Seki Yukio and the Shikishima unit: the first organized special attack

Zeros of the Shikishima unit, led by Lt. Seki Yukio, prepare to sortie from Mabalacat, Luzon, on 25 October 1944, the day the unit struck the escort carriers off Samar. Photo: Imperial Japanese Navy, Japanese navy photograph, PD-Japan via Wikimedia Commons.

Special Units · Kamikaze, 1944–1945

Seki Yukio and the Shikishima Unit

Five Zero fighters, five 250-kg bombs and a 23-year-old lieutenant: the first unit formed to crash into enemy ships, and the man the navy made its symbol.

Lt. Seki Yukio of the Imperial Japanese Navy led the first organized special attack of the Pacific War. On the morning of 25 October 1944 he took five Zero fighters of the 201st Air Group’s Shikishima unit, each carrying a 250-kg bomb, from Mabalacat airfield on Luzon to the escort carriers of the American Seventh Fleet off Samar. Shortly before eleven o’clock the Zeros dived on the carriers of Task Unit 77.4.3, known as Taffy 3. One crashed through the flight deck of USS St. Lo (CVE-63), which blew up and sank within about half an hour; three other carriers were damaged.

Seki was 23. He had graduated from the Naval Academy at Etajima, had spent the first half of 1944 teaching flight students, and had married that spring. He was not the first Japanese airman to dive into an enemy ship, and the men of the unit were not the first to volunteer for it in principle. But his unit was the first to be formed in advance for no other purpose, and its success on its fifth sortie made the tactic the policy of the navy. The navy credited him officially with the first attack, promoted him two ranks after death, and published his name to the nation.

This page follows Seki and his unit from its formation on 20 October to the attack of 25 October, separating the contemporary record (his letters, the navy’s photographs and newsreel, American action reports) from the postwar testimony of the officers who chose him. The wider story of Mabalacat is in Chapter 1, and the attacks off Samar in Chapter 2.

From Saijō to Etajima

Seki came from Saijō, in Ehime Prefecture on the island of Shikoku. His father died in 1941, and his mother lived alone in Saijō while he was in the navy. He graduated with the 70th class of the Imperial Japanese Navy Academy at Etajima, the navy’s officer school on the Inland Sea. From January to June 1944 he served as an instructor with the Kasumigaura Naval Air Group, teaching the 42nd class of flight students. In the spring of 1944 he married Mariko, from Kamakura in Kanagawa Prefecture.

These facts come from the Japanese biographies used by Bill Gordon of kamikazeimages.net: a 1975 history of the Shikishima unit, Matsugi (1971), Osuo (2005) and above all Nemoto (2003), whose book is a study of Seki and four young enlisted pilots of the unit in their last five days. Whether Seki had trained as a fighter pilot or in another branch of naval aviation is described differently in English-language accounts; this page leaves the question open.

Chosen at Mabalacat

On the evening of 19 October 1944 Vice Adm. Ōnishi Takijirō, newly in command of the 1st Air Fleet, proposed to the officers of the 201st Air Group that Zeros carrying 250-kg bombs be crashed onto American carrier decks. The group’s executive officer, Cmdr. Tamai Asaichi, consulted his squadron leaders and agreed. A leader was needed, and the staff wanted a Naval Academy graduate.

The only account of how Seki was chosen is postwar: the memoir of Inoguchi Rikihei and Nakajima Tadashi, staff officers who were present at Mabalacat. They write that when Seki was told, he sat with his head in his hands, eyes closed and fists clenched, and then, in a clear and quiet voice, asked to be appointed to lead the attack. They note that he had recently married. Whatever he thought, the account shows that the offer was made by his superiors at night, in a setting where refusal would have been extraordinary.

The first Special Attack Corps was formed early on 20 October 1944 from 23 Zero pilots of the 201st Air Group, with Seki in command (Inoguchi gives 24). Its four units took their names from a poem by Motoori Norinaga about the Japanese spirit and the mountain cherry blossom: Shikishima, Yamato, Asahi and Yamazakura. Seki commanded the Shikishima unit himself, flying from Mabalacat; other units were sent to Cebu and Davao.

Four days without a target

The unit was ready on 21 October, the day after the American landings on Leyte. A navy newsreel crew filmed the departure: Seki receiving the farewell cup, the pilots in flying clothes, the bombed-up Zeros. The film was released at home as Nippon Eigasha newsreel no. 232. But the Shikishima unit found no carriers that day, and the five pilots returned to Mabalacat. The same thing happened on three more days. Each time the farewell was repeated and each time the men came back.

Meanwhile the navy’s great gamble for Leyte, the Shō-1 operation, was in motion. On 24 October American carrier aircraft sank the battleship Musashi in the Sibuyan Sea; that night Vice Adm. Nishimura Shōji’s force was destroyed in Surigao Strait; and early on 25 October Vice Adm. Kurita Takeo’s battleships came through San Bernardino Strait and fell on the escort carriers of Taffy 3 off Samar.

25 October: Taffy 3

Taffy 3, under Rear Adm. Clifton A. F. Sprague, consisted of six small escort carriers and seven destroyers and destroyer escorts. From about seven in the morning it had fought one of the most uneven battles of the war against Kurita’s battleships and cruisers, losing two destroyers, a destroyer escort and the carrier Gambier Bay before Kurita turned away. At 10:50, as the carriers were recovering and rearming aircraft, the special attack aircraft arrived. The DANFS entry for St. Lo records a concentrated air attack and a battle with suicide planes of about forty minutes in which every escort carrier except Fanshaw Bay was damaged.

