Author of At War With The Wind Featured at Navy Memorial

David Sears will Discuss and Sign His New Book Followed by a Q&A

Wednesday, November 11, 2009, 12:00 NOON
Free and open to the public

Part of the Navy Memorial’s “Authors on Deck” Series of Navy-related Book Lectures. David Sears will present his new book, At War With The Wind, followed by Q&A and book signing.

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 is the first book to recount in nail-biting detail what it was like to experience an attack by Japanese kamikazes.  Born of desperation in the face of overwhelming material superiority, suicide attacks—by aircraft, submarines, small boats, and even manned rocket-boosted gliders—were capable of inflicting catastrophic damage, testing the resolve of officers and sailors as never before. From carrier USS St. Lo, the first U.S. Navy vessel sunk by an orchestrated kamikaze attack, to USS Henrico, a transport ship that survived the landings at Normandy only to be sent to the Pacific and struck by suicide planes off Okinawa, and USS Mannert L. Abele, the only vessel sunk by a rocket-boosted piloted glider during the war, these unforgettable stories reveal, as never before, one of the most horrifying and misunderstood chapters of World War II.

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, when suicide as a weapon remains a perplexing and terrifying reality.

DAVID SEARS is a New Jersey-based historian author and speaker.  His early career included service as a U.S. Navy officer with duty aboard the destroyer USS Gearing and as an advisor to the Vietnamese Navy during the Vietnam conflict.  This is his second book.