On the afternoon of April 11, 1945, a man from the battleship Missouri’s sick bay called up to the bridge and asked whether the Japanese pilot on the deck should go over the side. Captain William Callaghan’s answer was brief: they would bury him tomorrow. By evening, what the medics had gathered lay below in the sick bay, and the ship’s daily schedule for the next morning carried a funeral, printed in among the meal times and routine work. The background to that afternoon was plain enough.
Ten days earlier, American troops had gone ashore on Okinawa, the last large island between the Pacific Fleet and the home islands of Japan. The fast carrier force was working northeast of the island, sending strikes over the landing and keeping fighters overhead. The Missouri steamed in the carrier’s screen, her main job anti-aircraft fire. She had been in commission for ten months.
On April 6, Japan had begun throwing its aircraft at the ships off Okinawa in massed suicide raids. The Navy’s own count for that first raid put more than 700 Japanese aircraft over the fleet, many flown by inexperienced pilots with orders to strike the first ships they found. The destroyers on the outer radar picket stations took the worst of it. The heavy ships in the carrier screen saw fewer attackers, and each one that reached them came in the same way: low, fast, aimed at a hull.
On the 11th, the Missouri had already brought down one suicide plane when another came at her from astern. Her gunners hit it with a five-inch shell. The fighter dropped toward the water, then steadied at about twenty feet and kept coming for the starboard side through heavy fire. At 2:43 in the afternoon, by most counts, it struck the hull just below the main deck near frame 169.
The aircraft broke apart on impact. Its bomb did not go off and went into the sea with the engine. The starboard wing was thrown forward across the deck, spilling fuel that caught at once, and the damage control party had the fire out quickly. A gunner’s mate named Bob Bishop, whose battle station was the five-inch mount nearest the point of impact, later set down what he saw from inside it.
The burning wing skidded across the top of his mount, left a long black tire mark, and slammed into the next mount forward. A machine gun from the nose of the Zero ended up jammed between two barrels of a quad 40-mm mount just outside his handling room. The skin across his mount, he thought, was what spared the smaller guns sitting between the two turrets. He added, for completeness, that the tire was a Firestone.
The Navy’s official ship history puts the wing fire at a different mount from the one Bishop named, and nothing aboard settles it. What everyone agrees on is the result. Nobody on the Missouri was killed. The hole left a shallow dent in the plating near the main deck, which the Navy never bothered to hammer out, and a photographer caught the Zero at the instant before it hit: a dark shape a few feet above the water under a haze of shell bursts, with a gun crew in the foreground still firing.
The Navy’s photo archive credits that picture to a seaman named Len Schmidt. It became one of the best-known images of the Okinawa campaign. What came aboard with the wreckage was part of the pilot. Another crewman, Ivan Dexter, later described the upper half of the body landing on deck while the rest went into the water with the plane.
Men on deck wanted it hosed over the side and done with. One of the ship’s medics, Steve Cromwell, was with the group that recovered the remains, and it was Cromwell who called up to the bridge to ask. Callaghan told him to wait until the ship secured, take it below to the sick bay, and plan on a burial in the morning. Nobody aboard knew who the pilot was.
Nothing that came aboard carried a name anyone wrote down, and before the remains ever reached the sick bay, men had already taken pieces of the flight gear as souvenirs, among them the helmet, the scarf, and the jacket. The Missouri was about to hold a formal funeral for a man her crew could only call the Japanese pilot. Putting a name to him would take more than half a century, and the work would be done largely by men who had served on the Japanese side of the war. That night the sick bay did what it would have done for one of the ship’s own.
The medics examined the remains, cleaned them, wrapped them in canvas, and weighted the bag with dummy shell casings so it would sink. Callaghan wanted the man buried under his own colors, and the story the crew told afterward is that men spent the night making a Japanese flag out of whatever red and white cloth they could collect. Who made it is where the accounts part. The ship’s veterans association says a group of signalmen stayed up most of the night sewing it, and then adds in its own text that this may be conjecture because the flag is nowhere to be seen in the photographs of the ceremony.
Dexter’s account gives the sewing to one of the ship’s boatswain’s mates. The museum aboard the Missouri today describes the crew collecting cloth and stitching a rising sun between them. All three agree there was a flag. None of them names the man with the needle.
The funeral was held on the morning of April 12 after breakfast, at the rail near the point where the Zero had struck. The ship’s medics served as pallbearers. They brought the canvas up from the sick bay, laid it on a tray against the rail, and set the flag over it. A marine rifle detail fired three volleys.
A bugler played taps. The ship’s senior chaplain, Commander Roland Faulk, gave a short invocation and committed the body to the deep, and the pallbearers tipped the tray and let the canvas slide into the sea. It was the same funeral the Missouri would have given one of her own sailors. Cromwell, one of the men holding the tray, put it plainly when he looked back on that morning: “We did not like it, but those were our orders.
”
A burial at sea asks a crew to agree, for the length of three volleys, on what a dead man was, and plenty of the men standing at attention that morning agreed with none of it. Some disliked the order then and kept disliking it. Others grumbled at the time and came around later. The Navy never repaired the dent the Zero left in the plating, and it is still there, marked out for visitors.
The other half of that afternoon began at Kanoya, an airbase in the far south of Kyushu. Earlier on the 11th, sixteen Zero fighters of a special attack unit called the 5th Kenmu Squadron took off from Kanoya, each with a bomb slung beneath it. One of the division leaders at the base that day, Lieutenant Fujio Hayashi, described the plan long afterward. The squadron would fly south to a small island called Kikai, then split into pairs and spread out at different angles in the shape of a fan, hunting for the two American carrier groups that reconnaissance aircraft had reported earlier in the day.
