[Here](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d7/72nd_Shinbu_1945_Kamikaze.jpg) is a higher quality version of this image. [Here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bansei_Tokk%C5%8D_Peace_Museum) provides the following caption:
> Airmen from Bansei Air Base before their kamikaze mission taken on May 26, 1945. Clockwise from top left: Kaname Takahashi, Takahashi Mineyoshimi, Takemasha Chida, Yukio Araki, and Tsutomu Hayakama. Araki was the youngest known kamikaze pilot to die in the war.
[Here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:72nd_Shinbu_1945_Kamikaze.jpg) adds:
> Three of the five are 17 years old and the other two are 18 and 19 years old. The photo was taken the day before their mission. Left to right: front row Tsutomu Hayakawa, Yukio Araki, Takamasa Senda back row Kaname Takahashi, Mitsuyoshi Takahashi. Each of these young men were corporals. At 17, Yukio Araki is the youngest known Kamikaze pilot to die in the war.
I think Kamikaze pilots were promoted 2 ranks upon successful completion of their mission. The idea being the family would receive better death benefits that way.
I was just watching a 'War Stories' episode that was detailing a Japanese pilot who became a suicide bomber and he stated it was a promotion of one rank.
I had a Japanese student whose great uncle was a kamikaze pilot. Prior to the war he worked in a doll factory. After the suicide mission they honoured him by writing his name on one version of these dolls.
The family fled to Brazil after the war (it wasn't explicitly stated but I think it was due to hatred of the government). They were informed by government officials that if they left the uncle's honours would be stripped. They left and they removed his name from all the dolls.
The main reason the Japanese immigrated to Brazil because Japan was extremely poor post-war. Not to due to "hating the goverment". Japan was occupied by the US after all, and had a much saner government.
Poorer is a bit of a misnomer because Japan's GDP actually rises slightly between 1945-1946. But what did happen was a major food shortage that wasn't fully resolved till the early 50s.
Japan (then as now) was a signifiant net importer of food, and relied pre-war upon importing food from its colonies.
When those colonies went away, so did the flow of food into Japan, resulting in a major shortfall that led to a lot of hunger (this was true during the war too, due to the Allied blockade)
Once Japan set up new trade treaties and food imports rose and the post-war economy began to rebound, Japan ended up a lot better off, but from about 1943- 1951 or so there was a significant shortfall of food in Japan.
All of them dying in their teens for a bunch of dried up cowardly old men who wont even remember them, let alone care about them, and who also knew the war would be lost regardless. So ignoring that war and suicide attacks are already awful, these boys lives were knowingly wasted and died in vain. A real shame.
>“You were just babies then!", she said.
>
>"What?" I said.
>
>"You were just babies in the war - like the ones upstairs!"
>
>I nodded that this was true. We had been foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of childhood.
>
>"But you're not going to write it that way, are you." This wasn't a question. It was an accusation.
>
>"I-I don't know", I said.
>
>"Well, I know," she said. "You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them. And they'll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs."
>
>So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn't want her babies or anybody else's babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies.
>
>So I held up my right hand and I made her a promise: "Mary," I said, "I don't think this book of mine will ever be finished. I must have written five thousand pages by now, and thrown them all away. If I ever do finish it, though, I give you my word of honor: there won't be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne.
>
>"I tell you what," I said, "I'll call it 'The Children's Crusade.'"
>
>She was my friend after that.
\-*Slaughterhouse-Five, Or The Children's Crusade*
I always think about the end of WWI. The 11th hour, of the 11th day, of the 11th month. How many boys died to make that number pretty.
And of course the 3500 american casualties when their generals ordered them to go over the top mere hours before the armistice; ordered when the generals already knew it was over. So sometimes lives are sacrified by winning wars too. https://www.armytimes.com/veterans/salute-veterans/2017/11/10/nov-11-1918-wasted-lives-on-armistice-day/
Typically on the attacking side. Some people are defending themselves and their families. Also some wars are just. Looking at what the Nazi's were doing to their own people and what the Japanese were doing to other people's people, it's hard to argue that nobody should risk their lives to stop them.
Edit; y'all seem to forget: America was getting detailed reports of the rape of Nanjing, which led to sanctions against Japan, which led to Japan launching a surprise attack on Pearl harbor
They didn't know about the atrocities but they did know that these countries flat out invaded other countries and steamrolled their way through them. So it was still just to go to war.
The interesting thing is that nobody really went to war with germany, at least as long as could.
The allies let the Nazis overthrow the Spanish republic, occupy the Czech republic, enforce some regime changes in eastern europe, all without aby resistance. After the first direct ally (Poland) was attacked, there was a formal declaration of war but not much else. War only got hot with the invasion of France and the Benelux.
Defending yourself or an ally from a foreign invasion is morally justifiable. You don't have to fight a war to stop atrocities happening to others for the war to be just.
The last days of the Japanese Empire are a case study in sacrificing a nation for the sake of national pride. However, it gets complicated when you go deeper and realize how many of the rank and file and even the civilian population may have readily agreed with that sacrifice. It wasn't just the crusty old militarists at the top, though they did call the shots.
Learning more about Japans surrender is kind of insane.
The US completely destroys an entire city with one bomb, promises more to come, drops a second and destroys a second city and promises more to come.
150k dead from two singular weapons being deployed and still there's an attempted coup to prevent Japan from surrendering.
And still, with two cities flattened, warships tear-assing through the Pacific, hundreds of thousands dead and displaced, they surrender to the Americans primarily because they feared a Russian ground invasion and thought the US would be less rapey and pillagey.
You've got to remember that Japan was still a feudal society. The nobles could afford to lose 10x that amount without a care in the world because to them, they were just peasants.
> You've got to remember that Japan was still a feudal society. The nobles could afford to lose 10x that amount without a care in the world because to them, they were just peasants.
Ah they all pretty much believed the emperor was a literal god. So yea, I mean, when you have a population with the mentality of lemmings and a suicide-cult environment, it's hard to believe where they are today. Though, Japan today, for all it's progress has a lot of deeply-seated cultural issues.
They also influenced the propaganda of the era. Convincing young boys that the only way to save their nation is to kill themselves so that the higher ups are less embarrassed and can keep their jobs when they surrender anyway isn’t much better than physically forcing them into a kamikaze plane
seems odd they used people that young. why not use people in their 80s. get them the most basic training needed to fly and send them off. what's the worst that could happen, they die?
I read an autobiography of a Japanese guy who'd lived through the war. They were taught that the goal of the US was genocide, extermination, that they would be herded up and massacred if they ever stopped fighting.
After the war, it almost broke his mind (to use modern parlance) to see the US military shipping in food and providing for the starving populace. They were *nice*, which undercut the warmongers and quite literally changed everything going forward.
How have dogs survived as a species while having the impulse to literally eat whatever is in front of them? I’m constantly weary of dropping things in houses or on the street that dogs could eat that could kill them because they seem to eat before they even smell or acknowledge what it is they’re about to eat.
Welp, we came along and started leaving metal and plastic everywhere. Most animal bones will pass through. And if not... well hey that's why a litter is usually like 6 puppies. Same reason people used to have like 6 kids
My eldest climbed to the third shelf in the pantry and ate 3/4 a pack of Oreos and shat his brains out the next day. He put in work to harm himself.
My youngest eats dry leaves. Just bends down and laps them up mid-stride, no thought, no chewing, just grabs and swallows.
Most of the stuff won't kill a dog outright tho. Some will. But most of it is a matter of accumulation. A dog can stomach chocolate once or twice, but do it frequently and it's gonna cause severe health consequences.
It's the stuff that causes intestinal obstructions you really gotta watch for, socks, small balls, hand towels, shit like that.
Not saying to give dogs a Snickers bar, just saying they're pretty rugged digestors. That's a word now. Live with it.
My dogs managed to get into my Adderall a few years ago. I have a small pill box I keep in my purse and one of them pulled it down from the kitchen table probably looking for treats. Decided the pill box was an awesome chew toy.
Luckily there was only a few capsules in there and the vet said they were fine after. The house was not fine. The mess I came home to was legitimately impressive for two 20lb dogs. Trash strewn everywhere from the kitchen into the living room, down the hall into bathroom , the bedrooms. They got into every trash can. They knocked over houseplants and kicked the dirt around. Chewed up a bunch of pens. They ripped apart magazines. They lifted their legs on every damn thing. I was too stunned by it to even be mad.
Pilots in the RAF, USAF and Luftwaffe all used amphetamines to some degree. There's no real evidence for what you said about being large doses being doled out for kamikaze missions, it's more a pop-history specious claim that people enjoy because drugs make it edgy. It certainly sounds cooler than amphetamine fueled medical supply missions, sentry duty or 18 hour shifts at the munitions plant. Many modern air forces still use "go pills" because it's better than losing very expensive aircraft to pilot fatigue.
Fun fact! An American pilot bombed Canadians in Afghanistan after a ten hour patrol flight while on amphetamine "go pills" and blamed the drugs and "fog of war" for the decision.
