Controversies
It is debated whether Seki's plane sank the St. Lo. Nishizawa survived the attack and made his report stating that Seki's plane glanced off the deck of a carrier but that the bomb did not explode. His description on this point closely matches the attack on St. Lo as reported by her captain. A second plane did score a hit on the same carrier that Seki attacked and that plane's bomb did explode. The only carrier with two hits was the Kalinin Bay. However, the description is sharply different, since there was an immediate visibly large explosion following the first hit on the Kalinin Bay, and no portions of the plane were seen to go over the bow. So Nishizawa's description of Seki's hit most closely matches that on the St. Lo.
Prior to Seki's mission, Masashi Onoda, a Domei war correspondent interviewed Yukio Seki and quotes him disparaging suicide attacks. "Japan's future is bleak if it is forced to kill one of its best pilots. I am not going on this mission for the Emperor or for the Empire... I am going because I was ordered to!" In this interview, he gives insight into his thinking on how the carrier force should be attacked. "If they would let me, I could drop a 500 kilogram bomb on the flight deck of a carrier without going in for body-crashing and still make my way back." During his flight, his commanders heard him say "It is better to die, rather than to live as a coward."
Whichever pilot actually sank the St. Lo did so by releasing his bomb onto the flight deck just as Seki described to the reporter, instead of crashing his plane directly onto the deck. The reports of the attack are consistent with that of a pilot who intended to return to base after successfully sinking the St. Lo.
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