Letters

Who Started It?

Robert Asahina's review of Danger's Hour: The Story of the USS Bunker Hill and the Kamikaze Pilot Who Crippled Her (Book World, Jan. 4) quotes author Maxwell Taylor Kennedy as writing that the Army Air Force's B-29s "could have been better deployed bombing strategic transportation hubs and the airfields used to launch the kamikazes" rather than the urban-industrial targets of many B-29 raids. But between April 17 and May 11, 1945, some 2,104 B-29 sorties were flown against kamikaze airfields on Kyushu. Bombing airfields, however, had only a limited effect because the damage could be quickly repaired and alternative fields used.

Asahina claims that American policies of total warfare, including the "indiscriminate fire-bombing of Japanese civilians," provoked the Japanese to fanaticism. The use of kamikaze tactics began in the fall of 1944, initiated by mid-level officers, prior to the bombing of Japan. Although urban incendiary raids were a major part of the B-29 bombing campaign, other important targets included daylight attacks on the aircraft industry, the mining of the entrances to the Inland Sea and the destruction of more than 80 percent of Japan's petroleum refinery capacity.

I was a B-29 navigator based on Tinian during the last months of the war.

-- Philip A. True Fairfax, Va.

Robert Asahina's review of Maxwell Taylor Kennedy's Danger's Hour doesn't mention yet another class of suicide bombers, pilots of Japanese "kaiten," or manned torpedoes. He suggests America's insistence upon unconditional surrender and strategic bombing "provoked" Japanese military "fanaticism."

However, Japan authorized the manned torpedoes before Japan was within reach of U.S. air power. Thus, the imperial Japanese military's "seeming contempt for death, and what appeared to U.S. forces as fanaticism for a lost cause," as Kennedy puts it, did not originate with the strategic bombing of Japan's home islands.

-- James P. Cowgill

Lieutenant Colonel (Retired), USAR Springfield, Va.

Robert Asahina responds:

The bombing of the Japanese homeland actually began in April 1942, with Lt. Col. James Doolittle's famous raid. Though it inflicted little material damage, it was intended to demonstrate Japan's vulnerability to air attack. Admiral Yamamoto's response was to attack Midway, a strategic submarine port and staging point for American airpower, in June 1942. The defeat of the Imperial Japanese Navy at Midway crippled Japanese airpower. From that point on in the war, Japan was on the defensive, with an ever shrinking perimeter and drastically declining resources, especially oil and food. The resulting starvation of not just the military but the civilian population encouraged the Japanese leadership to pursue ever more desperate measures such as the kamikazes.

We welcome letters. Send them -- no more than 200 words, please -- along with your full name, address and telephone (we will not publish the last two) to bwletters@washpost.com or to Book World Editor, The Washington Post, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20071. We reserve the right to edit letters for length and clarity, and we regret that, due to the volume of letters we receive, we cannot answer them all.