stage of the descent, and everything here was timing and depth perception: keeping proper descent rate; watching approach angle; knowing when to drop the flaps (which had only two settings – up or down); and getting the craft on the ground with enough runway to work with. Dropping the flaps too soon would result in a stall, but deploying them too late would make the landing speed excessive. In one common accident pattern, the Marudai would crashland when the pilot panicked and pulled back on the stick in an instinctive braking attempt, causing the craft to flip over backward and crush its occupant when the canopy collapsed. The most common mishap, however, was when the momentum of a high-speed landing would simply end up carrying the craft past the far end of the runway and into the trees.

Remembering everything he had been taught in the preflight lectures, Akinori waited until he was about a kilometer out before dropping flaps. The Marudai decelerated rapidly, but airspeed was still 200kph when the wooden landing skid hit the grass. Akinori’s fate now depended solely upon the friction between the landing skid and the grass runway stopping the craft before it careened into the trees.

After covering almost the entire 2,500-meter length of the landing strip, the craft finally shuddered and scraped to a stop in the shadow of the scrub pines at the end of the runway. Akinori’s adrenaline buzz gave way to a profound and ecstatic relief at being alive, and his sweat-drenched flight suit suddenly felt as heavy as lead. Closing his eyes and catching his breath, he heard the
putt-putt
of a small motor in the distance. The sound got louder until a ground crewman on a navy blue motorcycle with a sidecar pulled up and helped him out of the cockpit. He rode in the sidecar back to the command post on the main base and reported the results of the drop to the CO of Ōka
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Section One, Lieutenant Akira Hirano. After his report, he went back to the barracks, flopped on his bunk and savored the fact that he was alive to enjoy the moment. Dying could wait for another day.

W
hen not buzzing airfield buildings in mock suicide dives, Marudai pilots led leisurely and comfortable lives compared with the daily grind and stresses of an aviator in a line unit engaged in regular combat. Yes, the permanent KP duty that Tokurō, Akinori, and their Ōmura classmates were assigned to as junior personnel on the pilot roster was no fun at all
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, but other than that, compared to Yokaren and flight school, they were living high on the hog. Best of all, they would never again have to deal with the kind of arbitrarily abusive discipline they had known as Yokaren and flight school cadets. They had considerable amounts of free time on their hands and wallets fat with flight and hazardous duty pay riding on their hips.

The boys had so much money, in fact, that they were often pressed to think up ways of spending it. Unlike the situation at Yokaren and
Ōmura, they did not have to pay for most amenities anymore. As tokkō personnel, they were given what would be considered “luxury” items as standard issue rations. Hefty slabs of rich chocolate, packs of cigarettes, and small bottles of Nikka whiskey were handed out a few times a week, as were emergency aviation rations,
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which were stockpiled in literal mountains of boxes in the base dry goods storehouse. Bottles of wine and saké were distributed every few days, a policy which led directly to Tokurō – like so many of his peers – finding out the hard way that he was alcohol-intolerant. Having never drunk anything more than a tonguetip’s worth of his father’s saké as a child, he was at a bit of a loss as to what to do when issued his first bottle of wine at Kōnoike. All doubts aside, appearing to be a sissy in front of his barracks mates was not an option here, so he slammed down the whole bottle in minutes flat, then promptly passed out. What he experienced after regaining consciousness at reveille the next morning was harrowing enough to make him resolve never to drink like that again, and he made it a practice from then on to trade away his booze to veteran pilots in the barracks who had no need for their candy and confectionary rations but who sometimes needed a little liquid assistance in keeping their bad dreams at bay.

Although only fifteen or sixteen years old, Tokurō and his classmates were treated as adults and, like other Jinrai pilots, given a lot of leeway as far as minor infractions of uniform regulations or military protocol lapses. For example, the majority of Tokurō’s group began smoking cigarettes after their arrival at Kōnoike, regardless of the fact that they were four or five years under the legal limit of twenty years of age for such adult r
ecreation. But just as the boozing in the barracks was overlooked, the Jinrai command staff and cadre recognized the absurdity of demanding adherence to naval smoking regulations from young men in the uniform of their country who would be asked to die in coming months. If these boys were prepared to die like men, then it seemed only fair that they be allowed to smoke and drink like them, too.

