Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [267]
Hachiro Miyashita and his comrades found kamikaze take-offs unfailingly emotional. Ground crews paraded beside the runway, waving caps as the pilots taxied forward with open cockpits, the white scarves that signified their sacrifice fluttering in the slipstream, hands outstretched in farewell. After the engines faded, those left behind drifted uneasily away, sometimes chatting tersely about the departed pilots, already in the past tense: “He was a good chap”…“What a naughty boy so-and-so was.” The ground crews found it hard to work closely with pilots through a few weeks of training, then launch them to death. A snapshot which Miyashita himself took, of a young airman standing on the wing of his plane as the ground crew fuelled it for the last time, shows a face tense and drawn, as well it might be.
“The whole thing was very moving,” said Miyashita. “Once, just as the pilots boarded their aircraft to start up, one shouted in dismay: ‘My watch isn’t working!’ For a flier, a watch is as indispensable as a compass. The man shouted to the group gathered to watch their take-off: ‘Who’ll lend me a watch?’ There was a moment of embarrassed hesitation. Watches were precious. The loan would not be repaid. Then the base commander broke the tension, shouting, ‘Take mine!’” He ran to hand up this parting sacrifice to the young man’s cockpit.
Vice-Admiral Ugaki, now commanding all navy “special attack” forces, inspected a kamikaze unit on 27 February. He recorded in his diary with grotesque banality: “I was perspiring in the spring warmth, while warblers sang in the bushes and larks twittered. Whatever is happening to the war, nature comes and goes as always.” The admiral often professed to be moved to tears by the kamikazes. Yet he was unembarrassed by dispatching them to die, because he had committed himself to follow them at an appropriate moment. His diary entries leapt from strategic fantasy to humdrum personal detail, in a fashion which invites the derision of posterity. “11 April…in the light of so many reported crashes on enemy carriers, there can’t be many undamaged ones still operating.” Ugaki spent hours cantering across the countryside on horses lent to him by the army, or wandering the fields with a shotgun in search of game. On 13 April he was so irked by his own poor marksmanship that he wrote crossly: “Maybe it is time for me to give up shooting.”
Ugaki, like Onishi and others responsible for the kamikazes, had convinced himself that this manner of making war represented an acceptable norm. “By the spring of 1945763, there seemed nothing unusual about the idea of suicide missions,” said fighter pilot Kunio Iwashita, who flew over Okinawa. “It was a desperate situation. We were losing the war, and pilots were constantly being killed in combat. We felt that a man might just as well sacrifice his life deliberately as lose it in an air battle.” Yet Iwashita’s view was far from universal. It would be mistaken to suppose that all young Japanese were eager to follow this path to death, or applauded it. Most of those who flew suicide missions to Okinawa had been drafted, accepting the assignment with varying degrees of enthusiasm.
One night a young pilot wandered into the barrack room of Lance-Corporal Iwao Ajiro, with whom he had shared army basic training. “You’re a lucky guy764, working in signals,” said the young man gloomily. “I’m supposed to fly tomorrow.” Ajiro sought to console him with a shrug and the familiar catchphrase of the Japanese soldier: “We’ll meet again soon