Dan Snow's History Hit - The Kamikaze Pilots

Episode Date: April 27, 2024

Please note, this episode contains discussion of suicide. By October 1944, the Japanese were in real trouble. The Allies had made great strides in their Pacific island-hopping campaign and were advancing on the Japanese home islands. In a desperate attempt to stem the tide, Japan created the 'Special Attack Units', which included the kamikaze - young pilots tasked with launching suicidal missions against Allied forces.For the first episode in our three-part series on the kamikaze, Dan is joined by Christopher Harding, a cultural historian of India and Japan and author of 'The Light of Asia'. Chris explains the ideological and tactical messages of the kamikaze, and raises an important question - were these pilots enthusiastic zealots or terrified young men with nothing to lose?Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/We'd love to hear from you- what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, and welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Now, this year marks the anniversary of not one but two crucial events in Japanese history. The first one is the start of the so-called kamikaze attacks of the Second World War, which began 80 years ago in October 1944. The second anniversary is fascinating as well, and the two are linked, as you'll hear. It's the legendary event, well, semi-legendary event, that gives those kamikaze attacks their name. The original so-called kamikaze, the divine wind that smashed the Mongol invasion fleets, which had come to conquer Japan in 1274, 750 years ago.

So over the next three days, we're going to release a three-part series looking into the kamikaze phenomenon across the centuries. So first of all, we're going to look back at the World War II kamikaze story, the story of these extraordinary, heartbreaking suicide missions. And we look at them from the Japanese point of view. Then we're going to ask what it was like to face those attacks from the flight decks and the cockpits of Allied ships. And finally, we're going to go all the way back. We're going to hear about the fortuitous, perhaps divinely sent, typhoons. Well, they were fortuitous, of course, if you're Japanese, less so if you were a Mongol. The typhoons that saved Japan

from the mighty, unstoppable Mongol Empire in the 13th century. For this episode, we're going to go back 80 years. We're going to go back to 1944. October 1944, to be precise. The Japanese are in terrible, terrible trouble. In retrospect, their unbelievably stupid gamble to fight America in the Pacific Ocean while engaged, let's not forget, in a very bloody and expensive war in mainland China, has proved to be a mistake of existential proportions. The Americans and their allies like the Australians are now coming for the Japanese, grinding forward inexorably. In October 44, the Japanese garrison in the Philippines was in particular trouble. They were in the crosshairs of what you can only describe as the most potent naval force ever assembled. By contrast, Japanese naval air forces have now been taken to the brink of

annihilation in several mighty battles across the Pacific. And now this huge American war machine is grinding ever closer to the vital organs of the Japanese Empire and the Japanese home islands themselves. By attacking the Philippines, the Americans were going to slice that short-lived Japanese Empire in half. Japan would be severed from the resource-rich conquests that they'd made in Southeast Asia, which let's not forget, were the reason they'd gone to war with America in the first place, places like Indonesia and Malaya. So that American assault on the Philippines really meant the end of the idea of the Japanese Empire stretching into Southeast Asia. And perhaps even more disturbing for the Japanese, they were inevitably the precursor to attacks on the Japanese home

island themselves. The American force was enormous. By this stage of the war, the Americans had more aircraft carriers in the Pacific than the Japanese had major warships of all types. And the grand-sounding 11th Japanese Air Fleet, which was defending the Philippines, had just 41 aircraft. So not only were they astonishingly outnumbered by the Americans, these aircraft were also outclassed. They were now outdated by the new carrier-borne aircraft, the US Navy. outclassed. They were now outdated by the new carrier-borne aircraft, the US Navy. So given the desperate situation, the Japanese decided to redesignate a unit within this air fleet, the Tokubetsu Kōgegi Tai, which means special attack unit. These would be aircraft piloted by young men who were told to press their attacks home to the point to which there was no possibility at all they would be able to return to base. These were to be one-way suicide missions. This unit is now

