FIERY SACRIFICEThe carrier Bunker Hill burns after being hit by two kamikazes on May 11, 1945, killing nearly 400 Americans and wounding more than 250.

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IN THE FINAL MONTHS OF WORLD WAR II, JAPANESE AVIATORS RESORTED TO A LAST-DITCH TACTIC: THE SUICIDE DIVE BY DON HOLLWAY

DIVINE WIND

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After the mid-1944 Battle of the Philip-pine Sea—the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot”—the U.S. military considered

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the destroyer screen around Task Force

-Franklin: a

taken it upon himself to personally lead an attack

close call Above: This attack by a Zero on the battle-ship Missouri on April 11, 1945, did only minor damage. Above right: Vice Admiral Takijiro Onishi, father of kamikaze tactics.

days after the torpedo run on Franklin-

to the Japanese spirit.-

more aircraft carriers. “In my opinion there is

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an enemy carrier.”

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the same to the U.S. Navy.

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to launch torpedo bombers when at 0740 hours an A6M Zero, plunging so swiftly that the ship’s gun crews could not reach their posts in time, hurtled through its port side into the hangar bay. It killed

Special Attack Unit. Half an hour later a Japanese

Suwanee

a 25-foot hole in the hangar deck below. (Its engine was later found down in the lower compartments.)

It was left to Lieutenant Yukio Seki, who had

Special Attack Unit, he had insisted on leading

married just a few months earlier, he dedicated his death not to the emperor but to his wife, and in samurai tradition left her a lock of his hair.)

hit the escort carrier St. Lo a little before 1100 that

dozen secondary explosions. The ship’s torpedo and bomb magazines detonated, blasting smoke

than 100 men were killed. In 30 minutes St. Lo

by suicide attack. Within hours kamikazes dam-aged the carriers Kalinin Bay, Kitkun Bay and White Plains, Onishi’s handful of planes and pilots caus-

FOR ONCE AMERICA HAD COME UP AGAINST A WEAPON IT COULDN’T ROLL OFF ASSEMBLY LINES.

rites of passage Kamikaze pilots don samurai headbands (top) and take part in a saki ceremony (above) before setting out on one-way missions—in this instance, taking off from Kyushu in Nakajima B6N torpedo bombers.

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Commander (later Admiral) John S. “Jimmy” Thach, the kamikaze was “a weapon, for all prac-tical purposes, far ahead of its time. It was actually a guided missile before we had any such thing as guided missiles. It was guided by a human brain, human eyes and hands, and even better than a guided missile, it could look, digest the informa-tion and change course, thus avoiding damage, and get to the target.”

For once America had come up against a weapon it couldn’t roll off assembly lines. As Thach put it: “Every time one country gets some-thing, another soon has it. One country gets radar, another soon has it. One gets a new type of engine or plane, then another gets it. But the Japs have got the kamikaze boys, and nobody else is going to get that, because nobody else is built that way.”

Suicide tactics struck Westerners, who initially believed every Japanese pilot had turned kamikaze, as inhuman. Sonarman 1st Class Jack Gebhardt of the destroyer Pringle, sunk in a kamikaze attack, described it as “horrifying to try and comprehend someone intentionally diving through a hail of

killing themselves in a blinding explosion.”Yet judging by their surviving letters and dia-

ries, kamikaze pilots were less fanatic than prag-matic. They knew their odds of survival were already slim. Vice Admiral Charles R. “Cat”

Essex, noted the average fast-carrier task force could bring to bear “over 1,600 guns to use in its defense....6,000 bullets per second or just under 200 tons of steel every minute....Even those Japs who were not suicidially inclined grew to con-sider an anti-carrier mission as almost automatic enrollment in the Kamikaze Corps.” For kami-kaze pilots, death went from probable to certain, but also from anonymous to glorious. Onishi him-self captured their mindset with a haiku: In blossom today, then scattered; / /

?He demanded, and got, every available airplane

sent to the Philippines. There was no shortage of pilots, only experienced ones. Volunteers were

a low approach under radar before a pop-up and dive; the former was more damaging, but the lat-ter more often successful. They targeted a ship’s bridge or the steering gear in the stern. Against carriers, which even an exploding plane might not sink, they aimed for the elevators, to cripple air operations. Later they were taught to actually dive under the waterline, using hydrostatic shock like a depth charge.

