KAMIKAZE PILOTS MAKE LETHAL SHOW OFF OKINAWA
U.S. Navy Offshore Okinawa, Ryukyu Islands • March 26, 1945
Late in 1944 Vice Admiral Takijirō Ōnishi, recently appointed commander of the First Air Fleet in Japanese-held Manila, the Philippine’s capital, championed a special attack force (tokubetsu kogeki tai, abbreviated as tokkotai) that would inflict maximum damage on Allied naval vessels squeezing the island empire: Japan’s food supply and fuel reserves were scraping the bottom, which is also where her once-vaunted fleet lay. A chief tactic in Ōnishi’s strategy involved loading high explosives onto land-based aircraft that would be flown by youthful, mostly inexperienced aviators who reputably gloried in self-sacrifice as they crashed their planes into Allied ships to sink or cripple them and kill as many sailors and Marines as possible. These one-way tokkotai pilots had been named after a “Divine Wind,” a kamikaze, that destroyed a Mongol invasion fleet centuries earlier, saving Japan from conquest. Ōnishi hoped to repeat his ancestors’ fate by using these one-way aviators in what were euphemistically called “special attack formations.”
On this date, March 26, 1945, the first kamikazes participated in the Okinawa campaign, the last major action of the Pacific War. In doing so they tipped the Allies off that their Operation Iceberg, the April 1 amphibious invasion of Okinawa, 340 miles/547 kilometers from the Japanese homeland and its last line of defense, would face serious and relentless airborne opposition. The Allies did their best to put into place shipboard antiaircraft defenses, dispatch destroyer and/or destroyer escort radar pickets on the fleet’s perimeter, and form radar-directed combat air patrols. Still swarms of kamikaze planes extracted a heavy toll in April. A day before the invasion launch date a death diver crashed his plane into the USS Indianapolis, the flagship of Adm. Raymond Spruance, who was the overall Allied naval commander of the U.S. Fifth Fleet and the newly formed British Pacific Fleet.
On April 6–7 a typhoon of more than 700 Japanese aircraft, fighter planes, and conventional bombers assaulted the Allied fleet and overwhelmed its defenses. It was 19 hours in kamikaze hell. The tally of enemy aircraft shot down during this period was reckoned at 304 by American sources. Japanese sources concede that none of the fighter planes returned home, while admitting that conventional bomber losses are unknown. In all, 1,465 large-scale kamikaze attacks launched from Kyūshū, the southernmost Japanese Home Island, were made off Okinawa between March and June 1945. Roughly 1 in 5 or 1 in 7 (sources vary) kamikaze pilots found their target and their death (about 3,800 pilots per one source). Of the 1,400 Allied ships and vessels that took part in the Okinawa campaign (April 1 to June 21, 1945), 34 (or 36) were sunk (6 warships in the hellish hours of April 6–7), chiefly destroyers; 368 vessels were damaged, including 8 carriers. More than 400 fleet aircraft were lost. Over 4,900 or likely as many as 7,000 U.S. and Allied sailors were killed or went missing in action, with an additional 4,824 injured. Nearly 1 in 5 U.S. Navy casualties suffered during the war came off the coast of Okinawa. This was by far the heaviest loss incurred in any naval campaign in the war. Overall, however, the losses kamikaze pilots inflicted on the Allied fleet off Okinawa were insufficient to turn the tide of war in Japan’s favor, although they did raise the price of America’s eventual victory.
A final word. From a Japanese perspective it is worth pointing out that the typical Japanese person then and now rejects the term “suicide attack” when speaking of kamikaze. The kamikaze pilot did not begin his one‑way mission with the intention of committing suicide. He considered himself a pilot-guided lethal bomb that would cripple or destroy a certain part of the enemy fleet for his emperor and country similar to the fate that befell the Mongol invasion fleet centuries earlier. His was a glorious act, while suicide may or may not be.
