After the loss of the Marianas, the Imperial Japanese General Headquarters revised its over-all plan for the conduct of the war in order to meet the grave situation which had developed. The new policy was set forth in the Sho-Go Operation Plan which made the island chain of the Japanese homeland, the Ryukyu Islands, Formosa, and the Philippines the last-ditch line of defense. The operation was further broken down into four regional divisions:
(a) The Sho-Ichi-Go Operation for the defense of the Philippine Islands;
(b) The Sho-Ni-Go Operation for the defense of Formosa and the Nanseishoto Islands (Ryukyu Islands);
(c) The Sho-San-Go Operation for the defense of the Japanese homeland;
(d) The Sho-Yon-Go Operation for the defense of Hokkaido and the Kuriles.
These Japanese titles may be translated: Victory No. 1 Operation, Victory No. 2 Operation, Victory No. 3 Operation, and Victory No. 4 Operation.
According to the early estimate of the situation by the Imperial Japanese General Headquarters, the most probable region where the enemy would direct his major invasion after the capture of the Marianas was the Formosa-Ryukyu area—the region for the Sho-Ni-Go Operation.
In the Battle of the Philippine Sea, the carrier-borne air strength of the Japanese Navy was virtually annihilated. Although the surface units survived the battle almost intact, the Japanese sea-going forces, deprived of carrier-borne air squadrons, were no longer capable of roaming the vast ocean at will. With the loss of mobility, the Japanese surface fleet had lost most of its value as a fighting force. Consequently, in the Sho-Go Operation Plan the core of the fighting strength was built around land-based air forces.
In preparation for the Sho-Go Operation the Japanese Navy regrouped its available land-based air power. Thus the Second Air Fleet came into existence, and I was assigned as its commanding admiral. The fleet was composed of the major portion of the then existing naval land-based air units and deployed along the Formosa, Nanseishoto Islands, and southern Kyushu line to carry out its defense assignment under Sho-Ni-Go Operation.
Responsible for the Sho-Ichi-Go Operation was the First Air Fleet, which had been assigned to take care of the Philippine region. To prepare for the Sho-San-Go Operation, the Third Air Fleet had been organized in the homeland area. This air fleet was to continue its daily duty of training and education of airmen as well as to prepare for an emergency in case the worst came prematurely. It was also provided that, in spite of the foregoing division of regional assignment, all available strength was to be concentrated at once in any region where the enemy’s main invasion might fall.
When the Sho-Go Operation Plan was drawn up, the Second Air Fleet was officially allocated 510 land-based planes. The First Air Fleet was assigned 350 planes, and the Third Air Fleet 300 planes. Although the official number of planes allocated to the three air fleets totalled 1,160, about one third were actually not available. With Japanese aircraft production severely reduced, it was impossible for the air forces to make up for the attrition of war with new equipment. To make matters worse, few experienced, capable aviators were available. Inadequately trained pilots reduced even further the military potential of the aircraft assigned to the air fleets.
In addition to the land-based naval air power, the Japanese Navy possessed slightly over one hundred planes belonging to the carrier division of the Third Fleet under the command of Vice Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa. The remnant of the forces defeated at the Battle of the Philippine Sea on June 19-20, 1944, these carrier-borne air squadrons had lost much of their effectiveness as a fighting force. There were also the Twelfth Air Fleet under Vice Admiral Michitaro To- zuka in the Hokkaido and Kurile district, and the Thirteenth Air Fleet under Vice Admiral Shiro Takasu in the Malay and Dutch Indies area. Although the two air fleets were to reinforce the Sho-Go Operational forces in case of emergency, the planes they possessed numbered less than one hundred each.
The Japanese Army Air Forces allocated about 600 planes to the Sho-Go Operation, about 200 planes each from the Fourth Air Army stationed in the Philippines, from the Formosan Army, and from the Army training forces scattered in the homeland. Like the naval air forces, the actual combat ability of the Army air forces had seriously deteriorated.
