‘Kamikaze: Japan’s Sacred Warriors 1944-1945’ by Denis Warner & Peggy Warner (1982).

Published in 1982, this book is by Australian historian Denis Warner who produced it with the assistance of his wife Peggy. Warner served as a war correspondent during the Second World War, covering the Middle-east theatre and later in the Pacific. He was on board the British aircraft carrier HMS Formidable when it suffered a hit by a Kamikaze on 4th May 1945 while the ship was supporting the Okinawan Campaign. The Japanese plane struck the deck only 30 feet from where Warner was standing. Having experienced such an event at close-hand, Warner was in an ideal position to write a history of the Kamikaze campaign. Warner, who died in 2012, continued to work as a correspondent after the war, covering war-zones such as Korea & Vietnam. He was known for having conservative views on politics and, although he criticised much of the conduct of those wars, Warner remained a staunch anti-communist, putting him at odds with more left-leaning fellow Australian journalists. In this book, Warner adopts a respectful tone towards the Suicide Corps, attempting to understand and grasp the mindset and culture of the era. His book begins with a grimly detailed narrative of the ghastly closing stages of the Fall of Saipan in July 1944, which culminated in a massed Banzai charge and widespread suicides among the civilian population. Drawing on accounts and memories of survivors, Warner focuses on the suffering of Saipan’s civilian occupants, highlight the ugly side of the battle. As Warner argues, the loss of Saipan and the defeat of the IJN at the Philippine Sea the previous month left the Japanese reeling in shock, creating the desperation & fatalism that led to the Kamikaze tactics. He studies the preparations of the Special Attack units and the first pre-mediated suicide air attacks that took place at Leyte Gulf the following October. The book is a narrative history, drawing on first-hand accounts of survivors and participants on both sides, depicting what was a brutal campaign. As Warner argues, the Japanese were, contrary to popular history, divided in their attitudes towards the suicide tactics with many senior officers showing reluctance and occasionally outright opposition to them. Even Lieutenant Yukio Seki, who led the very first attack on Taffy 3 at Leyte, showed little real enthusiasm for Kamikaze missions, not out of cowardice but out of his opinion that such tactics were a waste of precious resources. The book covers the early months of the Kamikaze era in early 1944, arguably the most successful part of the campaign in terms of the ratio of Allied warships hit in exchange for numbers of planes sacrificed. It then moves on into 1945, culminating in the massive Kamikaze operations at Okinawa. In this campaign, the ‘Stalingrad of the Pacific’, the Kamikazes, thanks to improved US tactics such as the system of ‘Picket’ Destroyers, upgraded anti-aircraft weaponry and co-ordination of combat air patrols, not to mention the declining skills of the suicide pilots, found themselves expending higher and higher numbers of precious planes with proportionately fewer hits sustained on enemy ships. Warner also examines the lesser-known aspects of the campaign such as the suicide boats and the ‘Biggest Kamikaze’ of all, the foolhardy final sortie of the IJN Battleship Yamato. The British and Australian ships involved also get due attention, especially the cruiser HMAS Australia, a ship which proved to be a veritable honey-pot when it came to attracting the attention of suicide pilots. The detail is exhaustive and many general readers could end up rather war-weary by the three-quarter mark, as the descriptions of Kamikaze attacks become monotonous in their similarity. The book concludes with an exhaustive list of what Warner insists to be every Allied ship sunk or damaged by a Kamikaze attack. Keep in mind that this book dates from 1982 and more recent research has challenged the accuracy of this list. Warner claims that 57 ships were sunk by Kamikazes, however other historians now claim the number is more likely 47. Warner erroneously included the two US minesweepers Palmer & Hovey as being both sunk by Kamikaze attack on Jan 7, 1945 whereas both ships were lost to conventional air attack. And another two ships- LCT 876 & Destroyer Braine- although both hit by Kamikazes, did not sink although Warner lists them as having done so. This book was published in paperback in Australia in 1983 and another paperback version was released in the United States the following year. It has not been re-printed since. One word of warning, if hunting the book second-hand, if possible avoid the Australian paperback version (pictured above). Like most books printed in Australia back in the Eighties, the quality of the binding was terrible. My copy, which I purchased second-hand about 20 years ago, has been slowly falling apart ever since. I was friends with a librarian back in the 80s who used to say that you could always tell if a paperback book had been printed in Australia, you just had to drop it on the carpet and all of the pages would fall out! 