Kamikaze: Japan's Suicide Gods

Rating:
Summary: Caveat to scholars.
Review: A cross-cultural study should have a bibliography and footnotes/endnotes, so this is a caveat to scholars of East Asian history and the Pacific war in general: this book has neither, nor does it account for its sources, other than to offer "recommended readings." Since most of the works cited there are familiar, it's hard to say how much of the material here is original.

Rating:
Summary: long overdue; a few flaws
Review: This is the best study of the Japanese suicide pilots that I have read. With his Japanese co-author, Mr. Axell (who taught for a time in Japan) is able to get at Japanese-language sources and oral histories that have mostly been ignored by western scholars. This can be spellbinding stuff.

Unfortunately, the Japanese orientation leads them into many niggling errors that leap off the page to a western reader versed in military aviation. There's also a pro-Japanese bias in their presentation of material, especially when they strain to find parallels to the kamikaze in western air forces.

Excerpts from a kamikaze how-to manual are a chilling reminder to anyone who remembers the similar document carried by the al Qaeda suicide pilots of September 11, 2001.

Very much worth the reading, but take it with a grain of salt.