The reason kamikaze failed
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- Опубліковано 6 чер 2023
- In the later stages of the Second World War in the Pacific, Japan was desperate. They turned to a new tactic - kamikaze. Although suicide attacks had been used before, the kamikaze campaign trained attack squadrons specifically for this purpose, and brought into combat a new aircraft - the Yokosuka MXY-7 Ohka - the only rocket-powered suicide aircraft. They first saw action at the Battle of Okinawa in 1945, where extensive damage was done to the Allied fleet. But overall, how effective were these aircraft and this campaign?
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Shows the true meaning of the General Patton quote - ( You don't win wars by dying for your country. You win wars by making them die for theirs )
Very a propos.
I think part of our fascination with the suicide pilots is a desperate effort to blind ourselves to the fact that almost all methods of attack are suicidal. The reason Rommel lost the battles of Alamein is he had only a pitiful few dozen tanks left out of the thousands he had brought with him to Africa.
@@TheDavidlloydjones he never had thousands. But he lost a lot
@@TheDavidlloydjones I don't think almost all methods of attack are suicidal, most people try not to attack if they don't have a reasonable hope of being successful, or at least they believe they have a chance to survive. I don't even most kamikaze pilots happily or even willingly did so but it was foisted upon them.
So! Who killed 'im?
@@TheDavidlloydjonesAttacking itself isn't suicidal. You just need the right equipment and a numbers advantage - about 3:1 for a land attack, for example.
If you choose to attack when the enemy has a 10:1 advantage over you, then that's arguably suicidal, but mostly it's just bad decision making.
It should be mentioned that the US Navy packed extra anti-aircraft guns onto every square inch of the battleships - the crews were nearly double the normal complement as a result. The photos of US battleships in the late WW2 period are striking for how many extra guns were on the decks. In addition, the US had developed its first radar guided gun firing systems, the Mark I gun director, which were installed into these ships, and the larger caliber ammo had proximity fuses that allowed for knocking down an aircraft with a near-miss. Finally, there were the combat air patrol aircraft. It was a multi-layer air defense system that was quite effective at destroying most of the kamikazes
So many guns that the destroyers were top heavy and sank.
The most effective weapon was the 5-inch 38-cal DP gun firing VT shells. The 40mm lacked the range to keep the Kamikazes at arms length, and the 20mm lacked both range and stopping power, even after single mounts were replaced by twins. Even before the end of the war, the Navy had decided to replace the quad Bofors gun with twin 3-inch 50s. What the latter lacked in rate of fire it made up for in range, weight of fire, and the ability to fire VT ammunition. Post war, the 3-inch 50-cal became the standard short range anti-aircraft gun of the U.S. Navy, while the 5-inch 38 was replaced by the 5-inch 54-cal. gun, which fired a heavier shell out to a longer range.
Destroying most of everything.
@@StuartKoehl Proximity fuzes are something we kind of think of as a given nowadays, it's wild that they managed to figure it out and pump em out by the millions in the 1940s.
Excellent point - Three Iowa class BB's (Ill, KY and Montana(?)) were being refitted in drydock to have their main guns removed and become strictly AAA platforms in prep for the invasion of Mainland Japan.
It's a lucky thing that Japan surrendered the day it did: when I moved to Japan in 1972 I found the bars of Yotsuya, Marunouchi, Kabuto-cho and elsewhere full of men who had been scheduled to fly their kamikaze mission the very next day.
When I lived in France everyone had been in the resistance.😂
@@annoyingbstard9407 Definitely true as well.
America won
@@user-cv8qe9ru8c The allies won! America started late because they were concerned only about themselves. Nothing has changed since then, which is why America is in such a mess. It’s called karma.
@@backagain5216 without American supplys, len lease then Britain would have collapsed
By the time kamikaze tactics were used, Japan had lost its best pilots, and it's easier to teach someone how to crash a plane vs how to actually fly one for combat purposes.
Makes sense
The choice:
Kamakaze: 100% chance not returning
Non-Kamakaze: about 70+% chance not returning
By 1944-45 huge amounts of AA, Radar, Combat Air Patrols and Coordination meant few pilots would return from any mission.
At least at the start, a kamikaze pilot did not have a 100% chance of not returning. If they did not find a suitable target, they were instructed to return to base, rather than attempt to attack a low value target, because "there will always be another chance to die for the Emperor". There was at least one documented case of a pilot that returned to base 9 times, before he got executed for cowardice.
@@adamwu4565 looks like he successfully avoided the Kamikaze mission 👍
Japan was too focused into convincing themselves they were superior when they were anything but superior.
I'm pretty sure a pilot would be shot if he returns about three times alive
@@MetalsirenIXI they were superrior just like a big and strong crocodile who prey other weaker countries. Problem is they challenge USA which is a dragon.
A report I read stated that half of Kamikaze pilots survived due to aircraft malfunctions. A book I read of post war Kamikaze pilots' narratives translated into English contained the revelations that the pilots deeply resented their cynical exploitation by military authorities and that they were also surprisingly grateful for the atomic bombs because their effect was to eliminate the zaibatsu which had an iron grip on the nation which led to better lives with a western style government.
They did for a while until the evil bastards in command started bolting the canopy shut so that the 13 year old boys who were forced into this insane mission would die regardless and this stopped them from chickening out....
Eerily similar to that Titan submersible.@@davidhollenshead4892
That "They were wrong." at the end felt really powerful for some reason.
Fun fact: the term "Kamikaze" originally referred to the two typhoons which saved Japan from the invading Mongol fleets, Hence "Divine wind"
It's more appropriate to call it "Devil Wind". I am so glad that it did not work !
@@clee6746 It worked, which was one of the reasons why the invasion of Japan proper didn't start at the same time as Okinawa, they simply couldn't cover two staging points with carrier fighters.
@@clee6746 what makes you think it didn't work
It's interesting that last point: that the Japanese thought the Kamikaze would intimidate U.S. forces and undermine their willingness to fight. That Japanese pilots, showing such resolve as to deliberately sacrifice their own lives, in order to sink American ships and kill American personnel would shake us out of our resolve. I suppose it's not surprising. These were the same planners who thought they could win a war over a _massively_ bigger, richer, more industrialized country because it's people were "decadent." They _did_ know they couldn't match American wealth and industrial might, and a protracted war would doom them. Their mistake was in thinking that they would never have to, in judging that the American people didn't have the will to fight a protracted war.
They thought to replay the Russo-Japanese War. Win a couple or three decisive battles in which they destroyed the U.S. fleet -- just like they had the Russian fleet in 1904-05 -- and those soft, luxury-addicted Americans wouldn't want to spill any more of their own blood over the war Japan was fighting in Asia. So the U.S. would give up and accept the _fait accompli_ of an expanded Japanese Empire in China, southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands.
They couldn't _possibly_ have miscalculated more disastrously.
The sneak attack on Pearl Harbor was perceived as so treacherous and underhanded that it absolutely _enraged_ the American public, and filled the American people with a desire to see Japan in ruins, no matter the cost. Japan's leaders thought the American people were weak, soft, and decadent, and so would never fight a warrior race like the Japanese to the finish. That warrior culture, that fighting spirit of _Bushido,_ they thought, would give them victory against a materially superior foe. They misjudged their enemy's character, and their tactics so angered that enemy that they themselves actually _created_ the resolve they didn't think that enemy capable of having.
