Masamitsu Yoshioka, last Pearl Harbor bombardier, dies at 106

By Sam Roberts

Masamitsu Yoshioka, the last known survivor among about 770 crew members who manned the Japanese airborne armada that attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, has died. He was 106.

His death was announced August 28 on social media by Japanese journalist and author Takashi Hayasaki, who spoke with Yoshioka last year. He provided no other details.

"When I met him last year, he spoke many valuable words with a dignified presence," Hayasaki wrote. "Have Japanese people forgotten something important since the end of the war? What is war? What is peace? What is life? Rest in peace."

In the almost 80 years since World War II ended, Yoshioka, who lived in the Adachi ward of Tokyo, said he had visited the Yasukuni Shrine to pray for the souls of his fellow combat veterans, including the 64 Japanese who died during the attack on the US base in Hawaii. Japan lost 29 aircraft and five submarines.

But Yoshioka -- who as a 23-year-old bombardier dropped a torpedo that, by mistake, sunk the unarmed battleship USS Utah -- rarely spoke publicly about the 15 minutes over Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, which President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously described as a date that will live in infamy.

He explained last year in an interview with Jason Morgan, an associate professor at Reitaku University in Kashiwa, for the English-language website Japan Forward, "I'm ashamed that I'm the only one who survived and lived such a long life."

Asked in that interview if he ever thought of visiting Pearl Harbor, he at first replied, "I wouldn't know what to say." He then added: "If I could go, I would like to, I would like to visit the graves of the men who died. I would like to pay them my deepest respect."

Yoshioka was lucky -- on that and several later occasions. He not only survived the stunning attack on America's Pacific Fleet in Hawaii and returned safely to the aircraft carrier Soryu; he was also on leave in June 1942 when the vessel was sunk in the Battle of Midway. He served in the Palau Islands but was recuperating from malaria in the Philippines in 1944 before the bloody Battle of Peleliu. And by the time Japanese planes were ordered to make kamikaze attacks on Allied ships in the Pacific, his plane had been grounded by a shortage of spare parts.

He participated in the attack on Wake Island on Dec. 11, 1941, and a raid in the Indian Ocean early in 1942. (As Morgan put it, he "was involved in many additional campaigns for the liberation of Asia from white colonialism.") But when Emperor Hirohito announced his nation's surrender, Yoshioka was on an air base in Japan.

After the war, Yoshioka worked for the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force, which replaced the Imperial Japanese Navy, and for a transport company.

Born on Jan. 5, 1918, in Ishikawa Prefecture in western Japan, Yoshioka joined the Imperial Japanese Navy when he was 18. Information on his survivors was not immediately available.

He worked on ground crews, maintaining old biplanes and other aircraft, until 1938, when he began training as a navigator. A year later, he was posted to the Soryu, which was deployed against the Nationalist Chinese.

In August 1941, the air crewmen were diverted to torpedo training; because of a shortage of weapons, they practiced with dummy wooden canisters filled with water and with only one actual armor-piercing projectile. When the Soryu sailed east from the Kuril Islands archipelago on Nov. 26, 1941, the destination was secret; the crew was told only to pack shorts.

"I felt honored to be selected for the crucial mission, but I also wanted to return home alive," he said -- a sentiment that, expressed publicly, might have been considered heterodoxy at a time when military personnel were outfitted with pistols so they could kill themselves to avoid capture.

"Some of the men would speculate as to what we were doing," Yoshioka recalled. "Who were we training to attack? The gasoline for our airplanes came from the USA. So, many of the men said, 'There's no way we can be preparing to attack America.' Nobody had the slightest notion that that was what was coming."

But by early December, negotiations in Washington over a U.S. oil embargo imposed in response to Tokyo's military incursions in Southeast Asia were proving fruitless. Japanese commanders told the crews sailing east that their target was the US fleet moored at Pearl Harbor.

"When I heard that, the blood rushed out of my head," Yoshioka recalled. "I knew that this meant a gigantic war, and that Hawaii would be the place where I would die."

He had never taken off from an aircraft carrier before. His plane, weighed down by a torpedo that weighed 1,800 pounds, dropped six feet below the Soryu's deck before climbing for the 220-mile flight to Pearl Harbor, which took 110 minutes.

When he arrived at the target, shortly before 8 a.m., he could see only two ships in the harbor through the black smoke billowing from the vessels that had already been damaged or destroyed. His pilot flew at one of them, just 35 feet above the water.

"I spotted, out of the corner of my eye, two narrow, white columns of seawater, about 2 meters in diameter and 30 meters high, exploding up right beside the vessel," Yoshioka remembered. "Direct hit!"

Crews had been instructed not to bother with the Utah, a training ship, which had been demilitarized in 1931 under the terms of the London Naval Treaty. Still, 58 crewmen aboard the Utah were killed.

"As we flew over the deck I could see, in a flash going by, gun turrets without any barrels," Yoshioka recalled. "A training ship. It was the Utah. A mistake!"

"Now I think of the men who were on board those ships we torpedoed. I think of the people who died because of me," Yoshioka said. "They were young men, just like we were. I am so sorry about it; I hope there will not be any more wars."

More than 2,400 US military personnel and civilians were killed and nearly 1,800 wounded in the attack that triggered the US declaration of war on Japan. Yoshioka explained in the Japan Forward interview that as far as he was concerned, his targets were men-of-war, not men.

"We were trained to attack ships," he said. "The order came down to hit battleships, and we did.

"Nobody ever told us to go out and kill. That was never our mission."