Home : World War II : The Navy In WWII :Operation Iceberg - Okinawa Invasion
The "most audacious and complex enterprise yet undertaken by the American amphibious forces," according to British observers. And, indeed, it was. It was also the bloodiest battle of the war. The Japanese name for the hellish reaction to the Okinawa invasion was beautiful, Kikusui ("floating chrysanthemum," obviously inspired by the banner of a fourteenth-century warrior patriot, Masashige Kusunoki, who led his men to certain death in the Battle of Minatogawa). The first Kikusui attack was scheduled to take place on April 6 and 7 and would be a mass, combined Navy and Army suicide plane attack in which the Second Fleet - the "Special Surface Attack Force" spearheaded by the Yamato - would participate. It was hoped that the Yamato and the nine other ships in the fleet would lure the American carrier planes away from Okinawa while the kamikaze planes, Navy and Army, dealt with the American fleet. Thus off balance, the Americans might not be capable of aiding the troops already ashore, where Ushijima's men would wipe them out. In every aspect the Kikusui plan was suicidal; it was not even a gamble. It began with the early morning attack launched from Kanoya and Formosa, both kamikaze and conventional attackers taking part. Although the exact numbers that participated in this first, largest Kikusui attack cannot be determined with any accuracy, at least 198 suicide planes attacked the American fleet on April 6 (the attack, continued into the next day, is believed to have consisted of about 355 kamikaze planes alone, with perhaps an equal number of conventional planes participating). The air filled with unreasoning death as hundreds of kamikazes swept in upon the concentration of American ships. This concentration was capable of ripping the very air to shreds with its antiaircraft guns, numbering literally in the thousands. Desperation inspired the men aboard the ships to feats of remarkable endurance and firepower. Din and clatter, shouts and curses, the sound of a thousand rapid-firing guns, the cry of straining engines as a Zeke attempted to break through the myriad of black puffs: all these merged into a jungle of sound. When word had come of large groups of bogies on the ship's radars, torpedo planes and bombers were struck below decks, their bombs removed and their fuel tanks emptied. Hellcats were quickly readied and the fighters of Task Force 58 were launched to meet the enemy. Combat Air Patrol planes met the first attackers midway between Kyushu and Okinawa and began shooting them out of the sky. But they came on like a swarm of hornets, singly and in large groups of thirty or more. The Japanese planes ranged from the most recent Zeke or Tony to ancient fabric-covered biplanes; few if any experienced pilots guided these planes, for the Task Force 58 airmen were amazed at the easy mark they made. By sheer weight of numbers, however, some of the suicide planes broke through the CAP, only to be met by the guns of the radar picket ships - destroyers which had been set out around the major ship concentration at Okinawa. Antiaircraft fire stopped 39 of the kamikazes, which splashed and cartwheeled into the Pacific; escort carrier planes accounted for another 55 and the fighters of Task Force 58 destroyed 233 before they could do any damage. But 22 kamikaze planes dashed through the curtain of fire and spread havoc among the ships. As it would develop through the remaining nine major Kikusui attacks (from April 6 through June 22), the radar pickets suffered the worst of the attacks. The picket ships were not only bombed, but also took the brunt of the "floating chrysanthemums." On April 6 Radar Stations No. 1 (destroyer Bush) and No. 2 (destroyer Calhoun) were both sunk under the fury of the mass attacks. By the next day, when the attacks diminished, twenty-two other ships had taken kamikaze hits. Another destroyer, the Emmons, was sunk; 466 men were dead and 568 horribly wounded by fire. Kikusui No. 1, though heavily sacrificial, had hurt the American fleet. Reports, in fact, from the Thirty-second Army on Okinawa claimed that thirty American ships were seen sinking and an additional twenty or more burning. Because of the smokeblackened skies, Japanese reconnaissance planes were unable to check the Army's extravagant report. But Kikusui No. 1 had one more act to go: the drama of the Second Fleet. Before setting out Admiral Ito sent a message to the crews of the ten ships in his force in which he said that the "fate of the homeland rests on this operation. Our ships have been organized as a surface special attack corps ... Every unit participating in this operation, whether or not it has been