Japanese Kamikaze Pilots—Ten-Month Scourge of the U.S. Fleet
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Left: A Japanese Navy kamikaze pilot in the rank of a lieutenant receives sortie orders. Three-quarters of the 4,000 Japanese pilots who died in the last 18 months of the war, many in kamikaze missions, were classified by the Japanese as “young boy pilots” (少年飛行兵), teenagers barely out of school. The youngest kamikaze pilot was Yasuo Tanaka, just 16, who died on May 11, 1945. Another thousand kamikaze pilots were university draftees. The oldest kamikaze was Army Lt. Col. Yoshio Itsui, 32, a unit commander who led the first flights from Chiran airbase on April 1, 1945, the kickoff date of the amphibious invasion of Okinawa. Most Japanese, especially the well-educated student soldiers and aviators, knew well before 1944 that Japan was going to lose the war. The cruel and futile kamikaze operation was the last desperate hurrah for Japan’s military leaders and their emperor Hirohito. Unlike modern-day suicide bombers of the al Qaeda or ISIS sort who make no distinction between combatants and civilians when selecting their victims, kamikaze pilots only attacked military targets. The same goes for 1‑man submarines, manned solid-fuel rocket bombs with wings called Ohka (“Cherry Blossom”), which 16‑year-old Yasuo Tanaka flew, and land-based explosive motorboats, which were less well-known kamikaze missions.
Right: In an image many consider the most striking ever made of the kamikaze units 17‑year-old Cpl. Yukio Araki pets a puppy surrounded by 4 other pilots of the 72nd Shinbu Squadron based on the home island of Kyūshū. Araki died the following day, May 27, 1945, in a lethal attack on ships near Okinawa. Between April 6 and June 22, Kyūshū launched 1,465 kamikaze aircraft in large-scale attacks and 185 individual kamikaze sorties. During the Pacific War 1,036 boys and men who were part of the army died on kamikaze missions. Another 1,584 flying for naval units were also killed in action. Between the 2 branches, they flew more than 1,730 combat missions.
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Left: Kamikaze flights found strong appeal in a nation with a long tradition of ritual suicide (seppuku or hari-kari). Two or 3 pilots stepped forward for every available kamikaze plane, sometimes filling out their applications in blood. High school girls idolized the doomed heroes, who could not possibly change the course of the war. What they could do, and indeed did, was make the eventual Allied victory more costly than otherwise. In this photo Chiran schoolgirls wave farewell with cherry blossom branches to 2nd Lt. Toshio Anazawa of Army Special Attack Unit (20th Shinbu Squadron). Anazawa’s single-engine land-based aircraft, a Nakajima Ki‑43 IIIa Army Type 1 fighter carrying a 550 lb/250 kg bomb, departed Kyūshū’s Chiran airbase at Kagoshima on the southern end of Kyūshū Island for Okinawa on April 12, 1945. Chiran airbase, with its 2 runways, was the principal base of kamikaze pilots during the Battle of Okinawa, April 1 to June 21, 1945. From Chiran, kamikaze pilots could make the flight to Okinawa as quickly and with as little fuel as possible.
Right: USS Bunker Hill was turned into a blazing junkyard on May 11, 1945, by 22‑year-old kamikaze pilot Ensign Kiyoshi Ogawa and another airman 30 seconds apart. From a carrier crew of 2,600, 389 personnel were killed or went missing and 264 were wounded when planes on the flight and hangar decks caught fire and blew up. Although kamikaze attacks on the heavy cruiser Indianapolis and the carrier Bunker Hill are relatively well-known, toward the end of the naval battle off Okinawa, the radar picket ships on the edge of the fleet became the prime kamikaze targets. Of the 206 ships serving radar picket duty, 29 percent were sunk or damaged in Japanese air attacks, making theirs the most hazardous but least known naval surface duty of the war.
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Left: The destroyer escort USS Witter, shown damaged in port, was hit at the waterline while on antisubmarine patrol by a kamikaze Aichi D3A Type 99 carrier bomber on June 6, 1945, losing 6 crewmen. Another 6 were wounded. (The Aichi D3A Type 99 sank more Allied warships than any other Axis aircraft.) The Witter was seaworthy enough to make it back to the Philadelphia Navy Yard. However, owing to extensive damage and an excess of ships of her type, she was decommissioned at the end of October and sold for scrap the next year.
Right: Sailors at their starboard aft battle stations aboard the battleship USS Missouri braced themselves for impact moments before a kamikaze, keeping low above the water, slammed into the ship at Okinawa, April 11, 1945. The “Mighty Mo,” nearly indestructible, sustained damage and casualties, yet survived to host the Japanese surrender ceremonies in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945.
Allied Sea Power Threatened by New Military Tactic at Okinawa: Japanese Kamikaze Pilots
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