Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [254]
Unblooded in combat, Minamoto was imbued with an instinctive condescension towards his foe, which did not long survive his Okinawa experience: “The naval bombardment was terrifying. It seemed to go on and on. The sound of those shells in flight frightened me very much.” Yet the invaders’ demonstration of naval and air power made little physical impact on the defenders, sheltering underground. Minamoto emerged from his cave on 25 March to a scene of devastation—“Trees were torn apart, the ground blackened, all our quarters flattened along with the local civilian houses.” However, the suicide boats which he commanded were safe in laboriously dug bunkers along the shoreline. Glory and death seemed at hand for the two officers and thirty NCOs of his company, designated to pilot their explosive-laden craft against American ships.
Okinawa, April–May 1945
But the crews on Tokashiki and its neighbouring islands never attacked. They were fifteen miles offshore, and U.S. escorts protected every route to the invasion armada. The Japanese had expected the Americans to anchor further south, allowing the suicide crews to strike them from the rear, on their seaward side. Now, instead, the vexed young commanding officer sought radio guidance from headquarters at Shanri Castle on the mainland, which was swiftly forthcoming: “Scuttle your craft.” The order provoked a moment of hysteria among the crews. Many men burst into tears, denouncing their commanders: “Surely we haven’t been through all this, to quit now!” The order was baffling, but was obeyed. Minamoto kept two boats intact, in case there was a new opportunity to launch them. The rest, almost a hundred craft scattered among three islands, were sunk in shallow water. Only a few of those on Okinawa itself were launched, to small effect.
On the morning of 27 March, American troops landed on Tokashiki. The suicide crews now lacked means to resist the invaders beyond swords, pistols and a few grenades. Minamoto ordered the coxswains to withdraw immediately to the north end of the island, to preserve them for future actions. He himself led the maintenance crews, around a hundred strong, in a brief defensive action. The Americans made short work of them. After losing nine dead in the first half-hour, Minamoto ordered his survivors to retreat northwards. He rejected the notion of self-immolation: “I felt that I wanted to fight to the death with the enemy, rather than merely bring death on myself.” In the event, he did neither. Minamoto became a passive spectator of the first of the ghastly human tragedies which disfigured the Okinawa campaign.
Around nine hundred civilian farmers and families inhabited Tokashiki. As Minamoto and his men withdrew northwards into a jumble of rocks and caves, villagers left behind began to use grenades to kill themselves. Today, a revisionist movement among Japanese historians and nationalists seeks to argue that such civilian suicides were spontaneous acts, neither ordered nor condoned by the military. This is impossible to accept. Munitions had been supplied to many inhabitants, though it remains conjectural what orders accompanied them. On 28 March 1945 and in the days that followed, on Tokashiki 394 men, women and children immolated themselves. “Their actions reflected the spirit of the time,” said Minamoto. “It was the consequence of all the reports about the fate of Japanese civilians on Saipan. Those islanders should not have been so hard on themselves. It wasn’t as if the invaders were Chinese or Russians.” This, however, was a sentiment of 2005 rather than of 1945. By a bleak irony, Minamoto and his fellow suicide crewmen survived in hiding, while more than a third of the civilians on Tokashiki perished. To the Americans, this little action represented only a skirmish, a minor objective seized at negligible cost. Yet for the Japanese, it was a foretaste of much worse to follow.