Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 68 - The Kamikaze

Episode Date: September 16, 2019

On this episode Joe and Nick dive into the troubled and misunderstood history of the Kamikaze. Were they really so devoted to the Emperor they willingly blew themselves up or were they scared and abused kids who were peer pressured into becoming suicide bombers? Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Buy a shirt: https://teespring.com/stores/lions-led-by-donkeys-store Sources: Wings of Defeat (2007) Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney. Kamikaze Dairies: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers. Kaiten Memorial Museum: http://www.kamikazeimages.net/museums/kaiten/index.htm

Hello, welcome to yet another episode of the Lions Led by Donkeys. Another. I'm Joe, as always, and with me is the booted wonder Nick. Yes. Out of a cast into a boot, moving on up in the world. I could move my ankle just a little bit. Yeah. It's all about the little things.

Yeah, pretty much. He took his boot off before we started. And it's always nice to see a cleanly shaved leg just below the knee and nowhere else. You can really tell. It's got to make it silky smooth. Yeah, now it's starting to get all prickly. That's going to be so... It almost makes me want to shave again. Dude, it's going to be so itchy as it's growing within the boot.

Yeah, I know. It's going to be miserable. I had to take the sock off because I'm cleaning it. And I had to come here and I was like, fuck, looks like I had to golet sockless in the boot he had a raw dog the boot yeah pretty much don't worry i keep my house hospital sterile with three dogs worth of hair yeah just random beer bottles everywhere um i threw my back out today doing nothing uh because that is apparently what it is like to be now that i'm 31 years old existing yeah just existing is enough to throw my shit out. But what we were talking about today is the kamikaze.

Yes. What did you know about, like, what was your perception of the Japanese kamikazes of World War II before going into this? No fucks given. More fucks need think. I actually originally had this episode planned to be access suicide weapons in general because like the Nazis. Oh yeah, the Germans had one.

The Nazis had a manned missile that they thought of. They never used it because... Well, the Germans also used to ram bombers. Yeah, yeah. Well, the Nazis had a plan to strap someone to a missile and strap it to a bomber and then just like yeet it at something. But then they didn't really have a whole lot of volunteers

because blowing yourself up isn't exactly a German military tradition. And martyrdom wasn't exactly idealized in the German military like it was the Japanese so it didn't really take kamikaze on the other hand definitely took off and they did a whole lot of damage

for for the little amount of training and technology that went into their creation now the reason why we're covering this is because one, kamikazes are fucking rad. And two, there's a lot of incredibly common misconceptions that surround the concept of the kamikaze.

Those misconceptions have kind of wormed their way into academics and pop academics, I'll call it. Because a lot of the misconceptions I remember vividly from growing up watching the History Channel before it was all about aliens. I guess they called it the Hitler Channel then because it's none of the World War II stuff.

It's better than fucking Pawn Stars and aliens. Yeah, every pawn shop shows us we need to throw fucking porn. Also, one of them ended up being a child molester, so there's that. Like, maybe don't put gross pawn shops on TV. But one of those misconceptions is they were all just volunteered to die and ready to die for the glory of the emperor, which was not true, which we will get into.

But to get there, we have to kind of chart the path of how japan got in such a place where they thought blowing themselves up was like the only option um honestly i imagine everybody thinks of it as the opening scene one of the opening scenes to pearl harbor when the japanese bombed pearl harbor right and it does show some of them crashing into targets. It does. That's where... That, on the other hand, was normal. It was, but what I'm thinking is what they're thinking,

like, oh, man, look at them get ready. They're putting on their headbands. Right. They're doing the ceremonial stuff. That's a kamikaze. That's what I see. Yeah, and kamikazes didn't even exist yet. No, not that early.

So before we get started, I have to acknowledge and recognize our sources. Imiko Onuki Tierney's book, The Kamikaze Diaries, a documentary called Wings of Defeat, where they interview surviving kamikazes, who I'm sure are not long dead, because they'd be in their late 90s. Aerospaceweb.org and the kaiten memorial museum so uh like i said kamikaze doesn't even exist yet at pearl harbor uh but pearl harbor is where this all kind of begins uh because that's obviously where our war began against japan though some would say that we already waged economic warfare against them and gave them no choice but to attack us, but that's a really fucking stupid reason, and that's wrong.

So to make a long story short, the attack on December 7th, 1941 was meant to cause a crippling strike or crippling damage against the American Pacific fleet. This would stop the Americans from interfering on Japanese expansion throughout the Pacific, or what they call the East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, which is like the most PR thing that they could possibly... No, this is the Japanese Empire.

This is what we're going to do. It also meant that it would buy Japan time to prepare for the coming war. As such a crushing blow against American morale that the government of FDR would simply give up and strike a compromise peace deal with Japan and

stop objecting to Japanese operations in China clearly that's what happened right yeah yeah bad idea now to a lot of Japan's military's credit a lot of them said that was dumb and we shouldn't do it but a lot of them's military's credit, a lot of them said that was dumb and we shouldn't do it. But a lot of them went along with it, too.

Did they have a choice to go? No, no. I believe it was the guy who led the attack on Pearl Harbor was like, this isn't going to work. It turns out he was right. At least he was honest. That's good. Yeah. it turns out he was right.

At least he was honest. That's good. Yeah. Japan wanted to destroy as many battleships as possible, as battleships at the time were considered the prestige of any Navy. One could argue that they succeeded in those goals. They attacked, killed 2,400 Americans, sank numerous ships, and destroyed nearly 200 aircraft. One thing they did not destroy,

because they're not there, was the U.S. Pacific carrier fleet. They were there earlier, weren't they? They left to go on maneuvers, and the commander of the attack said, we need to find those aircraft carriers, and he was kind of waved off. Now, on to 1942 and the Battle of Midway. I will obviously not be covering this battle in full. You can probably hear us yell about that soon

when this horrible movie comes out that they're basing on Midway. Oh my God, I want to see it so bad. It's going to be terrible. I know it's going to be terrible. God. Just know that American code breakers had managed to crack the Japanese plans

for the attack into the area. It would be a preparatory strike and further advances on Fiji, Samoa, and Hawaii. They cracked the code so well that they knew the exact time, date, and location of the coming attack, so the U.S. Navy planned an ambush. The Battle of Midway, where the Japanese carriers Akagi, Kaga, and Soryu and Hiryu, which just so happened to be part of the same

six-carrier force that attacked Pearl Harbor, would meet their demise. For their 200 plans, over 3,000 Japanese naval personnel would be killed in the same six carrier force at tech pearl harbor uh would meet their demise for a further 200 plans over 3 000 japanese naval personnel would be killed in the battle so it's a pretty pretty big loss for them uh now the battle of midway has been uh ranked as such a masterpiece of naval warfare it's uh held alongside like trafalgar and tsushima as the greatest battles of all time and it generally could sort of win the turning points of the entire pacific war uh now it's all those things if you're american sort of win the turning points of the entire Pacific War. Now, it's all those things if you're American. If you're Japanese, the Battle of Midway was an unmitigated disaster the likes of never been seen.

While a lot of people like to look at the fact that they lost four carriers as a devastating loss, there is a bit more to it than that. Outside the carriers, Japan lost thousands of skilled naval technicians and trained aircraft mechanics. They lost so many pilots in one day that they actually lost more pilots than they had trained in an entire year before leading up to the war. So that's a pretty fucking steep loss. I don't know exactly how many pilots they trained in the last year because I couldn't find that number.

