WAR WITHOUT MERCY

James Bowell, signalman third class, was standing on the bridge of his ship when the kamikazes came. "The sky was full of airplanes," he recalls, flown by pilots bent on killing as many Americans as possible at the sacrifice of their own lives. It was April 6, 1945, and Bowell's ship, the minesweeper Defense, was part of a picket line protecting the American invasion fleet off Okinawa. A kamikaze plane came right at the Defense, but at the last instant it tilted its wings and flew right behind the ship's smokestacks. "I was staring right at the pilot," recalls Bowell. "He had a look of absolute terror. It was 'Errr, what am I doing?'" One wing of the Japanese plane clipped a gun tub amidships, sending the plane cartwheeling into the water. Miraculously, the pilot bobbed to the surface. "I want that pilot alive!" shouted the captain, Cmdr. Gordon Abbott. "Don't shoot!" cried the officer of the deck. But machine gunners had already opened up, blasting the pilot as he floated in the water.

Most kamikazes looked forward to their fate. Toshiharu Konada, at the age of 82 a distinguished gray-haired man, recalls his feelings from long ago in an interview with NEWSWEEK. Konada was to be an underwater kamikaze, trained to ride and steer a torpedo with 3,000 pounds of explosives into the side of an American ship. The human torpedoes were called kaiten--literally, "turning of the heavens"--built to save a nation at the edge of ruin. When Konada was given his orders to die in March 1945, "it was the happiest day of my life," he recalls. "Excitement filled from the bottom of my spine through my head. I was not afraid of dying at all. I thought my life could save many other people from dying." He was spared when the Americans dropped two atom bombs, ending the worst war in the history of mankind, on Aug. 15, 1945, 60 years ago.

A willingness to die is nothing new in warfare. Men have given their lives and commanders have willingly sacrificed their men since they were fighting with stones and spears. But no nation has ever intentionally, methodically sacrificed its soldiers on the scale of Japan in World War II, and no nation has ever responded more purposefully or with such overwhelming force as the United States. Americans remember World War II as the Good War and its veterans as the Greatest Generation. But especially in the Pacific, where America was up against an island empire that refused to give in short of death, it was a brutal, vicious war.

Thanks in part to the film "Saving Private Ryan" and a series of moving anniversary celebrations, Americans tend to focus on D-Day and the liberation of Europe from Nazi rule. But a bloodier, more brutal battle was fought at Okinawa between April and June 1945, and that engagement, which cost some 12,000 American and 200,000 Japanese lives, was a mere skirmish compared with the carnage that would have been wreaked by an invasion of Japan, scheduled to begin in the fall.

Don Dencker, an Army infantryman who carried a mortar on Okinawa, was shocked to see that the captain played by Tom Hanks in "Private Ryan" wore his captain's bars on his helmet at D-Day. At Okinawa, says Dencker, "we stripped our insignia, including the red crosses on medics." Captains and medics just made for more tempting targets. "It was a war without mercy. It was kill or be killed--no prisoners," Dencker, now 80, recalls to news-week. "Our chaplain carried an M-1 rifle, and he used it."

As Americans sink into a dirty war in Iraq, it is worth recalling the depths to which both sides plunged in the final days of World War II. Japan knew that it could not win, so it tried to bleed the United States and break its resolve. America merely redoubled its fury and began burning Japan, city by city. Recently, NEWSWEEK interviewed veterans on both sides of this grotesque endgame. Their recollections are appalling and instructive about the way in which men and women deal with all-out war.