Treacherous? America was treacherous with Japan first, talks of peace but strangling them with blockades that was causing harm to their country, all for some cheap products in China, if Americans actually looked outside their borders and understood other cultures, they would realize that Japan and China have been mortal enemies since their foundations, with Germany backing Japan, it was the proper time to squash their mortal enemy once and for all, and take the resources for themselves.. of course, Hitler would've turned on them once they fulfilled their use to him, but I digress.. also another thing to note.. Japan doesn't forgive easily, and America did threaten to destroy Edo.. aka Tokyo back in the 1800s unless Japan opened trade agreements.. so really.. Pearl Harbor was inevitable because of that..
Thinking the same thing
Japan military clique gamble that war against the US will be a replay russo japanese war.japan giving there experience in russo japanese erroneous assume one single decisive battle will the force the US to sue for peace.
A very good analysis. Also, the Japanese were led astray by the isolationist sentiment prevalent in the US, and it didn't occur to them that attacking without sending a declaration of war would cause the isolationist sentiment to vanish. And I suspect they were not prepared for how fast Americans could start turning out tanks and war planes.
Why japanese determine to fight to the dead was fuel by honor and saving face.they policy in the late year of the war.was to inflict a very high casualties on the US.forcing the US to negotiate so they can get a better term
To say we were enraged is a rather fair statement. When Germany bombed London over 8 months they killed roughly 40,000 to 43,000 civilians. US firebombed Tokyo and in one night it is estimated to have killed 90,000 to 100,000 civilians. The first sets of bombers created a flaming X over Tokyo and the rest of the bombers were told to fill in the gaps.
18 battleships at Okinawa is an incredible amount of firepower, can you imagine how the Japanese defenders felt seeing such a powerful fleet offshore preparing to land enemy forces, they must've been terrified.
Firepower that couldn't penetrate the Japanese bunkers.
@@Poliss95 Correct, thats what the flame throwers were for.
Battleships were not built to provide fire support. They were forced into it.
Took 2 A bombs so don’t think so
And they fought to the very last man... unlike some other Axis surrounded commanders i could mention
Due to the minimal training that the Japanese pilots were receiving, their chances of successfully dropping a bomb on a ship were miniscule. On top of that, so few pilots survived a conventional attack that, as someone else here pointed out, the missions were virtually suicidal anyhow.
The Kamikaze attack was correctly seen as a higher-percentage option, but with 70-80% losses prior to even reaching their targets, it still wasn't enough.
The video is a very poor analysis and something that the USN propagandists have pushed for decades to try to cover up the catastrophic damage and loss of life that kamikazes achieved in late 1944 to the end of the war. Sure they ultimately failed because they were going to lose no matter what after the Battle of the Philippine Sea but the kamikaze attacks were terrifying and effective against USN ships and were just as good as modern-day guided missiles. Leyte Gulf, Lingayen Gulf, Mindoro, and Okinawa completely debunks the notion that they "failed". There were numerous PTSD cases for the sailors on those ships that was impossible prior to Leyte Gulf. The Japanese lost so many men and planes doing ineffective conventional attacks at Philippine Sea (lost 600 airplanes for the loss of 100 U.S. planes and no sunken U.S. ships) and the Formosa Air Battle (lost something like 800 airplanes for the loss of 90 U.S. planes and no sunken U.S. ships). They were able to beat the heck out of the U.S. ships while invading Leyte, Mindoro, Luzon, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. 5,000 USN sailors were killed by kamikazes at Okinawa and something like 1,500 U.S. sailors and soldiers were killed in November/December 1944 in the Philippines by kamikazes! At Lingayen Gulf in January 1945 over a 2 week period about 1,000 Allied sailors were killed even though there were only 200 kamikaze planes used!!!
Japan lost so many experienced pilots trying to conduct kamikaze and kamikaze escort missions it was unable to offer much of a bombing threat late in the war. They would have been far better off to use those pilots in more conventional attacks. They still would have lost because they couldn't compete with the industrial capacity of the Allies, but that damaging effect these suicide tactics had on the Japanese psyche during and after the war would have been avoided.
@@pimpompoom93726 LMAO. You don't pick up a history book, do you? At Philippine Sea in June 1944 and Formosa Battle in October 1944 they lost something like 2000 planes without using kamikazes and damaged only 1 battleship at Philippine Sea and 1 cruiser at Formosa. They switched to kamikazes at Leyte Gulf and immediately started getting hits and sinkings on aircraft carriers and other ships. They couldn't even get hits on destroyers at Philippine Sea and Formosa! I think I trust Admiral Spruance more than you on the effectiveness of kamikazes. From Spruance's own words: "This is my second experience with a suicide plane making a hit on board my own ship, and I have seen four other ships hit near me. The suicide plane is a very effective weapon, which we must not underestimate. I do not believe anyone who has not been around within its area of operations can realize its potentialities against ships. It is the opposite extreme of a lot of our Army heavy bombers who bomb safely and ineffectively from the upper atmosphere."
@@nogoodnameleft Nothing worse than somebody who thinks they have profound knowledge and doesn't know what they're talking about. Kamikaze was a desperation tactic, a last gasp intended to cause allied losses so significant as to promote a negotiated settlement of the war. That's the best the Japanese could hope for and they knew it. They failed to attain even this modest goal because it was generally ineffective and a one shot deal-the pilot couldn't use that experience ever again. Yes, the Japanese lost a lot of aircraft in the Marianas-because their aircraft were generally inferior at this stage of the war and their pilots had less experience than their American counterparts. Better planes, better pilots, superior numbers translate to lopsided victory. Still, the threat they posed as an experienced attack force was greater using conventional tactics than expending everything in a one-shot, suicide attempt to sink ships. When the US was planning their invasion of Japan the fact that so many experienced Japanese pilots had been lost in Kamikaze missions and as their Escorts factored into the number of aircraft the USA needed to support those landings. The Kamikaze tactic was a failure-as Japanese Ace Saburo Sakai noted. What ship sinkings and damage they caused was primarily to destroyers, a few cargo ships, LST's, 3 CVEs and other less consequential vessels. No battleship, cruiser or fleet class carrier was sunk by a Kamikaze.
.... it was already ALMOST suicidal to attack a US navy task group at sea by 1942. Kamakaze just increased the chances of death from 90% to 99%.
night attacks by wooden trainer planes would be the one that would have given the us most sleepless nights. Almost radar invisible, and carried a similar bomb load.
It most certainly was not. In 1942, the Japanese were well ahead of the US in coordinated carrier strike doctrine and overall pilot training and quality. With the exception of the Dauntless, they had superior equipment as well. The Hornet, Lexington, and Yorktown were all lost to Japanese air power in 1942, accounting for a startling percentage of total carrier based air power at the time.
It wasn't until summer of 1944, at the battle of the Philippine Sea, that the assertion you made above was demonstrated to be generally true. Notable exceptions to that rule persisted, however, to include night torpedo attacks by land based bombers, single Judy dive bombers quite successfully hitting major US ships off Japan in 1945, etc.
@@Phoenix-ej2sh Not really true. Japanese and US planes in 1942 were very different, and each had particular advantages and disadvantages. The proper exploitation of these features by the respective pilots was most often the key to success. The best way to judge the balance of differences is to compare the overall kill ratios of the various planes. Admittedly, US torpedo planes had serious issues,, but again, these issues could be overcome depending on the methodology of usage. Sending US torpedo planes into attack while the only other planes above them were Zero's was not so much a problem due to the zeros as it was to the absence of US fighter planes to protect the torpedo planes.
