Danger's Hour: The Story of the USS Bunker Hill and the Kamikaze Pilot Who Crippled Her

Additional Danger's Hour: The Story of the USS Bunker Hill and the Kamikaze Pilot Who Crippled Her Information

By the beginning of 1945, American pilots were shooting down Japanese planes more than ten to one. The Japanese had so few metals left that the military had begun using wooden coins and clay pots for hand grenades. For the first time in 800 years, Japan faced imminent invasion. As Germany faltered, the combined strength of every warring nation gathered at Japan's door. Desperate, Japan turned to its most idealistic young men -- the best and brightest college students -- and demanded of them the greatest sacrifice.

On the morning of May 11, 1945, days after the Nazi surrender, the USS Bunker Hill -- a magnificent vessel that held thousands of crewmen and the most sophisticated naval technology available -- was holding at the Pacific Theater, 70 miles off the coast of Okinawa.

At precisely 9:58 a.m., Kiyoshi Ogawa radioed in to his base at Kanoya, 350 miles from the Bunker Hill, "I found the enemy vessels." After eighteen months of training, Kiyoshi tucked a comrade's poem into his breast pocket and flew his Zero five hours across the Pacific. Now the young Japanese pilot had located his target and was on the verge of fulfilling his destiny. At 10:02.30 a.m., as he hovered above the Bunker Hill, hidden in a mass of clouds, Kiyoshi spoke his last words: "Now, I am nose-diving into the ship."

The attack killed 393 Americans and was the worst suicide attack against America until September 11. Juxtaposing Kiyoshi's story with the stories of untold heroism of the men aboard the Bunker Hill, Maxwell Taylor Kennedy details how American sailors and airmen worked together, risking their own lives to save their fellows and ultimately triumphing in their efforts to save their ship.

Drawing on years of research and firsthand interviews with both American and Japanese survivors, Maxwell Taylor Kennedy draws a gripping portrait of men bravely serving their countries in war and the advent of a terrifying new weapon, suicide bombing, that nearly halted the most powerful nation in the world.

What Customers Say About Danger's Hour: The Story of the USS Bunker Hill and the Kamikaze Pilot Who Crippled Her:

Poorly edited. A lot of repetition for no particular reason. I ended up skimming to bypass the constant repeating of facts. The subject is interesting, the way it was presented was not.

I was extremely impressed by this book. Although analogies are always tricky, this book really offers some interesting insights into our present confrontation with people who think death is more honorable than their present situation. It shows a remarkable skill at telling a fascinating story from all sides. The author is particularly engaging when he recounts the history of the kamikaze, not a group most Americans view sympathetically. I also salute the author for taking the time to interview and record the stories of many people who will soon no longer be with us. This is a first rate work of military history.

The editors, fact checkers and other support staff at Simon and Schuster who allowed this incredibly bad imitation of a history to be published should be fired, now.I have read the 5 star reviews of this book on this site and have concluded that they must have read a different book than I did, or did not read it at all. It is a disorganized mass of inaccurate, convoluted, virtually unreadable gibberish.

That the ships of the Big Blue Team bore the brunt of combat at sea in the Pacific War is unquestioned. The story of the Essex class fast carriers of TF58/TF38 is one that deserves telling.

Unfortunately, this is not that book. Books like the "Big E" and the "Little Giants" are well-written expositions of fact combined with personal stories that illuminate the subject and are timeless.

Telling the whole story of the Essex class in general, and the tragic story of the USS Bunker Hill in particular, would be a welcome addition to the available literature. The most mundane facts regarding the US Navy, its ships and aircraft as well as those of the Japanese Empire are unknown to this author.

I did read it all, and wished I had not done so.

Kennedy's work, a very meticulous and well-done job. His successor as 10th Army Commander was Lt.-General Roger Geiger, USMC; (6) Page 434 - ".Turnbull borrowed a plane from Henderson Field."; Henderson was in Guadalcanal rather than the Hawaiian Islands.

This books describes two parallel stories, the struggle to save the big ship and a brief biography of the young men who took the fatal plunge crippling her. On May, 11, 1945 the US Navy aircraft carrier USS Bunker Hill (CV-17), while supporting the Okinawa landings, was hit by two kamikazes, suffering heavy damage and horrendous losses in lives.

(2) page 109 - quoting the text ".the Intrepid, Essex, Bunker Hill, Yorktown and the new Lexington."; the correct should be ".The Essex, Yorktown, Lexington, Bunker Hill and the new Intrepid."; from the above mentioned carriers, the USS Intrepid (CV-11) was the last to get into action, doing it on January 1944; (3) page 164 - Iwo Jima served as na unsinkable carrier for the hundreds of B29 crewmen who took to her 9.000 foot airfield for emergency landings, and which also acted as a base for VLR P51Ds and P47Ns escorting the Superfortress fleets bombing Japan; (4) page 199 - All told, 24 Essex-class carriers were built but only 14 were comissioned and went into action against the Japanese before VE Day; (5) Page 260 - Buckner Bay was named after Lt.-General Simon Bolivar Bruckner, US Army (not Marines), who was KIA on June 18, 1945. Several mistakes were found in the text, amongst them: (1) page 51 - General Eduardo Gomes didn't take power in 1930's Brazil; it was Getúlio Dornelles Vargas who did it, starting a dictatorship which went through 1945.

Gomes was just one of his Cabinret Ministers. However, these small revisional errors don't reduce the excellency of Mr.

the story of the bunker hill and the kamikazi pilots is fascinating and heart wrenching, but i really wasn't impressed at all with this author. the subject matter could at times be a little dry ( the details of how the ship was built and how it worked), so it didn't help that he has a disorganized style of writing and often repeats himself - sometimes repeating himself just a paragraph later. i found myself reading this exciting story, but wishing someone else had written it.