The Last Kamikaze: The Story of Admiral Matome Ugaki

Vice Admiral Ugaki served as chief of staff to the legendary Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander of the Combined Fleet, until Yamamoto was killed in an aerial ambush in 1943. Ugaki, who was himself wounded in the attack, later was appointed commander of the First Battleship Division, remaining in that position until the battle of Leyte Gulf. He was then charged with directing the aerial defense of Japan, oriented around the untried Kamikaze Corps. Hoyt ( Japan's War ) bases part of his narrative on Ugaki's terse but revealing war diary, which the admiral called ``Seaweed of War.'' Often poetic and abstract, the diary nonetheless conveys Ugaki's stoic struggle to prepare himself for defeat and death even as he sent waves of suicide missions into the air against the Americans. Resolved to follow his young pilots to certain death, Ugaki flew a kamikaze mission within hours of Japan's surrender on August 15, 1945, and was never heard from again. A strange, stirring tale, sympathetically related from the Japanese point of view. (Mar.)