Lieutenant Commander Kiyokuma Okajima of the 303rd Combat Flight Unit also staunchly refused to send out any kamikazes, whatsoever, even after command branded him a traitor to his country.
So, even among the Naval Academy graduates, there were some fine, upstanding officers. Unfortunately, though, their numbers were disappointingly few.
Anyway, let me tell you about Miyabe-san.
He was an excellent instructor. Many of the student reservists adored him. His gentle bearing and polite manner of speech were entirely unexpected of a military man of that era. Even so, there was something indescribably intimidating about him. We often said among ourselves that he was what they called a professional.
We never did any mock air battles because all of us student reservists were intended to be used on kamikaze missions.
On the day our training ended, we were forced to fill out a Special Attack Force volunteer form. It was a direct order masquerading as an opportunity. Because of this, those in command were later able to get away with saying that “They all became kamikazes of their own volition,” and even sixty years later, men like that journalist insist on echoing the lie.
Let me be very clear. Except for a small number of exceptions, the special attack pilots were ordered into it. I don’t want to tell you about the pain and inner anguish we felt when we checked the “I volunteer” box on the form. Even if I told you, I don’t think you’d fully understand.
After we graduated from flight school and were commissioned with the rank of ensign, we weren’t immediately deployed. Instead, we underwent continued flight training. Around that time, there was a shortage of aircraft fuel, and we’d barely been able to practice as flight students.
Even during the continued training, what we flew were either biplane trainers that we called “red dragonflies” or the old Type 96 carrier-based fighter. Training aircraft were fueled with crude gasoline, oil derived from pine tree roots, or ethyl alcohol. I heard later on that even actual combat aircraft weren’t using high-octane fuel.
This is getting off topic a bit, but after the war the Americans ran various flight tests on Japanese fighters. When they fueled an Army Type 4 fighter with U.S. military-grade high-octane gasoline, they found that it indicated performance levels superior to that of a P-51 Mustang. The P-51 was considered the most powerful fighter of WWII. When I heard of this, it really sank in that winning a war is all about comprehensive strength. Even if you have one or two superior elements, that doesn’t mean much in the end.
Still we persevered. We thought that if our poor abilities might aid the country, we would volunteer. We were willing to sacrifice our lives to protect our homeland. Are such thoughts really fanatical nationalism?
Once I became a kamikaze reserve, I piloted my first Zero. I was stunned by its performance, which was on a different level from the trainers I’d flown up until then. I was thrilled and deeply moved to be sitting in the cockpit of the fighter that was out there gunning down American aircraft.
But our training in the Zeros was limited only to diving. That was what kamikaze training consisted of. Carry a bomb and fling yourself at an enemy ship—we were practicing how to die. Yet we tackled it in earnest.
Why? That’s just how people are.
One day, during drills for pulling out of a steep dive, for the first time even I thought I’d done quite well. After the training session, I approached Instructor Miyabe on the airfield and said, “I did pretty well today, don’t you think, sir?”
“I was surprised. That was extremely well executed,” he said with a smile.
“Really?”
“Yes, really. I’m not flattering you. You’re all excellent, yourself included, Takeda-san. I can see why the Navy wanted to turn so many college students into pilots. But…” The smile faded from his face. “Those who become good pilots are immediately shipped off to the front.”
I understood what he was saying. At the front, we would be made into kamikazes.
Instructor Miyabe continued. “When I trained to be a pilot, the lessons were on how to survive. How to best shoot down an enemy fighter, how best to escape an attack. All fighter pilots should be given such training. But the situation is different for you. You’re only being trained on how to die. What’s more, the best ones get sent out first. In such a case, never improving would be better.”
I didn’t know how to respond.
“Japan needs you all. When this war is over, this country is going to need people like you,” Instructor Miyabe declared.
Today, I firmly believe that it was Miyabe-san that Japan needed for its future. He was the one who should never have died.
“Is the war going to end, sir?”
“It will. And soon.”
“Will we win, sir?”
He laughed. It was a decidedly sad sort of laugh. “That, I don’t know,” he said. “I have fought the Americans in the Pacific since Pearl Harbor. They are frighteningly strong.”
“In terms of materiel, sir?”
“Not just that. They are superior to our forces in every way.”
“What about the Zeros?”
“At the start of the war, the Zero was invincible. I thought that as long as I was in a Zero, I would never lose. But in the latter half of ’43, the Americans finally started deploying fighters that are better than the Zero. The Grumman F6Fs and the Sikorskys significantly outperform the Zero.”
His statement was earth-shattering. We had been taught that the Zero, the most powerful fighter in the world, was so dominant it could smash any and all enemy fighters.
“The Zero has fought for way too long,” Instructor Miyabe said. “It has fought in the vanguard for five years, since the Sino-Japanese War. They’ve made countless minor revisions to it, but there has never been any dramatic improvement in performance. The tragedy of the Zero is that they never developed new aircraft that could succeed it. Once, the planes were unrivaled warriors, but now they’re a bunch of… old-timers.”
The image of the plane as he spoke of it overlapped with him in my eyes. I found myself wondering if the Zero wasn’t an avatar of the instructing officer himself.
Day by day, the state of the war worsened, yet every day we kept on throwing ourselves into training, at considerable risk to our lives. If you made a split-second error in a nose-dive, you were a goner. In fact, more than a few flight students were killed in training accidents.
My best friend, Ito, died that way. He failed to pull up the nose of his aircraft during a diving drill and crashed into the ground. He was a very bright, cheerful guy, popular with everyone. He was great at reciting old comical limericks, and after a tough day of training when everyone was feeling depressed, he would amuse us with his wonderful voice. He died right before my eyes. “Shock” can’t come close to describing what I felt.
Miyabe-san was the instructor at that time. When he got out of his plane, his face was white as a sheet.
That night, all the students were made to line up. A junior-grade lieutenant, a Naval Academy graduate, screamed at us in a hysterical voice. “I don’t think I need to tell you that there was a fatal accident here today!” We thought he was about to offer condolences. What he actually said next was wholly unexpected.