THE STORYTELLERS

Wings of Defeat features interviews with four trained kamikaze pilots, including three who took off to attack the U.S. fleet off the coast of Okinawa in the spring of 1945:

Navigator pilot ENA: A drafted college student, Ena crash-landed near a remote island where he survived. Months later, trying to report back to his mainland unit, he wandered through the wastelands of Hiroshima on August 7th.

Pilot HAMAZONO: An experienced fighter pilot who encountered American Corsair fighters off Okinawa, he ditched his bombs and engaged in a 30-minute dogfight, miraculously surviving and abandoning his mission.

Gunner NAKAJIMA: Pilot Hamazono’s gunner was a rebellious rookie who kept loading and firing his machine gun during the dogfight. Flying back to the mainland, he wished he had a radio to tell oncoming kamikaze pilots, “Turn back! Go home!”

Pilot UESHIMA: A drafted college student, Ueshima was ordered to pilot a kamikaze plane and practiced for his final dive until the end of the war. He remembers the terrible pain of sending off his comrades as he awaited a final order that never came.

Exclusive interviews with surviving veterans of the USS Drexler, a destroyer sunk by two kamikaze pilots, illustrate the enduring trauma of the suicide attacks. The documented story of one of the pilots who sank the USS Drexler reveals the complexity of motivations behind the attacks. Two Japanese kamikaze authorities and John W. Dower, the Pulitzer Prize-winning, American historian of modern Japan, and Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, author of Kamikaze Diaries and Cherry Blossoms, Kamikaze and Nationalism contextualize these individual narratives into a portrait of youthful determination exploited by a desperate military.