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David Sears - At War With The Wind

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David Sears At War With The Wind
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A Main Selection of the Military Book Club and a Featured Alternate of the History Book Club

In the last days of World War II, a new and baffling weapon terrorized the United States Navy in the Pacific. To the sailors who learned to fear them, the body-crashing warriors of Japan were known as suiciders; among the Japanese, they were named for a divine wind that once saved the home islands from invasion: kamikaze. Told from the perspective of the men who endured this horrifying tactic, At War with the Wind is the first book to recount in nail-biting detail what it was like to experience an attack by Japanese kamikazes. David Sears, acclaimed author of The Last Epic Naval Battle, draws on personal interviews and unprecedented research to create a narrative of war that is stunning in its vivid re-creations. Born of desperation in the face of overwhelming material superiority, suicide attacks by aircraft, submarines, small boats, and even manned rocket-boosted gliders were capable of inflicting catastrophic damage, testing the resolve of officers and sailors as never before. Sears s gripping account focuses on the vessels whose crews experienced the full range of the kamikaze nightmare. From carrier USS St. Lo, the first U.S. Navy vessel sunk by an orchestrated kamikaze attack, to USS Henrico, a transport ship that survived the landings at Normandy only to be sent to the Pacific and struck by suicide planes off Okinawa, and USS Mannert L. Abele, the only vessel sunk by a rocket-boosted piloted glider during the war, these unforgettable stories reveal, as never before, one of the most horrifying and misunderstood chapters of World War II.

This is the candid story of a war within a war a relentless series of furious and violent engagements pitting men determined to die against men determined to live. Its echoes resonate hauntingly at a time of global conflict, when suicide as a weapon remains a perplexing and terrifying reality.

November 1, 1945 Leyte Gulf

The destroyer Killen (DD-593) was besieged, shooting down four planes, but taking a bomb hit from a fifth. Pharmacist mate Ray Cloud, watching from the fantail, saw the plane a sleek twin-engine Frances fighter-bomber swoop in low across the port side. As its pilot released his bomb, Cloud said to himself, He dropped it too soon, and then watched as the plane roared by pursued and chewed up by fire from Killens 40- and 20-mm guns.

The bomb hit the water, skipped once and then penetrated Killens port side hull forward, exploding between the #2 and #3 magazines. The blast tore a gaping hole in Killens side and water poured in. By the time Donice Copeland, eighteen, a radar petty officer, emerged on deck from the radar shack, the ships bow was practically submerged and the ship itself was nearly dead in the water.

Practically all the casualties were awash below decks. Two unwounded sailors, trapped below in the ships emergency generator room, soon drowned. The final tally of dead eventually climbed to fifteen.

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Table of Contents ALSO BY DAVID SEARS The Last Epic Naval Battle Voices - photo 1
Table of Contents