But it was less than 200. Yeah. Now, a lot of that has to do with inter-branch rivalry within the Japanese Navy and Air Force, which could be an episode unto itself. And the just sheer amount of attrition that their pilot program had. It was obscenely difficult. And if you failed, it was one of those things that like you know so in the in our army we have a thing called recycle well those recycle through until you learn something and you know you'll try again and in the pilot programs for japan that just didn't happen like oh you fucked go back to the infantry or go wherever you know

you obviously can't be a pilot. Yeah, that blows. So literally only the best of the best would graduate before the war. That changed significantly. Yeah, imagine they'd start recycling. Now, making things worse was losing hundreds of aircraft. It was just not something Japan's war economy was prepared for, hundreds of aircraft. It was just not something Japan's war economy was prepared for, as its industry had already began to waver under the weight of waging a three-front war at this point. Because they've already engaged to the north, and they've invaded China for years before.

They're now invading the South Pacific, and now they're attacking the United States. And one of the main reasons why Japan went to war against the United States was the United States was obviously against their expansion into China. So they cut off oil and precious metals and stuff like that. So one of their main oil exports is now fighting you

and you're like, time to ramp up production. Like you're going to hit a wall somewhere yeah the the amount of of dumb people within the japanese military and government at the time is pretty impressive because it's obvious they never listened to anybody other their own little circles and i wanted to go in a little bit about japanese politics at the time but it's fucking impenetrable um i'm going to try to talk to a Japanese history PhD that's a fan of the show, and maybe she can explain it to me better. But I read the entire book on it

called The End of the Rising Sun, and it makes no fucking sense whatsoever. There was numerous coups and attempted coups before, during, and after the war. Really? With different parts of the Japanese military. I only know of one yeah the one at the very end yeah where they tried to keep the emperor from surrendering yeah

there was a lot uh really and there was a lot of like i didn't know that numerous people who came to power because somebody else died or was murdered or assassinated whatever um it's convoluted as shit just just know that the japanese government at the time was not controlled by the emperor almost at all though there was a part of the military who did want to give absolute power back to the emperor uh but yeah it's really complicated um so japan had to find out a way to adequately train new pilots uh or at least to the same standard that they'd once been they quickly found how that was just not possible for the sheer amount of people that they needed yeah flight training was cut

drastically sometimes just in half for somebody flying a plane yes and and yeah planes were rudimentary back then but there's still a fucking plane yeah you're you're defying gravity and like you're you're, you're going to have to teach them how to target and shoot things in the air and drop bombs kind of accurately, like more than, so it was, so I couldn't find the exact schematics and layout and logistics of the

Japanese, uh, training programs before the war. But what I did find was American ones, uh, Japanese training programs before the war. But what I did find was American ones. A normal American naval pilot would get around 600 hours or more of training. Now, sometimes they'd get even more than that before they end up getting deployed. Japanese pilots got their training cut down to 200 hours, sometimes less.

Sometimes they weren't even trained how to land correctly. Oh, okay. We'll fix the wheels. Just wheels just go you'll learn just aim towards the ground uh this put even more stress on veteran japanese pilots who had survived battles like midway um like and there wasn't a lot of them there was a couple hundred but they were dropping like flies because they're they're the ones that who continued to survive based on their good training and experience, while the other shitty trained pilots really didn't get a chance to build it. That was a battle that was so catastrophic for the Japanese military, it became known as the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot, otherwise known as the Battle of the Philippine Sea. This destroyed three more Japanese aircraft carriers, around 600 planes, and another 3,000 naval personnel. From then on the war, the Japanese Navy would be in a position of total

desperation with little hope of regaining the upper hand. Now, the idea of suicide attacks by Japanese pilots was nothing new. It was something of a normal tactic if a bit desperate uh for a pilot whose plane was badly damaged and uh they were so badly damaged they couldn't return home or they're running out of fuel like what you probably saw in uh pearl harbor i think i remember that i do my best to not remember anything about that fucking movie uh but it was pretty common for them to not bail out if they're over enemy territory they would just crash their plane into targets that that looked like they could fuck them up there at the last second right uh and they weren't the only people who did that there's

actually accounts of allied pilots doing the same thing that's a lot more common in the pacific theater than europe um because there was unless you were of a certain persuasion in Europe, Allied prisoners were generally treated pretty well unless you were Russian or Soviet in general or Jew. You had a much higher chance of survival, right? Being treated fine. Pacific, not so much. So people had a tendency to be a little bit more desperate about

the whole thing yeah which i don't blame them for instance they once almost ate a president of the united states uh have you ever heard that story what uh so i so who ate who ate it was future president george herbert walker bush his plane crashed into the uh into the ocean or sorry his plane was shot out of the air he was in a bomber crew i believe i think it was he a dauntless crew i don't know uh and he bailed out but the rest of the crew didn't he landed in the ocean and was picked up by a passing naval vessel the rest of his crew crashed onto an island that was controlled by the japanese where they then proceeded to be slowly executed and eaten. Like, they put tourniquets on people's arms, cut their arm off, eat it, and then keep that guy alive.

You gotta keep the pantry going. Like, you gotta keep the meat fresh. Yeah. So, the idea of an instituted, trained squadron of suicide attackers, or kamikaze uh didn't really come up till 1944 and one man named captain okaharu akamura uh he proposed a bold new innovation in the realm of japanese pilots killing themselves he did it for brownie points these guys are gonna get a great idea our pilots already are fine with crashing to people let's drop bombs their ass so he said he had to put up some type of ideas and he didn't have them at all because you know he got he partied the night before yeah so he didn't have anything prepared for the next day's meeting so when that meeting came up he's like flipping through shit

uh this uh let's crash into boats great idea Oh God, I don't have to do this. I'm not a pilot. I'm good. Yeah. He's, it's like a synergy meeting and everybody's throwing ideas out. Let's updraft numbers. Let's come up with a new rifle.

Kids planes, plane bombs. What? He said, quote, in our present situation, I firmly believe that the only way

to swing the war in our favor is to resort to crash dive attacks with our planes. There's no other way. There will be more than enough volunteers for this chance to save our country.

And I would like to command such an operation. Provide me with 300 planes and I will turn the tide of the war. Spoiler alert, they still lost. No tide was turned.

But because he's a captain, Akamaru would not get to be the one that created the first Kamikaze squadron. It is kind of a nice thing with the Imperial Japanese military. It's a lot like our own. And junior people ideas would just be stolen by somebody else. I'm not saying suicide attacks are cool or anything, but credit where credit is due is all i'm saying like yo akamori gave me the idea that's like some admirals like boys i got an idea yeah this is mine now this is where a lot of the the the popular misconceptions come into play almost nobody thought this was a good idea.

Really? Yeah, everybody's like, that's a fucking waste. Why would we do that? We don't even have pilots, you fucking idiot. I mean, Japan was already very, very low on pilots and planes, and they were struggling to replace

the losses of those planes. And their plane quality got significantly worse as the war went on for that exact reason. They couldn't manufacture small parts very well anymore. So they're going to switch out for this new part that broke a whole lot more because they have no materials. Like fuel was short. So they're like, well, we don't have we can't have any offensive attacks anymore. We only can fly above our own cities in defense because we don't have enough gas to leave the island.

Shit like that. I mean, why the fuck would they be in a position to start proved it well that's the thing they eventually did um they were not in a position to start flinging planes and american ships with absolutely no chance of getting them back that's when uh eventually vice admiral takajira onishi was given permission to find volunteers. Like, fuck it. If people want to do this, let's give it a shot.

