'Kamikaze'
The mentality that lay behind 'Japan's Last Bid for Victory'
In late 1944 and into 1945 the Japanese began to make extensive use of ‘Kamikaze’ piloted aircraft. These men were intent on committing suicide by crashing their planes into Allied warships, mostly US Navy ships. It was a desperate measure, but it had its origins in the long traditions of the Samurai warriors, which date back centuries. The internal wars of Japan gave rise to the Bushido Code - ‘The Way of the Warrior’. Japanese warriors developed a code of conduct that displayed contempt for death combined with utter loyalty to their warlords. This was expressed in the phrase ‘Death is lighter than a feather', while duty is weightier than a mountain’.
Adrian Stewart explores all the aspects of the Kamikaze tradition in Kamikaze: Japan's Last Bid for Victory as he traces the origins and use of these attacks during the war. The following excerpt considers how the Bushido code came to guide members of the Japanese armed forces, and even Japanese civilians:
While the samurai disappeared, however, their Bushido code did not. Instead, it was extended to become the guide for members of Japan’s army and navy and, in due course, their respective air arms. Its principles were accepted with pride by the new armed services, whose men burned with eagerness to emulate ‘the renowned bravery’ of the samurai heroes, the exploits of whom were well-known and much admired. Now, though, the loyalty that was the cornerstone of Bushido was not given to any territorial lord but to Japan and the country’s living symbol, her semi-divine Emperor.
So all the beliefs and attitudes described earlier were relevant to and would be repeated by the Japanese fighting men when their country came into the Second World War on the side of Germany and Italy. Their bravery was remarkable, but was so taken for granted by their superiors that while official citations were given to divisions or smaller units that had distinguished themselves in action, it was rare for any individual to be so honoured. At the conclusion of probably Japan’s greatest military triumph, the conquest of Malaya and Singapore on 15 February 1942, Lieutenant General Tomoyuki Yamashita, commanding Japan’s Twenty-Fifth Army, awarded citations to just one officer and two NCOs, all of them posthumously.
Of course members of all the armed services of all the combatants in the Second World War showed examples of conspicuous gallantry every bit as admirable as anything displayed by the Japanese. They did not, however, possess the Japanese hatred of surrender and indifference to death.
… the Americans thwarted the Japanese intention of compelling them to fight for every scrap of land throughout the Pacific
It might well be argued that this makes their courage all the greater, but there is no doubt that the Japanese attitude did give their leaders a valuable advantage. A British commander might order a position held to the last man and the last round’ but he would not expect this to be taken literally. A Japanese commander would probably have considered that there was no need to give such an order in the first place.
That the Japanese really did prefer death to capture was not at first appreciated and they in turn never made any allowance for the fact that their enemies had a totally different outlook and code. As a result, they regarded their prisoners with contempt and subjected them to vile treatment that earned for their country a hatred that was entirely understandable and has never completely disappeared.
This willingness to fight to the death rather than capitulate fitted in well with Japan’s aims in the Second World War. It had never been intended by Japan’s leaders that they should conquer America, a task for which, it was accepted, their resources were utterly inadequate. Instead their strategy would be to seize a vast extent of territory that would provide them with the raw materials, chiefly oil, rubber and tin, which their country badly needed. When this had been done - as it duly was - then their conquests would be defended with such determination that their enemies would be persuaded to accept a compromise peace and leave them with at least some of their gains in preference to fighting a costly war of apparently limitless duration.
By the autumn of 1943, however, the Americans had built up a massive fleet of aircraft carriers with which they could pursue a strategy termed ‘island leapfrogging’. This consisted of penetrating immense distances to seize key islands, usually those with airfields, and ignoring all the rest which were left to ‘wither on the vine’. By these means, the Americans thwarted the Japanese intention of compelling them to fight for every scrap of land throughout the Pacific. All that the Japanese could do was resist as long as possible and when that became hopeless, follow the samurai tradition of doing as much damage as they could before being wiped out.
This they certainly did on Attu in the Aleutian Islands when this was invaded by the Americans in May 1943. Faced by 11,000 US soldiers, supported by air attacks and naval gunfire, the 2,600-strong Japanese garrison resisted for over a fortnight until its numbers had been reduced to about 1,000. These were now out of food and their supplies of ammunition were so low that many were reduced to fighting with knives or bayonets.
Any Western force would have felt entirely justified in surrendering, but this was unthinkable to the defenders of Attu. In the early hours of 29 May, they made what the Americans called a ‘banzai charge’ for the sole purpose of killing and being killed. Bursting into the American positions, they slew soldiers in their sleeping bags and, horrible to relate, massacred the patients in a field hospital. When their attack was finally held, most of those Japanese who had not been killed already committed suicide. Only twenty-eight men, all wounded, were captured alive.
