|
Former naval officer Sears (The Last Epic Naval
Battle: Voices from Leyte Gulf, 2005) writes affectingly of the terror
the “divine wind” campaign wrought on American sailors. Contrasting
the fate of several American ships to that of USS Cole in the 2000
al-Qaeda terror attack, he demonstrates the damage that the Imperial
Navy suicide bombers wrought. That campaign, he observes, was a mark of
having no other options, the American fleet having destroyed most of
Japan’s and forcing “a stunning new ‘backs-against-the-wall’ paradigm
for modern warfare.” The author focuses on U.S. forces, though with
considerable attention to the Japanese side of the equation, for which
readers will also want to consult Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney’s provocative
Kamikaze Diaries (2006) and Albert Axell’s Kamikaze: Japan’s Suicide
Gods (2002).
Sears does a particularly good job of bringing
in the various voices of the fast-dwindling corps of American survivors
of hellish engagements at Leyte and Okinawa, among other places.
Drawing on interviews, diaries and other sources, the author depicts men
such as a Marine junior officer who, his soldiers suspected, slept at
attention, in contrast with one of those fighters who weighed only 135
pounds and was “quiet, introspective, and mild mannered.” Both served
valiantly, as did most of their comrades, even though, by the closing
months of the war, recruits were pushed through training and sent into
the field as “90-day wonders fresh from Midshipman School.”
The horror of kamikaze steeled them—those who
survived, that is, for the attacks took a terrible toll on American
sailors, Marines and soldiers, which left “even the healthiest…veterans
perplexed and embittered at a nation, culture, and people capable of
devising such attacks.”
Sears closes with a look at how veterans on both
sides bridged the gulf between them.
Of considerable interest to students of the Pacific War.
|
