55 of 64 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Worthy Kamikaze Project Crashes & Burns from Fatal Errors, December 8, 2008
This review is from: Danger's Hour: The Story of the USS Bunker Hill and the Kamikaze Pilot Who Crippled Her (Hardcover)
Where "Danger's Hour" succeeds is wholly in the human element, describing relationships among Americans and Japanese combatants. Undoubtedly that aspect will find favor among generalist readers and reviewers who care little about ships, aircraft, or history.
Sailors, aviators and historians: stand by to be repelled.
Mr. Kennedy knows almost nothing of his core subject: naval aviation. There are literally scores of errors that would have been avoided by competent fact checkers. For instance, we are told that Admiral Marc Mitscher learned to fly "soon after graduating from Annapolis" and became Naval Aviator Number 17. Actually, he was No. 33 six years after graduating. That information is readily available in a casual Internet search.
Basic chronology of the Pacific War is too often muffed, with overlapping accounts of events 1942-43 and again in 1944-45. The Guadalcanal campaign is especially convoluted.
Kennedy's attempts at describing aviation matters inevitably fail. He has bombs attached to Corsairs' landing gear (!) and his description of the Mitsubishi Zero defies explanation. His effort to explain aerodynamics becomes unfathomable.
Nor is he better with nautical subjects. Throughout, the book refers to a ship's "tunnels" (presumably passageways), "ceilings", and "hanger decks." The naval term "head" is properly used once amid "bathrooms," "restrooms," and "lavatories."
Historical facts take repeated hits. Allegedly Vice Admiral Ozawa took four carriers to Leyte Gulf without aircraft or escorts. We are told that Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay refused to send B-29s against kamikaze bases, then we read multiple accounts that state otherwise. (In truth, XXI Bomber Command diverted from Japanese industrial targets to airfields in support of the Okinawa invasion.) A Marine pilot, then-Captain James Swett, is repeatedly cited as "Colonel" when in fact he gained that rank 20 years later.
The final manuscript still requires editing. Grammatical errors abound, especially mixing subjects and pronouns. ("Japan was devastated; they had almost no fuel.") Furthermore, the author unnecessarily inserts himself into the narrative: "Mr. X told me" rather than merely "Mr. X said..."
The publicity promoting "Danger's Hour" often descends into puffery. A noted scholar proclaims that kamikazes remain "one of the little known aspects of WW II." Another statement says that VE-Day in Europe, five weeks previously, has overshadowed Bunker Hill's story for 65 years. (Actually, the Navy released the news a month later.) The promotional material even states that Bunker Hill's survival "proved crucial to Allied victory" though she never returned to service.
This is pretty poor stuff, especially since the story has stood on its own merit since 1945. Yet 21st century values sometimes are imposed upon WW II subjects. No better example exists than the assertion that all Bunker Hill fliers were "challenged by the guilt of homicide." Not some, not most--all of them. (This reviewer has known many Bunker Hill aviators and not one ever expressed such maudlin sentiments.)
The debrief: though "Danger's Hour" receives credit for an innovative, ambitious approach, it may charitably be characterized as inadequate. That's a shame: properly executed, it could have been magnificent.
Two stars.
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17 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent subject, appallingly bad writing and absolutely no editing, April 26, 2009
This review is from: Danger's Hour: The Story of the USS Bunker Hill and the Kamikaze Pilot Who Crippled Her (Hardcover)
The story of the Essex class fast carriers of TF58/TF38 is one that deserves telling. That the ships of the Big Blue Team bore the brunt of combat at sea in the Pacific War is unquestioned. 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 .
Unfortunately, this is not that book.
It is a disorganized mass of inaccurate, convoluted, virtually unreadable gibberish.
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.
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. I did read it all, and wished I had not done so.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
WHERE IS, REPEAT WHERE IS THE EDITOR...THE WORLD WONDERS, May 1, 2010
This review is from: Danger's Hour: The Story of the USS Bunker Hill and the Kamikaze Pilot Who Crippled Her (Hardcover)
Maxwell Taylor Kennedy, billed as an Associate Scholar with an interest in maritime history at the John Carter Brown Library, a Center for Advanced Research in History and the Humanities at Brown University, has an interesting idea in DANGER'S HOUR, to juxtapose the parallel stories of an Essex-class aircraft carrier, the USS Bunker Hill, with that of Kiyoshi Ogawa, a Japanese student conscript who is ultimately 'volunteered' for the kamikaze corps. These parallel stories intersect on May 11, 1945, when Ogawa and his wingman crashed into the USS Bunker Hill, killing and injuring over 700 men, and knocking the Bunker Hill out of the war for the duration.
There is only one major problem: Kennedy isn't much of an historian and, if anything, a worse writer.
