Ripley's Believe It or Not! True War Stories
The Last Kamikaze
Ripley Enterprises, June 1967, 36 pages
Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki, who as commander of the Fifth Air
Fleet led many mass kamikaze attacks against Allied ships near Okinawa, was the
last kamikaze. After he heard the Emperor's message of surrender, that same
evening he led a group of eleven Suisei ("Judy") dive bombers
to make kamikaze attacks. However, after a final radio message from Ugaki on
his way to Okinawa, he and his group were never heard from again. This comic
book of "True War Stories" has a distorted and historically incorrect
nine-page story about Japan's kamikaze attacks and Ugaki's last mission.
This comic depicts Ugaki and other Japanese in a very
negative light. Whereas Americans in this comic all have normal flesh-colored
skin, Japanese military men have light greenish-yellow skin. Ugaki is described
as a "fanatical warrior" with a "blind, fanatical wish to
die," and his last message is termed a "berserk farewell." The
story does not provide any support for such statements. Near the end of the
comic, Ugaki sends a radio message that he has sighted the American fleet and
plans to crash into them. The story's final comment is, "But strangely, a
search of U.S. Naval archives shows no record of a kamikaze attack on August
15th, 1945--believe it or not!" This makes it sound like Ugaki lied about
carrying out a kamikaze attack. The truth is that although Ugaki did send a
radio message, there was no mention that he had sighted the American fleet
(Ugaki 1991, 665-6). The location of Ugaki's death never has been determined
with certainty, but he most likely crashed without finding any ships (Ugaki
1991, 664; Warner and Warner 1982, 316-7) or was shot down by American night
fighters near Okinawa (Hoyt 1993, 210).
The writer of "The Last Kamikaze" mixes up
historical facts. The comic says that off Okinawa the first kamikazes caught
Americans by surprise, even though in history the first kamikaze attacks
happened six months earlier in the Philippines. The Japanese never had air
bases on Okinawa for kamikaze sorties, but the comic mistakenly says that the
Japanese moved kamikaze planes and pilots from Okinawa to Kyushu. The first
frame of the comic shows Japanese ships being sunk in July 1945, but in real life the
Japanese Navy had been destroyed three months earlier in April with the sinking of the battleship Yamato
and several escort destroyers.
Although Ripley's Believe It or Not! comics
supposedly contain true stories, "The Last Kamikaze" strays far from
reality.
Sources Cited
Hoyt, Edwin P. 1993. The Last Kamikaze: The Story of Admiral
Matome Ugaki. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Ugaki, Matome. 1991. Fading Victory: The Diary of Admiral Matome
Ugaki, 1941-1945. Translated by Masataka Chihaya. Edited by Donald M. Goldstein
and Katherine V. Dillon. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Warner, Denis, Peggy
Warner, with Commander Sadao Seno. 1982. The Sacred Warriors: Japan's Suicide
Legions. New York: Van Nostrand
Reinhold.
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