Kamikaze over Okinawa

On 11 April 1945, the eleventh day of the battle for Okinawa, Japanese suicide aircraft once again fell upon the American fleet operating around the island. In the afternoon a Zero fighter flown by a young airman broke through the barrage and struck the starboard side of the battleship Missouri, just below the main deck. That same day a veteran of the Pacific War, the aircraft carrier Enterprise, was damaged, and the destroyer Kidd lost 38 men to a kamikaze strike. It was one of many such days in a campaign that proved the bloodiest in the US Navy’s history.

War chronologies record under this date that the kamikaze attacks on American ships off Okinawa were continuing and that the carrier Enterprise and the battleship Missouri were hit. This is consistent with US Navy records; it should only be added that the Missouri suffered merely superficial damage, and that the Enterprise, according to most accounts, was damaged by the explosions of suicide aircraft that crashed just alongside her rather than by a direct hit – although she still had to withdraw for repairs.

The weapon of last resort

The first organised kamikaze attacks – by the Japanese special attack units (tokkōtai) – were carried out in October 1944 off the Philippines on the initiative of Vice Admiral Takijirō Ōnishi. In the autumn suicide pilots attacked aircraft carriers, in January 1945 they harried the fleet sailing to Luzon, and in March, on the eve of the invasion of Okinawa, Japanese aircraft from Kyushu struck at the carriers that had carried out the raid on Kure and Kobe. For a Japanese command bereft of experienced pilots and of a fleet capable of fighting, the suicide aircraft was a weapon that offered at least some chance of hitting an enemy ship even with a pilot who had little training.

Okinawa, some 600 kilometres from the airfields of southern Kyushu and within range of the bases on Formosa, was an ideal target for the kamikaze. The invasion fleet that put troops ashore on 1 April had to remain in the same waters for weeks to support the ground forces, bring in supplies and cover the beachhead. Unlike in earlier operations, it could not strike and sail away.

The Kikusui operations

The Japanese navy and army prepared a series of mass air attacks against Okinawa called Kikusui – “floating chrysanthemum”, after the crest of the fourteenth-century commander Masashige Kusunoki, a symbol of loyalty to the emperor unto death. On Kyushu they were directed by the commander of the 5th Air Fleet, Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki, from Kanoya air base. Between 6 April and 22 June 1945 ten such operations were carried out. According to an American tally cited in the literature, about 1,465 suicide aircraft took part in them; several hundred more attacked singly or in small groups from Kyushu and Formosa.

The first Kikusui operation began on 6 April and continued into the next day – at the same time as the sortie of the battleship Yamato, sunk on 7 April by American carrier aircraft. According to published accounts, some 400 Japanese aircraft, about 350 of them suicide planes, came in over the fleet on 6 April. Among the ships they sank were the destroyers Bush and Colhoun, the destroyer-minesweeper Emmons, the landing ship LST-447 and two ammunition ships, Logan Victory and Hobbs Victory; a dozen or so other vessels were damaged. On 7 April kamikaze hit, among others, the carrier Hancock and the battleship Maryland. The Japanese lost most of the attacking aircraft – but achieved more than ever before.

11 April: Missouri and Enterprise

The attacks did not stop after the first massed strike. On 11 April the suicide planes went for the fast carriers of Task Force 58, operating east of Okinawa, and their screening ships. The Missouri, the newest of the Iowa-class battleships, which had joined the fleet only at the beginning of 1945 and was escorting the carriers, was attacked in the afternoon. According to the ship’s records and the crew’s accounts, a Zero under fire from the anti-aircraft guns struck the hull with its wing near one of the 5-inch (127 mm) gun mounts, just below the main deck. The aircraft broke up and its spilled fuel caught fire on deck; the blaze was quickly put out. The damage was superficial, no one in the crew was killed, and the battleship stayed in formation. The dent in her side can still be seen today on the ship, which since 1999 has been a museum at Pearl Harbor (PL).

The remains of the Japanese pilot were thrown onto the Missouri’s deck. The next day the ship’s commanding officer, Captain William Callaghan, ordered him to be buried at sea with military honours, his body covered with a Japanese flag sewn by the sailors. The decision met with objections from some of the crew, who had just been the target of the attack, but Callaghan – according to those present – held that a fallen serviceman who had carried out his orders deserved a dignified burial. The airman’s identity is not certain; Japanese and American researchers most often point to a nineteen-year-old naval pilot who had taken off from one of the airfields on Kyushu.

