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(More customer reviews)This is a quite remarkable assemblage of anecdotes detailing the carnage wrought by Japanese aerial and naval suicide campaigns conducted against Allied forces in the Pacific during World War II. The bulk of the book consists of explicit, blow-by-blow descriptions of a number of these horrifyingly deadly attacks. Sears obviously went to great lengths to obtain official action summaries, diaries, letters, first-hand accounts by survivors, interviews with unsuccessful attackers, and many other sources providing vivid portrayals of the incidents.
Despite the value of Sears' depictions as a record of the atrocities resulting from the kamikaze phenomenon, this book's readability and overall value are diminished by several significant defects. The text contains multitudes of punctuation goofs, mistaken or misleading word choices, and other basic typographical errors that any competent copy editor should catch on the first reading. Sears, obviously an experienced Navy man, throws many acronyms and other jargon into his narratives, often neglecting to define them at first use. A glossary explains many of these terms, but the requirement to consult it so frequently detracts from the flow of reading.
A more serious weakness is the inconsistency of both fact and commentary in Sears' attempts to frame his battle reports with summaries of the major events in the tide of war in the Pacific. The frustrating thing is that he does a marvelous job of introducing many of the pivotal battles and decisions in a way that even the least knowledgeable of readers can understand. But, probably in an effort to remain concise, in some places he omits or skews facts to the extent that those same neophyte readers may come away with misconceptions that might never be corrected. For instance, the Battle of Midway is dismissed in a paragraph without any indication of the crucial role of this engagement in shaping the rest of the Pacific air war. Sears' description of the SBD Dauntless dive bomber not only misspells its designation as SPD, but confuses it with its predecessor, the SB2U-3 Vindicator, mistakenly bestowing the latter's unfortunate nickname of "wind indicator" on the far more airworthy Dauntless. The universally respected Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher receives short shrift throughout the book, coming across to any uninitiated reader as a hesitant, obstructionist figure mainly responsible for losing carriers Lexington (CV-2) and Yorktown (CV-5) and serving more as an obstacle than a competent leader at Guadalcanal. (Sears probably picked up his negative view of Fletcher from Samuel Eliot Morison, who had been offended by the publicity-shy admiral's refusal to cooperate with his naval history research.)
One of the more ironic gaps is Sears' failure to provide any detail in mentioning the gallant sacrifice of the American ships of Taffy 3 during the Battle Off Samar in October 1944. As described by James Hornfischer in his excellent book The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy's Finest Hour, destroyer Johnston and destroyer escort Samuel B. Roberts charged the battleships and heavy cruisers of Admiral Korita's armada at point-blank range with such ferocity that the Japanese fled in disarray, thereby sparing the Leyte landings from probable disruption. In the face of certain destruction, USS Johnston executed not one but two attack runs, the second after the ship had already been riddled with shells and many of the crew were dead. This heroism presents such an obvious parallel to the deliberately suicidal behavior of the kamikazes that its omission is incomprehensible in a book of this level of detail, particularly since Sears himself is a former destroyer officer. On the other side of the conflict, Japan's long-standing traditions of death with honor and respect for suicide receive little attention, and there's no mention of the naval officer generally credited with drawing up the first plan for a Special Attack Corps, Lt. Comm. Jo Eiichiro, whose samurai heritage undoubtedly spawned the concept.
I think the most damaging lapse is the book's denouement without a thorough treatment of the potential for catastrophe inherent in a land invasion of the Japanese home islands. After sprinkling numerous implied comparisons of damage caused by kamikazes in outlying areas with a presumably vastly greater toll to be inflicted during the final battle, Sears ends his account with only a cursory mention of the atomic bombs and a few anecdotes illustrating the joys (and problems) meeting homecoming sailors and airmen after the war. In light of Sears' diligence in research and access to original databases and first-hand sources, it seems likely that he should be able to contribute significantly to the ongoing discussion of hypothetical losses due to suicide attacks that purport to justify the use of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Appendices listing ships and crew victimized by kamikazes are limited to those personally researched by Sears. Hundreds more were targeted by suicide planes, and their story remains to be documented by a more complete, if perhaps less graphic, chronicle. Although this is an outstanding record of the ghastly effects of many individual suicide attacks, it cannot stand alone as a history and analysis of suicide missions in general, their significance in the overall war picture, or their lasting effects on victims from both sides.
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A Main Selection of the Military Book Club and a Featured Alternate of the History Book ClubIn the last days of World War II, a new and baffling weapon terrorized the United States Navy in the Pacific. To the sailors who learned to fear them, the body-crashing warriors of Japan were known as suiciders; among the Japanese, they were named for a divine wind that once saved the home islands from invasion: kamikaze. Told from the perspective of the men who endured this horrifying tactic, At War with the Wind is the first book to recount in nail-biting detail what it was like to experience an attack by Japanese kamikazes. David Sears, acclaimed author of The Last Epic Naval Battle, draws on personal interviews and unprecedented research to create a narrative of war that is stunning in its vivid re-creations. Born of desperation in the face of overwhelming material superiority, suicide attacks by aircraft, submarines, small boats, and even manned rocket-boosted gliders were capable of inflicting catastrophic damage, testing the resolve of officers and sailors as never before. Sears s gripping account focuses on the vessels whose crews experienced the full range of the kamikaze nightmare. From carrier USS St. Lo, the first U.S. Navy vessel sunk by an orchestrated kamikaze attack, to USS Henrico, a transport ship that survived the landings at Normandy only to be sent to the Pacific and struck by suicide planes off Okinawa, and USS Mannert L. Abele, the only vessel sunk by a rocket-boosted piloted glider during the war, these unforgettable stories reveal, as never before, one of the most horrifying and misunderstood chapters of World War II. This is the candid story of a war within a war a relentless series of furious and violent engagements pitting men determined to die against men determined to live. Its echoes resonate hauntingly at a time of global conflict, when suicide as a weapon remains a perplexing and terrifying reality. November 1, 1945 Leyte Gulf The destroyer Killen (DD-593) was besieged, shooting down four planes, but taking a bomb hit from a fifth. Pharmacist mate Ray Cloud, watching from the fantail, saw the plane a sleek twin-engine Frances fighter-bomber swoop in low across the port side. As its pilot released his bomb, Cloud said to himself, He dropped it too soon, and then watched as the plane roared by pursued and chewed up by fire from Killen's 40- and 20-mm guns. The bomb hit the water, skipped once and then penetrated Killen's port side hull forward, exploding between the #2 and #3 magazines. The blast tore a gaping hole in Killen's side and water poured in. By the time Donice Copeland, eighteen, a radar petty officer, emerged on deck from the radar shack, the ship's bow was practically submerged and the ship itself was nearly dead in the water. Practically all the casualties were awash below decks. Two unwounded sailors, trapped below in the ship's emergency generator room, soon drowned. The final tally of dead eventually climbed to fifteen.
