National Geographic: Untold Stories of World War II Page #4

---

burned on the runways.

Only a handful of pilots managed

to scramble into a sky

thick with enemy planes.

The midget subs' moment had come.

But one had been sunk by the Ward.

A second was depth-charged outside

the harbor.

Of the three that remained,

two posed a threat to Battleship Row.

Between waves of attacking planes,

Sub Three fired a torpedo and missed.

Moments later,

it was rammed and depth-charged

by a destroyer making for the open sea

Sub and crew hit bottom.

Overhead,

the Japanese continued their assault.

But now smoke and anti-aircraft fire

obscured their targets.

The "sleeping giant" had awakened.

an ammunition magazine,

battleship Arizona blazed toward

her doom.

Survivors staggered into waters aflame

with burning oil.

Japan's brilliant, relentless attack

had killed more than 2,400.

Americans and crippled most

of the U.S. battleships in the Pacific

For the midget subs, though,

the battle was not as glorious.

Two still roamed Hawaiian waters.

Number Four, which may have fired

at Battleship Row,

radioed news of Japan's victory to

the fleet that evening.

Then she disappeared,

never to be heard from again.

The subs may not have seen

resounding success...

But Japan needed heroes,

so the propaganda machine

reincarnated their crews

as the nine young gods of Pearl Harbor

This wartime Japanese feature

told their story

with luxurious exaggeration.

In truth, quarters were cramped,

and reeked of battery fumes.

The midget subs helped create

confusion at Pearl Harbor,

but didn't affect the war's outcome.

And what of the last midget sub

at Pearl Harbor?

Commanded by ensign Kazuo Sakamaki,

it suffered a fate worse than sinking.

On December 8,

as President Franklin D. Roosevelt

called for war,

Sakamaki's sub washed up

on the far shore of Oahu,

undone by a faulty gyroscope.

The submarine wouldn't function right.

So he drifted all the way around

the island to the opposite end

and then went ashore on the morning

of December 8 at Bellows,

where he and his crewman assigned to

the sub tried to blow the ship up.

It didn't work.

They jumped into the water.

The crewman then drowned,

but Sakamaki washed ashore

and become the first washed ashore

and became the first prisoner of war

that the U.S. captured

in the Pacific:
P.O.W. Number One.

Sakamaki spent the war in prison.

His sub toured the U.S.,

helping to sell war bonds

a souvenir of dark days.

At war's end,

after throwing its all at U.S. forces,

Japan let slip a new weapon of terror.

For decades,

the scars left by kamikaze attacks

enforced a silence on both sides.

But the men who fought those battles

will never forget them.

Nineteen forty-four.

Japan, its back to the wall,

makes a final,

fanatic effort to stave off defeat.

In an act incomprehensible to Americans

the empire orders thousands

of men to certain death.

Before an attack,

pilots drink a toast of sake

a warrior's welcome

to the death that awaited.

They were kamikazes named for a typhoon

that saved Japan from Mongol invaders.

Some were veteran pilots,

many were idealistic students eager

to die for their nation's glory.

Kamikazes inflicted awful punishment

on their enemies.

More than three thousand fliers dove

to their deaths.

They sank fifty-seven ships and

damaged more than three hundred others

Their attacks killed at

least three thousand Americans

and wounded more than six thousand.

The kamikazes were the deadliest weapon

ever launched against the U.S. Navy

so frighteningly effective that their

existence was initially kept secret

from the American public.

On April 16th, 1945, kamikazes knocked

the U.S.S. Laffey out of the war.

The Laffey was rebuilt;

she now is a museum ship in Charleston

North Carolina.

Today, she's receiving visitors her

skipper and four crew members

from World War II.

The sight of their ship raises a tide

of memories for these comrades-in-arms

Rear Admiral F. Julian Becton,

who died in 1995,

was 81 when he gave this interview.

He commanded the Laffey during

the invasions of Normandy

and the Philippines.

Steaming toward Okinawa,

he knew what perils lay ahead.

The kamikazes were

the most effective weapon

that the Japanese developed

during the war.

And it was a desperate effort

on their part to do it,

but they were terribly they had a

terrible effect on our ships out there

Ensign James Townley would win

a Silver Star

for his valor aboard the Laffey.

My opinion of the kamikazes were that

they were misguided people.

Then we learned more about them.

We found out that, yes, they were the

"Sons of the Divine wind",

or whatever they chose to call them.

We called them "One-Way Charlies".

And we were really scared

to death of them,

because no matter what you did,

unless you could shoot them out

of the air, they were coming in.

Gunner's Mate Second Class

Lawrence Delewski

would earn a Bronze Star

before his 21st, birthday.

Everybody has their own way of thinking

and their own way of thinking,

and their own ideas.

And their ways didn't suit us.

There was-I certainly didn't feel

as complacent as I feel now,

At that point,

I was ready to kill them all.

In Japan, another group of

old comrades gathers for a reunion.

These men were once the elite of the

Japanese Kamikaze Corps-the Thunder God

They should be long dead,

but they survived some

because they flew fighter cover,

others because seniority

kept them out of combat

to await American's invasion

of the homeland.

Now largely forgotten, they once

made up an awesome attack force.

Their weapon was the okha, which meant

"exploding cherry blossom".

But Americans gave it the code

name baka, meaning "fool".

The weapons were another type

of kamikaze attack,

a baka bomb captured on Okinawa.

It's a two-and-a-half-ton flying bomb,

dropped from a mother plane

and carrying a suicide pilot.

Three rocket propulsion units are

set off on approaching the target,

giving a maximum level speed

of 535 miles per hour.

The baka's punch is an

armor piercing 2,600lb. Warhead.

It's the first

weapon specially designed

for the Kamikaze Flying Corps.

Reserve Lieutenant Hachiro Hosokawa

was a senior member of an okha squadron

There is a Japanese word,

inujini "to die like a dog",

meaning to die in vain.

It is a wasteful death without honor.

When I became a pilot, this situation

was already so bad

that fighting in

an ordinary way was no use.

We were chosen as elite pilots.

Each of us received a headband

and a dagger.

We thought it was a

privilege granted only to the members

of the Human torpedo Unit,

the elite Okha Corps,

and that we would die gloriously.

These were the Thunder Gods.

All had volunteered;

all were ready to die.

Each year, they gather to pray

for their fallen comrades.

Commander Kunihiro Iwaki

was Vice Commander of the Corps.

The war situation was going so badly

for Japan at that time

that we realized that any semblance

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes