Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (32 page)

News of the navy’s Shikishima
Flight
taiatari
attacks during the Leyte battles provided one spark of hope in all of the doom and gloom. The pilots had first heard about taiatari tactics as official army policy in early November, after the Fugaku and Banda tokkō bomber units were dispatched to the Philippines and squandered in under-escorted attacks. Although that particular piece of news had been disheartening, the navy “special attacks” were showing promise. Fukagawa was convinced of the basic merit of the taiatari concept, and in discussions on the topic, he and his fellow pilots at Akeno felt that tokkō was
atarimae
– perfectly understandable, given the circumstances – and they were eager to kick in and do their part, especially after hearing that IMA classmates at the other army fighter school in Mito, Ibaraki Prefecture were already being organized into tokkō squadrons.

The Akeno pilots would not have to wait long to prove th
eir enthusiasm. One night in late November, an impromptu formation was called in the IMA ’44 officers’ quarters. Forming a long file in the narrow corridor of the single-story wooden structure, Fukagawa and the other thirty or so residents of the barracks were addressed by the Akeno CO.

“Things have not been developing well for us on the war front,” the CO said, pacing up and down the line, the floorboards creaking in the silence between his words. “Therefore, High Command sees no choice but to employ body-crashing tactics against the Americans. Anyone who wants to volunteer for this, take one step forward.” 

Despite all of Fukagawa’s mental preparation in previous weeks for the eventuality of such a moment, the suddenness of its arrival left him momentarily blank. There was no time to mull over a response, and in any case, the atmosphere in that tight hallway was too tense for anyone to speak up even if they had made up their mind not to go. In such a situation, standing in ranks and in full sight of one’s peers, it was absolutely inconceivable that a Japanese officer – especially an IMA graduate – could have ever stood fast and refused to “volunteer.”

“I don’t even remember telling my feet to move,” Fukagawa-san recalls of the moment, “It was like a strong gust of wind whooshed up from behind the ranks and blew everyone forward a step, almost in perfect unison.”

Satisfied with the response, the CO nodded with a kind of grim relief, informed the pilots that their names would be added to official tokkō rosters, then turned on his heel and walked out into the night. The episode was never mentioned again, and Fukagawa was soon too busy training to think much about the ceremony’s significance during the next few months.

*****

The Flight Leader course at Akeno officially started on December 1, 1944, with instruction concentrating on formation flying, bomber interception and other aerial combat tactics. Also included in the training regimen – somewhat ominously – were simulated diving attacks on stationary ground objects. But while the tokkō runs were only simulated, the bomber interception drills were most decidedly intended to be on-the-job training, and for the task, the pilots were given their first rides in the highly touted Hayates.

Beginning in January 1945, the anti-B-29 patrols
were flown mainly over the Nagoya area, as this was the metropolitan area closest to Akeno. While the trainees never ran into any Americans during these patrols, the missions gave them much needed stick time on the new Hayates.

The Hayate was a quantum leap in Japanese fighter design – a beautiful airplane that more than lived up to all of its hype to deliver as advertised. Powered by a Nakajima Ha-45 engine delivering up to eighteen hundred horsepower on a War Emergency Power setting, the plane was fully 100km/h faster than its Hayabusa predecessor, and more importantly, had an almost 20km/h edge on the American Hellcat. Highly maneuverable, with excellent climb rate and diving speed (crucial for prudent escape from an unfavorable combat situation), the plane also provided decent armor to protect its pilot, which was a rarity in Japanese military aircraft at the time. Another confidence-instilling feature of the design was its main armament of two 12.7mm (equivalent to American .50 caliber) and two wing-mounted 20mm cannon, which gave it enough firepower to knock anything up to and including the mammoth B-29 out of the sky. For the Akeno trainees, their introduction to the plane was something akin to a religious experience.

