Japanese Kamikazes: Heroic or Horrifying?

When Mongol emperor Kublai Khan sent his naval fleets to attack Japan in the 13th century, fierce winds twice repelled the invasions. The Japanese considered these storms direct gifts from the gods and called them "kamikaze." The most common translation of the word is "divine wind."

In October 1944, after stinging defeats had turned the tide of World War II against the Axis powers — the U.S. retook Guadalcanal in 1943, liberated Guam in July 1944 and started bombing Okinawa in October of that year — Japan's commanders in the Pacific were desperate. They needed to slow the onslaught of the Allies though, in reality, many knew that it was just a matter of time until the war was over. Japan was looking for some divine intervention.

Vice Admiral Takijirō Ōnishi, commander of Japanese naval air forces in the Philippines, decided to unleash a new tactic on the enemy: suicide bombers.

"In my opinion, there is only one way of assuring that our meager strength will be effective to a maximum degree," Ohnishi told his men, according to Capt. Rikihei Inoguchi in "The Divine Wind: Japan's Kamikaze Force in World War II," originally published in 1958. "That is to organize suicide attack units composed of Zero fighters armed with 250-kilogram bombs, with each plane to crash-dive into an enemy carrier." (The Mitsubishi A6M "Rei-sen" was the chief aircraft of Japan during World War II. The Japanese pilots called the plane the "Zero-sen" based on the Imperial Year calendar (1940). The Allies eventually dubbed the plane the Zero.) And so the modern-day version of kamikaze was launched.

Statistics vary, but thousands of kamikaze sorties were launched in the final months of the war, and more than 3,000 Japanese pilots were killed. Those attacks resulted in the sinking of some 47 ships, killing more than 7,000 U.S., Australian and British soldiers.

That sounds deadly effective. But it really wasn't.

"The statistic I quote ... says that 27 percent of the attacks in [the battle of] the Philippines resulted in either a hit or a near miss that caused damage to the ship ... In the battle of Okinawa, when most of the kamikaze pilots were going in, I think it was like 13 percent," Bill Gordon, who has been collecting data and stories on kamikaze on his site, "Kamikaze Images," since the early 2000s, says from a town near Nagoya, Japan. "I guess it's what you compare it to. The reason they were making the attacks was that the conventional attacks were not effective. In the Philippines, they originally thought they were doing great. But 13 percent is pretty low. That means 87 percent were shot down, some well before they reached any ship, by American fighters.

"Most people look at it and say they already lost the war by the time the kamikaze attacks started, so regardless of how effective they were, they were going to lose. If the percentages were higher, it really doesn't matter."

Japanese suicide missions in World War II were not only limited to dive-bombing Zeros. Midget submarines (kōhyōteki in Japanese), manned torpedoes (kaiten), manned rocket-powered gliders (ōka) and motorboats carrying depth-charges (shin'yō) all were used at various stages of the war.

Still, when historians look upon kamikazes, it is the dive-bombing suicide planes, part of a Special Attack Corps (Tokubetsu Kōgekitai), that remain the focus.

In 1975, in Chiran, Kagoshima Prefecture in the southern part of Japan, the Chiran Peace Museum — otherwise known as the Chiran Peace Museum for Kamikaze Pilots — opened. Thousands of articles left behind by kamikazes, including letters to loved ones before their final missions, are featured.

Here's a typical one from Corp. Takao Adachi, who took off on his final mission on June 1, 1945. He was 17. (As translated by Kamikaze Images' Gordon.)

"The big topics, they're talking about filial piety to their parents, what commitment they had, and saying how sorry they were that they were leaving and dying, basically," Gordon says.

The letters have helped portray the young men who flew these missions — their average age was around 21 — not as crazed suicide bombers but as loyal sons of Japan, heroic and worthy of praise. It's a widely held belief in Japan, though not everyone thinks that way.

In comparison, many Americans — especially older ones — see kamikazes only as those grim Zero pilots bearing down on poor American soldiers, bent on killing and destruction. Instead of heroism, they see madness.

That may have changed some over the generations. "In the U.S., it's probably not as extreme anymore," Gordon says. "But I will tell you, people were emotional when I talked to them about it on the U.S. side [when he did research back in the early 2000s]. Some people didn't even want to talk to me."

Kamikazes, in the end, were fighters on the front line of a war that their side was losing badly. Americans already were bombing cities in Japan from bases in China. More raids were coming. The kamikazes were Japan's last resort. And so they went out fighting for their country.

"I still think," Gordon says, "that most of them believed that there was a good chance that they could somehow at least stop the American advances — if not necessarily win the war — and not have the destruction of Japan."