THE Japanese army aviation section’s difficulties were almost the same as the navy’s.
In June 1943, following the enormous losses of Japanese aircraft in the South Pacific and Southwest Pacific campaigns, General Tojo, wearing his hat as war minister, decreed a major increase in aircraft production. The problem then posed to the army air forces was how to man the planes that would soon be coming off the assembly lines. The army did not have the complication of carrier operations, but it had other worries. The main trouble, as with the navy, was that it took far too long to turn out a proficient pilot. It did not make any difference whether the students were coming in as second lieutenants or as enlisted pilots.
Another worry common to both services was the growing shortage of aviation gasoline, the priority for which had to be given to the
Organizing for Death
fighting fronts as opposed to the training programs.
The first effort was to enlist new officers for the air forces. On July 3, Imperial General Headquarters ordered a major change in pilot training. First of all, university students were to be recruited. Hitherto advanced students had been deferred from military service, particularly if they were engaged in technical studies that would be of future use to Japan. Now the need was pressing.
The advanced-training program was reduced in scope, on the principle that these selective university students would be able to pick up the elements more quickly than the pilots of the past. Three thousand young men were recruited in the first two groups of cadets enlisted under the new plan. At the same time actual flight training was reduced to six months. By the fall of 1944 the first two classes were ready for assignment to the fronts under the curtailed training.
Patriotic spirit being whipped to a fervor at the time, young men flocked to join the army air service. The propaganda machine made much of the fact that one of the new recruits was Yasui Tomonaga, the only son of Lieutenant General Kyoji Tomonaga, the Deputy Minister of War. These and other student-enlistment plans, however, still failed to meet the need. Before the drastic, shortened program went into effect, the main Japanese army air-cadet school had enrolled Class No. 517. That class, operating under more or less the old rules, graduated in March 1944.
Up to the time of this class the movement back and forth in the service had canceled out any benefits from the new procedures. Casualties, plus decisions by some air-trained officers that they would rather fight in other branches meant that the graduating classes had filled the ranks of needed officers.
But with the next class, No. 518, there was a decided change. That class would be graduated in June 1945. And by the time Class No. 519 was enrolled, the rules and regulations had almost all changed, because the war by that time had adopted an entirely new pattern. There was virtually no dropout from army aviation.
With the announcement by General Tojo in the summer of 1943 that aviation was to be increased a number of junior flying schools
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sprang up. Each of these had one or two army instructors who taught high-school youth in ground school for a year. There they studied aviation theory and tactics. After this year they went on to four months of “war craft,” most of which unfortunately consisted of ground instruction again, because of the shortage of fuel; after another two months of flight training, they were promoted to corporal and told they were fliers.
What a difference from the old days when it took three and a half years from enlistment to graduation as a pilot!
Even in the beginning of 1944, the tragic course of the war was not foreseen, and the youngsters who entered the short-term schools had no idea of the future. The army would take them for specialized quick training at fourteen years of age, and not later than their seventeenth year. They went to ground school for four months’ basic aviation study, then four months of “advanced” instruction. The rule was that no youngster could be sent to the front until he was seventeen—as the Japanese noted themselves, certainly an early age for a warrior. The aviation section was immensely popular with youngsters.
As for the officers’ training, this was considerably more thorough than that of the enlisted pilots: two months of ground school and then a year of flight training. Most of their aviation practice they were supposed to receive at the war front. Thus every air army had its own training in the field.
In a year’s time under the new aviation expansion plan the army had twenty thousand men under training, and it seemed that the army was on the right track. Theoretically, that vanguard of the new wave would go into “limited” action at the beginning of the autumn of 1944, and after a year of limited operations, in what was still a learning process, the experience acquired by the young pilots would put them in position to fight the “formidable” American air forces, as author Makoto Ikuta put it in his history of Japanese army suicide operations.
In concept the army system was superior. However, as author Ikuta wrote: “The United States forces did not wait.”
So the successful theory did not test out in the field. Even before
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the crash program of air force expansion, the youngsters had to be thrown into battle at Rabaul in 1943 and 1944 to man the planes before most of them were ready, and the casualties were very high. The problem continued to grow worse in 1944 on all fronts. In September, when the American carriers made their heavy raids on the Philippines, a number of pilots observed that many of the planes they destroyed were single-engined biplanes—training planes. Particularly on Negros island the airmen of the Essex found the pickings easy, especially among the army planes they met. The answer was simply that they were meeting young pilots who in America would not yet have qualified for combat training.
That was the tragedy of Japanese army aviation in the fall of 1944.
The result, even as early as 1943, had been the development of the taiatari (ramming attack). The technique went back to the Bougainville offensive of November 1943, when it was used by some frustrated navy pilots.
Even then new Japanese pilots quickly realized that their skills were not great enough to match the Americans. Except for its tendency to explode and burn (no armor) the Zero fighter was still a formidable weapon, even against the new F6F-5s that many of the Americans were flying. But the difference was skill. For example, one day over the southern Philippines, Commander David McCampbell, one of the most skillful fighter pilots in the navy, encountered a Japanese pilot flying an old biplane who was so adept that McCampbell was glad to break off the engagement and get away with his skin intact.
