Many of those who commanded kamikaze operations were that type of officer. They would say, “You aren’t the only ones who are going off to die. I’ll be following you without fail.” But barely any of those officers actually followed their men as promised. Once the war ended, they all feigned ignorance, acting like they had no responsibility whatsoever. Even worse, a good number said things like, “The kamikazes were all volunteers. They all gave their lives for the country out of the pureness of their hearts.” They were shirking responsibility by flattering the kamikazes. Or maybe they were attempting to lessen the pangs of their consciences. In any case, it was because of this sophistry that the kamikazes became the subject of public criticism after the war.
I said that there were almost no officers that followed the kamikazes into death. But Vice Admiral Takijiro Onishi, the “Father of Special Attacks,” committed seppuku the day after Japan surrendered. More than a few people interpreted his suicide as a noble act, calling it Onishi’s atonement. But I don’t think it was noble in the slightest. How is the suicide of one old man sufficient atonement for stealing the futures of so many young men?
Even if I ever ceded that it was a desperate but necessary tactic for the Battle of Leyte, special attacks were altogether pointless from the Battle of Okinawa on. If he had the courage to die, then why didn’t he say, “I oppose special attacks even at the cost of my life,” and disembowel himself then?
They say that Vice Admiral Onishi proposed and adopted kamikaze tactics in October 1944. But was that true? Onishi, himself, once called the special attacks “heresy for any commander.”
The Navy started to deploy other suicide weapons, the Kaitens and Ohkas, towards the end of 1944. But they had been in development since the beginning of that year. Such weapons would never have been developed had the military not already mapped out that course of action, which leads me to believe that Vice Admiral Onishi was just made into a scapegoat. He never attempted to make any excuses. It’s likely he died shielding many others who’d been involved. If he was going to shield anyone, I wish it’d been all those young men.
The Kaiten was a human torpedo. A modern torpedo is guided by computers, so even if the target tries to escape it can still give pursuit and score a hit. With the Kaiten, humans played the role of those computers. No other country’s military would ever have come up with that.
It’s possible that the groundwork for the kamikazes existed within the Navy since the very start. Type A submarines were deployed in special attacks on Pearl Harbor at the outset of the war.
Type A subs were midget submarines with two-man crews. For Pearl Harbor, they were loaded onto full-size submarines and carried close to the Hawaiian shore, then launched into the harbor. But there was little hope of small subs making it into a heavily guarded U.S. naval port. Even if they managed to succeed in their mission, it was impossible for the crew to then escape and be recovered by the mother submarine waiting off shore. In other words, this tactic was essentially the same as the kamikaze forces. The ten crewmembers that sortied knew full well there was no hope of them returning alive. And indeed, all five Type A subs never made it back. I think that was the point when the fate of the future special attack units was sealed.
This is a digression, but during that mission one of the Type A subs ran aground at the mouth of the harbor, and one of her crew was taken prisoner. Imperial General HQ sang the praises of the nine others who had fallen in combat, proclaiming them war gods, and totally ignored Ensign Sakamaki, who had been captured. Even so, Ensign Sakamaki’s name became known to the public. Stones were thrown at his parents’ house, and abusive letters poured in from all over the country. “Why didn’t that damn unpatriotic guy kill himself?” and all that.
An essential navigational instrument, the gyrocompass, was malfunctioning on Ensign Sakamaki’s sub. The captain of his mother sub asked, “What do you plan to do?” Ensign Sakamaki apparently replied, “It’s a go, sir.” There was no military man then who could refuse to embark on a mission when asked that by a superior officer. Why didn’t the captain simply cancel his sortie? Due to the faulty gyrocompass, Ensign Sakamaki was unable to properly direct the sub, miscalculated his position, and ran aground. His crewmate died.
In stark contrast to Ensign Sakamaki, who was branded as unpatriotic, local villagers and children thronged the houses of the nine dead men, praising them as heroes. But after the war, the villagers abruptly reversed their opinions and frowned upon their families as ones that had produced war criminals.
There is nothing that puts me in a fouler mood than stories like this.
There’s an endless supply of infuriating people and events concerning the kamikazes, but, in particular, I will never find it in me to forgive the commander of the Fifth Air Fleet, Matome Ugaki. Once he learned that the war was over, he sought out a place to die and took along seventeen of his subordinates, young men who didn’t need to perish, on a final suicide mission. “If he wanted to die, I wish he’d done it alone.” That’s what the father of Lieutenant Nakatsuru, one of the subordinates, said, and I wholeheartedly agree with him.
But there’s someone we mustn’t forget: Lieutenant Commander Tadashi Minobe, who stridently opposed the use of kamikazes.
In February 1945, over eighty military commanders convened a council at Kisarazu to discuss the Combined Fleet’s battle strategy for Okinawa. There, Lt. Cdr. Minobe expressed unambiguous opposition to the presiding general staff officer’s announcement of a full-force kamikaze operation.
The military had been imprinted with the concept that an order from a superior officer was an order from the Emperor himself. Those who disobeyed orders could be executed after a court-martial. Yet Lt. Cdr. Minobe defied death and voiced steadfast opposition. When his superiors yelled themselves red in the face at him, he retorted, “Is there anyone gathered here today who is ready to charge in?” Then he said, “And it is preposterous to order kamikaze missions using training aircraft. If you think that I am lying, try getting into the cockpit of one and carrying out an attack. I will easily shoot each and every one of you down with a Zero.”
After the war, when I learned of what he had said, I was deeply impressed that such a brave officer had existed in the Imperial Navy. Had there been just a few more men like him present at that council, the plan to use kamikazes at Okinawa might never have been enacted.
I blame the negligence of journalists for the fact that most Japanese have never even heard the name Tadashi Minobe.
—Why isn’t he well-known?
I think that has to do with his postwar career as an officer of the Self-Defense Force. Progressive journalists who considered the SDF to be evil were probably unwilling to praise its senior officers. Moreover, ultimately, Minobe did not totally oppose the use of kamikazes. After the war he said, “In the absence of any other effective course of action, a special attack is inevitable.” Perhaps they considered this statement to be an affirmation of kamikaze tactics. Yet Lt. Cdr. Minobe never sent a single pilot in his squadron off on a special attack.
I’ve heard that his name is held in higher regard overseas than in Japan. That’s unfortunate. Tadashi Minobe was one of the truly magnificent Japanese of that period. I don’t think he should be forgotten.
Lieutenant Commander Saburo Shindo was another exemplary fighter squadron commander. Shindo was the CO of the squadron of thirteen Zero fighters when the aircraft made its spectacular debut over mainland China. He went on to serve in Rabaul, fought at the Mariana Islands and Leyte Gulf, then became the commander of the 203rd Air Unit in Kagoshima in the final year of the war. Even as the “All Planes Kamikaze” call came from the brass, Shindo did not deploy a single special attack.