assigned for a special attack, is expected to fight to the bitter end. Thereby the enemy will be annihilated and the eternal foundations of our motherland will be secured." The Yamato, which had fuel enough to get to Okinawa only, was to shell the American positions with its giant 18.1 guns (which outranged any gun in the American or British fleets), while closer in the light cruiser Yahagi and the eight destroyers would do the same. The Yamato was the last survivor of the once great battleship array of the Japanese fleet (the Haruna was then under rcpair and was in fact the last surviving Japanese battleship; the Yamato was the last of the giants). American planes had contended with the big battleship on three other occasions: Midway, the Marianas, and Leyte Gulf, but the mammoth had escaped despite hits. In the evening of April 6 the American submarines Hackleback and Threadfin reported the emergence of the Surface Special Attack Force from the Inland Sea through the Bungo Strait. There was literally no air cover, for the few planes which provided it were land-based and were forccd to leave as soon as they had reached their maximum range. The one-way navy continued on through the night. Word having reached Spruance and Mitscher of the approaching Japanese force, Mitscher immediately sent three of his task groups north to intercept. At dawn of April 7 forty Hellcats fanned out to the north and west searching for the Yamato and company. An Essex plane sighted the ships passing through Van Diemen Strait just south of Kyushu at eight twenty-three in the morning. The force seemed to be heading into the East China Sea away from Okinawa. Ito, however, was hoping to elude the carrier planes by taking a course beyond their range. If lucky, he could approach Okinawa from the west and open up with his big guns - guns that hurled a projectile of more than a ton over a distance exceeding twenty miles. In the hold there were a thousand of these missiles. The weather was not ideal: a low cloud ceiling (three thousand feet) with visibility from five to eight miles, hampered by rain squalls. As Ito watched from his bridge on the Yamato, the American planes gathered in the distance, first a few, then many. About half past twelve the first attack came. Although antiaircraft fire was intense it was not accurate and the Helldivcrs and Avengers swooped down upon the Japanese ships. Within ten minutes two bombs had struck the Yamato and an additional rent opened up its side as an Avenger placed a torpedo in its path. The Yahagi too had been hurt and for the next two hours scores of Avengers, Hellcats, and Helldivers slashed and ripped at the hapless ships. The Yahagi was the first to go, its deck a shambles and a slaughterhouse under the blows of a dozen bombs and seven torpedoes. The destroyers too suffered heavily, although they were not the major objectives: but the carrier planes sent four - the Isokaze, Hamakaze, Kasumi, and Asashimo - to the bottom before the battle was over. It was the Yamato that was the prize, however. After the first attack the big ship took a list to port but continued on course at a good speed and remained very active with antiaircraft fire. Desperately, Captain Aruga ordered the ship on a zigzag course, hoping to throw off the aim of the attackers. But there were too many of them. Intrepid planes swarmed around the ship with bombs and torpedoes, adding further to the battlewagon's distress. Then six Yorktown Avengers appeared on the scene. Because of the list to port, the starboard side had lifted from the water, exposing the thinner underplating of the "invincible" Yamato. The Avengers circled around to the starboard; torpedoes were set for a depth of from ten to twenty feet - and the Grummans dropped down for the run on the Yamato. The upper decks, as with the Yahagi, had been reduced to twisted wreckage, and the once formidable gun batteries were either silent or desultory, so that the Avengers made perfect runs; all six fish pierced the exposed underbelly. A series of explosions shook the gigantic ship as if it were a child's toy in a bathtub. A thousand men below decks were trapped and had no chance to get out. On the bridge a typical argument ensued. Captain Aruga had ordered his executive officer to tie him to the remains of the bridge. He was afraid that if he once got into the water he would instinctively save himself. As the waves washed around him and the deck assumed an acute slant, Aruga spoke to Admiral Ito, commander of the no longer existing Second Fleet. "You are indispensable," Aruga said. "Please leave the ship." But Ito chose to remain; there would be no world for him in which Japan was vanquished and in which aircraft had written the