The Pilots: Who They Were, How They Were Chosen, What They Wrote

Girls of Chiran Girls’ High School wave cherry blossom branches as 2nd Lt. Anazawa Toshio of the army’s 20th Shinbu Unit takes off from Chiran in a Nakajima Ki-43 on 12 April 1945. He died that day off Okinawa. Photo: Hayakawa (photographer as credited on Commons), Japanese press photograph, PD-Japan via Wikimedia Commons.

Kamikaze · Chapter 3 of 9

The Pilots: Who They Were

Most were teenage petty officers and sergeants; about a thousand were university students drafted in 1943. Some volunteered with conviction, many under pressure, some not at all. Their letters, read by their superiors before they were sent, are the record they left.

October 1944 – August 1945Chiran · Kanoya · Bansei · Kushira · Tomiya~25 min read

On the morning of 12 April 1945 a press photographer at Chiran airfield in southern Kyushu took one of the best-known photographs of the war in Japan. Schoolgirls from the local girls’ high school, mobilized to serve the pilots, wave branches of cherry blossom as a Ki-43 fighter carrying a bomb rolls past them. Its pilot, Second Lieutenant Anazawa Toshio of the Army’s 20th Shinbu Unit, was a student from Chuo University in Tokyo. He was killed that afternoon in an attack on the American fleet off Okinawa. His letters to his fiancée are displayed today in the museum that stands on the site of the airfield.

The men who died in Japan’s special attacks have been seen in many ways: as fanatics, as heroes, as victims of the state, as the purest of patriots or as boys sent to die by older men who stayed behind. Each view holds some truth about some of them. This chapter tries to describe them as they were, as far as the record allows: how many there were and where they came from, how they were trained and chosen, how the Navy and the Army organized them, how they spent their last days at the Kyushu bases, what they wrote, and what happened to those who came back. It draws on the pilots’ own letters and diaries (contemporary, but written under censorship and the eyes of their units), on the testimony of survivors given decades later, and on the work of historians, especially Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, M. G. Sheftall, Kōdachi Naoki, Yuki Tanaka and Bill Gordon.

A note on the letters. Almost every last letter quoted here was written in the knowledge that an officer would read it before it was sent, and many follow models of phrasing taught in the schools and the forces. They are genuine and moving documents, but they are not a window into every writer’s private thoughts. Diaries, a few letters sent outside the official channels, and survivors’ testimony fill out the picture. All quotations are from published English translations, mostly by Bill Gordon, and are kept short.

How Many, and Who

The Japanese special attack units of 1944–45 lost about 3,800 to 4,000 airmen in aerial attacks, by the compilations of the Japanese associations that commemorate them: about 2,500 from the Navy and 1,300 to 1,400 from the Army (Chapter 1 compares the counts; Chapter 8 explains why they differ). Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, whose study of the student pilots’ diaries is the most important work in English on their thinking, rounds the figure to about four thousand and divides it in a way that corrects a common impression: roughly one thousand were student soldiers, drafted from the universities and colleges, and about three thousand were “boy pilots”, young men who had entered the services’ aviation programmes as teenagers.

The students wrote most of the famous letters and diaries, because they were educated, articulate and often from families that kept papers. The majority of the dead left fewer words. The historian Yuki Tanaka’s analysis of the Navy and Army figures shows the balance by rank: in the Navy, 1,732 petty officers and 782 officers died as special attack pilots; in the Army, 708 non-commissioned officers and 621 officers. Of the Navy officers, 685 were former students who had entered through the reserve officer programme. Among the Navy officer pilots killed in the Okinawa campaign, by Tanaka’s count, 81.3 percent were former students; among Army officer pilots, 58 percent. The career officers of the Naval Academy and the Army Academy, the men trained over years at great cost, were, with exceptions like Seki Yukio, mostly kept back as flight leaders and instructors.

That the special attacks fell mainly on the youngest and least experienced, and on the drafted students rather than the professional officers, was noticed at the time and resented afterward. Tanaka records that surviving students and bereaved families accused the Navy of sacrificing the students to preserve its professional aviators. The Navy’s argument, that experienced pilots were needed to lead, escort and train, was militarily sound and morally uncomfortable, and both things remained true.

