Maxwell Taylor Kennedy

Danger's Hour, The Story of the USS Bunker Hill and the Kamikaze Pilot Who Crippled Her, Maxwell Taylor Kennedy, Simon & Schuster,2008. 476pp plus end notes. Large number of photographs and diagrams. Few, if any, maps.

As indicated in the title, Danger's Hour chronicles the kamikaze attack on the USS Bunker Hill on 11 May 1945 that put her out of the war. While the book thoroughly discusses the actions by the ship before, during, and after the attack, it also looks closely at one of the two pilots that struck the Bunker Hill that day, Ens Kiyoshi Ogawa.

The book was very readable and seemed to have well researched, both talking with surviving principal crew of the ship and friends and families of the crew and pilot. At times the author seemed to go into too much depth about subjects that seemed to detract from the overall story, such an overly lengthy discussion of the biological response to severe burns.

Basic diagrams of the ship help to keep the reader on track as to where the losses occurred and the large number of photos, of both the US and Japanese, helped to tie the reader back to the subjects of the book.… (altro)

This is a multi-faceted book. Yes, it tells the brief history of the USS Bunker Hill, an Essex class fast carrier of the naval war in the Pacific for 1943-1945. AS a simple history it is good but not great. The Bunker Hill was of some 38 carriers that were damaged by the death actions of Kamikaze pilots. Many men died on May 11, 1945, when two Kamikazes dove onto the Bunker Hill and many were injured. As such, that day was a day of the war when many men died.
But this book also gives a biography of the principle Kamikaze not usually found in books of this type.
There is also a major attempt to describe the society that would produce Kamikaze pilots. In this, it tells a slightly different story that contradicts the common view that the Kamikazes were crazed. According to Kennedy, they were highly educated young men who were drafted into the suicide corps. In a way that I don't fully understand, these young men lived with a full appreciation of their ultimate fate with a form of resignation that was not supported by their expectations.
Kennedy tries to draw a parallel between the family honor Kamikaze pilots and the U.S. sailors who stoically labored in the bowels of the great carrier, but that attempt does not work too well.
On the other hand, the results of the two Kamikazes, the death and maiming of so many sailors, is very vividly described. More to that assessment are the descriptions of how the survivors have coped. Even the Japanese largely agree with the premise that the best war is the war avoided.… (altro)

Not bad in concept – sort of a parallel lives account of Japanese kamikaze pilot Kiyoshi Ogawa and crew on board the aircraft carrier he and his compatriot Yasunori Seizo almost destroyed, the USS Bunker Hill. The author is Maxwell Taylor Kennedy, ninth child of Robert F. Kennedy. I expect the Kennedy charm contributed to the strong point of the book – personal interviews with survivors of both the kamikaze corps and of the Bunker Hill. Alas, I suspect the Kennedy charm also contributed to the book’s abysmally bad editing and numerous errors of fact; I have a mental image of the Simon & Schuster staff falling all over themselves for the honor of pretending to edit and fact check a book by a Kennedy. I hope I’m not coming across as a Kennedy-hater; the family has certainly had more than its share of grief and tragedy. But you don’t do anybody favors by giving them a free ride.


Kennedy, according to the dust jacket blurb, is “a devoted maritime historian”. You could have fooled me. The backstory account of the Pacific War leading up to the convergence of a pair of Zeros and the Bunker Hill on May 11th, 1945 is so badly composed that it suggests Kennedy must have gained his experience as a maritime historian by spending an afternoon reading on a boat. The accounts of Pearl Harbor, the Coral Sea battle, the Solomons, and Leyte Gulf read like Kennedy had written several rough drafts, shuffled them, and decided to use them all – the chronology jumps all over with the same events described multiple times, pages apart.


The Amazon book reviews give some examples of factual errors. There are so many it’s almost impossible to read a full page without coming across one. Here’s my favorite (p. 106, hardcover 1st edition, discussing aircraft capabilities, and no, there are no misprints in the quote):


“The Zero’s 20mm machine guns were almost completely ineffective against the well-armored American fighters. The Zeros carried a single 7.5mm cannon, which could do serious damage, but it was difficult to aim and carried few rounds.”

To add to the annoyance, we have snarky political correctness. In a footnote to a discussion of what it’s like to die of oxygen deprivation, we get “This is why waterboarding is such an efficient method of instilling terror”. Just after the comment that the Japanese held Okinawa for 100 days, without resupply, against a vastly superior American force, we’re told that the atomic bomb was unnecessary, because the Japanese were running out of supplies. Finally, in the epilogue, there’s the statement that despite her aircraft carriers a few determined men can block American foreign policy.