remembered not to history by the slightly sterile euphemism but by the informal name that the Japanese public started to use to refer to these attacks, kamikaze. It means divine wind, and it's a reference back to those winds that saved medieval Japan from the Mongols. These suicide attacks are almost unimaginable waste of the young pilots' lives, but they weren't just a desperate evocation of the distant past, a way to brainwash young minds with ancient notions of warrior spirit, they did actually make some practical sense too. It is easier to train pilots, or for that matter helmsmen of boats, to drive directly into an enemy ship. It's much easier to do that than to pass by at just the right altitude and just the right speed and angle and release your bomb or torpedo at the perfect

time to hit the target accurately. And this is particularly true if you're working with war recruits. These young men, these boys really, were much less experienced than the professionals who'd manned Japanese aircraft and ships at the outbreak of war. By now that professional cadre of men had been wiped out after two and a half years of fighting in the Pacific. And so that was the thinking really. and that's why on October 25th at 7.40am just off the eastern coast of the Philippines, a kamikaze aircraft carrying a bomb weighing around 60 kilos smashed straight into the flight deck of the US carrier Santee. It cut straight through the flight deck and detonated in the hangar deck below, doing a lot of damage and killing about 16 American sailors. Very shortly after, another carrier, the Suwanee, was hit by a kamikaze. 71 sailors aboard were killed, and the following day, another kamikaze attack caused even more damage than that on the same carrier. It started a huge fire that took hours to extinguish. In the space of two days,

on board the Suwanee, 100 men were killed and 150 were wounded. This was a new type of war. And in the weeks that followed, the Japanese increased the tempo of these attacks. They created special units like the 721st Naval Air Group, otherwise known as the God Thunder Corps, to carry out these kamikaze attacks. And today I'm going to talk about these kamikaze attacks, these aerial kamikaze attacks in particular, even though there were other forms of kamikaze. There were kaiten, or heaven shaker mini submarines. There were shinyos, the sea quake that were motorboats that were designed to be rammed into allied ships. But I'm going to focus on the most famous form of kamikaze, and that is the airborne form.

And on the podcast, talk to me about it, is a wonderful scholar who's been on many times before. It's Professor Christopher Harding, historian of Japan, India, East-West connections, based at the University of Edinburgh. And so now 80 years on, let's find out more about the astonishing, the tragic kamikaze. But before you listen, please be aware,

given the nature of the subject, this series does discuss suicide. T-minus 10. Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower.

So Chris, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me back. Right, so Japan rescued from Mongol invasion in the medieval period by these gigantic divine winds. Presumably they were hoping for something a little similar. This was the inspiration for this effort to see off an American invasion in 1944. Exactly that. I think there's always this sense in Japan that you draw from your heroic past to encourage people in the present. And that's very much, I think,

what this was about. Was it just the name or was it the ethos, the attacks, the way in which they conducted the sort of culture around them? Did it lean into that history? I think it did a little bit. So there's a traditional element, I suppose, in Japanese culture where giving up your own life for certain purposes is considered to be acceptable. So there are different definitions of taking your life in Japan, some of which would be considered suicide, would be considered wrong. Others are more about taking responsibility, doing something for your lord or for the wider community. And I think that traditional element was, it was at work here, but at the same time, the modern Japanese military was, I think you could say, twisting it and exploiting it when they came up with this idea of the kamikaze attacks. Yeah, because one is a sort of natural phenomenon, divine natural phenomenon. This is a very human,

this is about aviation fuel and aircraft, and this is a very, very different phenomenon. Yeah, and it's a strange one. There were two things going on, I think, in the Japanese military in the run-up to World War II, enduring it. One faction, if you like, said we need to have a strong economy. If we're going to fight the Americans one day, we need to invest in the latest military hardware. We need to plan, do things properly. Then you have this other faction, which is much more traditionalist, sees this kind of spiritual element in the Japanese armed forces. They're called the Imperial Way factionaction. And they basically make the claim that because Japanese soldiers are spiritually superior to their Western counterparts, actually, you don't

