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By Root 1011 0

enough at Yasukuni.” As it happened, Ajiro noted later, “That boy survived. But he did not expect to, and he did not want to die.” Toshio Hijikata and his squadron held their CO, Kigokama Okajima, in deep respect, partly because he refused to nominate his own fliers for kamikaze duty. “The job of fighter pilots is to fight,” Okajima growled. Senior officers said harsh things to the squadron commander about letting down the navy and the country, but his view prevailed, and his pilots were grateful. Their own duties continued to offer a likelihood of death, but not its certainty.

Most Japanese formations approached Okinawa as high as they could fly, maybe 20,000 feet, but American combat air patrols were always above them. As the sky grew black with the puffballs of massed anti-aircraft fire from the fleet, the suicide bombers dived steeply. Once Hijikata saw a dogfight developing below, and was looking for an opportunity to join it when, without warning, enemy bullets raked his wing. Seized by a moment of naked fear, he pushed the plane into a banking descent and drove towards the sea with a Hellcat on his tail. He was almost in the water when the American broke away. Atsuo Nishikane and Hamashige Yamaguchi, two of the squadron’s best fliers, had chased him off. “In the air, they saved my neck again and again,” said Hijikata. “We were real soulmates. Like most of the best pilots, on the ground those two were quiet men, but in the sky they were sensational.” He nursed his damaged plane carefully home to Kyushu.

Between 6 April and 22 June, the Japanese mounted ten big suicide attacks by day and night, involving 1,465 aircraft, together with conventional air attacks by a further 4,800. About four-fifths of these flew from Kyushu, one-fifth from Formosa. George Kenney, MacArthur’s air chief, rejected repeated requests from the navy for increased effort against the Formosan bases, because SWPA’s intelligence officers refused to accept that these were being used against Okinawa. The kamikazes sank 27 ships and damaged 164, while bombers sank 1 and damaged 63. A fifth of all kamikazes were estimated to have hit a ship—almost ten times the success rate of conventional attacks. If suicide operations reflected Japanese desperation, it could not be claimed that they were ineffectual. For the sacrifice of a few hundred half-trained pilots, vastly more damage was inflicted upon the U.S. Navy than the Japanese surface fleet had accomplished since Pearl Harbor. Only the overwhelming strength of Spruance’s forces, together with the diminishing skills of Japanese aircrew, enabled the Americans to withstand losses on such a scale. Many of those who attacked the American fleet were barely capable of keeping their planes in the air until they found a target. Once an American fighter pilot made an interception, so poor was the enemy’s airmanship that it was not unusual for a single Hellcat to shoot down four, five, six Japanese aircraft. Added to that, now that so many kamikaze planes were crewed by pressed men, their spirit and determination visibly diminished. The British naval staff analysis of the campaign said: “What in the Philippines had been765 a crusade was at Okinawa deprived of all humanity and the virtue went out of it.”

The cardinal Japanese misjudgement was target selection. Although the kamikazes achieved notable successes—for instance, sinking two ships loaded with ammunition for the shore battle—many contented themselves with falling upon radar picket destroyers covering the island. These were much easier to reach, since their function demanded lonely station-keeping, far forward of the carrier task forces or transports. Destroyer losses cost seamen’s lives, but the ships were almost infinitely replaceable. For all the trauma of those weeks of incessant alerts, infernos on stricken vessels, at no time did it seem plausible that the kamikazes could reverse the dogged American advance to victory.

INSHORE, the Japanese navy’s only contribution to the campaign was made by scores of suicide boats, kindred of Yoshihiro Minamoto