The Boy Pilots: Yokaren and the Army’s Youth Schools

The largest group of special attack pilots came from the services’ programmes for teenage boys. The Navy’s yokaren (予科練, preparatory flight training) took boys in their middle teens, some from the higher elementary schools and some from the middle schools, and trained them as enlisted aviators. In the 1930s the programme had produced the petty officers who flew at Pearl Harbor and Midway; by 1944 it had expanded enormously and its courses were shortened again and again. The Army had its own equivalent, the youth pilot schools (shōnen hikōhei), which took boys of similar age. Recruitment posters, school visits and popular songs made the young naval air trainee a hero of wartime youth culture.

These were the men the commanders at Mabalacat drew on in October 1944, and they made up most of the special attack dead to the end. The photograph of five pilots of the 72nd Shinbu Unit at Bansei on 26 May 1945, the day before their sortie, has become an emblem of their youth: three of them were seventeen. The ages recorded for the pilots whose letters the Chiran museum has published run from 18 to 29. A statistic displayed at the Kanoya Air Base Museum, as quoted in the archival record of the photograph below, holds that over 90 percent of the Navy’s special attack pilots were between 18 and 24.

The Students: October 1943

Until 1943 Japanese university and college students had been exempt from conscription until graduation. As the war turned against Japan, the government shortened university courses and then, in October 1943, ended the deferment for healthy male students of the humanities and social sciences aged 20 and over; students of science, engineering and medicine, whose skills the war economy needed, were kept back. On 21 October 1943 a great send-off rally for the departing students was held at the Meiji Shrine Outer Garden stadium in Tokyo and filmed for the newsreels. The policy came to be called gakuto shutsujin, the students’ departure for the front.

Many of the drafted students were channelled into aviation as reserve officers. The Navy took thousands into its reserve flight officer classes; Tanaka counts 14,347 Navy air cadet officers inducted between September 1943 and 1944 alone, of whom 2,485 died in the war, 685 of them as special attack pilots. Ogawa Kiyoshi, the Waseda University student from Gunma who would crash into USS Bunker Hill on 11 May 1945, was drafted in the autumn of 1943 with other liberal arts students and entered the 14th class of Naval Flight Reserve Students. Uehara Ryōji, an economics student at Keiō University, joined the Army in December 1943 under the student mobilization and became an officer pilot.

Shokan (“My thoughts”) · Chiran, night of 10 May 1945

“I think liberty’s victory is evident.”

— 2nd Lt. Uehara Ryōji, 56th Shinbu Squadron; trans. Bill Gordon (kamikazeimages.net)

Farewell note · flight school, 1944

“Liberalism is needed in order for Japan really to continue on eternally.”

— Uehara Ryōji, second farewell note, written in flight school, February–June 1944; trans. Bill Gordon (kamikazeimages.net)

The students were not typical of the men they flew with, but they were not exceptional either in one sense: they shared the fate of the boy pilots once they reached the operational units. What set them apart was what they left. They had read Western philosophy and literature, kept diaries, argued with themselves on paper, and some of them wrote openly that they did not believe in the cause they were dying for. Ohnuki-Tierney’s reading of their diaries shows young men who drew on Kant, Kierkegaard and the Romantics as readily as on the imperial ideology to make sense of their deaths, and who often accepted death while rejecting the meaning the state gave it.

Training: Hours and Aircraft

The men sent on special attacks in 1945 were, as a rule, less trained than any Japanese combat aviators before them. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey found that the average flying experience of Japanese pilots entering combat had fallen from 500 to 800 hours at the start of the war to just over 100 hours; many special attack pilots had less, because they were assigned to the special attack units precisely because they were judged unfit for anything else. A pilot did not need to master aerial combat or formation bombing to fly into a ship; he needed to take off with a heavy load, follow his leader or navigate to the target area, find a ship, and hold his dive. Even these were hard for men with little time in the air, and many of the sorties that failed did so because inexperienced pilots got lost, lost their leader in cloud or crashed on take-off.

As the war went on, the aircraft became as marginal as the training. In the Philippines the special attack units flew front-line types, Zero fighters and Judy dive bombers. By the spring of 1945 they were also using obsolete fighters, worn-out light bombers, reconnaissance aircraft, floatplanes and trainers, including the Navy’s K5Y “Willow” biplane trainer and the Kyushu K11W Shiragiku crew trainer, both slow and lightly built. The aircraft and the special weapons designed for these attacks, the Ohka among them, are described in Chapter 4.

“Volunteering”

Every special attack pilot was, officially, a volunteer. The Navy and the Army both insisted on the form, because a man who chose death for the emperor was the ideal the policy rested on and because the services were reluctant to order death outright. How the form worked in practice varied from unit to unit and changed over time, and the evidence for it is uneven: the commanders’ postwar accounts describe enthusiasm, the survivors’ testimony and the diaries describe pressure.

