The Long War Journal: The Heirs of the Divine Wind
Written by Bill Roggio on January 28, 2005 1:37 AM to The Long War Journal
Available online at: http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2005/01/the_heirs_of_th.php
In the later months of 1944, the Japanese, after suffering a string of defeats in the Pacific Theater starting with Midway in June of 1942, began to employ the tactics of a cornered enemy. The Japanese recruited young pilots to sacrifice themselves by flying their airplanes into U.S. Navy warships. The men were called Kamikaze, and like all Japanese soldiers, were conditioned to fight to the death and sacrifice their lives for their ”Emperor God”. Kamikazes were eager to accept their mission, and there was never a shortage of volunteers:
Especially emphasized among the Japanese Soldier code was unyielding allegiance to Emperor and country. The belief in the Kamikaze was stronger than ever. It was adamantly believed that, because they were fighting for their Emperor God, the Kamikaze would bring them deliverance at the darkest hour, just as it had in the 13th Century. In fact, the call for kamikaze pilots drew a staggering response. Three times as many applied for suicide flights as the number of planes available. Experienced pilots were turned down. They were needed to train the younger men in how to fly to their deaths. As a result, the majority of those accepted were in their late teens. They felt grateful to have the opportunity to prove that they were real men.
The first Kamikaze attacks took place during The Battle of Leyte Gulf, one of the largest naval encounters of the war. Sonarman 1st Class Jack "Gibby" Gebhardt, who served on the USS Pringle, describes the fleet’s first encounter with the Kamikaze at Leyte Gulf, and the deadly nature of this new weapon:
The Pringle was anchored among a vast number of battleships, cruisers and destroyers being gathered for the next island assault. It was here during this port stop that the sailors heard about Japan's newest style of warfare called the "Kamikaze"… (Divine Wind) [referring to a typhoon which saved Japan by destroying a 13th Century Mongol invasion fleet]. It was "planned suicide" as a Kamikaze plane only had enough fuel for a one-way trip and Japanese pilots intentionally crashed into our ships. The Jap[anese] planes would explode in a ball of flames from the fuel and bombs they carried which would kill the pilot. The only way to stop a suicide piloted plane was to shoot it down before it hit you. Now there could be no margin for error. Prior to the Kamikaze attack style we would shoot at the Japs and they would bomb us, sometimes everybody missed! It was horrifying to try and comprehend someone intentionally diving through a hail of deadly anti-aircraft fire with the sole purpose of killing themselves in a blinding explosion.
In April of 1945, after numerous encounters with Kamikaze attacks, the USS Pringle eventually succumbed to a determined Japanese pilot. The Fleet lived in fear of the Kamikaze, who in the end extracted a high toll in both American and Japanese lives, as well as U.S. warships:
* 7,465 Kamikazes flew to their deaths* 120 US ships were sunk, with many more damaged
* 3,048 allied sailors were killed and anther 6,025 wounded
The United States and her allies eventually defeated the Japanese after four long and hard years of brutal fighting in the Pacific, despite the single minded determination of the Kamikaze. American power and strength could not be deterred by maniacal suicide pilots raining from the sky.
Today, the heirs of the Kamikaze fight against American soldiers and marines on the battlefields of Iraq, using cars, trucks and suicide belts instead of airplanes. Like the Imperial Japanese, the Islamists in Iraq and elsewhere fight for a perverted higher cause. Both practice a Cult of Death; the Japanese had their Emperor God to die for, the Islamists have their distorted view of Allah. They also share a violent form of elitism; the Japanese were culturally superior to all other races, which in turn justified their brutality and murder towards the Chinese and American prisoners; Islamists are religiously superior and view all who do not adhere to their beliefs as infidels unworthy of life and treat them as such. Beheadings, gangland style bullets to the head, disembowelments, mutilations and torture are the practices of jihadis.
The Counterterrorism Blog points to a profile of the Foreign “Martyrs” of Iraq: 2003 – 2004 (PDF format). Like the Kamikaze, these jihadis were young, well educated and religious. Some were experienced mujahedeen fighters prior to the Iraq war; some were married and left their wives and children behind; some of the families treated these men as heroes upon hearing of the nature of their deaths. Interestingly enough, many of these men are celebrated by Abu Musab al Zarqawi in a video titled "Winds of Triumph". The Divine Wind lives on.
Here are the murderers of al Qaeda in Iraq: Moroccan Abu Usama al-Maghribi owned a restaurant with his father and earned $3,000 a month before joining jihad; Jordanian Bahaa’ Ibrahim Mohammed Yahya was a martial arts expert, a Kung Fu champion and a computer science student before he volunteered for suicide bombing; Saudi Yousef As-Sayegh Al-Johani was attending his first year in college prior to martyring himself (Incidentally, Al-Johani was in Iraq three months prior to Operations Iraqi Freedom, “seeking to fight Jihad against America.”). These men are not the poor, uneducated, downtrodden victims of Zionist or capitalist oppression, but the result of a perverted cultural and religious ideology of hate endemic in their societies.
Al Qaeda attempts to sow fear and despair among the American military and public with devastating attacks and numbing violence. America has faced down a far superior enemy in the Japanese, with a greater technological ability to dispense death via suicide coupled with powerful air, land and sea forces. Al Qaeda cannot muster the military, technological and industrial advantages of Imperial Japan, and their attacks are dwarfed in scale by those of the Kamikazes.
Yet al Qaeda does possess a very powerful technologically advanced ally – a press that is unwilling to properly define the heinous nature of al Qaeda, and is often ambivalent or even downright hostile to efforts to fight terrorists and liberate the peoples of Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. The collective shudder of the media in reaction to President Bush’s inaugural speech promoting freedom is a prime example of the antipathy towards the war, as is the overall coverage in Iraq and the shading of the nature of al Qaeda in Iraq. Sonarman Gebhardt explains how American servicemen were barraged with enemy propaganda in the Pacific during World War II:
Every evening "Tokyo Rose" [Iva Ikuko Toguri d'Aquino, a Japanese-American woman, who along with other women made English-language propaganda radio broadcasts for the Japanese Broadcasting Company. D'Aquino was pardoned by President Gerald Ford in 1977.] would report on the Jap radio frequency the growing number of US casualties and how more thousands would die in very horrible ways.
Today’s enemy has no need for a state run propaganda machine. Our media does a fine job disseminating al Qaeda’s message, weakening the will of the American public by reporting every single attack on American troops in Iraq without placing the attacks in context (did the attack fail or reach its intended target?) or reporting al Qaeda and insurgent defeats, which occur daily. In spite of this, we have overcome the media negativity and facilitated the first democratic election in Afghanistan, and are on the cusp of doing so in Iraq. Iraq will elect a democratic assembly this Sunday. Iraq's citizens will vote under heroic circumstances, braving the attempts to thwart the vote by murderers, thugs, dare we say terrorists; and yet the election will be characterized as illegitimate by many in the press. Afghanistan's election could be conveniently ignored, as it was held during the presidential election season. Iraq's election cannot be ignored, so it will be disparaged.
Would the press have referred to the Kamikaze of 1945 as "freedom fighters", "rebels" or "militants"? Today we are in a global war with a fascist enemy no less committed to the destruction of civilization, and our media cannot recognize that suicide attacks are a tactic of desperate, bankrupt and failed ideology. There is no excuse for them not understanding this, as they need look no further than the history of World War II.