At War With the Wind

This is another book on the subject of Japanese kamikaze in World War II. It's over 500 pages long and includes a few pages of photographs.

One of the interesting things the book hits at is how different communication was during that time compared to this time. News could be obtained from newspapers or radio and that was about it. No internet, no Twitter, no 24-hour news programs, nothing like that at all. It could take a while for even an enemy to find out just what had happened at any particular place.

Control of the media was also easier in those days and that is what happened in Japan as the military government strictly controlled all media so the general populace of Japan had no idea what was going on in the war especially as it got later in the war and things had turned against Japan.

One of the things the book covers is how utterly different the kamikaze mind set was from the American mind set. The American military early on could not understand how lives could be thrown away like that but their thinking changed as the damage the kamikaze caused grew.

Racism in the American military is briefly covered. It was, for all intents and purposes, a war of white men against Asian men. Blacks were held back in a lot of ways (even the famed Tuskegee airmen had a terrible time with military racism). The Japanese Americans who were allowed into the military either were used basically as cannon fodder in Italy or in very limited translation positions in the Pacific Theater (even while many of their families were locked in in "internment camps" behind barbed wire and with armed outposts.)

Reference is made to battles on Saipan and Okinawa where civilians, brainwashed into believing that American soldiers were hideous rapists and murderers, chose to leap from cliffs rather than trust the American soldiers who were trying to help them.

For example, some 22,000 civilians chose death rather than listen to the American soldiers.

The various forms of kamikaze are covered including the oka bomb, also called the fool's bomb, which was a rocket-propelled suicide craft launched from a Japanese bomber.

An indication of just how intense the Japanese fought and how they were unafraid of death is shown in the statistics for Iwo Jima where some 20,000 Japanese died and only around 200 actually surrendered.

Chapter 24 discusses the balloon bombs that were launched from Japanese territory and were supposed to be terror weapons, setting entire forests on fire. Things didn't work out the way the Japanese expected.

All this is only, of course, a sample of the material in this quite good book.

Main Index
Japan main page
Japanese-American Internment Camps index page
Japan and World War II index page