At one end is Inoguchi and Nakajima’s account of Mabalacat in October 1944, in which all but two of 23 pilots volunteered when asked (Chapter 1). Some volunteered with real conviction. First Lieutenant Fujii Hajime, an Army flying school instructor whose duty was the “spiritual education” of his students, had twice applied for special attack duty and been refused, probably because of his post and his young family, according to Bill Gordon’s account from Japanese sources; in December 1944 his wife drowned herself and their two small daughters in the Arakawa River, leaving a letter urging him to fight without reserve, and his third application, written in his own blood, was accepted. He died leading the 45th Shinbu Squadron from Chiran on 28 May 1945. Sources disagree on several details of the story, which Japanese censorship kept almost unknown for years.

At the other end is the evidence collected by Ohnuki-Tierney and Kōdachi. Ohnuki-Tierney describes the common procedure: the men of a unit were summoned to a hall, lectured on patriotism and sacrifice, and told to step forward if they were willing to volunteer. Sometimes the procedure was reversed, and those who did not wish to volunteer were told to step forward; sometimes men raised their hands with their eyes closed, in a room where the rustle of uniforms told everyone what the others were doing. Kōdachi reports the same reversal in the Philippines, in the words 「志願しない者は一歩前へ」, “those who do not volunteer, step forward”, and cases of men named who had never volunteered at all. One of the students in Ohnuki-Tierney’s study, Kuroda Kenjirō, decided not to volunteer and found his name on the list of volunteers for the Navy’s Mitate unit anyway, because his superior had reported that all his men had volunteered. Refusal, where it was possible, could mean transfer to the southern fronts, from which few returned.

Diary

“To be honest, I cannot say that the wish to die for the emperor is genuine, coming from my heart.”

— Hayashi Ichizō, Navy reserve officer pilot (Kyoto Imperial University), diary; in Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Kamikaze Diaries (Chicago, 2006)

Between the two ends lay most of the men. Many wrote that they were glad to go, and there is no reason to think all of them were pretending. Others went because their comrades were going and they would not leave them, because they believed they would die in the war anyway and this way at least their death would count, because their families would be honoured and provided for, or because refusal would bring shame on those families. Some of the cadets Tanaka studied resisted in the only ways open to them, by feigning illness or, rarely, by flight. The word “volunteer” covers all of this. The site uses it in quotation marks where the record shows that the choice was not free.

Navy and Army: Two Systems

The two services ran their special attack forces separately to the end. The Navy’s units were formed, as at Mabalacat, from existing air groups and, from 1945, increasingly from the training air groups, whose instructors and students were turned into special attack units and given names: the Kenmu, Shōwa, Tsukuba and many others, numbered in sequence as each group sortied. Ogawa Kiyoshi flew with the 7th Shōwa unit from Kanoya; the pilot who struck USS Missouri on 11 April 1945 is believed to have been Petty Officer Ishino Setsuo, 19, of the 5th Kenmu unit. Overall command for the Okinawa campaign lay with the 5th Air Fleet under Vice Admiral Ugaki Matome at Kanoya, whose diary is one of the great contemporary sources of the period (Chapter 5).

The Army called its Okinawa units Shinbu (振武, “inspiring martial spirit”), numbered from the 1st upward, with other names for special formations. They were raised largely from flying schools and training units, organized into small squadrons of about a dozen aircraft, and sent south to the 6th Air Army in Kyushu or the 8th Air Division in Formosa. Army squadrons often arrived at Chiran or Bansei from bases elsewhere and waited there days or weeks for orders and weather. Among them were men from the colonies: Mitsuyama Fumihiro, a Korean-born Army pilot who flew from Chiran, is remembered at the Tomiya restaurant for the folk song he sang in Japanese and Korean on his last night. Korean and Japanese researchers give different counts of the Korean-born special attack dead.

The Bases: Chiran, Kanoya and the Rest

Southern Kyushu was the nearest part of the home islands to Okinawa, about 600–650 km away, and from April 1945 its airfields became the special attack bases. The Navy flew mainly from Kanoya, on the Ōsumi Peninsula, the headquarters of the 5th Air Fleet and the base of the Ohka unit, and from Kushira, Kokubu, Miyazaki and the seaplane base at Ibusuki. The Kanoya Air Base Museum’s table counts 829 Navy special attack dead who flew from Kanoya alone, about a third of the Navy’s total. The Army flew mainly from Chiran on the Satsuma Peninsula, an airfield that had begun in 1941 as a branch of the Tachiarai Army Flying School, and from Bansei on the coast to the west, Miyakonojō, Kengun near Kumamoto and the airfields of Formosa.