If any optimists had thought that this might be a ‘one-off’ event, they were fully disillusioned when the great Central Pacific drive began in November 1943. Its first objectives were Tarawa and Makin in the Gilbert Islands. The capture of the former was entrusted to the 2nd Marine Division of well over 18,000 men. This greatly outnumbered the defending combat troops who have been variously estimated at from 3,000 to 4,500, the bulk of whom were naval infantrymen, the equivalent of Marines in other countries, under Rear Admiral Shibasaki.
It took four days and 3,000 American casualties, a third of them fatal, before the last defenders of Tarawa put up their hands: one officer, sixteen men, all badly wounded. The 300 Japanese combat troops who made up the garrison of Makin also resisted for four days, against odds of twenty-three to one. Just a single Japanese infantryman was taken prisoner.
Japanese reluctance to surrender was demonstrated even more horribly when the Americans invaded Saipan in the Mariana Islands on 15 June 1944. Again estimates of Japanese strength vary widely, but it seems that Lieutenant General Yoshitsugu Saito had as many as 32,000 troops to defend the island, including some 6,700 sailors under Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, once commander of the task force that had attacked Pearl Harbor. Many of his soldiers, however, were virtually unarmed as a result of US submarine attacks on Japanese reinforcement convoys. Yet from Saito downwards, most of them believed in the ethics of Bushido and were prepared to die if need be.
Against them the Americans directed the 27th Infantry Division and the 2nd and 4th Marine Divisions, over 127,500 men in all, once more with strong naval and air support. A series of attacks by Japanese soldiers, screaming war cries and headed by officers brandishing their beautiful but utterly obsolete swords, failed to ‘destroy the enemy at the beachhead’ as Saito had ordered, and his men settled down to their usual stubborn resistance. This lasted until 6 July, by which time the bulk of the remaining defenders had been driven into the northern end of the island and their cause was clearly lost.
For Lieutenant General Saito there was only one action that his men could take. He urged them to ‘utilize this opportunity to exalt true Japanese manhood’ by striking a final blow at their enemies. He concentrated more than 3,000 of them, as is related by Major Frank Hough in The Island War, for one tremendous ‘banzai charge’. Since he was elderly and far from well, he would not take part in this himself but would instead demonstrate the unimportance of death. After a last ceremonial meal, he committed seppuku. The Americans later recovered his body and buried it with full military honours. Vice Admiral Nagumo died by his own hand at about the same time. His body was never found.
Men hardened in one of the bloodiest campaigns of the Pacific, turned away from the sight, sick at heart and physically ill.
Next day, the ‘banzai charge’ was duly delivered, the first attackers being followed by men covered with bandages or walking with the aid of crutches. ‘The sick and wounded from the hospitals,’ explains Major Hough, ‘had come forth to die’, and of course, to kill as many Americans as they could before they died. The attack smashed two infantry battalions and overran two batteries of Marine artillery before it was halted and the attackers wiped out. The Americans suffered more than 400 fatalities.
On the day following, the Americans pushed on to the cliffs marking the northern end of Saipan and the beaches below them. ‘Here,’ says Hough, ‘was enacted the crowning horror of the whole campaign.’ Saipan had been a Japanese possession since the First World War and although the Americans had rounded up numbers of civilians during the first few days after their landings, it seems that these were local inhabitants. The Japanese civilians had retreated with the surviving soldiers and, like them, were trapped in the north of the island.
It soon became clear that they shared their countrymen’s reluctance to surrender. Parents shot, stabbed or strangled their children. Then they hurled themselves off the cliffs or waded out into the sea to drown. A group of about fifteen women and children knelt before a soldier who shot each of them neatly through the head, then blew himself to pieces with a hand grenade. Another group of three young women carefully combed and arranged their hair, then hand in hand, they calmly stepped over a precipice. The base of the cliffs was heaped with corpses and for days afterwards floating bodies drifted past the US warships. ‘Men hardened in one of the bloodiest campaigns of the Pacific,’ reports Hough, ‘turned away from the sight, sick at heart and physically ill.’
So ended the struggle for Saipan, officially at least. The US casualty list was more than 3,400 dead or missing and more than 13,000 wounded. No one will ever know the exact Japanese losses, but the Americans buried almost 24,000 Japanese soldiers and held about 1,800 prisoners, by far the most in any campaign to date, though it should be noted that much the larger proportion of these were Koreans. Even after Saipan was formally declared secure, numerous Japanese held out in its hills and caves. Some were still doggedly refusing to surrender when the Second World War itself came to an end.
© Adrian Stewart 2020, 'Kamikaze: Japan's Last Bid for Victory'. Reproduced courtesy of Pen & Sword Publishers Ltd
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