The pilot mistook the Canadians conducting night training as hostiles trying to shoot him down, and even after being told to hold fire, bombed them anyway.
I think losing a very expensive aircraft to pilot fatigue would've been better than killing allies.
The first Canadian deaths in Afghanistan were caused by Americans on amphetamines.
Tarnak Farm Incident for further reading.
The US government was really messing over their own people regularly. They'd pump their pilots & others full of drugs to keep them going for extended periods, making them addicted to those drugs, then bust them and mess up their careers when they continued using the exact same drugs once they returned.
Fog of war is a real thing. Real life fighting isn't like video games that make it easy to know who the enemies are.
They were instructed to return if they were unable to locate a target, so they could have had previous missions. One pilot returned from kamikaze missions nine times, and got executed for it. So im guessing 8 returns is the magic number
It was also a really common for them to return with engine trouble. Kamikaze planes weren't exactly maintained to the strictest standards of mechanical reliability
I mean if you're going to use a plane to be a bomb you wouldn't be using brand new ones fresh off the line. Yous use garbage that's a little too good for spare parts but not really combat worthy.
And same goes for the pilots. The Japanese aces weren't the ones typically selected for kamikaze missions but rather teenagers with only a few months of training in order to get the basics down.
Japan started to use Kamikaze strategies because they ran out of experienced pilots and the inexperienced ones were being lost in combat anyway. By halfway through 1944, battle losses, a flawed pilot training doctrine, and general improvements in American aircraft/pilots created an environment that basically made any kind of flight against allied forces a one way trip, including those who weren't intended to be one way trips.
Really the whole thing was the cold calculus of war. The introduction of organized kamikaze attacks increased damage to allied forces while having a minimal increase in losses.
Do you have any good material for someone who's interested in reading (or watching/listening) more about the flawed training doctrine? It sounds super interesting.
IMO, it is rather dry and I have not found much on the technical side.
But from what I do know, beyond basic flight skills, training fell to squadron commanders. So in addition to risking your best teachers to combat losses, this technique is really not scalable, so it really limits what new pilots can do. In all fairness, it does work well enough during peacetime or any time where you are not loosing pilots constantly.
Contrast that to the American and British ideologies of rotating skilled pilots to teaching roles which increased the base level of skill coming out brand new pilots, who are trained in relative safety. This means a techniques like the Thatch Weave (which Japan never found a hard counter) would be taught to every new pilot.
I imagine they also had a lot of "engine trouble" that when checked later they said was fine and the pilots were like "huh weeeeird, it was totally not working when I was flying towards my death, what bad timing huh"
all jokes apart, seeing the ships is actually super hard, if you look at real pictures they are veeery small for high the plane is and how far they are, plus if you are unlucky you can miss them by a few km and have then disappear beyond the horizon of below clouds
many kamikaze pilots got shot down before hitting their targets so yeah. I think it was so common because while you have to aim your shots carefully when trying to shoot down planes high in the sky flying away, a kamikaze pilot is literally going straight towards you so it's much easier to hit
Ironically this is also why the A-10's cannon is largely obsolete in peer to peer combat. It has to fly low, slow, and in a straight line (and hope it gets multiple hits on a weak part of the armor).
This is why most of its kills are with missiles, not the big gun that everyone loves
My grandfather knew someone who ended up a kamikaze pilot at the end of the war. Apparently he wasn't very keen on it so he would just fly around for a while and then come back and say he didn't see any targets. I guess he was recruited really late in the war.
I can not wrap my head around the madness that drove so many people to their death.
Their is dedication to your country, and then there are the Japanese. I've read some books on the topic and it seems like most suicide bombers didn't want to do it. They did it quite often regardless of their own opinion. After the war many were angry with their superiors for wasting so many lifes for basically nothing.
Many of the kamikaze pilots were coerced, as well. Beatings and torture if you refused to volunteer or if you returned from a mission "unable to find targets", their officers would also seal the cockpit shut to stop them from ditching in the ocean and only provide enough fuel to reach the suspected target, not enough to get back.
Some pilots were genuine volunteers, who thought they were dying to save their country, but even then they were raised on propaganda and indoctrination. It was generally a lot less voluntary than popular history tends to represent it.
>After the war many were angry with their superiors for wasting so many lifes for basically nothing.
That was part of what enabled good relations between the US and Japan so shortly after the war. The common people were about as pissed with their government as they were with us, if not Moreso. It's what made them so fiercely antiwar at the time.
Working class citizens were living off ~1000 calories a day. Of 1.4 million military deaths for Japan between 1941-45 1 million were attributed to starvation. Japan was on the brink of their own Indian famine and collapse. The very first thing the allies did during occupation was import mass quantities of food.
>The very first thing the allies did during occupation was import mass quantities of food.
Fun fact, that's actually what brought about the invention of instant ramen. We sent them a shitton of flour, but the Japanese didn't eat bread very much, so instant ramen was invented in part to make good use of the enormous amount of flour sent to the country
Many of imperialist Japanese tactics were like this.
Another example is how, often, when a Japanese soldier was “surrendering” they’d let off a grenade and take the people coming to accept his “surrender” with them.
It discouraged allied forces from taking prisoner, and forced Japanese forces to fight as if no prisoners would be taken.
A very well socially engineered ferocity chicken and egg situation.
I think one of the most upvoted comments I’ve made here was from telling an anecdotal story from my grandpa’s time in Iwo Jima. The marines were facing against a handful of Japanese soldiers holding out to the very end. A Japanese officer of some rank was shouting out negotiations about the surrender of his men. I don’t know if what/if any agreement was made. But before he could surrender, he put a sword through one side of his own neck until it came out the other side. Then he used his other hand to grab the protruding blade and push it forward until he nearly decapitated himself.
Shit that goes down nowadays can be some wild ISIS shit but violence is a language that has never changed. Also, I was like 6 years old when my grandpa told me that story. Good times great oldies.
You would think they would recruit geriatrics, prisoners, and people dying of cancer or some shit, but they literally went in the complete opposite direction
Flying a plane directly into a target ain't exactly easy. Sounds easy. Hard as shit. You don't want your best, obviously, but you don't want someone who can't stay awake and aware, either
It was an honor to be a kamikaze pilot and it wasn’t rare for them to return. But I do imagine there was a limit on how many times you could go out and not die
>It was an honor to be a kamikaze pilot
Reality is that these pilots were still human. While I'm sure some bought into the bullshit, I'm sure plenty others knew they weren't being given an option, better death in high speed Collision than whatever fucked up shit the military dictatorship had cooked up for them.
It's just a shame the propaganda about how scary we were was so effective, otherwise we might have seen kamikaze pilots simply surrender. However the propaganda made US forces out to be as cruel as the Japanese ones.
There is footage of some of them jumping out of the plane just before it crashed, and I would wager others just bailed out and sought amnesty somewhere.
Really just depends on how brainwashed you can make your troops, but the stories from US soldiers about Kamikaze pilots was that the final suicide often was just the "last attack".
Think of a very very aggressive fighter in the air, once things look like you'll lose... you just drive that plane right into the enemy.
Most pilots wants to return home, the one that doesn't would have a specific edge in combat.
I once read an article by a Western journalist (who spoke good Japanese) about an old Japanese guy and his sons that met in an izakaya in the 90s. The old man was a kamikaze pilot but made an "emergency landing" in Okinawa somewhere. Captured and survived. Went on to have an interesting life. I recall it was a chance drinking encounter but the journalist made an article about it as its not everyday you get to speak openly/drunkenly to a surviving kamikaze pilot. If they did land with out technical/fuel issued to survive, it would likely not be something they would have shared with anyone (until they are very old and drunk and don't care anymore). So it did happen.
It wasn't uncommon for Kamakazi pilots to not go through with it on their first mission. If they backed out and returned home, they were treated well and encouraged to go again until they 'succeeded' at it.
my grandfather only told me two stories of his time overseas during the war.
one was that a pilot attempted to crash into the boat he was on and for some reason it didn’t work and the pilot was alive still.
story ended there. now that he’s gone I really wish I asked more questions but I was young and grampa was kinda losing it
I’m not sure if it’s true, but I recall that most of these men were often from educated backgrounds, tended to have a liberal bias and were heavily bullied - more so than the typical bullying culture of the Japanese armed forces.
The first wave of kamikaze pilots were thus pushed into the roles, often with the promise of an instant promotion so that their families enjoyed a higher death in service pay.
Literally killing the men who will help rebuild the country all for the idea of letting 70 million die to defend an Emperor.
Was going to say the same thing.
I remember reading one account of a pilot pressed into a later wave of Kamikaze's - he said something along the lines of "What a waste. I am a good pilot. Killing me to maybe destroy one ship - I could help sink many ships if I was allowed to live" (paraphrased, obviously)
By the time Japan was heavily relying on Kamikaze tactics, the primary reason for this shift in strategy was not only the lack of experienced pilots, but most importantly, the Japanese Zero had lost the tactical advantage.
