Tokkō pairotto o sagase: Umoreta
rekishi no nazo o horiokoshita shinjitsu no kiroku (Finding a kamikaze
pilot: Record of truth uncovered regarding puzzle of his hidden history)
by Katsumi Hiragi
Fusōsha Publishing, 2005, 295 pages
On April 11, 1945, during the Battle of Okinawa, the destroyer USS Kidd
(DD-661) got hit by a single-engine kamikaze aircraft carrying a bomb. The
plane crash and bomb explosion killed 38 men and wounded 55 others. The original
edition of this book published in 2002 was entitled Ware tekikan ni totsunyū
su: Kuchikukan Kiddo to aru tokkō, 57 nen-me no shinjitsu (I will dive into
an enemy ship: Destroyer Kidd and kamikaze attack, truth 57 years later).
This revised and expanded 2005 edition goes through the detail steps taken by
the author to unravel the mystery of who piloted the kamikaze aircraft that hit
USS Kidd.
Katsumi Hiragi grew up in Japan and completed his high school and university
education in the US, where he now practices law in San Diego. He has written
several magazine articles and a Japanese book about the accidental shooting in
1992 of a
Japanese high school student in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. While gathering
materials for that book, he found out about the museum ship USS Kidd in
Baton Rouge. When he saw the photograph at the museum of a kamikaze aircraft
headed toward the destroyer Kidd, he became interested in the
identity of the pilot who crashed into the ship. Although not a professional
historian, he skillfully applied his legal skills related to evidence and
reasoning in order to thoroughly document his support for the identity of this
kamikaze pilot.
Also in 2005, Japanese author Akira Kachi wrote a book titled
Senkan mizūri ni totsunyū shita reisen (Zero fighter that crashed into
battleship Missouri), which examined evidence regarding identification of
the kamikaze pilot who hit battleship Missouri on April 11, 1945. The books
written by Akira Kachi and Katsumi Hiragi have many parallels. Each author
developed a personal non-professional interest in identification of a certain
kamikaze pilot based on a visit to a museum ship in the US. They conducted their
research over roughly the same period of time, and they carried out many of the
same or similar research steps. It turned out that both pilots were members of
the same squadron, the 5th Kenmu Squadron, which took off from Kanoya Air Base.
The two authors met in 2001 to exchange information, reasoning, and conjectures,
which helped both of them in their research efforts in that their subject was
the same kamikaze squadron that flew Zero fighters each carrying a 500-kg
bomb, although the two different ships got hit some distance and time apart (USS Kidd
hit at 14:10, and USS Missouri hit at 14:43).
The chapters present chronologically the research steps taken by Hiragi to
obtain relevant information about the kamikaze pilot whose plane crashed into
USS Kidd. After his visit to the museum ship in Louisiana, he contacted
former Kidd crewmembers. Next, in 2001 he visited the Chiran Peace Museum
for Kamikaze Pilots and the Kanoya Air Base Museum. The museum in Kanoya
was especially relevant to his research, since many aircraft departed from there
on special (suicide) attacks on April 11, 1945. As he carried out his research,
his most valuable personal interviews were with Fujio Hayashi, who was unit
commander at Kanoya Air Base when 16 Model 52 Zero fighters made sorties with 500-kg
bombs on April 11, 1945. He quickly narrowed down the plane that hit Kidd
to a Model 52 Zero fighter based on information from Hayashi and a careful
examination of the photograph that showed the plane headed toward Kidd. Hiragi went with Hayashi to
the library at the National Institute of Defense Studies in Tokyo to examine
wartime documents, where they found much valuable information such as pilot names,
takeoff times, and radio telegraph messages sent back to base. Later Hiragi also
made a three-day visit to the US National Archives to examine records related to
USS Kidd and the task force to which the ship belonged. He
attended the annual reunion of USS Kidd veterans to discuss his
findings about the identity of the kamikaze pilot. It is hard to imagine how
anyone could ever do more rigorous and extensive research than that performed by
Hiragi on this narrow historical topic.
As Hiragi visits places and interviews persons, he gives his personal
reactions regarding their helpfulness and value to his research. He admires the
professionalism and support of a curator at the US National Archives, while he
expresses his irritation with the indifferent attitude of a woman who works at
the library of the National Institute of Defense Studies in Tokyo. He appreciates
how the US National Archives strives to make historical information accessible
to anyone interested in it, even to the point of making it easy for a researcher
to make copies. He criticizes the high cost of about $1 per page to make copies
at the National Institute of Defense Studies library in Tokyo, whereas the
National Archives only charges 10 cents per page.
Many individuals provided information related to Hiragi's search for the
pilot who hit Kidd, and he expresses his deep gratitude to them and
singles out Fujio Hayashi's contributions. Hayashi with his first-hand knowledge
interpreted for Hiragi some of the cryptic written wartime naval records found
at the National Institute of Defense Studies. He also dispelled some myths
regarding special attacks. The goal of Hayashi's special attack unit was not
just to die but rather to achieve battle results, so a Zero pilot in a Kenmu
Squadron would drop his bomb into the sea and engage an enemy fighter if met
along the way or would return to base if enemy ships could not be located. He explained
that aircraft involved in special attacks, in order to have enough fuel to
return if enemy ships could not be found, would always depart with a full tank
of fuel, not with only just enough to reach the target as often depicted in
Japanese movies or books.
