It is also worth noting that the
Sun article contradicts its own headline. According to the story in the
Sun, the officer in question was asking air crew how they would feel about a suicide mission--but the headline alleges that pilots have been told to prepare for suicide missions, and that is an intentional misrepresentation on the part of the newspaper.
Nevertheless, people's attitudes can vary significantly based upon a perception that an act is noble or despicable. At the beginning of the Second World War, Colin Kelly was alleged to have dived his aircraft into the stacks of the Imperial Navy battleship
Haruna. This, however, was not true:
[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Kelly][b]Wikipedia[/b][/url] wrote:On December 10, 1941, Kelly's plane lifted off from Clark Field in the Philippines. During its bombing run, Kelly's bomber hit the Japanese cruiser Ashigara. On its return flight the bomber came under attack by Zeros, one of which was piloted by famed Japanese flying ace Saburo Sakai. Kelly stayed at the controls of the badly damaged aircraft so that the surviving crew members could bail out. Just after the last crew member escaped the plane exploded. Early reports misidentified the Ashigara as the battleship Haruna, and also mistaknely reported that he had crashed his plane into the smokestack of the Haruna, becoming the first suicide pilot of the war.
The legend of Colin Kelly and a suicide attack was so persistent that it was still being taught in high school history classes in the U.S. when i was a student, 20 years after the event. Kelly was considered a hero--while the subsequent attack of
kamikazes against American shipping at Saipan and Okinawa was condemned as the action of a brutal and barbaric people who did not value human life. A classic example of Luther's conundrum about whose ox has been gored.
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