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By Root 901 0

Pearl Harbor, and joined the rapturous reception on their return: “What passions that day fired!” Through the years which followed, however, their lives became incomparably more sober. After the 1942 Coral Sea battle, in which the ship was hit three times and 107 men died, each body was placed in a coffin weighted with a shell, and solemnly committed to the deep. The coffins broke open, however, and sprang to the surface again. The ship’s wake became strewn with bobbing corpses, a spectacle which upset the crew. Thereafter, they tipped their dead overboard with a shell carefully lashed to each man’s legs.

Miyashita lived through hours of frenzied firefighting when American bomb strikes tore open the flight deck, and endured the harrowing experience of clearing casualties and body parts. He never shrugged off the memory of picking up a boot bearing the name “Ohara,” with a foot still inside it. In the Marianas battle of June 1944, aboard the carrier Zuikaku, he watched a pall of black smoke rise above the sea, marking the end of his old ship Shokaku, and of most of the shipmates he knew so well. He thought of close friends from the petty officers’ mess like Ino and Miyajima, now among the fishes, and muttered to himself: “My turn next.” Zuikaku lost almost all its aircraft. “As long as we were fighting, there was no time to think. Afterwards, however, as we sailed home, seeing the hangar decks almost empty, sorting out the effects of all the crews who were gone, gave us a terrible feeling. From that stage of the war, my memories are only tragic ones.” Hitherto, Miyashita had prided himself on his steadiness in action. After three years of Pacific combat, however, “I found that I jumped53 when a hatch cover clanged shut. My nerves were in a bad way.”

So were those of more exalted people than Petty Officer Miyashita, and it influenced them in strange ways. Thousands of Japanese civilians on Saipan chose to kill themselves, most by leaping from seashore cliffs, rather than submit to the American conquerors. Vice-Admiral Matome Ugaki, later commander of the navy’s kamikaze units, wrote in his diary: “It’s only to be expected54 that fighting men should be killed, but for women, children and old men in such large numbers on a helpless, lonely island to prefer death to captivity…What a tragedy! None but the people of the Yamato nation could do such a thing…If one hundred million Japanese people could display the same resolution…it wouldn’t be difficult to find a way to victory.”

Here was a vivid example of the spirit prevalent among Japan’s leadership in 1944–45. Many shared a delusion that human sacrifice, the nation’s historic “Yamato spirit,” could compensate for a huge shortfall in military capability. In modern parlance, they committed themselves to asymmetric warfare. This was unconvincing in a death struggle between nations. In December 1941, Japan had launched a war against enemies vastly superior in resources and potential. Its leaders gambled on two assumptions: first, that the U.S. would lack stomach for a long contest; second, that Germany would triumph in Europe. Both were confounded. Indeed, far from Japanese accession increasing the strength of the Axis, it served to ensure Hitler’s doom by making America his enemy. So dismayed were the Western Allies by their defeats in 1941–42 that they chose to perceive these as manifestations of their conquerors’ prowess. They were correct, insofar as the Japanese displayed an energy and effectiveness then lacking among the British and Americans. Japan’s early triumphs, however, reflected the local weakness of the vanquished, rather than the real might of the victors.

The Japanese people were far more enthusiastic about going to war in December 1941 than had been the Germans in 1939. Japan’s mission to expand territorially into Asia, and to defy any nation which objected, had enjoyed popular support since the beginning of the century. After their country’s 1941 intervention in French Indochina, many Japanese were bewildered, as well as embittered, by America’s imposition of