need to have the latest technology. And so all you need to do, perhaps at this late, desperate stage in the war, is pack a bomb into the nose of a Mitsubishi Zero fighter and let the spirit of your soldiery do the rest. So there was that, which seems quite strange to us, this very romantic idea that there really was something special about the Japanese and that it might, at the last minute, turn the war around. Well, let's talk a little bit more about the tactical and the engineering and the individual elements of this kamikaze set. But let's start by talking about what was going on in 1944. Why was this drastic tactic reached for? How was the war going?

So I think really within a few months probably of Pearl Harbor, the war starts to go against the Japanese. And by 1944, you've got certainly towards the end of 1944, the situation in Japan looks pretty dire. So even though most people don't have a really accurate sense of just how badly it's going, as it were, out on the battlefield, if you're living in Japan, you've seen extreme rationing. You've seen people being conscripted for the army, for the navy. You've seen all your valuables, any metal valuables you've got being melted down, even your local statues and railings and temple bells. Food is scarce. By this point, you've got children being drilled in how to defend the country with bamboo spears.

So there's a real sense that the war is taking a turn for the worse. And then you start to get these allied bombing campaigns against most Japanese cities, which are pretty indiscriminate with their use of incendiaries. So it's a pretty desperate end-stage feel, I think, for many Japanese by this point. And the Japanese military, the Navy, know that the two prongs of the US naval assault is beginning to threaten the Japanese home islands. Should we think about these suicide attacks as a kind of just desperate acts of defiance, or did they believe that they might turn the course of the war, or they could have a big strategic impact? So I think there was a practical element to it, which was that

American radar, their aircraft carriers' radar, was really quite sophisticated. And the only way it was thought that you could do them serious damage was to have these low-flying single aircraft basically skimming the water and then either launching torpedoes or simply crashing into them. That that might be a way to do some practical damage and also perhaps to give the Americans a flavour of just how heavy the loss of life might be, the loss of Allied and American life might be, if they did these planned landings on the Japanese home islands. They wanted to make sure the Allies knew basically what the cost to them would be of doing this. So I think there was a practical element, but the ideological romantic side, which no doubt we'll come to, I think was

really powerful. Oh, that's very interesting. So there was a strategic message here, which is, look, these might not stop the US fleets in, say, the Leyte Gulf in the Philippines, where they're first deployed in October 1944. But we want to teach the Americans at the highest level a lesson, which is if they land on Japanese shores, this will be their fate. Men, women, and children will hurl themselves in suicidal charges against the American assault forces. I think that's right. And if you look at some of the debates going on in the United States at the time, I mean, of course, most famously when it came to debates over the use of atomic weapons against Japan, some of the way that Imperial Japanese Army soldiers conducted

themselves on the battlefield, most famously in the Battle for Okinawa, I suppose, taking place in 1945, there really was a sense that if the Japanese fight like this for, as it were, outlying islands or perhaps parts of the Japanese colonial empire, just imagine how they might fight, for example, for a city like Tokyo, facing not just the soldiery, but actually the rest of the population as well. So I think there was, to some extent, a successful message being sent there. And then I think back at home, there was a lot of romanticising about the idea of potentially the whole Japanese population giving itself up for the sake of the emperor. So there was a lot of heavy, very value-laden propaganda in circulation within Japan itself.

Wow. Well, both those two points are fascinating, but the first one is you're right. So, the Kamikaze campaign, well, we'll come on to this, but it wasn't hugely effective at stopping the advance of the US, but actually it did prove very effective in changing the terms of the conversation in America and actually might have had, inadvertently for the pro-Japanese, might have had some bearing on the decision to use nuclear weapons. I think it's certainly possible. Yeah, I think there were big worries in the United States about how far American support for the war, which had been very, very high, of course, after Pearl Harbour, would really carry on once they found their brothers and sons being killed in enormous numbers for the sake of taking the Japanese home island.