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Lieutenant Junior Grade
Shigehisa Yaguchi
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After Hiragi completed much in-depth research, he concludes with near
certainty that Lieutenant Junior Grade Shigehisa Yaguchi, commander of the 5th
Kenmu Squadron, piloted the Zero fighter that crashed into the destroyer Kidd.
The primary support for this conclusion relates to the time (at 14:08) that
Yaguchi radioed back to base that he would dive at an enemy warship and the time
(at 14:10) that Kidd got hit. Fujio Hayashi, unit leader of the Kenmu
Squadrons, thought that a kamikaze pilot would send a radio message back to base
about a minute or two prior to hitting a ship. Hiragi systematically eliminates
other possibilities by examining the take-off times and plane types of all other
special attack squadrons that made sorties on April 11, 1945. Based on the
correspondence between take-off times, estimated time for a Zero fighter loaded
with a 500-kg bomb to reach Kidd's location, and time of attack on
Kidd, he quickly focuses on the 16 Zero fighters of the 5th Kenmu Squadron
that took off from Kanoya Air Base from 12:15 to 12:24. Three squadron planes
made forced landings, but 13 Zeros passed the island of Kikaijima about 13:30
at which time they broke off into pairs and angled off in different southerly
directions in the shape of a fan in order to try to locate the American task
force. Hiragi carefully examines what happened to each of these 13 planes before
finally making the determination that Yaguchi's Zero must have been the one to
crash into the destroyer Kidd. A couple of other 5th Kenmu Squadron
pilots possibly could have hit Kidd, but they radioed that they were
diving on an enemy carrier about 15 minutes prior to the crash into Kidd.
Since Kidd was not an aircraft carrier but rather a regular warship, the
other two pilots' messages that they would dive into an enemy carrier seem to
make them unlikely that they hit Kidd. Also, it is improbable due to the
large gap between the time of their radio messages that they would make
attacks and the time that Kidd got hit.
When Hiragi attended an annual reunion of Kidd veterans, he presented
the results of his research regarding the pilot who hit the destroyer, but he
did not have answers when they started asking questions about the personal life
of Shigehisa Yaguchi. After the reunion, Hiragi visited Yaguchi's younger
brother living in Ibaraki Prefecture and found out much about his life and
personality. Shigehisa Yaguchi was in the Navy's 13th Class of Reserve Students
(Yobi Gakusei). After graduation from a technical school in Ibaraki, he started
work as an engineer at a company in Fukuoka Prefecture, but he soon joined the
Navy. While serving in a Zero fighter unit, he volunteered and trained to be an
ōka (manned rocket-powered glider) pilot. However, after the utter failure of
the first ōka mission from Kanoya Air Base on March 21, 1945, he volunteered
for the Kenmu Unit that would use Zero fighters carrying 500-kg bombs in order
to execute special (suicide) attacks. He was 23 years old when he died. During
2004 Hiragi worked together with an American lawyer, who had been aboard the
destroyer Black, which was near Kidd when the ship got hit by a kamikaze
plane. They tried to have Shigehisa Yaguchi remembered during a memorial
ceremony as the 39th attack victim, in addition to the 38 Kidd
crewmembers who died in the attack on April 11, 1945. However, they did not
succeed in their proposal due to lingering bitterness among some Kidd
veterans toward the Japanese pilot who had killed so many of their shipmates.
In addition to the striking cover photograph of a kamikaze plane headed
toward the destroyer Kidd, the book has about 20 other photos. There are
also several maps and charts that provide a clear description of Kidd's
location, the route taken by the 16 Zero fighters of the 5th Kenmu Squadron, and
the attack path of the plane that crashed into Kidd. In places the
narrative becomes extremely detailed such as the more than 30 pages that provide
information regarding the movements of the American fleet and Japanese kamikaze
squadrons. At times such fine points may cause some readers to start skimming in
order to reach the key points of Hiragi's analysis on which pilot hit Kidd.
Hiragi's search for identification of the kamikaze pilot exemplifies
typical frustrations and disappointments faced by a historian who examines an
incident many years in the past. He discovered that the photograph of the Zero
headed toward Kidd was just one frame of a film taken by the ship's
doctor. He hoped to be able to somehow find the entire film of the attack at the
US National Archives, but he did not succeed. Hiragi could not personally
interview certain individuals who most likely had relevant information to his
research, since they had died prior to his starting the search. During the
course of his research lasting several years, other persons he had interviewed
near the beginning had passed away by the time he wanted to ask them follow-up
questions. Even after the tremendous amount of research he completed on the
topic of which kamikaze pilot hit the destroyer Kidd, he could not be
100% certain due to the lack of physical evidence. One former crewman told
Hiragi early in his research that a document had been taken off the pilot's
corpse, and he thought that the name began with "Ya" such a Yamamoto or
Yamaguchi, but he could not remember for certain. By the time Hiragi wanted to
follow up with the crewman regarding this document, he had already passed away.
Ōka pilot unit during visit to Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo
(Shigehisa Yaguchi on far right of back row)
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