At War with the Wind The Epic Struggle with Japan's World War II Suicide Bombers

Drawing from hundreds of interviews with WWII veterans who survived Japan’s terrifying kamikaze strikes, acclaimed author and former U.S. Navy Officer David Sears vividly portrays what it was like to experience this tactic, capturing the real-life dramas behind America’s first confrontation with the psychology and devastating impact of suicide warfare.

In the last days of World War II, a new and baffling weapon terrorized the United States Navy in the Pacific. To the sailors who learned to fear them, the body-crashing warriors of Japan were known as “suiciders”; among the Japanese, they were named for a divine wind that once saved the home islands from invasion: kamikaze.

Told from the perspective of the men who endured this horrifying tactic, At War with the Wind is the first book to recount in nail-biting detail what it was like to experience an attack by Japanese kamikazes. Acclaimed author David Sears draws on personal interviews and unprecedented research to create a narrative of war that is stunning in its vividness and unforgettable in its revelations.

This is the candid story of a war within a war—a relentless series of furious and violent engagements pitting men determined to die against men determined to live. Its echoes resonate hauntingly at a time of global conflict, especially when suicide as a weapon remains a perplexing and terrifying reality.

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David Sears is a New Jersey-based author, historian, and former Navy officer. His acclaimed military history narratives include Pacific Air, Such Men as These, and The Last Epic Naval Battle, and he has written for Aviation History, Military History Quarterly, Naval History, Smithsonian Air & Space, Smithsonian Digital, VFW Magazine, Vietnam, and World War II magazine. He served as a U.S. Navy officer with extensive sea duty aboard a destroyer and a tour of duty as an in-country advisor during the Vietnam conflict. He appears as a commentator on the History Channel and has spoken frequently before military and civic groups such as Chicago’s Pritzger Military History Library, New York’s Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum, and New Orleans’s National World War II Museum.