The Divine Wind – Rikihei Inoguchi & Tadashi Nakajima with Roger Pineau, 1958 ★★

Survival Was Not an Option

Call it bushido, call it warrior spirit, call it wanton military terrorism, there is something about the idea of young men willingly flying their planes into enemy ships that is hard to process, even more than 80 years after it was part of daily life in World War II.

To read the story the way it is told by two principal architects of Imperial Japan’s kamikaze program, the problem wasn’t finding volunteers for these suicide missions. The problem was saying no to those who had to wait for another opportunity.

Believable? Not entirely, to be sure. But two things about Japan in 1944 helped make the kamikaze idea reality. One: Their people were steeped in a tradition of honor centered around self-sacrifice. Two: They had already all but lost the war by any conventional metric.

Rikihei Inoguchi, senior staff officer to the man credited with inventing the kamikaze concept, explains:

But it is more understandable if one bears in mind that, considering the heavy odds that our flyers faced in 1944, their chances of coming back alive from any sortie against enemy carriers was very slim, regardless of the attack method employed. If one is bound to die, what is more natural than the desire to die effectively, at maximum cost to the enemy?

Kamikaze pilots gather before their final mission, May 1945. According to the authors of The Divine Wind, they were happy warriors one and all, serene in the knowledge they served their Emperor.
Image from https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/15389313

Inoguchi co-wrote this postwar memoir with Tadashi Nakajima, another top officer to leading kamikaze advocate Vice Admiral Takijiro Ohnishi, as part-justification, part-overview of strategy and tactics. They acknowledge near the end of the book that the concept was not universally popular, even among the Japanese people. When Emperor Hirohito himself expressed a gentle demurral (“Was it necessary to go to this extreme?”) it rocked Admiral Ohnishi to the core.

Yet the kamikazes continued to fly, and in increasing numbers.

The more I read, the more I wondered if going to that extreme wasn’t the whole point. The kamikaze program never seemed to be about winning, or even about producing stalemate. It was about living up to an ideal.

Admiral Ohnishi is quoted addressing a group of kamikaze pilots: “Even if we are defeated, the noble spirit of this kamikaze attack corps will keep our homeland from ruin. Without this spirit, ruin will certainly follow defeat.”

That “noble spirit” had been evident throughout the war in the Pacific. Surrender was a rarity among the Japanese soldiers, who preferred banzai charges when cornered. Even before Pearl Harbor, Admiral Yamamoto had sent out five midget submarines to attack the American fleet at the same time as his carrier planes, missions with little to no hope of survival. To die in battle was not just ennobling but glorious.

In 1281, the Mongol fleet was stopped from invading Japan by a sudden typhoon, which became known as kamikaze or "divine wind." Almost seven centuries later, this became the inspiration for the tactic of defeating another imminent invasion fleet.
Image from https://www.mongolianz.com/post/2018/09/12/divine-wind-kamikaze-that-twice-saved-japan-from-the-mongol-invasion/

By late 1944, things were much more desperate. At the Battle of the Philippine Sea that June, the United States sunk three Japanese carriers and destroyed over 550 planes, and with them most of Japan’s best air warriors. Their supply of planes was similarly exhausted.

As Inoguchi explains, in 1944 the chance of surviving any air encounter with better-trained, more numerous American flyers was increasingly tiny. Thus the kamikaze concept, to crash a plane laden with explosives into the flight deck of an enemy aircraft carrier:

Against carriers the best point of aim is the central elevator – or about one-third the length of the ship from the bow. Next best is either the fore or aft elevator – both being vulnerable locations – since the destruction of these sections destroys the operational effectiveness of the ship.

The Japanese understood the carrier had become the prime difference maker in the war. Without them, the Americans would be forced into battleship-centered surface battles where their advantage was still sizable but not so overwhelming.

A kamikaze successfully attacks the U. S. S. Enterprise off Okinawa in May, 1945. The carrier was not sunk, but its forward elevator was destroyed, reducing its effectiveness and thus fulfilling the kamikaze's main objective.
Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Enterprise_(CV-6)https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:USS_Enterprise_%28CV-6%29_is_hit_by_kamikaze_on_14_May_1945_%2880-G-323565%29.jpg

The book is fine at laying this tactical aspect of the kamikaze concept. Where it falls short is in explaining the human element.

Right from the outset, and all the way through to the end, The Divine Wind makes clear how strongly every pilot believed in their mission and embraced its suicidal aspect without qualm. Almost 4,000 pilots gave their lives in the ten months before the war’s end, and many succeeded in their mission of inflicting disruptive carnage on the enemy. The performance is not in question. But what of the pilots’ deeper feelings?

