By the beginning of 1945 the tide of the Pacific War had turned dramatically against Japan. During the summer of 1944, U.S. forces had seized the Mariana Islands, breaching the Japanese inner defensive perimeter, virtually annihilating the Combined Fleet’s carrier air groups at the Battle of the Philippine Sea, and placing land-based bombers within range of the Home Islands. Almost simultaneously, the British were repulsing the last Japanese offensive in Southeast Asia at the Battle of Imphal-Kohima on the Indian frontier. And in October, the U.S. dual advance reached the Philippines and effectively eliminated the Imperial Navy’s powerful surface-action component at Leyte Gulf. Meanwhile, the war on trade spearheaded by U.S. submarine forces had decimated the enemy’s merchant marine, depriving Japan of the strategic materials for which it had gone to war.
Even worse setbacks were to follow. In February 1945 the U.S. offensive, then pursuing a single axis of advance, took a giant stride to Iwo Jima, a Bonin island selected as a forward base for the aerial bombardment of Japan. In March, B-29s flying from the Marianas carried out the first fire-bombing of Tokyo, destroying 16 square miles of the city and killing, at low estimate, 73,000 of its inhabitants. Iwo Jima was declared secure on the 24th, and on 1 April U.S. soldiers and Marines landed on Okinawa, in the Ryukyu Islands, from which the projected invasion of the Home Islands—only 350 miles away—would be launched.
Moderate Japanese military and political leaders had been convinced since the fall of the Marianas that the war was lost and should be ended. On the other hand, with every new defeat the still-dominant hard liners clung all the more fiercely to the patriotic slogan, “One hundred million deaths rather than surrender.” Even at this late date, they insisted, the spiritual superiority of the Japanese warrior could nullify the enemy’s enormous material advantage. This would be manifested through “special operations”—a euphemism for suicide attacks. The first such attacks had been made by naval airmen during the Battle of Leyte Gulf. At the time, they were regarded as a temporary expedient, but their successes (exaggerated by the claims of returning escorts) soon led to their institutionalization in the Kamikaze (Divine Wind) Special Attack Corps. Japanese military values assured that, at least initially, there was no shortage of idealistic young volunteers for one-way missions, and in the war’s closing months the aircraft of the original kamikazes were complemented by other suicide weapons: kaiten (turn toward heaven) human torpedoes, first deployed in November 1944; oka (cherry blossom) piloted bombs, which became operational in March 1945; shinyo (ocean shaking) motorboats mounting contact charges in their bows, intended for use in the defense of the Home Islands; and the battleship Yamato.
Completed in 1941, the Yamato gave her name (a poetic version of “Japan”) to the heaviest class of dreadnoughts ever built. She measured 862 feet, 9 inches overall, displaced 71,699 tons at full load, and carried a main armament of nine 18.1-inch guns, each capable of hurling a 3,220-pound shell 29 miles. (By way of contrast, the U.S. Iowa (BB-61)-class battleships displaced 57,940 tons and carried nine 16-inch guns.) Three more of these mastodons had been laid down after the Yamato, but only one—the Musashi, destined to succumb to Admiral W. F. “Bull” Halsey’s air groups at Leyte Gulf—emerged as a battleship. The third of the class—the Shinano—was converted into the world’s largest carrier and sunk on her first day at sea by the U.S. submarine Archerfish (SS-311). A fourth vessel, never named, was broken up prior to completion.
The Yamato herself had made no mark on the war to date. Although she had been present at the Battles of Midway and the Philippine Sea, not until the Battle of Leyte Gulf did she find a target for her great guns—the escort carriers off Samar—and they had not scored any hits. At Jutland, she would have been a marvel; in Pacific carrier air battles, she was an anachronism.
The giant vessel’s transformation into a kamikaze ship occurred as an afterthought to the plans for the defense of Okinawa. Correctly anticipating a landing, officers at Imperial General Headquarters had concentrated an army 115,000 strong on Okinawa. They could rely upon this army—like others before it—to fight almost literally to the last man. While such dedication was extremely commendable, the outcome of every island battle from Attu to Iwo Jima had shown that an isolated garrison, however heroic, would eventually be overwhelmed. The Imperial Navy proposed to provide another ending on Okinawa by using its kamikazes to inflict unacceptable attrition on the U.S. fleet, upon which the forces ashore depended. Most of the damage was to be done by ten mass kikusui (floating chrysanthemum) attacks, in which army kamikazes would collaborate, launched during a six-week period commencing 6 April.
