Russell Spurr

Russel Spurr’s “A Glorious Way to Die” chronicles the final sortie of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s pride, the battleship Yamato. Inter-weaved in this narrative are the concurrent events happening in the U.S. fleet that was assaulting Okinawa at the time, as well as the preparations and sorties of the kamikaze suicide pilots at local airbases.
I thought this book would have been better since so many use it as a resource when it comes to the battleship Yamato and it has been recommended to me numerous times. While the last few chapters provide ample and strong descriptions of the sinking of the Yamato on April 7, 1945, I must say that the writing and overall narrative prior to these chapters leave something to be desired.
My main problem with the book is that I find the overall use of sources, style of writing, and integration of details into the narrative, to be suspect. Perhaps this is simply Spurr’s writing style, but the book seems to be based largely around interviews and conversations the author had with former Yamato crew member Masanobu Kobayashi whom he befriended later on in life. The issue is that the book contains dialogue and descriptions of people's thoughts and actions that seemingly nobody could have known about. Additionally, while the book does contain a decent bibliography, most of the sources cited are secondary sources and there are no footnotes or end notes to reference where the author derived his information from. The book is filled with the use of “you are there” vignettes which attempt to add color to the story, but much of the dialogue between people in the book seems stilted and fabricated apart from that which can be directly corroborated with other sources. In other words, the Japanese people speak like westerners and the Americans speak like pulp adventure characters. As a result, the line between fact and fiction in blurred, and it casts doubt on the credibility of the work in my eyes.
Another issue I have with the book is that, the overall narrative seems filled with fluff and not terribly coherent. The chapters jump back and forth between events in the U.S. fleet, a kamikaze air base, Imperial headquarters, and the Yamato herself. The problem is that there is not much to link them together, and apart from the fact that all these events were more or less contemporaneous, I had difficulty in understanding how the description of kamikaze air raids was really pertinent to the sinking of the Yamato. I suppose that the author wanted to make a thematic connection between kamikaze pilots and the final one-way sortie of the Yamato, but the connection is poorly demonstrated.
As a result of the pulpy writing style and the disjointed chapter layout, I began speed-reading the book about halfway through. It was only when I got to the attack on the Yamato that I began reading intently again, and this is where the book was the strongest. The descriptions of the battle, as Yamato comes under three successive waves of air attack from U.S. carrier planes, is where the writing is the best. Spurr dispenses with some of the silly dialogue and needless decription, and instead goes for a more straightforward narrative which gives a decent description of the events.
Overall, Russel Spurr’s “A Glorious Way to Die” was a mediocre read. Given the referencing of this book in so many other bibliographies out there relating to the Yamato, I thought it would have given me more insight into the final months of this particular battleship. While some interesting details were elucidated on, they were few and far between, and I found the writing and quality of research to be too popular in tone. This book may have been groundbreaking when it was published back in 1981, but I feel that there have been better works written on the Yamato in the subsequent 30-plus years we’ve had to research this ship.… (més)

I have a bunch of Korean War books in the “to be read” stack, and this one came up first. Author Russell Spurr is a British journalist; his previous venture into military history was the excellent A Glorious Way to Die, about the death ride of the Yamato during the battle for Okinawa. Although I have some reservations, Enter the Dragon is a fine and thought-provoking book.


Reservations first. This is an old book, written in 1988. It still wasn’t quite clear how Communism was going to end up, and a lot of the intellectual elite of the world were hedging their bets. Thus Spurr writes from a slightly left-of-center position; not egregiously so, but often enough for some tongue-clucking. For example, he repeats the official North Korea claim that they were just responding to South Korean aggression – although Spurr does comment that if the DPRK was responding to an ROK attack, it was extraordinarily well-prepared, and he doesn’t say he accepts the claim. To be fair, Spurr was based in Hong Kong, and if he wanted to keep access to PRC sources he couldn’t be too critical. Next reservation: Spurr is only concerned with the initial PRC response, from about October 1950 to April 1951. The North Korean blitzkrieg that started the war and the slow UN meatgrinder that drove the Chinese and North Koreans to the armistice line only receive overview coverage. Thus, if you want a complete Korean War history you’ll need another book. Finally, Spurr, as a war correspondent, devotes a little too much space to the adventures of war correspondents, especially Maggie Higgins. It seems like a nod to political correctness again; Higgins was the first female war correspondent accredited to the US Army (and was praised for tending wounded during a firefight on the Pusan perimeter); she landed with the Marines at Inchon and was present during the retreat from Chaingjin. Certainly more heroism than I would be capable of. OTOH, this is supposed to be a book about the Chinese in Korea; Spurr never mentions any Americans below officer rank by name and thus singling out a war correspondent for special attention seems out of place.


That being said, Spurr did have unprecedented access to Chinese sources – not only official military, but Chinese veterans who were now overseas and who could thus speak unreservedly about their experiences. If there’s an overarching theme to the book, it’s the danger of believing your own propaganda; the Americans (specifically, Douglas MacArthur) didn’t believe the Chinese would intervene and didn’t believe they could fight and the Chinese (specifically, Mao Zedong) didn’t understand that American economic power really could overcome Chinese fighting spirit and that the Chinese in Korea were not guerillas swimming in a sea of friendly peasants but a more or less organized army that needed to be more or less supplied. You could make an interesting set of parallel lives here. According to Spurr, MacArthur never spent a night in Korea, running the war from Tokyo and expressing condescending incomprehension when his troops were pushed back by “Chinese laundrymen”; Mao, in turn, didn’t understand that the Chinese People’s Volunteers were initially successful because of surprise and captured American supplies and kept demanding (from Beijing) that starving and frostbitten troops with no ammunition continue to push the capitalists and their puppets south.