For what would become known as the Special Attack Force. Nice. Formed at Mabalot Air Base in the Philippines. So, Onishi approached 23 pilots of the 204th Flying Corps and asked if they would like

to volunteer. For what? Well, he told them what their mission would be. Like, you're going to crash your shit and die. Like, that's what you're going to do. And he asked if they wanted to volunteer for it. Onishi told the men that their commander, a guy named Sakai Yamamoto, had totally approved and encouraged his men to volunteer.

Kai Yamamoto had totally approved and encouraged his men to volunteer. It turned out Yamamoto was actually in a hospital in Manila and had no idea that his men are being talked into killing themselves. Jesus. And I mean, it's hard to like as an American, if my commander said, yeah, my captain really wants everybody to volunteer to kill themselves. I'd be like, fuck that guy. No. Yeah. But that's that's the difference in military and civilian cultural cultures were at the time society couldn't it is

was so much different in japan at the time that's hard to comprehend um people had been taught that especially in the military if your supervisor says something or uh it should be treated uh with like the utmost respect right it's a shame culture and it still kind of is no yeah japan is a more disciplined culture very much so and the military in japan there's a total difference between the two for a reason japan is really disciplined like even their civil society like their trash system, is to a fucking science. It's so strict. They still have some shitty privatized company, which in our area is known as LeMay, by the way.

They can go fuck themselves. Just going to come by and kick your trash can. We didn't pick it up because it was laying outside. I watched him do it. He dropped it trying to pick it up and it just drove away. Oh, dick. I had literally, it was like a little thing hanging out.

A little piece of the trash bag hanging out. They said, couldn't pick it up. Trash hanging out the side. Like, you fucks. If I remember correctly from my very, very limited time in Asia, Japan employs a large amount of people to sweep and mop the street yes i saw that but they're just so disciplined there to the point where they don't want tattoos no rough like nothing is it's super weird other cultures just

so much different and i mean it is engineered to a lot it's engineered to to kind of force people into uh doing a lot of shit they don't want to do overworking and oh to the point they die there's even like the condition has a name i forget exactly what it is but uh it's engineered to the point that dissent is is not just frowned upon it's simply like taboo and you can amplify that by a thousand in the 1940s and the government instituted that into schools to train people to be that way which is why long story short the kamikaze were peer pressured into killing themselves is what i'm trying to say but totally still love love Japan. I'd go back. No, I'd totally go. Yeah. I believe we made plans to go at some point in the future.

We did. So here's where things start to get weird. It is almost universally taught in popular media that kamikazes were volunteers. And that's kind of true. That's kind of not. As the Japanese propaganda machine back home, and definitely the attitude at the front,

the message was sacrifice for the emperor and your homeland. That part is true. They were attempting and largely did succeed in creating a culture of sacrifice which is why i said um you know the the nazi version of a kamikaze didn't pan out because they're like that's not really german it's not german thinking is to blow yourself up for your government yeah um and they didn't really breathe that into people quite yet maybe if they had another 10 years or something they would have flipped the switch and it's a thousand years yeah instead of fighting for the for your fewer die for him instead because that that is what um what i read in the kamikaze diaries when

the things uh what stood out is the first thing that you're taught in japanese military-based training is not how to kill it It's how to die. Really? Literally the first training they had is how you kill yourself with a bayonet. Or how to blow your head off with your rifle. The first thing to do? One of the first things they learned. So you would learn how and why to die way before you learn how to soldier. So, I mean, it's always there.

Okay. Now, the amount of which enlisted soldiers actually believe this is to be debated. For instance, officers were asked to lead these suicide units. There would be lieutenants in charge of an air wing of kamikaze pilots. Now, it's important to note, insubordination within the Japanese military was met with extreme violence. Actually, you didn't really even have to be insubordinate to be greeted with brutal violence. It's just a measure of discipline. It was considered and it was taught that to shirk your duty as given to you by your commander was

incredibly shameful a good example of this is one lieutenant yukio sakai who is a very well-known flying ace like almost uh celebrity level in japan at the time like everybody knew who this guy was yeah um he was asked to lead a kamikaze attack kind of to bring i think it was to bring pr to the whole thing like it makes sense you know this lieutenant who everybody it would be like asking if uh i don't know a rock star to be a suicide bomber like scott stapp i mean at first you'd probably like scott's that blew himself up like wait who's that he's the creed guy and everybody like he would probably blow himself up like it's it makes a lot of sense it's just it it's the japanese version of creed god i would not wish i would not wish that being nuked is less is less bad than being than being forced to listen to creed like you have to listen to, was it Human Clay?

Or just get wiped off the face of the planet by a nuclear bomb. Like, please just wash me with warm nuclear hellfire. Also, I just remembered one of their album names, Please Kill Me. But it's a lot like what the U.S. did with Hollywood stars during World War II. Like, he enlisted. Oh, yeah. Clark Gable. Yeah.

There's a lot. And there's a couple of them who really did go out and do soldier stuff. But, like, they wanted an ace to be a kamikaze to drive more volunteers. How'd it work? Not well. They filled the ranks, but I'll tell you how. Now, Lieutenant Seki himself absolutely didn't want to do it. This is horse

shit. But because he's being asked by his commander to do so, according to Kamikaze Diaries, he closed his eyes, sighed, and forlornly answered, quote, please appoint me to this post. Now, later on in talking to a war correspondent when he

was hours away from flying to his death and didn't really give a fuck anymore he said quote Japan's future is bleak if it's forced to kill one of its best pilots and then continued on to say I'm not going on this mission for the emperor or the empire I'm going because they fucking ordered me to it's

awesome it should be noted that kamikaze pilots got the drink quite a bit before they went on their flights in fact this shit was so unpopular That's awesome. It should be noted that kamikaze pilots got to drink quite a bit before they went on their flights. In fact, this shit was so unpopular that not a single officer that was recorded by the kamikaze diaries or by the documentary that I noted would ever go on to actually volunteer to lead a kamikaze mission. Now, a lot of them did volunteer. They did not go on mission. Now, a lot of them did volunteer. They did not go on mission. There's a lot of people who volunteered to become kamikazes.

What the fuck did they volunteer for? Just to say they did. There's a lot of people ended up... It goes on my record. Well, there's a lot of people who ended up volunteering and then would use connections to just never go on a flight. So they could say that they were kamikaze. What kind of connections do you need? High up ranking officers.

My daddy. And remember remember this is an empire they had peerage so they're like they knew a guy who was in the imperial court something like that um no actual commissioned officer who was not commissioned for the sole purpose of volunteering for a kamikaze mission which i will talk about in a bit volunteered to go to kamikaze shit um and in the jet so you have to wonder like seki knew this is bad and yes violence it would be greeted upon him if he was like i don't want to do it sure get your ass up but you're not going to die but outright and soborn nation was almost universally dealt with by immediate execution by

the imperial japanese military um there's a common belief dating back to the 80 period that if you were guilty of something as shameful as disregarding a direct order from your superior that five generations of your family could be punished as well cool yeah that's a lot which is something that kind of north korea does today yeah it's like guilt by blood nice uh so and i couldn't find anything they actually said that they did this but they it was enough that they believed it you know something doesn't have to be true it's like the fort knox of punishments everybody believes that it's incredibly well defended and like there's gonna be a SWAT team up your asshole if you take a picture of it in reality it's a bunch of old fucking treasury guys who are asleep i i drove onto Fort Knox with nothing but a dog tag once.

