Crouching Dragons

Before V-J day, 4,000 men had gathered mysteriously at Tokyo Bay's naval base of Yokosuka. Their working garb was strange, their training secret, their mission vitally important, their fate certain death. These were the first of the fukuryus (crouching dragons), underwater attack units wearing special diving suits and armed with explosive charges. Upon them the Naval Ministry had pinned its hopes of repelling an American invasion of the home islands.

U.S. planners expected the Japanese to defend the home islands by tactics similar to those used at Okinawa: no defense on the beach, retreat to strong positions, last-ditch defenses. The Japanese, however, still tried desperately to find a means to stop massed amphibious assaults at the water's edge. When the Marines were fighting on Iwo Jima, the high command pressed for development of an anti-landing craft weapon suitable for cheap, quick mass production. The fukuryus were the result.

In diving suits equipped with two oxygen tanks, submarine-type air cleansing devices, tubes for liquid food, the fukuryus could operate in deep water (most effectively at 50 feet), walk under water more than a mile an hour, stay under about ten hours. Each carried at the end of a stick a ten-kilogram explosive charge with contact fuse. A floating chamber behind the charge made it easy to handle. The fukuryus, organized in squads and platoons, were to wait till a vessel passed overhead, then ram the mine into the ship's bottom. They were to be protected from bombardment by underwater "foxholes"--sections of large concrete pipe fitted with steel doors.

Flashlights and wrist compasses were standard fukuryu equipment. They could communicate with each other up to 16 feet apart by using breathing units as megaphones, up to 1,000 feet by knocking pieces of metal together. Planned, but not yet built at the war's end, were reinforced concrete underwater dens where crouching dragons could lie in wait for ships. At war's end there were 4.000 fukuryus at Yokosuka, of whom 1,200 were fully trained.

The fukuryus fitted into a formidable system of invasion beach defenses: farthest out from the beaches a row of anchored mines, to be released by a trip wire; next, three staggered rows of fukuryus, one man every 65 feet, armed with mines and charges; nearest the beach, in three feet of water, masses of beach mines.

Captain K. Shintani, in charge of the fukuryu program, explained these plans to Commander M. H. Pryor of the U.S. Naval Technical Mission in Japan. He ruefully admitted that the new weapon might not have been decisive, but the Japanese had hoped they would cause as much damage as the Kamikazes (suicide planes), which accounted for 80% of the 223 U.S. ships damaged during the Okinawa campaign.

A nation whose most potent military asset was its soldiers' readiness to die rather than yield had actually developed a defense, however fantastic and uncertain, against the U.S. amphibious attack.

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