The Japanese pilot had come up from one of the army training fields below. He was obviously an instructor, and probably was also a veteran of the South Pacific, where Japanese pilots were known to have flown as many as 250 missions. There was no “rotation” in the Japanese military service. A warrior went to war and fought until he was victorious or dead. Only at the convenience of the government was he repatriated. A few pilots, such as the navy’s Saburo Sakai, were sent home when they were badly wounded. But not many. After 1943 the pilots in the front
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line usually did not live that long.
From the beginning of the Pacific War incidents of ramming had occurred when a pilot was so badly hurt or his plane so badly incapacitated that he knew he would never make it home. There were several ramming incidents during the Marianas operation. But ramming as an accepted aerial tactic really first appeared in the skies over the Philippines in September 1944. At first the American fliers did not believe it could be other than accidental. But it did not take long for them to learn.
Within the army quite different forces were at work than those affecting naval air operations. The past distribution of responsibility had given the navy the job of dealing with the enemy navy, and in the Pacific War this turned out to mean one amphibious landing after another. But by 1943 the American attack had become so powerful and so general in the Japanese-held islands that the navy could no longer manage the job alone. In the battle for the Marianas this became obvious beyond a doubt. And in the Philippines, Formosa, China, in Japan itself, the responsibility for defense was as much that of the army as of the navy.
The catch was that the Japanese army air forces were basically untrained in such matters as the bombing and torpedo bombing of ships. Also, because of the nature of army aviation duties, there were fewer types of aircraft available than to the navy.
To meet this new threat the Japanese army had only two really adequate aircraft: the heavy bomber called by the Japanese Type 4 and by the Americans “Peggy” and the light bomber the Japanese called Type 99 and the Americans called “Lily.”
The “Peggy” was a twin engined Mitsubishi product, with two 2,000-horse-power engines. It was capable of carrying two thousand pounds of bombs at 450 miles per hour for 3,800 kilometers.
The “Lily” light bomber had a payload of a thousand pounds of bombs or a torpedo and could travel 2,000 kilometers at 400 miles per hour. But this aircraft, too, was not right for the job of sinking ships.
In August 1944, a special experimental unit of the Japanese army air forces conducted some tests in the homeland with 250-
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kilo and 500-kilo bombs. In essence the finding was that direct hits with armor-piercing bombs could go through fifteen millimeters of armor plate or twenty-five millimeters of the ordinary steel plate used in building transports. The problem was delivery. The bombers sacrificed speed and maneuverability, and were easy targets when on their run in.
The allies knew all this and had the weapons to take full advantage of the Japanese deficiencies. The principal weapon was radar, which warned the American ships that the enemy was coming long before he appeared in the sky. Given that knowledge and a sufficient number of fighter planes, it was possible for the Americans to intercept bombing raids time after time, far from the target, to break up the formations and then shoot down many planes.
For work against ships the heavy bombers proved to be less than efficient. That lesson was learned by the army in Burma. There the problem of who (navy or army pilots) was to attack war shipping was resolved because there were no naval air forces in Central Burma; and since the Japanese planned to attack the Indian border it became important to interdict supplies. The base most suitable for this was Aranmiyo air base, which could control the eastern Indian coastline. So there the No. 7 Air Division took the responsibility for a sort of operation for which it was most unsuited.
Army heavy-bomber pilots were trained to fly formation at high altitude, to begin an approach at from three thousand to twelve thousand feet, then to come in gradually and bomb horizontally. When they went after shipping they soon found that they were easy marks for enemy fighters and that their aim was thrown off by the enemy anti-aircraft guns. Squadron 98, commanded by Captain Tsunemiro Nishio, carried out a number of missions, none of them satisfactory.
After a number of unsuccessful missions in 1943, the air forces decided to withdraw the heavy bombers from Burma. The last missions were flown in support of the Chittagong drive of December, and in January 1944 the squadron was sent home with its aircraft. The heavy bombers were incapable of doing the necessary job against allied shipping. Squadron 98 was reorganized as one of the
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army’s first torpedo-plane squadrons and the pilots were sent to the Hamamatsu school for training in the new techniques.
This action was part of a secret operation within the army forces carried out largely at the behest of Lieutenant General Takeo Ya- suda, chief of the air force section of the army. For months he had favored the concept of suicide attacks. But the opposition within the army air forces was such that until he could secure absolute control of policy, he could not effect this drastic change. In March 1944, General Yasuda felt he had the support he needed and engineered a major reshuffle in the air force command, especially in the training program, ridding himself of many officers he considered unsympathetic to the right point of view. (After the war there would be an extensive inquiry into this matter.)
Having eliminated the drags on his program, General Yasuda then proceeded at best speed, but as of that spring the Special Attack training program was still shrouded in secrecy. General Yasuda issued orders that any mention of planned suicide attacks on ships was forbidden. The trainees learning the techniques of ramming still believed these were nothing more than desperation gestures to be used as a last resort.
In the field virtually nothing was known of this, and the subject of ramming and suicide attacks was quite controversial within the service.
BY the fall of 1944 both the Japanese army and navy had become inured to the high casualty rate of planes and pilots, but this still did not solve the problem of stopping the enemy. The Japanese army leaders in Tokyo, having labored all summer and into the fall, finally came to share Admiral Onishi’s conclusion, although with great misgiving. They did not have the weapons to combat the American threat, and they would have to invent them. Many officers of the Japanese army were ready to accept Admiral Onishi’s concept of the suicide dive. They did not know that their own top command was way ahead of them and that the machinery was all geared up.
CHAPTER THREE