Seki’s five Zeros dived through the anti-aircraft fire at the carriers. Kitkun Bay, Kalinin Bay and White Plains were damaged by crashes and near misses. One Zero crashed through the flight deck of St. Lo at 10:51. Its bomb and the burning fuel set off bombs and torpedoes in the hangar, a series of explosions tore the ship apart, and she sank about half an hour later. Of the 889 men aboard, 113 were killed or missing and about 30 more died of wounds. Earlier the same morning, special attack aircraft from Davao had hit the escort carriers Santee and Suwannee of Taffy 1 further south.

Which aircraft was Seki’s is not certain. Japanese records credit him with St. Lo, and the navy announced it that way; Inoguchi and Nakajima write that an escort pilot saw Seki dive into a carrier and a second Zero hit the same ship, and that two more pilots hit a second carrier and a light cruiser. No cruiser was hit, and American sources describe the identification of the St. Lo pilot as probable rather than proven. The escort pilots’ claims, made in good faith in a few seconds of smoke and flak, were the basis of the navy’s announcement.

What Seki wrote

Seki left letters to his parents, to his wife, to his wife’s parents and to his former students. They were translated by Bill Gordon in 2018 from Nemoto’s book. Like most special attack letters they were written to be read by family and could be read by superiors; they are contemporary documents, but they show what a young officer felt he could say, not necessarily all that he thought.

To Mariko he apologized that he was leaving without being able to do anything for her, asked her to look after her parents and sent his good wishes to her sister and her sister’s small son. To his wife’s parents he wrote, in the formal language of the day, that he was resolved to repay the Emperor’s favour with his own life. To his own parents he apologized for the hardships he had caused them and for his lack of filial piety. To his students at Kasumigaura he wrote a single line.

Last letter · Mabalacat, October 1944

“I am truly sorry for going to fall without being able to do anything for you.”

— Lt. Seki Yukio to his wife Mariko; trans. Bill Gordon (2018), from Nemoto (2003), via kamikazeimages.net

To his former students · Kasumigaura

“My students, fall like mountain cherry blossoms.”

— Lt. Seki Yukio; trans. Bill Gordon (2018), from Nemoto (2003)

The image of the falling cherry blossom was the navy’s own: the unit names came from Motoori’s poem, and the imagery ran through the propaganda that followed. The anthropologist Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney has traced how the state used the blossom to make death in battle seem beautiful and natural. In Seki’s line to his students it is both a farewell and an instruction. To his parents he wrote in a different voice:

To his parents · October 1944

“Please forgive me for causing you hardships since I was very young and for my lack of filial piety.”

— Lt. Seki Yukio; trans. Bill Gordon (2018), from Nemoto (2003)

Made into a symbol

The navy announced the attack within days, and Seki’s name and photograph were published across Japan as the leader of the first “divine wind” unit. He was promoted two ranks after death, to commander. The newsreel of the Mabalacat sortie was shown in cinemas. The effect, inside the navy, was to settle the argument: on 26 October Ōnishi became chief of staff of the combined land-based air forces in the Philippines, and the special attack became their standard method. From then until mid-January 1945, kamikazes struck ships in Leyte Gulf, at Ormoc, at Mindoro and at Lingayen Gulf.

His family lived with the symbol: his mother in Saijō, his young widow in Kamakura. Postwar Japanese writers, including Nemoto, have tried to recover the young officer behind the propaganda portrait. Remarks that Seki is said to have made to a navy war correspondent before the sortie, expressing doubt about the tactic and saying he was going for his wife’s sake, are widely quoted in Japanese and English books. They come from the correspondent’s postwar recollection; this page does not quote them, because their wording cannot be checked against a contemporary source.

The other men of the Shikishima unit

Seki was the only officer among the five attack pilots of 25 October. The other four were young enlisted airmen, products of the navy’s preparatory flight training (yokaren) programmes; Japanese accounts say many of the first volunteers were Tamai’s former students. Their names are recorded in Japanese sources, above all Nemoto’s 2003 study, which is subtitled for “Seki Yukio and four young men”; romanizations in English books vary, and they are not listed here until they can be checked against the navy’s roll.

The escort fighters that flew with them, whose task was to protect the attack aircraft and report the results, returned to report what they had seen. The leader of the escort is usually named as the ace Warrant Officer Nishizawa Hiroyoshi, who was killed the next day when a transport aircraft carrying him was shot down; that detail, too, rests on secondary accounts. The loss of so experienced a pilot in an accident of transport shows how thin Japanese naval aviation had become by the autumn of 1944.

Memory

In Japan the first special attack is commemorated at Yasukuni, where Seki is enshrined with the war dead, and in the literature of the tokkō, where he is often the first name. In the Philippines the airfields at Mabalacat, now inside the Clark Freeport, carry monuments to the first units, placed and maintained largely by Filipino local historians. On the American side the men of St. Lo are remembered by their association and by the Navy; the survivors who met at reunions for decades seldom knew the name of the man who struck their ship.

The question Seki’s case raises, how freely men accepted such an order, is taken up in Chapter 3. The record does not answer it for him. It shows a young officer chosen at night by his superiors, given a few seconds to answer, filmed for the home front and then sent out five times; and letters in which duty, apology and affection sit side by side.