Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [301]
Toshiharu Konada and his fellow midshipmen on the heavy cruiser Ashigara volunteered for submarine service when it became plain that Japan’s remaining big ships were going nowhere useful. Konada, by then a lieutenant, spent a fortnight at the submarine school at Otake before he and thirteen others in his draft were abruptly informed that they were being transferred to man new weapons named kaiten—“heaven-shakers.” They had no notion what kaiten were, until they reached a training base on the island of Ohtsu. There, at last, they were admitted to the secret. Their craft were human torpedoes, piloted by frogmen sitting astride them. Their commanders claimed that these would transform Japan’s fortunes, destroying the enemy’s ships as they approached the home islands.
Konada’s group were thrilled. “This was a role which made us really happy and excited,” he said. Class photographs of himself and his beaming young comrades support this claim. They were all twenty-one-year-olds: “We felt that kaiten offered us an opportunity to make a personal difference to the course of the war, to save our country, even.” Some 1,375 pilots entered training, but only 150 completed the course before the war’s end, because of a shortage of torpedoes. A further fifteen died in training, for kaiten were immensely dangerous to their operators. Some pilots suffered respiratory failures, others steered their craft into rocks or were lost in rough seas.
Konada found the atmosphere on his course “very tense and serious; but it was also a very exciting experience.” When his detail graduated in December 1944, he himself was retained at Ohtsu for four months to help train the next intake. He found this frustrating, “because I wanted to get on with the job.” It became more so as he heard the fate of comrades of his own course, already dispatched against the enemy. There was his roommate Kentaro Yoshimoto, “a very jolly fellow, though not very bright. We used to talk for hours about everything—except the war or death.” Yoshimoto and his torpedo were launched on a mission in the Carolines on 20 December, which ended in an anticlimactic technical failure. He set forth on a second operation on 12 January 1945, and was never heard of again.
Likewise Seizo Ishikawa, who had served with Konada in the gunroom of Ashigara, “a bold character of passionate loyalties, with a very sharp tongue.” Ishikawa’s torpedo was launched from the submarine I-58 off Guam on 12 January. Pilots at the home bases never learned the fates of these men and scores of others, though American records show that they achieved little. By the summer of 1945, to Konada’s embarrassment, he found himself the only survivor of the fourteen men in his training detail designated to wear the suicides’ white headband. However, his turn seemed sure to come soon enough. In May he was dispatched to command a unit of eight kaiten on the island of Hachijo, in the Pacific 140 miles south of Tokyo. The Americans were expected to land on Hachijo before they assaulted the mainland. The kaiten crews practiced launches in all manner of tactical circumstances, and worked incessantly on maintaining their frail craft. Konada said proudly: “It was the most rewarding time of my life.”
All through the summer of 1945, Japan poured men onto Kyushu, to confront the expected American landings. In January, there had been only one garrison division on the island. Thereafter, the build-up was relentless. American historians Edward Drea and Richard Frank have made important contributions to the study of this period,