A Glorious Way to Die: The Kamikaze Mission of the Battleship Yamato, April 1945
by Russell Spurr
Newmarket Press, 1981, 341 pages
Yamato, the largest battleship ever built, embodied
the pride and spirit of the Imperial Japanese Navy. The battleship saw its
first military action in June 1942 during the Battle of Midway. Many Japanese
viewed Yamato as a symbol of the country and Japan's military might, not
only because of its awesome size and firepower but also because Yamato is the
poetic name for Japan. Yamato continues in Japan as a strong symbol of
heroism against hopeless odds. On April 7, 1945, the day of its sinking by
American bombs and torpedoes, the ship's officers and men fought hard to the
end in what the author describes as "a glorious way to die." The fame
of Yamato has continued since the end of World War II with commercial
films and books about the battleship's fated final mission. These books include
a classic piece of wartime literature, Requiem for Battleship Yamato, by
Mitsuru Yoshida, a survivor of the sinking of the great battleship. The
battleship's heroic image continued on to a new generation with Space
Battleship Yamato, a very popular Japanese animation series in the 1970s [1].
In 2199, when Earth has few space ships and has been conquered, the people of
Earth recover Yamato from the bottom of the ocean and convert it into a
modern spaceship in order to fight against a conquering empire.
Russell Spurr did extensive, in-depth research with both
Japanese and American sources in order to write this dramatic narrative of the
final days of Yamato. He served with the Royal Indian Navy during World
War II, and he worked as a correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review
and the London Daily Mail. The main narrative covers the period from March
28 to April 7, 1945, but Spurr weaves in historical background throughout the
book. The book switches back and forth between different locations on both the
Japanese and American sides, such as Yamato, Japanese Combined Fleet
headquarters, U.S. Fifth Fleet, kamikaze headquarters at Kanoya Air Base, and
U.S. planes attacking Yamato.
The Combined Fleet headquarters designated battleship Yamato
and its nine escort ships as a surface special attack fleet. "Special
attack" (tokkō in Japanese) meant that Japanese military
leaders expected that none of the soldiers would return, with death being
certain due to the nature of the attack. The military also referred to attacks
made by kamikaze planes, kaiten manned torpedoes, and explosive motorboats as "special
attacks," since a "successful" attack would result in death for
the person making the attack. Although focusing on Yamato, this book
also describes kamikaze and conventional plane attacks made by the Fifth
Air Fleet on American ships around Okinawa. The chapters on kamikaze
headquarters in Kagoshima, the southernmost prefecture of mainland Japan,
explain that Yamato had no air cover during the mission to Okinawa
because planes needed to be saved for the planned mass kamikaze attacks on
April 12, 1945.
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Smoke Rises After
Explosions on Yamato
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Numerous details and scores of characters make for slow
reading at times, but this thoroughness is also one of the book's strong
points. The story lacks a main character, but the book does include quite a few
conversations, which makes it easier to read. Spurr writes in the Introduction
that dialogues have been included only when participants were certain as to
what was said. In writing the book, he had to deal also with conflicting facts
and different versions of the same story, but he skillfully deals with these
inconsistencies, several times referring to the confusion of battle and the
tendency of pilots to overestimate hits in the excitement of battle. The book
contains four detail maps, many photos, two detail views of Yamato, an extensive
bibliography, a chart of the command structure of the Allied fleet leaders
mentioned in the book, and a similar chart for the Imperial Japanese Navy
leaders.
Although many books and documentaries on kamikaze operations
tell the basic story of Yamato's final sortie, A Glorious Way to Die
has numerous fascinating details not found in these other works. For example,
the story does not stop after Yamato has been sunk, but rather goes on
to describe American planes spraying the sea with machine-gun fire and to tell
about survivors struggling against bullets, exhaustion, Yamato's
undertow, cold, and spilled oil. Yamato's dead totaled 3,063, and only
269 men survived. Another 1,187 men lost their lives in the escort force. The
book tells how a flying boat dramatically rescues an American pilot downed
in the midst of the enemy fleet. The Americans lost only twelve men in the
battle in comparison to thousands of Japanese.
This book succeeds not only in telling the story of the
tragic end of Yamato but also in showing the desperate situation that Japan
faced at the end of the war and the courage with which its military officers
and ordinary soldiers tried to protect their country even though they faced
impossible odds.
Note
1. Space Battleship Yamato was the first animated
work of Leiji Matsumoto. He also created the manga episodes on which the three
stories in the animation video titled The Cockpit: Kamikaze Stories are
based.
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