The district attorney of New York County, Robert Morgenthau, called the other day to say that he’d appreciated the editorial about the Copperheads. It wasn’t just the substance of the editorial that had caught his eye, he said, but the historical tone, and he suggested we take a similar look at the battle of Okinawa.

We perked up because Mr. Morgenthau is an old salt himself, having had a destroyer* torpedoed out from under him and sunk in the Mediterranean and then, in the Pacific, had another destroyer ** torpedoed, but not sunk, and later, when he was still on it, hit by a Kamikaze plane.

“There were 1,900 kamikaze pilots that attacked us at Okinawa,” he said. He said he didn’t want to belittle the significance of the suicide attacks that our side has been taking in Iraq. But neither did he want to forget the scale of the suicide bombers in World War II — not only their scale but their fanaticism.

The way the history is sketched on the World Wide Web is that the idea of the kamikaze attacks formed after a series of American victories — not unlike, we would suggest, the triumph of our coalition forces in the first months of the Battle of Iraq. The Japanese had a string of successes after Pearl Harbor but, as Wikipedia puts it, they were “checked” at the Coral Sea in May of 1942, “defeated” in June at Midway, and “lost their momentum at Guadalcanal.” Our planes outnumbered and outclassed them, particularly the Hellcat and the F4U Corsair.

It was sometime after the battle of the Philippine Sea, where the Japanese lost more than 400 carrier-based aircraft and pilots, that Vice Admiral Onishi decided to form the Kamikaze Special Attack Force composed of suicide bombers. Mr. Morgenthau wired us some excerpts from Ronald H. Spector’s book “At War At Sea: Sailors and Naval Combat in the Twentieth Century,” in which the scale of these attacks is sketched.

The Japanese, Mr. Spector reports, had expended about 1,900 suicide planes at Okinawa alone, sinking 57 of our warships and damaging more than 100 so extensively as to take them out of the war for extended periods. Another 300 ships had some damage. It’s illuminating perspective. Mr. Spector’s report puts at 5,000 the number of our sailors killed, with another 5,000 wounded, in the Okinawa campaign.

They were the heaviest losses of any naval campaign of the war, he notes, and about 30% greater than those at Pearl Harbor. Mr. Spector quotes a postwar analysis as showing that at Okinawa, an astounding 32% of all kamikazes that were able to leave their bases succeeded in hitting one of our vessels, which was what Mr. Spector called seven to 10 times the success rate of conventional sorties. He then offers this paragraph:

“It is ironic that the last and greatest naval encounter of World War II should have become not a contest of technology but a contest of wills. Admiral Onishi and other Japanese leaders believed that Allied fighting men would be shocked and disheartened by the Kamikazes’ determination and disdain for death. Americans were shocked and fearful of the new weapon, but they were not discouraged. One ship followed another on the radar picket stations. The Allies never considered abandoning their conquest of Okinawa or their plans for the subsequent invasion of Japan.”

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What we take to be Mr. Morgenthau’s message in bringing all this to our attention is be not afraid. The current war is not the first in which we have been met with a wave of the most barbaric kind of suicide attacks. The current attacks being launched against us by our Islamist foes are greater than the kamikazes in neither scale nor barbarity, save for the fact that the Islamist enemy has so often aimed not only at uniformed military personnel but at women and children.

The Japanese were every bit as extremist and crazed as the suicide bombers of today seem to us. Yet we eventually fought off and defeated the suicide bombers of World War II. And even, we don’t mind pointing out, went on to have a peaceful and productive relationship with a democratic Japan, while Americans came to enjoy sushi and haiku and Toyotas and the Sony Playstation.

* United States Ship Lansdale

** United States Ship Harry F. Bauer, which was relieved on picket by the United States Ship Callaghan, which in turn was sunk by a suicide bomber, the last American destroyer sunk in the war. The Bauer was awarded a Presidential Unit Citation for its service at Okinawa.