So yeah, to some extent, that attitude on the part of the Japanese to make the cost appear very high for the Americans, perhaps in the end helped to incur this terrifying cost at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Wow. So now let's talk me through the tactical level. Talk me through what kamikaze aircraft were, what the pilots prepare themselves differently. I mean, how would a kamikaze raid be different? So some of them would use the famous Mitsubishi Zero aircraft, this very famous aircraft that came into service in 1940 with this highly secret ultralight aluminium alloy used. No armour, so it was very, very vulnerable to having its fuel explode if it had bullets fired at it. But nevertheless, it had done quite well as an aircraft early on. It had this hugely long

range. It was very manoeuvrable, very good in a dogfight, as long as you had decently trained Japanese pilots still alive to operate these things. So for a while, the Zero did really well. And the Allies, I think they ended up with the impression that the Japanese had many more of these aircraft than they really did. Because they had such long range, they were all over the place. So they did very well for a while. But then by the time you get to late 1944, which is when these attacks begin, what they started to do instead was basically put a bomb in the nose of these zero aircraft. And then you would have someone, allegedly a volunteer, but it's probably worth coming back later on to just how accurate that idea that all these young men were volunteers

might have been. But anyway, some poor soul gets put in there. They might strap a cherry blossom branch to their chest. They might have what's called a sennyinbari, which is a thousand stitch band for good luck around them that have that famous headband on, which said kamikaze in Japanese, the two Japanese characters for divine wind. Some of them were given a small bottle of wine to take with them. They might be given a bar of chocolate as well. And then they'd be taxiing off down the runway, sometimes waved goodbye by young women waving these cherry blossom branches. And it's worth chatting maybe in a bit about the symbolism of that. And then off they would go, trying to fly low, skim across the water.

And they had a kamikaze manual which would give them an idea of exactly what they were supposed to be doing. So some of them ideally should be aiming for the smokestack of these vessels to try to bring them down. And it's worth just giving you a quick flavour of the kind of training that these kamikaze pilots would receive. The ideological training was right alongside, I think, the practical. So there was a manual that they would use. And in the manual, this is one of the lines that you get, it says, aim for the smokestack, crash with your eyes wide open. Many have done so before you, they will tell you what fun they had. So there's this idea that if you do this, you'll become a divine spirit, you'll become a war god, and you will see all your friends and your family again,

but you'll be in this elevated position. It's hard to know how many of the pilots really believed that's what would happen after they died. But nevertheless, that sense of ideology mixed in with the practicalities of flying these planes, I think is really a big feature of the kamikaze. You listen to Dan Snow's history, talking about the kamikaze, more coming up. To be continued... who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. And in movies we've become so obsessed with the samurai nature of it the sort of the ceremonial attached to climbing to the cockpit you've touched it there but what is

your sense of how important all that was would it have felt a bit more prosaic to think on the ground and bleary-eyed people chucking young men into aircraft and sending them off down the runway? Or do you think there was a romance to it on lots of these occasions? I think there's good evidence. There's been some historical work done on the diaries of these young men, the letters that they wrote home. We think that probably about two-thirds of them genuinely were volunteers. And some of those, again, I think were really taken by the romance of the project, by the promises that were made to them. But what's really telling, I think, is the third or so who were not volunteers, the sorts of things that they wrote back to their family. So we find one young kamikaze pilot wrote back to his family to say that the war is basically lost and all I can contribute to

is the end stages of that war. And he compared it to a field that you decide to burn for yourself so that in time it'll be fertile again and something new can grow. So there's a real sense of sadness and of resignation, I think, amongst some of these pilots that they've ended up in this position. There's not really much that they can do about it. And the best possible scenario is that their families somehow survive and reap the rewards of whatever Japan looks like after the war. You know, there are stories as well, some of these pilots getting blind drunk the night before. So as you say, they'd be quite bleary getting into the cockpit. There are even stories of pilots who take off and then turn back round again to strafe their own commanders, or that they fly their planes into the sea well short of their targets. So I think it's a really