“I’ll never forget the first time I opened up the throttle all the way and heard the take-off roar of that big engine,” Fukagawa-san recalls with a distinct gleam in his eyes. “There was nothing like it. We felt omnipotent in that plane. Everyone was saying ‘Bring on the Hellcats!’.” 

As
Fukagawa and his classmates accumulated flight hours in the Hayate, most of them seem to have conveniently forgotten about their tokkō pledge, instead believing that they were destined for post-graduation assignments to lead fighters into combat with line units. Reality for most turned out to be distinctly less glamorous. In Fukagawa’s case, orders were cut for him to return to his old barracks at Kita Ise Field to begin duty as an instructor on Akatonbos at Flight Basic. No previous teaching experience was necessary – the sheer numbers of college student volunteers the army was beginning to push through its
Tokubetsu Sōjū Minarai
Shikan
flight program
[166]
were beginning to swamp the regular cadre there, and they needed all of the qualified pilots they could get to help pick up the instruction slack.

The Tokubetsu Minarai program – or
Tokusō
, as it was usually abbreviated – was created in late 1943, when the official cancellation of college draft deferments presented the army with a tempting new pool of potential flight candidates to compensate for the alarming attrition of pilots it had suffered over the previous year of combat in the Southwestern Pacific. A two-birds-with-one-stone combination of OCS and rudimentary flight training, the four-month crash course (too often literally so) was designed to produce combat-ready Army Reserve officer pilots from students straight out of civilian universities, teachers colleges and higher-level vocational schools. Not surprisingly, its graduates were notorious for their often less-than exemplary piloting skills, and experience soon proved the majority of them to be little more than cannon fodder when sent out on conventional combat missions. By early 1945, as Japanese air doctrine shifted decisively toward tokkō tactics, most Tokusō graduates were being sent directly to tokkō units. Many hundreds died during the Iwo Jima and Okinawa campaigns, and the vast majority of those not sacrificed in these battles were pooled as reserve tokkō pilots for the apocalyptic “Hondo Kessen” battle to come when the Americans invaded the home islands.

During his three-month stint as a flight instructor at Kita Ise, Fukagawa did his best to keep his mind on the task at hand and off of the post-graduation fate that probably awaited most of his students. In this sense, the workload was mercifully busy, and by the end of a typically exhausting and often terrifying training day of student stall-outs and lousy landings, it usually took all of the strength he could muster just to climb out of the observer’s cockpit of the Akatonbo. 

Late in the afternoon of May 3, 1945, Fukagawa finished a hair-raising day of wingtip-bumping formation flights with his students and went back to the barracks even more exhausted than usual. He had just stretched out on his bunk in his favorite post-training posture when his roommate Shigeharu Arai poked his head in the doorway and told him that their CO, Major Kanezawa, wanted to see him immediately. He bolted upright and ran to the HQ shack as quickly as he could, still in his sweaty flight suit.

In 1995, when the Association Of IMA’44 Graduates compiled a class history of their air operations in the war, Fukagawa wrote down the following recollections of that afternoon:

After knocking on the CO’s door, I entered and reported for duty. For some reason, I remember the room as dark and shadowy. I stood there at attention for a while in front of the major’s desk, where he sat in silence for an uncomfortably long time. Finally, he spoke.

“Tomorrow, you are to report to the Akeno Main Campus,” he said, as if he had to struggle to get each word out. “They are organizing more tokkō units. Do you understand? Tokkō.”

“Understood, sir,” I said, and snapped a salute. Major Kanezawa returned it and dismissed me. As I walked back to the barracks – much more slowly than I ran there! – I thought of all the heavy hitters who had already gone on tokkō missions, never to come back. People like Koretoshi Wakasugi, who had graduated first in our IMA aviation class. I figured if tokkō was good enough for someone like him, it was good enough for me. I laid down on my cot, staring at the ceiling in a daze and trying to think things out when Arai stuck his head in the doorway again.

“Hey Gan-san,” he said, using my nickname. “Did you hear? They say we’re all going tokkō.”

