whistlingdeathcorsairs wrote:
Where do you feel that there is a need for sympathy on that for the Japanese?
Not what I said, nor my points for this discussion. Have another read.
whistlingdeathcorsairs wrote:
We lost battle after battle until Midway turned it around for us. I'd have to say that was a last-minute miracle resort for us, and it was fulfilled.
Midway isn't near the continental United States, hence the name, and was far from a 'last minute' miracle. Spielberg's
1941 isn't a documentary.
Midway was far less a defence of the homeland and a step before invasion than the Battle of Britain was - itself, an early battle in a longer-to-run strategy. In all cases, they were important, decisive, historic battles of critical importance to the war. But the US was not even nearly at risk of invasion, as Japan was when the Kamikaze system was brought to a peak.
Once Japan attacked the US, and the US government decided not to fight a limited war, Japan was doomed to lose. You can't run scenarios any other way. It was simply a matter of time and cost - massive, and horrifying as that was. God's big battalions for the Pacific was the US' production success - one of the great achievements of the century, and the US personnel under arms and devoted to the war effort.
Personally I find history interesting when I test what I've learnt against new data, and basic logic ('What if the reverse were true?' 'How would we react?') rather than trying to maintain a simple orthodoxy. One of the factors with the western horror of the Kamikaze attacks was that they were systematic, planned and premeditated. However suicidal defence and final defiant attacks have occurred by most societies at extreme moments in war. Would we have found allied defenders of our homelands doing the same thing as bizarre, or admirable sacrifice hoping to achieve a last minute miracle? (As many know, but often overlook it's importance, "Kamikaze" was a name chosen for some Special Attack as a deliberate tribute to the 'Divine Wind' that
did save Japan many centuries before.)
Having recently been involved in editing a book on the Kamikaze and related aircraft (
Japanese Special Attack Aircraft & Flying Bombs by Ryusuke Ishiguro & Tadeusz Januszewski*), which contains a good deal which covers the background and causes of such a bizarre programme, it's a lot stranger than the normal appreciation of it. And disquieting too. I'm glad
not to have ended up in a society that is militaristic, and so perverted that such suicidal sacrifice was an almost inevitable outcome. But for the grace of birthplace and time...
Incidentally, did you know that the ship most frequently hit by the Kamikaze was not in the USN? You may know that the British armoured carriers withstood Kamikaze attacks ('Sweepers, man your brooms') much better than the lighter US carriers - but the attacks on those carries actually malformed the hulls so badly that they were not worth refitting and were thus scrapped, postwar, much earlier than might otherwise have been expected. There's always more to discover.
Regards,
(*Book details.
http://mmpbooks.biz/mmp/books.php?book_id=39 )
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