Yes, the Japanese were better organized and experienced at the beginning, but that alone didn't survive all that long, which it would have if the Japanese planes had been obviously superior in all aspects, but they weren't and so that advantage disappeared fairly quickly as the US gained equivalent mission experience.
@@Phoenix-ej2sh After Santa Cruz, a battle which the Japanese won, the IJN refused to face the USN carrier forces for 20 months, from October 42 until June 44. They simply ran out of carrier trained aircrew. By the beginning of 1943 the USN had far superior aircrew training, aircraft and doctrine. Wasp was also sunk in 1942 by submarine attack. Akagi, Kaga, Soryu and Hiryu with the CVLs Shoho and Zuiho were sunk by USN air attack in 1942.
Japanese carrier doctrine was irrelevant in 1943 and for almost half of 1944 as they had no one to implement it.
Thunderf00t, sleepless nights do not win a war. 😛
change your statement to "after 1943" and you would be more correct. Prior to that Japanese strategy and aircraft and pilots were far better than that of the Americans. We won Midway by sheer luck, not superior anything.
No interviews with former pilots I see. ;)
Sometimes they came back. ua-cam.com/video/_1VoMLwb_oA/v-deo.html
WWII Japanese pilots were just DYING to fly Kamikaze aircraft...😉
@@Allan_aka_RocKITEman bass drum, snare, cymbal.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Bruh
It boggles my mind how many times military leaders, throughout history, have had the idea or have come to the conclusion that they can "attack/beat the morale" out of their opponents through atrocities, then only for those atrocities to actually turn out to have a galvanizing or resolve reinforcing effect on the enemy attacked. Imperial Japan made that mistake quite often against the U.S. during WWII, which is even more perplexing, i.e., I.J. kept coming to that same mistaken conclusion. 😕😟😲😞
I wouldn't call the Kamikaze an attempt to beat the morale out of the US. If you look at the cold numbers, trading an obsolete plane that is gonna get destroyed anyways and its pilot for an enemy ship and hundreds of enemy sailors is a good exchange. The Kido Butai was basically destroyed at Coral Sea and Midway so Japan didn't have their experienced pilots around anymore and their issues with resources (which is why they invaded Manchuria in the first place) kept them from building planes more powerful than the Zero in any significant numbers. Yamamoto pointed this out prior to Pearl Harbor when he said "after this attack, I will run wild and achieve victory upon victory. But if the war lasts longer than 6 months, I have no expectation of success."
Mark felton did a pretty good video on why the japanese were so brutal and it's a lot of different things
@skyden24195: That depends on the time, location and context. Every single European colonial empire owed its rise and maintenance in part to the liberal use of atrocities to intimidate the local population. And those empires lasted for a long time.
@@RaderizDorret I'm sure that it is mentioned in the video that part of the belief by higher-ups of Imperial Japan's military was that the sight of or attack by the Kamikaze would be demoralizing to U.S. sailors and convince the Americans that they are fighting an enemy that will do anything and everything to cause as much death and destruction as possible, by any means, so much so that the Americans would give up the fight. I.J. thought that attacking Pearl Harbor would demoralize the U.S. and that the Americans would have no will or desire to go to war with Japan. What your comment points out about the condition of Japan's military, especially its navy, as well as its limited resources is accurate and all, but part of the thinking to even make these kinds of attacks was that the U.S. didn't have the stomach for the kind of war Japan would give them. The plans were merely the plans. The results desired was the U.S. giving up the fight. Japan's only card, especially as the Allies got closer to the home islands was to cause so much death that the Allies, (U.S. in particular) would negotiate. Beating the morale out of the Allies was the only card Japan had to play towards the end, and they tried playing it every which way they could think of.
@@dpeasehead oh yes, time and context is of course relevant. Really the difference is dependent upon the strength of the opposition. Colonial powers overrunning inferior native populations is "just" a conquest. But the ones I'm more referring to are the ones that know they're going to be fighting an opponent of equal or greater strength than their own, so the attacker resolves to take actions against the defenseless (or what-not) in the hopes that these actions compel their opponent to just give up the fight.
Weird how none of the Japanese generals "volunteered"......
ikr, its almost as if they could see through the bs and indoctrination or rather, knew the importance of it to keep the Japanese people indoctrinated and worshipping a fake deity so they could happily kill themselves in his honor.
Generals volunteer to be leaders and then there are soldiers who do the fighting. Jeez, get a grip on how things work!
@@james-pierre7634 lol volunteer to be leaders hilarious 😆 you mean being a coward and sending subordinates to their death , like any dictator
@@Agadendro every military is guilty of this.
@@Agadendro there is a reason they're the leaders. No all men can become leaders.
One thing that the gentleman did not mention (probably because it would be too cumbersome to describe without a visual representation) was that the Allies expanded their battle formations so that the main concentric circle protecting the fleet carriers were surrounded by smaller versions of concentric defenses around light carriers. Knowing that the kamikaze pilots could not easily differentiate between escort and fleet carriers, the kamikaze would be tricked and waste themselves on these outer defensive circles, and the light carriers were usually able to shoot them all down. If a kamikaze got past the outer radar picket, wasn't distracted by the light carrier decoys, then they'd still have to make it through the layers of destroyers, light carriers, combat air patrols, and the main ships' anti-aircraft guns to even have a shot at sinking a fleet carrier or battleship.
Approximately one out of every four Kamikaze aircraft that reached the pushover point hit their targets. That compares favorably with the record of anti-ship missiles since 1967. Analysis of the Philippines and Okinawa campaigns convinced the U.S. Navy the solution was intercepting the incoming Kamikazes (and, post-war, anti-ship missiles) BEFORE they entered the terminal phase of their attack. This was done by a combination of combat air patrols, and the development of shipboard surface-to-air missiles--specifically, the Tartar, Terrier and Talos systems that armed U.S. ships up to the 1970s, when they were succeeded by the Standard Missile family. Navy doctrine focuses on destroying launch platforms before they reach their release point, a principle called "Shoot the archer, not the arrow".
Although Phalanx CIWS has also been there for the last 40 odd years, just in case...
@@timgosling6189 The problem with Phalanx and similar CIWS is their lack of range and stopping power. As the U.S. Navy discovered in its fight against the Kamikazes, within a certain range, even a direct hit will not stop the incoming plane or missile. Instead, even if it disintegrates, the debris will "go ballistic", continuing on its path until it hits the ship. That's why other navies have moved to much heavier projectiles on their CIWS--Goalkeeper, for instance, uses a 30mm round, which not only has longer range, but more kinetic energy. The U.S. Navy, for its part, has supplemented CIWS with the RIM-116 Rolling Airframe Missile and the RIM-162 Evolved Sea Sparrow Missile, which have the range and stopping power to destroy supersonic anti-ship missiles before they enter the lethal zone.
By 1944, the 20mm Oerlikon was seen by the U.S. Navy mainly as a "morale weapon", too light to actually protect a ship from a Kamikaze. Even the 40mm Bofors gun was seen as marginal, largely because it lacked range and couldn't accommodate a radar proximity fuze. In the last year of the war, the Navy initiated plans to replace the quad 40mm mount with an automatic twin 3-inch 50-cal mount on a 1-for-1 basis. While it did not have the Bofors' rate of fire, the shell was so much heavier that the weight of fire was greater. In the post-War navy, the 3-inch 50-cal mount was ubiquitous until superseded by the OTO-Melara 76.2mm Super Rapid, and the Mk.15 Phalanx.