The relaxed atmosphere of the Kōnoike culture – in such stark contrast to the grisly reality of the Jinrai mission – carried over into the highly egalitarian tone of relations between officers and enlisted flight personnel, which were relaxed even by tokkō
standards. Mutual respect among pilots of all ranks and ages precluded excessive reliance on military protocol to maintain professionalism, and the use of less than rigidly formal language when addressing superiors – a lapse that would have resulted in an on-the-spot howdy-do to the kisser in most any other naval or army units – was generally tolerated at the base. Not surprisingly, the morale of the Jinrai’s personnel was quite high, even by elite naval aviation standards.
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The two officers most responsible for establishing and maintaining this almost paradoxical combination of professional pride, relaxed atmosphere and high morale were the Jinrai CO, Captain Motoharu Okamura, and Commander Shirō Nonaka, CO of the 711
th
Hikōtai (HKT), the Jinrai’s main attack element. Both officers were highly experienced combat veterans and products of the Imperial Naval Academy. But despite their Etajima pedigrees, Okamura and Nonaka were not martinet sticklers for details and regulations, nor were they too proud or haughty to receive and appreciate feedback from their subordinates – even from the enlisted ranks. Experience in the field had shown them that uptight attention to trivia and ignoring the opinion of their men were detrimental to morale and performance under the stresses of combat. And if any of the seventeen other INA men
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on base holding key positions in the chain-of-command thought otherwise, Okamura and Nonaka would see to it that they either quickly got with the program and learned to grin and bear it, or transferred out before they could do any damage.  

One INA graduate who needed no urging to approach his subordinates with a relaxed attitude was the easy-going Lieutenant Hirano, whose even temperament and good communications skills were probably why he wa
s pulled from the Jinrai combat roster and put in command of Ōka Pilot Section One, which had just received a consignment of thirty-odd Yokaren fifteen- and sixteen-year-old PO3’s straight out of flight school. Hirano was joined by a cadre of seven Naval Reserve ensigns whose skills as potential educators were also held in esteem by Jinrai HQ, and these eight officers were ordered to stay behind at Kōnoike to see after their fledglings’ training needs when the main attack element of the 721
st
flew south for deployment in Kyūshū on January 20. The lonely reality of being left out of the fight, combined with saying farewell to comrades and fast friends for what might very well be the last time, had the Section One cadre members suffering something of a dip in morale. Adding to the gloom, a thunderous silence prevailed on base in the absence of the charismatic and wildly popular Commander Nonaka, who had taken with him to Kyūshū his beaming smile, tea ceremony utensils, repertoire of joyfully shrieked profanities and the replica samurai war banners he often used as motivational props. But Hideo Suzuki, one of the ensigns in Section One, came up with an idea for countering the blues afflicting Lieutenant Hirano’s cadre members. The ensign, a native of the entertainment and hot springs resort of Atami, Shizuoka Prefecture, considered himself to be an expert in matters of rest and recreation, and he approached the mustachioed but still rather naïve young INA graduate one day during these late January doldrums with some measure of confidence in his plan.

“You know, Lieutenant,” Suzuki began, “submariners always get great R and R after they come back from a combat mission, don’t they?”

Hirano blinked at the non sequitur for a moment.

“Yes. I suppose they do. So?”

“Well, Lieutenant, wouldn’t you agree that Ōka pilots are just as elite as submariners?”

“Uh, certainly. Unquestionably.”

“But we won’t be coming back from our missions.”

“No, I don’t suppose so.”

“Well, sir, it just doesn’t seem fair, and you know it isn’t healthy for us all to be cooped up on this lonely base all the time. Who knows what kind of effect all this gloom might be having on our fighting effectiveness?”

“Hmm…I agree that is a matter of some concern,” Hirano said, blinking some more, twisting his mustache a bit. “But you know I can’t authorize any leave. The base is top secret, and so is our unit. There’
s no precedent at Kōnoike for personnel taking leave. Nobody has left since we came here in November, outside of official business or a family emergency.”

Suzuki had not yet begun to fight.

“Well, that’s just my point, sir. Begging the lieutenant’s pardon, don’t you think it would be good for our morale if we
could
get out of here for a spell? Maybe to a hot springs resort somewhere? I have family connections in Atami. I can set it up. And there wouldn’t be any security risk if we all go together. You’ll be there to supervise us, after all.”

“I don’t know, Suzuki, I don’t know. I’ll take it up with command at the next CO’s meeting, but don’t get your hopes up.”

One night a few days later, the lieutenant showed up in the officer pilots’ quarters wearing a big smile.

“Pack your bags, boys. We’re going to Atami tomorrow,” Hirano said to cheers. “And the navy is paying for everything.”