During World War II, then-Captain Truman Johnson Hedding (1902–95) was at the forefront of events during the final phase of fighting in the Pacific. A contributor to the 1947 U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, he chronicled the naval component of the Okinawa campaign (see “Operation Iceberg’s Mixed Legacy,” pp. 12–17) and the final actions leading up to the Japanese surrender as a coauthor of Air Campaigns of the Pacific War. Conducting interviews and interrogations while compiling his report, he got up close and personal with the phenomenon of the kamikazes, which he describes in his U.S. Naval Institute oral history.
We had the bloody battle for Iwo Jima; following that was the move into Okinawa. That was a very tough one, particularly tough on the Navy. We lost more ships to kamikazes there, except for the big ships. Those picket destroyers on picket stations—that was just something.
[Kamikaze strikes] first started in the Philippines; more or less one squadron volunteered. [The Japanese] found that the effects were so devastating that it was their principal weapon on Okinawa. They sank a lot of our ships.
Of course, the baka bomb [MXY-7 Ohka] that they developed never did turn out to be anything. The baka bomb was actually just a flying bomb; it was only about 12 feet long. It was jet-powered and had small elementary wings. They would put a young pilot in the bomb for terminal guidance. They would hang them on a Betty bomber or something, and they would take off for Okinawa. When they’d get within range, they’d release the guy. He’d fire up his rocket and supposedly guide it into a ship. As I remember, there were only one or two instances where these baka bombs ever hit a ship. Most of the so-called mother planes were shot down with the poor baka bomb guy still hanging on underneath.
But the kamikaze attacks on the ships were well organized. They would come down the chain of islands to Okinawa in groups of 10 or 15 or 300 or 400 at a time. The pilots were actually very poorly trained. They were able to fly the planes, but they weren’t able to navigate very well. So they usually had a leader. The actual navigation was not particularly difficult; they’d just come down the island chain until they got to Okinawa. The first ships they’d see would be the destroyers at the northern picket stations, and down they’d come.
At those northern picket stations we had a lot of ships sunk, and had a lot sunk around Kerama Rhetto. When they would come, [the small-craft picket supports] would make smoke and try to cover up the transports and all the other shipping that we had in there and all the damaged shipping, which there was a lot of.
The kamikaze is, you might say, traditionally Japanese. The warrior in Japan has always had a leading role, like the samurai warriors. That develops a military philosophy that the Japanese armed forces had. I was very interested in how you can get these pilots to take off on a kamikaze mission, knowing they were not going to return. The instinct that we all have to [stay] alive is so strong—how did they overcome it?
I interrogated one Imperial Japanese Navy officer, Captain Mitsuo Fuchida. Captain Fuchida was better known as the commander of the air group that attacked Pearl Harbor (see “Commander Fuchida’s Decision,” December 2016, pp. 16–23). I think now he’s a Baptist minister. I was interested in how they got all these pilots hopped up to put the white scarves around their heads and get into Bettys with 500-pound bombs slung on them and then go down and just dive into our ships. I asked him, “Did you give them any drugs?”
“No.”
“How did you do it?”
He said, “It’s probably very difficult for you to understand, but to us it’s bushido.”
Bushido, in Japanese, means the way of the warrior. It goes back to the samurai tradition. A lot of these kids were just barely able to take off, fly the planes, then dive into our ships.
I think most of them were volunteers at the beginning. Later on, a squadron commander would volunteer his squadron. So I don’t know how many of them actually went down there because they were ordered to, or partly because they were ordered to, or partly because they felt that was what they should do.
It can really make you stop and think.