Hidaka had no excuses for that. Like Yamamoto, he had been educated in America, and he understood the nature of his enemy with much greater fidelity than many of their countrymen. Perhaps, more to the point, he did not understand himself and his own culture well enough. There was nothing in the code of bushido that should lead a true samurai to commit such grotesque atrocities as Hidaka had visited upon his vanquished foes.
A sigh at last escaped Yamamoto. A small exhalation of stale air, and a slumping of the shoulders under the weight of his own responsibility for all that had transpired. Around him, preparations continued without pause. Messengers arrived. Junior officers attended to the demands of their superiors. Staff officers worked through scenarios they had examined from every possible angle uncountable times before. Intelligence about the enemy’s movements arrived as the tiniest drops of ice water on the swollen tongue of a man dying from thirst. It wasn’t just that the Allies had access to unbreakable cryptography, thanks to Kolhammer. Not every unit in their order of battle could be so equipped. But there was also a tsunami of disinformation to be picked through, hundreds of thousands of false radio messages sent quite openly, to distract and disarm.
And regardless of the restrained but growing excitement around him, Yamamoto was transfixed by something that frightened him more than all else, something nobody here seemed to see: the specter of the world he was working to create. A world in which men like Jisaku Hidaka and Heinrich Himmler were armed with atomic weapons.
“A grim business, yes, Admiral, but I place my faith in the Cherry Blossoms and the spirit of Shikishima.”
The voice of the First Air Fleet commandant, Vice Admiral Takijiro Onishi, cut through Yamamoto’s maudlin self-indulgence. The grand admiral lifted his chin off his tunic, where it had been resting while darker thoughts got the better of him.
Yamamoto had not been looking forward to this conversation. Vice Admiral Onishi was that most dangerous of creatures, a romantic. To Yamamoto’s way of thinking, he was nigh on obsessed with the martial virtue of self-sacrifice-a reasonable thing, one might have thought, except that Onishi took it to unreasonable lengths. He was known both here and in the twilight world of the Emergence barbarians as the father of the kamikaze- although nobody in the Imperial Japanese Navy used that insulting form of words. To them he was the creator of the tokkotai-the special attack units.
Suicide bombers.
He stood in front of Yamamoto, seemingly entranced with the evolving cataclysm on the map table. His eyes positively sparkled as he contemplated the presumed westward passage of Spruance’s main strike force, the Clinton battle group. It was thought to be somewhere between San Diego and Hawaii by now, as the Allies gathered their might for a sledgehammer blow on the empire. A long time ago Yamamoto might have shared Onishi’s enthusiasm for the coming fight. It was shaping up as the Kassen Kantai, the decisive battle, which he had advocated in the first days of the war. But unlike Onishi, who had yet to taste the ashes of defeat, Yamamoto was sanguine about their chances for success.
“You have heard from Manila, then, Admiral?” he said, tipping his head in reply to Onishi’s bow. “How go your plans?”
“Very well, Admiral. They go very well. The last of the Ohkas are ready. We have nearly a hundred of the Type Twenty-twos and forty of the turbojet Forty-threes. I have seen a test flight myself, and they are magnificent. Fearsome. The Americans will not be able to withstand them.”
Yamamoto’s eyebrows crawled toward the ceiling. “So you have only a hundred and forty all together. Admiral Onishi, almost none of them will survive the air screen. Kolhammer’s people have been dealing with rocket swarms of much greater sophistication than anything we can invent.”
Onishi looked insulted. “That is not all I have been doing,” he protested. “There are two and a half thousand tokkotai ready to fall on the enemy in the conventional way. And many of them will get through. But their role is really to overwhelm the Allied defenses and create a gap for the Ohkas to exploit. That they will do-I assure you. I have studied the archival material and concluded that it would not be sensible to send our men in piecemeal. They must come upon the American fleet as a typhoon comes upon a fishing boat, with overwhelming power.”
His eyes glistened as he spoke, and Yamamoto feared that he was about to cry again. He had famously soaked the ground with his tears when told of his own act of seppuku in the alternate world at the end of the war. Something had fused in the vice admiral’s mind since then, and he had become unbalanced on the subject of “his” tokkotai.
“And where have you disposed your forces, Onishi?” he asked, hoping to forestall any possible blubbering.
His subordinate rapped out instructions, and three junior officers began to place unit markers on the map table throughout the islands of the Marianas.
“The Germans,” he said as they worked at their task, “were most helpful in speeding up the development of the Type Forty-three, as you would expect given their expertise in the field. However, they were also of great assistance in helping us disguise the airfields from which the tokkotai will embark. I suppose they have learned something from the Soviets in that regard. At any rate, if you examine the map, you will see that the approach to the islands will naturally funnel the Allied ships to this point”-he tapped at the map table with a long wooden pointer-“where we shall suddenly appear as a great swarm of hornets buzzing about their heads.”
Yamamoto examined the display, and was not entirely unhappy with what he saw. Onishi had dispersed his forces well, so that they could not be destroyed at a stroke with some Emergence superweapon. They would have a reasonably short flight to intersect the American advance, and although the pilots were not the best in the empire-far from it, in fact-they could probably be trusted to follow their pathfinders. Since the full weight of Spruance’s airpower would most likely be given over to demolishing the bunkers and sandbagged gun pits that generals Takeshima and Obata were so lovingly building, there might even be a chance that some real damage could be done.
“Have you assigned your men to their targets yet, Admiral Onishi?” he asked.
“Not only have they been assigned, but they have also been training to press home their attacks as best they can, given our resources. My study of the archives led me to understand that I had previously underestimated the importance of piloting skills, to ensure that a higher percentage of them penetrate the air defense screen. I imagine that Spruance will use his jet fighters for long-range strike missions, and his lesser aircraft to fly combat air patrol around the fleet.”
Yamamoto could not stifle a snort at that.
Lesser aircraft! Onishi was talking about F-4 Corsairs and Skyraider fighter-bombers, both of which were vastly superior to the Zero that was still the mainstay of the Japanese fleet. He was glad that Onishi had planned on having so many tokkotai in the attack wave, because most of them were never going to make it through the American defenders.
It was encouraging, however, this small lift in spirits he received from contemplating what might be done, outclassed though they might be. They would lose the battle for these islands-of that he was in no doubt. But perhaps, with some luck, he could make it a Pyrrhic victory for the Allies.
“So you will concentrate on the Clinton?” he pressed.
“On the Clinton and the other carriers in the first instance. And on the troop transports in the second. I studied the history of the Falklands War from the nineteen eighties,” Onishi said, “and I believe that if the Argentineans had concentrated on sinking the British transports, rather than her destroyers and frigates, they would have kept those islands. We see that point made again with the Chinese attack on Taiwan in the following century, except that there the rebels did concentrate on the Communist transports, and prevailed because of it.”