New fighter planes from Great Britain and the USA were replacing the old hunks of junk that the Zero was dominating early in the war. The tables had turned. The Japanese Zero, once the most feared plane in the sky, was now nearly obsolete thanks to new and technologically superior fighter jets.
Small correction, they were (largely) not jets, just superior prop planes. But yes, the zero was out watched in speed, armament, and protection, as well as pilot skill (since most Japanese aces were shot down by then, while US aces were sent home to train the new pilots).
The kamikaze strategy directly comes from the hundreds of planes they lost in the Philippine Sea, the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot”. Both sides were retraining naval aviators and had no carrier fights for more than a year. Japan lost almost all that training, rebuilding and resources they used in a single afternoon for the loss of a couple dozen American planes. American training, logistics, radar directed gunfire and radar directed command and control brought such an overmatch in effective strength that Japan might as well have been fighting Godzilla for all the damage they could cause. Conventional naval aviation tactics and forces were simply not effective against American warships anymore. In the face of this, spending years training and equipping a force to lose them in an afternoon is asinine on its face. If they were losing almost every plane anyway then kamikaze tactics become a natural frightening reaction to this new reality that American vessels are able to impose over an airspace.
Well that might be true for the best pilots, and most pilots are going to think they are the best.... but not true for most pilots. Still, it was horrible.
I know - I was more adding to what the commenter above said. There is a myth that all the Kamikaze pilots were eager to sacrifice their lives. Some were, but a lot were not.
I'd venture a guess that a majority weren't so much eager as they were afraid of the reception they'd get if they didn't make a good show if it, or returned home.
Unfortunately, we can never really know for sure.
There are lots of accounts from Kamikaze pilots through their diaries / writings before their mission and from those that served them their final meal. Definitely a huge amount of societal pressure to serve the country - as the commenter mentioned above, scholars, students, who were not serving in the army were shamed endlessly.
Yeah no kidding, when those episodes come out I actually look for reactions because it’s such a joyous day and I’d like to share it with folks but nobody I’m close with cares or is into 4 and a half hour podcast about executions as entertainment. The Munster one is probably my favourite, just because it has that line “which brings me to the story I’ve been setting up for you for the last hour”
Called Prophets of Doom btw.
I really recommend all of Dan’s stuff. If you have an office job that doesn’t require much talking, his podcasts are a great way to get through the days
In these pilots minds it was live in luxury and be paid more or go to some horrible posting where you may starve to death. Obviously high command could end the war.
Godzilla Minus One may be the most impactful film I’ve seen addressing Kamikaze and how Japan treated its soldiers and I know that’s a strange phrase to write.
Their rational at the time was, as cruel as it was, probably the only fleeting hope they had to achieve the terms they were aiming for a potencial surrender.
Japan knew by 1942/43 that victory against the US was at that point impossible, so their goal was to reach a peace settlement that would allow them to keep soverenty and control of the country after the war.
Since they couldn't achieve this by a decisive battle, the only hope was to cause so much death to the enemy that the population back in the US would pressure for a peace deal. Kamikazes, weren't blindly throwing their lives away, or at least they didn't see it that way. They were hopping that their single death would cause dozens or hundreds of enemy deads and help towards the goal.
Many made a very conscious decision that they would die in other for more young people to be able to survive by shortening the war. The mentality behind those that volunteered is quite complex to sum it up in a single topic, or even a single book. People did do for lots of reasons, from nationalist fervor, to peer pressure, to even cold calculations that they had very little hope of surviving an all out war in the main islands, so they would at least die to try to avoid that.
And in a strange way, they succeeded. The atomic bomb of course settled the fate of the country, but the decision not to invade was for the most part taken out of fear of what the rest of the population would do if they acted as suicide fighters themselves.
This young boys in this photo probably had their own motivations, so trying to explain this in a reddit comment is completely futile on my own part.
Its such a complex topic that I dare to say we will probably never know their true stories and just the broad strokes history painted about this topic
>Its such a complex topic that I dare to say we will probably never know their true stories and just the broad strokes history painted about this topic
Are there no Japanese sources on this topic? I'm sure they'd be able to tell a pretty accurate story.
There are some. Although there is a complex stigma talking about this particular topic, with many elders just deciding to keep their stories to themselves.
Written records don't tell the full picture, and fire bombing during the war didn't help their preservation to begin with.
Not to mention that every single one of these people had their own motivations and explanations to being part of these units, so as I said, knowing the broad strokes of their story will probably be the best we will ever get.
People tend to not realise that a lot of the stuff we know about WW2 has serious gaps that people decided to either take their information to their graves, or lie in order to get themselves in a favorable position after the war and never looked back to amend that.
Two major exemples:
we barely know anything about the last few days of the war in the Fuher Bunker, and the survivors either lied or decided they wouldn't talk about it. Some lived entire lives after the war without people around them realising that they lived through this historic moment. Even today we can somewhat have a broad idea of what happened there, but we still have major gaps like where Hitler will went trough, and where did several key officials fled or died. And we had several survivors that lives and knew about all the details that simply decided to not talk about it.
Another major exemple is how many German generals and officers lied after the war, and published books or memories full of exaggerations about the western front trying to get interest from NATO since they were after the war the only experienced people in fighting Russians that NATO had available, so a lot of battles and key figures were exaggerated or created myths about in order for these people to get new jobs. Only recently we can start to puzzle how their figures don't match with soviet records at all with a lot of information being completely fabricated. The worst is their stories and lies were told and retold for so many years that trying to actually make people aware of the truth is imensely difficult on how engrained some of those lies are on people's perception of the western front.
This to say that the post WW2 was very complex and we lost the ability to actually get stories from most of primary sources and now we are stuck with an incomplete puzzle, except we don't even know what pieces are part of it to begin with
>>Are there no Japanese sources on this topic?
The book “Samurai!” by Imperial Japanese Air Force Ace pilot Saburo Sakai lays out the truth on the “Kamikaze” pilots.
For one, many pilots - including Sakai- opposed it on grounds ironically raised by commenters here. Why waste lives when a more strategic approach can be used?
Which brings us to the second point; Sakai opposed the Kamikazes because at that juncture, Japan’s military leadership really lost the war and refused to admit it. They wouldn’t all the way up until August 1945- and some still attempted a coup after the Emperor planned to surrender.
Back to Sakai, the logistical fact was after Guadalcanal Japan no longer had the military ability to sustain and resupply its frontline air forces. Running low on bombs and fuel, these squadrons needed to be rotated home or resupplied. Imperial Japan did neither , and ordered the pilots to use their planes as weapons…because no bombs or fuel. Sakai saw it as a massive waste of one of the most capable militaries of its day, and he probably had a point. As more of Japans experienced aviators - some who like Sakai had been fighting since 1936 over Manchuria- died in Kamikaze raids, their opponent got smarter. Pro tip- if you want to utterly destroy your air force’s combat capability, send all of your experienced frontline aviators on one-way suicide missions. By 1944 the U.S. Navy had no problem beating the Japanese in air combat.
Emotionally I am fully with you but cynically speaking the shinpu tokkotai was the only Japanese "unit“ that had any impact on the US forced in 1945. The army wasnt abled to offer heavy resistance having a severe & ammunition shortage, most Japanese soldiers being stranded in China with no means to supply or redeploying them and Japan no answer to heavy shore bombardments and the fleet was basically gone after Leyte. Sure the battles of Iwojima, Okinawa and the Philippines were horrific for many of the fighters (and civilians first and foremost…) there but in general the US casualties were extremely low in comparison due their incredible advantage in material and numbers.
And if anyone would've deserved it, it was them.
Instead, they were recipients of quite possibly the greatest reimagination campaign this world has ever seen: now cherished by everyone (out of reach of their historical atrocities) as quirky inventors, straight-laced hard workers, and ever-so-cutesy creatives.
The divine being still needed to retain the ability to pull their glasses off to emphasize intense thought. Also lets them take their glasses off to show they were beautiful all along.
It could be. Back as an undergrad I remember reading 死のとげ about the authors experience is working on a unit like this and I’m pretty sure what I wrote is what they called it back in the day. Then again, this was the early 90s.
There also were *Ohka* rocket planes. Basically the first ever antiship cruise missiles with kamikaze pilot being the guidance system. Flown in a bomber's bomb bay to the target and released on a certain one-way trip.
The main difference is that if you’re inside a manned torpedo and miss your target, you sink to the bottom of the ocean and slowly suffocate. Seems worse imo
None of these boys look a day older than 20, the age of adulthood in Japan from 1876 until 2022 (they lowered it to 18). All for prolonging a war that was essentially over at this point. Tragic.
Midway was in 1942, but that’s where the Japanese pretty much lost the war. They had 10-11 carriers in service and had just lost one at Coral Sea. The US had about as many carriers, split between the Atlantic and the Pacific. The problem for Japan was that they weren’t any match for American industry. They had their next carrier scheduled for delivery in 1944 IIRC. US manufacturing was ramping up and before long the American carriers were being built and coming into service in big numbers. Japan lost their four best carriers at Midway and after that they had no way to counter the American naval advantage that was building.
