Kamikazi
Valiant Picture Library No. 131
Fleetway Publications, April 1968, 58 pages
Previously published in December 1962
This Australian war comic presents Lieutenant "Hurricane" Jackson of the
Royal Australian Navy as a hero who leads a rescue attempt of Allied POWs held
at an unnamed kamikaze base in Kyūshū. He receives help from two members of the
Royal Air Force held as prisoners after being shot down during a reconnaissance
flight. The comic has an exciting plot but little historical accuracy.
Jackson, seconded to a U.S. task force fighting on Okinawa, tries to escape a
Japanese counterattack by getting to an American landing craft not yet hit. The
landing craft barely reaches a tanker, which gets torpedoed by a Japanese sub.
The sub captures Jackson floating in the water and returns to Kyūshū, where
Jackson gets thrown into a POW cell. He and two other cellmates, Barlow and Miles
from the Royal Air Force, escape when American bombers attack the area.
The three men search for and find a nearby kamikaze base, where an Allied
airborne detachment that had parachuted into the area causes damage. Colonel
Ugaki, commander of the kamikaze operations, threatens to shoot 20 POWs as
retaliation against the enemy sabotage operations. He orders the Allied
prisoners to march in front of Japanese troops in the event of an enemy landing.
Jackson signals by a blinking light to a submarine off the coast to not attack
due to the beaches being heavily mined, but he sends this false signal only to
protect the POWs.
The Allies figure out that the mines had actually been cleared and that the
light signal was a fake. Jackson, Barlow, and Miles create a diversion to try to
free the POWs. As the POWs flee, American bombers attack the base while Betty
bombers each loaded with a kamikaze ōka (rocket-powered glider bomb) begin to
take off. One Betty bomber gets hit by enemy fire, and the ōka plunges down and
crashes on the airfield. Jackson gets rescued but cannot remember anything due
to shock caused by the ōka explosion. He returns to a Sydney hospital to recover, but
he is court-martialed for sending the fake signal to the submarine off the coast
of Kyūshū. Miles arrives in Sydney just in time to give his testimony that
Jackson sent the false signal in order to save the POWs.
The comic book Kamikazi (spelled differently than the correct Japanese of
Kamikaze) has plenty of exciting action but with quite a few discrepancies with
actual history. The comic's kamikaze base has Allied POWs, who were used to
build the air base. In real history, the military did not keep POWs at air bases
on the home islands or use them in the construction of airfields. The story
depicts an Allied landing on Kyūshū that never actually occurred. The comic
mentions jungles several times on the southernmost Japanese main island of Kyūshū, even though the island does not have jungles.
Ugaki, a colonel in the comic but a Navy vice admiral in history, gets
portrayed as a sadistic madman who will take revenge by shooting Allied
prisoners in cold blood. He did lead Japan's kamikaze operations from February
1945 until the end of the war, but his diary portrays him less as a madman and
more as a military
strategist trying to use all means possible to win the war. He mentions no
direct encounters with Allied prisoners during the war. The comic shows ōka missiles released
from Betty bombers whenever referring to kamikaze aircraft, but actually the
Japanese Navy and Army employed many different types of aircraft in kamikaze
attacks. Slow-moving Betty bombers loaded with ōka glider bombs would never
have been allowed to take off in the middle of an enemy air attack on a base.
The comic's first page shows an ōka glider bomb about to crash into an aircraft
carrier, even though this never came close to happening in actual history as
most Betty bombers got shot down by American fighters before they could release
their ōka weapons.
Kamikazi misrepresents the historical background and stereotypes Japanese
military members, including kamikaze pilots, as fanatical and heartless.
However, this long comic story of 58 pages has a plot filled
with action and suspense.
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