This piece of wing fabric was ripped from the wing of a Japanese fighter aircraft by my grandfather in WW2 after the plane dove kamikaze into the cargo hold of the ship (SS Josiah Snelling) he was helping to unload it in E. Okinawa Harbor. The wings snapped off at the deck level and the fuselage, with 500lb bomb attached, went into the cargo hold. The bomb did not explode. The attack happened on May 28, 1945.
The dark gray (might have a slight green tinge) top, trailing edge, and light silver wing bottom are shown. It's made of painted fabric - like a light linen. It would be pretty sweet to know the actual model of plane but maybe that's not possible. Help me Reddit historians, you're my only hope!
Help me Reddit historians, you're my only hope!
Like u/DBHT14 , I too have not found much specific abut this attack beyond generalities. And the surviving fabric could be from the flaps of ant number of IJN or IJA aircraft. However, askhistorians is not the only resource available on this matter. A large number of relic experts and historians of Japan's air effort frequent the bulletin board j-aircraft.org. A lot of posters there work with identifying and cataloguing surviving relics. Registering and posting your question to one of their boards like the general aircraft one might garner more results than what you have found on reddit.
At this point unfortunately it is probably going to be difficult in the extreme to figure out the make/model of the aircraft from the remains.
In part because of the number of aircraft over and around Okinawa that day, as late May was the tail end of the height of the Kamikaze effort but they still remained a common and deadly threat to the Allied forces.
28 May alone saw over a dozen different Japanese Navy and Army units launch sorties of 1 to 10 aircraft each. The day began early with the destroyer USS Drexler on radar picket duty being sunk, and several other transports and auxiliaries hit. In the air that day you had Japanese aviators flying various versions of the E13A and E7K floatplanes, K11W and Ki-79 training aircraft, the Ki-45 twin engine heavy fighter, and the Ki-61, Ki-43, Ki-84, and Ki-27 fighters.
Even the US Navy's official chronology of WW2 isn't clear on numbers and types which hit each ship damaged that day. http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USN/USN-Chron/USN-Chron-1945.html
And while more information ahs allowed a better picture of the Kamikaze units on the Japanese side since then, its still a struggle sometimes to match what sortie to what hit or attack when multiple are involved.
Off Okinawa, kamikazes sink destroyer Drexler (DD-741), 27°06'N, 127°38'E, and damage attack transport Sandoval (APA-194), 26°15'N, 127°51'E, and large support landing craft LCS(L)-119. A suicider crashes and damages U.S. freighter Mary A. Livermore in Buckner Bay, 26°12'N, 127°46'E; the 27 Armed Guards and 75 Construction Battalion sailors on board contribute men to firefighting efforts (four Armed Guard sailors, as well as seven merchant seamen, die in the explosion and fires). Another kamikaze crashes and damages U.S. freighter Brown Victory off Ie Shima; two of the 27 Armed Guards are killed instantly, and 18 injured (one merchant sailor and an Armed Guard sailor die of their wounds later). Still another suicider crashes U.S. freighter Josiah Snelling off Okinawa; Armed Guard gunfire manages to deflect the Japanese plane from its suicidal course toward the amidships deckhouse and into a less vulnerable part, saving the ship from worse damage. There are no fatalities on board.