It's theater is what it is. But it was enough to scare these guys. So the first kamikaze strike set out on October 25th, 1944, in a vain attempt to repel the American invasion of Leyte, an island in the Philippines. Before taking flight, they're given a ceremonial sash that was sewn with a piece of thread from thousands of different women as a sign of good luck and a shot of sake and sent on their way. Now, a lot of the videos that you see shows people cheering for the emperor and then jumping in their planes. shows people um like cheering uh for the emperor then jumping in their planes a lot of the people had to be carried out of their planes because their nerves just would not allow them to

actually get behind the controls oh they're like they're like fuck i don't want to die and their bodies would just refuse to work so like they'd have seconds almost like a squire that would like pick them up and carry them over to their plane body Body crew? Yeah. The lieutenant passed out. Go ahead and get the body crew. Just eat him into the cockpit. Hut, hut, hut, hut, hut. Now, as you can imagine, the Americans they are attacking were totally unprepared

for what was coming for them. Never in their wildest dreams like those planes are even going to shoot at us. Is he going to turn? Is he going to pull up? He's still kind of a dumbass. Oh, wait.

Now, like I had pointed out before, these first kamikazes included several actually decent pilots who may or may not have been shamed in taking part in the mission. So they had a pretty decent idea of how to quickly approach the American ships that are immediately being smacked out of the sky. The later generations, not so much. Many of the pilots flew their planes just above the water,

trying to hit the ship at the waterline to make it sink. When they attacked aircraft carriers, they'd dive up into the air and come crashing down on the flight decks. Now, in one case, a plane supposedly being flown by Secchi himself slammed right into the deck of the USSs sanlo a casablanca

class aircraft carrier and exploded it quickly caused the fire to sweep into the ship's magazine causing the entire ship to explode killing 133 sailors and of course taking an aircraft carrier out which is something the japanese have not really been very good at and up until now yeah so like oh shit that one guy just did something our entire air force can figure out now and they were peer pressured into this for the most part now there's a lot of well i was ordered to go like wouldn't you want to volunteer for this and you're gonna be like come on taisho everybody's doing it bro come on it's kind of like you get voluntold to do something somebody says hey sergeant can you go do this that's not a question it's an order

framed as a question most of the time i question it as a question i mean like they got voluntold slash peer pressured slash shamed into this there There was some very, there was some actual volunteers that, that needs to be said there. It wasn't like a hundred percent. It's just like suicide bombers today. A lot of people actually volunteer for it, but there's some people that get peer pressured, tricked or otherwise conned into killing themselves for something they don't

entirely understand. God, that sucks. Yeah, it's not good. Uh, it gets worse because of course it does. It's what we do sucks. Yeah, it's not good. It gets worse. Because of course it does.

It's what we do here. Now, in the same attack, five ships were sunk, 40 others were hit, 23 of them so badly they had to be pulled back for peril, risk sinking, and hundreds of sailors were killed.

Now, this is more damage than the Japanese Navy or Air Force done in a very long time. Oh, so they got good results. How many pilots do you think it took to get rid of all those not sure 55 for the cause of 55 people they did all that damage which i believe is more than they did in the marianas turkey shoot very in short these poor bastards flinging themselves at the u.s navy on a suicide run was the most successful thing the japanese military has done in years so now they

got positive off this they're like it's a great idea right like the people who there's a lot of um diehards that leading up to like this is this is it this has got to be the only way just like kamikaze which meant divine wind uh it drove back the hordes and saved Japan. Did you say August winds? The divine winds. These divine winds will push back the American fleet. We need to do this. And the final, whatever, do what the fuck you want, man.

Because if it failed completely, they didn't really lose much. They lost 55 guys and some planes. Right. But like it worked. They're like, it's like the dog when it catches the car. Like it's chasing cars. Like, oh God, I caught it. What now?

And they're like, oh fuck, this worked really, really good. So now we need to get a whole bunch more kamikaze pilots, which of course meant they need to find a whole bunch more volunteers, which they didn't have. Yeah. Now the initial success sold the japanese military in the need for more of these pilots if they're ever going to hold off the possible and seemingly inevitable invasion of the homelands which was planned it's called operation downfall and it is fucking apocalyptic one day we'll do an entire episode on we need to and what that plan looked

like and what it would have entailed because it's fucking nuts uh but that came back to the question when they had the first time they went around for kamikaze recruitment how would they get more volunteers well luckily for the military the japanese government had their back you see japan like most other countries during the war had draft deferments one of the draft permits was for education. Now, much like America, Japan at the time did not have very affordable higher education. So if you were well-to-do, rich, whatever, you'd be able to go to school, get a deferment, or at the very least, at the end, you'd just be an officer. So a lot of these kids in school were like the upper class people because they've been being able to dodge drafts for all these years. This is generally how it works.

So a lot of people have been in there for a very long time like, ha-ha, you'll never get me. Well, since before the war and only getting worse from then on, Japanese education had morphed into more of a ultra-nationalist, militaristic, dystopian nightmare than an actual education system. Mostly because their equally insane education minister, Sadao Araki. Now, um... Sounds like a dick. He was.

So, he actually fully supported Unit 731. Really? like a dick he was uh so he actually fully supported unit 731 really yeah he was like a vocal supporter of unit 731 he's like this is great torture more people what uh for people who are not already unit 731 needs to be an episode it will be uh but it was the japanese military equivalent of all the nazi medical experiments you've heard so much about but worse yes um but we won't go so much and far into his background, but just know he is one of the main reasons that the concepts of Bushido were introduced into the education structure.

And once supporting an attempted coup that would have given the Japanese emperor absolute power, he's someone that even Japanese fascists of the time thought was radical. Really? Yeah, like the Japanese fascists like, whoa, bro,

you're too far, right? This guy's fucking crazy. That was the guy in charge of educating Japan's children. So you can imagine what their education looked like. Much like we talked about before where they're being, it's being beaten into their head about how they need to sacrifice and die. Sacrifice and die.

So that is when the government thought of a really good idea to free up a bunch of kids for the draft. Simply eliminate two years from college. You get to graduate two years early. If you're in those later two years, congratulations, you're graduated. No, you don't have a choice. Here's your college degree. Yeah.

What do I get? What do I get? Now those people are all free for the draft oh fuck i have a degree in history what could i do fly this plane into an aircraft carrier bitch uh damn it you'll be in the history books while they're fucking giggling at each other this fucking guy sucker now these new conscripts reach training. They learn the hard way how terrible life was for regular Japanese soldiers.

This horrible existence was made even worse by the fact that many of these college-educated conscripts had pretty easy lives up until that point. Japanese training at the time believed that beating soldiers was a key part in developing what is known as a soldier's spirit. Now, in the book Onward to Our Noble Death, which is obviously a graphic novel and not a history book, but it was written by a veteran of the Japanese Imperial Army. And one of the quotes that he says in it is, soldiers are like tatami, they're better once you beat them god yeah uh to make matters worse

they're being trained by officers and ncos that worked their way up through the ranks during the years of japan's warfare and absolutely hated these college-educated sissies who had shown up to be soldiers um did you throw sissies in there or was, that wasn't a quote. Yeah, that wasn't a quote. Now, I have to point out that these guys are not kamikazes yet. I'll tell you how it ended up that way. One man named Irokawa Dayakichi called it a living hell, saying, quote, After I passed the gate to Tashashira Naval Air Base, training took place day after day. I was struck in the face so hard and frequently that my face is no longer

recognizable. On January 2nd, 1945, Ensign Kaneko hit me in the face 20 times and the inside of my mouth was cut in many places by my teeth. I've been looking forward to eating zoni, which is like a special rice dish. Instead, I was swallowing blood from the inside of my

mouth. On February 14th, all of us were punished because they suspected that we ate at a farmer's home near the base to ease our hunger. In the midst of a cold winter, we were forced to sit for seven hours on a cold concrete floor and they hit us on the buttocks with a club. Then each of us was called into an

officer's room. When my term came, I soon entered the room. I was hit so hard that I could no longer see and fell on the floor. The minute I got up, I was hit again by a club so that I would confess. A friend of mine was thrown with his head first into the floor, lost consciousness, and was sent to the hospital. He never returned.