@@StuartKoehl All true, although I'm sure for instance HMS Shefield's crew would rather have been hit by bits of Exocet rather than an intact live one.
@@timgosling6189 The result might have been much the same. The Exocet that hit Sheffield did not explode, but broke apart, starting fires from residual rocket fuel (which, carrying its own oxidizer, was almost impossible to extinguish). Assuming that a close-in weapon managed to destroy the Exocet within a few hundred meters of the ship, the blazing fragments would have hit the side of the hull and the superstructure, penetrated inside, and still started fires. It might have been worse, since the fires would have been distributed over a wide area, instead of concentrated around the point of impact for the intact missile.
Your content is exceptionally well done. Thank you very much for all your hard work.
Keep in mind that the Japanese only started using kamikazes once they had run out of skilled pilots. By that point in the war, getting past the American fighter screens (which were actually the main line of defence; AA fire, even after the VT fuse came along, was only ever a secondary weapon in air defence during WWII) was suicidal anyways, so why not take as many of the Americans down with you as you die?
It was an immoral strategy that ultimately failed, but one that actually was better than the alternative of continuing to use conventional tactics (which would have failed even harder)
It failed before it began.
Immoral how? Unless you are referring to how many pilots were coerced into becoming kamikaze pilots, which is not something integral to the strategy, I can't see what you mean.
also worth noting that since the pilots were generally quite young and untrained, it was remarkably hard to control the zero (and i imagine the ohka as well). I know the zero used unassisted control surfaces like just raw hydraulics which meant at high gs it was basically impossible to control, like in a dive.
I think what this video missed is the statistics, that they'd lose more planes + pilots on conventional attacks than suicide attacks.
@@ElZilchoYo
Exactly.
My grandfather was serving aboard the USS Borie (Sumner-class Destroyer) during the Battle of Okinawa. During the final hours of the battle, his ship was hit by a Kamikaze (believed to be the last Kamikaze of the war), resulting in over 60 casualties. I feel very fortunate to have heard first-hand accounts of a Kamikaze attack, which sounded absolutely terrifying.
My Great Uncle was in the Navy and was assigned to Hawaii after the war. He told stories of how angry people were.
Mine was on the bunker hill......he survived after being seriously wounded.....most didn't..... respect to your grandfather and mine
@@nobody-ly9ef The men who fought in that war were the greatest our country ever produced.
@@starzkream truth.
Brave kamikazis!
That last bit, about how the Japanese had overestimated how demoralized the Americans would be after getting attacked by kamikaze is crucial, I think. The big lesson: never plan a strategy around demoralizing the enemy instead of concrete goals. It’s true that morale may be the deciding factor in the end, but morale crucially depends on the effectiveness of the tactics, not on the audacity of the tactics.
This was a very well done documentary!! I've heard about the battle of Okinawa countless times, and not to discredit those sources, this was the first I've heard of the Ohka. Thanks for showing this lens of the pacific theater!!
One reason the Kamikaze failed was psychological warfare. Calling them "Baka and making everyone know it means foolish was, I suspect, as very effective way of removing the "Divine wind" metaphor. The original Kamikaze was a typhoon(the hurricane, not the airplane) that sunk a large mongolian fleet in 1281.
Twice, actually; in 1274 and 1281. The formal designation of the units was 'tokubetsu kogekitai', 'special attack unit'; the IJN units were called 'shinpu tokubetsu kogekitai', 'shinpu' being the 'on-yomi' pronunciation of the same characters that, in the Japanese kun-yomi reading, were pronounced as 'kamikaze'; the kun-yomi pronunciation was used only informally in the press until after the end of the war.
The reason they failed is very simple.. No feedback, no adjustments..
@@seanmalloy7249 "Special units" is still what they are called at the "Chiran Peace Museum" which is mostly a museum about the kamikaze.
@@jacobjones5269 I'm sure they flight tested them *somehow* before sending them into battle. But they were most likely desperate to get them into battle quickly, and since the pilots and planes were considered expendable they didn't work too hard at making them easily controllable.
@@dx1450
Not what I mean.. The strategy was failing miserably, but nobody ever came back to tell anyone, so they could cease.. No feedback..
Thank you IWM. You are one of my goto UA-cam channels.
Kamikazes had a better hit rateo/losses than conventional attaks. The war was lost anyway and no strategy would have changed that fact.
Another great presentation IWM!
Hey! What are you doin here?
hey I know you and I'm not subscribed well s*** you got me
I love it when you find those you subscribed to and find them in the comment section
Im just shocked one of the top comments about the voices switching back and forth needlessly.
@@beeell8017 Probably looking for weird-arse things to fire out of a shotgun.
British aircraft carriers had armoured decks, which meant that kamikaze attacks put a heavy strain on the ships' broomsticks.
THe American ships didn't have the armoured decks. There is one reported case where an American officer was on a British aircraft carrier, and was surprised when a huge bomb splatted on the deck and didn't penetrate. After a bit of puzzlement a British officer explained that there was 5 " of armour, and the bomb wasn't physically strong enough to penetrate.
@@paullangford8179 The US could have also built armoured decked ships but chose to produce greater numbers of wooden decked vessels instead... defence is also in REACH and numbers. Also... wooden decked vessels can be repaired fairly easily. I can't remember the name of the vessels but two British carriers spent weeks in US repair docks after the armoured decks buckled from hits by German Stuka bombers in the Mediterranean.
but that weight penalty was paid for in a very reduced air group
@@toonsis yes but British aircraft carriers recover they small air groups when they repaired the damage of a holed flight deck in a sort time, American Carriers spent 6 months in dried bock and lost there air groups or and find alternative Carriers to land on . swing and roundabouts one could say , the fact that not talk by the end of war ll new USA aircraft carriers were to have armoured decks
@@daniellastuart3145 At Midway, the wooden deck (and boilers) of the Yorktown were repaired so quickly that the Japanese thought that it was a fourth carrier. It was steaming under its own power and performing flight operations in an hour and a half. The Japanese pilots reported it as sunk, not knowing the advantage of USN damage control.
I watched one video where the presenter went through the economics of kamikaze attacks verses straight up traditional attacks and found that as material, men and money wise, kamikaze attacks were much better suited to the type of warfare the Japanese were engaged in by comparing both types of attacks to ships damaged, taken out of action or sunk. In fact, if you look at the preparations of Britain to a possible German invasion, they have very eerie similarities. While not overtly claiming to be suicide defenses, the various Stop Lines, and "left behind" commando units weren't much different than what the Japanese were planning. Heck, the Brits were arming their home guard (old men) with P14 bayonets welded onto lengths of pipes as stop gap pikes to thwart German airborne landings. ...that's not much different than arming old Japanese men with bamboo pikes.
You can always take one with you
Famous unpublished speech by Churchill
Or they could just surrender? Unlike UK Japan literally had zero chance of winning the war at this point.
@@ArmoredNeko It wasn't about winning the war, it was hoping to make the cost of an unconditional surrender too expensive. The Japanese were hoping to get a conditional surrender.
i want watch it, do u remmeber the name?
@@hailene6093 They did get a conditional surrender. They were allowed to keep the emperor.
I hate to criticize a video by the Imperial War Museums, but this has missed a critical part of the equation: number of hits per lost aircraft/pilot. Kamikazes scored more hits per lost aircraft/pilot than conventional attacks, and by that metric they were wildly successful.
