Kamikaze

By late 1944, Allied qualitative and quantitative superiority over the Japanese in both aircrew and aircraft meant that kamikaze attacks were more accurate than conventional airstrikes, and often caused more damage.

These factors, along with Japan's unwillingness to surrender, led to the institutionalization of kamikaze tactics as a core aspect of Japanese air warfare strategy as Allied forces advanced towards the home islands.

The word originated from Makurakotoba of waka poetry modifying "Ise"[7][clarification needed] and has been used since August 1281 to refer to the major typhoons that dispersed Mongol-Koryo fleets which invaded Japan under Kublai Khan in 1274 and 1281.

[13] First Lieutenant Fusata Iida's aircraft had taken a hit and had started leaking fuel when he apparently used it to make a suicide attack on Naval Air Station Kaneohe.

[18] Japanese planners had based their assumptions on a quick war and lacked comprehensive programs to replace mounting losses to ships, pilots, and sailors.

By the Battle of the Philippine Sea (June 1944), the Japanese had to make do with obsolete aircraft and inexperienced aviators in the fight against better-trained and more experienced US Navy airmen who flew radar-directed combat air patrols.

After the fall of Saipan, the Japanese High Command predicted that the Allies would try to capture the Philippines, strategically important to Tokyo because of the islands' location between the oilfields of Southeast Asia and Japan.

Captain Motoharu Okamura, in charge of the Tateyama Base in Tokyo, as well as the 341st Air Group Home, was, according to some sources, the first officer to officially propose kamikaze attack tactics.

[21] In August 1944, it was announced by the Domei news agency that a flight instructor named Takeo Tagata was training pilots in Taiwan for suicide missions.

Arima personally led an attack by a Mitsubishi G4M "Betty" twin-engined bomber against a large Essex-class aircraft carrier, USS Franklin, near Leyte Gulf, on or about 15 October 1944.

The 1st Air Fleet commandant, Vice Admiral Takijirō Ōnishi, decided to form a suicide offensive force, the Special Attack Unit.

In a meeting on 19 October at Mabalacat Airfield (known to the US military as Clark Air Base) near Manila, Onishi told officers of the 201st Flying Group headquarters: "I don't think there would be any other certain way to carry out the operation [to hold the Philippines] than to put a 250 kg bomb on a Zero and let it crash into a US carrier, in order to disable her for a week."

[27] These names were taken from a patriotic death poem, Shikishima no Yamato-gokoro wo hito towaba, asahi ni niou yamazakura bana by the Japanese classical scholar, Motoori Norinaga.

On 11 March, the US carrier USS Randolph was hit and moderately damaged at Ulithi Atoll, in the Caroline Islands, by a kamikaze that had flown almost 4,000 km (2,500 mi) from Japan, in a mission called Operation Tan No.

[35] Late in 1944, the British Pacific Fleet (BPF) used the high-altitude performance of its Supermarine Seafires (the naval version of the Spitfire) on combat air patrol duties.

A long steel splinter speared down through the hangar deck and the main boiler room (where it ruptured a steam line) before coming to rest in a fuel tank near the aircraft park, where it started a major fire.

For example, Mitsubishi Ki-67 Hiryū ("Peggy") medium bombers, based on Formosa, undertook kamikaze attacks on Allied forces off Okinawa, while a pair of Kawasaki Ki-45 Toryu ("Nick") heavy fighters caused enough damage for the destroyer USS Dickerson to be scuttled.

The last ship in the war to be sunk, the Fletcher-class destroyer USS Callaghan, was on a radar picket line off Okinawa when she was struck by an obsolete wood-and-fabric Yokosuka K5Y biplane.

Soviet fighter aviation, which managed to destroy three enemy aircraft and an anti-aircraft artillery which lost two planes[clarification needed] participated in repulsing the air raids.

[51][52][53] Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki, the commander of the IJN 5th Air Fleet based in Kyushu, participated in one of the final kamikaze attacks on American ships on 15 August 1945, hours after Japan's announced surrender.

To the United States, the losses were of such concern that more than 2,000 B-29 sorties were diverted from attacking Japanese cities and industries to striking Kamikaze air fields in Kyushu.

[68]Australian journalists Denis and Peggy Warner, in a 1982 book with Japanese naval historian Sadao Seno (The Sacred Warriors: Japan's Suicide Legions), arrived at a total of 57 ships sunk by kamikazes.

He had expressed his desire to lead a volunteer group of suicide attacks some four months before Admiral Takijiro Ohnishi, commander of the Japanese naval air forces in the Philippines, presented the idea to his staff.

"After the war, some commanders would express regret for allowing superfluous crews to accompany sorties, sometimes squeezing themselves aboard bombers and fighters so as to encourage the suicide pilots and, it seems, join in the exultation of sinking a large enemy vessel."

In 2006, Tsuneo Watanabe, editor-in-chief of the Yomiuri Shimbun, criticized Japanese nationalists' glorification of kamikaze attacks:[73][74][75] It's all a lie that they left filled with braveness and joy, crying, "Long live the emperor!"

This brutal "training" was justified by the idea that it would instil a "soldier's fighting spirit", but daily beatings and corporal punishment eliminated patriotism among many pilots.

A Foreign Office official named Toshikazu Kase said: "It was customary for GHQ [in Tokyo] to make false announcements of victory in utter disregard of facts, and for the elated and complacent public to believe them.

[82] Stories like these, which showed the kind of praise and honour death produced, encouraged young Japanese to volunteer for the Special Attack Corps and instilled a desire in the youth to die as a kamikaze.

[83] While it is commonly perceived that volunteers signed up in droves for kamikaze missions, it has also been contended that there was extensive coercion and peer pressure involved in recruiting soldiers for the sacrifice.

Firsthand interviews with surviving kamikaze and escort pilots has revealed that they were motivated by a desire to protect their families from perceived atrocities and possible extinction at the hands of the Allies.