December 3, 2020

"For the right, the kamikaze are a symbol of traditional virtues and a spirit of self-sacrifice that they believe is woefully absent from modern Japan."

"For the left, they are part of a generation destroyed by Japanese militarism, and a powerful reminder of the importance of maintaining the country’s postwar pacifism.... [In October 1944] Japanese officers explained to Mr. Odachi and his cohort the plan to use suicide missions and asked for volunteers. They were met with stunned silence. Only when the officers began to harangue them did the first few men reticently volunteer, he wrote. 'We were essentially cajoled into committing suicide,' he recalled.... Mr. Odachi’s Zero... was loaded with an 1,100-pound bomb, weighing it down so much that it would be impossible to outmaneuver the enemy. When American fighters spotted him, he jettisoned his bomb into the ocean and managed to escape. On his next sortie, his group failed to find a target. The next six missions also ended in failure. After each attempt, he would wait for weeks for new orders. Every night, the officers announced who would fly into battle the next day. It 'felt like the conferral of the death penalty, and it was stomach-turning,' he wrote. But by the end, he said, 'we had become indifferent to matters of life and death. Our only concern was making the final moment count.' That moment, however, never came. On his final mission, his plane was preparing to take off when a member of the ground crew ran onto the runway, shouting and waving for the squadron to stop. The emperor, Mr. Odachi learned, had just announced Japan’s surrender. He was going home.... 'We were the same age as today’s high school students and college freshmen,' he said. 'There wasn’t a single person among us who would have decided on their own to die.'"

32 comments:

BobJustBob said...

He wants to remind Japan that before its modern success came the sacrifices of the young American pilots who gave their lives.FIFY

Expat(ish) said...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Callaghan_(DD-792)

“ Though the Allied forces had taken Okinawa by June 21, Japanese forces continued to skirmish. On 9 July 1945, Callaghan took station on the radar picket line, where on 29 July she drove off an attacking wood-and-fabric Yokosuka K5Y biplane. The aircraft survived the first approach because the proximity fuses were ineffective against its wooden fuselage.[2] The plane, skimming low and undetected, crashed into Callaghan on the starboard side. It exploded and one of the aircraft's bombs penetrated the aft engine room. The destroyer flooded and the fires which ignited antiaircraft ammunition prevented nearby ships from rendering aid. Callaghan sank at 02:35, 29 July 1945, with the loss of 47 members of her crew. She was the last Allied ship sunk by a kamikaze attack during the war.”

Please note the ineffectiveness of the proximity fuse. At the end of the war there were >1000 planes rigged for attack.

-XC

Balfegor said...

And how can man die better Than facing fearful odds, For the ashes of his fathers, And the temples of his gods

The kamikaze airplanes were just one example of suicide attacks at the end of the war. There were also suicide submarines -- basically human-guided torpedos. And on so many islands, once they were down to their last supplies and ammunition, Japanese soldiers threw away their lives in final banzai charges. It is a mercy that Japan ultimately avoided going the full Churchill:

If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.

Perhaps ironically, Japanese troops were shocked by Chinese nationalist suicide attacks earlier in the Sino-Japanese war.

Richard Aubrey said...

My father, an Infantry veteran in the ETO, said that kamikaze was not something Americans would do. At the last, they would press their attacks into such terrible odds that that they'd likely die, but the goal would always have been to strike and live to strike again.

Fernandinande said...

"Many group selectionists [...] write as if suicide missions, kamikaze attacks, charges into the jaws of death, and other kinds of voluntary martyrdom have long been the norm in human conflict. My reading of the history of organized violence is that this is very far from the case."

'There wasn’t a single person among us who would have decided on their own to die.'

"What about the ultimate in individual sacrifice, suicide attacks? Military history would have unfolded very differently if this was a readily available tactic, and studies of contemporary suicide terrorists have shown that special circumstances have to be engineered to entice men into it."

Bob Boyd said...

