Ginga tokkōtai kishū seri! Saigo no nichibei kōkū kōbōsen
(Ginga special attack corps kamikaze attacks! Last aerial battles between Japan
and America)
by Shin Ueda, Kuroko Yabuguchi, Masato Tanaka, Taisyu Matsuda,
Yohnosuke Sugiura, Hiroyasu Hatakeyama, Yohichi Ochiai, and Takeshi Kobayashi
Gakken, 2001, 206 pages
Fantasy rules the skies in this manga book. Separate authors wrote this
book's stories on five different types of Japanese war planes, such as the Raiden
interceptor fighter (Allied code name "Jack") and the Gekkō
night fighter (Irving). The stories focus on the real planes' capabilities and
on invented battle accomplishments. The pilots and military leaders constantly display
bravado, but the authors pay almost no attention to the characters' personalities and
relationships.
The first story relates a fictional event concerning a squadron of 16 Ginga
(Frances) twin-engined bombers. The Ginga take off from the carrier Shinano
in April 1945 to make an attack on the B-29 air bases in Saipan and Tinian. The
Navy leaders designated this as a special attack (suicide) mission, so the Ginga
pilots do not worry about a place to return when they intercept an enemy message
saying that the carrier Shinano
has been sunk by American planes. The squadron goes first to drop bombs on
parked B-29s at Saipan, which sets off a chain reaction of fires around the
airfield. Next, the remainder of the squadron head for Tinian, and two planes
make body-crashing attacks on the B-29s on the ground. This daring mission
results in the destruction of over 300 B-29s, but the Americans with their huge
supply of B-29s soon continue the bombing of Japan by using the air base in
Guam.
The writers of these stories mix in enough historical names and events to
blur the distinction between fact and fiction. The Japanese pilots in these
stories always seem to be much more successful than actual history. For example,
the Japanese did have a carrier Shinano with a heavily armored flight
deck, but she sank when attacked by an American submarine just outside Tōkyō Bay
in November 1944, five months prior to the time of the first
manga story (Warner 1982, 141-2). In the story, the Kamikaze Special Attack Corps Mitate
Unit No. 2 pilots the 16 Ginga planes to bomb the two B-29 air bases, but this
unit actually had been destroyed in February 1945 in an attack on American ships around
Iwo Jima (Inoguchi 1958, 130-1). The destruction of over 300 B-29s on the ground
is sheer fantasy.
The other stories in this manga book do not specifically involve special
attacks, but there are a couple of remarks about suicide ramming attacks on
other aircraft.
Although this book contains a separate page of detailed technical data for
each plane's specifications and performance capabilities, the authors took no
such care with other historical facts.
Sources Cited
Inoguchi, Rikihei, and Tadashi Nakajima, with Roger Pineau.
1958. The Divine Wind: Japan's Kamikaze Force in World War II.
Annapolis: Naval Institute 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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