The USS Missouri buried an enemy pilot with full military honors on April 12, 1945, a day after his Zero fighter slammed into the battleship’s hull during the Okinawa campaign. The plane’s bomb failed to detonate, and no American aboard was killed, but the wreckage brought part of the pilot’s body onto the deck. Captain William Callaghan ordered the remains recovered and prepared for a formal burial at sea. The ship’s medics cleaned and wrapped the body in canvas, weighted it with dummy shell casings so it would sink, and the crew reportedly spent the night sewing a Japanese rising sun flag from whatever red and white cloth they could find.
The funeral took place after breakfast the next morning at the rail near the point of impact. Medics served as pallbearers, a Marine rifle detail fired three volleys, a bugler played taps, and the ship’s chaplain committed the body to the deep. It was the same ceremony the Missouri would have given one of her own sailors. Steve Cromwell, one of the medics holding the tray, later said, “We did not like it, but those were our orders.
” Many of the crew resented the order at the time, though some came to agree with it in later years. Nobody aboard knew the pilot’s name. Nothing recovered carried identification, and pieces of his flight gear had already been taken as souvenirs. The dent left by the crash remains visible on the Missouri’s hull today, marked for visitors at the Pearl Harbor museum.
The attack itself came during Japan’s massed suicide raids against the fleet off Okinawa. On April 11, sixteen Zero fighters of the 5th Kenmu Squadron took off from Kanoya airbase in southern Kyushu, each carrying a bomb. Most of the aircraft were shot down without hitting a ship, but two pilots swung wide to the east and approached the American carrier group from the rear. One of those pilots radioed sighting the enemy fleet at 2:39 p.
m. and reported enemy fighters two minutes later. The Missouri was struck at 2:43 p. m.
At 2:47, American gunners shot down another Zero in the same area. That second pilot never transmitted a message. The timing made it impossible for researchers to determine which of the two men hit the battleship. One was Petty Officer Setsuo Ishino, who sent the messages.
The other was his wingman, Petty Officer Kenkichi Ishii. Both went into the sea north of Okinawa before 3:00 that afternoon. Captain Callaghan had personal reasons to understand burial at sea. His elder brother, Rear Admiral Daniel Callaghan, had been killed by Japanese gunfire aboard the cruiser San Francisco off Savo Island in November 1942 and was committed to the sea near Guadalcanal.
William Callaghan never discussed his decision about the kamikaze funeral and left no written explanation. His family only learned of the ceremony in 2001, a decade after his death. That year, the USS Missouri Memorial Association held a memorial service for the Japanese pilots, and some veterans objected loudly, saying the Japanese could honor their own dead on their own soil. Others said their captain had been right.
The effort to name the pilot began at the museum in Pearl Harbor. Three volunteers, including a former crewman of the battleship Musashi and an American veteran of Army intelligence, spent a year and a half tracing the attacking flight to the 5th Kenmu Squadron. A television documentary made in Japan in 2001 settled on Ishino as the likeliest pilot based on the radio times. Researcher Akira Kachi, a retired businessman who began his own study after visiting the ship in 2000, worked for five years through Japanese flight plans and American ship reports.
His 2005 book accounted for all sixteen aircraft of the squadron one by one and eliminated every pilot except Ishino and Ishii. He could not choose between them because either plane could have been the one that struck the Missouri and the other the one shot down at 2:47. The question remains open. As of the last published check in 2011, the display near the dent showed one photograph, Ishino’s.
But no evidence has ever settled which of the two young men, both in the sea before three o’clock, was carried to the rail and given a burial under a flag stitched from spare cloth.