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A Glorious Way to Die: The Kamikaze Mission of the Battleship Yamato
Acclaimed by Critics, Historians, and Military Leaders the World Over
368 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1981
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147 people want to read
About the author
Russell Spurr
9 books3 followersRussell Spurr was based in Hong Kong for more than 20 years as the China and Far East correspondent for the London Daily Express and ABC Radio Network, and the chief correspondent and deputy editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
July 23, 2015
Battleship ‘Yamato’ was the heaviest and most powerfully armed battleship ever constructed and it was a proud gem of the Imperial Japanese Navy during World War II. Commissioned in 1941, Yamato was Initially utilized as the flagship of the Japanese Combined Fleet and participated in the ‘Battle of Midway’ and ‘Battle of Leyte Gulf’. In 1945 when the Japanese naval force was seriously on the back foot in the Pacific, in a desperate attempt to regain some leverage and to slow down the Allied advance they gave shape to a suicide mission codenamed ‘Operation Ten-Go’, which assigned virtually every available Japanese surface forces in to the protection of the Island of Okinawa against Allied invasion.
The battle scared leviathan ‘Yamato’ – she was actually hit by multiple armor piercing bombs from aircrafts of USS Essex, during the ‘Battle of Sibuyan Sea’ and despite suffering moderate damage it stood battle worthy – along with other destroyers and Kamikaze units were thrown into a suicide mission from which there was no safe return. On 7 April 1945 after hours of battle with the Allied battle ships and aircraft’s she finally succumbed to mortal wounds suffered from a dozen direct torpedo and at least half a dozen bomb hits. With his fascinating military history volume ‘A Glorious Way to Die: The Kamikaze Mission of the Battleship Yamato, April 1945’, British journalist ‘Russell Spurr’ tells the reader the tale of ‘Yamato’ and recreates the glory and tragedy of her last engagement.
Battle Ship Yamato
Written with an eye to detail this spellbinding narrative from Russell Spurr is the result of meticulous research and eyewitness accounts from both American and Japanese participants of the Second World War. The book is written with enough flair to keep the reader always hooked and the last voyage of the Yamato on its suicide mission to Okinawa comes alive before the reader's eyes with graphic details. The author has succeeded in giving a certain amount of life to the characters so that the reader will feel as if the narrations are made through their voices. The maps, vessel schematics, diagrams and rare photographs, which accompany the text, add to the value of the narration.
‘A Glorious Way to Die’ scrutinizes the events and decisions that led to ‘Yamato’ getting assigned with a suicide mission, and retells it’s final battle - with a loss of more than 3000 of it’s crew members - from the perspective of both American and Japanese participants. In this book Russell Spurr never tries to glorify the events from either side; he gives a commentary that is candid and brutally honest all the while taking the role of a non-biased observer, which makes his narrations credible from a historic perspective.
Japanese battleship Yamato blows up, following massive attacks by U.S. Navy carrier planes north of Okinawa
The segment of the book, which describes the American planes peppering the sea with machine-gun fire against survivors of a sunken ‘Yamato’ can be taken as an example for this brutal candidness of Russell Spurr’s narrative.
This encapsulates how armed confrontations, which begin on political levels, often collapse into chaos of ‘racial conflict’; history is rife with such cases of battles escalating into mass killings and we will be seeing many more such cases in the future.
What makes this book more valuable for a military historian is that it inspects the politics and mentality behind the Japanese tactics of 'suicide war' meticulously. The psychology of choosing death instead of defeat – one of the primary traditions of the Samurai life and the Bushido code – ingrained in the Japanese military culture can be perceived from the way in which ‘Yamato’ was made the largest Kamikaze against the opponents. Anyone interested in gaining insights into the Kamikaze attacks and its state of mind will definitely find the book much useful.
Praiseworthy research invested by the author for gaining historical evidences and his perfect story telling abilities in chronicling the findings of the research makes this book pretty captivating.
The battle scared leviathan ‘Yamato’ – she was actually hit by multiple armor piercing bombs from aircrafts of USS Essex, during the ‘Battle of Sibuyan Sea’ and despite suffering moderate damage it stood battle worthy – along with other destroyers and Kamikaze units were thrown into a suicide mission from which there was no safe return. On 7 April 1945 after hours of battle with the Allied battle ships and aircraft’s she finally succumbed to mortal wounds suffered from a dozen direct torpedo and at least half a dozen bomb hits. With his fascinating military history volume ‘A Glorious Way to Die: The Kamikaze Mission of the Battleship Yamato, April 1945’, British journalist ‘Russell Spurr’ tells the reader the tale of ‘Yamato’ and recreates the glory and tragedy of her last engagement.
