Wireless reports from Japan’s special submarine attacks went to the Sixth Fleet staff, who argued over how much of them anyone else should hear. The first of those attacks on the American anchorage at Ulithi in November 1944 left behind a pilot’s diary calling it the golden opportunity to use the Kaiten. It also left reconnaissance photographs taken three days afterward of an oil slick and the American fleet at anchor in about the same numbers as before. The Kaiten was a torpedo with a man inside it.
From its first mission, the staff had to work out what an oil slick, a few flashes of light, and an anchorage with no obvious gap in it added up to, because the men who could have told them were gone. Karoki had already drowned in one during training in September, and Nisha took his friend’s ashes into the torpedo with him in an urn. The two submarine captains who had carried the torpedoes described their night. Then the fleet’s communications officer, Lieutenant Commander Bonichi Sakamoto, pulled the pieces together.
One submarine had seen two columns of fire. The other had heard two heavy explosions. There were the routes each pilot had been ordered to take, the sketches made through a periscope, and the aerial photographs from before and after. Ensigns Akira Sato and Watanabi were each credited with a battleship.
The Americans had spent that autumn turning Ulithi into a place where damage was absorbed fast. Mail, movies, ammunition, stores, and replacement men went out to the carriers in the same holes. In October, she had come into Ulithi carrying survivors of the torpedoed cruiser Houston. The Houston herself had been towed in from waters off Formosa, and the wrecked cruiser Canra had been brought into the same lagoon.
The Japanese still patrolled into an anchorage where the work of keeping them afloat could begin. Both cruisers were saved. On the 7th of November, at the Kitan base on Utsujima Island in the inland sea, Vice Admiral Shigoshi Miwa stood before the 12 pilots chosen for the first mission, four for each of three large submarines, and handed every man a new hair and fingernail clippings, which went into the parcels with their belongings for their families. Then they climbed onto the torpedoes strapped to the submarine’s decks and stood there waving their swords as the boats moved out.
Small craft crowded around them flying white banners, then turned back to save fuel. The four pilots in I37 bound for the players never got the chance. After a full day at sea, Fukura was found squirming in misery because he was too embarrassed to ask anyone how the submarine’s toilet worked. A few days later, Chief Petty Officer Yukio Oka went over the side while checking the torpedoes and had to be fished out of the Pacific.
That same day, a Japanese reconnaissance plane from Trou flew over the atoll, and its report reached I47 by wireless the following morning. In the center were about 100 cargo ships and auxiliaries in two groups. Orita described him as elated and disappointed at the same time. And in Nisha’s view, the high command had waited far too long to accept the weapon that might have hit them.
At sunset on the 18th, Orita surfaced well west of the atoll, and for a while the sea, the sky, and the wet steel of the submarine all seemed to be dripping orange. Then the Southern Cross came up. As he steered toward Ulithi after dark, he could see a glow on the horizon from the anchorage lights. The four pilots each took a turn at the eyepiece.
One of them said a fleet that size could never get out of the lagoon in a single night. Orita could not eat. The pilots spent the afternoon getting ready, and the submarine let them do it right with a haircut for Fuka, a fine beard shaved away by Sato, and showers for all four in the submarine’s precious fresh water, after which they dressed in the wardrobe. Each man wrote his last words.
A pencil drawing of an American carrier breaking in two with its planes sliding off the flight deck was signed by the pilot. Around midnight, he caught something else inside the lagoon, the sparkle of welding torches. He took it to mean the Americans were repairing ships damaged at sea, and he took the lights as a sign the enemy had no idea a submarine was anywhere near. At 1 in the morning on the 20th, Sato and Watanabe climbed into the two torpedoes that could only be boarded from the deck, and the hatches were shut over them.
At 3, Nisha and Fuka went up through access tubes into the other two. Before he went, Nisha asked Orita not to risk the submarine by staying to watch and said Kaiten attacks ought to remain a mystery to the enemy. A navigator kept a telephone line open to all four men. Nishino went first with thanks to everyone and good luck to the Kaiten that would follow him.
Watonabe shouted long life to the emperor and to I47. Three of her four torpedoes could not be launched and her pilots had to be brought back inside. Only Ensign Ymanishi got away, and his telephone line failed at the last moment. His captain, Commander Iwawo Terramoto, wrote in his report, “At 5:47 that morning, just after Revela, a heavy explosion shook the Mrs.
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A light breeze pushed the aft fire, and it reached her after magazine, which blew with a second explosion heavier than the first. From the bridge of I47, Orita and his lookouts saw a reddish orange flash in the center of the anchorage, then a pillar of fire, then a second flash. Which pilot hit the Misanoa is not settled by anything that survives, though the Navy’s history of the ship names Nisha as the pilot in all likelihood. Orita’s watch put the first flash at 75, well before the time the Navy gives.
