The Last Kamikaze; WWII magazine, March, 2007

The article is about Admiral Matome Ugaki. He had been appointed head of the Fifth Air Fleet, a kamikaze group for Southern Japan that was going to meet the expected US invasion.

His first mission was to launch a kamikaze attack on US ships that were anchored at Ulithi. The mission involved two dozen planes, but the mission was aborted and the planes returned. They had been told the US fleet had pulled out of Ulithi, but actually it was still there.

To make things worse, that was the night that the major US firebombing of Tokyo happened (March 9/10), with over 100,000 people killed in the one night.

The bombers were sent out the next day. Eleven of them reported engine trouble. By the time the group got to Ulithi there were only six planes left for the attack. The sum total of the two raids was one carrier slightly damaged.

He sent out his kamikaze groups during the battle of Okinawa, and they did do a lot of damage, but apparently no where near the damage that he wrote about in his diaries, grossly inflating the actual damage numbers.

Apparently he was becoming unhinged, according to the article, and ended up living in a cave on Kyushu to avoid the American bombing missions.

Then he was ordered to withhold all the remaining planes, expecting to use them in massive kamikaze attacks for the expected US invasion. The article notes that the Japanese plan was to send as many kamikaze flights against the US fleet off Kyushu in three days as were used in the battle of Okinawa in three months.

(My own comments here. There is little doubt that, if the US had carried out its planned invasion of Kyushu, the death toll would have been horrible. Even though a lot of the Japanese planes probably would have never actually flown in the attacks due to lack of fuel or being destroyed by US bombing, there would have still been a massive number that would have done very, very severe damage to the attacking boats. The planes probably would also have gone after the landing craft and caused terrible casualties.)

With the dropping of the atomic bombs, Japan's leaders considered ending the war. Not all the military people were in favor of doing that, though; the article notes that the original creator of the kamikaze units, Admiral Takijiro Onishi, said that Japan could have victory if it was willing to sacrifice 20 million lives.

The decision was taken out of his hands when the Emperor made the surrender speech. Saying that Japan surrendered and getting all the military units to actually surrender were two different things, though. The other units had to be officially contacted, convinced that the surrender orders were legitimate, and then be willing to actually obey the orders, and some of the military men were not ready to give up.

Ugaki was one of them. He organized an attack force after he had heard the orders to surrender (but technically he had not actually received any written orders, or at least that was his thinking). They were to attack ships off Okinawa, and eleven planes were to be in the mission.

Three of the eleven returned with engine trouble. All the others were shot down or crashed, including Ugaki. Most likely, he ended up being buried in an unmarked grave on an island.

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