The Death Match of Imperial Japan. 
Speaking Sunday 21 with another of the Kennedy clan, Maxwell Taylor Kennedy, named for
his father's friend, and youngest son of the late Senator, who has written a passionate and humblingly detailed account, "Danger's Hour: The Story of the USS Bunker Hill and the Kamikaze Pilot Who Crippled Her," of a single moment of horror in 1945 when a young Japanese student pilot named Kiyoshi Ogawa plunged his Japanese Zero into the center of the flight deck of the Essex Class aircraft carrier Bunker Hill. Max Kennedy writes cleanly, patiently, perspicaciously of the men, machines and events that lead up to the moment and then after the moment as Bunker Hill struggles to survive the explosion. What is most persuasive now, 64 years after the event, is the recognizable grim logic of the combatants. Bunker Hill was part of a vast American fleet dutifully remained in range of the Japanese attacks because it was supporting the fight to the death on Okinawa. The Imperial Japanese Navy, without any major ships, dutifully remained on attack because of the spiritual
fatalism of its commanders, such as Admiral Matome Ugaki (right) who directed the kamikaze attacks. Ugaki was trained as a samurai, polite, poetic, patriotic, unremitting. The twist of fate is that Ugaki was the chief of staff to Japanese Admiral Yamamoto, the man who launched the Pearl Harbor attack. In 1944, American war planes, using intercepted Japanese Naval code signals, ambushed the airplane carry Yamomoto and Ugaki. Yamamoto died; Ugaki survived clinging to wreckage in the sea and was ready to lead the last fanaticism of the war. The kamikaze were presented as spiritual, patriotic, transcendental. The facts are that Ugaki used student pilots like Ogawa rather than throw away great veterans of the air. The kamikaze base was the Kanoya airbase on the southernmost Japanese homeland island Kyushu that was bombed to smithereens by the American airfleet so that conditions were no more than primitive and mindless. After April 1945, none of the kamikazes were more than despairing, isolated, abandoned young men who awaited their chance to fly and die while under ceaseless bombardment and with starvation rations. By May, and the attack on Bunker Hill, cherry blossoms did flutter through the torn open roof. Admiral Ugaki kept up the assault to no purpose other than the madness of war. Japan was defeated. Iwo Jima and Okinawa were battles that the Americans were destined to win by grit and sacrifice. The final defense of the homeland islands was a defeatist delusion of the military cult around the emperor cult. The kamikazes are the strange exception to the lost world of the last months because the fact of them today inform us about the power of suicide attacks. Ugaki called the mass suicide attacks Kikushu, or chrysanthemum water. Japanese poetry associates flowers with death. Ugaki, in his poetic tomfoolery, reached for the self-serving anecdote of a medieval samurai who had chosen the emperor's emblem of a chrysanthemum half submerged in water as his crest. There were ten Kikushi raids launched between April and June, 1945, and they were increasingly deadly. The American fleet at Okinawa was losing more than a ship a day, and the famous Intrepid, now in anchor as a museum in New York, was hit and driven from battle on April 16.
Bunker Hill Fights.
Around 10 am in the morning of May 11, 1945, Yasunori Seizo finished a shallow dive on the aft deck of Bunker Hill and released an armor piercing bomb that tore through the deck and luckily exploded outside the ship over the water; Seizo's plane struck near the aft elevator and started a huge black smoke fire that covered the aft deck. Moments later student pilot Kiyoshi Ogawa in his Zero radioed, as instructed to do, his final messages, "I see an enemy plane," and "I see the enemy aircraft carrier," and then at 10:02.30, "Now, I am nose-diving into the
ship." Ogawa put himself into a steep dive, 70 degrees, and an astonishing photograph in the book shows his tiny aircraft aiming directly at the burning Bunker Hill. Ogawa's 550-pound bomb struck just amidships at the central elevator, and his plane struck soon after. What followed was breathtaking drama that is chronicled by Kennedy with precision and compassion. Heroism was matter of fact and constant. The rescue of the wounded and the trapped, the fire-fighting and damage control, the fact that the forward parts of the ship continued to battle the Japanese kamikazes still coming on over the smoking ruin, the training and discipline of the approximately 3000 men onboard, all are a library of what makes war at sea so mesmerizing, existential. Mr. Kennedy has identified one particular hero of many whom he and many of the veterans today choose as the man who saved Bunker Hill, chief Engineer Joseph Carmichael. About ten minutes after the explosions, Carmichael heard a rumor spreading that the ship was sinking. He took to the public address system and gave a speech that matches anything of Ceasar's in strength and
valor: "This is the chief engineer speaking. This ship is not sinking. It is not in any danger of sinking. And it will not sink. So put your minds at rest on that." Two days later, Bunker Hill made the largest mass burial at sea in Navy history to this day, 352 officers and men were put into the sea about 380 miles southeast of Naha Town. Bunker Hill limped home, out of the last three months of the war. Mr. Kennedy, 43, has provided a significant testimony to the courage of Bunker Hill and to the still unhealed sadness of the Japanese student pilots who were thrown away by their cynical, criminal leadership. What is the significance today of the suicide attack? That it will succeed to do great damage, however that it demonstrates a failure of the attacking force to be more than a futile fever, a banal evil, the losing cause that is eventually swept into the dustbin of history.
Whereas it is tempting to compare the kamikazes to modern-day suicide bombers, the overall struggle today is different. No doubt Islam's suicide bombers are effective, but they have not yet provoked us into officially declaring war. Nor is it likely. We have chosen to treat them merely as annoyance, ignoring their grievance and passion by refusing to honor their sacrificial blood.
Yes, we do have the wherewithal to engage them, but we lack the will. We don't have the intestinal fortitude to confront them decisively, preferring instead to die the death of a thousand cuts (as to preserve the kumbaya fiction for as long as possible).
By not taking them seriously, we accord our enemies the most stinging insult possible. This is not enough to force them into backing down - or even to duck.
Lotus leaves in the pond
Ride on water.
Rain in June.
Masaoka
"What is the significance today of the suicide attack? That it will succeed to do great damage, however that it demonstrates a failure of the attacking force to be more than a futile fever, a banal evil, the losing cause that is eventually swept into the dustbin of history."
Perhaps. But I am uneasily aware that the suicide attacks of seven years ago goaded the United States into making a number of critical errors that may yet be the ruin of us all.
We would be wise to recall Zhou Enlai's famous words when he was asked to comment on the impact of the French Revolution: "It is too soon to say."