Unification of command was achieved during the battle off Formosa, fought for five consecutive days beginning October 12, 1944, by placing all available aircraft under my immediate command. These forces aggregated 720 planes and included Army air forces stationed in Formosa, all the naval air units stationed in or reinforcing Formosa, including the naval training air group in Formosa, and the carrier squadrons from the Third Fleet. The total number included also my own Second Air Fleet deployed along the Formosa-Kyushu line.
T Attack Force
Having been appointed the Commander of the Second Air Fleet on June 15, 1944, I established my headquarters at the Katori Air Base in Chiba Prefecture near Tokyo. Activated on the same date, the air fleet was composed of various flying units scattered all over Japan. By the first part of July, I ordered all these widely dispersed forces to concentrate in Kyushu, and moved my headquarters to the Kanoya Air Base on the southern tip of Kyushu on July 10.
Our first essential task was to accelerate advanced training, since our units were hurriedly formed by collecting together green flyers fresh from elementary training and remnants of squadrons then somehow available. I personally directed the training at the Kyushu air bases for about three months, placing emphasis on two points:
The first point was related to the size of the flying formation to be employed in attacking enemy carrier task forces. I knew we had to deal with well-trained and powerful enemy carrier task forces as our foremost antagonist, but we did not have sufficient time to convert our green flyers into highly qualified combat aviators. The only solution to our problem was, I believed, to approach the target with a large number of torpedo planes and bombers under the strongest possible escort of our fighter planes and to resort to a simultaneous attack with that large formation. To my disappointment, however, most of the flyers had not yet completed basic individual training. To begin training these green flyers in a large formation flight was itself impossible until almost the end of our training period. Only three times, and those immediately before the Battle off Formosa began, could we conduct attack training in a large formation. Finally we had to content ourselves with the hope that we had somehow cast a mould for a large formation attack.
The second point on which my emphasis was placed concerned a special flying group called “The T Attack Force.” By T we denoted the initial letter of the word typhoon. This force was to be used in total darkness or in very bad weather, in which enemy planes were considered inadequately trained to fight—such as in a typhoon. The force was composed of torpedo attack planes which we intended to use against the enemy carrier task forces. The commanding officer of the group was Captain Shuzo Kuno, one of the few surviving first-rate veterans among the senior naval aviators. Crew members were selected from among veteran flyers then available. Organized in March, 1944, the T Attack Force was first attached directly to the Imperial General Headquarters, but on June 15, 1944, it was transferred to my command.
At this juncture I should like to explain the background of our military concept which gave birth to the T Attack Force. The story goes back to the year 1909, when the Japanese Government and High Command, in order to cope with a new international situation after the Russo-Japanese War, formulated a new national defense policy and made the United States Navy the most probable enemy of the Japanese Navy. Ever since then, the Japanese Navy felt it necessary to develop a tactical method to destroy, with its numerically inferior strength, a superior enemy. All naval training was devoted to attaining this objective. It was out of the question for the numerically inferior Japanese Navy to conduct a costly expedition to American waters to seek out and fight the superior American fleet there. Instead, the Japanese naval plan was inevitably based on the so-called offensive- defensive strategy. According to this plan, the Japanese Navy expected that the American fleet would steam across the Pacific. We expected that the American fleet would have maintenance troubles during the long transpacific cruise, whereas we could conserve our whole strength while awaiting the enemy approach. Since the Japanese waters in which we expected to fight a decisive fleet action were our home-grounds, we could take full advantage of superior geographic and local intelligence. From the foregoing basic policy of fighting a superior fleet with numerically inferior strength was born realization of the need for emphasizing night action. It was believed that the Japanese fleet, a smaller force, could more advantageously meet the American fleet, the larger force, in darkness than in broad daylight.