The US Navy published an Anti-Suicide Action Summary (available on the Naval History and Heritage Command website) to help improve the fleet's air defenses in anticipation of Operation Downfall. As part of the analysis, it includes a table of the effectiveness of these attacks vs. traditional attacks. According to the US Analysis from October 1944 through the end of April 1945, 784 kamikazes made it within anti-aircraft range of the US fleet, scoring 216 hits on ships. In the same period 2,152 traditional attack aircraft came within range of US Navy antiaircraft guns, losing 356 aircraft to score 58 hits. Even when you account for surviving aircraft making multiple attacks over a long period of time, you would lose 6.1 planes per hit in a traditional attack vs only 3.6 in a kamikaze attack. Note traditional bombers typically had two- or three-man crews, so the air crew losses are worse than just the plane losses.
We also see this in the US response to the kamikazes. So many ships were being hit and spending weeks or months out of action that we began a mass program to upgrade our already impressive antiaircraft firepower. Throughout the entire war the US Navy had fought against removing torpedo tubes from destroyers to add more antiaircraft guns, but in April the Chief of Naval Operations ordered torpedo tubes be removed as quickly as possible to bulk up the Bofors fit. During the entire war US destroyers were hit by enemy fire (bombs, torpedoes, shells, even severe damage from ramming submarines) 251 times. 40 of these were kamikaze attacks in April 1945 ALONE (including two suicide boat attacks), sinking four ships outright and with four more never repaired (this does not count destroyers modified for other roles, like DM minelayers or APD transports). The standard Essex class carrier group as of 30 August 1944 was 51 fighters and 42 bombers, but as of 30 April 1945 it was 73 fighters and 30 bombers, as fighters were far more effective at killing enemy kamikazes before they got in range of your fleet.
Kamikazes were an act of desperation due to poorly trained air crews and an unstoppable Allied juggernaut, but they were a successful act of desperation. Every kamikaze that came within range of US antiaircraft fire was 10 times more likely to hit than a traditional attack. Every kamikaze that hit an Allied ship was 1-2 fewer Japanese airmen lost to get that hit. And while many kamikaze hits only managed to cause light damage, many more ships were now heading home for major repairs/refits, and US shipyards were working overtime to upgrade the ships moving from the Atlantic before they sailed west to war.
Being on a ship just before a Kamikaze hits has to be a very disturbing feeling since you have no where to go but wait for the hit!
Love your work, IWM 👍
The Japanese strategy against the US was primarily that of demoralization. The goal of Yamamoto's campaign throughout the Pacific was to capture significant territory and goad the US into a decisive naval defeat such that, by the time the US had the capability to counter, the price of doing so would be so high as to dissuade the attempt.
Hindsight is 20/20. The Japanese didn't know their codes had been more or less broken or else Midway may have turned out differently.
@@iridium8341 I'm pretty sure Yamamoto knew it was a long shot at best. If all the carriers survived and the IJN never made it to Panama, Japan would be in for an eventual world of hurt.
@@AlexeiRamotar that would apply the German to
Yamamoto knew the a war with the United States would end in one of only two ways: quick Japanese victory and negotiated peace, or long Japanese defeat.
Pearl Harbor made negotiating impossible.
Pearl Harbor was a tactical failure for the Japanese. 1) The attacked on Sunday when 90% of the crews were on shore leave 2) The did not attack the fuel reserves and 3) They did not attack the dry docks or ship yards. Damaged ships could be repaired, refueled and crewed in Hawaii instead of San Diego or San Francisco.
If the Emperor and the generals weren't prepared to hop into the seat of a suicide plane - I sure as hell wouldn't have either.
I'm surprised that _Operation Ten-Go_ was not included in your kamikaze overview. I think it perfectly illustrates the gulf between cultures at that point in history.
THOUSANDS died in a doomed effort to spend their lives for the Empire. They pretty much died in vain, though. I always envisioned a tall adult holding off the best aggressive efforts of a short adolescent, such was the disparity of force and capability.
I did enjoy the aero-related facts you shared.
Not that big of a gulf. If Putin had just captured Florida and was getting ready to invade North Carolina, you might do something similarly desperate.
@@penultimateh766 Not likely. Paid cops in US schools have found reasons to hold back in safety against untrained school shooters many times, even as the heard children being slaughtered.
I doubt any attempt at organizing suicide squads would work at all in the US.
@@penultimateh766 Not necessary. Just let the skeeters take care of anyone they send into Florida or the Carolinas. America's little "special attack aircraft." And if that doesn't work... unleash the deer flies, mwahahaha!
@@mbryson2899 I agree. The US has a very individualist culture whereas Japan has a collectivist one. Plus while the US population is not as cynical of its governments as some other western countries (those in the Westminster system for example), political leaders are much more revered in the east. Convincing westerners to commit suicide for their country in war- one which they probably would be skeptical of- would be an impossible sell.
They did alot of damage as well .
I love the pride of family members detailing their elders experiences in the war knowing the details of vessel and role. You should absolutely be proud of you fore fathers accomplishments!!!
My late Uncle Jim was a gunners mate on the USS Astoria CL 90 in WW2.
The USS Astoria killed 13 Kamakazi and had partial kills on another dozen from January 1945 to Wars end.
That sounds as good a reason as any.
My grandfather was on the bunker hill..... respect to your grandfather and mine too
Excellent analysis IWM ! Subbed.
The ship my late grandfather was on (USS Stanley DD-478) was on radar picket duty off Okinawa in April '45 and was attacked by two rocket kamikaze (Ohka or Baka bomb). One was a direct hit but did not explode and punch clean through the ship. The second barely missed. The speculation being either a control surface was hit or the pilot. That said, it was close enough that its wing reportedly ripped the ensign (US flag) off the mast.
Another possibility is that the pilot simply missed your dad's ship (thank God). By 1945, Japan had few seasoned pilots left alive and a poor pilot could easily miss something as large as a warship, particularly since Japanese planes didn't dive particularly well. They had large control surfaces that would require a lot of strength to move at high speed and that's assuming there was no wing or aileron surface warpage which was common in high speed dives.
@@ohger1 - Plus, he mentioned they were the rocket propelled kamikaze that were notoriously difficult to control. How would you like being on the bomb disposal crew for the dud?
My moms uncle was to be in Hawaii but decided to finish school and visit after the war. He always told us that story.
@johnlawler4241 If you visit Pearl Harbor, some of the buildings stick have some minor surface damage from Japanese staffing runs. A reminder to remain vigilant. That and the sunken ships still in the harbor, both the Arizona and Utah though I don't think Utah has a memorial you can visit.
My grandfather was on the bunker hill.....it didn't fare so lucky...... blessings and respect to your grandfather....I'm sure mine and yours are in heaven together.
Very well made video and very interesting information. Thanks!
The biggest problem with kamikaze-plane development was lack of testpilot feedback.
Yep. The first kamikazes worked because they had skilled pilots and the US was not expecting planes to be flown directly into our ships. But within a short period of time there were no experienced pilots left and the US was prepared for kamikaze planes
The main reason is called PROXIMITY FUSES. This invention practically increased effectiveness of anti-air by a factor of 10 and combined with automatic radar fire control suddenly won the "plane vs anti-air" race. Of course Japanese had limited pilot reserves (USA had very popular civil pilot training program since 1920's which gave tens of thousands of pilots, and Japan being a small mountain island country could not compete with that), and also even before the war Japanese economy was about 10x smaller than economy of the USA.
