The Twilight Warriors by Robert Gandt Read Free Book Online Page A

loud noises from the Navy weapons range, were startled.
    Most of all, it shocked the pilots in the Corsairs. A single collective thought passed through their brains:
Holy shit!
It dawnedon them that this thing could do a hell of a lot of damage. And not just to the enemy.
    V ice Adm. Matome Ugaki poured himself another sake. It was evening, and he was alone in his small wood-and-fabric home in the coastal town of Atami, 60 miles southwest of Tokyo.
    Drinking had become one of Ugaki’s preoccupations since his return from the disastrous battle at Leyte Gulf. Unlike his mentor, Adm. Isoruku Yamamoto, who was a teetotaler, Ugaki loved sake. When he had nothing else to do, he frequently drank himself into a stupor. This evening, like most evenings lately, he had nothing else to do. Nothing except think about the war and write in his diary.
    The war news was all bad. The Americans were in Subic Bay, on the main Philippine island of Luzon. The Red Army was within 15 miles of Berlin. American B-29s were flying nightly over Japan. From his garden Ugaki could hear the drone of the bombers on their way to raze another city.
    Ugaki had started the diary during the months before the war in 1941. Like a good navy man, he began most entries with an observation about the weather. Amid cynical comments about the course of the war and the damage inflicted on Japan’s homeland, he inserted snippets of poetry, thoughts about nature and the changing seasons, and notes about his health problems. He disliked going to Tokyo, he wrote, because the lack of warm water aggravated his piles.
    Even when he was drunk, Matome Ugaki seldom smiled. Photographs showed a bullet-skulled man with a stern, unyielding countenance. The expression was common to senior Imperial Japanese Navy officers, most of whom wished to emulate the fierce image of a samurai warrior. The nickname bestowed on Ugaki by his subordinates was the “Golden Mask.”
    There was more, however, to Matome Ugaki. Behind the mask was a man of intelligence and sensitivity. Like his colleague, Vice Adm. Takijiro Ohnishi, founder of the Special Attack Corps, Ugakiembodied all the ancient contradictions in Japan’s culture—the warrior’s bloody
bushido
ethic balanced against an aesthete’s tears over the changing of the seasons.
    Ugaki was a classically educated scholar who had made a lifetime study of Buddhist philosophy. He was also a devoted family man, inordinately proud of his son Hiromitsu, who had just become a naval surgeon. Ugaki had never stopped mourning his wife, Tomoko, who died five years earlier. He made regular visits to her tomb to clean the grounds and offer prayers.
    Ugaki had begun the war as chief of staff of the Combined Fleet, serving under the brilliant Yamamoto. He remained in that post, surviving the Battle of Midway, until April 18, 1943, when Yamamoto’s and Ugaki’s planes were ambushed by American P-38s over Bougainville. Yamamoto’s Mitsubishi G4M “Betty” bomber was shot down in flames and crashed in the jungle. Ugaki’s bomber also went down, ditching offshore. Ugaki managed to crawl out and survived by clinging to floating wreckage.
    Though badly injured, he recovered from his wounds, was promoted to vice admiral, and took command of a battleship division in time for the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Again he escaped death, though his fleet was pounded by American carrier-based planes, sinking the 72,000-ton dreadnought
Musashi
. En route back to Japan, Ugaki endured the further ignominy of losing more ships—the battleship
Kongo
and the destroyer
Urakaze—to
American submarines in the East China Sea.
    Then Ugaki’s career slid into limbo. For the rest of 1944 he was attached to the navy general staff, with no specific duties. Each day passed much like the one before, puttering in his flower garden, writing in his diary, drinking sake. He took long walks and gazed balefully into the sky. American bombers were a steady presence. On the last day of 1944 he