A Glorious Way to Die

The subtitle is The Kamikaze Mission of the Battleship Yamato, April, 1945. In general, the book goes into the construction of the Yamato, the fights it was in, and its sinking by U.S. airplanes. It also goes into the fact that there was some opposition to the final mission of the Yamato, and that it was basically pretty much doomed from the moment it set sail on its final voyage.

There was no aerial cover for the ship or the ones sailing with it, and the Japanese military just couldn't seem to understand that air supremacy had become the major thing in the war, and having ships sail without air coverage was just inviting a disaster to happen.

The book points out that school children were working at Kure, the port where the Yamato was built. He then notes that the Japanese experimented with some 32 types of new aircraft that proved unsuitable between 1941 and 1945. Operations at Kure were prioritized, the highest priority being the craft to be used for kamikaze missions.

Originally, 5 ships the size of the Yamato were to be built. Two were built, one was started and converted to an aircraft carrier, and the fourth and fifth were not built at all. The author goes into a technical description of the structure of the Yamato. There were originally going to be built two craft even bigger than the Yamato, but those also got canceled.

Various flaws in Japanese naval thinking are noted, including the lack of importance given to rescuing crews of a ship that had been sunk. The Yamato had neither life rafts nor life belts, for example. The medical facilities were not built to handle a large number of casualties. There was a lot of wood used on the ship.

The author notes that Japanese naval planning generally revolved around the enemy doing exactly what the Japanese thought they would do. If they didn't, the plans fell apart.

The Yamato was to help in the attack on the American forces attacking Okinawa, so a good part of the book deals with the battle on Okinawa. The idea was for the Yamato to attack the American ships around the island, destroy lots of them, then beach itself and use the ship for firing on the American ships with the sailors from the Yamato leaving the ship and joining the Japanese defenders on the island.

This involved getting the Yamato and the other ships all the way from Japan to Okinawa without encountering any American airplanes or American submarines. There was, of course, no way that was going to happen.

The book not only tells about what happened to the Yamato itself, but goes into what happened to the ships that sailed with the Yamato.

There was yet again another one of the 'The fate of the empire rests upon this one action' statements. This type of thing was done over and over again, with each battle being the main one that would crush the American offensive.

The Japanese started with the war with 60 active submarines. They ended it with eight. Also discussed are various kamikaze craft.

The book then goes into the actual attack on the Yamato.

This is a very well-done book, filled with information and a good bit of analysis on the general military approach Japan followed as far as its Navy went.

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