The Last Days: Barracks, Rituals and the Send-off

At Chiran the pilots who arrived for their sorties lived in low wooden barracks, half sunk into the ground and roofed with earth and branches for concealment from American aircraft; their triangular shape gave them their name, sankaku heisha. A replica stands at the museum today. The waiting could last days or weeks, depending on weather, on aircraft and on the operational orders for each mass attack. Many pilots wrote letters and wills, cut locks of hair and nail clippings to be sent to their families in place of the remains there would never be, posed for photographs, visited the town, and in some units were given leave to see relatives who travelled to Kyushu to meet them.

The last night and morning followed a pattern set at Mabalacat and repeated, with variations, at every base. There was a farewell gathering, often with sake provided by the unit and songs. In the morning the pilots, in flying suits with the hachimaki headband and often a “thousand-stitch” belt sewn by women at home, received a farewell cup of water or sake from their commander, bowed toward the Imperial Palace, and walked out to their aircraft. Local schoolgirls, mobilized to clean the barracks and serve the pilots, saw them off with cherry branches in April and with flowers later. Press photographers and newsreel crews recorded many of these departures for publication in Japan, which is why so many photographs of the special attack pilots exist: they were part of the policy, made to be seen.

Torihama Tome and the Tomiya

In the town of Chiran, near the airfield, Torihama Tome ran a small eating house, the Tomiya Shokudō, which the Army designated as a place where its personnel could eat. From 1945 the special attack pilots waiting at Chiran came to her restaurant for food, company and a link with ordinary life; many called her “mother”, and she became known in Japan as tokkō no haha, the mother of the special attack pilots. She remembered them individually, kept their photographs and letters, and after the war tended their memory, received their families and told their stories to anyone who would listen. She received the Order of Merit from the emperor in 1977 for her service during and after the war, and died in 1992.

The stories associated with the Tomiya are among the most often told of the special attack war, and they come to us through her memory and that of her family, recorded decades later. Besides Miyagawa’s firefly and Mitsuyama’s song, the Hotaru-kan tells of pilots who played the shakuhachi upstairs, of parents who travelled to see a son before his departure, and of a young wife who learned after her husband’s death that she was pregnant. These are later testimony, not contemporary record, and they are told here as such. Torihama Akihisa’s own summary of what the museum is for is direct: “We must communicate to the next generation so that a war where blameless young men must die will never occur again.”

What They Wrote

The special attack pilots left a very large body of writing: last letters to parents, wives, siblings and children, wills, poems in the traditional waka and haiku forms, diaries and notes. The Chiran Peace Museum displays the letters and photographs of the Army dead it commemorates; the Yūshūkan at Yasukuni Shrine shows a selection of Navy and Army writings; many more remain with families. Bill Gordon’s study of the last writings of 392 special attack members, the most systematic in English, found recurring themes: commitment to the mission, gratitude to parents, filial piety and apology for dying before them, concern for the family’s future, and, in a minority, dissatisfaction or doubt.

Last letter · to his parents

“I will go smiling, both on the day of my sortie and forever.”

— Ensign Ogawa Kiyoshi, 7th Shōwa unit, to his parents; he died crashing into USS Bunker Hill on 11 May 1945, aged 22; trans. Bill Gordon (kamikazeimages.net)

Last letter · to his younger brother

“I will watch over your future from the skies.”

— Sgt. Yoshihara Shigenori, Shitei Shinbu Squadron, to his brother Mitsuharu; sortied from Kanoya, died off Okinawa 7 April 1945, aged 22; trans. Bill Gordon (kamikazeimages.net)

Letter to his sister · 27 March 1945

“Do not neglect your studies.”

— Sgt. Shimizu Yasuzō, 23rd Shinbu Squadron, to his younger sister Kiyoko; sortied from Chiran 3 April 1945, aged 23; in Itsu made mo, itsu made mo ogenki de (Chiran Peace Museum, 2007), trans. Bill Gordon

Letter to his mother and older brother

“All men here are truly pure-hearted without the slightest doubt about their resolve and determination.”

