Yamato was the heaviest and most powerfully armed battleship ever constructed. It used so much fuel near wars end it mostly sat in port. The admirals decided to send her on a suicidal decoy mission with the express intention of being sunk. It had fuel for the leg out and not enough to return. This memoir is by a radio operator, one of a few of the three-thousand member crew who survived. The writing is very good, with a literary quality, a philosophical quest to understand life and death. Insights into the mindset that considered defeat as victory, death as winning.

The scenes of carnage are graphic. Yamato was strafed with bullets, torpedoed from airplanes, and submarines, bombed from the air. Human bits spattered decks and walls. How anyone survived the final moments is hard to fathom. As the ship sank its ammo went up at once, massive HE and AT shells, creating an atomic-like blast that felled passing airplanes. The few survivors in the water were sucked down into a whirlpool, or run over by passing ships and chewed up by propellers, or once plucked from the water, the rescue ships sunk by more planes. A few oil-soaked survivors made it through the maelstrom from which we have this insightful first-person account.

It has a complicated publishing history. Mitsuru wrote the first draft in less than a day in 1946. It was rejected by censors, portions were published in magazines over the following years, and a revised final edition appeared in 1952. It was made into a movie in 1953. The first English translation did not appear until 1985. Although not as well known in the English world (it should be) it is a classic in Japan and was influential in Japanese war literature. ( )

A Sailor Remembers
"Ours is the signal honor of being the nation's bulwark. One day we must prove ourselves worthy."

Requiem for Battleship Yamato is about sacrifice--immolation on the altar of national survival. It was written not to needlessly lionize the wanton sacrifice of combatants in order to bring to an end what one historian called "a war to establish and revive the stature of man." Instead, it was written, and properly so, as catharsis: Yoshida Mitsuru, as a 20-year old ensign on the bridge of the Yamato during its final voyage, had witnessed War, and thus wished that future generations would no longer be called upon to "prove themselves worthy," and to bear the burden of armed conflict.

Yoshida's prose satisfactorily captures the spirit on board the Yamato prior to its climactic encounter. Yet there is no way to adequately describe what the men of the Yamato went through during the ship's final hours. The battle could be described as a nautical siege, a maritime battle of Troy. There is no apotheosis in death; death is merely a release from duty. There is no sanctuary aboard the most massive dreadnought ever constructed.

This is a highly readable book, redolent with poignant memories, written by a man who had the courage to confront his phantoms. Through Yoshida's book, many souls who fought during the Pacific War found a voice.

"Three thousand corpses, still entombed today. What were their thoughts as they died?"

(Posted in Amazon.com, April 6, 2004) ( )