Interesting. I had no idea about that particular book, but it is indeed curious that the U.S did not anticipate the use of kamikaze attacks.
However, perhaps the idea was a bit too strange to accept, since the U.S. inherited many cultural precepts of honor from European countries, where suicide was seen as the cowardly way out and forfeiture of a chance to reclaim honor by way of restitution and/or penance, whereas the Japanese considered suicide a means of atonement for wrongs committed against family, their own conscience, or, in feudal times for vassals, failure to honor one's obligations to their daimyo (i.e. - feudal lords), and thus saw suicide as means of retaining honor by way of what their culture deemed the ultimate penance/restitution.
Personally, I'm not surprised the cultural side was not anticipated (or fully considered), but also from a military standpoint it probably far too alien to comprehend treating perfectly good aircraft and especially their pilots as expendable. In fact, in my view, the preservation of life where possible became more and more entrenched in Western military doctrine after World War I (though the American Civil War had already given the U.S. a precedent for desiring this) due to the excessive losses of manpower and the wake up call of just how dead modern weaponry could render soldiers en masse, especially since military leaders on all sides sustained horrific losses to machine guns, chemical weapons, and had learned that using Victorian-era tactics on modern battlefields with modern weapons of destruction was nothing less than throwing sheep before wolves.
As a result, it was a tendency of Western military leaders not to regard their forces as expendable, but since the Japanese had a long cultural history of honorable death and preferring to fight to the last man, it's no surprise that the dissonance in context had the U.S shocked, mostly because even if they knew it was possible, it just seemed too crazy to believe.
However, perhaps the idea was a bit too strange to accept, since the U.S. inherited many cultural precepts of honor from European countries, where suicide was seen as the cowardly way out and forfeiture of a chance to reclaim honor by way of restitution and/or penance, whereas the Japanese considered suicide a means of atonement for wrongs committed against family, their own conscience, or, in feudal times for vassals, failure to honor one's obligations to their daimyo (i.e. - feudal lords), and thus saw suicide as means of retaining honor by way of what their culture deemed the ultimate penance/restitution.
Personally, I'm not surprised the cultural side was not anticipated (or fully considered), but also from a military standpoint it probably far too alien to comprehend treating perfectly good aircraft and especially their pilots as expendable. In fact, in my view, the preservation of life where possible became more and more entrenched in Western military doctrine after World War I (though the American Civil War had already given the U.S. a precedent for desiring this) due to the excessive losses of manpower and the wake up call of just how dead modern weaponry could render soldiers en masse, especially since military leaders on all sides sustained horrific losses to machine guns, chemical weapons, and had learned that using Victorian-era tactics on modern battlefields with modern weapons of destruction was nothing less than throwing sheep before wolves.
As a result, it was a tendency of Western military leaders not to regard their forces as expendable, but since the Japanese had a long cultural history of honorable death and preferring to fight to the last man, it's no surprise that the dissonance in context had the U.S shocked, mostly because even if they knew it was possible, it just seemed too crazy to believe.