Other reviewers have already detailed the many factual gaffes sprinkled throughout the book's pages. There are plenty others--the two typhoons that saved Japan from the Mongols were in 1274 and 1281, not 1281 and 1284. Equally disturbing, the book is replete with numerous seeming inconsistencies. For example, on page 337, two aviators are described as "crawl[ing] across the deck, trying to keep their heads and bodies below the level of flying debris" to get to two nearby planes. Yet on the very next page the same two pilots "together leapt up from the catwalk and sprinted to the Avengers. After retrieving both raft containers, they raced back across the flight deck...." Crawl or sprint--which is it? On page 205 Kennedy describes the final aerial assault on Japan's super battleship, the Yamato, as the approaching torpedo pilots skim above the water. As they close in, antiaircraft fire lights up the sky. Every enemy ship is firing "their AA guns flashing white as the antiaircraft fire hurled skyward." How will this prevent the attack when the enemy is approaching, as Kennedy states, at 60 feet above the waves?
These kinds of flaws and inconsistencies could have (and should have) been caught by a good editor, or any editor. What is perhaps harder to fix is Kennedy's writing style--it is not simply bad--it is awful. The tortured circumlocutions, the fractured phraseology, are the verbal equivalent of nails being scratched across a chalkboard. In one Japanese attack, the nearby USS Enterprise "was near-missed four times." (p. 214). Because the Japanese government was leery of "obliterating all freedom of thought," college students "were given more freedom of thought than any other group in Japan." (p. 86). One can only wonder how freedom of thought is 'given' to anyone (or obliterated for that matter), let alone how a ship is 'near-missed.' After student conscripts are told they will become kamikazes, they blow off their frustration by rampaging through town, "cutting their way through the...doors of frail restaurants...." (p. 186). A door may be frail, but an entire restaurant? Burning badly, the Bunker Hill's captain attempts to clear the decks: "Seitz would use what was then called centrifugal force to tip the ship, and push everything out." (p. 351). What is centrifugal force now called, pray tell? The author even manages to take a simple idea, and convolute the sentence until it yields up an entirely unexpected meaning: "They made their way twenty-five feet below the waterline of a vessel that many thought was sinking into one of the engineering rooms." (p. 378). Where was the vessel heading? Again, where was the editor? I could go on, but you get the idea.
Kennedy's prose is often the purplish/overwrought style more typical of a junior high school term paper. Nights are "unimaginably dark," beaches are "staggeringly beautiful," blasts are "impossibly loud," flare-ups are of "staggering brightness," one suicide crash dive is described as "sibylline," the meaning of which wholly escaped this reviewer. Kennedy's favorite action words, however, are 'annihilate,' and especially 'obliterate.' Domestic political freedoms are 'annihilated' by the military junta during the Taisho dynasty (p. 30). The Bunker Hill's pilots annihilate the Japanese in every confrontation (p. 165). Better yet, the Yamato isn't simply sunk, it is obliterated (all 70,000 tons of it); freedom of thought itself is in danger of being obliterated (as noted above); indeed, within a nine-page span (pp. 292-301), Kennedy describes a kamikaze pilot, a mule tractor, the two men operating it, the deck edge elevator, and a hapless sailor closing down a hatch, as all having been obliterated. (Since obliterate typically means to destroy completely, leaving no trace, it is somewhat oxymoronic for Kennedy to caption one of his photos "note the obliterated mule tractor....") As a final example of the clumsy wording (and dubious historical analysis), which epitomizes the entire book, consider Kennedy's final judgment on the Japanese war effort: "One reason that Japanese imperialism failed so severely [?] is probably that the Japanese, perhaps more than any other nationality, intensely dislike living outside their home country." (p. 258). Try telling that to the inhabitants of Tinian and Saipan and those of Manchuria, who had been living under Japanese overlords since the 1920s and the 1930s, respectively.
As some other reviewers have suggested, many of the five-star reviews follow a suspiciously similar story line. In the interests of full disclosure, some of these reviewers (at least 12 by my count---Caslin, Gillespie, Campbell, Riva, Idler, Reiss, Meyer, Wilcox, Falanga, Soll, Freeman, Ward and Binder (twice)) should have mentioned that they all received a shout-out from Kennedy in his acknowledgements section --some for having "helped,"---hardly the source of a disinterested review (all, not surprising, gave the book five stars). What is harder to fathom, however, is what influenced people like Doris Kearns Goodwin and others to lavish their praises on this book---clearly they did not read the same book I did.
One hopes that the next time Kennedy has a good idea and an urge to write US history, he will hire not one, but two, editors---one to clean up the factual errors and another to eliminate (or, obliterate, if you will) the writing faux pas that he seems prone to. Perhaps then a worthy book will emerge. I'll take a pass.
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