mixed picture in terms of what some of these pilots really expected they were going to achieve. And quickly tell me, what's the symbolism of the cherry blossom? So the cherry blossom, famously in Japan, flowers very, very briefly in the spring, and then these petals drop to the ground and they die. So it was a really big symbol in Japan of the brief blossoming of youth and then of their disappearance or their destruction soon after that. And in Japanese poetry, in the songs that some of these pilots would have sung while they were still at school, there's a really big romantic celebration of that brief flowering of youth before inevitably it dies away. So you can see how it was extraordinarily powerful for the kamikaze pilots. They weren't just serious. There were other types of suicide missions,

weren't there? There were small, fast boats or even weird human bombs. I mean, they did try a few different things. They did, and they had specially made Orca planes as well, which they sent out on these missions. It's probably worth saying, I think for the pilots themselves, for most of them, they wouldn't have seen these as suicide missions. They would have seen this as, albeit a 100% certainty of dying in combat. Nevertheless, I think that's how they would have seen it, that they were dying in combat rather than giving themselves up. I think there was some, you get a sense from their writings that they had bought into what some listeners will have probably heard of as this Bushido warrior ethic. But what's really interesting, I think, about that is because it's there not just among the kamikaze pilots, but it's there, of course, in the Imperial Japanese Army as well, whose own manuals tell them not even to use words

like retreat or surrender, let alone consider either of these things when they're actually in battle. But these things were actually rather new. So they would draw a few elements from Japan's samurai past going back many, many centuries. But it really feels in the modern era like a kind of tribute act, I think, to that much earlier era, mixed in, in fact, with modern European war doctrine. So this idea of fighting spirit, for example, that that can overcome technological advantage, you know, where the Americans are concerned, partly you can trace that back centuries in Japan to the samurai. But it's also there in some of the Prussian advisors who were training the modern Japanese army.

They would say fighting spirit is much more important and tactics based on fighting spirit are much more important than whatever technology you might possess. So it's distinctively modern, I think, some of this. It sounds very 1914 French army as well, yeah. Oh, there you go, Elan, yeah. of this. It sounds very 1914 French army as well. Yeah. Oh, there you go. Elam. Yeah. So we've got these young men with their wine and their cherry blossom they've taken off.

Are we able to judge its effectiveness? I mean, we talked perhaps about its strategic effectiveness, but did they manage to sink or set fire to American ships in the numbers that were hoped? I think in general, they did relatively well early on because this was a brand new tactic. And for example, if you did it well, you could disguise your kamikaze plane on American radar within a larger cluster of Japanese planes that appear to be returning from another mission. So until the last minute, the Americans wouldn't know what was happening and you could have a certain amount of success on that basis. But quite quickly, the Americans react with the way that they organise their own fighters. They have faster guns. They understand the tactic. To give you an example from the statistics, as far as they're reliable on this, probably about 3,300 planes were launched

on kamikaze missions. And probably only a little over 10% of those actually hit their targets. Although a bit of a caution with the statistics, we don't have information probably for about 50% of the attacks, what actually happened. But on the basis of what we do know, it was a very, very small success rate indeed. Probably nowhere more than about 450 American vessels were actually either sunk or damaged, and that's at a cost of nearly 4,000 Japanese lives in these attacks. You mentioned Bushido on land. With the Battle of Okinawa, you get these suicidal charges, don't you,

of Japanese infantry against American positions. And then, meanwhile, at sea, you get this so-called typhoon of steel, where they wave upon wave of kamikaze aircraft attack the American fleet. I mean, it must have felt like Armageddon. I think that's right. And also the extent to which, certainly from the Allied point of view, the Japanese armed forces were prepared to, as it must have seemed in any case, almost give away the lives of their personnel. And so I think by the time you get towards the end of the war, and you really see this actually in Japanese dramas and Japanese paintings and books that recall this period, the sense of getting that piece of red paper