Good summary, well presented. Thank you.
Thanks for shedding light on this military strategy that has baffled me since I was a kid. Now I have a lot better understanding of the kamikaze attacks and the mindset behind them. By covering this concisely but in detail you’ve earned my like and my subscription. Thanks again!
Now I have a lot better understanding of the kamikaze attacks. You'll learn much more from this video: ua-cam.com/video/9HptaPOwkrA/v-deo.html
I spent some years as a US military brat in Japan. My dad had interactions with the Japanese military, aka Self-Defense forces. He struck up a strong friendship with a Japanese colonel who told this story - In WWII he was a young midshipman at Enoshima, the Japanese Naval Academy. One day his class was assembled and told that they were to be Kamikaze pilots, but the planes never showed up. Then they were told they were to drive explosive-laden motorboats into US Navy ships, but the boats never showed up. They they were told that were going to plant explosives by hand onto US tanks. Then they heard the infamous recording of the Emperor announcing the surrender of Japan. The members of his class climbed a nearby mountain where most of them committed suicide, some by disembowelment. The gentleman felt great guilt for the rest of his life over this for not committing suicide with classmates despite raising a family and having a good career later.
Having seen the mountains and towns of Japan and spending some time there, I have no doubt most Japanese would have fought to the death and invading Japan would have killed millions on both sides. My own great-uncle, a navy man who was at Pearl Harbor, got the Purple Heart when the combat tug he was on at Okinawa (designed to move large navy ships that lost power), suddenly went into evasive moves upon sighting a kamikaze aircraft, pitching my Uncle into an open cargo hatch where he fell and broke his back, thus ending his navy career.
12:20 - Statistically the Kamikaze were actually decently successful. Strategically it was a terrible idea as Japan lacked trained pilots, planes and fuel. It was a desperate strategy and I don't believe many thought it would do anything more than delay the inevitable.
Admiral Yamamoto famously believed that Japan could never win a war of attrition against the US and this proved to be so true.
Now a truly terrible tactic was the Banzai charge.
the one thing it did was convince the Allies that direct invasion of the home islands would be a very difficult undertaking as they assumed the Japanese people would all fight to the death rather than surrender.
also they said we shot down 50 kamikazes but it was the51th kamikaze that sank their ship!
@@stargazerspark4499In a proud Asian culture such as Japan and China, I would expect people to fight to the death. Pride for us Asians means not losing face and, certainly in those days, death is preferable to humiliation.
Good one!! Thanks for this clear and detailed video on the Kamikaze against the Allies.
Great overview! Thank you!
By the last year of the war, the United States Pacific fleet was larger than the fleets of every other country in the world combined. That is a simple explanation why the Kamikaze attacks did not have a serious impact. Although these suicide attacks damaged many ships, they could never have an effect on the outcome of the conflict.
this is so wrong. the reason why there were no kamikaze attacks because japan has no fleet left and no pilots left.
Bro thinks he's 🤓, when tim is actually the smart one.
While the Japanese fleet had been largely eliminated as a force towards the end of the war, researchers have gleamed through delving into volumes of Japanese military and governmental documents that Japan had approximately 7000 kamikaze pilots and planes which were being saved to be used upon the Allies invasion of the main islands. These pilots were not highly skilled aviators and weren't suitable for naval flight operations in any case.
@@timw8646
One reason why so many kamikaze were shot down is the then top secret fuse on five inch AAA shells. It used a fuse that only detonated when it was within lethal range of the offending aircraft. Called a proximity fuse. You may see a video here at the You Tube. Amazing how American engineers were able to overcome the 20K ‘g’ forces of a gun fired shell to enable the fuse to work.
those were the proximity fuses mentioned in the video. I agree it is a remarkable technical achievement but it was mentioned albeit briefly.
Actually, a British invention given to the USA during the Tizard mission. Along with radar, a lot of work on the atomic bomb etc.
@@wilf609 The US had an early radar system prior to the meeting, although the technology exchange without a doubt improved it's capabilities for both nations. Although Britain contributed to the Manhattan project, It doesn't appear to be too vital to the project as a whole other than it being done quicker.
@@gabriel.b9036🤣 do you know what the Tizard Trunk was ?
You've got the voice young lady. Some women don't have the voice for narration but YOU'VE GOT IT. Good luck with your channel you've got the voice
Another great presentation IWM!. Another great presentation IWM!.
My late father was enlisted and served aboard the Escort Carrier U.S.S. Lunga Point and was at Okinawa and Iwo Jima as well at other major battles.
I remember when I was in High School and Dad and I were watching a documentary about Okinawa & Iwo and the Kamikaze attacks. The scene showed a Kamikaze coming from the bow direction and barely missing the stern and crashing right behind the Carrier. Dad got excited and said that scene was of the Lunga Point and he remembered it well. Dad was a Gunners Mate on one of the AA gun batteries. This video also shows the same kind of bow to stern attack and I cannot help but wonder if the Carrier was the Lunga Point. I assume that Kamikazes did this approach on other carriers as well, so I cannot say for certain that this scene in this film was actually the Lunga Point...but it could have been.
The Lunga Point earned the distinction of being the only Carrier to have as many direct hits by Kamikazes as it did and still make it back to a safe port under its own power. After Japan surrendered, the Lunga Point and other carriers went to Tokyo and Nagasaki and picked up Allied P.O.W.'s and also many sick and injured Japanese.
Your dad has an awesome story the for sharing bud👍
@@Wolvieonepunch Thanks...I wish Dad had told me more about his time on the Lunga Point, especially after I was in the Navy, but like so many of the soldiers; particularly the Marines and Army guys that were on the ground fighting, they are very reluctant to resurrect those memories. Dad got hit by a piece of shrapnel from a kamikaze attack and was eligible for the Purple Heart. He refused it, saying that the men on the islands who were dying every day were the ones who deserved the Purple Heart. He said he had a dry bunk to sleep in every night and good food every day and thought it was an insult to the men on the ground to accept it. I call that integrity.
At 3:10 of this video is a young man looking into the cockpit. I sure it's my dad Norman Robarr. My sister felt the same. As a young lad my dad told about this aircraft and the fact get got in to see it right at the end of the war in Japan. One thing that always upset him was the fact they didn't lock in the pilots but the media said it was so. He said he had looked at a bunch of the aircraft and could not find any type of locks.
Easy to crash
Hard to crash at speed into a target
Barely trained to fly
The Zero was hard to control in a high speed dive. Supposedly, a lot of the footage of Zeros diving into the waves as they tried to crash into ships doesn't mean they were hit, the novice pilots simply lost control of the plane in the high speed dive.
@@1977Yakko or passed out due to high G dive
I think the success of kamikaze attacks is best illustrated by that one image you can find online of where a early war zero hit the armored belt of a american cruiser, and just left a black smudge along with a slight dent where the engine hit.
British armored deck carriers did better than American wooden deck carriers
Unfortunately, one success does not make a tactic successful. Success and failure are relative terms. What's success to one person maybe a failure to another. I think I'd decide success based on what percentage hit their intended targets (A), and how many targets wer3 & disabled or destroyed (B).
@@chrismartin3197except the uk got really lucky if you read into them, although U.S. carriers didn’t do bad, they also were out back into service pretty quickly, except bh which was just unlucky
My old duty station from '78-'80, a museum now in San Diego, was home based in Yokosuka...
Thanks for this video, it brings back many memories..!
