• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Arima’s melodramatic gesture ended in bathos. He plunged into the sea alongside a carrier, without damaging it. But he was one among many desperate men who concluded in those days that new methods were required to offer the Japanese any possibility of overcoming their enemy’s overwhelming might. Two army fliers based on Negros Island had already made a suicide attempt on 13 September, meeting the same fate as Arima before they reached a target. Several Japanese fighter pilots314 deliberately rammed American bombers in what were known as tai-atari—“body-bashing” attacks. Since the Marianas disaster, many Japanese officers, including a naval aide to the emperor, had discussed the possibilities of launching a systematic suicide campaign. Captain Renya Inoguchi, senior air staff officer of 1st Air Fleet on the Philippines, wrote gloomily in his diary: “Nothing is more destructive to morale than a belief that the enemy possesses superiority.”

Conventional Japanese air forces were being devastated by the Americans. Haruki Iki and his squadron landed at Clark on 14 October to find that a sister unit which arrived only the previous day had already lost its commanding officer and most of its planes. “In the Philippines, every day315 was desperate,” said Iki. “At night, the work of the ground crews preparing aircraft for next day’s strikes was constantly interrupted by American bombing. Even when we drove from the mess up to the strip in darkness, if we showed headlights we were liable to be shot up by American night-fighters, which was no fun at all.” Every time Iki flew out, he penned a last letter for his wife, Yoshiko, living with their two children at her parents’ house on Kyushu. “If I did not leave a letter, she might never even have known where I died, because nobody would have told her,” said the pilot. When the decision was made to launch suicide missions, Iki welcomed it: “At the time, this seemed the only option we had.”

A Japanese instructor wrote of his efforts to train pilots: “Everything was urgent316. We were told to rush men through. We abandoned refinements, just tried to teach them how to fly and shoot. One after another, singly, in twos and threes, training planes smashed into the ground, gyrated wildly through the air. For long, tedious months, I tried to create fighter pilots. It was a hopeless task. Our resources were too meagre, the demand too great.” Before entering combat, American pilots had received two years of training and flown at least three hundred hours, often many more. In 1944, Japanese fliers’ previous hundred hours of pre-operational experience was cut to forty. Navigation training was abolished. Pilots were told simply to follow their leaders. A Japanese after-action report on the poor performance of their fliers in the Marianas declared: “Chapter 49 of the Combat Sutra says that ‘Tactics are like sandals. Those who are strong should wear them’…[The consequence of lack of pilot training, however, is that] it looks…as if good sandals were put on the feet of cripples.”

Suicide attack offered a prospect of redressing the balance of forces, circumventing the fact that Japanese pilots were no longer capable of challenging their American counterparts on conventional terms. Instead, their astonishing willingness for self-sacrifice might be exploited. Here was a concept which struck a chord in the Japanese psyche, and caught the Imperial Navy’s mood of the moment. Officers cherished a saying: “When a commander is uncertain317 whether to steer to port or starboard, he should steer towards death.” An alternative aphorism held that “One should take care to make one’s own dying as meaningful as possible.” The suicide concept appeared to satisfy both requirements. Four days after Arima’s death, Vice-Admiral Takijiro Onishi, new commander of 5th Air Base on the Philippines, held a meeting with Captain Inoguchi, his staff and some fliers. They agreed that Zeroes fitted with five-hundred-pound bombs and crashed headlong into targets could achieve much greater accuracy than conventional