It is not so much a history of the ship’s last few days as her imaginings of what must have taken place and of the emotions of the officers and crew. The heart of the account is Morris’ imagining the atmosphere on the ship as it sails to its demise. About 500 of the crew survived at least briefly (about 1 in 6), but Morris ignores them and focuses instead on those who went down with the ship as intended. And in fact the mission made it only about half way to Okinawa before the Yamato and most of its escort were sunk by American torpedo bombers. There not a hope in hell for Yamato, her nine consorts and her patriots of the Second Fleet, except the wan and glorious hope of sacrifice. In this case Morris points out that without air cover, In the overwhelming majority of cases, they did so. It’s widely known that Japanese servicemen were explicitly trained to fight to the death and if necessary to commit suicide in preference to surrendering. With the defence of Okinawa in full swing and even kamikaze pilots and planes running short, Okinawa was the moment for the imperial navy to throw what were almost its last ten ships into its own suicide mission to defend the motherland. For Morris, it is the ship’s last suicide mission that interests her. Yamato in fact served for 34 months in the South China Sea, the Carolines and the Philippines, but none of that is discussed. The book might more correctly have been titled The Sacrifice of the Yamato. She describes herself as inspired by “…the pride and splendour of it all, the undeniable beauty, the excitement of battle, the elegiac calm of defeat.” Despite having served in World War II herself, Morris seems taken with the idea that many servicemen enjoy conflict and sing their way into battle.īattleship Yamato: Of War, Beauty and Irony, Jan Morris (WW Norton, March 2018 Pallas Athene, March 2018) She presents the ship as “…an allegorical figure of war itself, in its splendor and its squalor, its heroism and its waste”. Her account is presented as a “reflection on the meaning of war”. In her most recent work she has undertaken to memorialize the sinking of the Japanese battleship Yamato, a subject which she says has fascinated her since childhood. Now in her 10th decade, it would be understandable if Jan Morris could no longer cope with the amount of research she once so enjoyed.

The 40-Minute War by Janet E. Morris