So, this is just regular basic training. You could see how these men would eventually break down pretty quick after this kind of pressure. It's why torture doesn't work. If you treat someone like this for long enough, then you ask them a question like, yes, yes, fine, whatever.

Yeah, I'll tell you whatever you want, man. This, of course, made them perfect candidates for special attack units. Now, one of these trainee groups would be brought into a large hall altogether. They'd all be sat down and forced to listen for hours of lectures on the virtues of patriotism and sacrifice for the emperor. Ah, okay, buttering them up.

Then they would be told to step forward if they did not want to sacrifice themselves. Step forward in front of the group of their peers and say they did not want to sacrifice themselves. Sometimes this is in reverse, where they would step forward if they of the group of their peers and say they did not want to sacrifice themselves. Sometimes this is in reverse, where they would step forward if they wanted to volunteer, leaving the non-volunteer sitting by themselves. Either way, you can see how the group dynamic here

all but promised absolutely nobody would ever say no. These teenagers who were effectively peer pressured into killing themselves. Now, not to mention that the people around them are probably the only friends that they had left in the world um since they had left home yeah most of the kamikazes who left behind diaries point to that nearly all of them simply felt guilty for thinking about saving their own life while their friends volunteered to die another interesting thing about these kamikaze diaries none of them talk about attacking the

enemy almost none of them talk about why they want to attack americans or why they want to go fight or or that they hate that the enemy is attacking their home not like virtually none of them talk about the person they're going to go fly a plane into yeah it's all about their duty it's never about the person they actually want to fight so that that tells me that they're going to go fly a plane into. It's all about their duty. It's never about the person they actually want to fight. So that tells me that they're more afraid of their own government than the army. Now, let's say you did have the courage to refuse, and some of them did exist. Your life would immediately become infinitely worse.

Now, one of the more interesting ways that militaries throughout human history have bred what is now known as esprit de corps is by shared suffering and misery. It makes you guys bond together. I've been a part of it. You've been a part of it. Anybody who's in the military has been a part of it.

And it's engineered that way. It makes everybody closer and it makes things suck less that's important um so the beating would continue and your starvation rations that you were already living on were cut in half oh cool you would then be totally shunned by everyone else so your own peer group that the people you've absolutely been relying on this entire time gone you then be sent out to the battlefield as infantry where your death is almost guaranteed So your own peer group, the people you've absolutely been relying on this entire time, gone. You then be sent out to the battlefield as infantry where your death is almost guaranteed.

Oh, with the army? Yep. Oh, cool. I mean, you probably had a better chance of surviving Kamikaze missions. Oh, God. All options seem to suck. No, there's no good option. There's no good option.

Every option is bad. I can see what they're saying. I definitely... Sometimes, your courage won't even matter. Say you finally got the meaty clackers to stand up in your group like, Fuck this. I don't want any part of this. Yeah.

You see, it had become a point of pride for some commanders report that their entire unit had volunteered just look at all these people willing to die for us that should go on my oer now the problem is they won't even ask their soldiers if they wanted to volunteer or not they would just volunteer for them in one case a named Kuroda Kenjiro had been one of two in his group to refuse. Those two were sent back to their barracks, only to find out that the next morning his name was on the list of volunteer anyway.

What? In another case, Lieutenant Fuji Masaharu had pissed off his commander. His diary never says why. stayed a personal disagreement said his name wrong yeah uh only only to find out that his commander ordered him to lead a kamikaze attack on okinawa knowing he couldn't refuse he forced his subordinate to kill himself on okinawa. How long ago was that? 1945, I believe. That's far away from where they were. Yeah.

Out of the 4,000 trained kamikaze during the war, virtually all of them would come from those newly conscripted boy pilots. Boy pilots. They would eventually become known as the student soldiers. The ones that got their college cut short.

Yeah. The sissies? Yep. Oh, okay. Once selected, they'd undergo more training, which only meant more beatings and more starvation. That's training. How does this make me

a better pilot? Shut up. I don't have to train you. You only have to teach you half of flying. We could ignore the landing part. I mean, there was kind of a point to this.

Not a good one. The beatings? uh they they thought they had to train them somehow they didn't have the means to give them more flight training they had no planes and no fuel so they're like let's just hit them fuck we don't have this uh let's just uh we this rock, though. We do have to fill up this curriculum somehow. It has obviously limited their flying time, which was about 100 hours or less. God, I imagine flying was probably the best part of it. Like, oh, I'm not getting beat. Crashing and dying.

They can't hit me while I'm flying. Now, this flight training, like I said, is now 100 hours or less. Taught them how to aim for certain parts of enemy ships, do this flight training, like I said, is now a hundred hours or less taught them how to aim for certain parts of enemy ships, do the most damage as well as to not sacrifice themselves. If they didn't think that they'd hit a target. Um, now their,

their brochure or their flight manual said, quote, a pilot should not waste his life lightly. Uh, however, showing up back at base more than a few times is a bad idea you just go there and see everybody go and turn around you're like well try one pilot returned less than no no less than nine times and was shot on the flight line and returned his last time oh fuck

that's a little suspicious other kamikazes in their diary admitted for simply aiming for the water and to skip across hoping they'd survive and get captured I'm gonna skip this bitch like a rock My whole thing was this dude came in nine times and be like these guys aren't gonna suspect a fucking thing He's got like

the old timey tick marks they have on planes for shooting death all the times he came back alive. Sucker, I'm as good as a nine kamikazes. I'm basically an ace. Skip across the fucking water. Now, as kamikaze attacks continued, allied tactics against them improved. In one particular way, it was called the Big Blue Blanket,

since apparently the American Navy sucked at naming things. Yeah, that's terrible. So that involved sending out advanced fighters and like a picket group out in front of a carrier force to shoot down as many kamikazes as they could before they come close. Because it quickly became apparent that they really only cared about the aircraft carriers. They wanted to take out battleships and aircraft carriers. They send out anti-aircraft equipped ships and fighter aircraft to try to head them off.

Yeah. The now incredibly poorly trained kamikaze pilots went down pretty much instantly. Yeah, I imagine that was stats day for some of the American pilots. Yeah. I'm an ace six times. That guy was 10. Oh, shit. Still got it.

It counts. It was a plane. Now, the peak of kamikaze attacks would come during the Battle of Okinawa between April and June of 1945. And with those waves of attack came other Japanese suicide weapons. The first was the kaiten or the suicide torpedo some people don't think of it as a torpedo and think it was a submarine the suicide submarine which is not correct uh the kaiten was literally a torpedo with a guy seat inside so the name kaiten is also interchangeably used for suicide boats uh that the japanese had planned

on using but we're not here to talk about them those are just boats full of explosives right the Kai 10 began development 1944 it was designed to be loaded onto a regular submarine which would then kind of act as a mothership get close to what the

target was and then just tow the Kai 10 close enough where it could pilot itself towards the target after which it then just tow the Chi 10 close enough where it could pilot itself towards the target. After which it would be launched and it would be guided towards a carrier or large shadow in the water or whatever, whatever the pilot could see. Yeah.

