Yasuzawa was flying them to an airfield about a hundred miles from Hiroshima, on Kyushu, where they would receive their final training. Afterward, they would leave for Okinawa, where this first month since the Americans had invaded, nearly a thousand kamikaze pilots had died. They had sunk or damaged over a hundred American ships.
Yasuzawa realized how important holding Okinawa was to Japan. He hated having to remain behind as an instructor. He had recently been stopped by a senior officer just as he was about to take off in a training plane with the intention of ramming into a B-29 that was bombing his airfield. Yasuzawa was considered too valuable to lose; apart from instructing experienced pilots how to fly more advanced aircraft, Yasuzawa had the ability to take a raw recruit and teach him the rudiments of flying in ten days. The kamikaze pilots were being given only ten hours’ tuition. They barely knew how to fly. To make sure they did not lose their nerve at the last moment, the cockpits of their suicide craft were sometimes screwed down shortly before takeoff. Once they were airborne, the young pilots had no alternative but to die.
Today, as he settled himself at the controls of his well-used transport, Yasuzawa felt he would end the war preparing school-boys for combat while never experiencing it himself.
Soon after Yasuzawa’s transport trundled into the air, Yokoyama watched a navy fighter-bomber land and taxi toward the communications room. Officers ran to meet it. Out of the cockpit climbed an immaculate figure in a spotless white naval uniform. It was Captain Mitsuo Fuchida, the pilot who had led the raid on Pearl Harbor and was now the Imperial Japanese Navy’s operations officer.
Listening to the respectful greetings of the other officers, Yokoyama gathered that Fuchida was in Hiroshima to attend one of the regular army-navy liaison conferences. Yokoyama bowed deeply as Fuchida walked briskly past him. The flying ace did not return the greeting. Yokoyama doubted whether Fuchida even noticed him.
Shortly afterward, an officer told Yokoyama there would be no seat available for him that day to Tokyo. He left the airport, his mind still filled with the image of Fuchida. It would be something to cheer him on the long journey he now faced by train to the capital.
Across the city, in their Hiroshima home, Mayor Senkichi Awaya listened sympathetically as his wife and eldest boy told of the rigors of their nightlong train journey from Tokyo. Several times the blacked-out train had been forced to stop until American bombers passed.
Although Mrs. Awaya had agreed to bring their son to Hiroshima weeks ago, only recently had it become convenient to transfer him from his school in Tokyo to the one attached to Hiroshima University. They had decided the other three children would remain in the capital. Their eldest daughter was married and living in Kobe.
The mayor’s assistant, Maruyama, sought to reassure Mrs. Awaya. “They will all be safe as long as they stay out of the center of the cities. And here, you will be safe. Hiroshima is not a large city. They will bomb other places first. By the time it is our turn to be attacked, the war will be over.”
The train carrying Yokoyama to Tokyo left at 4:00 P.M. Six months had passed since he had last made the journey. Nothing had prepared him for the changes he now saw: city after city bore the marks of incendiary bombing. As he came closer to Tokyo, even the darkness could not conceal the destruction.
Leaving the Shimbashi railway station, Yokoyama set out to walk to the southern suburbs where his parents lived. His route took him past the Imperial Hotel. Designed by the brilliant American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, the Imperial had survived the great Tokyo earthquake of 1923, but now it was a gutted ruin. Farther on, the Ginza—the business and nightlife heart of Tokyo—was a scorched wasteland of ashes and craters.
Yokoyama realized that he had been misled: in Hiroshima the newspapers and radio had given no inkling of the scale of the destruction in Tokyo. For the first time he felt he had been betrayed by the army. He could now see clear evidence that Japan was incapable of winning the war.
Eventually, he reached his parents’ home. The house was intact, but Yokoyama wondered how long it would remain so. The American bombers seemed intent on working their way outward until all of Tokyo was destroyed. Wearily, he entered the house convinced that Japan must make peace or face extinction.
His parents were waiting for him. After they made him comfortable, he told them the purpose of his visit, explaining about Abe’s marriage proposal. Yokoyama described what little he knew of his commander and his daughter. His parents listened gravely. Finally, Yokoyama’s father spoke. Normally, a marriage joining two military families was a desirable thing, but these were not normal times; values were changing. Nobody could be sure what the future attitude of people would be toward members of the armed forces. To have been in the army might be a disadvantage. To be married to the daughter of a ranking officer could even be a liability.
Yokoyama’s parents would promise no more than to consider the matter further after they had made the necessary inquiries about Colonel Abe’s antecedents.
Professor Tsunesaburo Asada’s wife bowed gracefully to her husband as she boarded the train for Nara, bound, along with the families of other important Japanese scientists, for the comparative safety of the countryside. In the past fortnight, Osaka had been attacked three times by formations of B-29s; 20 percent of the city was destroyed.
Mrs. Asada turned and bowed again from the train. Then she was lost behind the press of people crowding the windows to wave to loved ones on the platform.
Asada did not wait for the train to leave. He had work to do. His long period of research had begun to pay off. One of Japan’s latest and most advanced long-range bombers, the Ginga, carrying a single seventeen-hundred-pound bomb, had flown to Saipan and attacked the main American air base on the island. The bomb was fitted with Asada’s proximity fuze, similar to the one that had exploded prematurely under Sweeney’s bomber.
Asada’s fuze had detonated its bomb exactly as planned, thirty-five feet above the Saipan airfield. It had caused considerable destruction. Scores of parked B-29s were destroyed or damaged. The pilot of the Ginga reported to Asada that a large part of the air base was “an ocean of fire.” The photo-reconnaissance pictures showing the wrecked American planes reminded the scientists of similar ones taken at Hickam Field, Pearl Harbor. But it was a short-lived moment of triumph.
The air force could not repeat the attack because its base on Iwo Jima was now in American hands, and the round trip to Saipan from Japan was outside the sixteen-hundred-mile range of the Ginga bomber.
Nevertheless, Asada’s proximity fuze had been proved a success. The navy had ordered twenty thousand of them to be manufactured. Eventually, twelve thousand would be produced, many of them fitted to bombs and stored secretly on Kyushu awaiting an American invasion. When that came, it was planned, the bombs would be exploded at mast-height above the warships and troop-carrying landing craft so as to cause maximum casualties.
Asada was praised by senior naval officers for his invention. He was pleased, though secretly he thought some of the approbation was an attempt to humor him. His death ray remained far from ready for use. But he was still optimistic and spending most of his time on the project.
Meanwhile, the navy now had another new weapon.
It was the brainchild of Dr. Sakyo Adachi, a scientific colleague of Asada’s attached to the naval meteorological department. Adachi had remembered what every Japanese high school pupil knew: although the great trade winds blow from east to west, from America to Japan, there is another wind, the Japan Current, which blows in the opposite direction.