Spurr is rather more charitable to Mao than he is to MacArthur, which gripes me a little; it’s certainly true that MacArthur was an incandescent excretory orifice, but he was our IEO and thus it’s unsettling to have him dissed by the Brits. (The most cutting remark about MacArthur is a quote from an unnamed officer in the 27th Commonwealth Brigade, who describes him as “…worse than Montgomery.”) Still, Spurr also notes that CPV troops at the front, including officers, called Mao “the schoolmaster”, in reference to his prerevolutionary career and as a subtle criticism of his grasp of military matters; there was still a little room in 1950 for comments about The Great Helmsman that would get you sent to the laogai in, say, 1967 (in fact, a number of Korean war heroes ended up victims of the Red Guards).


The meat of the book, interspersed with discussions of war strategy and international politics, is the sort of narrative familiar from many military histories – Spurr follows a “band of brothers” from different parts of the country; tells their life story, nicknames, feelings, fears, and hopes; describes their heroism in victorious battle; and finishes with their fate. The disconcerting thing is that instead of being from Brooklyn and Ohio and Oklahoma and Oregon they’re from Sichuan and Hunan and Lioning and their names include Big Ears Wong, Fat Belly Wu, Young Kung, and Pig Snout Wu. The account of the ambush and destruction of the U.S. 2nd Infantry Division as the road-bound Americans attempt to retreat along Sunchon Road is especially disturbing, as the Chinese attackers have become familiar while the Americans are just faceless and nameless figures in olive drab dying under Chinese mortar and machinegun fire.


Spurr has plenty of blame to go around. MacArthur’s overconfidence has already been mentioned. Most of the initial US troops assigned to Korea were Japanese occupation forces, who Spurr claims had gone soft (although he concedes that conditions in Japan made training difficult). The US depended too heavily on aerial reconnaissance and did not patrol aggressively; when large concentrations of marching Chinese troops were spotted they were assumed to be Korean refugees (the Chinese took advantage of this assumption to infiltrate in their initial attacks). And American troops were far too dependent on motorization and ended up road bound.


However, Spurr has nothing but praise for the United States Marines, who learn the lesson of Chinese foot mobility (or perhaps never needed to be taught) and seize the high ground along their retreat route from Changjin Reservoir (apparently a more correct spelling than the more familiar Chosin). He also praises Matthew Ridgeway (with perhaps a hint of political correctness, noting Ridgeway’s later criticism of the Vietnam War). Spurr calls Ridgeway a “military genius” for retreating to the open country south of Seoul and then doing what the US Army did best – smothering the overextended CPV with American artillery and air power (well, sometimes it takes a genius to see the obvious).


Fat Belly Wu is shredded by shell fragments and Young Kung is chopped up by a Ma Deuce in January 1951; Big Ears Wong is napalmed in April 1951; we never find out what happens to Pig Snout Wu. Peng Dehuai, portrayed by Spurr as a “people’s general” with a perfect appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of his command, the Chinese People’s Volunteers, is hailed as a hero and is promoted to Marshall in 1955. He made the mistake of expressing mild criticism of the Great Leap Forward 1958 and was stripped of his rank and awards and sent to a laogai in Sichuan. In 1966, he was arrested by Red Guards and repeatedly “interrogated” to unconsciousness in an attempt to get him to confess his “crimes” (which he apparently never did). He died in prison in 1974.


Excellent maps; I had never realized that the original 38th parallel border was exactly that, a straight line along the 38th parallel regardless of rationality (in particular, it left an isolated peninsula in South Korean hands; this is where the DPRK claimed the initial “attack” by the ROK came from). Strategic and tactical maps are also well done, with an appreciation for terrain effects. Recommended with the mentioned caveats.
… (més)

On April 29, 1945, the Japanese battleship Yamato left her anchorage in Kure harbor and headed for Okinawa, accompanied by a single light cruiser and eight destroyers. The official mission of “Special Attack Force 2”—raise as much hell as possible among the American invasion fleet, then beach the ships and join the defense of Okinawa—was strategically irrelevant and tactically dubious. The unofficial mission was clearer. Yamato, the largest battleship ever built, was the flagship and the last significant unit of the once-mighty Imperial Japanese Navy. It was imperative that she go down fighting.

Yamato fulfilled her last obligation on April 7, 1945. Holed by torpedoes and bombs from four waves of American carrier-based aircraft, she rolled over and sank, taking with her all but a few hundred of the more than 3,000 men aboard. Losses to the attackers were 10 planes and 12 men.

Spurr, a British journalist who spent years reporting from East Asia, uses naval records and interviews with survivors to tell the story of the Yamato’s last mission from both sides, putting the reader on the decks of the battleship, at the controls of the attacking aircraft, and in the operations centers of both fleets. The Japanese side of the story occupies roughly two-thirds of the book, which is as it should be: The sinking of the Yamato may have been “just another mission” for many of the American pilots, but for the Japanese it was both a grand gesture of defiance (the same spirit that motivated the kamikaze pilots, expressed on a vastly larger scale) and a final, humiliating defeat

A Glorious Way to Die is far less well-known than the more recent work of James Hornfischer (Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors) and Ian Toll (Pacific Crucible), but it has the same vivid, engrossing quality, and is well worth seeking out.… (més)