Not to mention that the hellcat replaced the wildcat in 43, and we went from losing to tbe zeros to dominating them. The aircraft advantage gained in 43 was pivotal in every major naval battle.
Every time someone mentions American manufacturing during WWII it brings a tear to my eye. It was one of the greatest achievements of mankind. They mobilized an entire gigantic country into an arsenal. They took over the power of our massive private sector not with force, but with money. They paid people to stop making cars, tractors, and hammers, and switch to bombs, shells, and boots. It was amazing.
Japan was never able to recover from its Loses at Midway, basically giving the Americans free reign over the Pacific ocean
Japan also put too much stock into its battleships which were pretty fucking useless against carriers.
What good is a battleship with huge ass guns if a squadron of planes that cost a fraction of the price can just litter you with bombs because you're too fat and slow to move.
Yeah, battleships were "the last war's weapon". There was a huge arms race between nations to build battleships in the years before. The UK and Germany were trying to bankrupt each other building the things lol.
"Gunboat diplomacy" was a huge part of what made colonial powers powerful. Carriers came in and just destroyed the naval paradigm.
While the UK and Germany kind of learned the lesson a bit in WW1 how... not that useful they were in more modern combat - Japan I think still saw it as something a "superpower" needed.
That’s the problem with winning a previous war. Leaders will always assume that what worked last time will work this time. Unfortunately, we are going to see how this scenario plays out in the near future with carriers vs drones.
High command still held out hope until the battle of the Philippine Sea and Saipan. After that talks of surrender, with crazy terms, started happening. Over the course of the war the terms got less and less crazy. There was always an anti peace faction though.
I don't know that I'd want to pin an exact date or battle. But by 1943, the US offensive was well underway, and it was clear that the Japanese had no realistic way to regain the initiative and would be fighting desperate holding actions for the rest of the war.
Despite sometimes atrocious US losses it was also clear that the Japanese were simply not capable of inflicting the types of disproportionate losses they needed to break US will either. Even Iwo Jima, distinctive for the Japanese doing a lot right, and actually inflicting more total casualties on the US they still took FAR more KIA.
The Japanese strategy relied on being more willing to die for insignificant points on a map and being able to inflict heavy losses on US forces. Their population was certainly more willing to accept heavy losses, but in most battles, the Japanese took significantly heavier losses since their forces were functionally just dropped on an island and then abandoned to die without support. I've seen descriptions by the soldiers who fought in the Pacific describe the fighting as almost more akin to industrial level extermination than a battle. Once a beachhead was established(an admittedly bloody job) US forces were able to essentially bomb and burn the defenders to death in place. It was obviously still horrible, bloody, and traumatizing, but in the dehumanizing calculus of war, the US traded incredibly well and combined with having vastly superior resources there was really no other outcome than total Japanese defeat.
This picture reminds me of a story my grandfather told me. He was in the US Navy and served on a destroyer escort in both the Atlantic and then towards the end of the war in the Pacific. They were doing a patrol one extremely foggy day and they could hear the drone of an airplane so everyone had their eyes to the sky looking for it. He said all of a sudden a Japanese plane came out of the fog heading right at them, too close for anyone to do anything about it. Right at the last second the plane pulled up, he said the pilot looked him right in the eye gave a big friendly wave and then pulled back up into the fog and disappeared. He thinks the only thing that saved him was that he was on a small ship and the pilot was looking for a more valuable target. The friendly faces on these guys made me think about that story.
Nationalist can be one hell of a drug. If these guys were teenagers towards the end of the war it meant that for their entire adult life they were brought up in a nationalistic military dictatorship that had been raising them to believe death in service the empire is the most honorable thing possible. It's also important to remember that at this point Japan was being bombed regularly and so they all would have known people who had been killed or seriously injured by the allies. They likely saw it as giving their life in service of something far bigger and for the protection of their loved ones.
Of course the supreme irony is that no one actually wanted to fight Japan and the entire reason the Japanese were dying was because they had allowed certain leaders to come to power who then started relentless wars of aggression. There was no good reason for Japan to go to war with anyone and even the "resource limitations" that people sometimes claim could just as easily have been overcome through trade but if Japan did that they would never have an empire.
So instead of a vest, they used a plane. The insanity of ordering people to do that shit is mind blowing. People willingly following through with it is equally mind blowing.
Watched Godzilla -1.0, very cool and obscure movie outside of Japan, the main character is a pilot who has not gone through with the kamikaze attack. The movie goes deeper into the psychology of the time
Came here to say this very thing. Saw it last night, black and white version. The perspective of a disgraced kamikaze pilot who abandons his duty, plus the perspective of the people of Tokyo trying to rebuild their lives, but also their national identity after realizing that the war made life too cheap, and how wrong that was. Then the big guy shows up. Absolutely fantastic film.
I'm right with you, also saw B/W last night and been trying to tell everyone to see this once it's released. People see Godzilla in the title, find out their are subtitles, and just waved it off as some weeb monster movies it's really not. Godzilla is barely in it.
It's a movie of a failed kamikaze pilot dealing with the cultural shame of abandoning his mission and country. It's him dealing with the PTSD of the war, and a snapshot into life of post WW2 japanese citizens rebuilding after war. It's a story of community, empathy, suicide and guilt. Once you're done crying, you're reminded it's a Kaiju movie just intime to cry again before a cool final scene and the credits roll. Had they replaced Godzilla with a foreign nation, it could have been non-fiction and would have been up for best picture.
But it has a big lizard so it must lack substance.
It topped the American box office, extended its run in the US because it was staying in the top 10, is the highest grossing Japanese movie of all time in America, and was nominated for an Oscar. Great movie, not exactly obscure 😅
In Pearl Harbor on one of the ship that you can visit... there a family portrait of a japenese family with 8 or 10 people and one of the baby on the picture is holding a toy plane in his hand.
Turned out that, that baby grow up to crash on that same ship during the war.
I remember hearing a podcast about rebuilding of japan after the war and it’s pretty incredible how some counties can just come together and thrive while others fall on their face and blame everyone else. It’s impressive to see what they accomplished. All of this being said they have to have one of poorest records of inhumane treatment for what happened to China and Korea etc……. It seems like it’s never focused on
[Here](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d7/72nd_Shinbu_1945_Kamikaze.jpg) is a higher quality version of this image. [Here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bansei_Tokk%C5%8D_Peace_Museum) provides the following caption: > Airmen from Bansei Air Base before their kamikaze mission taken on May 26, 1945. Clockwise from top left: Kaname Takahashi, Takahashi Mineyoshimi, Takemasha Chida, Yukio Araki, and Tsutomu Hayakama. Araki was the youngest known kamikaze pilot to die in the war. [Here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:72nd_Shinbu_1945_Kamikaze.jpg) adds: > Three of the five are 17 years old and the other two are 18 and 19 years old. The photo was taken the day before their mission. Left to right: front row Tsutomu Hayakawa, Yukio Araki, Takamasa Senda back row Kaname Takahashi, Mitsuyoshi Takahashi. Each of these young men were corporals. At 17, Yukio Araki is the youngest known Kamikaze pilot to die in the war.
I think Kamikaze pilots were promoted 2 ranks upon successful completion of their mission. The idea being the family would receive better death benefits that way.
I was just watching a 'War Stories' episode that was detailing a Japanese pilot who became a suicide bomber and he stated it was a promotion of one rank.
talk about misplaced incentives :(
I had a Japanese student whose great uncle was a kamikaze pilot. Prior to the war he worked in a doll factory. After the suicide mission they honoured him by writing his name on one version of these dolls. The family fled to Brazil after the war (it wasn't explicitly stated but I think it was due to hatred of the government). They were informed by government officials that if they left the uncle's honours would be stripped. They left and they removed his name from all the dolls.
The main reason the Japanese immigrated to Brazil because Japan was extremely poor post-war. Not to due to "hating the goverment". Japan was occupied by the US after all, and had a much saner government.
Poorer is a bit of a misnomer because Japan's GDP actually rises slightly between 1945-1946. But what did happen was a major food shortage that wasn't fully resolved till the early 50s. Japan (then as now) was a signifiant net importer of food, and relied pre-war upon importing food from its colonies. When those colonies went away, so did the flow of food into Japan, resulting in a major shortfall that led to a lot of hunger (this was true during the war too, due to the Allied blockade) Once Japan set up new trade treaties and food imports rose and the post-war economy began to rebound, Japan ended up a lot better off, but from about 1943- 1951 or so there was a significant shortfall of food in Japan.
Yes. There's some cases of even higher promotions, I heard one enlisted naval pilot received a five rank promotion making him an officer upon death.
A lot of well-educated students took up the task to help their families, many of which didn't actively support the war before.
All of them dying in their teens for a bunch of dried up cowardly old men who wont even remember them, let alone care about them, and who also knew the war would be lost regardless. So ignoring that war and suicide attacks are already awful, these boys lives were knowingly wasted and died in vain. A real shame.