By the end of November, the carriers Franklin, Belleau Wood, Lexington, Hancock, , Cabot and Essex had all been damaged. At the end of December, the Liberty ship John Burke, loaded with ammunition and hit by an Aichi D3A2 “Val” dive-bomber, utterly vanished in an explo-sion approximately 60 percent as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb; an Army supply ship convoying behind it sank as well—two for one. On January 4, 1945, a twin-engine Yokosuka P1Y1 “Frances” released a pair of bombs just before smashing into the escort carrier Ommaney Bay, which was so badly damaged by the triple hit that the Ameri-

the Japanese struck 137 ships, sank 22 and killed more than 2,500 Americans.

Though impressed with the results, Emperor Hiro hito inquired, “Was it necessary to go to this extreme?”

Majesty of this concern,” Onishi told his pilots. “The evidence is quite conclusive that special attacks are our only chance.” But with the Battle of Leyte Gulf lost, so were the Philippines. Willing to die, but not under American bombs, the kami-kazes withdrew to save themselves for the next big

the destroyer Maddox (later of fame in the Gulf of Tonkin Incident) in two. The carrier Ticonderoga, hit twice, was escorted from the battle zone by two

out of action by just two aircraft, as surely as if they -

kazes scored a carrier trifecta, damaging Lunga

relentless Lieutenant Yoshinori Yamaguchi points his burning D4Y3 at Essex’s flight deck on November 25, 1944. He killed 15 crewmen and wounded 44 aboard the carrier.

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Point, knocking the venerable Saratoga practically out of the war and sinking Bismarck Sea, all in one day. In mid-March some two-dozen P1Y1s, each

to attack the Navy base at Ulithi, 2,500 miles away

-rines to guide them across the trackless ocean. Only one completed the mission, diving into the carrier Randolphand wounded 105.

became strongly encouraged, then required. Pilots were permitted to return from missions due to engine trouble or inability to locate the enemy,

radio announced the names of fallen “hero gods” and broadcast interviews with young Japanese boys longing to grow up and kill themselves against American warships. Imperial army troops strapped on land mines and dived under Ameri-can tanks, or joined “banzai” suicide charges into

By the invasion of Okinawa, their home soil, -

world’s largest battleship, Yamato, on its own sui-cide mission, attempting to beach the great ship on Okinawa and bombard the Americans; it was

-pedoes and rocket-boosted, piloted glide bombs

(see sidebar, P. 53). Rather than face captivity, Oki nawans hurled themselves off a precipice

island’s population died. And almost every morn-ing Japanese men tied on samurai headbands, took a ceremonial sip of sake and ascended toward the heavens, never to touch the earth again.

pilots was to kill every last one of them, and quickly, before they entered their death dives. He devised the “Big Blue Blanket,” dawn-to-

and guided to intercepts by outlying destroyers, destroyer escorts, landing ships, minelayers, mine sweepers—anything with radar—all bristling

shells. Most kamikaze pilots never lived to reach the target zone, and those who did often attacked

percent, perhaps the deadliest surface duty in the entire naval war and almost a suicide mission itself. One picket-boat crewman countered the desperate nature of his duty with black humor when he painted a big white arrow on his ship’s deck lettered !

On April 16 Intrepid was hit again, losing 40 planes, 10 men killed and 87 wounded. Bunker Hill, hit by two kamikazes on May 11, burned so hot that airplanes melted on deck and its elevator buckled. It went out of action with almost 400

SUICIDE FEVER SWEPT JAPAN. KAMIKAZE DUTY BECAME STRONGLY ENCOURAGED, THEN REQUIRED.

ultimate test On October 25, 1944, the escort carrier St. Lo becomes the first warship sunk by a suicidal air attack.

