Now that he’s dead, he’s not the enemy anymore. But the captain of the USS Missouri, William Callaghan, announced to the crew: “No, we’re going to give him a proper military burial. When the crew was putting out the fire, the initial reaction had been to hose his remains off the deck. The wreckage spilled onto the deck and amidst that was the pilot’s remains. The bomb on the plane that hit the Missouri did not detonate. There’s a feel-good aspect to this story - very hard to do when you’re talking about kamikaze attacks. The USS Missouri was hit on April 12, 1945, exactly 70 years ago. What makes the USS Missouri an especially relevant venue is that it is to my knowledge only one of two still-existing ships - the other being the USS Intrepid - that were actually hit by kamikaze during the war. You’ve witnessed something very historic, because the exhibit is the first about any kind of Japanese military activity in the modern era ever held outside of Japan with Japanese cooperation - in this case, with the Chiran Peace Museum on the kamikaze in southern Kyushu.