At least that was the plan. Now, uh, the first Chi 10 was quite literally a torpedo with a seat on it. Um, rudimentary controls were installed as well as a few gauges. So the pilot could kind of see where he was going but they they weren't very good at that part because remember this is

not a submarine it was a fucking torpedo uh that the gauges really worked like shit and they put a little porthole window that would immediately fog up because that a person inside of it so they just stick a guy blindly into the water and be like, go forth and do great things. And he's just like, which way do I go? Don't hit us. Now, the design did begin to change. Not always for the better. The normal pilots for the Kaiten were much like the Kamikaze's young conscripts between the ages of 17 and 28. Because the number of kaitens are very small,

almost none of the would-be pilots would actually train inside of the weapon they would end up using. So they would not even sit in the seat until it was game day. They're just sitting in a car seat for a car. So this is how it would be? More or less, yeah.

Pretty much. Good enough. Instead, so the train consists of having a trainee haul ass in a speedboat and then try to steer it only using periscopes and instrument panels this is miami vicing it with fucking a blindfold on yeah i know like some naval lieutenants like, is this really going to work for a training? He's like, no, but they won't live to tell about it. So if anybody asks, it worked great. As bad as the training was,

deployment of these weapons is actually somehow worse. So because they are, like I said, retrofitted fucking torpedoes, there wasn't a whole lot of room for a person to sit inside. I feel like they were just holding on to it like wily coyote like the guy uh riding the nuke all the way down except he's just like he has a he's like a web belt around the waist the torpedo let's get this i don't know what a texan japanese person sounds like but he's yeah uh now there was a small seat carved out for them uh but the modification for

that seat was was half-assed at best what do you think like an important part of if you're gonna sit in something and then have it sink and you survive like what being watertight would be important right yeah yeah they for They left that part out. So they kept flooding and drowning people. All right. First mystery. Here we go. Other times they would just randomly explode like they're made by fucking acne.

Like, oh, cool. I got one. The one that's watertight i mentioned the engineers are going through a montage oh that one's not worse how you drown i think i've quoted this fucker i've brought up this episode the simpsons like eight times that's when homer's trying to make cereal that catches on fire yeah fuck we're gonna have a montage it's just teenagers exploding out yeah oh man so one thing that the early versions of uh the torpedoes had uh was it was an escape hatch so you see the the rig it's not even big enough for an escape hatch. So, you see the... I feel like it's not even big enough

for an escape hatch. It's just the door. It's probably a screen door at this point. The original plan was to jump in the Kite 10, steer it towards a ship, which remember you couldn't fucking see, and then just jump out at the last second. The problem was it goes

against all kinds of laws of physics because these things get up going decently fast and the water would make it so the escape hatch couldn't actually open. Oh yeah. Oh fuck. Like oh they told me

I could escape. Fuck. You try to star ski and hutch out the fucking guy tin. But you can't. So they decided that well the escape hatch is the problem for all the leaks so we'll get rid of it oh okay so now uh the mothership would carry these chitins close to

a target which now forces the submarine to go pretty slow because the chitins are pretty big then the pilot would jump inside engineers would weld you inside of it so there so i imagine what you're in you're like so where's that escape hatch you guys were talking about it hold on a second what's that shinji on your ear yeah that was an awful lot of sparks there must be the escape hatch working we're just installing it uh so another problem with a torpedo being launched from a submarine is you want to be hidden right like otherwise this whole system doesn't work like submarines are fucking armored they're like sheet metal held together with rivets yeah um so you want to be deep or far away from your target so the kai 10 can only dive about 80 feet nice

which should be noted is shallow enough where it could be seen by the naked eye oh no death charges you could take it out of a fucking gun um so this in turn limited the diving depth of the mother submarine because if you only have the diving depth of 80 feet that means the mother submarine have to rise up to at least 80 feet, probably more, sometimes even surface, to launch the torpedo. Let's go! Fuck that guy! This meant that the submarines

got blown out of the water as they attempted to line their chitons up for an attack run. In the end, only a couple chitons had actually hit their target, so they did sink two American ships. Total. Honestly, imagine.

Some of them didn't even come up to the ADI and just launched and said, yep, we did it. It's gone out of there. As the guy inside just strangles a dais of explosive decompression. Yeah. Wow, that torpedo's going awfully deep. So in the end, about 187 Allied sailors were killed by kaitens and those two boats that they sank uh how many pilots do you think died 65 100 g6 this included 15 in training as well as the eight submarines the

motherships that were sank attempting to use chitons killing another 900 sailors god which means they are now like negative 700 sailors and this being a good idea I think they're probably pitching this off great idea it still works this is a good idea if you don't do the math.

You're thinking about it. Don't think about it so much. Yeah. So the next suicide weapon that would join the Kamikaze airwave at its peak at Okinawa was the Yokosuka MXY-7, or the Oka. Sounds like algebra. So in short, it was a human-guided cruise missile. And yes, it's exactly as awesome as you'd think and here's why i take back my whole thing with the whole acne strap this is the one where the

dude sits on top it's just like a horse fucking saddle on top of a missile like there you go dude so the oka was originally designed by an ensign in the navy and a couple students at the university of tokyo yeah it was literally invented by college students. Jesus, the sissies. The ensign was named Mitsuo Ota, submitted his plans to the Imperial Japanese Navy, who then just said, fuck it, and gave it a shot. At that point, yeah, they're at that fuck it stage.

We're like, we'll try anything. Just throw enough shit to the wall, see what sticks. We're desperate. What's guiding it? More people? Fine, whatever. We only have eight more of these plans um they began testing in 1944 but actually testing uh isn't important and the reason why is because they actually began production before testing was done yeah like really who cares about safety we're strapping this dude to a rocket so the model 11 which is the only one of the models that would ever see you so it's the only

one we're going to talk about was about 19 feet long with a wingspan of 11 feet at its nose was a 1200 kilogram warhead that would be used to just crash just right into shit it's pretty big fucking boy that That's a big-ass bomb. Now, the Oka is kind of like the airborne version of the Kai-10. It would be towed into battle by a Mitsubishi bomber known as a Betty. The problem, of course, being those Bettys are large and slow.

Like the Kai-10, strapping more to a large and slow thing made them larger and slower and easier to shoot down. The Betty would get as close as they could and drop the Oka. Once the pilot of the rocket had a target in mind, they'd kick on three fucking rocket engines

that were strapped to their ass and shoot towards their target at over 500 miles an hour. Yeehaw. That's fucking rad, dude. Like, I hope these guys are listening just, like like grinding death metal the whole time like these guys

if you put an oka in Mad Max Fury Road it would not be out of place that'd be sweet too yeah like the guitar guy just straddling it sweet okay and it also goes into competition

for what I think in our year and a half long podcast lifespan of the coolest fucking name of all time. Really? Is this taking it? I think it is. We'll leave it to a popular vote. Oh, I love names.

The Japanese gave the pilots the coolest name of all time. The Thunder God Corps. Yes! That's a fucking party. I'd party with them. Just saying that name out loud makes you deadlift at least 50 pounds. I understand you don't want to guide a cruise missile,

but what if I told you you'd be in the Thunder God Corps? Like, fuck, sign me the fuck up right now. My dick just got hard. And theicans gave it a pretty funny nickname the baka bomb which is japanese for fool or idiot there's the dumb bomb full of idiots because they're launching a rocket into a ship yeah but they're listening to heavy metal dude they are the heavy metal they have to be the most like motivational people on earth because like dude i dude, we're the Thunder, like, we're acting like we're the regular army. We're in the special attack units, guys.

