Word: fuchida
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
MIDWAY, THE BATTLE THAT DOOMED JAPAN (266 pp.)-Mitsuo Fuchida & Masatake Okumiya-U.S. Naval Institute...
Come Out & Fight. In this first complete Japanese account of the battle of Midway to be published in the U.S., Former Captain Mitsuo Fuchida, who led the bombing attack on Pearl Harbor and now preaches in Japan as a Christian missionary, evokes the long-forgotten months when the Imperial Navy was top dog of the Pacific. The Midway invasion fleet that he describes numbered more than 200 ships, the mightiest yet assembled by the Japanese. Proud in the van rode the powerful, fast carrier attack force that had spread destruction from Pearl Harbor to Ceylon. Its bonus of strength...
...night the force sailed Author Fuchida was knocked out of his air command by an emergency appendectomy. But early on the morning of June 4, he climbed shakily to the flight deck of the flagship Akagi to see his boys launch the first strike on Midway. He watched the carriers easily brush off first retaliatory attacks by land-based Marine and Army planes. Then: "A lookout screamed 'Hell-divers!' I looked up to see three black enemy planes plummeting toward our ship. Some of our machine guns managed to fire a few frantic bursts at them...
...well aware, in hindsight, that U.S. code crackers found out Japan's plans in advance. Fuchida and his coauthor, another officer who survived the disaster, quote U.S. Naval Historian Samuel Eliot Morison's verdict that Midway was "a victory of intelligence." They have practically nothing good to say for their leaders' performance. They find the Imperial Navy's intelligence "ineffective." its plan "faulty," its technology backward (only the U.S. had radar at Midway), its security procedures far slacker than before the Pearl Harbor attack. In the first week of June 1942, they say, all Japanese suffered...
...Mitsuo Fuchida, 51, onetime Japanese navy airman who directed the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and later became a Christian convert and missionary (TIME, Nov. 17), paid Hawaii a return visit last week. "This time," he told reporters, "I come not with orders from Tokyo but from a higher command: God." When he spoke of a wish to lay a wreath on the bombed-out hulk of the U.S.S. Arizona, which still holds the bodies of 1,092 U.S. Navymen below decks, the Honolulu Advertiser editorialized: "Hawaii will listen with interest to what Captain Fuchida has to say, but Hawaii believes...