That same day the Enterprise was damaged – one of the oldest and most distinguished carriers in the American fleet, a veteran of battles from Midway to Leyte, by then specialising in night air operations. According to US Navy records she was damaged by kamikaze; accounts indicate that two bomb-carrying suicide aircraft exploded just alongside, damaging the hull and the ship’s equipment. The carrier had to withdraw for repairs to Ulithi atoll. She returned to Okinawa at the beginning of May, and on 14 May another kamikaze struck her near the forward aircraft lift, killing more than a dozen men and putting the ship out of action for the rest of the war.

Also on 11 April a suicide plane hit the destroyer Kidd, which was screening the carriers; 38 members of her crew were killed. Several other ships were damaged by near misses.

The second wave and the Ohka

The next day, 12 April, the second Kikusui operation began, in which, according to published accounts, some 185 suicide aircraft took part. It saw the first successful use of the piloted Yokosuka MXY7 Ohka (“cherry blossom”) – small rocket-powered gliders carrying more than a ton of explosives, slung beneath Mitsubishi G4M bombers and released near the target. The Americans called them “Baka” – Japanese for “fool”. The destroyer Mannert L. Abele, on duty at a forward radar station, was hit first by a suicide aircraft and then by an Ohka, which broke her in two. The ship sank within minutes; between 79 and 84 men were killed, depending on the source. She was the only ship sunk by an Ohka during the Okinawa campaign. That day kamikaze also hit, among others, the battleship Tennessee.

The radar pickets

The heaviest burden of the attacks fell not on the carriers and battleships but on the destroyers posted to radar picket stations. To detect aircraft approaching from the north early and to direct fighters onto them, the Americans set up a dozen or so stations around Okinawa, some of them dozens of nautical miles from the island. They were manned by single destroyers or pairs of destroyers, supported by small landing craft converted into fire-support vessels. The Japanese pilots, often poorly trained and tired from the flight, attacked the first ships they saw – which were the pickets.

Duty at these stations became a byword among sailors for the hardest of ordeals. On 16 April the destroyer Laffey, according to published accounts, survived six suicide-plane strikes and several bomb hits in less than an hour and a half; more than thirty of her crew were killed, but the ship stayed afloat. Many others were less fortunate. Destroyers were the largest group among the ships sunk and damaged off Okinawa.

The British fleet, too, encountered the kamikaze. The carriers of the British Pacific Fleet, operating from the end of March against the airfields on the Sakishima Islands between Okinawa and Formosa, had armoured flight decks. Suicide aircraft that hit them did far less damage than on the wooden decks of the American carriers, and the ships usually resumed flying operations within a few hours.

The toll

The attacks went on until the end of the fighting on Okinawa in June 1945. According to American figures cited in most accounts, 36 Allied ships and craft were sunk during the campaign – mainly destroyers, landing ships and smaller vessels – and 368 were damaged, most of them by kamikaze. The US Navy lost 4,907 killed and missing and 4,874 wounded – so the navy had more killed than wounded, and more killed than the Marines lost ashore on Okinawa. None of the large ships – carriers and battleships – was sunk off Okinawa, but many of them, like the Bunker Hill in May, were put out of action for months.

Japanese losses were enormous: thousands of airmen died, most of them very young and often after only brief training. Many left farewell letters, which after the war became a subject of controversy in Japan – as testimony to self-sacrifice, or as evidence of how the state had exploited its youth. Ugaki himself was killed on 15 August 1945, a few hours after the Emperor announced the surrender, when he led a last suicide flight towards Okinawa.

Significance

Okinawa was the high point of the Japanese suicide campaign. The kamikaze neither stopped the invasion nor forced the fleet to withdraw, but they inflicted losses on it greater than in any earlier operation and showed what the defence of the home islands might look like. In 1945 the Japanese were gathering thousands of aircraft for suicide attacks on Kyushu and Honshu, as well as explosive motor boats and midget submarines. American planners factored this experience into their estimates of the cost of invading Japan, considered in the summer of 1945.

For the American fleet the lessons of Okinawa meant stronger anti-aircraft defences, more fighter patrols and new procedures for the radar pickets. The Missouri, damaged on 11 April, lay in Tokyo Bay nearly five months later – on 2 September 1945 – as the venue for the signing of Japan’s surrender. The dent in her side became one of the most photographed relics of the Pacific War.