“Please, don’t trouble yourself, sir,” I said.
I couldn’t reconcile the image of a kamikaze pilot with the diminutive old man seated before us. But to be fair, I hadn’t really had any set image in my mind as to what a kamikaze should look like.
“Miyabe-san was a truly outstanding instructor,” Okabe suddenly started in.
“By ‘instructor’ you mean?”
“An instructor at an air training unit. Even though they were all teaching us, officers were called ‘instructing officers’ and NCOs were called ‘instructing staff.’ The military was very stratified, even in ways like that.”
“I didn’t know that our grandfather had worked as an instructor.”
“Miyabe-san came to teach at the Tsukuba Air Training Unit at the start of 1945.”
I was a flight student reservist. Student reservists were basically officers who came from colleges. The Imperial Navy had previously accepted a small number of student reservists, but starting in 1943 they sought a large number of us.
Unlike nowadays, not everyone was able to attend college. I doubt even one out of a hundred did. College students were members of an exclusive elite, which is why the military didn’t try to force us into service at first. But by ’43, the progress of the war had taken a turn for the worse, and they couldn’t be so lenient. That was the year we were defeated at Guadalcanal and Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto was killed.
Collegians and high school students of the old system who had until then been exempted from conscription were drafted under the student mobilization order. Except for those majoring in the sciences, all college students were now subject to the draft. I thought then that Japan had entered an age where every citizen was a soldier.
Many of us college students had been uncomfortable about our deferrals. We wondered whether it was really appropriate for us to be cooling our heels in class while soldiers our age were out there dying every day. Of course there were some who had enrolled in college specifically to escape military service. For instance, some professional baseball players enrolled in night classes to avoid the draft. But most college students didn’t relish their privileged status.
The first student mobilization in 1943 produced over a hundred thousand student soldiers. They said that colleges across the country had gone empty. In October, a send-off rally for the newly tapped students was held at Meiji Jingu Gaien Stadium. As a cool rain fell, fifty thousand female students saw off a procession of half as many student troops.
Ah, the irony of fate. Most of the pilots in the special attack units were selected from that year’s recruits. This was because both the Navy and the Army selected a great number of flight trainees from the student pool.
Piloting an aircraft isn’t as easy as driving a car. There are many things one must learn before ever getting into the cockpit. And so, before the war, the pilots in training and those who attended the flight prep program were all brilliant kids who’d passed highly competitive exams. The military believed that the air corps required such standout personnel. Since college students had a wealth of knowledge and high intelligence, we offered some fine material to quickly dress up as pilots. Thus, after intensive training, we became for-kamikaze aviators. Over 4,400 men died as kamikazes, and nearly half of them were flight student reservists.
Those chosen to become pilots from among the students culled that year, the 13th class of reservists, would make up the bulk of the IJN’s special attack units. I belonged to the 14th class, mobilized the following year. Many members of my class, too, were selected to become kamikazes.
By the way, the generally accepted story is that the first kamikaze unit was Lieutenant Seki’s Shikishima Unit deployed at Leyte Gulf, but, in fact, the very first one was Lieutenant Junior Grade Kofu Kuno of the Yamato Unit, also formed for Leyte. Lieutenant Kuno came from the 11th class of student reservists.
Lt. Seki’s Shikishima Unit struck on October 25th, but Lt. Kuno’s Yamato Unit made its charge on the 21st. On that day, both units failed to make contact with the enemy and all aircraft turned back, except Lt. Kuno, who kept flying and searching for the enemy and never returned to base.
So in truth Lt. Kuno was the very first kamikaze, but he was never honored as such. Partly because they couldn’t confirm his results; another major reason was that he’d been a reserve officer. The Navy naturally wanted the credit of “first kamikaze” bestowed on a Naval Academy graduate, so they announced that Lt. Seki had become the first kamikaze. This fact should make it pretty clear how much they valued their own academy’s officers and made light of us student reservists.
Even so, a great number of reservists of the 13th and 14th classes were turned into aviators for special attack purposes.
It was rare for a veteran pilot to be sent out as a kamikaze. In the Philippines theater in 1944, a number of seasoned pilots were ordered to become kamikazes, but that no longer happened in the Battle of Okinawa the following year. Because most of the old guard who had served since the start of the war had died out by that point, highly skilled veteran pilots had become precious to the military.
The battle-tested aviators mostly defended the mainland or deployed to escort the kamikazes. Either that or they served as flight instructors. As I’ve said many times, it was the expendable student reservists and boy pilots from the prep program who were picked to be kamikazes.
I became a flight student reservist in May of 1944, as a member of the 14th class. Lieutenant Seki’s Shikishima Unit’s deployment would come half a year later. But I’m sure the Navy was already seriously considering the option of using special attack units at that point. I think they had already decided to use the 13th and 14th classes as kamikaze pilots. But of course, we had no way of knowing.
We weren’t taught anything about dogfighting or bombing methods, probably because such lessons would have been completely pointless given that all we were meant to do was load ourselves up with explosives and crash into enemy ships.
Flight training was incredibly rigorous. Since we had to complete training that normally took two or three years in less than one year, both instructors and students were frantic. The military wanted us students to be able to fly as soon as possible for use as kamikazes.
But the instructing staff were non-commissioned officers, and they were very conscientious. Since a cadet’s status fell between commissioned officers and non-comms, we outranked most of our teachers. Once we completed training, we were immediately made ensigns, that is to say, commissioned officers, even without any actual experience in battle. For a rank-and-file enlisted serviceman to rise to commissioned status took over a decade. When you stop to think about it, that was pretty irrational.
In the flight training units, too, the student reservists had a higher rank than most of those who taught them, which was definitely awkward for both sides. I think the instructing staff felt they had to stand on ceremony with us. Even if they wanted to be strict or stern, the difference in rank prevented them from doing so. But in any case, we were being trained for use in kamikaze attacks, so perhaps it wouldn’t have made any difference.
Meanwhile, ignorant of our fates as kamikazes, we threw ourselves into the training, wanting to become full-fledged pilots as soon as we could. We were chafing to go off and shoot enemy aircraft out of the sky. How ludicrous.