Battle Ship Yamato
Written with an eye to detail this spellbinding narrative from Russell Spurr is the result of meticulous research and eyewitness accounts from both American and Japanese participants of the Second World War. The book is written with enough flair to keep the reader always hooked and the last voyage of the Yamato on its suicide mission to Okinawa comes alive before the reader's eyes with graphic details. The author has succeeded in giving a certain amount of life to the characters so that the reader will feel as if the narrations are made through their voices. The maps, vessel schematics, diagrams and rare photographs, which accompany the text, add to the value of the narration.
‘A Glorious Way to Die’ scrutinizes the events and decisions that led to ‘Yamato’ getting assigned with a suicide mission, and retells it’s final battle - with a loss of more than 3000 of it’s crew members - from the perspective of both American and Japanese participants. In this book Russell Spurr never tries to glorify the events from either side; he gives a commentary that is candid and brutally honest all the while taking the role of a non-biased observer, which makes his narrations credible from a historic perspective.
Japanese battleship Yamato blows up, following massive attacks by U.S. Navy carrier planes north of Okinawa
The segment of the book, which describes the American planes peppering the sea with machine-gun fire against survivors of a sunken ‘Yamato’ can be taken as an example for this brutal candidness of Russell Spurr’s narrative.
“The Americans felt no compunction about slaughtering their helpless foes. They had always fought a blatantly racial war in the Pacific – and so had the Japanese. Headline-seeking brass hats openly declared that killing Japs was no worse than killing lice. The apogee of brutalization was to be reached, four months later, at Hiroshima”
This encapsulates how armed confrontations, which begin on political levels, often collapse into chaos of ‘racial conflict’; history is rife with such cases of battles escalating into mass killings and we will be seeing many more such cases in the future.
What makes this book more valuable for a military historian is that it inspects the politics and mentality behind the Japanese tactics of 'suicide war' meticulously. The psychology of choosing death instead of defeat – one of the primary traditions of the Samurai life and the Bushido code – ingrained in the Japanese military culture can be perceived from the way in which ‘Yamato’ was made the largest Kamikaze against the opponents. Anyone interested in gaining insights into the Kamikaze attacks and its state of mind will definitely find the book much useful.
Praiseworthy research invested by the author for gaining historical evidences and his perfect story telling abilities in chronicling the findings of the research makes this book pretty captivating.
April 10, 2016
As a young tyke in the late 1970s I loved to watch the cartoon show "Star Blazers" which was about the space battleship Argo being the last hope to defend the Earth from an evil alien invader. It was not until much later that I found out this was actually a Japanese animated series called "Space Battleship Yamato". It was still later when I discovered that the Yamato was a real Japanese battleship sent out to fight the United States Navy in one last desperate attempt to defend the home islands from invasion. The book does an excellent job chronicling the last days of the world's largest battleship until it was sunk on April 07, 1945. Russell Spur was a long time correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review, a British veteran who fought the Japanese in Burma, and was apart of the Allied occupation force in Japan after the war. I am not the biggest WWII buff, but
A Glorious Way to Die
held my interest for the entire novel.
October 4, 2019
I loved this book. A thrilling read
December 26, 2015
On April 29, 1945, the Japanese battleship Yamato left her anchorage in Kure harbor and headed for Okinawa, accompanied by a single light cruiser and eight destroyers. The official mission of “Special Attack Force 2”—raise as much hell as possible among the American invasion fleet, then beach the ships and join the defense of Okinawa—was strategically irrelevant and tactically dubious. The unofficial mission was clearer. Yamato, the largest battleship ever built, was the flagship and the last significant unit of the once-mighty Imperial Japanese Navy. It was imperative that she go down fighting.
Yamato fulfilled her last obligation on April 7, 1945. Holed by torpedoes and bombs from four waves of American carrier-based aircraft, she rolled over and sank, taking with her all but a few hundred of the more than 3,000 men aboard. Losses to the attackers were 10 planes and 12 men.
Spurr, a British journalist who spent years reporting from East Asia, uses naval records and interviews with survivors to tell the story of the Yamato’s last mission from both sides, putting the reader on the decks of the battleship, at the controls of the attacking aircraft, and in the operations centers of both fleets. The Japanese side of the story occupies roughly two-thirds of the book, which is as it should be: The sinking of the Yamato may have been “just another mission” for many of the American pilots, but for the Japanese it was both a grand gesture of defiance (the same spirit that motivated the kamikaze pilots, expressed on a vastly larger scale) and a final, humiliating defeat
A Glorious Way to Die is far less well-known than the more recent work of James Hornfischer (Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors) and Ian Toll (Pacific Crucible), but it has the same vivid, engrossing quality, and is well worth seeking out.
Yamato fulfilled her last obligation on April 7, 1945. Holed by torpedoes and bombs from four waves of American carrier-based aircraft, she rolled over and sank, taking with her all but a few hundred of the more than 3,000 men aboard. Losses to the attackers were 10 planes and 12 men.
