Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (7 page)

If there was ever a time for the admiral’s fabled gambling acumen, it was now. He decided to try a bluff. It would be the most important one of his career.

“I’ve already spoken with Captain Yamamoto in Manila,” Ōnishi lied
[27]
, not missing a beat, drilling Tamai with the sternest gaze in his repertoire. “And he told me to consider your opinion as his own. He has complete trust in your judgment, and leaves the decision in this matter up to you.”

Trumped by a virtuos
o, Tamai was out of maneuvering room. Placing his hands palm down on the tabletop, he bowed from the shoulders.

“With the admiral’s permission”, he said. “I will assume responsibility for the formation and deployment of the 201
st
Air Group’s Special Attack Unit.”

“Carry on”,
Ōnishi replied, clearly relieved but, at the same time, with a somewhat pained facial expression. He excused himself from the table and was shown to a small room with a single bunk on the second floor. He dismissed the orderly with a request to be roused as soon as the planning group downstairs had something to report, whatever hour of the night that might be.

He removed his boots and stretched out on the thin rack, determined to get a few hours of shut-eye but resigning himself to the probability that he faced yet another night of being, in the age-old warrior’s lament, too tired to sleep. The success or failure of the crucial Operation Sh
ō weighed heavily on his shoulders. Ōnishi’s 1st Air Fleet was a key element in a battle plan that called for swift, complicated maneuvering with pinpoint timing by a disparate collection of slapped-together air units and the last remnants of Japan’s surface fleet (some of these “remnants”, admittedly, were pretty awesome; the surface attack force included the legendary superbattleships
Yamato
and
Musashi
). The operation also relied, to an extent, on cooperation with Army units whose commanders harbored only slightly less hostility toward their counterparts in the Navy than they did toward the Allies, and who saw Leyte as nothing more than a delaying action for the defense of Luzon and the capital of Manila, a strategic picture completely at odds with the Navy’s plans.

Interservice rivalries and questionable priorities aside, the plan looked doable on the war-gaming tables, but the tiniest foul-up in movement or coordination would invite catastrophe, triggering a snowballing chaotic chain of events that would bring the whole complex, unwieldy system crashing down. The damage could very well be even more catastrophic than the Marianas. They were staking everything on this.

Shock – defined here in the military sense of the application of overwhelming force on a concentrated area upon an unprepared enemy – was a key principle in the plan, and Kurita’s top-heavy battleship armada was to be the prime instrument in its application. If all went according to plan, he would catch the American invasion fleet off-guard in a pincers maneuver from the north and south ends of Leyte Gulf. To facilitate the pincer, his force was divided into two battleship squadrons, each with its own supporting force of cruisers and destroyers. Kurita’s flagship, the heavy cruiser
Atago
[28]
, would be in the northern or “strong” half of the force along with
Yamato
and
Musashi
, the battleships
Nagato
,
Kongō
, and
Haruna
, thirteen cruisers and fifteen destroyers. The southern half of the force, led by Vice Admiral Shōji Nishimura, consisted of the venerable old battlewagons
Yamashiro
and
Fusō
, the heavy cruiser
Mogami
and four destroyers. Sallying from Lingga Roads near Singapore after topping its tanks with precious fuel oil, Kurita’s formidable flotilla would divide into its “northern” and “southern” elements off the southwestern tip of the island of Palawan to enter the Philippine archipelago from the west. The northern group would cut through the Sibuyan Sea, snaking through the San Bernardino Strait out into the Pacific, skirting the island of Samar and penetrating Leyte Gulf from the north, and Nishimura’s squadron would come in through the back door in a dash across the Mindanao Sea to slip through the Surigao Strait and out into the gulf from the other end to close the pincer on the Americans from the south. A third supporting force under Vice Admiral Kiyohide Shima with three cruisers and seven destroyers would sortie south from Hashirajima anchorage in Japan and follow Nishimura through the Surigao Strait to exploit the situation in the event of a breakthrough, lure American battleships in the area away from the main striking force or, in the worst case scenario, try to rescue floating survivors in the event of a disaster.