We are the Thunder God Corps. Start acting like it. This is great. Now, unlike the heaps of abuse and strict discipline of the Kamikaze, the Thunder God Corps pilots just kind of act like soldiers. They would get belligerently belligerently drunk fight each other their superiors and routinely sneak off base to fuck their way across town nice nice so the thunder god core is basically the cool guys

the thunder guard the thunder god core is the chads of the imperial military eventually their commanders stopped trying to control them and just promise like guys just pinky promise me you'll show up whenever we have a mission hell yeah bro because they're not really flying anything oh dude they're just kind of pointing it in the general direction and hitting the go button so like you don't have to be sober for that uh now before they would they would normally get drunk and put uh and save most of their money because they never really had to worry about buying anything um and they would put several months of money uh of their paychecks they'd saved up and give it to a random family in town before

they went off to fucking throw themselves into a ship fuck that's cool yeah huge uh huge uh givers these thunder god core veterans yeah. In comparison, the kite... I think they put it towards a Thunderbird or something. They don't need it where they're going. I really hope before they crash, they said, Witness me. Just huffing spray paint. They're the fucking Chromeboys of World War II.

In comparison, the Kai-10 pilots, when they died, only when they died uh which was obviously a lot of the time if you remember the numbers yeah they'd give they'd be given 150 bucks and be sent to their family you think this there's just like a like a shoebox this is your son like threw a bunch of like change in there this is what we think he's worth with inflation you owe us this at the end actually your son was such a shit bag you now have kaiten debt you have to give us another son yes we're just gonna drag him out to the bane he's gonna die but you still owe us one um now back to the regular kamikaze they had begun to build a purpose-built kamikaze planes

rather than just retrofitting old ones with giant bombs on their face makes make sense and they purposefully built the worst goddamn aircraft possibly of world war ii um it was a pile of shit known as the nakajima uh now remember this is 1945 late 1944 japan They don't really have a lot of material laying around. So, growing up, when you lived on leftovers and shit, did your mom ever just make a leftover casserole? Oh, what's left in the pantry soup? Yeah.

Or fucking whatever she could make? This is the leftover casserole of airplanes. Yep. Sure, it flew, but you didn't want to fly it. No, you're going gonna fly it for long so it was built out of shit they just didn't have use for anymore

which is like bad grade metal that they couldn't make into literally anything else and wood a fucking world war one biplane would probably be better than this I got a toothbrush some pocket lint got some floss is that a wheel oh that's too good put on one of the good french dressing french dressing

just lather up the kamikaze french dressing um they use shitty old engines that they just had lying around from the 20s and 30s not all of them had the same engine yeah they don't need it whichever plane would be vastly different than the other you know what i just realized you remember the guy that flew back nine times yeah from his mission yeah that was their most experienced pilot just fucking killed yeah all those years of experience um so all this uh like leftover shit made it virtually impossible to fly and very very slow um and that was before they slapped an 800 pound war or sorry 1800 pound warhead to it i want to see like the greaser japanese guy who came up with his own plane that was a badass plane

had like ape hangers and it had a fucking sweet blower and headers on it. And it was just ripping across the sky. That's a look really good crashing into a ship. I know. Wait, what? I don't know, man. Japanese car culture is so weird. Have you ever looked at it?

Their cars are weird. It's a sight to behold as they have this like giant 18 foot tall plastic monstrosity bumping down the road. It's outstanding. Some of the places I went to, because we went to a, for some reason, I don't know why, a car dealership in the area where we're in Japan. Let's see if you get a really badly overpriced car alone like any other good soldier. I couldn't find a single car that could fit either one of the people I was with oh yeah they have the mini cars that are oh they were so small and i didn't understand where the engines went we're at they're in the back like i was like where's the engine they're so small that they can't be exported to the u.s so they don't pass any fucking federal safety laws but but they're super affordable go-kart yeah yeah it's they're super affordable

for like a normal japanese person because like rent is so fucking high. Yeah. So like they're, I think they equal out to be like six grand. So they're for a brand new car. I mean, and they're like terrible for highway use. Yeah. It's like trying to fucking, it's like a Jeep Wrangler with a sale on it.

Like my first car was a Jeep Wrangler with like a canvas top. It was a really shitty one. Like it wasn't cool. I'm not a Jeep guy,ler with a canvas top. It was a really shitty one. It wasn't cool. I'm not a Jeep guy, so I didn't give a fuck. But if you got over 50, 60 miles an hour, it felt like you were breaking through the Earth's atmosphere and reentering the planet. That's kind of what one of those cars is going over 50 miles an hour on the highway.

So they're strictly for city use. They have their purpose, not like this goddamn plane, which is apparently made of a repurposed lawnmower engine and some wood. And a lawn chair. That's not a pilot seat. That's a lawn chair. Is that French dressing?

It's all we had for a joystick. Fish rocks. So according to a book on Japanese aircraft of World War II, the performance was abysmal, the visibility terrible, and it could not be safely flown by anybody. So only the skilled, you're saying, can fly this. Yeah, only their most skilled pilots could safely test this thing. And even so many of them died in testing that they just scrapped it.

These guys are not smart no i think all the smart ones are dead i don't know their game i really don't yeah this is clearly the long con but well how's this end yeah as it turns out the japanese high command did not see a problem that kamikaze simply could not fix oh yeah um this being the late stages of the war allied strategic bombing had reduced most of japan's industry to little more than fire and corpses so they formed the 47th air regiment of the special attack unit their job was to fly directly into b-29s that had been bombing the piss out of the country now you can imagine how hard this is in your head imagine hitting a flying

bomber with your own plane all while dodging curtains of defensive fire that came out of these things from and like all that would call for like incredibly skilled piloting which they didn't have um yeah it's just like impossible it never worked but they tried time

and time again yeah uh so many of these pilots flung themselves in the con vein died pretty quickly that they get like well we don't have any of them left anymore i imagine they had a hard time getting up there yeah most of them died uh before they even came close because just the way our tactics work uh during world war ii is you know the planes were flying fortresses for a reason to fight off attacking fighters. That became even easier when they weren't trying to dodge the incoming and flying directly at you. Yep. Wow, you made my job easier. Cool.

And the formations were like that so they can cover each other. Right. And the supporting aircraft, which could fall them out to a certain distance. Yeah. Yep. Terrible. But that brings us back to the peak of the kamikaze's existence at okinawa and what a fucking peak it was wave after wave of kamikaze pilots took off thousands in all

really yeah the kamikazes had adapted somewhat to the new american tactics to counter them instead of just going for carriers the first wave would directly attack the ships put in place to fight kamikaze and then just kind of attrition warfare but with kamikaze pilots didn't work but it worked better than it did before around 30 allied ships would be sunk or damaged so badly that had to be taken out of service

the main goal of defending the carriers worked only smaller ships were sank. Carriers got damaged, but they were pretty well protected. The plan did not work flawlessly. For instance, the USS Laffey, wonderful name, got hit with six fucking kamikazes. What kind of ship was it?

It was a destroyer. It didn't fucking sink. Oh, God. It earned the nickname, The Ship That Would Not Die. Cool. Like, it's the only ship that, like, the fifth Kamikaze was like,

Oh, God damn it, here comes another one. I imagine the Kamikaze was like, Fuck, another. Yeah, imagine being the Kamikaze that that kept hitting it imagine being number six like well the sixth one should do the trick yeah you just leave it alone it's not going down it's not working i think they were expecting to see it actually go down into the ocean not just be damaged but in the ocean and You're supposed to sink, not just be on fire. That's also during this battle that the U.S. found out a curious way of why their carriers were being rocked by kamikazes and the British allies were not.