Spurr, a British journalist who spent years reporting from East Asia, uses naval records and interviews with survivors to tell the story of the Yamato’s last mission from both sides, putting the reader on the decks of the battleship, at the controls of the attacking aircraft, and in the operations centers of both fleets. The Japanese side of the story occupies roughly two-thirds of the book, which is as it should be: The sinking of the Yamato may have been “just another mission” for many of the American pilots, but for the Japanese it was both a grand gesture of defiance (the same spirit that motivated the kamikaze pilots, expressed on a vastly larger scale) and a final, humiliating defeat
A Glorious Way to Die is far less well-known than the more recent work of James Hornfischer (Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors) and Ian Toll (Pacific Crucible), but it has the same vivid, engrossing quality, and is well worth seeking out.
March 2, 2019
A good, solid, readable account of the final mission of the battleship Yamato to attempt to attack the US fleets supporting the Okinawa campaign. The story at the core of this book is very compelling, and Spurr is a storyteller, but sometimes he lays it on a bit thick, and extensive use of dialogue without citation may make some uncomfortable. One of the strengths is that Spurr does a nice job pulling out the individual stories - I had not realized the predicament of a number of Nisei Japanese-Americans in the crew. Be aware that Spurr sometimes narrates the book from the view of those at the time to convey their viewpoint, and this often means some passages that are rough in language and viewpoint. A solid, readable account of Yamato's final mission.
September 23, 2017
From the other reviewers I'm sure you can ascertain that the Battleship Yamato was the largest battleship ever put to sea. Based solely on literary quality, this book is ok. The author goes too much into the nitty-gritty. After about half way, the "story" really picks up and you do get a good sense of foreboding for the Japanese seamen who (spoiler alert) will be throwing their lives away to serve an outdated idea. As Americans, we're seldom given an opportunity into the "why" of Japanese culture, and this book gives a good account of the transitional period.
February 2, 2019
Just fabulous. Excellent narrative history.
March 15, 2023
They were strapped on to a bomb and then sent into enemy ships. I don't know about glorious, they were blown to smithereens.
December 23, 2023
An addictive read told from both sides of the battle.
January 28, 2016
The subtitle is The Kamikaze Mission of the Battleship Yamato, April, 1945. In general, the book goes into the construction of the Yamato, the fights it was in, and its sinking by U.S. airplanes. It also goes into the fact that there was some opposition to the final mission of the Yamato, and that it was basically pretty much doomed from the moment it set sail on its final voyage.
There was no aerial cover for the ship or the ones sailing with it, and the Japanese military just couldn't seem to understand that air supremacy had become the major thing in the war, and having ships sail without air coverage was just inviting a disaster to happen.
The book points out that school children were working at Kure, the port where the Yamato was built. He then notes that the Japanese experimented with some 32 types of new aircraft that proved unsuitable between 1941 and 1945. Operations at Kure were prioritized, the highest priority being the craft to be used for kamikaze missions.
Originally, 5 ships the size of the Yamato were to be built. Two were built, one was started and converted to an aircraft carrier, and the fourth and fifth were not built at all. The author goes into a technical description of the structure of the Yamato. There were originally going to be built two craft even bigger than the Yamato, but those also got canceled.
Various flaws in Japanese naval thinking are noted, including the lack of importance given to rescuing crews of a ship that had been sunk. The Yamato had neither life rafts nor life belts, for example. The medical facilities were not built to handle a large number of casualties. There was a lot of wood used on the ship.
The author notes that Japanese naval planning generally revolved around the enemy doing exactly what the Japanese thought they would do. If they didn't, the plans fell apart.
The Yamato was to help in the attack on the American forces attacking Okinawa, so a good part of the book deals with the battle on Okinawa. The idea was for the Yamato to attack the American ships around the island, destroy lots of them, then beach itself and use the ship for firing on the American ships with the sailors from the Yamato leaving the ship and joining the Japanese defenders on the island.
This involved getting the Yamato and the other ships all the way from Japan to Okinawa without encountering any American airplanes or American submarines. There was, of course, no way that was going to happen.
The book not only tells about what happened to the Yamato itself, but goes into what happened to the ships that sailed with the Yamato.
There was yet again another one of the 'The fate of the empire rests upon this one action' statements. This type of thing was done over and over again, with each battle being the main one that would crush the American offensive.
The Japanese started with the war with 60 active submarines. They ended it with eight. Also discussed are various kamikaze craft.
The book then goes into the actual attack on the Yamato.
This is a very well-done book, filled with information and a good bit of analysis on the general military approach Japan followed as far as its Navy went.