final chapter in the history of the proud battleship. The ship tipped and below decks the big shells rolled across the deck of the ammunition room. More explosions followed and the ship, 863 feet in length, turned over and churned to the bottom of the East China Sea, exploding and detonating as its compartments burst under air pressure and exploding ammunition. At two twenty-three in the afternoon of April 7, 1945, the world's greatest battleship no longer existed. And, for that matter, neither did the Japanese Imperial Fleet (the last battleship, the Haruna, originally announced sunk by Captain Colin Kelly's B-17 attack early in the war, was sunk by carrier planes in its own dock at Kure Harbor on July 28, 1945). The death toll on the Yamato alone was 2488; the cost to the Navy attackers was four Helldivers, three Avengers, and three Hellcats (four pilots and eight aircrews were lost). During the battle the carrier Hancock was crashed by kamikaze planes twice with a toll of about seventy seamen killed. Kikusui No. 1 had, like Sho-1, succeeded in its predicted Japanese losses, but it had decided nothing. Japan's military future now lay in the systematic, inconclusive pursuit of death. This pursuit continued for the following several months, literally until the August surrender. In between the Kikusui mass raids, small groups or individual attacks also took place, so that from April through August it was impossible for the men in the ships in the Okinawa area to relax. The ten Kikusui assaults opened with the climax, during the April 6-7 raid, when six American ships were sunk and seventeen damaged (ten seriously enough to be out of the war for the duration). The other Kiketsui attacks, with American losses from U. S. Navy sources, were:
These were but the major concerted Japanese Army and Navy attacks. Also there were rare lulls, while the Japanese scrounged more aircraft and impressed more young pilots into the Special Attack Corps. Weather too intervened. Even so, to the men on the Amcrican ships it was a rare day, indeed, when they were not under the horror of the lunatic attacks. During the second Kikusui another innovation fell upon them when Lieutenant Saburo Dohi piloted an Ohka bomb into the destroyer Stanley; Dohi had climbed into his flying bomb assuming that his target was a battleship. Of the eight Ohka-carrying bombers that were dispatched on April 12, only one - the one that had transported Dohi to the target area - returned. The others were destroyed before doing any damage. Dohi's Ohka did strike, but the Stanley was not seriously damaged. On the same day the destroyer Mannert L. Abele was crashed by a Zeke kamikaze; after being hit by what may have been an Ohka, the ship seemed to dissolve and sank within five minutes, with a loss of seventynine of the crew. The special attacks did not, as the Japanese High Command so fervently believed, alter the course of the war. This must have been obvious even before all the chrysanthemums had fallen, but the mania grew more and more incurable as the situation grew worse. However, if the purpose of going out to battle is to kill, maim, and destroy (once accepting your own destruction as part of the price), then the kamikazes were a great success. The fiery charnel house each plane created when it struck was all but unspeakable. "The deck near my [gun] mount was covered with blood, guts, brains, tongues, scalps, hearts, arms etc. from the Jap pilots," wrote Seaman First Class James J. Fahey in his Pacific War Diary aboard the Montpelier (in the Leyte Gulf area). "They had to put the hose on to wash the blood off the deck. The deck ran red with blood. The Japs were spattered all over the place. One of the fellows had a Jap scalp, it looked like you skinned an animal. The hair was black, but very short and the color of the skin was yellow, real Japanese. I do not think he was very old. I picked up a tin pie plate with a tongue on it. The pilots tooth mark was into it very deep. It was very big and long, it looked like part of his tonsils were attached to it. ... This was the first time I ever saw a person's brains, what a mess ..." Throughout the Kikusui attacks, the radar picket ships, stationed around Okinawa in all directions ranging in distances from eighteen to ninety-five miles out, bore the brunt of the devastation. If these ships were eliminated, the Japanese believed, it would be possible to get through to the more important larger ships closer to Okinawa. The pickets then became the most frequently struck victims. One enterprising seaman, after days of attack, put a sign out on his ship: THAT WAY TO THE CARRIERS. But the only sure method of disrupting a suicide attacker who had slipped past the combat