The Film
“After a final toast at the command post, I encounter my final hours. My doom looms, wretched and unjust. I… climb into the cockpit, soon to be my casket.”
—former Kamikaze Ena Takehiko’s journal entry, May 11, 1945
In October 1944, following crushing defeats at the hands of Allied forces, Japan’s WWII military leaders dreamed up a last, desperate strategy—the Kamikaze, an elite corps of Japanese pilots whose airborne suicide missions were to cripple the fast-approaching U.S. Naval warships.
Few outside Japan knew that hundreds of Kamikaze actually survived the war. WINGS OF DEFEAT explores the life stories of four surviving Kamikaze pilots, revealing the tragedy of young men drafted to kill themselves in a war that had already been lost.
|
Named for the typhoons or “divine winds” that saved Japan from a Mongolian invasion 700 years before, the Kamikaze remain cloaked in mystery and myth—revered in Japan for their selfless sacrifices and despised in the West for the mayhem they wreaked on U.S. forces.
When director Risa Morimoto learned that her Japanese uncle had trained as a Kamikaze in his youth—but had carried that secret to his grave—she retraced his footsteps. Through interviews with four surviving pilots and family members, a portrait emerges, revealing the Kamikaze not as a one-dimensional symbol of either fanaticism or national heroism, but as a complex individual caught up in a system beyond his control.
Like their American counterparts, the Kamikaze were young men, full of talent, promise and dreams. The four pilots featured in the film were pulled from their studies and drafted into a hopeless and brutal war. Now octogenarians, the former Kamikaze reflect on their lost youth and their many peers who died. They recall climbing into their cockpits, certain they too would die—and how their will to live triumphed over both training and culture.
Japanese war propaganda films, American newsreels and pencil sketches by doomed trainees help to illustrate their stories. Interviews with U.S. seamen who survived Kamikaze attacks reveal the healing power and compassion that come with age and perspective.
WINGS OF DEFEAT offers a rare window into the thoughts and feelings of those assigned to suicidal missions, ultimately revealing the human tragedy of war and the devastating toll exacted from both sides of the battlefield.
Update
Filmmakers Risa Morimoto and Linda Hoaglund provided an update in May 2008 on what some of the people featured in WINGS OF DEFEAT have been doing since filming ended:
After we showed the film to the U.S. veterans Fred Mitchell and Eugene Brick, they asked us to take them to Japan to meet their former enemies: the Kamikaze featured in the film. We traveled together to Japan in the summer of 2007 and introduced Fred and Gene to Ena Takehiko, Ueshima Takeo and Hamazono Shigeyoshi.
Each of the meetings was frank, open and emotional. They were especially cathartic for Fred Mitchell, who still suffers from post traumatic stress disorder since the Kamikaze attack that killed so many of his friends. Hamazono pressed the U.S. veterans to try to find the American Corsair pilot who saved his life.
Since then, through extensive research of the flight logs from the aircraft carriers on the day that Hamazono and Nakajima took off, we have been able to locate the American Corsair pilot. He clearly remembers being in a dogfight with a very skilled veteran Kamikaze pilot, so unlike the other inexperienced Kamikaze he shot down that day. The American pilot was on the tail of Hamazono’s plane when he was ordered to rendezvous with his squadron, flying off suddenly. Hamazono has written to the American pilot to express how grateful he is to have been able to survive the war.
 | ||
 |
| |
 | ||
Read about the making of WINGS OF DEFEAT >>
Get the DVD >>