There was no aerial cover for the ship or the ones sailing with it, and the Japanese military just couldn't seem to understand that air supremacy had become the major thing in the war, and having ships sail without air coverage was just inviting a disaster to happen.
The book points out that school children were working at Kure, the port where the Yamato was built. He then notes that the Japanese experimented with some 32 types of new aircraft that proved unsuitable between 1941 and 1945. Operations at Kure were prioritized, the highest priority being the craft to be used for kamikaze missions.
Originally, 5 ships the size of the Yamato were to be built. Two were built, one was started and converted to an aircraft carrier, and the fourth and fifth were not built at all. The author goes into a technical description of the structure of the Yamato. There were originally going to be built two craft even bigger than the Yamato, but those also got canceled.
Various flaws in Japanese naval thinking are noted, including the lack of importance given to rescuing crews of a ship that had been sunk. The Yamato had neither life rafts nor life belts, for example. The medical facilities were not built to handle a large number of casualties. There was a lot of wood used on the ship.
The author notes that Japanese naval planning generally revolved around the enemy doing exactly what the Japanese thought they would do. If they didn't, the plans fell apart.
The Yamato was to help in the attack on the American forces attacking Okinawa, so a good part of the book deals with the battle on Okinawa. The idea was for the Yamato to attack the American ships around the island, destroy lots of them, then beach itself and use the ship for firing on the American ships with the sailors from the Yamato leaving the ship and joining the Japanese defenders on the island.
This involved getting the Yamato and the other ships all the way from Japan to Okinawa without encountering any American airplanes or American submarines. There was, of course, no way that was going to happen.
The book not only tells about what happened to the Yamato itself, but goes into what happened to the ships that sailed with the Yamato.
There was yet again another one of the 'The fate of the empire rests upon this one action' statements. This type of thing was done over and over again, with each battle being the main one that would crush the American offensive.
The Japanese started with the war with 60 active submarines. They ended it with eight. Also discussed are various kamikaze craft.
The book then goes into the actual attack on the Yamato.
This is a very well-done book, filled with information and a good bit of analysis on the general military approach Japan followed as far as its Navy went.
November 29, 2009
This was a very decent and well researched account of the final mission of the Japanese Battleship 'Yamato'. The story was told well and the author made good use of first hand accounts by the participants on both sides. The book shows that not all Japanese were fanatical in their desire to die for no good cause, a lot where soldiers/sailors doing their duty as they saw fit.
The author presented some very interesting accounts of young Japanese sailors and of some young American pilots. It also offered a overview of the whole suicide campaign against Allied forces off Okinawa. This was a easy book to read and I came away feeling sorry for alot of the American & Japanese servicemen who gave their lives for the country. A good read!
January 24, 2019
This is a decent book. The author writes in an engaging and interesting fashion. I noticed he used the word "filthy" an inordinate number of times. There are a few insignificant factual errors but these are not severe enough to mar the history or the narrative.
One perplexing aspect I find is that many of the key naval officers proclaimed the Yamato to be unsinkable although it's sister ship, the Musashi, was sunk about 6 months earlier by American aircraft. The Yamato was also sunk by American aircraft. I don't see how any rational person would come to this belief, especially given (as I understand it) the Musashi incorporated some improvements gained from the Yamato.
One perplexing aspect I find is that many of the key naval officers proclaimed the Yamato to be unsinkable although it's sister ship, the Musashi, was sunk about 6 months earlier by American aircraft. The Yamato was also sunk by American aircraft. I don't see how any rational person would come to this belief, especially given (as I understand it) the Musashi incorporated some improvements gained from the Yamato.
July 31, 2014
An interesting and powerful book about the last mission of the Yamato - a legend in Japanese military tradition. The human look at the Japanese crew was especially intriguing, I've never seen that story told from that perspective and it makes it all the more powerful. It's a quick read but very interesting if you have any interest whatsoever in WW2
February 22, 2014
The death of the super-battlehip Yamato in a suicidal sortee at the end of World War II is ably (even movingly) recounted. The material on naval aviation is a distinct bonus, given that the Yamato was sunk by American fliers as the ultimate justification of the strength of naval air against battlewagons.
August 7, 2016
A riveting, vivid account of the sinking of the great battleship Yamato in the closing days of WWII. The largest battleship ever built, Yamato was obsolete even before construction finished as aircraft carriers came to dominate naval operations. Spurr examines the context in which Yamato was sent on her suicide mission, and the thoughts and emotions of the men on all sides of the final battle.
March 28, 2008
We read this as a family in preparation for a trip to Japan and to the Yamato museum there. It fun to read it together. Yamato was the biggest battleship ever built and was sunk by the Americans in one of the final WWII Naval battles near Japan.
September 2, 2015
Very well and painfully researched to show the whole picture of what went on from the both sides.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews