Divine Wind: Kamikaze Attacks Against the US Navy
by Gary Mortensen
National Combat History Archive Press, 2007, 32 pages
This small book of WWII photographs does not attempt to show the history of
Japan's kamikaze attacks against the US Navy in any organized fashion. This
self-published book does not mention the author, but a Lulu Publishing web page
that advertises the book gives the author's name as Gary Mortensen. Another page
on the same website explains that National Combat History Archive, the publisher
of this photo book, is "a foundation dedicated to the aggregation, preservation
and dissemination of military combat and military related film, photographs and
personal memoirs." Based on the low quality of Divine Wind, the National Combat
History Archive seems more like a scam to make money by publishing easily
obtainable photos in the public domain with minimal research effort to put them
together into a coherent history.
The contents focus on the ōka rocket-powered glider bomb with about a third
of the photos dealing with this kamikaze aircraft, even though the Japanese Navy
and Army employed many other types of aircraft in suicide attacks. Some photos
in the book have little or no relationship to kamikaze operations, but rather
they just show some general aspect of the Pacific War such as a Japanese
destroyer or American ground forces on Okinawa. The captions to the book's photos are
brief and often vague.
The captions contain some huge mistakes for a book that purports to tell the
story through photos of Japan's kamikaze attacks against the US Navy. For
example, the photo showing the aircraft carrier USS Bunker Hill (CV-17) smoking
after hits by two kamikaze aircraft has a caption that the attack took place in
April 1945 rather than on the actual date of May 11, 1945. In another example,
the famous photo of a Zero fighter about to crash into the side of the
battleship USS Missouri (BB-63) on April 11, 1945, has the erroneous caption
identifying the ship as the USS Wisconsin. Another caption makes the ridiculous
statement that "once successfully inside the perimeter defenses of the naval
screen, Kamikazes were virtually unstoppable." In reality, after passing
perimeter defenses, many kamikaze aircraft crashed into the sea when hit by
American warship anti-aircraft guns or by CAP (Combat Air Patrol) fighter guns.
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