Inferno - Max Hastings [403]
The Japanese never supposed that their stand on the island would achieve decisive results. They placed faith, instead, on an air assault of devastating intensity against the U.S. fleet, in which the key role was played by kamikazes. Suicide planes had been used with some success in the Philippines since October 1944. Though the Allies found this method of war making repugnant, from their enemy’s standpoint it was entirely rational. A postwar Japanese historian commented impatiently: “There have been innumerable Japanese critics of the kamikaze attacks. Most of them, however, seem to have been made by uninformed people who were content to be mere spectators of the great crisis which their nation faced.”
Against overwhelming U.S. air power, poorly trained Japanese pilots employing conventional tactics suffered punitive losses. By planning for their deaths as a certainty rather than a mere probability, fuel loads could be halved and destructive accuracy much increased. The resultant air campaign off Okinawa inflicted heavier losses on the U.S. Navy than had been contrived by the capital ships of the Combined Fleet at any moment of the war. In its closing months, Spruance’s ships were obliged to fight some of their toughest and most sustained actions.
Cmdr. Fitzhugh Lee, executive officer of the Essex, described his experience of monitoring the Japanese bomb and torpedo strikes from the huge carrier’s combat information centre:
I can remember spending many unhappy hours in CIC watching these blips coming at us, knowing what they were doing, and hoping that our guns would shoot them down, seeing them turn around on the radar screen, and then knowing that the torpedoes were in the water and on their way to you. Those minutes seemed like years, when you are sitting there waiting to see whether you’re going to get hit. CIC was not a happy place to be. It was interesting psychologically … my first experience of real fear—being in the face of what you thought might be death at any moment … Here you sat around these radar screens and watched these things happen with young seamen who were eighteen or nineteen years old, just off the farm or out of the shoestore … Their reactions were for the most part wonderful. Every once in a while you’d find one that couldn’t take it … I found that I could spot when somebody was getting a little hysterical … If he got very emotional, it would spread so you had to think of something quick—get him out … We had a few who lost control of themselves and started weeping, crying, praying.
The image of Japan’s kamikazes taking off to face death with exuberant enthusiasm is largely fallacious. Among the first wave of suicidalists in the autumn of 1944, there were many genuine volunteers. Thereafter, however, the supply of young fanatics dwindled: many subsequent recruits were driven to accept the role by moral pressure, and sometimes conscription. Their training was as harsh as that of all Japanese warriors, and attended by the same emphasis on corporal punishment. Kasuga Takeo, a mess orderly who served at Tsuchitura, a kamikaze base, testified to the melancholy and sometimes hysteria which attended the pilots’ last hours. Some smashed furniture or sat in mute contemplation, others danced in frenzy. Takeo spoke of a mood of “utter desperation”; peer pressure, a dominant social force in Japan since time immemorial, achieved its apogee in the kamikaze programme.
A Japanese historian wrote later with a lyricism incomprehensible to most Westerners about the doomed fliers of this period: “Many of the new arrivals seemed at first not only to lack enthusiasm, but indeed to be disturbed by their predicament. With some this condition lasted