CBS News Transcripts
SHOW: CBS Morning News (6:30 AM ET) - CBS
December 9, 2002 Monday
TYPE: Profile
HEADLINE: Museum in the Philippines telling the story of kamikazes during World War II
ANCHORS: SUSAN McGINNIS
REPORTERS: GABY TABUNAR
SUSAN McGINNIS, anchor:
More than 50 years ago, suicide bombers struck the US at Pearl Harbor. Now a museum in the Philippines reveals the untold story of those World War II bombers, the kamikaze. Gaby Tabunar has more on their rise and fall. GABY TABUNAR reporting:
They were the world's first suicide bombers, Japanese pilots in World War II who crashed their planes into American warships. They were called the kamikaze. Every year, Japanese citizens come to the Philippines to remember the young kamikaze pilots who perished in the Pacific. They go to Clark Field, north of Manila, to offer prayers in their memory. It was in a town near this former US base where the kamikaze was organized on October 19th, 1944.
Mr. DANIEL DIZON (Historian): And I was 14 to 15 and we never knew about the kamikaze at that time. It was a very, very secret organization.
TABUNAR: Daniel Dizon is a professional artist and historical researcher. He is the Philippines' foremost expert on the kamikaze. As a young boy during the war, he knew Clark Field and its environs, met many of the Japanese pilots.
Mr. DIZON: They were young, educated. They were not the rank and file Japanese soldiers.
TABUNAR: It wasn't until 1963 when he got interested in the saga of Japanese suicide pilots of World War II. He located historical sites, including the house where kamikaze pilots planned the first suicide missions against American battleships.
This was the airfield from where the first group of kamikaze pilots took off on October 21st, 1944, to launch suicide attacks against the US forces led by General Douglas MacArthur on the central Philippine island of Leyte.
And from pictures sent in from Japan, these unrendered light pencil sketches of the first five Japanese pilots to strike as human bombs against their targets, American warships in the October 1944 Battle of the Leyte Gulf. And this was the Japanese Lieutenant Yukio Seki now known to be the first pilot to die in a kamikaze attack. Seki's suicide dive during the Battle of Leyte Gulf sank the USS escort carrier, Saint-Lo. Kamikaze attacks played a major role in the epic battle of Okinawa in April 1945. Accounts say the US lost more ships and men in that battle than in the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. But in the end, the desperate and daring suicide missions of the kamikaze failed to stem the allied offensive in the Pacific. Gaby Tabunar, CBS News, Manila.
by Editor on December 10, 2002 at 2:12 PM