air patrol was to shoot him out of the air before he came in close enough to read the sardonic message. When a heavy raid developed there were simply too many targets to shoot at. During the fifth Kikusui (on May 3) the destroyer Aaron Ward rang with General Quarters at six twenty-two in the evening. In seven minutes a tiny speck materialized out of the sunset. Another minute, during which there had been a general intake of breath aboard the ship, and the speck became a Val. The guns of the Aaron Ward boomed and roared when the Japanese plane was still seven thousand yards distant. It would have been impossible, what with the massive cone of fire vectored on the lone plane, to have missed. The Val smoked but continued on its path toward the ship. It had already assumed the kamikaze approach dive before, at five hundred yards, a five-inch projectile from the Aaron Ward's No. 53 Mount made a direct hit. The Val blew up, still coming on, and splashed into the water about a hundred yards from the ship. As the gunners watched spellbound, the Japanese pilot was hurled by the impact of the crash over the ship's deck and into the water on the other side. Parts of the wrecked Val smashed into the ship; the engine rammed into No. 53 Mount, putting it out of action for a while. Even when the engine was removed the mount would operate only on difficult manual control. The Val's propeller whirled across the water and cut its way into the after deckhouse, where it jammed the door of the after passageway. The clean-up crew there found the pilot's boot near the deckhouse; his foot was still in it. There was no time for speculation, for another Val appeared bearing down from the port bow, but that one splashed twelve hundred yards out, with no damage to the ship. Suddenly a Zeke came in from the port, undetected by radar but spotted by the gun captain of No. 42 Mount. Nothing seemed capable of stopping the Zeke, which magnified in size with alarming speed. When it was within a hundred yards the Zeke had begun to smoke and its bomb fell from underneath the belly - but struck the port side of the ship under No. 44 Gun. The Zeke continued on to wrap its flaming wreckage around the ship's superstructure. The bomb struck the Aaron Ward below the water line, ripping open fifty feet of the hull upon exploding in the after engine room. The rudder jammed and the ship began circling to port as fuel from ruptured lines fed the flames topside. The deck was a shambles and a caldron. All men but two around No. 44 Gun were dead, burned to cinders, blown overboard, or just simply "missing," never to appear again. The wounded, burned and with broken limbs, writhed out of the way of the fire fighters. The horror of the kamikaze attack lay as much in its sensless persistence as in the gruesome details of the aftermath. Was it the perverse human instinct for harassing cripples? Despite the obvious fact that the Aaron Ward was listing, burning, and running in circles, this did not divert other kamikazes from hitting the ship again and again. The nearby Little was stricken too, so badly that it eventually sank (as did two other destroyers, the Luce and Morrison). For an hour or more the Japanese aircraft sprinted in on Radar Picket 10 - some splashed and others contributed to the misery aboard the mangled destroyers. The still operating gun mounts on the Aaron Ward spat out fire and succeeded in knocking down ten kamikazes before they reached the ship. Marine Corsairs from Okinawa strips some seventy miles away bore in to stop the ravaging planes. Even as they swept in to destroy the Zekes, Vals, and Bettys, the Corsairs suffered the hazards of "friendly fire," for the gunners on the beleaguered ships, overwrought, weary, and in pain, hated all things that flew; and there was no time to discriminate between friend and foe. The fifth aircraft splashed in that flaming twilight was a twin-engined Betty, which burst into flame and went spinning into the water. The geyser of the impact had barely settled before two more Vals appeared; these had Marine Corsairs on their tails and in the near-surface battle one of the Vals erupted burning fragments and crashed into the water. But the other Val came on in a precipitous dive. All guns trained on the lone attacker, who appeared to ride in on the tracers. It capered through the serried air, its nose growing ever larger, its wings widening, reeling and yawing from hits - but coming on nonetheless. Suddenly it jinked, the nose snapped up, a wing dropped, and the Val cleared the bridge, its high wing ripping through the lines of the signal halyards, wrenched out most of the signal antennas, crunched the top of the forward stack, and, in a shower of debris, cartwheeled