Success or failure hinged on taking as much American airpower out of the equation as possible, with the fire-breathing dragon in this case being Halsey’s unbeatable Third Fleet and its ferocious fast carrier Task Force 38 under Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher. They would have to be dealt with first for anything to work, but not even the most optimistic planners in Combined Fleet HQ had any hope that this could be accomplished through conventional air tactics alone — the Americans were simply too good and too many. Vice Admiral Shigeru Fukudome was due in from Taiwan in a few days with the remnants of his land-based 2nd Air Fleet, still a formidable force in its own right with nearly 200 planes left, including a sizable number of the outstanding new Shidenkai fighters. They were slated to provide straight air cover for Kurita and strikes on targets of opportunity
[29]
.

But this force – provided it arrived from Taiwan relatively intact – was still too small to take on all of Task Force 38, even with
tokkō assistance. Instead, Toyoda and his staff had devised a clever but risky ruse to deal with the huge American force of six fast new battleships, fourteen fleet carriers and over a thousand planes: Vice Admiral Jisaburō Ozawa, in a personnel choice that was probably tantamount to an honorable sword to fall on for the loss of the Marianas, would be put in command of a decoy/sacrifice force consisting of the carriers
Zuikaku
[30]
,
Zuiho
,
Chiyoda
and
Chitose
, hybrid heavy battle cruiser/aircraft carriers
Ise
and
Hyūga
, three light cruisers and eight destroyers. Sallying down from Hashirajima with less than half of their standard aircraft complement and pretty much the last of Japan’s carrier-qualified aviators, their role would be to twitch tantalizing tail feathers under Halsey’s nose, get him to commit Task Force 38 to go after the bait and leave the invasion fleet in Leyte wide open with Kurita’s battleship squadrons barreling down on them from opposite directions. There would be nothing but Kinkaid’s aging shore bombardment battleships
[31]
(most likely carrying minimal stores of armor piercing rounds for ship-to-ship combat, in light of their primary ground support mission) and thin-hulled escort carriers to protect them.

If Ōnishi’s tokkō boys could then take out the escort carriers’ flight decks, effectively grounding Kinkaid’s dedicated air cover, Kurita could concentrate on the Seventh Fleet’s old battle line, which might very well be tricked into going after only one p
rong of the pincer instead of both at once, leaving its other flank wide open. If all of this worked, and Halsey and Mitscher were off chasing ghost carriers, too far out of range to double back and help when calamity struck, then there would be nothing between at least one of Kurita’s battleship squadrons and a gulf full of defenseless troop ships and cargo vessels except a weak screen of destroyers, any of which could be sunk with a single well-placed main battery round.

If everything worked according to plan, this time it would be the Japanese Navy that enjoyed a “turkey shoot”. There were nearly 100,000 G.I.s on those troop carriers, and the cargo ships, loaded to the gunwales with ammo and fuel, would send up pillars of fire and smoke that would turn the sky red for a hundred kilometers. It would be a beautiful sight, indeed. Maybe even MacArthur himself could be caught in the snare – Admiral Yamamoto avenged at last!

The arrogant, overconfident Americans had sailed into a potential death trap – what could very well turn out to be the greatest naval debacle since Actium.