We stared at each other for a few long seconds before he went on his way without another word.
[167]

Fukagawa-san does not recall being particularly overwhelmed with fear or regret at having just been given orders
to die, or even pity at the thought of the sadness his death would bring to his family. Rather, the predominant emotion he experienced as he processed the enormity of the news was an oddly comforting sense of relief. By this point in the war, nearly half of his IMA-Aviation classmates had been killed in operational accidents or combat, with many of the latter casualties the result of tokkō missions. He counted some of his best friends among the dead.

“For months, I had felt incredible frustration at being left behind, spinning my wheels with those trainees at Kita Ise while my classmates were in combat, fighting and dying,” Fukagawa-s
an tells me. “I remember thinking ‘So it’s finally come to this…Alright then. Let’s do it already’.”

*****

On the morning of May 4, Fukagawa and his classmates were trucked to Akeno, where they were formed up in the courtyard of the main HQ building with a large group of reserve officers and enlisted pilots. Some bigshot from Area Command issued formal tokkō orders to the assembly in a practiced, polished speech before surrendering the podium to an adjutant, who began reading names off a roster in groups of six. When Fukagawa’s name was called, he formed up front and center with a squad of five other pilots – two new reservist second lieutenants and three corporals. He had never seen any of them before.

Another staff officer approached the group, informed them that they were now the 197
th
Shinbu
Unit, and that Fukagawa was their commander. The officer then marched them around the corner of the HQ building, where a photographer was waiting with a camera and tripod. After a formal snapshot of the group was taken, the staff officer walked over, shook each pilot’s hand and said “Thank you for your cooperation in volunteering to make this tokkō unit possible.” As the group was marched off for administrative paperwork in the HQ building, another group – ostensibly the 198
th
Shinbu Unit – was being formed up on the photographer’s bleachers. Fukagawa noted that his old IMA friend Shūzō Fujii was standing front row, center.

Soon after assuming his new command, Fukagawa was struck by the fact that until now, he had never been away from other Yōnen Gakkō or IMA personnel at any point in his seven-year military career
, and that his new situation would require adjustments in his worldview and leadership style. From his perspective, the men in his command were quasi-civilians, and when giving explanations and orders to them he would not be able to rely on the system of common values and shared knowledge operant when interacting with fellow IMA men. Of course, the same was true when teaching raw college kids how to fly an Akatonbo, but that was hands-on activity. Communications were simple, intuitively obvious and direct, and his authority was reinforced by the students’ knowledge that if they did not follow his instructions to the letter, they might not walk away from the consequences alive.

But now, Fukagawa would be living, bathing, eating and training with his men twenty-four hours a day until their sortie orders came in – whenever that turned out to be. He would be counting on them as much as they counted on him. There was no time anymore for ceiling-staring and post-training naps. He was the
taichō
– the boss – and his job was to lead and take care of his men. The supreme test would come later, in the unit’s single combat sortie.

Fukagawa sized up his pilots as they settled into their training and barracks routines at Kita Ise and established a rapport with one another. He was relieved to find out that his two reservist lieutenants were not Tokusō products, but rather had come up through the much more thorough and professional
Kanbu Kōsei
officer candidate program
[168]
and had received standard flight training. One of the reservists, the cheerful Lieutenant Tadatoshi Makino, was a teacher’s college graduate from rural Fukui Prefecture. His classroom experience would prove useful during instruction phases of training.

The other officer – Lieutenant Toshio Abe – would also serve as the unit XO. The son of a Kawasaki Heavy Industries executive, Abe was a cosmopolitan Tokyo swell who had graduated from the Department of Engineering at Waseda University. Although his piloting skills were somewhere between mediocre and awful, he knew his way around a teahouse and was only too happy to share his knowledge about the Wonderful World of Women with his comparatively naïve squadmates. More importantly, though, he had a warm, “human touch” leadership approach most IMA types – Fukagawa included – were both incapable of and uncomfortable with.