[AT YOUR SERVICE]
Ceremony to Fifty-six years after a Japanese "kamikaze" suicide aircraft slammed into the USS Missouri, a ceremony will be held to commemorate both the pilot's sacrifice and the battleship skipper's insistence on honoring the enemy, even in the midst of battle.
recognize kamikaze,
U.S. captain
Two Pearl Harbor bombing
figures will be honoredBy Burl Burlingame
Star-BulletinThe ceremony will be held Thursday morning aboard the battleship moored at Pearl Harbor. Keynote speakers will be U.S. Sen. Daniel K. Inouye -- awarded thie Medal of Honor last year for his heroism as a member of the U.S. 442nd Regimental Combat Team -- and retired Navy Adm. William M. Callaghan Jr., son of the late Missouri captain.
On April 11, 1945, an A6M5c "Zero" carrying a 500-pound bomb attacked Missouri during the battle of Okinawa. Dodging a hail of bullets, the plane struck the hull's rear starboard side near the gun turret.
Although the fighter was ripped in two, killing the pilot instantly, the bomb did not detonate, and it fell into the ocean. Flames from the shredded aviation fuel tanks spilled across the decks, and debris crashed into a 40mm gun position. None of the Missouri's crew was killed or injured.
The next day, after the plane's debris was cleared away, Capt. Callaghan ordered the crew to perform a burial at sea with military honors for the pilot. At the time, some crew members complained. Callaghan believed, however, that the unidentified Japanese pilot had served his country as an honorable warrior. Other crew members stitched together a Japanese flag to cover the pilot's shattered remains.
Callaghan's brother, Rear Adm. Daniel J. Callaghan, was killed in November 1942, during the battle of Guadalcanal.
The side of the ship where the plane struck remains dented and is marked for visitors. An account of the attack and burial is recounted during tours, and Japanese visitors are often moved to tears by the captain's gesture, said USS Missouri public-relations contact Patrick Dugan.
For the past year and a half, three volunteers at the USS Missouri -- Edwin Kawahara, Kensuke Sato and Tadafumi Sugiyama -- along with collections manager Mike Weidenbach, have researched the attack, trying to identify the unnamed pilot and his family.
Sato was a crew member aboard Imperial Navy battleship Musashi, sunk in the battle of Leyte Gulf. Sugiyama was a 15-year-old draftee in 1944. "We finally ran down that the flight that attacked the battleship that day came from a certain group based in Kyushu," explained Kawahara, a veteran of the U.S. Army's Military Intelligence Service and a specialist in Japanese military nomenclature. "You have to understand that it's all circumstantial -- all the Japanese witnesses died in the attack. We can't say, in God's truth, this is it. But it's narrowed down, and we believe at least three planes from the 5th Kenbu (a Japanese squadron) got through that day."
Those pilots were Petty Officers 2nd Class Takashi Sogabe and Setsuo Ishino, and Lt. (j.g.) Shigeju Yaguchi, leader of the 13-plane squadron.
As many as 300 are expected to attend the memorial service for the Japanese pilots and the American captain, including their relatives.
Shiro Yaguchi, 75, a brother of Lt. Yaguchi, will read a message at the service. Junko Kamata, 54, a niece of Sogabe who plans to attend the memorial service, said, '"I want to thank Capt. Callaghan for his humanitarian consideration for kamikaze soldiers.'
Dugan said the notion of a "kamikaze ceremony" aboard the battleship has drawn many comments, pro and con, from veterans' groups. "Some of them are up in arms, until they discover the ceremony is really about honoring the American captain," he said. Such ceremonies often occur at sites linked to the Pearl Harbor attack. For example, two veteran Japanese navy pilots who attacked Hickam Field, plus 243 other Japanese World War II veterans, gathered at Hickam for an American-Japanese Friendship Committee ceremony last December.