Song of the Kamikaze

THE LIBERATION OF THE PHILIPPINES (338 pp.)--Samuel Eliot Morison --Atlantic-Little, Brown ($6.50).

Two kamikaze planes had splashed close by destroyer Walke when a third crashed into the bridge, drenching her skipper, Commander George F. Davis, with gasoline. For a moment, he burned like a torch. Sailors near him smothered the flames and he exhorted officers and men to save the ship. While still on his feet, he saw Walke's guns destroy a fourth kamikaze. Finally he consented to be carried below; a few hours later he died.

The valor, suffering and death of Commander Davis on Jan. 6, 1945, three days before the troop landings at Lingayen Gulf, Luzon, were to be duplicated by scores of other Navy officers and men in the seven-month liberation of the Philippines. With the backbone of its naval power snapped in the historic Battle of Leyte Gulf (TIME, Nov. 10, 1958), the Japanese turned full power on their last desperate tactic, the suicidal kamikaze corps. If books had theme songs, the kamikaze Song of the Warrior might serve as an apt motif for this 13th volume of Samuel Eliot Morison's massive U.S. naval history of World War II:

In serving on the seas, be a corpse

saturated with water. In serving on land, be a corpse covered

with weeds. In serving the sky, be a corpse that

challenges the clouds. Let us all die close by the side of our

sovereign.

During the Luzon operations, almost 2,000 U.S. and Australian Navymen were killed by the kamikaze pilots. During the Philippines campaign, one in four kamikazes damaged a target; one in 33 sank a ship.

Ashore, military operations moved on schedule, though not with the deceptive ease of Historian Morison's brisk and necessarily brief account. In Manila alone, 20.000 Japanese fought house-to-house to the death. Except for Leyte. the Japanese never made any concerted attacks on U.S. beachheads, and this undoubtedly speeded the pace of the campaigns. After Luzon was secured, 38 major and minor landings were launched in 44 days, a record for amphibious operations unlikely ever to be challenged. If U.S. troops paid for their victories (761 killed in Mindanao), the Japanese overpaid staggeringly for their defeats (25,000 killed in Mindanao).

By summer of 1945, Japanese naval power was bottled up in its own home waters. After months and years of island hopping, soldiers and sailors alike felt the elation of the coming kill. Yet South Pacific veterans also felt twinges of peculiar melancholy, which Historian Morison subtly senses and records: "You might be sick of the magnificent scenery, hate the steaming climate, and loathe the squawks of the white cockatoos; but something of you had been left behind, irrevocably; and you hated to think of the jungle taking over roads and airstrips ... As Virgil makes Aeneas deplore the city he had left and lost forever: iam seges est ubi Troia fuit--'now corn grows where Troy was.' "

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