across the starboard rail into the sea. The din that followed in the Val's wake was something out of a nightmare. The Val's slashing plunge across the deck had opened up steam lines to the ship's whistle and siren, which now hooted and shrieked in a crescendo of pandemonium. One sailor, a survivor of the sunken Little (not understanding the plight of the Aaron Ward nor noting the fires aboard), pondered in his own misery the sanity of a ship that, in mid-battle, would do nothing but go around in circles whistling and hooting. This ludicrous situation was not appreciated by the men of the Aaron Ward; there were the wounded to care for, men whose burned flesh dripped from them as they moved, and the dead to identify, if possible. There were raging fires below decks and the word came round that the ship's sinking was imminent. No word to abandon ship came, however. But another Val came in, the pilot strafing a path before him toward the bridge itself. No. 42 Gun's crew stood its ground in the face of the onslaught until a stream of fire chopped off a wing. But momentum carried the plane forward as the bomb fell short of the ship; the plane struck in a fiery mass onto the main deck and the bomb burst in the water adjacent to the ship. A hammer blow shook the Aaron Ward, a hole ripped into the forward fireroom, and the flood which followed drowned the last operating engine. The Aaron Ward lay smoldering dead in the water as out of nowhere an unseen kamikaze added its bomb, fuel, and flame to the agony. Seconds later another unseen attacker smashed into the main deck. To the men aboard the Aaron Ward their world, confined to the single ship, had become a fiery bedlam and charnel house; flames lit up the sky, thick smoke choked them, and the decks grew slick with blood. It seemed that they had taken all anyone could be expected to endure. But that was not to be - a Zeke slashed in and slammed into No. 43 Gun, the crew of which vanished in a ball of flame. Others in the area of impact were seared by the fire, others disappeared in the explosion over the side. There was barely time to attend to the dead and dying before the tenth attacker appeared. "Here comes another one!" someone shouted. "God, we can't take another one," the ship's executive officer, Karl Neuport, muttered. Low on the water, difficult to see in the smoke and darkness, the Japanese plane came at them first from the starboard and then from aft. The remaining guns chopped away at the plane, which whipped down on the Aaron Ward and shattered against the base of the after stack. The bomb detonated as the stack, fragments of the plane, a searchlight tower, and guns lifted into the heavens and showered death and dreadful pain onto the decks. Horror had accumulated upon horror, but it was the final attack of the day. "The once trim Aaron Ward resembled a floating junk pile from the bridge aft," wrote Lieutenant Commander Arnold Lott. "Stacks, guns, searchlight tower, boats, everything was smashed and battered beyond recognition. Fires raged on deck, in the officer's and chief's quarters, in both clipping rooms, and in the after engine room. The main deck was only inches above water, both firerooms flooded, after engine room flooded, after diesel engine room, machine shop, shaft alleys, crew's bunkrooms, all flooded. Dead and wounded littered the wardroom, mess hall, sick bay, fantail and passageways." But the Aaron Ward remained afloat. As rescue ships pulled alongside, it was a relief to realize that the ordeal was over; but for the afflicted it was not over. Forty-five men were ultimately listed as dead (some were never found); forty-nine were wounded, some fatally, many horribly. None of the survivors would ever forget the testing of the Aaron Ward during Kikusui No. 5. Not all Japanese operations during the Kikusui mass attacks were suicidal. Conventional bombing missions were attempted (generally with poor results, as the bombers were stopped by carrier aircraft or the Marine and Army fighters based on Okinawa). A steady combat air patrol was maintained over Okinawa at all times. During one of these during the morning of May 10, 1945 (which opened Kikusui No. 6), a four-plane (Corsair) division of Marines took off from their base at Kadena, Okinawa. Led by Captain Kenneth L. Reusser, the four planes were flown by members of VMF-312; Reusser's wingman was a Navy and Marine veteran, twenty-eight-year-old Lieutenant Robert L. Klingman of Binger, Oklahoma. The Corsairs had climbed to about ten thousand feet to patrol over Ie Jima, just west of northern Okinawa, when at an altitude fifteen thousand feet above them they detected the contrails of a twinengincd Japanese plane. Throttling up their engines the four