Perhaps it was not cowardice so much as sagging morale that best explains Kurita’s equivocation and retreat. He and his fellow officers knew better than their civilian countrymen that the war was already lost, and that the high command had tried to hide the truth behind a skein of lies. They could not acknowledge it openly, but the incubus of defeatism was spreading through their ranks. And how could it have been otherwise, when the ludicrously named “Plan Victory” was itself a token of the regime’s defeatism?
