of civilians, as was witnessed in Kosovo. However, such “ethical” consideration of military personnel and civilians is a far cry from strategies during World War II wherein military strategists on both sides of the conflict regularly and deliberately targeted civilians, from the Dresden bombing to the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the following four books, we are provided with a firsthand account of such treatment of soldiers and civilians and its impact: 1) Rikihei Inoguchi’s (1994) The Divine Wind; 2) Johann Voss’ (2002) Black Edelweiss; 3) Ernie Pyle’s (2002) Brave Men; and, 4) Gerald F. Linderman’s (1999) The World Within War.
In Rikihei Inoguchi’s (1994) The Divine Wind, we are provided with the firsthand accounts via letters of Japanese kamikaze fighters in World War II. In The Divine Wind, we see that the suicide bombings of Muslim pilots on September 11, 2001, represented a similar strategy used by the Japanese during World War II. In the book Inoguchi (1994) relives his experiences as a pilot being informed of the new “suicide” strategy in the Philippines, “I was sitting in the airfield command post…talking with the executive officer of the 201st Air Group, Commander Asaichi Tamai,” (3-4). We see that the young men who volunteered for suicide missions in World War II had been brainwashed by training in military school to reverse the priority of life then country to country then life. Not extremely radical or extremely patriotic, these young men volunteered for suicide missions in such numbers that those with the better grades were permitted to go first.
Inoguchi explains how the justification for the suicide missions planned in the Philippines stemmed from the fact that Japanese forces were heavily outnumbered in the region. Furthermore, reinforcement from the Second Air Fleet in Formosa would not be forthcoming in time due to needing repairs from a previous battle. As I...