Through the Sea, 1945

Two ensigns consider their deaths during the Battle of Okinawa

The night before my great uncle abandoned ship in the lukewarm waters of the East China Sea, a young man in Kyushu sat down, by the light of a bonfire, to write a letter to his mother. This was a long time ago, when the world was at war and these two low-ranking officers — Jerome treading water, Hayashi finding words — were acutely aware of their imminent death.

Until sundown on April 6th, Jerome had been an officer of the USS Bush, a 376-ft long destroyer. But now that broken and burning ship hung 2300 feet above the ocean floor, paralyzed, ready to sink. Pacific tides had begun scattering the crew in all directions. Throughout the night, rough ocean would scatter them further. Though they had arrived in these waters in support of a Marine landing at Okinawa, the closest land was Iheya, a rocky island 18 miles to the southeast, well out of sight. So the 68°F water grew colder and the men drifted, looking out on nothing but open ocean. A peppy lieutenant yelled words of encouragement: “Fellas, we will walk Market Street again!” Japanese planes whined distantly overhead.

But up above, in the failing light, the Japanese pilots had only a dim view of the scene: a heavy plume of smoke rising skyward, maybe a few khaki sailors visible down below, bobbing in the darkened waves. Maybe not. Anyways the Bush and its scattered crew were foregone and difficult targets respectively, little more than scenery, so the pilots looked elsewhere.

These pilots were tokkotai. The solemn journey they had just completed — a shuddering three hour flight from a naval base in Kyushu, at the foot of Japan — was the last three hours of their lives. Once they had located a more suitable target than the Bush (the USS Colhoun was only a few miles away and not yet sunk), these college-educated naval officers would descend from overcast skies, turn their planes seaward, and end their lives.

Hayashi had thought he’d be among them. When he sat down to write to his mother the night before, he was sure of his death. “It is like a dream,” he wrote. “Tomorrow I am no longer alive.” But Hayashi did not take off on the 6th, and so was not one of the pilots whose planes exploded on the deck of the USS Bush.

Today we know these men as kamikaze, though the crew members of the Bush thought of them more plainly as “suicide pilots.”

“Do give my best to all,” Hayashi wrote. “I no longer have time to write to them.”

Around 5:15pm on the evening of the 6th, three tokkotai in Mitsubishi A6M Zeros had begun circling the USS Bush at a five mile remove, threading their single engine planes in and out of the clouds. The crew of the Bush stared upward. Ten minutes passed, then one of the Zeros peeled off from the circling group and turned into the path of the sun. For a moment, before the tokkotai’s final dive, his plane was invisible. The crew of the Bush squinted at the sun, searching for the descending plane they could hear, but not see.

Hayashi had imagined such a moment, though voluntary death had not been his plan. Determined to avoid the notoriously brutal Army, he had joined the Navy, against his mother’s wishes. He thought it was the lesser of two evils. His mother, a widow, thought the Navy would send him abroad to meet his death, which Hayashi deemed unlikely. Then in June of 1944 an enterprising naval officer in Tokyo suggested a new tactic: suicide attacks.

Before the year was up, on February 22nd of 1945, Hayashi was officially volunteered to the ranks of tokkotai (i.e. forced to join). That night, full of regret, he wrote to his mother: “We are assigned the location of our death.”

But he was exaggerating the exactness. For 48 days, Hayashi’s commanding officers kept the details of his death obscure. Any day now, Hayashi would take off. “I am not afraid of the moment of my death,” he wrote. “I am afraid of how the fear of death will perturb my life.” He begged his mother for forgiveness.

It was on the 43rd day of his purgatory that the three tokkotai in circling Zeros — men who that morning had eaten breakfast alongside Hayashi — had successfully completed their mission 17 miles northwest of Iheya island. The USS Bush, engulfed in flames, had begun to cave in amidships, and the crew members drifted, loosely grouped but scattered in all directions.

“Each group had its problems of survival,” the Bush’s captain later wrote in a confidential account of the sinking, since declassified. “Many men became exhausted from the pounding of the seas… Some swallowed salt water and started to wretch… some men became hysterical and violent.”

In 1943, as a student at Harvard, Jerome got very sick and was given a bed at the Navy Hospital Boston. The doctors said he had a spot on his lung. He could no longer be in the Navy. But Jerome called upon all his resources — every Harvard friend’s father — to avoid the fate. And once he graduated, the result was glamorous: a commission as Ensign, active duty in the Pacific. His fellow cadets were jealous.

But the pool at Harvard is not 2300 feet deep nor churned by powerful swells, and Jerome did not, like his classmates, grow up swimming at Cape Cod. He was a widow’s son from Columbus, OH; he had heard that an officer-desperate US Navy was offering tuition at great schools in exchange for naval service. Two birds with one stone: a Harvard man and a hero. Jerome could now become a world-class journalist, he could see the world. And so, around the same time Hayashi joined the ranks of tokkotai, Jerome flew to a white-sand atoll named Ulithi. Massive navy ships rested in its harbor. The USS Bush was among them. Jerome stepped aboard for the first time.

Then night fell completely on April 6th. Sitting at a typewriter months later, the Bush’s captain remembered the situation. “Although they were wearing life jackets and in all cases appeared to be physically unhurt, they would give up, slip out of their life jackets and go down or swim out into the darkness to meet the same fate.”

By the time rescue ships finally made it to the survivors, the sea was glassy, the skies were quiet, the USS Bush was gone. It was 3:00 am in the East China Sea. Crew members, as they were dragged out of the ocean one by one, could barely think clearly. Ensign Jerome Michael Rush was not among them.

On April 12th, Ensign Hayashi Ichizō made the three hour flight from Kyushu to Okinawa, where he died in his Zero, six days after Jerome swam out into the darkness, seven thousand miles from Ohio. “In order to return to you,” Hayashi had written to his mother, “I must go through the sea.”