Now here's a flyer who could've really used an emotional support animal.

Temujin said...

I consider todays journalists todays Kamikaze pilots. With their work, their biased articles or outlandish refusal to cover obviously important stories, they are driving their industry into the bowels of our society. They are killing us, by their own industrial level suicide.

And if you think they aren't tanking the news industry, you aren't reading the level of layoffs over the past 10 years.

Sure, I may have reached on this one, but any chance to dig at Journalists!

Howard said...

Short video on the rise and fall of the Zero. Discusses engineering short comings and kamikazes as well.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X0Mu4jJ0S0s

Phil 314 said...

Just finished the fifth installment of Dan Carlin’s “Hardcore History” podcast on the Japanese in WWII, “Supernova in the East”. Listening to that puts a very different perspective on this articles implication of nobility. Carlin spends quite a bit of time on the suicides of the natives on Saipan. And throughout he describes the rapid “to the last breath” and “to the last man” approach of the Japanese military. The experience of Saipan helped convince the US authorities that an invasion of Japan would be devastating for the US military AND Japan.

Howard said...

I liked Dan Carlin on the Lex podcast, then tried listening to Supernova in the East. He needs an editor. Very wordy long and drawn out taking forever to get to the point. I really want to get into his stuff because he does have interesting ideas, but my ADHD is a real handicap.

mikee said...

If you cannot be expected to surrender, the opposition is forced into going to the trouble of ending your ability to fight. See the firebombing of Tokyo, and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for the way that worked in WWII Japan. God, what horrors the Japanese unleashed upon themselves with their emperor worship.

gilbar said...

Phil 314 said...
Just finished the fifth installment of Dan Carlin’s “Hardcore History” podcast


thanx for reminding me Philpi! a while back i listened to everything Dan had out there, and Enjoyed it! But then the trough was empty, so i wandered back out into the fields. But NOW! there's New Stuff for me to listen to Thanx again!

Ice Nine said...

>>"Only when the officers began to harangue them did the first few men reticently volunteer"<<

(fingernails on blackboard)

So they simply raised their hands? Mutely stepped forward? Silently went off to their fate? All of them? Seems unlikely, doesn't it.

Actually, it seems like the writer doesn't know the meaning of 'reticent.' He's not alone.

Anonymous said...

'There wasn’t a single person among us who would have decided on their own to die.'

while this may have been true of his small group, who if like the the writer, had already balked several times at following through. But losses at Okinawa demonstrate that there were large numbers of pilots who would give their last full measure of devotion to the Emperor, a living God.

mccullough said...

These guys should have fragged their commanding officers.

NotWhoIUsedtoBe said...

The kamikazes accomplished something. They convinced Truman to drop the bomb.

traditionalguy said...

The Japs were all trained to die for their Sun God who wanted to slaughter the Chinese and Koreans mostly, or die trying.The nasty SOB added Americans to the list to die while killing us, and the Navy helped them die much faster for the scum Emperor.

Gordon Scott said...

Howard,

Listen to Carlin while doing something else. You'll know when to focus on his voice when he starts getting REALLY LOUD.

I listened to the book he published recently, The End is Always Near. I did not enjoy it. Something about his style doesn't work well reading a formal book, I guess. Perhaps the printed version is better.

Joe Smith said...

You had just one job!

effinayright said...

traditionalguy said...
The Japs were all trained to die for their Sun God who wanted to slaughter the Chinese and Koreans mostly, or die trying.The nasty SOB added Americans to the list to die while killing us, and the Navy helped them die much faster for the scum Emperor.
*************

You obviously have a very subtle and nuanced view of Japan and the Pacific War....

Joe Smith said...

"The Japs were all trained to die for their Sun God who wanted to slaughter the Chinese and Koreans mostly, or die trying.The nasty SOB added Americans to the list to die while killing us, and the Navy helped them die much faster for the scum Emperor."

I know someone who isn't getting an invitation to the Imperial Palace : )

Narr said...