A similar line of thought applied to the deployment of submarines. The Japanese Navy planned that its submarines should keep in touch with and continually attack the American fleet on its way across the Pacific, thereby achieving a diminution in American superiority. In brief, through a “warfare of attrition” the Japanese Navy expected to attain a material reduction in the strength of the U. S. Fleet before battle was joined in Japanese waters.
In addition to the advantages to be gained from distance and the harassment of submarines, a third advantage could be gained, it was believed, through special training for bad weather conditions. In 1934, the Japanese Combined Fleet under Admiral Nobumasa Suetsugu placed emphasis on conducting training and exercises on rough seas under adverse conditions. In Japanese waters we have about eight times as many stormy days as in American waters. Even on ordinary days, the sea in the vicinity of Japan is seldom calm. Further, we in the Japanese Navy believed that the U. S. Navy trained under easy natural conditions in the cool climate of Seattle and Halifax in summer, and in the warm breezes of Lower California and Cuba in winter.
Though fighting efficiency is lowered on ' rough seas, we believed that the Japanese Navy, constantly trained under adverse conditions, would be able to retain greater fighting efficiency than the American fleet with pleasant weather training. In order to meet the requirement of rough-water training, the Japanese Navy, first of all, built her warships generally bigger in size than each equivalent type of warship in other navies of the world.
Under Admiral Suetsugu I was senior operations officer of his Combined Fleet. And the following year I was transferred to the Naval General Staff to head the operations section. There, under the Chief of the Naval General Staff, Fleet Admiral Prince Fushimi, I planned a naval maneuver to be held with emphasis on rough sea training. I planned to hold a grand maneuver in the latter part of October, the season when the northeast monsoon begins to blow hard in the sea near Japan. For this maneuver I chose a sea area to the northeast of the homeland, an area where the sea is generally very high. Coincidentally, the naval maneuver thus planned that year met with a severe typhoon. With many ships having been damaged because of the typhoon, we were forced to abandon the exercise halfway. Dosed with this bitter pill and because of my resignation and that of Admiral Suetsugu, the two most ardent advocates of stormy weather training, enthusiasm for the practice died down, though its importance was still recognized.
After the outbreak of the Pacific War, lessons obtained through war experiences made us feel that we had to revive the idea of rough weather training, particularly in the field of aviation. The result was the organization of the T Attack Force. I, once a foremost promoter of rough weather surface training, became particularly interested in the training of the TAF. I placed my greatest reliance for victory upon this unit.
Concerning the TAF, there is one thing to be particularly noted—the fact that half of the TAF was composed of Army elements. The circumstances leading to the inclusion of the Army planes were as follows:
For many years the Japanese Army had built up its armament with a view to fighting the Russian Army in Manchuria and had organized and trained all its forces along that line. Army planes had been exclusively assigned to the duty of cooperating with ground combat forces. The Army’s policy in building up aviation armament had been to maintain as many short-range tactical aircraft as possible. A change in policy came, however, with the experience gained through the military adventure in China beginning in 1937. In the fighting in China, naval aircraft could easily carry out a shuttlebombing covering about a 600 mile span between the bases in Kyushu and the targets in Central China. But no Army plane could carry war to the Chinese mainland from the nearest base in Formosa, though the intervening distance was less than 120 miles. Later, as the Chinese war continued, the Japanese Army found it necessary to launch strategic bombers against targets in the interior of the continent. Thereupon, the Army began to manufacture a heavy bomber, called Type-Ki-81 after the model of the Navy’s then middle-sized torpedo bomber. This new Army bomber, if equipped with auxiliary fuel tanks, could carry out a shuttle-bombing of 800 miles radius.
Although the Army bombers of this type had become available for actual battle missions by the middle of the Pacific War, the Army refused to use them for the defense of the Marianas. It was obvious to all of us that the loss of these strategic islands would result in fatal exposure of the Japanese lifeline to relentless enemy attack. It was also obvious that the defense of the Marianas depended mainly upon the use of land-based planes, the Army’s as well as the Navy’s. But the Army, deeply committed to its activities on the continent, did not divert even a single plane for use in the defense of the Marianas, whereas the Navy threw into the Marianas all her first-line air power then available.