It went the way most of those missions went. Three of the sixteen never reached Kikai. Most of the rest attacked the American fleet from the north well before the Missouri was struck, and most of those went into the sea without touching a ship. One of them hit the destroyer Kidd and killed 38 of her crew.
Two pilots flying as a pair did something different. They swung wide to the east of the carrier group and came around to hit it from the rear, from the south. One of those two pilots kept his radio working. His first signal to Kanoya, sent at 2:39, reported the enemy fleet in sight.
The next, sent at 2:41, reported enemy fighters. The Missouri was hit at 2:43. At 2:47, in the same patch of ocean, American ships shot down another Zero, and the other pilot of the pair never sent a single message. Two fighters, one hull, and the clock moving from 43 to 47.
The man who ordered the funeral had his own reason to know what a burial at sea meant, and he never talked about it. Two and a half years before, on the night of November 13, 1942, his elder brother, Rear Admiral Daniel Callaghan, had been on the bridge of the heavy cruiser San Francisco off Savo Island when Japanese gunfire killed him and most of his staff. Daniel Callaghan was committed to the sea off Guadalcanal. Before the war, he had served as President Roosevelt’s naval aide.
His name is on the tablets of the missing at the American Cemetery in Manila. The family of William Callaghan did not hear about the kamikaze funeral from him. His grandson has said they found out in 2001, the year the museum held a memorial service for the pilots, ten years after the captain’s death. Why he gave the order is the thing nobody can supply.
He left no written explanation that anyone has found. His son said in 2001 that his father believed it was the right thing to do, and a good example to the crew about respecting life, even for people on the other side. A museum official that same year quoted him as calling the pilot a fellow warrior who had shown courage and paid with his life. Both of those are other people speaking for him decades later, and the captain himself stayed silent on it until he died.
Roosevelt died on April 12 by the calendar in Georgia, which on the Missouri’s clocks was already the 13th, a day after the funeral. The news of the president’s death swamped everything else coming out of the Pacific that week, and a burial held on one battleship’s deck went almost unnoticed. Those few marks on the clock between the hit and the shoot-down are the reason the battleship’s pilot stayed nameless for more than half a century. The ship’s own people never knew.
The Japanese side had sent sixteen aircraft that day and had no witness to how any of them ended. For decades, the man committed to the sea from that rail was described, when he was described at all, as an unidentified Japanese pilot. The work that finally named him started aboard the ship herself. By 2001, the Missouri was a museum at Pearl Harbor, and three volunteers had spent a year and a half on the question together with the museum’s collection staff.
One was Kensuke Sato, who had served in the battleship Musashi. Another was Tadafumi Sugiyama, who had been a fifteen-year-old wartime draftee. The third was Edwin Kawahara, an American veteran of Army intelligence. They traced the attacking flight to a unit based on Kyushu, and from there to the 5th Kenmu Squadron.
They narrowed the pilot to three names: a lieutenant of twenty-three and two petty officers of nineteen. By that August, for a television documentary made in Japan, they had settled on the likeliest of the three: Petty Officer Setsuo Ishino, the pilot who had sent the two messages. The same documentary also carried the objection from a retired businessman named Akira Kachi, who had begun his own research after visiting the ship in 2000, and he kept at it for five years, working through the radio times, the flight plan, and American ship reports from the waters south of Kikai. His book, published in Japan in 2005, accounts for all sixteen aircraft of the squadron one by one.
It concludes that the Zero which struck the Missouri was flown by one of the two men in that eastern pair, either Setsuo Ishino or his wingman, Petty Officer Kenkichi Ishii, the pilot who never transmitted. Kachi could rule out everyone else. He could not choose between those two because either plane could have been the one that hit and the other could have been the one shot down at 2:47. Of Ishino, there is a little.
He was nineteen years old and a petty officer in a flight training program. Before the mission, he wrote to his mother, and one line of it, “The time has come for me to blossom at last,” has been translated and quoted ever since. His father, writing for a Japanese memorial collection in the early 1950s, remembered the family making the trip to an airbase in Ibaraki to see their son one last time and quoted his farewell poem, which spoke of crashing straight into an enemy carrier. Kachi’s book says very little about either man’s life outside the service.
As of the last published check in 2011, the display near the dent showed one photograph, and it was Ishino’s. At a Missouri reunion in 1998, many of the men who had served aboard during the war said that on reflection, their captain had been right. When the museum held its memorial service in 2001, some veterans objected loudly, and one of them said the Japanese could honor their pilots on their own soil. Old men on both sides of that argument had earned the right to it.
The ship went on with her war, and the suicide attacks kept coming through April and May. Callaghan handed command of the Missouri to a Naval Academy classmate, Captain Stuart Murray, on May 14. And in September, the surrender of Japan was signed on her deck. Two young men took off from Kanoya that day, flying in the same pair, and both of them were in the sea north of Okinawa before 3:00.
One of them came aboard the Missouri in pieces, lay overnight in her sick bay, and went back into the sea the next morning under a flag stitched from spare cloth, with three volleys over him and taps. The other went into the water at 2:47. The researchers could get as far as those two names and no further.
Which of the two was carried to the rail is the part nobody has ever been able to say.
