Word: squadrons
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Bowing deeply before 49 bashful, middle-aged matrons at the old Myoen-ji Temple in Ozuki, seven former Japanese army pilots last week gathered for one of the most improbable war reunions ever. They were the survivors of Katsura Squadron, one of the Kamikaze ("Divine Wind") Special Attack Corps groups designed to destroy the U.S. fleet in the desperate months before V-J day. The women were the girls the pilots had left behind, never, as far as anyone then knew, to see again...
...dark hours of a May morning 21 years ago, the twelve fighters of Katsura Squadron roared off the Ozuki airstrip for assignment to a suicide mission. For the 16-year-old local Tabe High School girls, whose part in the war had been to wash down the planes, it was the end of an idyllic spring with the young second lieutenants. As one of the moonstruck maintenance girls remembered, when the squadron got its orders, "We felt like the wives of samurai sent off to battle in old Japan...
...women might never have known Katsura Squadron's odd fate had not Mrs. Atsuko Hori, now the wife of an Ozuki businessman, tracked down the pilots and invited them to a reunion. To Kenji Katayama, a mild-mannered Kyoto agricultural official at 43, the invitation brought a "burning nostalgia for those days when I was so pure that I thought nothing of dying for the glory of my nation. All at once I was full of desire for a rendezvous with my past...
...four-plane flight that Kasler commands as part of the 354th Tactical Fighter Squadron claims to have destroyed or damaged 219 buildings, 66 barges, 53 railroad cars, 44 trucks, 36 fuel tanks, 28 bridges and 16 flak sites-a record for any such air unit. And, miraculously, in 72 missions Kasler has yet to be shot down-though statistically, every American airman is downed at least once by the time he has reached 60 missions. The Indianan has an explanation for that too. Says he: "The best way to survive is by being aggressive...
...Station, but the station itself has disappeared, while up above, the steel skeleton for a new $75 million Madison Square Garden (third structure to bear the name), a 29-story hotel and office building is going up. On Madison Avenue, the 94th Street Armory, once home for the socialite Squadron A, is crumbling under the siege of wreckers to make way for an integrated junior high school; while at 74th Street, Architect Marcel Breuer's new Whitney Museum, with its massive cantilevers and moat, is readying for its September debut. Across Central Park at Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Opera...