After the fall of the Marianas, however, the Army changed its policy. In the light of rapid changes in the war situation, the Army realized that even Army planes had to be diverted to operations on the ocean frontiers. The Army authorities began thinking of training for oceanic missions with the use of the Type-Ki-81’s, which were the only Army planes capable of participating effectively in the new mission. At first, thirty planes of this type with their entire crews composing one flight squadron were experimentally placed under the command of Captain Kuno of the TAF, exclusively for training purposes. In the middle of the training, however, this squadron was ordered to become an organic part of the TAF. Later on, another squadron of the same type, numbering about thirty planes, was added to the TAF.
Of the foregoing two Army heavy bomber squadrons, the one which was first incorporated into the TAF had completed about six months of hard sea training at the time of the Battle off Formosa. As far as appearances were concerned, it was capable of joining a night attack as well as a daylight one. The other squadron, however, had completed only two months of sea training by the middle of October.
By the standard of those days, it was generally considered that before a green flyer could attain sufficient skill to carry out a night attack on ships at sea, he should have undergone at least three years of training, even if he had been trained from the first as a naval aviator. Army flyers, whose basic training was naturally different from that of the Navy flyers, required much lengthier training for over-water assignments. But in the specific instance under discussion, the Army flyers were given only two to six months of training for their sea mission. By our naval standards, therefore, we could not consider that the Army flyers in the TAF had completed their initiation course for night attack training. Especially deplorable was their ability in recognition. Without exaggeration, I have to confess that there was virtually none among the Army flyers who could tell exactly which ship was of what type.
In this respect the Navy aviators were not much better than the Army flyers. By the year of 1944, the status of the Japanese Fleet strength had so seriously deteriorated that it had become impossible for land-based aviators to train in cooperation with the surface units. When I inspected the TAF, I personally put a question to each aviator as to whether or not he had ever seen a submarine and found out there were many who never had.
In the Battle off Formosa, almost every attack on enemy surface units was made by the TAF planes. The results achieved in these attacks were tremendously magnified in the reports. It seems to me that the cause of this fabulous exaggeration was chiefly attributable to the fact that we had resorted to a night attack by those aviators who lacked recognition ability.
Moving Air Units to Formosa
Immediately after the fall of Saipan, the Imperial General Headquarters first estimated that the next enemy invasion would fall on Okinawa. Watching developments, however, we began to feel it was more probable that the enemy would strike the southern Philippines, with the Western Carolines and Morotai as stepping-stones. On September 10, with the foregoing estimate in mind, I moved my headquarters from the Kanoya Air Base in South Kyushu to the Takao Air Base in South Formosa. Strenuous efforts were made to put every air base in Formosa in good operational condition. At the same time I started to transfer my air units, one by one, to that island.
In planning the transfer of the air units I had a bitter war lesson in mind. In February, 1944, the First Air Fleet under Vice Admiral Kakuji Kakuda moved its torpedo bomber units from the homeland to the Marianas in advance of fighter units. On February 22-23, American task forces launched air raids on the Marianas, and Kakuda’s torpedo-bombers, just transferred from the homeland, suffered disastrous damage tantamount to total annihilation. In my plan for the Formosan transfer, I directed that as far as possible well-trained fighters move first. I also directed the transfer, parallel to the fighter migration, of some of the large flying boats to be used for long-range patrol duty.
By October 12, when Formosa was attacked by the American carrier task forces, I had transferred only about 100 fighters which were to be stationed in Takao and Shinchiku and about ten flying boats which were to be assigned to Toko Sea Plane Base. The remaining units composing the major portion of the Second Air Fleet units had not been readied for the transfer.
