Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [299]
The Ebisawas’ landlord was the matchmaker who had introduced the couple. Fumiyo was a teacher, now a heavily pregnant one, who possessed much of the legendary toughness of Yokosuka people. “I always felt that if anything should happen to me, she would be able to look after herself and the baby,” said Ebisawa. They talked between themselves about the future, after Japan’s inevitable defeat. Before Ebisawa was called up he had worked for Mitsukoshi, the famous Tokyo department store. He reckoned the firm would take him back, but did not expect to live to apply.
Zero engineer Jiro Horikoshi went to Nagoya station to bid farewell to his wife as he dispatched her to the safety of the countryside. On the platform, contemplating his country’s predicament, he burst into tears: “Those of us who knew821 the awesome industrial strength of the U.S. never really believed that Japan would win this war. We were convinced that our government must intend some diplomatic initiative which would save the situation before it became catastrophic. But now, bereft of any convincing government initiative to enable us to escape, we are being driven to our doom.”
Hirohito’s people could see for themselves that their defenders had lost control of Japan’s airspace. Bombers from the Philippines attacked targets around Formosa and off Korea. LeMay’s Superfortresses, in formations up to a thousand strong, broadcast fire by day and night. The Americans dominated sea and sky. Japan’s home air bases descended into a routine of alarms and damage control. At Hyakuri, for instance, Petty Officer Hachiro Miyashita gave up trying to reach a slit trench when he glimpsed American fighters—they approached so low that shelter was unattainable. He simply threw himself on the ground as shrapnel rattled down like hail after each bomb explosion. The crews enlisted the aid of soldiers from a neighbouring recruit camp to push aircraft deep into woodland, where they were concealed until immediately before take-off.
USAAF captain Jack Lee DeTour’s group commander was obsessed with a desire to sink an aircraft carrier before the end of the war, and was killed making the attempt off Kyushu. DeTour’s unit spent the spring flying B-25s out of the Philippines against ships, railyards and fuel-alcohol plants on Formosa. They attacked from heights between 5,000 and 10,000 feet, using a mix of bombs, rockets and machine-gun fire. Shipping strikes were by far the most dangerous, requiring lower-altitude attacks, with a five-second delay on bomb fuses to enable planes to jink clear after attacking. DeTour, a garage owner’s son from a small town in Nebraska, was twenty-two, and had been in the war a long time. Frustrated in his ambition to become a fighter pilot, he flew nine hundred hours before entering combat in New Guinea. He spent the summer of 1945 attacking Japanese convoys from a strip on Okinawa. The American pilots fell upon one cluster of enemy shipping, two squadrons strong, off the Korean coast. DeTour was dismayed to see one of his former flight students going down, hit by flak. The bombers hit a destroyer and a merchantman. He was awed by the sight of the stricken ships’ disappearance: “It seemed unbelievable822 that something that big went down so fast.”
Admiral “Jocko” Clark of Halsey’s Task Force 38 was disgusted to discover that one of his Helldiver commanders, finding a target fogged in, had jettisoned bombs in the sea rather than drop them randomly on Japan: “When I took him to task823 he said he did not want to kill innocent civilians…But any damage to the enemy in war contributed to destroying his willingness to fight. I told this strike leader that he should have dropped his bombs on Mount Fuji,