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 his
past summer I had a spirited discussion with a prominent historian.
He assured me that the wave of suicide bombings on the West Bank
marked "a revolutionary" break with the past. It was a
"new" tactic, he said — one for which Israel and
other free societies simply had no antidote. "You see,"
he confidently announced, "when people wish to kill you more
than they want to live, theirs is a cause that won't die."
I replied that there that had been no kamikazes since the surrender
of Japan on August 15, 1945 — and that Japanese militarism
still seemed quite dead to me.
There is no
doubt that suicide bombing portends terrible things for citizens
of affluent democracies. What sort of sinister zeal possesses men
to give up their lives to kill others? Why would these killers hate
us to such a degree as to destroy themselves and us at once? Why
do they prefer the next world to the present one?
I.
"Holy" Warriors Are Not New
Warriors
who deliberately seek death in battle — whether to end their
own misery amid certain defeat, to undergo offensive missions that
hold out no chance of their own survival, or to kill the enemy without
hope of escape — are not altogether rare in history. When nearly
surrounded, King Leonidas of Sparta sent away thousands of his army
from Thermopylae in 480 B.C. There, with his remaining 299 Spartans
and a few hundred Thespians and Thebans, he prepared to leave the
confines of the pass and charge out to fight amid a sea of thousands
of Persian troops. "Fight with great courage," the king
told his Spartans hours before annihilation. "Today we will
dine among the dead."
During the
failed Jewish revolt of A.D. 73, when the last enclave of the zealots
at Masada was surrounded, and before the Roman besiegers could storm
the stronghold, the rebels under Eleazar ben Yair killed themselves.
By the historian Josephus's count, all but seven of some 960 trapped
men, women, and children perished. Hitler's order, in January 1943,
for the encircled garrison at Stalingrad to shun escape or surrender
and fight to the last man was equivalent to suicide for thousands.
Yet, the September
11 terrorists were somewhat different — more like the Japanese
death brigades of World War II, who in their organization and training
killed on a scale never seen before or since in civilized warfare.
Thousands of Japanese flew as suicide pilots, commandeered ramming-boats,
manned one-way rocket planes, or (as infantrymen) organized death
charges. Many foot soldiers fought with dynamite satchels or grenades
strapped to their bodies.
In all these
cases, the sole intention was to kill as many of the enemy as possible
before meeting certain death. A new fanaticism — a lethal mix
of Shintoism, Buddhism, and Bushido — promised a better life
in the hereafter, where warrior souls would enjoy a divine existence
in return for their sacrifice on earth. The destruction of Japanese
parliamentary government in the 1930s, and the rise of a dictatorship,
had already helped to create the authoritarian state necessary for
the kamikazes — and desperation was the final ingredient. By
late 1944, obsolete planes and green pilots could no longer stop
a massive American fleet and air force headed for the Japanese mainland.
The climactic
struggle between democratic and suicidal forces was the battle for
Okinawa, called Operation "Holy War" (Ten go) by
the Japanese. Between April 1 and July 2, 1945, over 110,000 Japanese
died — nearly to the last man (barely more than 7,000 were
taken prisoner). Yet the defenders killed over 12,000 Americans,
inflicting an additional 30,000 casualties. Among the dead were
5,000 American sailors, victims largely of the nearly 2,000 kamikaze
attacks against the American fleet.
II.
The Divine Wind (Kamikaze)
What
can we learn from this, history's only real example of a democracy
facing organized suicide attackers? There are uncanny similarities
between 1945 and 2001, despite the vast differences across time
and space. Japanese kamikazes were young and impressionable —
mostly between 18 and 24. They were convinced by older, more cynical
officers (many of whom would survive the war) that their sacrifice
would gain them paradise, and that suicide missions were the only
mechanism left to stop a murderous America that wished to destroy
— not merely defeat — the Japanese people.
Once the squadrons
were organized, very little training was required. Return landings
would, of course, be unnecessary. In the case of the Ohka
— manned rockets dropped from Betty bombers — pilots
did not need even the rudimentary skills required for taking off.
In a sense, Japanese planners figured that America's technological
and organizational preeminence could be nullified by suicide pilots,
who became, in effect, early cruise missiles. A once-obsolete Zero
fighter, when piloted by a kamikaze, suddenly became as deadly as
far more expensive and sophisticated German V-1 and V-2 rockets
— and much more accurate, too, since it could change course
and trajectory in mid-flight. In the right circumstances, the brain
of a man determined to die can be more effective than any computer.
Moreover, much
of Western superiority in military design and expense was invested
in protecting the attacker — armor plating, parachutes, self-sealing
gas tanks, extensive training, sea and air rescue — and thus
was quite unnecessary on one-way missions. In the same way, our
present-day fundamentalists discovered that it did not take much
skill to pilot even a sophisticated jet — provided there was
no takeoff or landing required, and that the purpose was simply
to crash into a rather large target. Today's skyscrapers, after
all, were as prominent objectives as yesterday's fleet carriers
or battleships.
