00:00["Pomp and Circumstance"]
00:30["Pomp and Circumstance"]
00:55And now, Suicide for Glory.
00:59["Pomp and Circumstance"]
01:06In the year of 1938, Emperor Hirohito of Japan writes a poem.
01:11Peaceful is morning in the shrine garden.
01:14World conditions, it is hoped, will also be peaceful.
01:19The imperial poetry mirrors the Japan that most of the world wants to know.
01:23A picturesque land where nature is arranged in graceful patterns,
01:27and where people are arranged around the patterns.
01:54The Japanese live in a remote, feudal age whose philosophy is warlike,
01:59built on a worship of the nation, of Japan itself.
02:03Materially, the Japanese emulate the West,
02:06but spiritually they belong to the East.
02:09["Pomp and Circumstance"]
02:30Hirohito receives the homage of his 73 million subjects,
02:33not as poet of peace, but as warrior god, as both priest and emperor.
02:38He is Heikadenka, Sublime Majesty.
02:41He is Tenshi-sama, Son of Heaven.
02:44He is destined by divine right to seek domination of all the world.
02:48["Pomp and Circumstance"]
02:54And so it comes about that in 1945,
02:57the American Fifth Fleet steams in battle formation toward Japan
03:00to smother the domination which set afire the Far East.
03:04After three and a half years of war,
03:06the long arm of Allied sea power reaches out to throttle aggression at its source.
03:37Four huge task groups, 1,500 ships, 550,000 sailors, coast guardsmen, soldiers, marines,
03:45all under the command of Admiral Spruance.
03:48An assault as large as the Normandy invasion is bearing down on the island of Okinawa,
03:52300 miles south of the Japanese home islands,
03:556,000 miles from continental United States.
03:59What the Japanese once thought to be impossible,
04:01what the Allies hardly dared hope, is about to become reality.
04:16It is Easter morning, April 1, 1945, when the troops go ashore at Okinawa.
04:21It is also April Fool's Day.
04:24Strangely, ominously, there is no resistance.
04:28But no one is fooled.
04:30Within hours, Okinawa becomes the same old story.
04:33Resistance stiffening is the word from advance units.
04:37And then, greatly increased resistance.
04:40And then, 83 days of slow, deadly, savage struggle.
04:50Okinawa knocks open the door to Japan itself.
04:53Not a sailor, not a soldier, not a marine,
04:56not a man in the world knows this is to be the last great battle of the war.
05:00A war branded by great battles.
05:11Tokyo.
05:12The Japanese government needs an emergency session.
05:15The government knows Okinawa is a smoldering beacon of coming defeat.
05:19The government knows it must rally the people in a last, desperate effort to stave off collapse.
05:24Propaganda gives way to harsh, intolerable truth.
05:28The Japanese sun is setting.
05:37Schools and hospitals, children and nurses, young and old, crippled and infirm,
05:43are harnessed to the war machine.
05:45With factories smashed by air raids, with manpower consumed at the fronts,
05:49with production falling, with the enemy approaching,
05:52every citizen of Japan is ordered to increase production.
05:55Stand firm. Drive on.
06:19At home, desperation. At the fronts, fanaticism.
06:41The army is isolated, the air force broken, the navy sunk.
06:46But one group is left to save Japan.
06:49The kamikaze.
06:51Pilots pledge to crash themselves and their planes into enemy warships.
06:55The Japanese raise suicide to the status of a military tactic.
06:59Kamikaze pilots believe that by dying for the emperor, they live forever.
07:16And some even attend their own funerals before the final takeoff.
07:20Some fly in their burial rooms.
07:22All wear a sacred scarf, symbolizing their sacred mission.
07:30The pilots take their final vow.
07:38I am determined to destroy with my own body the enemy craft that menace our holy soil.
07:43I shall strike without returning.
07:59Farewell.
08:01We shall meet at the Yashikuni Shrine.
08:04At the Yashikuni Shrine where the hero dead of Japan achieved godhood.
08:08It is April the 6th.
08:10From the island of Kyushu, 350 suicide planes take off for Okinawa.
08:15To those they leave behind, to the life they leave behind, one final government announcement.
08:21Valiantly, the young eagles dash forth to attack along a path from which there is no homecoming.
09:21In the fleet spread far and wide around and around Okinawa,
09:24scores of ships are destined to fall victim of suicide attack before the Kamikazes have done their worst.
09:30Around the fleet, around the island, radar pickets are ringed.
09:34Watchdog destroyers, whose mission it is to detect oncoming Japanese planes,
09:38plot their course, speed, and range, and alert the bigger boys.
09:42From the destroyer picket line go out the first warnings of the long,
09:46nerve-shattering ordeal of the fleet at Okinawa.
10:46If it be now, it is not to come.
10:53If it be not to come, it will be now.
10:57If it be not now, yet it will come.
11:01The readiness is on.
11:04The fleet is ready.
11:06But one method, and only one, can stop the Kamikaze.
11:10Shoot him down before he has a chance to crash himself against a ship.
11:14American pilots pit courage and skill against the self-destroying frenzy of the Japanese.
11:19One last weapon remains against the Kamikazes that break through the combat air patrols.
11:44Anti-aircraft fire, as intense, murderous, and impenetrable as the ships can possibly make it.
11:50The battle becomes a duel between gunners who want to live and pilots who want to die.
12:21The Kamikazes are ready.
12:24The Kamikazes are ready.
12:27The Kamikazes are ready.
12:30The Kamikazes are ready.
12:33The Kamikazes are ready.
12:36The Kamikazes are ready.
12:39The Kamikazes are ready.
12:42The Kamikazes are ready.
12:45The Kamikazes are ready.
12:48The Kamikazes are ready.
12:51The Kamikazes are ready.
12:54The Kamikazes are ready.
12:57The Kamikazes are ready.
13:00The Kamikazes are ready.
13:03The Kamikazes are ready.
13:06The Kamikazes are ready.
13:09The Kamikazes are ready.
13:12The Kamikazes are ready.
13:15The Kamikazes are ready.
13:18The Kamikazes are ready.
13:21The Kamikazes are ready.
13:24The Kamikazes are ready.
13:27The Kamikazes are ready.
13:30The Kamikazes are ready.
13:33The Kamikazes are ready.
13:36The Kamikazes are ready.
13:39The Kamikazes are ready.
13:42The Kamikazes are ready.
13:45The Kamikazes are ready.
13:48The Kamikazes are ready.
13:51The Kamikazes are ready.
13:54The Kamikazes are ready.
13:57The Kamikazes are ready.
14:00The Kamikazes are ready.
14:03The Kamikazes are ready.
14:06The Kamikazes are ready.
14:09The Kamikazes are ready.
14:12The Kamikazes are ready.
14:15The Kamikazes are ready.
14:18The Kamikazes are ready.
14:21Techno Music
14:37The attacks are incessant, the damage stable.
14:39To die is to die,
14:41but to live is to fight...
14:43And the fleet that came to stay
14:44fights and lives and stays.
15:18Ships with famous names like Bunker Hill and Enterprise, Idaho and New Mexico,
15:23Tennessee and Nevada are damaged. The kamikaze becomes the greatest threat encountered by the
15:28United States fleet in World War II. The suffering is terrible. The casualties worse.
15:48So
16:18so
16:48so
17:03night brings no respite, darkness no relief.
17:07The fantastic contest between those who fight to live and those who fight to die
17:11goes on around the clock.
17:42So
17:55so
18:09this was the opportunity the Japanese had been waiting for.
18:12The kamikaze pilots would trade a plane for a ship, trade suicide for glory, but the ships carry on.
18:55So
19:13so
19:25so
19:42so
19:55so
20:17oh
20:25so
20:45Whenever a ship is hit, others come to the rescue.
20:49The risks of death are great, but the determination to save a shipmate is great.
20:53Hundreds of sailors are trapped below. Others, hemmed in by flames, escape over the side.
22:53So
23:02and while the harsh struggle for Okinawa on land, at sea,
23:06in the air, grinds on toward victory, free men everywhere suffer defeat.
23:159,000 miles away in the United States, the commander-in-chief has fallen.
23:20A casualty of war is surely as if a kamikaze had felled him at the helm.
23:25Franklin Delano Roosevelt, defender of democracy, foe of tyranny, architect of victory, is dead.
23:34He loved the fleet, its men, its ships, the sea, but as president of the United States,
23:54the Navy could but share his allegiance. His life was full, and the elements so mixed in him
24:01that nature might stand up and say to all the world, this was a man.
24:31So
24:43so
24:57and at Okinawa, one out of every seven naval casualties in World War II
25:02result from the fight for Okinawa.
25:07Of the 1,500 ships engaged in the campaign, 30 were sunk,
25:11223 damaged. Eight carriers were hit, but all survived. More than 3,500 kamikaze planes were
25:19destroyed. The greatest suicide offensive in history waxed and waned and collapsed.
25:42If the sailors at Okinawa bled, so did the soldiers and Marines ashore.
25:57If the Japanese were determined to commit suicide, the Americans were determined to live.
26:03If this last battle of World War II was one of the greatest, so was the victory.
