Edwin P. Hoyt - The Kamikazes: Suicide Squadrons of World War II

Hoyt, Edwin Palmer

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A powerful, incisive portrait of the menwho carried out the Japanese suicidemissions during the Pacific campaign ofWorld War II, and their role in prolongingthe war.

Between the early months of 1944 andV-J Day, the Kamikazes inflicted moredamage on American naval vessels andcaused more casualties to Americanfighting men than any single Pacific landbattle. Inspired by Admiral Ohnishi, whoconceived the plot from ancient Japanese historys divine wind, these superbly trained, fiercely obedient, recklessly ioyal pilotswilling to sacrificetheir lives in their efforts to bring theUnited States to its kneesare heredrawn with rare breadth and dimension.The brilliant defensive strategies of Admirals Halsey and Spruance put an endto the Kamikaze threat...but could theKamikazes reappear, in another time, inanother guise?

From a noted historian, a brilliant recreation of one of historys most curiousand frightening episodes, a riveting storyof the complex nature of patriotism, duty,sacrifice and fanaticism.

Illustrated with photographs

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Prolog*

OCTOBER 13, 1944.

Aboard the U.S. aircraft carrier Franklin the crew was at actionstations, as they had been off and on all during the day. Air strikeshad been launched early in the morning against the Japanese innorthern Luzon, to cover the larger air battle still raging aroundFormosa.

Suddenly the squawk box began burbling and the air raid sirensscreamed. The gunners shaded their eyes and squinted up to seethe enemy.

A twin-seater plane with the red ball of the Rising Sun on sidesand wings came hurtling down toward the Franklin. At first itseemed like a dive-bombing attack, but the pilot dropped to one

The Kamikazes

thousand feet and still did not pull out. Straight as a die he cameineight hundred feet, five hundredand it became apparent onthe deck of the Franklin that he had no intention of sheering off.

He was going to crash the deck of the Franklinl

With equal horror two staff officers of the Imperial JapaneseNavys First Air Fleet watched through field glasses from theirreconnaissance plane as the two-seater plunged toward the Franklin. On the sides of the plane, as it fell, they could make out theword Naifu, roughly painted in white on the fuselage.

And then came the impact. An enormous explosion, and theplane disappeared in the cloud of smoke that erupted from thecarrier.

Naifuthe knife. To the staff officers the scene they had justwitnessed was meaningful in a horrible way. The pilot they hadwatched, Rear Admiral Masafumi Arima, had dived to his deathdeliberately. The Japanese officers did not know what to call hisaction that day, any more than did the Americans, but Arima wasthe first of the Kamikazes.

FORTY-EIGHT hours earlier two of Admiral William F. Halseyscarrier task groups had hit the Philippines hard, concentrating onairfields around the Manila area and the south. The Japanese navysFirst Air Fleet had borne the brunt of the attacks. For the thirdtime since the battle for Saipan the Air Fleets strength was beingdecimated by American carrier planes.

For a month Rear Admiral Masafumi Arima had fretted overwhat he regarded as useless inactivity. As commander of the Twenty-sixth Air Flotilla he was as aware as any other high-ranking officerof the problems. He knew that the replacement pilots he had beengetting were basically incapable. Not that they were unwilling orstupid. They were eager and intelligent and they learned fast. Thosethat survived learned fast, that is. But the problem was that theseyoung men were so ill-trained at home that more than a third ofthem never arrived in the Philippines. Their planes broke down;

Prologue

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more often they simply got lost and then were victimized either byenemy planes or anti-aircraft; or simply wandered around abovethe deep blue sea until they ran out of gas and crashed in thewater.

And when they did arrive in the Philippines they proved to beno match for the skillful American carrier pilots in their fast, toughGrumman fighters. Also, these days, as many aircraft were beingdestroyed on the ground as in the air. The whole prospect wasalmost totally discouraging.

But Admiral Arima was aware of an argument made by ViceAdmiral Takajiro Onishi at the time of the Saipan battle. Thatargument was shocking to many in the defense establishment andhad aroused a bitter argument in the navy. Onishi called on thosepilots who were unable to come to grips with the enemy in theordinary way to crash their planes into the foe. And thus, said theadmiral, those young pilots would be doing a great deed for theircountry, accomplishing something they probably could not do inany other way.