ALSO BY DAVID SEARS
The Last Epic Naval Battle: Voices from Leyte Gulf
Epilogue
Movies on Topside, August 1945Present
Farewell to Victory! Farewell to the Efforts for Victory! Farewell to the Achievement of Defeat!
H IGHER F LIGHT P ETTY O FFICER M OTOJI I CHIKAWA , S URVIVING Picture 2 KA PILOT
The Last
During late July and early August, reconnaissance missions flown by Task Force 38 pilots over Honshu and Kyushu increased in frequency and impunity. After wrapping up one photo sortie over Tokyos Kanto Plain (where U.S. planners believed Operation Coronets decisive battle would be fought), VF-16s Art Whiteway landed his Hellcat on a deserted airstrip and watched from a distance by Japanese children, scooped up a pocketful of soil and returned with it to Lexington.
Photo intelligence missions continued to reveal hidden aircraft caches. When tactical strikes resumed several days after the first atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima 6 August, Hellcats and Corsairs swooped in at treetop level to blast camouflaged aircraft revetments. Action reports claimed 251 planes destroyed and another 141 damaged; postwar analysis revealed that 200 of these were to be used to transport commandos on a raid to destroy B-29 airfields in the Marianas.
No Japanese aircraft rose to contest the 9 August air sweeps and none came close to Task Force 38 carriers, but five planes drew fire from tin cans on picket station fifty miles southwest. One attacker, a Val, flew up the wake of destroyer Borie (DD-704) and crashed near Borie s bridge.
The Vals bomb broke loose on impact and exploded between No. 1 and No. 2 mounts, demolishing the 5-inch guns, disabling the forward 40s, and silencing internal communications circuits. Robert White, 22, a CIC radarman, was sure at first Borie was hit by torpedo. Whites job was to destroy radar equipment when this happened, but gasoline was leaking through the overhead, sparking fires that quickly chased everybody out.
Borie s skipper Noah Adair survived the explosion, but the impact blew him clear out of his shoes. Wounded and unsteady on his feet, Adair dispatched a messenger to engineering to slow the ship. Two men then helped Adair reach secondary control amidships where he could control Borie through voice commands to after steering.
When Jerry Harvey, an electricians mate on the after damage control party reached the blazing superstructure, he faced a solid wall of heat. Harvey saw one sailor step out of the inferno: shirtless, his torso, arms, and head cinder black. The sailor stood for a moment, balanced on his toes, punching his fist in rage at the vacant sky. As one or two men finally approached to help him, the sailors body started shaking and then dropped in a charred heap. He died soon after.
Stuart White, 20, part of the midships repair party, dodged the blast by diving into the midships passageway. Later, while carrying a fire hose to the bridge, White saw blackened, still-smoking corpses in the 40-mm gun tubs.
Borie s fires were soon contained and, once communications circuits were repaired, control passed back to bridge. Destroyer Abbot (DD-629), dispatched from the main force, came alongside with a doctor and additional medical supplies to help with Borie s more than 60 wounded. That night Borie s dead, nearly 50 in all, were put in weighted mattress covers for burial at sea the next day.
Borie s casualties and damage, it turned out, were the last from U.S. Navy engagements with kamikaze aircraftthough not yet Japans final attempts to strike. By the time Borie reached the hospital ship Rescue (AH-18), transferred its wounded, and set off for repairs in Saipan, the war was all but over. The second atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki the same day as the attack on Borie.
Picture 3
Following the Jun-no Special Attack Corps abortive mission in late June, priorities shifted. Precious fuel couldnt be wasted trying to hunt down carriers offshore. Instead, missions were limited to confronting American aircraftand only when they were actually overhead.
On 12 August, when American fighters were spotted heading toward the city of Kumagaya near Tokyo, Ryuji Nagatsuka and five other pilots sortied in the squadrons six remaining Oscars. Flying south of Kumagaya, Nagatsuka spotted five specks in the skies below him: Grummans. But just as Nagatsukas flight leader ordered his pilots to fan out and get ready to dive, more enemy planes suddenly burst through the clouds above them.
Nagatsuka turned left and into a series of barrel rolls trying to shake a Grumman close on his tail, but it was too late: ice candies grazed the Oscars fuselage and Nagatsuka felt a violent shock, as if his right shoulder had been hit with a hammer. Blood stained his flight suit, his arm went limp, and Nagatsuka drifted into unconsciousness.
When he awoke seconds later, the Grumman was gone, but Nagatsukas Oscar was spiraling out of control. His altimeter read three thousand feet and was dropping fast. Nagatsuka grabbed the stick with his left arm. He knew his only hope was to prepare for a crash landing. He tried to lower his landing gear but the control wouldnt work. The Oscars descent had slowed, but Nagatsuka was at six hundred feet and then just three hundred. The aircraft nose was pointed west and the setting sun blinded him. Nagatsuka saw just enough to know he was heading toward a paddy field. He felt the jolt of the plane hitting the ground and then once more plunged into unconsciousness.
Enduring the Unendurable
Nagatsuka awoke the next day lying in a bed at a tiny village hospital. It was hot and his mind was dulled by pain, but Nagatsuka learned it was now a day after the crash. Two days later Nagatsukas condition had improved, and he was alert enough to listen to Emperor Hirohito addressing the Japanese people.
The Emperors language was elaborate and formalin stark contrast to the thin, reedy voice coming over the radio:

The hardships and sufferings to which Our nation is to be subjected hereafter will certainly be great. We are keenly aware of the inmost feelings of all ye, Our subjects. However, it is according to the dictate of time and fate that We have resolved to pave the way for a grand peace for all the generations to come by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is insufferable.

The speech was actually a recording, but his audience didnt know this and it probably wouldnt have been less earth shattering if they had. It marked the first time the Japanese public had ever heard the Emperor speak, and so people paid as much attention to the messenger as his message. Hirohitos language and voice were disconcerting, and poor radio reception made the broadcast unintelligible to many. Still, whatever the precise details, it could only signify a catastrophe. Most understood it to be the Emperors admission of total defeat. He was commanding his subjects to submit to their barbaric enemies.

As Japans public tried to decipher the full meaning of what the Emperor was asking them to do, some of Japans senior military officers, including Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki and Vice Admiral Takijiro Onishi, were acting out dramas in the uncertain space between the official surrender and its actual implementation.
When commanding 5th Naval Air Fleet, Ugaki (though himself not an aviator) had presided over the training, deployment, and deaths of upward of 2,500 IJN Special Attack fliers. Now he was at an airbase on Kyushu, preparing for one final Tokkotai missionhis own. Ugakis suicide attack plan (unquestionably a violation of Hirohitos surrender decision) called for a three-plane strike, but when he arrived at the flight line wearing a uniform stripped of all insignia, Ugaki instead found eleven small bombers waiting, with flight crews for each ready to go.
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