Inviting Death

...But how many American veterans of the war in Indochina, searching after the fact for the roots of their own motivation, arrive at their image of John Wayne (from any of a dozen Westerns) and little more...

...Consider first the circumstances in which the kamikaze tactic emerged: October 1944, when the war had turned decisively against Japan...

...To denigrate their motives without also subjecting ours to a similar examination is hardly fair play...

...Here is Bernard Fall on the French Foreign Legion at Dienbienphu: "As the night fell over Dienbienphu that Friday evening—all the rest had fallen—the men could see the waves of enemy infantry surge toward them...

...Suppose the ludicrous for a moment: that American military men in the Pacific had faced inevitable defeat at the hands of an overwhelmingly powerful Japan...

...To understand the kamikaze—myth and reality—may help us to deal more objectively both with Japan and with ourselves...

...Japanese who survived the battle speak of the view from the surface of the ocean, and American pilots tell of what they saw from the clouds...

...Of one of the more rabid Japanese military planners, Spurr writes: "Fighting spirit, his inexorable catchall remedy, would swamp the productive and technological power of the enemy...

...I think not...

...The tactic was born of desperation...

...Brown: "Among us who were there, in the Philippines and at Okinawa, I doubt if there is anyone who can depict with complete clarity our mixed emotions as we watched a man about to die—a man determined to die in order that he might destroy us in the process...

...The warriors, ancient or modern, had the disease in its most virulent form: "Death was especially welcomed by warriors...

...the Yamato lasted two hours before succumbing to the furious onslaught of more planes than bombed Pearl Harbor...

...the Legionnaires fixed bayonets in the ghostly light of the parachute flares and—600 against 40,000— walked into death...

...Spurr traces the roots of the war to "causes...

...General Westmoreland put it most directly in the movie Hearts and Minds: "Well, the Oriental . . doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner...

...In the words of his title, it was all "a glorious way to die...

...There was a hypnotic fascination to a sight so alien to our Western philosophy...

...It was an argument born of necessity...

...Readers of Ruth Benedict and much subsequent scholarship on Japan will recognize echoes here of the dubious psychoanalysis long practiced on "the Japanese mind...

...Ever since the late days of 1944, when the Kamikazes made their first appearance, the Western world has seized on them as proof of something alien, fanatical, unfathomable in "the Japanese mind...

...but is it accurate, even of the Yamato's suicidal last charge...

...How else explain the fascination of Masada or the Alamo...

...but why settle today for the emotions of 1945...

...SoSpurr's analysis of the "Japanese mind" spills over from the Pacific to Vietnam, and we are not far from General Westmoreland's twaddle about "the philosophy of the Orient...

...Halsey...

...In the words of one young naval officer on board the Yamato, it was "deemed wise to have the Yamato act as decoy...

...The event happened in 1945...

...Nor are the Japanese alone in suffering from this disease...

...The ten ships fought valiantly...

...A General Schweitzer...

...Spurr chooses "a half-naked officer with a white Hachimaki around his head [who] hysterically screamed 'Banzai!' and waved his samurai sword in impotent defiance at the circling American aircraft" as "a symbol, somehow, of the whole futile mission...

...and in the early dawn, led by their commander...

...Of the ten ships involved, six, including the Yamato, were sunk by American carrier-based aircraft...

...Death became a refreshing release...

...The tactical rationale was to draw American planes away from Okinawa so that Japanese attack planes, most of them kamikazes, would have more of a chance to be effective...

...For Spurr, "no Japanese could ever fully repay" the debt to the emperor...

...Spurr writes that the Japanese motivation had its roots in "muddled tenets" and "ill-informed superstitions...

...Russell Spurr's book, A Glorious Way to Die: The Kamikaze Mission of the Battleship Yamato, April 1945, is a good place to start...

...A Glorious Way to Die gives us plenty of torpedoes, bombs, and bullets, but little sense of the humanity of the Japanese enemy...

...The mission was indeed suicidal...

...It is here that our hackles rise, or ought to...

...Patton...

...Consider the statement of Vice Admiral C.R...

...Still, to be good bait we must combine two traits: we must be attractive enough as a target to draw off most of the enemy planes, and we must have the antiaircraft defenses to withstand those planes for many hours...

...He speaks of "the muddled tenets of .Shinto metaphysics," of a captain who "fell back on ancient, ill-formed superstitions long fed into the samurai subconscious: a mixture of half-digested Buddhist belief and animist legend," of "a neurotic pyramid of obligations piled up on every Japanese from early childhood," of shame as "the one great fear...

...Spurr writes that the Yamato's last charge "contained all the elements of the hopeless heroism the Japanese admire...

...Most of these later warriors would be Marxists preaching "people's war" and "men above machines...

...Faced with a comparable situation involving the Soviet Union today, what would a General Jones do...

...deep in national institutions and in the Japanese character...

...Richard H. Minear (Richard H. Minear, professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, has just completed a translation of' 'Requiem for the Battleship Yamato," a battle epic written by one of the Japanese survivors...

...other Asians would shortly be adopting it, with varying degrees of success, in their forthcoming campaigns against the white man...

...Moreover, the Western world has often generalized from Japan to the "Far East," making the kamikaze symptomatic of that greater failing of the Oriental mind: its failure to value life...

...But who in fact does not...

...All this Spurr gives us in thirty-nine chapters which interweave Japanese and American accounts...

...It is a convenient explanation...

...The squadron was given no air cover and not enough fuel for a round trip: the American forces enjoyed an enormous superiority...

...Elsewhere he admits that the British share that trait...

...Le-May...

...Even the supreme sacrifice was insufficient...

...And as the philosophy of the Orient expresses it, life is not important...

...It is a journalistic account of the last squadron sortie of the Japanese navy...

...Life is plentiful, life is cheap in the Orient...

...Somehow what is heroic when done by the home team is something else—fanatic, suicidal, depraved—when done by the enemy...

...In the lines from Vietnam veteran Don Receveur's poem about the pilot of a helicopter gunship: "He hunts/ the Indian-gooks/in the Wild West/of his mind...

...What would Doolittle have done...

...An ex-General Haig...

...Spurr (who neither reads nor speaks Japanese) also attempts an analysis of the war itself and of Japanese "national character...

...Methodically they went about their business of destroying all the useless weapons and of caring for their wounded...