Japanese sailor was last of the crew that started war in the Pacific

Once on their way, the plans to attack Pearl Harbor were revealed. He was filled with dread. This would mean total war.

Masamitsu Yoshioka, who was the last surviving veteran of the 1941 raid on Pearl Harbor.

OBITUARY

Masamitsu Yoshioka Navy flyer
Born 1918, Noromachi, Ishikawa Perfecture, Japan; died August 31, Tokyo, aged 106.

The start of World War II was marked across Europe this week on the 85th anniversary of Germany’s invasion of Poland. But that date was revised by historians decades ago so the war would include the Second Sino-Japanese War that had started two years before. The Axis powers – Germany, Italy and the Empire of Japan – had signed up to nurture their expansionist ambitions in 1936.

A key player in Japan’s military planning was Isoroku Yamamoto, the marshal admiral of the Imperial Japanese Navy, who drew up plans for the shock raid on Pearl Harbor. It wasn’t just to punch the Americans on the nose, it was part of a grander project to establish the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere – a euphemism for a Pacific run by the Japanese, who already had annexed Korea and would occupy Guam, Hong Kong, The Philippines, Singapore, Malaya, Burma and of course Indonesia.

These were grand plans of the few that involved the many – millions of worker ants wearing the uniform of their service. Yamamoto made clear their responsibilities: “To die for emperor and nation is the highest hope of a military man … One man’s life or death is a matter of no importance. All that matters is the empire.”

Masamitsu Yoshioka said for the rest of his life that he was fully subscribed to that credo. He had joined the Imperial Japanese Navy, then one of the most advanced in the world, in 1936, the northern summer the Axis powers joined up. Aircraft carriers were part of Yamamoto’s imaginative strategic thinking and Yoshioka worked on maintaining his early biplanes.

Excited by flight, two years later he applied to be trained as a navigator, after which he was put in a plane on an aircraft carrier headed towards the Mekong delta for bombing missions that helped the Japanese advance farther into China’s mainland.

Soon he was training for an unknown mission that required perilously low bombing raids that they practised endlessly. Yoshioka was both navigator and bomber. His fleet set off, but there were contradictory signs: the ship’s pipes were swathed in asbestos that indicated they were sailing to a cold destination, but he had been told to pack his shorts.

Once on their way the plans to attack Pearl Harbor were revealed. He was filled with dread. This would invite total war. He hoped the ongoing negotiations between the US and Japan would resolve it before they reached Hawaii. “Honestly, somewhere in my mind, I just wished that I could come home alive,” he told a reporter two years back.

He was given a pistol to shoot himself rather than be taken prisoner, an unlikely end for a navigator. It wasn’t that sort of job.

“I knew … Hawaii would be the place where I would die,” he told a newspaper reporter years later. “My only regret was that I wanted to be able to tell my parents what I was doing.”

As they flew towards Pearl Harbor, he and his pilot ran through in their minds the silhouette profiles of the ships they were to attack. But black smoke was rising from the first Japanese strikes and it became difficult to define with precision the ship towards which they were headed with an 800kg torpedo bomb that would glance the bay waters to penetrate the hull of their target.

They hit their target dead centre, later learning it was the USS Utah, which soon filled with water and sank. But Yoshioka also noticed as they flew over the stricken ship that its gun turrets had no barrels. It was a training ship built in 1912. This was failure.

Most the men on Utah jumped and swam to safety, but 58 of them were killed. In all, the Japanese sank four battleships (another four were sailing), damaged four others, and sank or seriously damaged 11 more ships, destroyed 185 planes on the ground and killed 2403 Americans. The war in the Pacific had begun; Australia’s future was in play. Nine weeks later Japan started bombing Darwin.

Four years later, Japan forced on its enemies the worst possible strategy to end its suicidal fight to the death. Enola Gay’s work complete, Emperor Hirohito allowed a recording to be made of his surrender speech. Ordinary Japanese, including Yoshioka, had never heard his high-pitched tones. Without using the word surrender, Hirohito bowed to the inevitable and nine days after Hiroshima his words were broadcast. It was over.

Yoshioka was the last survivor of those who attacked Pearl Harbor on the “date which will live in infamy”.