The listeners in I36 heard a heavy explosion at 5:45, almost exactly when the oiler was hit, and that boat’s only pilot was in the water. Nothing in the surviving accounts reconciles the Japanese timings with the American one, and the only men who knew where each torpedo went did not come back. They went through the anchored fleet, dropping depth charges one at a time instead of in patterns so as not to damage their own ships. At about 6:25, a light cruiser reported a torpedo passing underneath her, which brought three small anti-submarine ships in on an attack that ended with two bodies coming to the surface and sinking again before anyone could reach them.
The captain of the North Carolina called the attack a surprise after the apparent safety of the lagoon and a jolt to the complacency of those having anchored there. The senior officer responsible for the anchorage weighed the chance of more craft against the short endurance such craft were believed to have, and shortly after noon routine supply work started again. Two days after that, a third group arrived with the carriers Yorktown, Wasp, and Cowpens, and the battleships Alabama and Massachusetts. On the 3rd of November, a Japanese submarine had put a torpedo into the Reno east of the Philippines.
The submarine’s captain, who had taken his boat to the reef and brought her home, had already told the room what he thought before any of it was decided. He hoped that making the attack public would put an end to sending Kaiten against anchorages where patrols, nets, and reefs stood between the submarine and its target, and would send the weapon out against the open supply routes instead. That drawing carried a result nobody aboard the flagship could verify all the way to the emperor. A channel like this one gets to check its own results, and a like or subscription is how that check arrives.
By then, the planners had ordered a second and heavier strike. At 5:45 on the 20th, the submarine I47 had four Kaiten pilots aboard, and the attack on the anchorage had already begun. The first pilot, Nishino, had gone out with a final message of gratitude and good luck, and the second, Watanabe, had shouted a farewell to the emperor. The third pilot, Nisha, had taken his friend’s ashes into his torpedo, and the fourth, Fuka, had been given a haircut before the mission.
The submarine had surfaced west of the atoll and the glow of the anchorage lights was visible on the horizon. The pilots had been ordered to attack the American fleet at anchor, and the submarine’s captain had been told to keep the Kaiten a secret from the enemy. The attack on Ulithi was a turning point in the Pacific war, marking the first time the Japanese had used the Kaiten against an American anchorage. The weapon was a suicide torpedo, designed to be piloted into the side of an enemy ship, and the pilots who volunteered for the missions knew they were not expected to return.
The submarine I47 had been chosen for the first attack, and the four pilots aboard her had been selected from a larger group of volunteers. The attack had been planned in secret, and the submarine had been ordered to approach the anchorage from the west, where the Americans had not expected a submarine to come from. The Kaiten was a new weapon, and the Japanese high command was still working out how to use it effectively. The first attack on Ulithi had been intended to test the weapon in combat, and the results had been mixed.
One of the Kaiten had been launched, but the other three had failed to launch, and the pilots had been forced to return to the submarine. The attack had caused some damage to the American fleet, but it had not been the decisive blow that the Japanese had hoped for. The high command had ordered a second attack, and the submarine I47 had been sent back to the anchorage with four new pilots. The second attack had been more successful.
The Kaiten had been launched in the early morning hours, and the pilots had managed to hit an American oiler, causing a massive explosion that had lit up the anchorage. The explosion had been visible from the submarine, and the captain had watched as a column of fire rose into the sky. The Americans had been caught off guard, and it had taken them several hours to respond. The attack had caused significant damage, but it had not been enough to stop the American advance in the Pacific.
The Kaiten attacks were a desperate measure, a last-ditch effort to turn the tide of the war in Japan’s favor. The pilots who volunteered for the missions knew that they were unlikely to survive, but they went anyway, driven by a sense of duty and a belief that they were doing the right thing. The attacks were a controversial tactic, and some in the Japanese high command argued that they were a waste of valuable resources. But the attacks did cause significant damage, and they helped to demoralize the American fleet.
The attack on Ulithi was a turning point in the war, marking the first time that the Japanese had used the Kaiten against an American anchorage. The attack was a success, but it came at a heavy cost. The Japanese lost several submarines and their crews in the attacks, and the Kaiten pilots who launched the attacks were all killed. The attacks were a desperate measure, but they were also a testament to the bravery of the Japanese pilots who were willing to sacrifice themselves for their country.
The Kaiten attacks continued for the rest of the war, but they never managed to turn the tide of the conflict. The Americans had too many ships, too many men, and too much firepower for the Japanese to overcome. The attacks were a tragic waste of life, but they were also a reflection of the desperation that had gripped Japan by the end of the war.
The Kaiten was a weapon of last resort, and it was used in a last-ditch effort to avoid the inevitable.