Then and now,
a man with little training — powered by fanatical zeal and
hatred for the West, full of delusions of paradise, relatively young,
and recruited and trained by professional militarists — could
do quite a lot of damage to initially unprepared Americans. If,
in the past, a Japanese kamikaze (who had little or no chance of
sinking an American ship in a conventional attack himself) could
raise havoc on the carrier Bunker Hill, and kill hundreds
in the process — so too an otherwise impotent al Qaeda terrorist
might topple a billion-dollar building and kill thousands, thanks
to his willingness to die.
We, like our
forefathers — who saw 36 ships lost and another 368 damaged
at Okinawa (the greatest single battle losses in the history of
the U.S. Navy), were stunned by the audacity and effectiveness of
the September 11 terrorists and the rumors of more to come. But
just as astounding as the initial suicide bombings off Okinawa,
and in Washington and New York, was — in both cases —
the swift and terrible response of the Americans.
In 1945, picket
destroyers, improved radar, increased sorties, and bombing of bases
on the mainland ensured that not a single battleship or carrier
was actually sunk. On Okinawa itself, horrific flamethrowers and
fire-spouting tanks were introduced to incinerate would-be suicidal
troops. Increased nighttime watches and strict fire control, coupled
with integrated artillery and naval gunfire, blew apart banzai
charges. The result was that upon the conclusion of the ghastly
battle of Okinawa, most veteran imperial land forces were ruined,
the last vestiges of the Japanese navy destroyed (the suicidal cruise
of the battleship Yamato being a complete failure), and the
air forces rendered nearly impotent.
Moreover, there
were reports of last-minute hesitancy and even ditching by kamikazes.
Later accounts described drunkenness and near-insurrection as pilots
had to be drafted, and were no longer solely volunteers. Much is
made of the supposed 5,000 kamikazes waiting on the mainland for
the American invasion. But more likely was that they comprised only
a few thousands, from an angry society of hundreds of millions,
willing to blow themselves up to kill Americans. We shall never
know what would have transpired had the Americans invaded Japanese
home soil. Yet for some five weeks after Okinawa, the American fleet
was in still in range of land-based enemy planes, thousands of aircraft
remained on the homeland — and kamikazes attacks were rare.
After Okinawa
was declared secure on July 2, only five more suicide sorties were
reported before the surrender on August 15. Had the Japanese simply
run out of willing pilots, or were they saving their reserve kamikazes
for the final assault? America, of course, took no chances, and
prepared extraordinary measures to neutralize the kamikaze threat
during the planned invasion.
Similarly,
after this terrible past September of 2001, the West was told that
thousands of Islamic fundamentalists were ready to bomb America,
Europe, and Israel. In fact, there were only a few hundred, from
an angry society of hundreds of millions, willing to vaporize themselves
to kill Americans. Alarmists, these past few months, have recalled
the kamikazes; realists should remember how they were dealt with.
We may well have more bombings, but the attacks are finite —
and the remedy proven.
III.
Lessons From the Past
In
1945, the terror of suicide brought out the greater terror of the
Western way of war. Grim Americans left Okinawa with a changed mentality
about the nature of battle itself: From then on, the fanaticism
of the human will to die would be repaid in kind by the greater
fanaticism of the industrial and technological power to live. Okinawa
taught the world that the chief horror of war is not the random
use of suicide bombers, but the fervent response they will incur
from Western industrial powers — as seen at Hiroshima.
The restraint
upon Americans' singular ingenuity for making war usually rests
only with their own moral reluctance — a brake that suicidal
attack seems to strip away entirely. It was not surprising, but
entirely predictable, that a nation that 60 years ago produced napalm,
flamethrowers, and — eventually — A-bombs to combat the
specter of thousands of suicidal warriors would retain the dark
imagination, organization, and willpower to blast apart a few hundred
suicide bombers and their enclaves of support in Afghanistan.
In this recent
war, the West's military referents for the Islamic fundamentalists
of the present have been the fanatical kamikazes of the past. This
autumn their letters were published in newspapers, and veterans
of the conflict relived the horror on television. We sensed that
kamikazes and al Qaeda terrorists alike strike at the very psyche
of the Western mind, which is repelled by the religious fanaticism,
the authoritarianism, or perhaps the despair, of such enemies —
confirming that wars are sometimes not just misunderstandings over
policy, or the reckless actions of a deranged leader, but accurate
reflections of real and fundamental differences in culture and society.
Yet in precisely
the same way as kamikazes off Okinawa led to frightful measures
of mass destruction, so too jumbo jets exploding at the World Trade
Center were the logical precursors to daisy cutters and bunker busters
in Afghanistan, as an unleashed America resounded with a terrible
fury and effectiveness not seen since 1945. And it is not over yet.
A roused and angry mind at Caltech or in Silicon Valley, with a
wife, kids, dog, and house in the suburbs, can conjure up far more
lethal weapons and strategies than can any madman from the Middle
East.
There is a
lesson here that al Qaeda bombers, their leaders, and their sponsors
should ponder, as they seek to die to kill those who so desperately
wish to protect and defend — and to live.
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