The Battle off Formosa
With my move to Formosa, the Imperial General Headquarters placed under my tactical command Army air forces then stationed in Formosa. Under the command of Major General Yamamoto, and belonging to the administrative chain of command of the Commander of the Formosa Army, General Rikichi Ando, the Army air forces were composed of about two hundred planes in all, including about a hundred fighters. They were based in the main at an airfield near Taihoku and at the Heito airfield east of Takao. As for their military skill, I must admit that it was very low by our standard.
In addition to the above, I was ordered to assume tactical command of the naval training air units stationed in Formosa. Among the planes of the training group, only about thirty at the Tainan Air Base could be counted as ready for combat missions when handled by training instructors.
Including both the Second Air Fleet planes moved to Formosa and the above- mentioned Army and Navy planes temporarily placed under my tactical command, all the air strength I could muster at the time of the Battle off Formosa was actually 330 planes. As I have already explained, I had under my command about 350 planes of the TAF and other units of the Second Air Fleet, but these were still based in Kyushu. After the Battle off Formosa began, about one hundred planes originally attached to the Third Fleet, then anchored in the Inland Sea, were placed under my command.
Immediately prior to the Battle off Formosa, we had an air raid by American carrier forces on Okinawa on October 10. On the previous day, October 9, one of our long-range patrol planes dispatched from the Kanoya Air Base in South Kyushu had disappeared far to the east of Okinawa. Except for that incident, we did not have a single indication of the enemy’s approach. The attack on Okinawa was, therefore, a complete surprise. To make matters worse, we had stationed no planes on Okinawa at the time. We had not been fully prepared for launching counter-attacks from Kyushu either. Consequently, we could not help sitting by as spectators to what was going on in the Ryukyu Islands.
Judging from the circumstances of the Okinawa air raid, we believed that the enemy would soon attack Formosa. At 0930 hours on October 10, the Commander in Chief of the Combined Fleet, Admiral Toyoda, expecting that an enemy invasion was imminent, issued an order to alert his fleet for the Sho-Ni-Go Operation. At noon on the same day, he sent out another order to have his fleet alerted for the Sho-Ichi-Go Operation, too. On the 11th, for the first time, our scouting planes were successful in discovering the enemy carrier groups. Convinced that a major enemy air raid would be launched upon Formosa early on the morning of the 12th, I ordered my forces to complete all the following measures during the 11th, thus to be made ready for the impending battle:
(1) Except for fighters and reconnaissance planes, all small aircraft stationed in Formosa should be closely concealed under cover. Planes of larger types should seek refuge in Kyushu.
(2) The 230 fighter planes presently stationed in Formosa should be divided into two groups of equal strength: One group should be assigned for counterattacking incoming enemy air forces in the air above Takao, and the other group in the air above Taihoku.
(3) The TAF, with its base in Kyushu, should launch repeated night attacks against the enemy carrier groups at sea. Other air forces stationed in Kyushu should execute a formation attack in full force against the carrier groups, with the Ryukyu Islands as refueling bases.
October twelfth dawned quietly, but at 0810 hours a radar station on the east coast of Formosa detected a great formation of enemy planes. This was the first wave of the enemy attack. All of our fighters took off from their bases at once; one group circled above Takao and the other above Taihoku to wait for and counterattack the enemy. By this time, Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo had issued orders activating the two major operations, Sho- Ichi-Go and Sho-Ni-Go.
Although I was thoroughly aware of the manifest inferiority of our airmen’s military skill as compared with that of the enemy flyers, I was confident that, as far as the defensive fighting in the air over Formosa was concerned, the odds would be in our favor at a six to four ratio. My confidence was based on two facts: first, we were able to use simultaneously as many as 230 fighters, a number which would, in all probability, exceed the number of planes the enemy carrier task force could dispatch at one time; and secondly, we were able to take advantage of our defensive position for counterattacking the invaders on our home ground. I expected that the foregoing two points would surely work in our favor, and that, therefore, no matter how superior the enemy flyers might be to our own men in military skill, there was no fear of our losing the fight.