At this point, the Yamato entered the planning process. Obviously, the fewer defending carrier aircraft the kamikazes encountered, the greater their chances of success would be. The Yamato was to act as bait, feigning an advance toward Okinawa to decoy as many as possible of these aircraft away from the U.S. fleet. Exiting the Inland Sea via the Bungo Suido, she and her escorts would steam south and then west along the coast of Kyushu, as if proceeding to a position where they could come down on Okinawa from the northwest. Instead, they would turn up the west coast of Kyushu to enter port at Sasebo.
On the morning of 5 April, the Combined Fleet’s commander in chief, Admiral Soemu Toyoda, announced a change in plans. Apparently on the prompting of his fiery operations officer, Captain Shiganori Kami, he had decided that the Yamato task force would actually turn toward Okinawa. Upon arrival there, the battleship would beach herself and expend her ammunition on the enemy’s amphibious units, after which her crew would somehow make its way ashore to join the island’s defenders. No air cover would be provided, and the ships would be issued fuel enough only to reach Okinawa—although, in the event, the officers at the Tokuyama Oil Depot discreetly disobeyed that instruction. The Japanese named the operation Ten’- ichigo (Heaven Number One).
Its authors excepted, the new plan found no favor with any of the senior officers involved—Vice Admiral Ryuno- suke Kusaka, Combined Fleet chief of staff; Vice Admiral Seiichi Ito, commander of the little force—rather grandiloquently designated the Second Fleet—that would execute it; Rear Admiral Keizo Komura, whose Destroyer Squadron 20 would escort the Yamato; Captain Kosaku Ariga, the Yamato's commanding officer; and all nine of Komura’s captains—not because, as they foresaw, the Yamato and most of her escorts would be lost, but because their loss was bound to be futile. Without air cover, the Yamato had no chance of even nearing Okinawa. Ironically, Kusaka was sent to overcome Ito’s objections. He finally did so by an appeal no samurai could resist: “You are being offered a glorious way to die.”
Escorted by the light cruiser Yahagi and eight destroyers, the Yamato passed through the Bungo Suido on the evening of 6 April, the day when the first kikusui attack had been made. At 1000 on 7 April Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher’s Task Force 58 commenced launching three waves of 386 aircraft against the Japanese formation. The Yamato opened fire at the first wave at 1232, and by 1423 it was all over. The Yahagi and two destroyers had been sunk; two battered destroyers were soon scuttled; and the Yamato had capsized and exploded, less than halfway to Okinawa, after absorbing hits from between 19 and 34 bombs and torpedoes. Of her 3,332 crewmen, 269 survived. Both Admiral Ito and Captain (posthumously promoted to Rear Admiral) Ariga chose to go down with the ship, the former retiring to his sea cabin and the latter lashing himself to the binnacle in the antiaircraft command station atop the bridge. The killed in action in Komura’s destroyer squadron numbered 1,187. Task Force 58 lost 10 planes and 12 men. Later that afternoon Combined Fleet Headquarters ordered the remaining destroyers to steer for Sasebo. What no one has ever characterized better than Captain Edward L. Beach in The United States Navy: A 200-Year History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1986), as “the mystical samurai navy of Japan” had made its last sortie.
Paradoxically, no kikusui attack was launched on 7 April, and intermittent raids damaged only four ships. The attackers returned in force in the following days, however, and by the end of the struggle for Okinawa, 32 U.S. vessels (mostly destroyer types and landing ships) had been sunk, 368 damaged, and 9,731 naval personnel killed or wounded, making this the costliest campaign in the history of the U.S. Navy. While conventional bombing contributed to the total, the majority of these losses were inflicted by kamikazes. In hits per unit, they had proved to be the most effective major antiship weapon of the war; but they had not saved Okinawa. On 21 June, Marine Major General Roy S. Geiger declared the island secure.
For further reading: Samuel Eliot Morison, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, Vol. XIV, Victory in the Pacific, 1945 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960); Russell Spurr, A Glorious Way to Die: The Kamikaze Mission of the Battleship Yamato, April 1945 (New York: Newmarket Press, 1981); Yoshida Mitsuru, trs. Richard H. Minear, Requiem for Battleship Yamato (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1985).