KURE, JAPAN
JULY 16, 1945
0600 HOURS
Just twelve miles south of the Japanese port of Hiroshima, the Japanese submarine I-58 slips her berth and glides from the port of Kure, loaded with enough food, torpedoes, and diesel fuel to remain at sea for one month. The rising sun emblem is painted boldly in red and white on her gray conning tower. Above it, perhaps even more patriotically, is painted the Kikusui (“floating chrysanthemum”) battle standard, in homage to a medieval Japanese warrior who fought to the death against impossible odds for the glory of the emperor.
A muggy, warm day is developing as Lieutenant Commander Mochitsura Hashimoto stands at the helm of his submarine. I-58 quickly clears the harbor and enters the inland sea that divides Japan’s many islands.
The sub leaves behind a city in ruins. Three weeks ago, 162 American B-29 bombers laid siege to Kure, sinking two submarines still under construction and heavily damaging another. Several bombs came close to hitting I-58, but she survived unscathed. For the thirty-five-year-old Hashimoto, the fact that his ship has been spared is a source of great relief—second only to the good news that his wife and three sons also lived through the barrage.
American B-29s have begun dropping mines across the entrance to Japan’s great ports, closing every harbor on the Pacific and a great number on the Sea of Japan. The mine campaign will effectively isolate the nation from the rest of the world.
Hashimoto is pleased that his vessel is getting away from the homeland before Kure harbor can be mined, for he knows that American planes now dominate the skies over Japan.
It is not just the heavy bombers of the Army Air Forces that are punishing Japan.1 Beginning six days ago, on July 10, the United States Navy has taken advantage of newly opened airfields on Okinawa to launch a steady stream of aerial attacks. Naval aviators are now flying hundreds of sorties a day over the Japanese mainland, destroying the nation’s shipping, railways, and limited aerial defenses. Instead of the behemoth silver B-29s that drop their payload from thousands of feet in the air, many aviators fly so low that the Japanese people actually duck as the fighter-bombers thunder overhead. Often they can clearly see the pilots’ faces.
American power is slowly crushing Japan’s national morale. A cruel blow came just two days ago: eight ferries carrying coal from the island of Hokkaido to Honshu were sunk, with great loss of life. This leaves Japan with no vessels capable of transporting coal from the mines of Hokkaido to the Japanese factories that rely on them for power to run their machinery. Without factories, there can be no bombs, guns, planes, or tanks to fuel the Japanese war effort.
Yet even if the factories could find another energy source, production is all but finished. Industrial leaders are now informing Japan’s military leaders that they can produce weaponry “for just a few days more” for lack of raw material.
The psychological toll on the Japanese people is also a liability, yet they represent the nation’s last chance for a proper defense of the homeland. Hungry, homeless, and increasingly humiliated, the populace is now being ordered to adopt the suicidal Ketsu-Go strategy—that is, that all Japanese men, women, and children will fight to the death. Many households have already been issued sharpened sticks, and family members are expected to use them when the Americans invade.2
For some Japanese soldiers in the distant battlefields of Asia, it is too late for Ketsu-Go. They see for themselves that the tide of war has turned. For the first time ever, many Japanese have begun to surrender—mainly because their weapons have been destroyed.
“From May onwards prisoners in a terrible state came in daily, many of them armed with nothing more dangerous than bamboo spears, and trembling with a mixture of malaria and humiliation,” one British soldier in Burma will report.
The Japanese war effort is almost on life support.
But Mochitsura Hashimoto still commands one of the best submarines in the world. Hashimoto has been in charge of I-58 ever since the state-of-the-art vessel was commissioned in late 1944. She is 356 feet long and 30 feet wide at the beam, making I-58 larger than most American submarines. She carries nineteen Type 95 torpedoes, which have an accurate range of almost six miles and can travel through the water at more than forty miles per hour. In addition, I-58’s deck gun has been removed to make room for six kaiten torpedoes—eight-ton, forty-foot-long human-guided suicide missiles that are the underwater version of kamikaze aircraft.3
A well-educated man, and a graduate of the Imperial Japanese Naval Academy, Hashimoto knows that Germany’s surrender means Japan stands alone against the world. More than two million soldiers and millions of other citizens stand ready to defend the home islands against invasion, but I-58 and Japan’s five other operational submarines represent the nation’s last great chance to be the attacker instead of the attacked.
It has been an adventurous, if frustrating, ten months since Hashimoto first took the sub to sea. The I-58 has seen action off the coast of Guam and during the battles for Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Her job is to harass the American fleet, launching her Type 95s and kaitens at vessels anchored offshore in support of the invasions. But it is US pilots who have often done the stalking, attacking I-58 whenever she comes close enough to the surface to fire her arsenal. Hashimoto has been forced to dive deep to save his crew on many occasions. On April 25, three American destroyers cornered I-58, and there was little Hashimoto and his men could do but wait out the attack from three hundred feet beneath the surface. They survived, and afterward were credited with sinking an American tanker and an American aircraft carrier.
But it was all a ruse. The truth is the I-58 had sunk nothing at all.4
The fact that Hashimoto has not destroyed a single American ship is a matter of shame for him. To become a true man of honor, he needs a kill. He hopes that this voyage will erase the lone blemish on an otherwise spotless service record.
Enemy ships seem to be everywhere in the Pacific now, offering I-58 a number of targets. Hashimoto’s orders are to “harass the enemy’s communications,” giving him the latitude to attack whenever he wants. And with I-58’s range of twenty-one thousand nautical miles, this means Hashimoto can travel almost any place in the Pacific that he wishes, a lone wolf in search of a sheep that has strayed from its flock.
Hashimoto’s crew of one hundred officers and men realize that the war may be over by the time they return to port. They are an elite group, hand-selected for service aboard I-58. The end of the war will surely mean the dissolution of the Imperial Japanese Navy. This, then, will be their last mission.
Hashimoto, the son of a Shinto priest, has erected a small shrine on board so that he might seek divine intervention. He prays that somewhere out there is an American ship destined to collide with one of I-58’s torpedoes.
Soon, his prayer will be answered.
“Dive,” orders Hashimoto.