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. ( )

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. ( )

As WW2 was drawing to a close the Yamato set sale on a one way mission to free Okinawa. A well written exploration of both the mindset and stratagey behind the kamikaze attacks at the end of WW2. ( )