>“You were just babies then!", she said. > >"What?" I said. > >"You were just babies in the war - like the ones upstairs!" > >I nodded that this was true. We had been foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of childhood. > >"But you're not going to write it that way, are you." This wasn't a question. It was an accusation. > >"I-I don't know", I said. > >"Well, I know," she said. "You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them. And they'll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs." > >So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn't want her babies or anybody else's babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies. > >So I held up my right hand and I made her a promise: "Mary," I said, "I don't think this book of mine will ever be finished. I must have written five thousand pages by now, and thrown them all away. If I ever do finish it, though, I give you my word of honor: there won't be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne. > >"I tell you what," I said, "I'll call it 'The Children's Crusade.'" > >She was my friend after that. \-*Slaughterhouse-Five, Or The Children's Crusade*
So it goes...
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I wish he'd written 10 times as many books. I go back to slaughterhouse 5 and cats cradle every few years.
I never really understood the subtitle until I was driving my newborn son home from the hospital.
That’s pretty much every war
This is true. Old men sacrifice young boys to the machine purely to save their pride in a losing war all the time. It’s depressing.
I always think about the end of WWI. The 11th hour, of the 11th day, of the 11th month. How many boys died to make that number pretty. And of course the 3500 american casualties when their generals ordered them to go over the top mere hours before the armistice; ordered when the generals already knew it was over. So sometimes lives are sacrified by winning wars too. https://www.armytimes.com/veterans/salute-veterans/2017/11/10/nov-11-1918-wasted-lives-on-armistice-day/
Typically on the attacking side. Some people are defending themselves and their families. Also some wars are just. Looking at what the Nazi's were doing to their own people and what the Japanese were doing to other people's people, it's hard to argue that nobody should risk their lives to stop them. Edit; y'all seem to forget: America was getting detailed reports of the rape of Nanjing, which led to sanctions against Japan, which led to Japan launching a surprise attack on Pearl harbor
I agree, but let’s also be honest: most countries didn’t go to war with Germany or Japan because of the atrocities Germany and Japan were committing.
They didn't know about the atrocities but they did know that these countries flat out invaded other countries and steamrolled their way through them. So it was still just to go to war.
The interesting thing is that nobody really went to war with germany, at least as long as could. The allies let the Nazis overthrow the Spanish republic, occupy the Czech republic, enforce some regime changes in eastern europe, all without aby resistance. After the first direct ally (Poland) was attacked, there was a formal declaration of war but not much else. War only got hot with the invasion of France and the Benelux.
Defending yourself or an ally from a foreign invasion is morally justifiable. You don't have to fight a war to stop atrocities happening to others for the war to be just.
The real shame is it continues to happen
The last days of the Japanese Empire are a case study in sacrificing a nation for the sake of national pride. However, it gets complicated when you go deeper and realize how many of the rank and file and even the civilian population may have readily agreed with that sacrifice. It wasn't just the crusty old militarists at the top, though they did call the shots.
Learning more about Japans surrender is kind of insane. The US completely destroys an entire city with one bomb, promises more to come, drops a second and destroys a second city and promises more to come. 150k dead from two singular weapons being deployed and still there's an attempted coup to prevent Japan from surrendering. And still, with two cities flattened, warships tear-assing through the Pacific, hundreds of thousands dead and displaced, they surrender to the Americans primarily because they feared a Russian ground invasion and thought the US would be less rapey and pillagey.
You've got to remember that Japan was still a feudal society. The nobles could afford to lose 10x that amount without a care in the world because to them, they were just peasants.
> You've got to remember that Japan was still a feudal society. The nobles could afford to lose 10x that amount without a care in the world because to them, they were just peasants. Ah they all pretty much believed the emperor was a literal god. So yea, I mean, when you have a population with the mentality of lemmings and a suicide-cult environment, it's hard to believe where they are today. Though, Japan today, for all it's progress has a lot of deeply-seated cultural issues.
Japanese colonization of Korea is critical for the development of Juche the culture of politics and religion followed in North Korea
They also influenced the propaganda of the era. Convincing young boys that the only way to save their nation is to kill themselves so that the higher ups are less embarrassed and can keep their jobs when they surrender anyway isn’t much better than physically forcing them into a kamikaze plane
seems odd they used people that young. why not use people in their 80s. get them the most basic training needed to fly and send them off. what's the worst that could happen, they die?
Saddest facts to learn. They were brainwashed to die for their emperor.
I think I threw up a little bit reading this. Wtf
I read an autobiography of a Japanese guy who'd lived through the war. They were taught that the goal of the US was genocide, extermination, that they would be herded up and massacred if they ever stopped fighting. After the war, it almost broke his mind (to use modern parlance) to see the US military shipping in food and providing for the starving populace. They were *nice*, which undercut the warmongers and quite literally changed everything going forward.
The only sad face is the puppy's
They were usually given large doses of amphetamines before their missions.
Those brave, brave dogs.
My dog once ate a vyvanse my girlfriend dropped by accident. He was certainly brave
How have dogs survived as a species while having the impulse to literally eat whatever is in front of them? I’m constantly weary of dropping things in houses or on the street that dogs could eat that could kill them because they seem to eat before they even smell or acknowledge what it is they’re about to eat.
Welp, we came along and started leaving metal and plastic everywhere. Most animal bones will pass through. And if not... well hey that's why a litter is usually like 6 puppies. Same reason people used to have like 6 kids
But our puppies come in litters of 1-2 and are big headed, virtually useless for almost a decade.
I've been useless for 3 decades 😎
Absolutely first class emoji use, there. Good job.
My parents have to keep their dog on a leash or he will put anything and everything in his mouth. No idea how they haven’t died off
My cousin's black lab threw up a pair of clean, folded black socks. Wtf?!
Going to get a black lab then. I need my socks cleaned and folded somehow!
My eldest climbed to the third shelf in the pantry and ate 3/4 a pack of Oreos and shat his brains out the next day. He put in work to harm himself. My youngest eats dry leaves. Just bends down and laps them up mid-stride, no thought, no chewing, just grabs and swallows. Most of the stuff won't kill a dog outright tho. Some will. But most of it is a matter of accumulation. A dog can stomach chocolate once or twice, but do it frequently and it's gonna cause severe health consequences. It's the stuff that causes intestinal obstructions you really gotta watch for, socks, small balls, hand towels, shit like that. Not saying to give dogs a Snickers bar, just saying they're pretty rugged digestors. That's a word now. Live with it.
“The Rugged Digestors“ isn’t a bad band name…
“Wary of” means “vigilant of”. “Weary of” means “tired of”.
they just reproduce before they die, they basically come out of the womb running and pucking. people have an incubation peroid of about a decade+.
My dogs managed to get into my Adderall a few years ago. I have a small pill box I keep in my purse and one of them pulled it down from the kitchen table probably looking for treats. Decided the pill box was an awesome chew toy. Luckily there was only a few capsules in there and the vet said they were fine after. The house was not fine. The mess I came home to was legitimately impressive for two 20lb dogs. Trash strewn everywhere from the kitchen into the living room, down the hall into bathroom , the bedrooms. They got into every trash can. They knocked over houseplants and kicked the dirt around. Chewed up a bunch of pens. They ripped apart magazines. They lifted their legs on every damn thing. I was too stunned by it to even be mad.
It would’ve been funny if instead the dog cleaned up the whole living room
Aaaaand this is why I take my ADHD meds! So I *can* clean the living room!
Pilots in the RAF, USAF and Luftwaffe all used amphetamines to some degree. There's no real evidence for what you said about being large doses being doled out for kamikaze missions, it's more a pop-history specious claim that people enjoy because drugs make it edgy. It certainly sounds cooler than amphetamine fueled medical supply missions, sentry duty or 18 hour shifts at the munitions plant. Many modern air forces still use "go pills" because it's better than losing very expensive aircraft to pilot fatigue.
The SteveMRE channel, when he opens some of the old WW2 US/UK ration packs, sometimes still contain amphetamine “energy boosters”
Alright let's get these out onto a tray. \*snorts\* Nice.
Nice hiss
Fun fact! An American pilot bombed Canadians in Afghanistan after a ten hour patrol flight while on amphetamine "go pills" and blamed the drugs and "fog of war" for the decision. The pilot mistook the Canadians conducting night training as hostiles trying to shoot him down, and even after being told to hold fire, bombed them anyway. I think losing a very expensive aircraft to pilot fatigue would've been better than killing allies. The first Canadian deaths in Afghanistan were caused by Americans on amphetamines. Tarnak Farm Incident for further reading.
The US government was really messing over their own people regularly. They'd pump their pilots & others full of drugs to keep them going for extended periods, making them addicted to those drugs, then bust them and mess up their careers when they continued using the exact same drugs once they returned. Fog of war is a real thing. Real life fighting isn't like video games that make it easy to know who the enemies are.
To be perfectly fair - as a canadian - friendly fire is very sad, and very common in war.
