Kamikaze: Japan's Suicide Gods

Kamikaze: Japan's Suicide Gods
Albert Axell | 2002-10-25 00:00:00 | Longman | 296 | Japan

The untold story of the Kamikaze pilots, a remarkable piece of military history and one of the most dramatic developments of World War II.

• Gripping real-life stories of life & death.
• Contains original material, interviews and new sources including excerpts from a never-before published suicide manual.
• Reports on survivors who have lived to tell the tale of the Second World War.

The use of Kamikaze pilots was one of the most dramatic and chilling developments of the Second World War. But who were the kamikaze pilots and what motivated them to give the ultimate sacrifice? Why was the practice initiated by the Japanese air force? This is the untold story of a remarkable development in military and world history. In this gripping account, Albert Axell explains that Kamikaze pilots were part of the national military policy of Japan during the 2nd World War. He writes that Japanese Vice Admiral Takashiro Ohnishi noted that the most effective way to inflict damage to warships was to crash planes into them. Those attacks took the American fleet completely by surprise - they were bewildered by the suicide missions and completely unable to comprehend the mentality behind them. We learn, however, that the call for kamikaze pilots drew a staggering response, with three times as many volunteers for suicide flights as the number of planes available. Kamikaze: The Untold Story sheds light on the world of the Kamikaze pilots, where they came from, what they were thinking about, how they looked at life and death, what they did in their last hours.

Albert Axell has done historical research in China, Japan, Mongolia and Russia and has written several books about these countries (including 'Russia's Heroes' and 'Stalin's War'). He also observed the Vietnam War as a journalist. During the Cold War years he met John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Brezhnev and has met thirty of Stalin's surviving generals.
Reviews
The co-author of this book, Mr. Hideaki Kase, is a right-wing Japanese revisionist who openly glorifies Japan's war crime during WWII and calls the horrific Nanking Massacre a fabrication. He also calls the "Comfort Women", women who were captured by the Japanese during WWII and were forced to be sex slaves for the Japanese Army, prostitutes. Not only Mr. Kase has little credibility in reviewing Japan's role during WWII, but also he is one of voice for the Nazi Japan.
Reviews
A cross-cultural study should have a bibliography and footnotes/endnotes, so this is a caveat to scholars of East Asian history and the Pacific war in general: this book has neither, nor does it account for its sources, other than to offer "recommended readings." Since most of the works cited there are familiar, it's hard to say how much of the material here is original.
Reviews
This is the best study of the Japanese suicide pilots that I have read. With his Japanese co-author, Mr. Axell (who taught for a time in Japan) is able to get at Japanese-language sources and oral histories that have mostly been ignored by western scholars. This can be spellbinding stuff.

Unfortunately, the Japanese orientation leads them into many niggling errors that leap off the page to a western reader versed in military aviation. There's also a pro-Japanese bias in their presentation of material, especially when they strain to find parallels to the kamikaze in western air forces.

Excerpts from a kamikaze how-to manual are a chilling reminder to anyone who remembers the similar document carried by the al Qaeda suicide pilots of September 11, 2001.

Very much worth the reading, but take it with a grain of salt.

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