Never heard of Dan Carlin and his historical musings, but maybe I'll take a look based on comments here.

I have read that the Japanese minority of Christians was overrepresented among the kamikaze pilots; partly I suppose because they were overrepresented among the educated class, and partly from a very Japanese hybrid of samurai and Christian traditions of sacrifice.

One thing that is clear now from the scholarship is that the Japanese had many more one-way planes and pilots stashed against Olympic than was estimated at the time, and the determination to use them. (Same same for ground forces.)

I watched the German miniseries "Generation War" recently. The title is stupid (the original Kraut title is translated as "Our Mothers, Our Fathers" [2013]), and some idiot critic has called it the "German Band of Brothers." As if.

It's very well done--the production values, direction, acting, all that technical stuff is superb. And the once soft and idealistic kid brother, by the end of the war, has long since fulfilled his own prophecy, before the invasion of the USSR, that the war would only bring out the worst in themselves. (SPOILER: at the end he dies like a kamikaze, on a one-man attack against the Red Army--but as much to persuade the teenage militia with him to give up as to achieve a glorious death for the Fuehrer.)

Narr
Hot Ostfront Action!

Joe Smith said...

"The title is stupid (the original Kraut title is translated as..."

"The Japs were all trained to die for their Sun God..."

In 1941 I guess this kind of language was OK, but in 2020?

'Kraut' and 'Jap' may not rise to 'Ni773r,' but really?

Btw, I lived in Tokyo...some of my best friends are Japanese.

James Kalb said...

It's all so odd.

People should watch Ozu's films. He's one of the all-time great directors. After the war he made family dramas, mostly about girls who are now 29 and it's time to get them married off even though it's inconvenient, because after all they do need their own lives which they won't have at home as daughters.

The films show people who are *terminally* considerate, conscientious, worried that they may be making life difficult for someone else, etc. And they have an air of absolute realism. The people are flawed, they miss things, they have preconceived ideas, etc. They're real people. So the positive qualities also shown seem all the more real.

He had been a soldier in China with a chemical warfare unit, and spent a lot of the rest of the war in Singapore. So he knew what was going on. I gather the people in Nanking for example found the Japanese sometimes seriously lacking in consideration.

So all of this coexists, and it's all real. How can we make sense of it?

Howard said...

Thanks Gordan. The End is Always Near sounds right up my alley. I love those sorts of deep dive long threads

Narayanan said...

Q: how and why Kamikaze different from Last Stands? is it just West Chauvinist history?

Q: how and why Kamikaze different from Last Stands?

Joe Smith said...

"Q: how and why Kamikaze different from Last Stands? is it just West Chauvinist history?"

Offense vs Defense would be the obvious answer.

If you're surrounded and the enemy is taking no prisoners, you might as well come out with guns blazing...

0_0 said...

If those haranguing officers were going to go first, then maybe.
If they are leading from the rear, no way.

Joe Smith said...

"If they are leading from the rear, no way."

It worked for The Light-bringer®

Lurker21 said...

Being a failed kamikaze pilot ...

I guess that's sort of bittersweet ...

ken in tx said...

The Japanese considered the Koreans to be almost human. If they were fit, they were conscripted into the military. The Imperial Marines were supposed to have many Koreans. Korean men are taller than the average Japanese man. Of course they liked the Korean comfort women. The rest were made slaves. My Dad’s LST was tasked to take Korean slaves from Japan back to Pusan, Korea, at the end of the war.

LakeLevel said...

Joe Smith said: "In 1941 I guess this kind of language was OK, but in 2020?"

Really? "Jap" is just a shortening of "Japanese". How on earth is that really offensive. I bet you think "Oriental" is offensive. It means Easterner. How offensive can you get. We now must say Asians for both Indians and eastern Asians even thought they are very different culturally and genetically. That's the sort of pedantic nonsense that we honky gaijin around here won't put up with.