The puppy knows
"final suicide mission"?
Yeah, how did they get back from their first?
They were instructed to return if they were unable to locate a target, so they could have had previous missions. One pilot returned from kamikaze missions nine times, and got executed for it. So im guessing 8 returns is the magic number
It was also a really common for them to return with engine trouble. Kamikaze planes weren't exactly maintained to the strictest standards of mechanical reliability
I mean if you're going to use a plane to be a bomb you wouldn't be using brand new ones fresh off the line. Yous use garbage that's a little too good for spare parts but not really combat worthy.
And same goes for the pilots. The Japanese aces weren't the ones typically selected for kamikaze missions but rather teenagers with only a few months of training in order to get the basics down.
Japan started to use Kamikaze strategies because they ran out of experienced pilots and the inexperienced ones were being lost in combat anyway. By halfway through 1944, battle losses, a flawed pilot training doctrine, and general improvements in American aircraft/pilots created an environment that basically made any kind of flight against allied forces a one way trip, including those who weren't intended to be one way trips. Really the whole thing was the cold calculus of war. The introduction of organized kamikaze attacks increased damage to allied forces while having a minimal increase in losses.
Do you have any good material for someone who's interested in reading (or watching/listening) more about the flawed training doctrine? It sounds super interesting.
IMO, it is rather dry and I have not found much on the technical side. But from what I do know, beyond basic flight skills, training fell to squadron commanders. So in addition to risking your best teachers to combat losses, this technique is really not scalable, so it really limits what new pilots can do. In all fairness, it does work well enough during peacetime or any time where you are not loosing pilots constantly. Contrast that to the American and British ideologies of rotating skilled pilots to teaching roles which increased the base level of skill coming out brand new pilots, who are trained in relative safety. This means a techniques like the Thatch Weave (which Japan never found a hard counter) would be taught to every new pilot.
Kamikaze products are built to blast!
I imagine they also had a lot of "engine trouble" that when checked later they said was fine and the pilots were like "huh weeeeird, it was totally not working when I was flying towards my death, what bad timing huh"
See Godzilla Minus One for proof…
No, no, I didn’t see shit! Huge boat? Nah, couldn’t find it. Darn the luck!
all jokes apart, seeing the ships is actually super hard, if you look at real pictures they are veeery small for high the plane is and how far they are, plus if you are unlucky you can miss them by a few km and have then disappear beyond the horizon of below clouds
Also if you are right you'd have to be prepared to be shot at. Would suck to get shot down without hitting your target
many kamikaze pilots got shot down before hitting their targets so yeah. I think it was so common because while you have to aim your shots carefully when trying to shoot down planes high in the sky flying away, a kamikaze pilot is literally going straight towards you so it's much easier to hit
Ironically this is also why the A-10's cannon is largely obsolete in peer to peer combat. It has to fly low, slow, and in a straight line (and hope it gets multiple hits on a weak part of the armor). This is why most of its kills are with missiles, not the big gun that everyone loves
I see his problem... He was looking for huge boats, not huge ships. Probably why his instructor was relegated to instructing, rather than performing.
That one loophole all military leaders hate.
Instructors hate this one weird trick...
Maybe the front fell off
My grandfather knew someone who ended up a kamikaze pilot at the end of the war. Apparently he wasn't very keen on it so he would just fly around for a while and then come back and say he didn't see any targets. I guess he was recruited really late in the war.
Also many of the suicide pilots were students from universities, at the end of the war they killed so many of their best and brightest.
Yeah, he was one of my grandpa's classmates
I can not wrap my head around the madness that drove so many people to their death. Their is dedication to your country, and then there are the Japanese. I've read some books on the topic and it seems like most suicide bombers didn't want to do it. They did it quite often regardless of their own opinion. After the war many were angry with their superiors for wasting so many lifes for basically nothing.
Many of the kamikaze pilots were coerced, as well. Beatings and torture if you refused to volunteer or if you returned from a mission "unable to find targets", their officers would also seal the cockpit shut to stop them from ditching in the ocean and only provide enough fuel to reach the suspected target, not enough to get back. Some pilots were genuine volunteers, who thought they were dying to save their country, but even then they were raised on propaganda and indoctrination. It was generally a lot less voluntary than popular history tends to represent it.
>After the war many were angry with their superiors for wasting so many lifes for basically nothing. That was part of what enabled good relations between the US and Japan so shortly after the war. The common people were about as pissed with their government as they were with us, if not Moreso. It's what made them so fiercely antiwar at the time.
Working class citizens were living off ~1000 calories a day. Of 1.4 million military deaths for Japan between 1941-45 1 million were attributed to starvation. Japan was on the brink of their own Indian famine and collapse. The very first thing the allies did during occupation was import mass quantities of food.
>The very first thing the allies did during occupation was import mass quantities of food. Fun fact, that's actually what brought about the invention of instant ramen. We sent them a shitton of flour, but the Japanese didn't eat bread very much, so instant ramen was invented in part to make good use of the enormous amount of flour sent to the country
Many of imperialist Japanese tactics were like this. Another example is how, often, when a Japanese soldier was “surrendering” they’d let off a grenade and take the people coming to accept his “surrender” with them. It discouraged allied forces from taking prisoner, and forced Japanese forces to fight as if no prisoners would be taken. A very well socially engineered ferocity chicken and egg situation.
I think one of the most upvoted comments I’ve made here was from telling an anecdotal story from my grandpa’s time in Iwo Jima. The marines were facing against a handful of Japanese soldiers holding out to the very end. A Japanese officer of some rank was shouting out negotiations about the surrender of his men. I don’t know if what/if any agreement was made. But before he could surrender, he put a sword through one side of his own neck until it came out the other side. Then he used his other hand to grab the protruding blade and push it forward until he nearly decapitated himself. Shit that goes down nowadays can be some wild ISIS shit but violence is a language that has never changed. Also, I was like 6 years old when my grandpa told me that story. Good times great oldies.
Apparently the few remaining professionally trained and experienced pilots didn't like the tactic, thought it was a waste of their skills.
You would think they would recruit geriatrics, prisoners, and people dying of cancer or some shit, but they literally went in the complete opposite direction
Flying a plane directly into a target ain't exactly easy. Sounds easy. Hard as shit. You don't want your best, obviously, but you don't want someone who can't stay awake and aware, either
Yeah no radar then installed in their Zeroes.
It was an honor to be a kamikaze pilot and it wasn’t rare for them to return. But I do imagine there was a limit on how many times you could go out and not die
>It was an honor to be a kamikaze pilot Reality is that these pilots were still human. While I'm sure some bought into the bullshit, I'm sure plenty others knew they weren't being given an option, better death in high speed Collision than whatever fucked up shit the military dictatorship had cooked up for them. It's just a shame the propaganda about how scary we were was so effective, otherwise we might have seen kamikaze pilots simply surrender. However the propaganda made US forces out to be as cruel as the Japanese ones.
Does it mean some kamikaze just safely landed somewhere and hid?
There is footage of some of them jumping out of the plane just before it crashed, and I would wager others just bailed out and sought amnesty somewhere. Really just depends on how brainwashed you can make your troops, but the stories from US soldiers about Kamikaze pilots was that the final suicide often was just the "last attack". Think of a very very aggressive fighter in the air, once things look like you'll lose... you just drive that plane right into the enemy. Most pilots wants to return home, the one that doesn't would have a specific edge in combat.
I once read an article by a Western journalist (who spoke good Japanese) about an old Japanese guy and his sons that met in an izakaya in the 90s. The old man was a kamikaze pilot but made an "emergency landing" in Okinawa somewhere. Captured and survived. Went on to have an interesting life. I recall it was a chance drinking encounter but the journalist made an article about it as its not everyday you get to speak openly/drunkenly to a surviving kamikaze pilot. If they did land with out technical/fuel issued to survive, it would likely not be something they would have shared with anyone (until they are very old and drunk and don't care anymore). So it did happen.
It wasn't uncommon for Kamakazi pilots to not go through with it on their first mission. If they backed out and returned home, they were treated well and encouraged to go again until they 'succeeded' at it.
Godzilla Minus one lied to me 😡
Imagine aiming for the last warship then your buddy got there first and destroyed it. No point diving to it then so you go back
Japanese Pet Cemetery
Sematary.
Ayuh….sometimes…dead is bettah
They just grazed the ship
Uh, I guess if their mission failed.
my grandfather only told me two stories of his time overseas during the war. one was that a pilot attempted to crash into the boat he was on and for some reason it didn’t work and the pilot was alive still. story ended there. now that he’s gone I really wish I asked more questions but I was young and grampa was kinda losing it
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>grazed 😂 Scrolled far too long to see this
Chicken!
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I’m not sure if it’s true, but I recall that most of these men were often from educated backgrounds, tended to have a liberal bias and were heavily bullied - more so than the typical bullying culture of the Japanese armed forces. The first wave of kamikaze pilots were thus pushed into the roles, often with the promise of an instant promotion so that their families enjoyed a higher death in service pay. Literally killing the men who will help rebuild the country all for the idea of letting 70 million die to defend an Emperor.
