Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [121]
For the loss of ninety aircraft, the Japanese had put three carriers out of action. Suicide missions inflicted far more damage upon the U.S. Navy in their first weeks than had been achieved by the Shogo operation of the Combined Fleet. The emperor was told of the “special attack force’s” achievements. Hirohito said squeamishly: “They certainly did a magnificent job. But was it necessary to go to such extremes?” When his words were reported to Onishi, the admiral was crestfallen. He himself was now convinced that, because of the desperate shortage of planes and pilots, only suicide tactics could make a serious impression on the Americans, and he was surely right.
The kamikaze squadrons evolved procedures as they went, or rather as they died. Initially, commanders dispatched attackers in threes, each flight escorted by two fighters, which were intended to return to report results. Later, when sufficient planes were available, pack tactics were adopted, to swamp the defences. Fliers were urged to take time, to ensure that they impaled themselves on a suitable ship: “An impatient pilot is apt to plunge into an unworthy target.” The forward elevator of an aircraft carrier was defined as the ideal aiming point. It was too dangerous for aspirant pilots to practice a steep dive onto their targets. They were invited to perform this manoeuvre just once, in the last seconds of their lives.
A squadron officer said: “There were new faces and missing faces at every briefing…The instructor and the mission remained the same, but the audience constantly changed…There were no theatrics or hysterics—it was all in the line of duty.” Ground crews polished planes almost obsessively. “It was [one technician’s] theory that the cockpit was the pilot’s coffin, and as such should be spotless,” said an officer. It was a point of honour among the suicide crews themselves that they should take off laughing. Tears were deemed appropriate for spectators watching take-offs, and the doomed pilots seemed to agree. One kamikaze wrote crossly in his diary how irked were he and his companions when they glimpsed staff officers exchanging jokes as planes started up.
The most difficult problem for the Japanese in the last months of 1944 was not to find volunteers for suicide missions, but to convey them alive to the Philippines despite American fighters and the poverty of trainees’ airmanship. Of the first 150 homeland aircrew assigned to the islands, only half arrived. Among one group of fifteen, just three reached the battlefield. Planes remained desperately short. By mid-December, Inoguchi’s unit possessed twenty-eight pilots, but only thirteen Zeroes. Crews worked day and night to make them more airworthy.
For the remainder of the war, kamikaze attacks represented by far the gravest threat faced by U.S. forces in the Pacific. In Samuel Eliot Morison’s words, “The Japanese had perfected330 a new and effective type of aerial warfare that was hard for the Western mind to comprehend, and difficult to counteract.” A British Royal Navy staff study, drafted in 1945, observed: “Logically, suicide attack331 in any of the forms, air or sea, practised by the Japanese, differed only in kind from the last-ditch defence enjoined upon the British after Dunkirk, and only in degree from such missions as the [RAF’s 1943] air attack on the Moehne Dam.” Yet Americans were bewildered, indeed repelled, by the psychology of an enemy capable of institutionalising such tactics. “I could imagine myself in the heat332 of battle where I would perhaps instinctively take