As senior staff officers behind the program, Inoguchi and Nakajima are at pains to allay any concerns readers may have:

The alerted flyers, in full flight gear, jogged down a narrow lane to the command post. There was nothing in their attitude to indicate that theirs was anything but a routine mission. No somberness of demeanor betrayed the imminence of their departure to certain death…

It took men of superior skill and ability to fly escort. And thus the requests of our best flyers, like Lieutenant Kanno, to become kamikaze pilots had to be denied. Such men were so urgently needed to guard the suicide planes that they could not be spared to pilot them, despite their strong desire to do so…

A comrade fastens a ceremonial hachimaki headband to a kamikaze pilot about to fly on his final mission. Their willingness to die was common, explain the authors: "It demonstrated a spirit of loyalty derived from generations of loyal ancestors."
Image from https://www.history.navy.mil/our-collections/photography/numerical-list-of-images/nhhc-series/nh-series/NH-73000/NH-73096.html

In such a desperate flight, with such grim tactics, what was the atmosphere at bases where the kamikaze pilots waited their turn? As a flight commander at Mabalacat and Cebu I came into contact in contact with most of these pilots and can truthfully say that I have no recollection of gloom or depression on their part…

Individual anecdotes center on how a pilot tearfully pleaded for a chance to go on a kamikaze mission, or how a group of pilots refused a rare recreational privilege so they could bone up on an upcoming attack.

“Everyone wants to go,” Nakajima recalls telling some angry rejected volunteers. “Don’t be so selfish!”

Late in the book, after the initial wave of volunteers have been expended, and the kamikaze program became mandatory, the book notes how “new arrivals seemed at first not only to lack enthusiasm, but, indeed, to be disturbed by their situation.” But we are assured this mood quickly passed once the pilots accepted their fate.

Admiral Takijiro Ohnishi, who may not have invented the kamikaze concept but oversaw its adoption across the Japanese Navy. According to the authors, he was committed to killing himself before surrender, and had little patience for those who sought survival over victory. He committed harikari after the Emperor declared the war over.
Image from https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takijir%C5%8D_%C5%8Cnishi

The kamikaze’s ability to bring destructive force upon an enemy with a minimum of training and skill was a huge psychological advantage in itself. But what of the actual military impact on the enemy? The Divine Wind seems much less concerned with that, simply allowing that the effort did nothing to alter or slow the war’s outcome.

After-action reports were tricky, to be sure; none of the successful kamikaze pilots were available for debriefings. But the authors are vague about particulars, except in noting that observing escorts reported direct hits and “successful attacks,” news of which was cheerfully processed by the late flyers’ comrades:

The success had its debit side, of course, in the extraordinary sacrifice of the flyers’ precious lives, but this too was inspirational.

It is often left to Roger Pineau, a third credited author and a war veteran from the other side of the conflict, to explain in footnotes the damage reported by the American side. This was considerable, though often less in terms of sinkings as Inoguchi and Nakajima claim.

According to the book’s appendix, 34 U. S. vessels were actually sunk by kamikaze, versus 81 claimed to have been sunk by Japanese records. However, it also records 288 vessels damaged by kamikaze, nearly 100 more than recorded by the Japanese military. The Japanese were prone to exaggerating the types of vessels their kamikazes hit; naturally enough these were more often reported to be large enemy carriers than was actually the case.

A kamikaze attacks the U. S. S. Missouri off Okinawa, April 1945. Pilots were taught to fly low and hit the hull, though at less of an angle than this. The Missouri survived the attack with minimal damage and would host Japanese surrender ceremonies five months later.
Image from https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/pacific-japans-plan/

The most successful kamikazes tended to be the earliest ones, like Lieutenant Yukio Seki, described in The Divine Wind as greeting the then-new kamikaze concept with enthusiasm: “You must let me do it,” Inoguchi recalls him telling his commander. At the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944, he would succeed in crashing his Zero into the flight deck of the escort carrier U. S. S. St. Lo and sinking it. Two other escort carriers were sunk by kamikaze before the war’s end.

By 1945, the kamikazes were less trained and less able, but the momentum to continue the program only grew. Even Inoguchi and Nakajima seem to agree this went too far with the rocket kamikaze, known as the Ohka and dubbed the “baka” (for foolish) bomb by Americans. But while ohkas proved fatal mostly to themselves alone, their pilots are praised by the authors as “just as dependable and capable about their duty” as the kamikazes were. Again, duty alone seems to have been their overarching mission.

The Divine Wind is a largely dry book, written in a dull, matter-of-fact way. Its authors offer little introspection about the ultimate sacrifices they made of others. Late in the book, Nakajima recalls one kamikaze who had patented several inventions whom he gently suggested could serve his country better after the war in some civilian capacity. But the man refused. “Death meant nothing to him,” he writes.

In treating such a fascinating subject, the book can not help but be interesting, even affecting, especially in a concluding chapter that excerpts letters to home written by kamikaze pilots to home. There is a sense of hope for the future in their words that can’t help but be touching, offering some grace notes to an otherwise morbid dirge.