DANGER’S HOUR

Elaborate study of one of the final naval battles of World War II, focusing on both Japanese and American participants.

Commissioned in 1943, the Essex Class aircraft carrier Bunker Hill sailed across the Pacific in the campaigns that reclaimed numerous islands from the Japanese, at tremendous cost. On May 11, 1945, the ship was hit by a kamikaze assault and suffered more than 700 casualties. Kennedy (Make Gentle the Life of This World: The Vision of Robert F. Kennedy, 1998) describes that attack and its aftermath in scarifying detail that is not for the squeamish. He writes of pilots trapped below deck and incinerated, “tangled together in a terrible knot worse than any nightmarish image by Hieronymus Bosch,” and of the young Japanese pilots who caused that damage, one of whose hand, detached from the body, “somehow maintained its shape, like a delicate glove, crushed.” Kennedy writes well, if gruesomely, of the lives of the fighters on both sides, and particularly of kamikaze flyer Kiyoshi Ogawa, 23 years old when he piloted his plane onto Bunker Hill’s deck. But the author sometimes writes to puzzling effect. He suggests at the outset that Americans who lived on the West Coast saw the war in the Pacific coming in advance and that America had no expansionist designs in Asia; he sidesteps the considerable historical discussion on the debate over invading Japan versus dropping the atomic bomb; and he lingers on the supposedly Caucasian physical characteristics of Ogawa and the Okinawans without quite explaining his fascination. He is also content to qualify matters that other historians would have nailed down, as when he writes, “The Bunker Hill did not sink, but she was knocked permanently out of the war. She probably never launched another aircraft.” Probably? It is the historian’s business to answer such questions.

Useful to students of the last months of the Pacific War, though less so than Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney’s Kamikaze Diaries (2006) and David Sears’s At War with the Wind: The Epic Struggle with Japan’s World War II Suicide Bombers (2008).