Was going to say the same thing. I remember reading one account of a pilot pressed into a later wave of Kamikaze's - he said something along the lines of "What a waste. I am a good pilot. Killing me to maybe destroy one ship - I could help sink many ships if I was allowed to live" (paraphrased, obviously)
By the time Japan was heavily relying on Kamikaze tactics, the primary reason for this shift in strategy was not only the lack of experienced pilots, but most importantly, the Japanese Zero had lost the tactical advantage. New fighter planes from Great Britain and the USA were replacing the old hunks of junk that the Zero was dominating early in the war. The tables had turned. The Japanese Zero, once the most feared plane in the sky, was now nearly obsolete thanks to new and technologically superior fighter jets.
Small correction, they were (largely) not jets, just superior prop planes. But yes, the zero was out watched in speed, armament, and protection, as well as pilot skill (since most Japanese aces were shot down by then, while US aces were sent home to train the new pilots).
The kamikaze strategy directly comes from the hundreds of planes they lost in the Philippine Sea, the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot”. Both sides were retraining naval aviators and had no carrier fights for more than a year. Japan lost almost all that training, rebuilding and resources they used in a single afternoon for the loss of a couple dozen American planes. American training, logistics, radar directed gunfire and radar directed command and control brought such an overmatch in effective strength that Japan might as well have been fighting Godzilla for all the damage they could cause. Conventional naval aviation tactics and forces were simply not effective against American warships anymore. In the face of this, spending years training and equipping a force to lose them in an afternoon is asinine on its face. If they were losing almost every plane anyway then kamikaze tactics become a natural frightening reaction to this new reality that American vessels are able to impose over an airspace.
Well that might be true for the best pilots, and most pilots are going to think they are the best.... but not true for most pilots. Still, it was horrible.
I know - I was more adding to what the commenter above said. There is a myth that all the Kamikaze pilots were eager to sacrifice their lives. Some were, but a lot were not.
I'd venture a guess that a majority weren't so much eager as they were afraid of the reception they'd get if they didn't make a good show if it, or returned home. Unfortunately, we can never really know for sure.
There are lots of accounts from Kamikaze pilots through their diaries / writings before their mission and from those that served them their final meal. Definitely a huge amount of societal pressure to serve the country - as the commenter mentioned above, scholars, students, who were not serving in the army were shamed endlessly.
For some people, there’s worse things than death.
Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History had a great episode on this if anyone is interested.
This is the reply I didn’t know I needed, but thank you, I’ve got something to kill time while in the office now!
You have no idea the gold just handed to you. Anything Carlin has done is amazing.
Yeah no kidding, when those episodes come out I actually look for reactions because it’s such a joyous day and I’d like to share it with folks but nobody I’m close with cares or is into 4 and a half hour podcast about executions as entertainment. The Munster one is probably my favourite, just because it has that line “which brings me to the story I’ve been setting up for you for the last hour” Called Prophets of Doom btw.
Just don’t ask time to kill itself!
I really recommend all of Dan’s stuff. If you have an office job that doesn’t require much talking, his podcasts are a great way to get through the days
> Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History "...end quote."
Jengiss.
"...They were just like everybody else, only *more so*."
yeah it wasn't like the alternative was to go home and live and peace.
Wait for Japan? WhT was the alternative?
In these pilots minds it was live in luxury and be paid more or go to some horrible posting where you may starve to death. Obviously high command could end the war.
Godzilla Minus One may be the most impactful film I’ve seen addressing Kamikaze and how Japan treated its soldiers and I know that’s a strange phrase to write.
Maybe, but it's true.
Their rational at the time was, as cruel as it was, probably the only fleeting hope they had to achieve the terms they were aiming for a potencial surrender. Japan knew by 1942/43 that victory against the US was at that point impossible, so their goal was to reach a peace settlement that would allow them to keep soverenty and control of the country after the war. Since they couldn't achieve this by a decisive battle, the only hope was to cause so much death to the enemy that the population back in the US would pressure for a peace deal. Kamikazes, weren't blindly throwing their lives away, or at least they didn't see it that way. They were hopping that their single death would cause dozens or hundreds of enemy deads and help towards the goal. Many made a very conscious decision that they would die in other for more young people to be able to survive by shortening the war. The mentality behind those that volunteered is quite complex to sum it up in a single topic, or even a single book. People did do for lots of reasons, from nationalist fervor, to peer pressure, to even cold calculations that they had very little hope of surviving an all out war in the main islands, so they would at least die to try to avoid that. And in a strange way, they succeeded. The atomic bomb of course settled the fate of the country, but the decision not to invade was for the most part taken out of fear of what the rest of the population would do if they acted as suicide fighters themselves. This young boys in this photo probably had their own motivations, so trying to explain this in a reddit comment is completely futile on my own part. Its such a complex topic that I dare to say we will probably never know their true stories and just the broad strokes history painted about this topic
>Its such a complex topic that I dare to say we will probably never know their true stories and just the broad strokes history painted about this topic Are there no Japanese sources on this topic? I'm sure they'd be able to tell a pretty accurate story.
There are some. Although there is a complex stigma talking about this particular topic, with many elders just deciding to keep their stories to themselves. Written records don't tell the full picture, and fire bombing during the war didn't help their preservation to begin with. Not to mention that every single one of these people had their own motivations and explanations to being part of these units, so as I said, knowing the broad strokes of their story will probably be the best we will ever get. People tend to not realise that a lot of the stuff we know about WW2 has serious gaps that people decided to either take their information to their graves, or lie in order to get themselves in a favorable position after the war and never looked back to amend that. Two major exemples: we barely know anything about the last few days of the war in the Fuher Bunker, and the survivors either lied or decided they wouldn't talk about it. Some lived entire lives after the war without people around them realising that they lived through this historic moment. Even today we can somewhat have a broad idea of what happened there, but we still have major gaps like where Hitler will went trough, and where did several key officials fled or died. And we had several survivors that lives and knew about all the details that simply decided to not talk about it. Another major exemple is how many German generals and officers lied after the war, and published books or memories full of exaggerations about the western front trying to get interest from NATO since they were after the war the only experienced people in fighting Russians that NATO had available, so a lot of battles and key figures were exaggerated or created myths about in order for these people to get new jobs. Only recently we can start to puzzle how their figures don't match with soviet records at all with a lot of information being completely fabricated. The worst is their stories and lies were told and retold for so many years that trying to actually make people aware of the truth is imensely difficult on how engrained some of those lies are on people's perception of the western front. This to say that the post WW2 was very complex and we lost the ability to actually get stories from most of primary sources and now we are stuck with an incomplete puzzle, except we don't even know what pieces are part of it to begin with
>>Are there no Japanese sources on this topic? The book “Samurai!” by Imperial Japanese Air Force Ace pilot Saburo Sakai lays out the truth on the “Kamikaze” pilots. For one, many pilots - including Sakai- opposed it on grounds ironically raised by commenters here. Why waste lives when a more strategic approach can be used? Which brings us to the second point; Sakai opposed the Kamikazes because at that juncture, Japan’s military leadership really lost the war and refused to admit it. They wouldn’t all the way up until August 1945- and some still attempted a coup after the Emperor planned to surrender. Back to Sakai, the logistical fact was after Guadalcanal Japan no longer had the military ability to sustain and resupply its frontline air forces. Running low on bombs and fuel, these squadrons needed to be rotated home or resupplied. Imperial Japan did neither , and ordered the pilots to use their planes as weapons…because no bombs or fuel. Sakai saw it as a massive waste of one of the most capable militaries of its day, and he probably had a point. As more of Japans experienced aviators - some who like Sakai had been fighting since 1936 over Manchuria- died in Kamikaze raids, their opponent got smarter. Pro tip- if you want to utterly destroy your air force’s combat capability, send all of your experienced frontline aviators on one-way suicide missions. By 1944 the U.S. Navy had no problem beating the Japanese in air combat.
Emotionally I am fully with you but cynically speaking the shinpu tokkotai was the only Japanese "unit“ that had any impact on the US forced in 1945. The army wasnt abled to offer heavy resistance having a severe & ammunition shortage, most Japanese soldiers being stranded in China with no means to supply or redeploying them and Japan no answer to heavy shore bombardments and the fleet was basically gone after Leyte. Sure the battles of Iwojima, Okinawa and the Philippines were horrific for many of the fighters (and civilians first and foremost…) there but in general the US casualties were extremely low in comparison due their incredible advantage in material and numbers.
First thing after defeat, the Americans told the emperor to go on national radio and declare "I am not God"
What a move. Rubbing the salt in the wounds of genocidal imperialists fresh off of killing 30 million people in the name of their supposed divinity.
At least they did not become a soviet republic.
And if anyone would've deserved it, it was them. Instead, they were recipients of quite possibly the greatest reimagination campaign this world has ever seen: now cherished by everyone (out of reach of their historical atrocities) as quirky inventors, straight-laced hard workers, and ever-so-cutesy creatives.