Would you happen to know the name of the museum, or the name of your old duty station? Thank you.
@@cody7068 USS Midway CV-41...
Excellent site. Thank you. NZ
It's also VERY difficult in practice to dive a speeding aircraft onto a specific point on the surface of the planet. Particularly when that specific point is traveling at a rate of knots across a relatively-featureless surface.
Why how many have you tried?
I seen in another clip about the german raids over Britain that the way anti aircraft was pretty much shoot as much as possible and hope for the best as aiming was more or less a lottery. The shells were primed on the ground based on position, speed, altitude of the advancing enemy officers on the ground would need predict a solution to set their aiming. But also it was standard for the enemy to change altitude and such in order to make it more difficult to get hit.
And at that time the US it said had a developed a new type of ammo that they kept secret, ammo that would explode only nearing enemy aircraft with good fragmentation in mind so it was way easier to hit planes. But they use it only above water so no unexploded shells be recovered and maintain that advantage over the enemy. First time they used it over land was at the Normandy push.
So the reason the japanese air force got wrecked was mainly because of this new type of ammo. And kamikaze approach appeared because they were in very low supply of trained pilots and started to use newbies with no experience and proper training to do the simplest thing, launch and point to the enemy, becoming literally the first guided missiles. But had little success also because of how much that new ammo changed the power balance and really the whole course of the war. And like it said and i tend to agree, the lest known weapon that changed the course of the war. It was not the atom bomb the weapon that got the win but the AA smart ammo that was the equalizer against air supremacy which was so without counter in the beginning of the war.
Very well made video! Good job.
Germans: “We now have the V2 rocket”
Japanese: “hold my sake”
Wow. You may have inadvertently found a rare bit of an entirely different bit of WW2 history. The A6M Zero footage at 1:26. Watch carefully as it rolls over. It has US Roundels on its topside wings. I believe there was only ever 1 Zero so marked. Is that US flight test footage of the Akutan Zero from late ‘42?
I think the proximity fuses probably had the biggest impact.
The ground launched Ohka 43 was used operationally as well In attempts to intercept B-29 bombers. The two seat variants shown in this documentary were modified versions of the Type 43 Ohka with the armament removed (the operational Ohka 43 was equipped with twin 20 mm cannon). Two interception attempts were recorded by B-29 crews but the B-29’s outran the Ohka’s.
This is some amazing commentary, love it❤😊
From all I've seen and read about kamikaze tactics what's stuck out the most, and why it was such a massive failure, is because they went one at a time.
Imagine if a swarm of them were coming at your ship and not just one at a time. Six or seven from all directions. That'd be insanity.
If they attack individually, then once a pilot succeeds, the other pilots can go home. If they all attack at once the, well, you'll be killing the pilots needlessly. Like a proper suicide mission.
Oh they did attack in multiples. But with untrained pilots, first u have to navigate to the target area in open seas, find the target, avoid CAP, then envelope the target from multiple angles under AA. Not easy to hit at the same time considering all that.
They did attack in swarms, it was just navigational errors, CAP from Hellcats, Corsairs and Seafire far from carriers, concentrated AA defensive screen fire left those Kamikaze from swarms to only a single unit.
Other way around.
The swarms were what they started out with. The issue is that that many aircraft is easy to detect by radar and eavesdropping long before they reach the fleet, allowing CAP to intercept them and the fleet’s gunners time to prepare.
Lone aircraft on the other hand is much harder to detect and distinguish as a kamikaze (rather than say a reconnaissance plane), meaning they stood a better chance at bypassing the CAP and taking the gunners by surprise. That’s how they came very, very close to sinking the Bunker Hill: one single kamikaze slipped past and struck her like a bolt of lightning from a clear sky.
The Oka was by now means "crazy." The delivery system was flawed because the Betty was so vulnerable to fighters - their own crew called them flying cigarette lighters. The US Navy can count itself lucky that Oka wasn't developed sooner. It had a huge advantage over normal Kamikaze aircraft. If you put a 500 lb bomb under a Zero and crashed it into a ship, the bomb went off at contact - on the deck. You could still get serious damage to carriers or destroyers, and this damage knocked ships out an killed crew. The Oka however had its warhead built into the fuselage and had a fuse - the warhead was also much larger. That meant it went off after penetrating the vessel - the way a properly configured bomb would do. (See the USS Franklin which was bombed, not hit by Kamikaze and effectively sunk.) Anyway, the one Oka that hit a target put it on the bottom fast. Had the US invaded Kyushu in late 1945 Kamikazes would have had short hops to the landing ships (their new main target) and would have been very hard to shoot down. The improved Oka, as I recall, could take off from the ground if it didn't have to fly very far. As it was Okinawa saw the death of nearly 4,000 US sailors - more than IJ Kamikaze pilots. So the idea was sound - if not the precedent.
My father was a Chief Machinest's Mate on the USS Aaron Ward DM-34, a destroyer on picket duty during the Battle of Okinawa in Spring 1945. It suffered 6 direct kamikaze strikes yet did not sink. The casualties, however, were horrendous.
"The fleeting nature of human life...", a powerful and beautiful summation.
Worth remembering there were Royal Navy carriers at Okinawa as well as American.
The British carriers fared better because, unlike the US carriers, the British carriers had armoured steel decks.
that was in the video
But they could not carry as many aircraft and were much slower as build, making American carrier design considerably superior for combat in the Pacific.
I read somewhere that the British carriers, though they were able to withstand these attacks and stay on mission, suffered significant structural damage that caused them to be retired from service just after the war. The American carriers, by contrast, seemed to suffer much more, but being repaired, were good as new. Some of these served for many years after the war. Be that as it may, Britain's ships and sailors took severe punishment that would have otherwise been reserved for Americans. Though Admiral King didn't really desire the British presence, I'm sure our boys felt very differently.
@@ronaldalanperry4875 I think the main reasons British carriers were retired is because the Royal Navy shrunk so rapidly they didn't have any reason for them. The Japanese didn't deliberately target them (kamikaze pilots had minimal ship recognition training, at most things like carrier vs cruiser.)
@@noneofyourbusiness9489 Yes, it's clear that the British government was no longer able to keep up the expense of maintaining its empire and the great navy that had so long protected that empire. The Royal Navy had given a splendid account of itself in two world wars and many of the ships had given all the service anyone could ask of them. A few of the more modern ships, like the battleship Vanguard and some of the carriers were kept in service for awhile, but even that was a strain on the budget.
The name Kamikaze comes from the storms that destroyed Kublai Khans invasion fleet.
The Germans also rammed fighters into American bombers for a short time (Sonderkommando 'Elbe') until the practice was stopped as being wasteful of men and aircraft.
And ze germans did gut?
I don't think the German unit was a suicide unit. Tho. The planes used were heavily armoured designed to survive long enough for the pilot to bale out..
The German attacks weren't suicide attacks (one man made two attacks), and they weren't a waste of aircraft, because Germany made countless outdated BF109s in an attempt to fudge their production numbers to satisfy Hitler. They just ran out of skilled pilots and fuel and ammunition.
Thus, ramming the tails of bombers then bailing out using unskilled pilots
@@animaltvi9515 'Most of the men who volunteered had grown up with war-era German propaganda and were willing to sacrifice themselves for the perceived cause, with their unit motto translating to “loyal, valiant, obedient.”
3:10 if I'm not mistaken, they have one of those in the USAF museum near Wright-Patterson AFB. It's a wonky little plane.
