Monday, February 02, 2009
FRENZIED brainwashed loyalists ready to die for their Emperor, they were manic in their patriotic determination to destroy American shipping.
Their faces fixed in vicious resolution as they speeded downward from the sky, knowing they would die on impact, they were nonetheless madly secure in their conviction that they personified the best of the Samurai and Bushido ethic. Highly skilled suicides in the flower of their youth.
That tends to be the image of Japan’s Kamikaze pilots in the second world war. Just under 2,000 of them dive-bombed US aircraft carriers in the Pacific in the dying days of the conflict.
According to maritime historian Maxwell Taylor Kennedy, the image does not match the reality.
For starters, the kamikaze pilots were not skilled. From the outset, Japan and America had taken sharply opposing approaches to the training of their pilots. The Americans ordered an intensive fifteen month training programme for 6,000 pilots. The Japanese initially trained only 100 pilots a year, creating a skilled elite. The Americans pulled their ace pilots off the front line to train the next waves of aviators. The Japanese left their best in the cockpit. The end result was a continuous enrichment of America’s air war capacity and a matching diminution in Japan’s.
By 1944, the huge aircraft carriers of the United States were all over the Pacific, destroying Japanese aircraft in relentless numbers.
"American tactical success was due to the new, well-supplied American aircraft, flown by highly trained pilots and delivered through the mobility of the fast carriers," writes Kennedy, in Danger Hour, his just-published account of the crippling of the USS Bunker Hill and the Kamikaze pilot who dive-bombed her.
Japan knew it was not going to win the war. But it was determined not to surrender, and to inflict as much damage as it could. Hence the kamikazes. Taylor makes it sadly clear that they were volunteers in name only — the moral and actual consequences of a refusal to join the suicide squads were unconscionable. They didn’t have to be trained to survive — like Mohammed Atta’s Twin Towers terrorists 60 years later, they needed to be able to take off and to keep their eyes open and focussed as their plane dived on the target.
Because they had failed to train their pilots to the level achieved by the Americans, they had effectively lost the first part of the air war. Because doomsday now loomed, the young pilots still alive were expendable. For decades after WWI, they were remembered in the West as little more than scary stereotypes. Taylor’s scrupulously researched book frees them from movie type-casting and shows them as 20 and 21-year-olds who loved flying, reading, poetry, their families and their country. But it also hammers home the fact that when a nation or a people has been backed against a wall and faces either economic or physical destruction, their rulers, despite the best of intentions, tend to lose their connectedness to human realities.
On the face of it, no link exists between the Kamikaze pilots of WWII and the workers sitting in the showrooms of Waterford Glass. The fact is that the same odd gaps in logic are in play.
One of those gaps in logic is the ceding — if not the willing hospital-passing — of responsibility to the officer on the spot. Who, in the case of Waterford Glass, is a receiver who must wish he had caught any job other than one which makes an entire community, never mind an entire workforce, hate him. God love him, the receiver is just doing his job. He’s like the flight commanders who ordered the Kamikazes into their cockpits: in the business context within which he finds himself, no alternative presents itself. His frame around the matter is necessarily constrained.
Enter — we must hope — the Government.
Mindfulness of the context wider than the local business context is the job of Government. The Cabinet provided guarantees to depositors in banks. They nationalised Anglo-Irish bank. They took these actions in the interests of the wider good, to ensure the survival of the banking system, and to protect Ireland’s standing within the international financial community. Yet the Government which intervened in private sector business seems to have no sense that it could or should intervene in the Waterford Glass situation.
Now, doesn’t that tell us something about our sense of what it is to be Irish? Here’s a business which, with an hiatus in the middle, goes back to the eighteenth century. Here’s a business which created chandeliers and awards for historic sites and international sporting events. Here’s a business which, for generations, has marked the milestones in the life of individuals, families and companies.
Generations of blowers and cutters in Waterford learned to capture light, to create artefacts so beautiful that to hold one is a sensual experience. Long before cleverality created internationally recognised brands like Kerrygold (based, as Tony O’Reilly observed, on a reference to a county which has precious few cows), Waterford Glass was a global reference. The factory itself became part of the mental maps of tourist-transporters, bringing millions of visitors to the sunny south-east who might never, otherwise, have set foot in it. Watching the craftspeople in action was, for many visitors to this country, the highlight of their time in Ireland.
Any business which closes throws people out of their jobs and has other consequences, including damage to the local economy and — on occasion — the bringing down of related enterprises, such as caterers and suppliers. Every enterprise, large or small, which ceases to trade as a result of the economic meltdown, leaves behind it a filigree of inter-related family and community sadnesses. In the case of new, young companies, the 20-somethings hand back the keys to their home and head for another county or another country. In the case of long-established companies, older employees find themselves beached after 30 or 40 years of daily life within a kind of extended family.
Waterford Glass is not unique in the devastation caused by its closure. Waterford Glass IS, however, unique in its marvellous straddling of the line between art and craft, in the precious fragility of its pieces, in its refinement of skills tracing back past centuries and millennia, in the capacity of its output to stand for what is best and most beautiful in Ireland, past and present.
The Government may have been obliged to nationalise Anglo, but — paradoxically — none of us feel that it’s ours. Waterford Glass, on the other hand, has ALWAYS been ours. Our names weren’t on the list of shareholders, but we owned a bit of it, nonetheless.
Let us not, in this recession, lose our connectedness to all that Waterford Glass represents.
Standing by while we lose an aspect of the best of ourselves is Kamikaze thinking.
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