Corsairs set off in pursuit of the lone intruder. As they climbed, so did the Nick (Kawasaki Ki. 45), apparently out on a photographic mission. At thirty-two thousand feet one of the Corsairs had gone as high as it could go - the engine simply refused to lift it higher. Four thousand feet higher and another Corsair left the chase for the same reason. Reusser and Klingman persisted, firing some of their ammunition to lighten the load. Finally, at thirty-eight thousand feet, they reached the Nick's level. The Marine Corsairs closed in. Reusser opened up first and with his remaining ammunition shot up the Nick's left wing and engine. But the Nick continued on its way, with the rear gunner menacing the Corsairs but not firing. Klingman soon learned why as he moved in to take up where Reusser had been forced to leave off. Hoping to make certain his .50-calibers could finish off the Nick he throttled to within fifty feet of the Japanese plane. But when he pressed the gun switch he found that at the high altitude his guns had frozen. Incensed, Klingman moved ever closer upon the Nick, determined to get the plane one way or the other. The Corsair was equipped with a massive thirteen-foot propeller and a rugged, powerful Pratt and Whitney eighteen-cylinder engine; since his guns had gone dead, Klingman was determined to employ some of his plane's other assets. He charged the fleeing Nick and with his propeller started hacking away at the tail assembly, biting pieces out of the rudder and nearly into the rear cockpit, in which the Japanese gunner furiously pounded away at his own frozen guns. The Nick flew on - and so did Klingman's Corsair. He brought it around again and this time sheared away the rudder completely and chewed away a piece of the right stabilizer. Still flying, Klingman jammed rudder, turned, and came in for the third time. His buzz saw propeller went to work again on the Nick. The stabilizer fluttered away into the slipstream and the Nick bucked into a spin. By the time it had fallen to fifteen thousand feet the wings had snapped from the fuselage, and the Nick plunged into the water below. But Klingman had overstayed his patrol. Before he could return to Kadena - with Reusser providing ammunition-less protection - his fuel supply ran out. Even so, he succeeded in bringing the Corsair into VMF-312's strip on Okinawa with a dead stick. Klingman jumped from the plane to inspect the damage and found that a generous portion of propeller tip was missing; wing, engine, and fuselage were pocked and pieces of the Nick were found lodged in the Corsair's capacious cowling. Klingman's adventure occurred during Kikusui No. 6; in the lull which followed sporadic kamikazes harried the invaders. During the early morning CAP on May 14, the Enterprise, 150 miles off the island of Kyushu, was alerted to individual or small attacks. One lone, determined Zeke broke through the Hellcats and the heavy 20-mm., 40-mm., and five-inch fire. As the Zeke came in close it appeared that he might overshoot, but at the last moment the pilot - whose name was Tomi Zai - flipped the Zeke onto its back and plunged inverted through the forward elevator. The flame shot out of the deck and the bomb continued through five decks before detonating. The explosion shot flames hundreds of feet into the air and No. 1 elevator ripped skyward four hundred feet above the flight deck of the Enterprise. Tomi Zai had accomplished one of the few effective kamikaze attacks of the war. His crash had killed thirteen men and injured sixty-eight, but he also eliminated the Enterprise from battle for the rest of the war. There was, however, the other, eternal but: it did not alter the outcome. After Kikusui No. 10, in late June, the kamikaze attacks waned except for rare, small flutters up to the moment of peace. Okinawa was declared secure by Marine Major General Roy S. Geiger, an airman who had led the fighting on Guadalcanal. Except for skirmishes in isolated areas, or flushing still resisting remnants of the Japanese Thirtysecond Army out of the hills and caves (often with napalm bombs lobbed into cave entrances), the fighting on Okinawa was ended. The technique of these mopping-up operations had been developed over more than eighty days of hard fighting. Closesupport operations between ground and air men, called by Army Major General James L. Bradley (commander of the 96th Infantry Division) as "superior throughout," brought a scourge of napalm and rockets to the dug-in Japanese. Likewise, strafing runs upon Japanese positions directed by radio from the ground cleared the way for the advance of American ground troops. Especially effective in such operations was the Corsair, which earned the name from Marines of "Sweetheart of Okinawa." The Japanese name was not so affectionate. Because of the aircraft's characteristic sound, the result of the rush of air through the vents on its bent wings, it was feared by the Japanese and called "Whistling Death." It had been one of the bloodiest campaigns in the history of American arms; for the U. S. Navy it was the costliest battle of the war. Most of the Japanese fought to the death, many dying in the final days of the battle in senseless banzai charges upon Marine and Army positions with no other ammunition but dirt to throw into the faces of the Americans. Great numbers committed suicide in a frenzy of slaughter by throat gashing, holding hand grenades to heads, or leaping from cliffs. The island's top commanders, Ushijima and Cho, went out in proper style. On the morning of June 22, ceremoniously dressed, the two men were disemboweled in a cave within a hundred feet of advancing Marines. Their deaths added but 2 to the 110,000 Japanese who died on Okinawa (about 10,000 were actually rounded up alive and taken prisoner). American losses too were high: about 12,000 killed; of these about 4000 were Navy men. At least 80 per cent of these deaths (there was an equal number of wounded) could be attributed to the kamikazes. The toll was high, but not determinative. Okinawa only meant that the fight for Japan in the home islands would have to be horrific. But those who knew realized that the kamikazes failed in their defined mission; they succeeded only in killing, maiming, and destroying equipment. The Japanese people were not aware of this failure, although the general issue of sharpened bamboo stakes with which to meet the expected invader should have inspired at least a glimmer of misgiving. That and the effects of LeMay's B-29 fire raids on city after city. Following the Kikusui No. 3 raid (April 16), Radio Tokyo informed the Japanese people that: 393 American warships have been sunk or damaged by the divine wind attackers since March 23. This includes 21 carriers, 19 battleships, 16 battleships or large cruisers, 26 large-type warships, 55 cruisers, and 53 destroyers. 217 ships, including 85 of cruiser size or larger, have definitely been sunk. 60 per cent of the Allied fleet in the Okinawa area have either been sunk or damaged. The truth was that at that time, 14, not 217, ships had been sunk. Throughout the entire Okinawa campaign a total of 17 American ships (including one baby flattop) were actually sunk; observers of the kamikaze flights (those that returned) claimed 44. Claims were put forth for 99 ships damaged; actually 198 American ships were damaged. (It might be noted that no British carrier was seriously damaged during the Okinawa campaign, because of the armored flight decks.) To sink those 17 and damage the 198 ships kamikazes were dispatched 1809 times; of these 879 returned and 930 planes were expended. Nearly an equal number of Army suicide planes were sortied, besides conventional aircraft. During the Okinawa fighting nearly 8000 Japanese aircraft - and pilots - were lost of all types. But Okinawa had fallen and the enemy was camped within 350 miles of Japan - the tactics of desperation had not worked. (All kamikaze operations beginning with Leyte Gulf and ending at Okinawa had actually sunk 34 American ships, although official claims were made for 81; 288 had been damaged, claims were made for 195. These "triumphs" had been gained at the cost of 1228 aircraft, a fraction of which carried two men.) It was during the Okinawa Kikusui missions that an obvious disenchantment with the kamikaze emerged. Rear Admiral Toshiyuki Yokoi, chief of staff of Fifth Air Fleet during the Okinawa campaign, noted that "... toward the last, the doomed pilots had good reason for doubting the validity of the cause in which they were told to die. The difficulties became especially apparent when men in aviation training were peremptorily ordered to the front and to death. "When it came time for their takeoff, the pilots' attitude ranged from the despair of sheep headed for slaughter to open expressions of contempt for their superior officers. There were frequent and obvious cases of pilots returning from sorties claiming that they could not locate any enemy ships, and one pilot even strafed his commanding officer's quarters when he took off." And to what purpose were they ordered to take off? Like Nicolai Rostov in War and Peace, the youthful Japanese pilots, sacrifices to the blindness and vanity of their elders, asked, "For what, then, those severed arms and legs, why those dead men?" When no reasonable answer was forthcoming, the shrieking horror of the divine wind became a whisper.
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