At least according to official doctrine, Ōnishi and his fellow flag officers were supposed to be chomping at the bit now that the
kaijō-kessen
or “decisive surface engagement” with the Allied fleet the Imperial Japanese Navy had sought for so long was at hand. This spirit was implicit in the use of the
kanji
character
shō
as the code name for the operation, a gesture of inspired eloquence and wishful thinking in equal measure that de-mothballed a simple yet elegant old Chinese ideogram no longer in colloquial Japanese usage by the 1940s. Implying in a martial context the blink-of-an-eye speed of a master swordsman’s killing blow, the character captured the very essence of Japanese tactical doctrine since time immemorial. You could trace an evolutionary line with it from the craftsmanship of the swordsmith and
yoroi
armorer right through to the spirit and principles behind Operation Shō: fight light, tactics taking precedence over logistical concerns; strike quickly, staying always on the offensive; let your opponent worry about defense. It was the same line of thinking that had banished the shield from the samurai warrior’s panoply
[32]
; that had designed a mainstay naval fighter plane, the fabled Zero, with superlative range, maneuverability and hitting power but no diving speed, protective armor or self-sealing fuel tanks
[33]
; that had sent the nation into war against an enemy with almost double the population, ten times the industrial capacity and hundreds of times the arable landmass on the pretext that spiritual strength could overcome material might.

This spirit had been adequate for pitched medieval battles fought with swords and longbo
ws, but where had it gotten the Japanese warrior now? To a situation so hopeless the whole Shō operation was keyed young men making suicidal crash dives into enemy ships.

To use Ōnishi’s own words, directed at Ei’ichirō Jō in a heated debate at Imperial General Headquarters less than a year before, tokkō was “heresy, coming from the mouth of a professional officer”
[34]
– insanity that no officer with any kind of respectability had any business tolerating in his command.

It was also, he now found himself admit
ting, the Imperial Japanese Navy’s only hope.

The Navy had been working on worst case scenario prototypes for weird weapons – manned torpedoes, piloted rocket bombs and the like – since Tōjō’s original rubber stamping in March, and support for tokkō had b
een voiced up and down the ranks as early as 1943, when the nation’s military fortunes took an alarming turn after the Guadalcanal defeat. Momentum for a decision on actual combat was reached only after Rear Admiral Masabumi Arima (INA ’14) established the necessary precedent on October 15th by trying to paste a Mitsubishi G4M2 Isshiki Rikkō bomber into the side of the fleet carrier
Franklin
during the height of the Taiwan air battles.
[35]
But Arima had crashed into the sea too far from the
Franklin
to do any damage, and rumor had it that the act itself was motivated more by the man’s fragile nervous condition cracking under the stress of command in a losing battle than by any conspicuous bravery on his part. However, as was so often the case in wartime reportage, once the propaganda people in Imperial GHQ got hold of the story, it was transformed into a media campaign, and Taiwan was described as a potentially war-winning rout of the Americans. The Emperor was delighted – told that his forces had sunk as many as eleven enemy carriers and turned back a massive Allied invasion fleet, he issued a special Imperial Rescript calling for mass public celebrations of the Great Victory at Taiwan. A wave of “victory fever” reminiscent of the post-Pearl Harbor raid euphoria swept over Japan, transforming the mood of the nation virtually overnight from one of patient dread to heady (if short-lived) optimism. Arima was elevated to national hero status; schoolchildren knew his name within days of the event. Even more significantly, the words
taiatari
and
tokubetsukōgeki
, splashed across headlines and shrieked from radio speakers, were now firmly ensconced in the national vernacular. The tokkō cat was out of the bag, and Tokyo had determined that this was all going to be immensely beneficial for homefront morale. It was now green lights all the way for suicide dives.

With Arima having already broken the ice, selling the rest of the tokkō concept to the public would be a simple enough matter of convincing it that The Powers That Be had determined that this w
as the best course of action for the nation to take at this particular time, that despite these seemingly extreme measures, everything was under control because the military authorities could read the Americans’ next moves like cablegrams, and that their heroic young war gods would carry the day before long. If the people’s psychological needs were taken care of properly, with the ultimate reassurance being that everything was being undertaken in the Emperor’s name and with his seal of approval, then the sale was already a done deal. Post-Meiji Restoration compulsory education and two decades of high-intensity Shōwa Era agitprop had done a magnificent job of laying the psychological groundwork for mass sacrifice on the part of the civilian population.