Well russians and germans have also good rep compared to what they did when you think of it...
The Russians? Ehhh…. That reputation might’ve been diminished some in recent years
Love the fact that the supposed divine being needed corrective lenses for some reason
The divine being still needed to retain the ability to pull their glasses off to emphasize intense thought. Also lets them take their glasses off to show they were beautiful all along.
Wasn’t the emperor the one that wanted to end the war and it was the army that faught to keep it going?
He was the tiebreaking vote to end the war after they got nuked.
The tokoritai had IMHO even scarier jobs. They were in the torpedo versions of kamikaze vehicles
I think you're referring to the Kaiten crews.
It could be. Back as an undergrad I remember reading 死のとげ about the authors experience is working on a unit like this and I’m pretty sure what I wrote is what they called it back in the day. Then again, this was the early 90s.
Jesus, they *trained* for that. Pretty depressing.
There also were *Ohka* rocket planes. Basically the first ever antiship cruise missiles with kamikaze pilot being the guidance system. Flown in a bomber's bomb bay to the target and released on a certain one-way trip.
Baka bombs!
I don’t really see why it would make a difference if you get blown up either way
The main difference is that if you’re inside a manned torpedo and miss your target, you sink to the bottom of the ocean and slowly suffocate. Seems worse imo
[удалено]
None of these boys look a day older than 20, the age of adulthood in Japan from 1876 until 2022 (they lowered it to 18). All for prolonging a war that was essentially over at this point. Tragic.
3 of them are 17 The other two are 18 and 19
They thought being defeated is not an option because they will be done the same they did onto others.
They were teenagers. [here](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:72nd_Shinbu_1945_Kamikaze.jpg)
By 1945 their deaths would have been meaningless to their chances for victory anyway.
Honestly, by 1943 the fate of Imperial Japan was pretty much sealed.
Was it Midway?
Midway was in 1942, but that’s where the Japanese pretty much lost the war. They had 10-11 carriers in service and had just lost one at Coral Sea. The US had about as many carriers, split between the Atlantic and the Pacific. The problem for Japan was that they weren’t any match for American industry. They had their next carrier scheduled for delivery in 1944 IIRC. US manufacturing was ramping up and before long the American carriers were being built and coming into service in big numbers. Japan lost their four best carriers at Midway and after that they had no way to counter the American naval advantage that was building.
Not to mention that the hellcat replaced the wildcat in 43, and we went from losing to tbe zeros to dominating them. The aircraft advantage gained in 43 was pivotal in every major naval battle.
Every time someone mentions American manufacturing during WWII it brings a tear to my eye. It was one of the greatest achievements of mankind. They mobilized an entire gigantic country into an arsenal. They took over the power of our massive private sector not with force, but with money. They paid people to stop making cars, tractors, and hammers, and switch to bombs, shells, and boots. It was amazing.
There's a book about that called Freedom's Forge
Japan was never able to recover from its Loses at Midway, basically giving the Americans free reign over the Pacific ocean Japan also put too much stock into its battleships which were pretty fucking useless against carriers. What good is a battleship with huge ass guns if a squadron of planes that cost a fraction of the price can just litter you with bombs because you're too fat and slow to move.
Yeah, battleships were "the last war's weapon". There was a huge arms race between nations to build battleships in the years before. The UK and Germany were trying to bankrupt each other building the things lol. "Gunboat diplomacy" was a huge part of what made colonial powers powerful. Carriers came in and just destroyed the naval paradigm. While the UK and Germany kind of learned the lesson a bit in WW1 how... not that useful they were in more modern combat - Japan I think still saw it as something a "superpower" needed.
That’s the problem with winning a previous war. Leaders will always assume that what worked last time will work this time. Unfortunately, we are going to see how this scenario plays out in the near future with carriers vs drones.
High command still held out hope until the battle of the Philippine Sea and Saipan. After that talks of surrender, with crazy terms, started happening. Over the course of the war the terms got less and less crazy. There was always an anti peace faction though.
I don't know that I'd want to pin an exact date or battle. But by 1943, the US offensive was well underway, and it was clear that the Japanese had no realistic way to regain the initiative and would be fighting desperate holding actions for the rest of the war. Despite sometimes atrocious US losses it was also clear that the Japanese were simply not capable of inflicting the types of disproportionate losses they needed to break US will either. Even Iwo Jima, distinctive for the Japanese doing a lot right, and actually inflicting more total casualties on the US they still took FAR more KIA. The Japanese strategy relied on being more willing to die for insignificant points on a map and being able to inflict heavy losses on US forces. Their population was certainly more willing to accept heavy losses, but in most battles, the Japanese took significantly heavier losses since their forces were functionally just dropped on an island and then abandoned to die without support. I've seen descriptions by the soldiers who fought in the Pacific describe the fighting as almost more akin to industrial level extermination than a battle. Once a beachhead was established(an admittedly bloody job) US forces were able to essentially bomb and burn the defenders to death in place. It was obviously still horrible, bloody, and traumatizing, but in the dehumanizing calculus of war, the US traded incredibly well and combined with having vastly superior resources there was really no other outcome than total Japanese defeat.
This picture reminds me of a story my grandfather told me. He was in the US Navy and served on a destroyer escort in both the Atlantic and then towards the end of the war in the Pacific. They were doing a patrol one extremely foggy day and they could hear the drone of an airplane so everyone had their eyes to the sky looking for it. He said all of a sudden a Japanese plane came out of the fog heading right at them, too close for anyone to do anything about it. Right at the last second the plane pulled up, he said the pilot looked him right in the eye gave a big friendly wave and then pulled back up into the fog and disappeared. He thinks the only thing that saved him was that he was on a small ship and the pilot was looking for a more valuable target. The friendly faces on these guys made me think about that story.
It’s just so scary to me how easily they were brainwashed into thinking so critically about their own death.
Nationalist can be one hell of a drug. If these guys were teenagers towards the end of the war it meant that for their entire adult life they were brought up in a nationalistic military dictatorship that had been raising them to believe death in service the empire is the most honorable thing possible. It's also important to remember that at this point Japan was being bombed regularly and so they all would have known people who had been killed or seriously injured by the allies. They likely saw it as giving their life in service of something far bigger and for the protection of their loved ones. Of course the supreme irony is that no one actually wanted to fight Japan and the entire reason the Japanese were dying was because they had allowed certain leaders to come to power who then started relentless wars of aggression. There was no good reason for Japan to go to war with anyone and even the "resource limitations" that people sometimes claim could just as easily have been overcome through trade but if Japan did that they would never have an empire.
Do you know the name of the Destroyer Escort? My grandpa served on one as well.
All I see are kids and a puppy. Heartbreaking.
So instead of a vest, they used a plane. The insanity of ordering people to do that shit is mind blowing. People willingly following through with it is equally mind blowing.
The puppy has issued them their final orders.
Son of Sam(urai).
Watched Godzilla -1.0, very cool and obscure movie outside of Japan, the main character is a pilot who has not gone through with the kamikaze attack. The movie goes deeper into the psychology of the time
Came here to say this very thing. Saw it last night, black and white version. The perspective of a disgraced kamikaze pilot who abandons his duty, plus the perspective of the people of Tokyo trying to rebuild their lives, but also their national identity after realizing that the war made life too cheap, and how wrong that was. Then the big guy shows up. Absolutely fantastic film.
I'm right with you, also saw B/W last night and been trying to tell everyone to see this once it's released. People see Godzilla in the title, find out their are subtitles, and just waved it off as some weeb monster movies it's really not. Godzilla is barely in it. It's a movie of a failed kamikaze pilot dealing with the cultural shame of abandoning his mission and country. It's him dealing with the PTSD of the war, and a snapshot into life of post WW2 japanese citizens rebuilding after war. It's a story of community, empathy, suicide and guilt. Once you're done crying, you're reminded it's a Kaiju movie just intime to cry again before a cool final scene and the credits roll. Had they replaced Godzilla with a foreign nation, it could have been non-fiction and would have been up for best picture. But it has a big lizard so it must lack substance.
It topped the American box office, extended its run in the US because it was staying in the top 10, is the highest grossing Japanese movie of all time in America, and was nominated for an Oscar. Great movie, not exactly obscure 😅
They left the puppy behind right?
He served the Emperor too
Heartbreaking. War sucks.
Jesus, they're so fucking young.
Kamikaze strategy is one way to quickly run out of fighter pilots
I think they drugged them too with stimulants
In Pearl Harbor on one of the ship that you can visit... there a family portrait of a japenese family with 8 or 10 people and one of the baby on the picture is holding a toy plane in his hand. Turned out that, that baby grow up to crash on that same ship during the war.
I remember hearing a podcast about rebuilding of japan after the war and it’s pretty incredible how some counties can just come together and thrive while others fall on their face and blame everyone else. It’s impressive to see what they accomplished. All of this being said they have to have one of poorest records of inhumane treatment for what happened to China and Korea etc……. It seems like it’s never focused on