Warbird Information Exchange

Time doesn't heal all wounds.
We have (had) a large number of Bataan Death March survivors here in Albuquerque. The ones I spoke with, still had a deep hatred of the Japanese people, even 60 years after the war.

you have to admire the japanese devotion to their cause.can you imagine US pilots crashing into japanese carriers and destroyers?
you cant say they werent comitted to the cause.

Japanese kamikaze was not limited to aircraft. They did have kamikaze submarines, actually were manned torpedoes. I think they sank one ship.

Actually I've read at least one account that claimed the Japanese were inspired by the damage done by a crippled F4F that did just that. Had it been a developed idea before that, the attack on Pearl might have been even worse.

Not what I said, nor my points for this discussion. Have another read.

Midway isn't near the continental United States, hence the name, and was far from a 'last minute' miracle. Spielberg's 1941 isn't a documentary.

Midway was far less a defence of the homeland and a step before invasion than the Battle of Britain was - itself, an early battle in a longer-to-run strategy. In all cases, they were important, decisive, historic battles of critical importance to the war. But the US was not even nearly at risk of invasion, as Japan was when the Kamikaze system was brought to a peak.

Once Japan attacked the US, and the US government decided not to fight a limited war, Japan was doomed to lose. You can't run scenarios any other way. It was simply a matter of time and cost - massive, and horrifying as that was. God's big battalions for the Pacific was the US' production success - one of the great achievements of the century, and the US personnel under arms and devoted to the war effort.

Personally I find history interesting when I test what I've learnt against new data, and basic logic ('What if the reverse were true?' 'How would we react?') rather than trying to maintain a simple orthodoxy. One of the factors with the western horror of the Kamikaze attacks was that they were systematic, planned and premeditated. However suicidal defence and final defiant attacks have occurred by most societies at extreme moments in war. Would we have found allied defenders of our homelands doing the same thing as bizarre, or admirable sacrifice hoping to achieve a last minute miracle? (As many know, but often overlook it's importance, "Kamikaze" was a name chosen for some Special Attack as a deliberate tribute to the 'Divine Wind' that did save Japan many centuries before.)

Having recently been involved in editing a book on the Kamikaze and related aircraft (Japanese Special Attack Aircraft & Flying Bombs by Ryusuke Ishiguro & Tadeusz Januszewski*), which contains a good deal which covers the background and causes of such a bizarre programme, it's a lot stranger than the normal appreciation of it. And disquieting too. I'm glad not to have ended up in a society that is militaristic, and so perverted that such suicidal sacrifice was an almost inevitable outcome. But for the grace of birthplace and time...

Incidentally, did you know that the ship most frequently hit by the Kamikaze was not in the USN? You may know that the British armoured carriers withstood Kamikaze attacks ('Sweepers, man your brooms') much better than the lighter US carriers - but the attacks on those carries actually malformed the hulls so badly that they were not worth refitting and were thus scrapped, postwar, much earlier than might otherwise have been expected. There's always more to discover.

Regards,

(*Book details. http://mmpbooks.biz/mmp/books.php?book_id=39 )

I agree there were certainly 'spur of the moment' precedents by Allied airmen. However, like most western contemporary and later reporting of Japanese motivations, I'd be very careful of taking them as sound. Even today there are many myths continually perpetrated. Whatever the initial inspiration for Kamikaze concepts, it needed Japanese military champions and a perverted social and military culture for it to develop as it did.

There's no reason to see any Kamikaze attacks by Japanese airmen on December 7th. It was a completely different scenario. (Also, as we all know the decisive factor at Pearl was the absence of the carriers in port.)

Regards,

yeah, real easy to attack a sleeping giant. Just like sucker punching somebody

Hey Muddy, I wasn't talking to any one person, I just think there is a difference that is all. Sure we have sneak attacks. It is a sound tactic just as you say. But we are at war with them when we do it. We were not at war with Japan when they attacked Pearl, and on top of that were giving us friendship medals for working toward peace.