May 25th, 2009
On the road this weekend visiting family with limited internet connection, but here’s an item I posted a few years back and is worth another look.
The men and women who have died in our wars were fighting for me and my family, even though they didn’t know us and we didn’t know them. I possess merely a tiny fraction of the understanding needed to comprehend the sacrifice that they made. With that tiny fraction, I do my best to remember them. Every day, of course, but on this day especially.
Several years ago my family and I visited the USS Yorktown in Charleston, South Carolina. While wandering the great ship, I happened to notice this among the thousands of displays:
It says WITHIN AND NEAR THESE EXHIBIT COMPARTMENTS 32 MEN DIED AND 71 WERE WOUNDED 16 APRIL 1945 WHILE FIGHTING 50 KAMIKAZES.
Right there. Right where I and my family were standing.
Sixty years ago. Before my kids were born. Before I was born. Before my parents were born.
And those men died fighting for all of us.
I don’t know what else to say about it.
May 25th, 2009 at 6:40 pm
And so did the 50 pilots, who fought for their families, people they loved. The Special Attack Force pilots (“kamikaze” is not the official term, the Americans started using it because Japanese propaganda compared the SAF to the “divine wind” that destroyed the Mongol invasions, but properly they’re called Shimbutai and the aerial assault units were called “tokubetsu kogekitai”, abbreviated as tokkotai or just tokko) were volunteers mainly coming from universities where they studied things that were not important for the war effort. You’ll be hard pressed to find a student of chemistry or engineering among them. But politics, law, history, music, philosophy, those were usually SAF pilots. These young men were essentially “given” two choices: either join the SAF, or get sent to a frontline unit. In both cases they were as good as dead. But commanding officers often didn’t even bother waiting for volunteers. There is more than one case documented where a CO simply volunteered his whole unit of student soldiers. Others were, more or less forced, into it by massive peer pressure. So most went to the SAF, because death for the emperor as part of the SAF meant a promotion by two ranks and thus a higher pension for their families. The average SAF pilot never married, never even had a girlfriend. Those who came from university, and that’s the interesting part, were often communists, they despised the emperor, they wanted to Japan to be destroyed so that it could be rebuilt better. Also, most of them were highly intelligent. They could read Kant, Voltaire, and many of the other great minds in their original languages. They spoke English, French, German, Russian… They were the bloom of this generation in Japan. Getting into a university back then was not easy in Japan.
Yet they still went and died.
Because, as general Kuribayashi put it in one of his letter, they weren’t fighting for the emperor. They were fighting for their families, to keep them save from the air raids just one more day.
The 50 pilots who attacked the Yorktown that day knew that they would die the moment they put on the SAF uniform. Most of them weren’t even 25. They knew they would die the moment they joined. One of the men responsible for them during the training wrote a book about how these young men reacted the night before the final sortie. It’s heartbreaking to read. Of course, their letters don’t show any of it, but these letters were written under supervision of the kempeitai and heavily censored by the different police units (let’s just call them “thought police”.) Their diaries, however, reveal their true feelings.
They were abused by a murderous regime.
But in the end even their dreams came true. The fascist government was destroyed, Japan was rebuilt into a better nation.
Without Hirohito and Tojo the 50 pilots and the 32 crewmen of the Yorktown who died that day would have had a drink together.
May 25th, 2009 at 9:45 pm
The side you’re on matters.