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dead and more than 250 wounded, the bloodiest suicide strike of the war. Three days later Enterprise, which had fought in every major battle in the

inverted to smash through three decks before his

Nevada, Missouri, West Virginia, Maryland, Idaho, New York, Tennessee and Mississippi were all damaged. Okinawa was

those dead than wounded.

die to the last man, woman and child, the United

warriors, there is no such thing as defeat. Even with Hiroshima and Nagasaki destroyed, Onishi

days later Hirohito surrendered.

“IF WE ARE ...PREPARED TO SACRIFICE TWENTY MILLION LIVES IN A KAMIKAZE EFFORT, VICTORY WILL BE OURS!”

damaged and about a quarter of those lost in the

task. Refusing medical attention, he lingered all

bombers might well take his dying words to heart: �

For the Japanese view of kamikazes, frequent contribu-tor Don Hollway recommends

, by Rikihei Inoguchi, Tadashi Nakajima and Roger Pineau. For the American side, try Robin L. Rielly’s

and . To view additional photos and video, visit donhollway.com/divinewind.

wall of steel A kamikaze (at left near the horizon) makes a run at the battleship Texas. It was downed before reaching its goal.

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So obsessed were the Japanese with “death before defeat” that even when they devel-

oped aircraft suitable for high-speed, high-altitude intercept similar to the German Me-163 Komet, they instead created the most advanced suicide weapon of all: the Yokosu-ka MXY7 Model 11 Okha (“Cherry Blossom”). Japan built 755 of these rocket- boosted, manned glide bombs. The first 80 were to have been shipped to the Philippines to oppose the American invasion, but they were lost when submarines torpedoed the carriers Unryu and Shinano in the last months of 1944. (It’s thought that the Okhas aboard Unryu exploded, blowing the ship apart.)

Americans didn’t learn of the new secret weapon un-til the invasion of Okinawa, where they captured four. They named it the Baka, Japanese for “fool.” Its bare-bones controls were sufficient only to keep it

one struck the destroyer Stanly at such speed that it passed completely through the ship and out the other side before exploding. Later that day the destroyer escort Mannert L. Abele, lying dead in the water after a previ-ous kamikaze strike, was hit amidships by an Okha flown by Lt. j.g. Saburo Dohi, who had calmly napped on the ferry flight out. The terrific explosion broke the ship’s keel. It snapped in two and sank in three minutes, taking 79 crewmen with it, the most successful Okha strike of the war. On May 11, the destroy-er Hugh W. Hadley, similarly hit, remained afloat but was so badly damaged that it

retired and was scrapped a few months later.

To overcome the Okha’s short legs, by war’s end several longer-ranged jet-bombs were under development. The Okha Model 22 was powered by a motorjet (a piston engine driving a single-stage com-pressor). The Baika (“Plum Blossom”) was a manned version of the German V-1 pulse-jet buzz bomb. They never reached operational status. Only about 50 Model 11s saw combat, and just four ever struck home, but that’s enough to secure the Cherry Blossom its curious niche in aviation history.

D.H.

in the air for a few minutes (its entire mission life) and center a target in a simple crosshair sight (no mean feat at the Okha’s near-600-mph terminal velocity). Perhaps because of this, rocket-bomb duty was highly sought by ka-mikaze pilots. A cynic might say that the extra training involved extended their life spans, but as with all suicide attacks, skill played less of a role than luck. With a theo-retical range of 50 miles—but realistically less than 10—the Model 11 required a ferry plane, usually a Mitsubishi G4M2e “Betty,” to reach launch distance. Its weight made the bomber clumsy and slow, easy prey for American interceptors. Under attack, the crew’s first move was to dump the rocket bomb and save themselves—the type’s typical fate.

Yet if it reached its target the Okha, which packed more than 2,600 pounds of explosive into an armor- piercing warhead, was capable of inflicting massive damage. On April 12, 1945,

NOSE FUSE

WARHEAD

BASE FUSES

PITOTTUBE

JUNCTION BOX

OXYGEN CYLINDER

ROCKET MOTORS (3)

PROPELLANT

TECH NOTES THE CHERRY BLOSSOM

INSTRUMENT PANEL

RING AND BEAD SIGHT

rocket ride This MXY7 was captured on Okinawa.

BATTERY