You see, the U.S. had wooden flight decks, which sounds really strange, and it is. But they had wooden flight decks built into their carriers while the british had metal ones the wood ones made fires spread much easier and were much harder to repair according to a u.s uh liaison officers with the british royal navy at the time he said quote when one hits a u.s carrier means six months of repair when one hits a limey carrier, it's just a case of sweepers, man, your brooms. Clean up this mess. Oh, bugger. Oh, bugger. Get the brooms.

I can honestly imagine like they're just looking at all the American carriers like, fuck, there's a lot of planes coming at them. And they're just looking at their blue open sky like, sweet. You know, it's weird. I never thought about World War II aircraft carriers having wooden flight decks. Yeah. Like, they'd have to be really hard and time-intensive to fix. I think the Japanese had wooden... I think they did. Yeah, and a few bombs would pop through the whole deck.

Right, and that's pretty much what happened with Kamikaze. They'd bust through the deck a lot of times and then just go right into the magazine or into the rest of their ship. So after Okinawa, however, the Kamikaze had begun to lose its effectiveness as the war was now totally lost and Allied tactics shifted to expect them now at every turn.

They knew now that wherever they invaded, they'd be hitting Kamikazes. That did not stop the Japanese from using them as one of their main interception weapons for the defense of their homeland. In the case of the Allied invasion of the Japanese homeland, like I said before, called Operation Downfall, the

IJN, or the Imperial Japanese Navy, and the IJA, or the Imperial Japanese Army, had around 10,000 kamikazes ready to go. In comparison, during Okinawa, they used 2,000 with a hit rate of about one for nine. Now, the Laffey...

Still not good. The Laffey kind of threw that statistic off a bit. Yeah, he did. During the downfall... Sorry, during Operation Downfall and their downfall, they hoped to make that number one for six oh which have been around 400 allied ships in total trying to raise their batting average according to the end of the japanese empire by richard frank that would

have been equal to be about one third or even one half of the entire allied fleet dead or at least fucked up pretty good yeah by the thunder god corps man badass name yeah but operation downfall never happened and instead japan was nuked into surrender in closing

i will quote the u.s air force's world war ii history page on the impact of these suicide attacks. Approximately 2,800 kamikazes sank 34 Navy ships, damaged 368 others, and killed 4,900 sailors, wounded another 4,800. Despite radar detection and cueing, airborne interception, attrition, and massive anti-aircraft barrages. 14% of kamikazes survived to score a direct hit on the ship. Nearly 1.8... Sorry, correction. Let me fucking say that whole goddamn thing over again.

Fuck me. Quote, approximately 2,800 kamikaze attackers sank 34 Navy ships. Damaged. I gotta say the whole thing again. Almost there. He's going to have to cut all the way up until I said who I was quoting. Damn it. In closing, I will quote the U.S. Air Force's World War II history page

on the impact of these suicide attackers. Approximately 2,800 Kamikaze attackers sank 34 navy ships damaged 368 others killed 4900 sailors and wounded another 4800 despite radar detection and queuing airborne interception attrition and massive anti-aircraft barrages 14 percent of kamikaze survived a square direct hit on a ship nearly 8.5 percent of all hit ships hit by kamikazes sank, which kind of means their numbers sucked. Yeah. Less than 10%. Out of how many?

They launched, according to the U.S. Air Force's history page, 2,800 total. I don't have numbers to counter that. I think that makes sense because they didn't really ramp up to Okinawa. Right. So it makes sense that 800 got sent out up until they sent out the 2,000 to Okinawa. Right. But if you think about it, that's more than double of what they spent.

That's two for one. Which, I mean, if you got nothing else going for you. But, I mean, in the realm of material, the kamikaze attacks never really slowed down the American Navy or the British Navy for that matter. No, they didn't do nothing. They're like, oh, we got more ships. Yeah. I mean, it sucked. It was better.

It was a terrifying weapon. Yeah. Yeah. It was a terror weapon. It was the Japanese version of the V-1 rocket. Significantly more effective in your head than in practice. I mean, that is

suicide bombing. I imagine at the time, towards Okinawa, you've been on a ship doing all this island hopping. You're expecting bombs. All this shit. Dude's coming at you with a plane? Yeah. Fuck.

You made a really good point about the terror weapon. Dude's coming at you with a plane. Yeah. Fuck. I mean, and that like you made a really good point about the terror weapon. Like it's a psychological warfare. A good example that Aaron could have said it suicide bombing. I cannot, I don't know the numbers of how many American soldiers have died in the forever war as victims of, of,

of suicide bombing, whether it be a car bomb or like a guy carrying a vest but it's not that many um but god damned if we weren't terrified of it yeah every like they teach you like every single person that walk towards you might be wearing a fucking suicide vest but like not that many people have died that way people have certainly died that way right not that many um and it's like it's a footborne kamikaze like yeah a lot of ships got damaged statistically you weren't going to be victimized by a kamikaze attack right be a victim of kamikaze attack but like you were constantly worried about the laffy or the laffy yeah unless you're the laffy then you're 100 guaranteed you're you 600% guaranteed to get hit by

a fucking kamikaze. I imagine after the fifth one you're like, alright, this should be good. After the second one, they're not going to make it a hat trick. Boom! Somewhere the entire Imperial Japanese Navy is throwing their hats off. Fuck that same ship

again. Fuck that one ship. Okay. Fuck that one ship in particular. Nobody else. That's terrible. I mean, imagine, because you're already worried about all the other fighters and bombers they're sending out. Because they were sending regular Air Force out to counter these ships.

And you're like, I'm shooting everyone. Oh, I missed it. Oh, shit, he's still coming. He's still coming. Is he a kamikaze? Oh, no, he just dropped the bomb. We're good. We're good. Like every plane they saw could be a kamikaze.

Right. And I mean, that was probably more effective than the actual physical damage. I mean, that's why when the Japanese military managed to kind of sort of bomb continental United States with a balloon bomb uh the government immediately cracked down about it because they didn't want anybody to be afraid of it yep yeah fear is bad fear saps morale and uh yeah i know i would be fucking terrified oh fuck yeah i would

especially be afraid of thunder god core yeah just for their name yeah like wait who are we fighting the thunder god core We should probably surrender to the Emperor right now. Yeah. We gotta fight Thor? You telling me that? I don't know what Japanese Thor would be but he's probably more terrifying than whatever Hemsworth brother. Is it Liam? Yeah. There's so many of them

now. I don't know. The blonde one. I don't fucking know. The good looking. The very good looking one. That's our show for this week. Now that nick's boot is getting moist over thor uh it is well now that we brought up world war ii in general and the japanese yeah i want to talk about the illusions god oh it's such a fucking hilarious operation yeah it's such a fuck up you a love invading an empty island and still taking a ton of casualties um but thank you for tuning in this week uh if you

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We're up to 500. Oh, man. Fuck. I assume that will go up after Brexit happens. I'm not really sure what that means. I know it's bad. One person in particular is probably going around to each irish household and well that's why we keep them on staff yeah everybody's gotta have their pipetters yeah

uh thank you so much for tuning in um and we'll see you next week later everybody it's joe again um i had to include this outro because i'm a hack and a fraud and I forgot to plug my own book signing. So if you're in the Pacific Northwest and you're a fan of military sci-fi, come on down to Seattle on September 29th at 4 p.m. The Barnes & Noble is located on Pine Street. I'll be signing copies of Citizen of Earth, which will also be there for purchase. I can sign copies of the Hooligans of Kandahar you bring in, but there will be none there for purchase because of stupid publishing rules that I don't entirely understand. But if you bring it in, I can sign it, which is kind of cool. Also, if you are a fan of the podcast and you purchase a copy of Citizen of Earth, I have a limited amount of stickers that I will give out to you for free with your purchase. So

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