— 1st Lt. Shinomiya Tōru, 19th Shinbu Squadron; sortied from Chiran 29 April 1945, aged 22; same source

Read together, the letters are striking for how little most of them say about the enemy and how much about home. Ogawa, who would hit Bunker Hill, asked his parents to be glad for him. Shimizu told his little sister to keep up her schoolwork. Fujii Hajime, whose wife and daughters had died so that he would not hesitate, wrote a letter to his dead elder daughter. Many letters use the formulas of the time, death as falling cherry blossom, reunion at Yasukuni Shrine, repayment of the emperor’s grace, and some are hard to read now for exactly that reason. One pilot whose letter is displayed at the Yūshūkan, Miyauchi Sakae, wrote to his family “since I will be waiting for you at Yasukuni Shrine, please come to see me”.

The letters must be read with their conditions in mind. They were written for families who would read them after the writer’s death, often in the knowledge that they might be published as examples, and they passed through the hands of superiors. A few men found ways to say more: Uehara’s Shokan, written for a journalist and kept unpublished until after the war, is the best-known example. Diaries, which were private, are often franker than letters; that is why Ohnuki-Tierney built her study on them. And the great majority of the dead, the teenage petty officers and sergeants, left short and conventional letters or none. The rich written record of the special attacks is the record of a literate minority.

Those Who Came Back

A special attack sortie did not always end in death. Aircraft turned back with engine trouble, which was common in the worn and badly maintained aircraft of 1945; units failed to find the American fleet in bad weather or lost their way; escorts and some attack aircraft were ordered back when no target was found; and pilots crash-landed or ditched on the islands along the route. D. M. Giangreco, writing in Naval History in 1997, found that of 1,809 sorties logged by the Navy’s 3rd, 5th and 10th Air Fleets, 879 kamikaze and escort aircraft returned to base. Some men flew two, three or more sorties before they died; some survived the war because the war ended first.

The most remarkable case is that of Sasaki Tomoji of the Army’s Banda unit in the Philippines. Sent out with orders to crash into an American ship, he returned again and again, nine sorties in all by the account of the writer Kokami Shōji, whose book based on interviews with Sasaki late in his life made his story widely known in Japan; his superiors reportedly told him he must die next time. He survived the war and lived into old age. His case is famous precisely because it was rare: most returning pilots were sent out again.

The Army’s treatment of men who came back was harsh. In Fukuoka the 6th Air Army converted a girls’ school dormitory into a facility, the Shinbu-ryō, where special attack pilots who had returned from unsuccessful sorties, often after forced landings on islands on the way to Okinawa, were held apart from other units and from their families and subjected to daily “re-education” by staff officers. The writer Satō Sanae, whose book on Chiran first brought the facility to wide attention, estimates that about fifty men passed through it; military records do not mention it. A former staff officer, Kurasawa Kiyotada, later explained the secrecy as a matter of the pilots’ honour.

After the War: Testimony and Silence

The pilots who survived, because they returned, because their sortie was cancelled or because the war ended before their turn came, faced a defeated country that did not want to hear from them. During the Allied occupation, militarist publications were censored, and the special attacks became for many Japanese a symbol of the war’s waste and of the state’s callousness toward its young men. The first collection of student soldiers’ writings, Kike wadatsumi no koe (“Listen to the voices from the sea”), published in 1949, framed the students as victims, a reading that the surviving pilots’ organizations and later nationalist writers would contest. Many survivors kept silent for decades.

When they did speak, in interviews with historians such as M. G. Sheftall and in documentaries, their testimony was various. In Wings of Defeat (2007), a documentary by Risa Morimoto and Linda Hoaglund, the former navigator Ena Takehiko, who survived when his aircraft crashed on a remote island, and the former gunner Nakajima Kazuo described the special attacks without heroics. Nakajima said simply: “I wanted to live; I didn’t want to die.” Other survivors defended the honour of their dead comrades and resented accounts that made them victims or dupes. Some memoirs that circulated in English are unreliable: Yasuo Kuwahara’s Kamikaze (1957), written with Gordon T. Allred, is judged by Bill Gordon to be fiction rather than personal narrative.

I wanted to live; I didn’t want to die.

— Nakajima Kazuo, former special attack gunner, in Wings of Defeat (Risa Morimoto and Linda Hoaglund, 2007), as reported in Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus [later testimony]

The tension between these memories, of victims and of heroes, of a policy condemned and of young men honoured, runs through the way Japan remembers the special attacks today, at Chiran, at Kanoya and at Yasukuni. That is the subject of Chapter 9. The young men themselves, in the record they left, rarely fit either category cleanly.