Well, I suppose I should say something complimentary. Kennedy’s discussion of Ogawa’s life is well done, as are the interviews with surviving American sailors. There are some good maps, including some I’ve never seen before – a plot of the radar picket destroyer locations around Okinawa, and a sample air support chart showing the grid method for locating an enemy position. If an editor had taken this thing in hand, and assigned a fact checker with some familiarity with WWII history, it might have been turned into a decent book. As it is it’s so bad I’m surprised I was able to finish it.… (altro)

What to make of this book. Not being a professional historian working in this area but with some interest in things nautical, I have no in-depth knowledge of the factual nature of this book. Nevertheless, there were some little things that struck me: the Langley (CV-1)described as having begin its life as a light cruiser (it was a collier - note that a later USS Langley CV-17 was indeed originally ordered as a light cruiser), “heads” being called bathrooms, the “rising sun” insignia described as being on the tail of a plane (all pictures I’ve seen had the red ball on the fuselage and the wings,) and bombs are not usually attached to the landing gear.

So I poked around in some reviews and leaving aside the inevitable antagonism toward the Kennedys -- why can’t we see people as individuals instead of part of the inevitably hated tribe -- there were several naval types who railed at the naval errors which they reported filled the book. (One wag reported that reading the first half of the book was like “walking around with a pebble in your shoe” - what a great line.)

On the other hand, the goal of the author was to celebrate the ordinary seaman and aviator (ironically both Admirals Mitscher and Burke were aboard the Bunker Hill); to examine why they performed such heroic actions under impossible conditions; why Japanese often flew their planes willingly into American ships; and to examine whatever cultural differences might exist between the two countries that might explain the differences.

A basic tenet of western culture is that suicide is immoral, yet despite our celebration of the individual as opposed to the Japanese adoration for those who subsume themselves for the group, we, too, honor those who “give their lives for their country.” That implies a willful act, one that could be considered suicide and it’s certainly done for the “greater good.” Charging the machine gun to certain death gets the country’s highest honor. If these values were not inculcated into us from birth, I suppose the military could not exist.

The Bunker Hill carried a new kind of bomb. Developed by Dr. Louis Fieser (who later invented antimalarial drugs and proved that cigarettes caused lung cancer,) this cluster bomb contained several pipes each packed with a mixture of sodium and gasoline which formed a kind of jelly that once burning was impossible to extinguish. Called the M-69 it was targeted against people. Since most Japanese homes were built of wood, the incendiaries created a firestorm. In a change of tactics, General Curtis LeMay ordered his B-29s to begin nighttime bombing of cities rather than daylight targeted bombing of industrial targets. The first test, a single raid, was horrifically successful destroying 25,000 homes in Tokyo. A larger raid, totally unopposed by Japanese fighters which by March of 1945 had been virtually destroyed, created a firestorm rivaling anything in Europe and killed more than 100,000 and destroyed sixteen square miles. Many died by trying to protect themselves in the city's canals but the water began to boil from the heat and they were boiled alive. More people than died at Hiroshima. Could this devastation provided part of the motivation for the Kamikazes, as a desperate act of revenge or to prevent further strikes?

By 1944, the shortage of experienced pilots and airplanes forced the Japanese military into adopting a last resort tactic as the only way to successfully attack U.S. fast attack carriers which were devastating their navy shore-based aircraft. The only solution left to them -- perhaps the only tactic for any desperate group whose righteous survival is threatened with destruction (Jim Jones, anyone?) was the suicide attack. That lesson seems to have been lost on the U.S. after 9/11: it represented a sign of Al Qaeda's weakness rather than strength.

So the question I continue to ask myself, and sought from this book, is just why we are so willing to give our lives for something as ephemeral and inconsequential as a political entity we call a country and/or a political system which many of us could not define except in mythological terms. My nephew and I once had a most interesting debate over lunch in Wurzburg where he teaches ethics and philosophy about a statement made by a German(!) professor I had in college who said that “no political system was worth one life.” If one accepts that one might be, just where does one draw the line: a thousand, ten thousand, a million? So my expectations for the book had less to do with whether the author was a Kennedy or whether the original Langley started as a collier, or where the Japanese planes painted their insignia. It was why people do what they do in times of extreme stress and how we define heroes. I still cannot answer that question to my satisfaction.

The first part of the book is rather disjointed and a disorganized aggregation of facts and background (albeit very interesting) in the development of Japanese adoption of suicide as a tactic. Suicidal behavior has always been a part of combat. Indeed, the attacks by U.S. slow torpedo bombers at Midway were suicidal if you look at the nearly 100% casualty rates and most pilots realized it. On the other hand, despite the realization on the part of the Japanese military of the need for some independent thinking, the general culture of Japan celebrated the community and a slavish devotion to the Emperor and society. (The recent Texas GOP platform has a statement with regard to critical thinking that would have made them fit right in with that kind of cultural mindset.*)

The book has an extraordinary bibliography and Kennedy has clearly done his homework. The rather obvious mistakes I noted above should probably be chalked up to bad editing at Simon & Schuster and not seen as a reflection on the entire book which is extremely interesting.

*From the Texas GOP platform: We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.… (altro)