kamikaze pilots

kamikaze pilots (kamikaze means ‘divine wind’), Japanese who deliberately crashed their aircraft on to their targets. At first they were volunteers whose sense of honour, or Bushidō, enabled them to embrace this form of attack eagerly, but conscripts proved to be equally enthusiastic. The Japanese developed a number of suicide weapons (see Baka bomb, explosive motor boats, human torpedoes, and midget submarines), but the kamikaze pilot was the only effective one and he did nothing to improve the morale of those he targeted.

Early in the Pacific war, Japanese aircraft occasionally crashed on Allied warships, but it only became a deliberate policy when, on 19 October 1944, Vice-Admiral Ōnishi Takijinō suggested forming a kamikaze force to attack American carriers supporting US landings in the second of the Philippines campaigns, an idea enthusiastically received and quickly adopted.

The first officially recognized kamikaze attack was made on the Australian cruiser Australia on 21 October 1944, though the aircraft may have crashed unintentionally. But the aircraft which attacked US ships on 25 October, sinking an escort carrier during the battle of Leyte Gulf, were undoubtedly kamikazes.

Ordinary combat aircraft were used, later modified to carry heavier bombs. At first aircraft were crashed with these attached but later the bombs were often released before impact. Kamikaze attacks reached their zenith during the American invasion of Okinawa in April 1945 when massed suicide sorties, called kikusui (floating chrysanthemums) by the Japanese, sank 36 ships and landing craft, and damaged 368. It has been estimated that 5,000 kamikaze pilots died.

The Japanese were not the only ones to train suicide pilots (see fighters, 2 and KG200).