What actually happened, however, was utterly contrary to what I had expected. As I watched from my command post, a terrific aerial combat began directly above my head. Our interceptors swooped down in great force at the invading enemy planes. Our planes appeared to do so well that I thought I could desire no better performance. In a matter of moments, one after the other, planes were seen falling down, enveloped in flames. “Well done! Well done! A tremendous success!” I clapped my hands. Alas! to my sudden disappointment, a closer watch revealed that all those shot down were our fighters, and all those proudly circling above our heads were enemy planes! Our fighters were nothing but so many eggs thrown at the stone wall of the indomitable enemy formation. In a brief one-sided encounter, the combat terminated in our total defeat. Looking up at the enemy planes which continued their perfect formation intact throughout the combat, I could not help heaving a deep sigh. It was a total surprise to me to see that, while our planes caught fire the instant they were hit, enemy planes, though momentarily smoking, did not catch fire, presumably because of their perfected fire-preventing devices.
Since our interceptors could not put up any real resistance, the enemy went on ravaging to his heart’s content and inflicted terrific damage to our ground installations through strafing and bombing. Early on the morning of the 12th, a little before the attack by the enemy, my chief of staff, Rear Admiral Shie Sugimoto, recommended that, with a view to boosting the morale of the officers and men, I should remain in the exposed administrative office building instead of moving to the protected command post. But I thought otherwise and moved to the command post, which had been just completed in a cave in the middle of a hill about 4,000 yards away from the administrative building. About an hour later, in the first wave of the enemy attack a bomb hit my office in the administrative building and destroyed it completely. Seeing the destruction, the chief of staff said, “It is very fortunate for us to have moved to the command post as the admiral decided. If we had stayed in the administrative office, all of us—the admiral, and all other headquarters personnel—would have been perfectly finished.” Looking into each other’s face, we both could not help laughing ironically.
Though the number of fighters we lost in the first waves of the enemy attack was only about one-third of our strength, the real effect was much severer than the mere number suggests, since among those lost were many of the leader-planes. Consequently, when the second wave of the enemy assault came, as few as between sixty to seventy of our fighters in the aggregate throughout Formosa took to the air to meet the enemy. Worse still, none of them could offer resistance of any value. Finally, when the third wave came, none of our fighters could take to the air. True, the remnants of our fighters put up a scattered resistance to B-29’s which invaded Formosa from Chinese Bases, but in that resistance, too, we could produce no appreciable result.
In the meantime, our forces based in Kyushu unleashed a daring offensive against the enemy at sea. The offensive was launched on the 12th by one hundred and one planes of the Second Air Fleet, utilizing Okinawa as a relay base. The sortie was made in a large formation in broad daylight and claimed, though dubiously, that two enemy carriers had been hit by bombing, with some damage. With reinforcement from the Third Fleet carrier squadrons, we repeated daylight formation sorties with about four hundred planes on the 14th and with about a hundred and seventy planes on the 15th. But the last two-day sortie claimed no perceivable result, with most of the planes having failed to sight the target.
It was the TAF alone which was credited with giving an appreciable blow to enemy surface forces. Beginning with the night attack on the 13th, the typhoon-trained air unit conducted sneak attacks on three successive nights until the night of the 15th. Each night about thirty planes were used. Immediately after the Battle off Formosa, Japanese Imperial General Headquarters announced that twelve enemy ships— cruisers and above—had been sunk and another twenty-three enemy ships had been otherwise destroyed. Most of this result was credited to the TAF. Delighted by the big victory, the Commander in Chief of the Combined Fleet, Admiral Toyoda, was determined not to miss this opportunity. On the morning of the 15th he ordered his entire fleet to make an all-out pursuit. Even the surface units then anchored in the Inland Sea were designated to join the pursuit. Needless to say, all this pursuit business ended in a fiasco.
In connection with the Battle off Formosa, the forces of B-29’s based in the Chinese mainland attacked Formosa for three consecutive days, beginning on the 14th, and heavily bombed many important military installations, thus furthering the damage done by the carrier task groups.
The Evaluation of the Battle Result
As we have seen, the announced result of the Battle off Formosa was originated from the report by the TAF, which, under the command of Captain Kuno, was then based in Kyushu, away from my personal direction, though, as the Second Air Fleet commander, I was officially responsible for it.
After the war ended in 1945, I was told that of the ships in the U. S. Fleet only two cruisers had sustained serious damage. Why on earth had such an exorbitant exaggeration been made in our report? Having been informed of the real damage, I was startled indeed at the great discrepancy, nor can we shrink from the responsibility for having made such a report.
The losses on our part were really great. Against the surface units of the enemy carrier task forces, we made 761 sorties in all, and lost 179 planes in these sorties. In addition, we lost about 150 planes in the air and on the ground in Formosa. The damage to the military installations was also very severe. An important aircraft arsenal which the Japanese Navy had built at the Takao Air Base was reduced to mere debris in a brief severe bombing. My original confidence in our ability to fight out the battle with six-to-four odds in our favor was shattered. The battle was fought with nine-to- one odds in favor of the enemy.
The results achieved by air forces were always exaggerated by airmen. It was particularly so in the case of a night assault. The basic reason for the exaggeration is that it is exceedingly difficult for the aviator to evaluate his success. As soon as the airmen came back to the base from their sortie, the commander held a close interrogation of each of them. The outcome of the interrogation was then submitted to superior commanders. Airmen, aspiring to fame, were likely to exaggerate their achievements. When they had attacked a destroyer, they believed it was a cruiser; a cruiser was often seen as a battleship; and a battleship was sometimes mistaken for an aircraft carrier. Night attacks resulted in universal exaggeration.
When two or more planes shared the same target, a single target was often claimed as several different targets. In a night action, the flare of a bomb-burst was not easily interpreted. Sometimes the flame of enemy gunfire was mistaken for direct hits. It seems to me the airmen of the TAF repeatedly concentrated their attack on the same target, which was reported as a number of targets. Since we added up these claims, the result was an exorbitant exaggeration.
It is not very difficult to understand that such mistakes are likely to be committed. I, too, through statistical study, had determined that aviators were likely to magnify their battle achievements. When our flyers reported to us what they had actually witnessed, and then supported their reports with various evidence, we could not help accepting their claim. We had no concrete ground on which to deny their claim, except for the case where we could clearly ascertain that there was a duplication or error. As the senior commanding officer stationed in Kyushu, Captain Kuno radioed his report directly to the Commander in Chief of the Combined Fleet and to Imperial General Headquarters, parallel to his reporting to me, the Second Air Fleet commander. Looking into his report, I realized instantly that it was undoubtedly exaggerated. Based upon my statistical study, I thought the real result was about one-third of what had been reported. As I have explained elsewhere, the TAF was the cream of my fleet strength and had been trained for night attack. I was convinced that such a trained unit could achieve one-third of what they claimed.
As a matter of fact, however, the real result they had obtained was less than one-tenth of what they claimed. It seems to me that this is attributable to the fact that the daylight formation attacks were all fruitless, with the night attack by the TAF alone being effective; and that the military skill of the TAF men who took part in the night attack was much inferior to what we had estimated. The exaggerated report caused the Imperial General Headquarters to commit, though temporarily, a mistake in its estimate of the war situation. It made the nation indulge in a false celebration and created the illusion that the Empire could turn the tide of the war.
For my part I ascertained through the reconnaissance planes' report on the 16th that the damage done to the enemy was slight, and I was convinced that a major invasion of the Philippines would soon be launched. As soon as the Battle off Formosa was over, I made all haste in preparations for our move to the Philippine theater.