"Sir! I can't fight the enemy, I'm out of ammo!"
General: "but not out of options.."
Apparently they also had other forms of kamikaze attacks during the tail end of the war that I had never heard about. I found some writing my grandpa had recalling his time in the pacific.
"From Iwo Jima, we assembled for the invasion of Okinawa. This was a much larger and higher island and the airfield was on a high cliff. As we approached for the first landing, the navy and air force had done such a complete destruction that the side of the cliff was littered with vehicles and airplanes that had been blown off the field. At that point, the Japanese forces were pretty much limited to men and smaller guns so we were not subjected to the type of resistance that we faced of the other islands. However, there was one final unusual thing we faced that surprised us and that was that since the Japanese fleet was very small, as we made our way into the beaches we were surprised by Japanese popping up suddenly riding torpedoes. They had white rags around their heads and bottoms and were waving a small Japanese flag, steering the torpedoes with their feet. Later we found out that this was considered a very heroic act. Fortunately for us, they were easy marks for the machine guns."
My understanding is that the pilots were not trained airforce pilots or pilots at all. They were the nerds and intellectuals who had so far avoided the military and, in the final hour, were doing their bit to defend their homeland. I heard that the actual Japanese airforce despised these guys.
Something else about the MXY-7 was that the pilot could either activate all 3 rockets or individually, and each one also had loops in the cockpit to hand their sword.
good to put many numbers to the stories . learned many things .
Failed because of our 'Proximity Fuses' in A/A rounds; devastated planes.
I think it is incorrect to say that the kamikaze was a “failure”. As was pointed out in the book “Hell to Play”, the Japanese military was working out strategies for the Allied Forces invasion of Japan. The Japanese military, as post war examination their military intelligence showed had learned lessons from these early attacks to make kamikaze attacks more effective when allied troop ships would be concentrated around the only two small beaches the allied forces could use to invade the mainland islands of Japan. The book presents a sobering assessment of the costs of invading Japan and the real possibility that Japan could have outlasted the allies. As these intelligence reports show, the Japanese rulers were planning for the war to last until 1948. The atomic bomb foiled that strategy of the Japanese military.
More about war in paific please. its verry interesting, but there are not so many videos abot that.
My favorite song is "I Was a Kamikaze Pilot" by the Australian group Hoodoo Gurus. It's a catchy tune and actually sums up the Kamikaze quite nicely. Anyway, another good video!
Career prospects were limited.
Even aside from cultural attitudes which may or may not be more accepting of suicide, the sheer economics make sense. Send out 100 normal attackers out, 10 come back, and none make a hit. Or send out 50, none come back, 1 makes a hit. Which is more cost-effective? Which costs fewer lives per hit?
Except it didn't work like that. If none come back you have no idea if they were successful or not, and they were far less successful than conventional attackers.
2:56 I think I saw one of those at the Marine Corps Museum outside of Quantico.
It was my impression that Kamikazes went after sexy targets like battleships and aircraft carriers but if they really wanted to stop an invasion like at Okinawa they should have been targeting troop transports and ships loaded with ammo etc.
1 bullet = 2-3 minutes
1 soldier = 18 > years
Yeah, the conversion is a little steep there.
The helicopter pilot in You Only Live Twice was a former Kamikaze pilot.
Clearly not a very good one.....
@@lovablesnowman I think it was meant to be a joke. (Again, clearly not a very good one)
@@notanumber1311 on contrary, it was a good one (joke, not a pilot).
Excellent video!
I remember very vividly of seeing that destroyed A6m when I visited IWM in 2016!!
By the time that started, Japan’s fate was sealed. It was a desperation move that could not have succeeded.
Yes; I saw the comment that 'japan lost the war from the moment they dropped the first bomb on Pearl Harbor'.
I haven't watched the video yet so I'm going to guess can someone tell me if I got it right or not
The Americans produced so many ships that any ship the Japanese sank could be quickly replaced while Japan could replace the lives and planes lost so quickly
Edit: watched the video the reason they failed basically was because they rarely made it to their targets
You got it wrong. Time to watch the video.
The Americans were building ships so fast that some of the ships still had price tags attached while sailing to the Pacific 😄. The navy had to send them away ASAP or the docks get clogged with new ships. 😁
From Scotland, my WW2 Veteran Grandfather taught to me...Never ask another man to do what you aren't prepared to do yourself. And lead your men.
Using two narrators is good at keeping up the momentum of the video. Great video.
It didn't fail, the idea was to take down something else as you went down, if you've ever played survival PVP games and were actually good at it, the most important thing is to not let your loss be another ones gain
War is not a survival PVP game.
@@parkerhughes434Sometimes it is...
This. It's not so much about winning at that point, as it is about taking the enemy with you.
It is true that the Japanese made a lot of overestimation regarding the capabilities of the Kamikaze, but in a way using planes to hit enemy battleships was a prelude to guided missiles.
No. The Germans were already using guided missiles against ships in 1943. The Fritz X and Henschel HS 293.
a prelude to modern Islam more like😁
@@Poliss95 You are right, but at the same time, it's like kamikaze prove the concept.
@@augustosolari7721 NOPE! Guided by a "pilot" does not count!
11:21 those are 2 Littorio class battleships of the Italian Regia Marina,
not Royal Navy ships as implied by the narration.
That's not the only mistake.
My father was in the Royal Navy. He was in the Pacific on an Aircraft Carrier fighting the Japanese..He was a gunner and Torpedo operator..He didnt even mention he was there or what he did..I have all of his Service Records from when he Joined the Royal Navy in 1926. To.1948..He was finally signed out of the Royal Navy in 1952..He was back home working by then..The only thing he mentioned was when it was the 50th Anniversary for the end of the War in Europe..I asked if he was going to be Celebrating with his Sisters. He said it wasnt the end of the War for me ..We were out in The Pacific fighting the Japanese. Our War didn't end untill August the 15TH When Japan finally Surrendered..He said when him and other's got off the Train in Newcastle Central Station. There were only a few dignitaries to welcome them Home from War..There was no dancing and singing in the Streets..He said everyone was back at work. Getting back to some kind of normal..
I have so much respect for the Japanese for having the courage to do this.
Really strange.
Actually it was due to the Kamikaze aircraft, boats and torpedos, plus suicide human wave attacks (that during WW2 Allied troops called Banzai Charges), army and naval infantry using suicide explosives against tanks that caused President Truman to order the Atomic Bombs to be dropped!
Hunh?
And here I thought the point of atom bombs was that you could destroy a city while only risking a single plane's crew.
Silly me.
Furtunately you confirm for us all, the value of the olde rule that anything beginning with the word "actually" is certain to be true.
@@TheDavidlloydjones No. The bomb was dropped so the Americans could avoid having to invade Japan itself, which they estimated could cost 1.7 to 4 million US casualties including up to 800 thousand dead.
Usually, when using parentheses, a second one is used to show other ideas or content within a sentence. Example: Bill liked gum(although he had cavities)and chewed it a lot.
@@johnrudy9404 typo, corrected
@@Poliss95 Yes due to the fear of attacks from "The Divine Wind"! (At Okinawa they found pens for Suicide Boats (which when had large fireworks style rocket motors attached could get an up to 80 knots sprint speed for the final 500+ meters) and Kaiten (Suicide Torpedoes) along with a shift to a number of aircraft going after Landing Ships and Transports trying to kill the Marines and Soldiers before they got on shore....