through the post that was a call-up to one or other branches of the Japanese armed forces. By this point, it was a death sentence. You find young men drinking lots of soy sauce so they can raise their blood pressure to try and get out of this. They might starve themselves to fail the weight qualification. They might move to some remote place. But there was a painting I remember seeing in Tokyo with my wife, which showed a Japanese conscript running across the field to go and jump onto the train and go to the barracks and being seen off by his family. And my wife was in tears at the time because she said, as the Japanese knew then and still know now, if that young man had not done that,

then his family probably wouldn't eat because no one in the village would supply them with anything. They might even face attack, an enormous amount of shame, of course, as well. So what it took, as it were, on the Japanese home front to produce, as you say, this typhoon of steel really was, I think, tragic. And from that point of view, it probably didn't make a huge... If you're at Okinawa, your survivability of that battle is probably reasonably poor if you're a Japanese infantryman, if you're in a Japanese aircraft, in a Japanese ship. So perhaps we focus on these kamikaze pilots and we shouldn't exclude these other young men. Absolutely. I think it's important to remember all of them and also to get a sense of the sorts of pressure that people were under at home. One

of the notoriously difficult things for historians of this period thinking about Japan is having a sense of the extent to which people in Japan really supported the war by the time you get to late 1944 and early 1945. There's been some lovely work on people who've dug up these letters that were sent to the Imperial Palace in Japan, insulting the emperor. You're still having elections towards the end of the war in Japan. People who would vote for imaginary characters, as far as they were concerned, like Stalin or Lenin, rather than have the same old warmongering politicians come back. So there is a sense of enormous resistance there. But I think

the letters of the kamikaze pilots, which are so fascinating. It's this sense of resignation, that there's simply nothing to be done. There's one lovely little excerpt that I wanted to share with you. A young man called Hayashi Ichizawa writing to his mother, I think by the light of bonfire at his airbase in the far south of Japan, more or less a day or two before going on what would be his final mission. And he says, Dear Mother, this is like a dream. Tomorrow, I'm no longer going to be alive. Those who went out on their mission yesterday are all dead. And he finishes by saying, his mother and he are both Christians, please pray for me. I don't want to go to a place where you're not going to join me later.

I just want to be held in your arms and sleep. And it's so moving, these letters. It gives you that, I think, the real insight well beyond the kamikaze cliche to what life was like for some of these young men. Is kamikaze as well known in Japan as it is, weirdly, in the West? I mean, it's something that seems to have endured in the English-speaking countries. Are they still remembered as something particular amidst the general horror of the Japanese Second World War experience? They are. It's a strange subject in some ways. There's evidence, even as early as the 1960s, so what, just 15, 20 years after the end of the war,

that the word kamikaze was being used for reckless drivers in Tokyo, or for skiers who went on a run that they couldn't really handle and were risking themselves and other people's lives. So there's that kind of black humour or ironic use of the term. But then again, there was a film that came out a few years ago now, Eternal Zero, it's called in English, which I'd highly recommend to people. And it was rather controversial in Japan because it tried to give a balanced sense of what that period had been like. But it just shows you the extent to which, in Japan, very many aspects of that war remain quite difficult to talk about. And for some, the kamikaze represent the extent to which

the Japanese population was successfully brainwashed by its government. And so if you have any noble presentation of the kamikaze now, then I think your own politics would be deeply suspect. And as you can imagine, those sorts of films where they get to places like China and Korea, because the war is still a really live issue, they can be enormously controversial there too. So I think it remains a really very difficult topic in Japan. Well, it's a tragic topic. And thank you for joining us on the 80th anniversary of the start of those attacks to talk us through it and give us the context.

Thank you so much. Thank you. you