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If American losses were relatively small, the price of being shot down and captured was always high, not infrequently fatal. On 25 July, Ensign Herb Law flew from the carrier Belleau Wood to attack Yokkaichi-shi airfield on Honshu. “We had the usual fun824 strafing and rocket-firing…I was saving my bomb for a juicy target. Just as we were pulling out at low altitude bullets began hitting my plane. My first thought was that it was AA. Much to my surprise, there was a Jap plane directly behind me…Where the hell he came from I’ll never know. My engine cut out completely, and he got in some more gunnery practice while I looked for a place to land.” Law was too low to parachute, and crashed in a field, where he sat on a wing examining a wound in his leg. He enjoyed his first glimpse of the enemy when a Japanese woman approached, and emptied a pistol towards him without effect. Ten minutes later he was encircled by a fiercely hostile crowd, who stripped him naked. He was eventually taken to Osaka: “I had no food or water for three days. I was beaten with clubs, fists, leather straps every day and night. I had lighted cigarettes put to my lips. It is surprising what a man can take and still live.”

Halsey deliberately excluded British aircraft from Third Fleet’s last strikes against the Japanese navy, claiming to have fallen in with his chief of staff’s views: “At Mick Carney’s insistence825 I assigned the British an alternative target. Mick’s argument was that although this division of force violated the principle of concentration, it was imperative that we forestall a possible post-war claim by the British that [they] had delivered even a part of the final blow that demolished the Japanese fleet.”

TWO FUNDAMENTAL propositions still underpinned Japanese strategic reasoning: first, that the Americans must invade their home islands in order to claim victory; second, that in such an eventuality, they could be repelled. All the elements used to such effect on Okinawa would be deployed manifold on Kyushu: fixed defences, kamikaze aircraft, suicide boats, “oka” rocket-propelled suicide bombs, suicide anti-tank units. The Japanese army’s newly issued Field Manual for the Decisive Battle in the Homeland called for absolute ruthlessness in slaughtering any Japanese, old or young, male or female, who impeded the defence or was used as a shield by the invaders. There would be no retreats. Casualties were to be abandoned. Those whose weapons and ammunition were spent should fight with bare hands. Here was a commitment to create not merely an army of suicidalists, but an entire nation.

At Yokosuka naval base, Kisao Ebisawa was instructing a new unit of “fukuryu”—“dragon divers”—destined for suicide missions against American landing craft. Many of the 4,000 pupils were teenagers, some as young as fourteen or fifteen. Their only asset was a sacrificial commitment, matching that of the Hitler Youth in Europe. Ebisawa and his fellow petty officers, recognising that the war was lost, recoiled from the enterprise to which these children were committed. “Whoever dreamed it up knew nothing about diving,” said the sailor. “First, anyone who had seen the Americans in the Pacific knew that they bombed and shelled everything in sight before making a landing. Shock-waves would kill any diver in the water for miles. Fukuryu were supposed to attack in groups, each one carrying a pole charge. It needed only one charge to detonate, for the whole group to go up in smoke. It would have made more sense to pack all those kids off to the mountains to wait for the Americans with grenades.” Some instructors were rash enough to make representations to their superiors along these lines, causing them to be posted out of the unit. Thereafter, Ebisawa and his colleagues kept their mouths shut, though they were painfully conscious of the chasm between the enthusiasm of their young students and the cynicism of their commanders.

At his airfield outside Singapore, Lt. Masaichi Kikuchi was deeply unwilling to become a human sacrifice, but gyokusai,