Could the Japanese have done significantly better in WWII by starting from say 1935 training the vast majority of their pilots as kamikaze? It certainly looks as though this was far more effective from a raid by raid perspective, and assuming this could have been started in the mid thirties secretly then there would have been considerably more of these suicide pilots along presumably with many more aircraft, so there wouldn’t have been material shortages. It would essentially be like having tens of thousands of guided missiles.
Very hard in my mind not to think of this as a hugely effective force to have. What’s the straight dope?
*Thanks to this board for letting me know that “Japs” is apparently offensive. It certainly ain’t here, and it’s what I would have used if I started this in another forum
Bad strategy: it’s much more effective to operate an air mission at the cost of fuel and munitions, rather than at the cost of fuel, munitions, plane and pilot. Even if you started out building light, expendable planes, the expense is still an additional burden. Also, a cadre of trained pilots is of inestimable value. It is one of the greatest assets any military has. To throw this away is grievously wasteful.
Intersting thought. The Japanese certaily wreaked havoc with these attacks, especially off Okinawa. These pilots were very inexperienced. Had they used inexperienced pilots in this fashion earlier in the war, saving their better pilots for later, it certainly would have made a difference. How much so we’ll never know.
I am not a military historian, but I seem to recall that one of the advantages the Allies had over both Germany and Japan was that our fighter pilots were rotated home. Once home, they trained student pilots. Germany and (I think) Japan kept their fighters active, meaning that they weren’t training new pilots.
The only thing that I can think of that would be worse than letting your best pilots burn out would be to get rid of them through suicide missions, which is pretty much what the kamikaze attacks did. True, the kamikaze pilots were inexperienced, but they were pretty much what Japan had left.
At the start of WWII, Japan had the best fighters in the world flown by some of the best pilots in the world. They nearly wiped out the entire U.S. Pacific fleet in one stunning attack and escaped with barely a scratch. They had no reason to resort to wasting aircraft and pilots in mass suicide attacks.
It is interesting to speculate, though…
The kamikaze was an act of desperation and it wasted trained pilots. More planes could be built but real combat can’t be taught in a classroom. Surviving one dogfight gave a pilot an advantage over the best untested rookie. Surviving ten dogfights or combat missions provided experience that would never, ever be duplicated with years of 1940’s training. Once the pilot was gone, his personal experience went with him. Real combat is brutal and terrifying. Your life is actually on the line. You can’t duplicate a real life or death situation with drills.
Zeros and Bettys were good aircraft but it was the pilots that made them deadly in combat situations.
Are you using these pilots on just any boat that floats or just the bigger high value targets?
IMO if you were selective on when and where you used kamikaze pilots it might have been a workable/good strategy.
An as an aside, I always found it bit odd that some folks considered kamikaze pilots cheating or dirty pool or some such. To me it was the most brave (or crazy) things a miltary person fighting for his country could do.
Tokkō Tai attacks were effective only in comparison to conventional attacks by the relatively obsolescent air forces remaining in the Imperial Japanese Navy by 1944. Although not well appreciated, the Allied Powers (in the South Pacific, predominately the United States, though the role played by the British in the critical Battle of Okinawa is often overlooked) won World War II not purely by overwhelming military force but by superior logistics; that is, while Germany and Japan were essentially cut off from outside resources, the United States, Britain, and many other Allied nations maintained supply lines for oil, cotton, grain, protein, gunpowder, and other materiel necessary to maintain fighting forces. The bloody war of attrition in the South Pacific turned tide in large part because the Japanese were incapable of resupplying forces that were under siege. Despite the legendary determination of Japanese soldiers to hold out, in the end the lack of food and ammunition (and the willingness of the US to accept massive casualties in order to take control of the South Pacific) inevitably resulted in Japan losing captured territories and being driven back to the Home Islands.
Returning to the effectiveness of Tokkō Tai, what it really demonstrated is the vulnerability of surface ships, including capital ships, to aerial attack. Not long after the war research was begun in earnest for both cruise missile and ballistic missile weapons to attack surface ships from over the horizon without exposing valuable pilots to direct anti-aircraft attack, and weapons to defend therefrom. The age of the broadside attack, even from distance, was decidedly over, and air power had come to its own. Had Japan relied upon such attacks from the beginning, it certainly would have done more damage to the existing US Pacific Fleet, but that would have very likely driven the US further toward submarine operations (even in the early days of the US involvement in war there were concepts for submarine aircraft carriers and amphibious craft), and thus obviated the value of such attacks.
Like the vaunted but ineffectual A4 (V-2) rocket, such attacks were a waste of precious materiel by forces that were already strained, and represented a desperate attempt to make an effectual response.
How much can you even train someone for kamikaze attacks? Maybe I’m being ignorant but surely flying into a target is a pretty much required ability for any pilot, and picking the target could surely be covered in a quick PowerPoint presentation. Or something?
What about developing dedicated kamikaze planes though? They could have some kind of armour-piercing ability and maybe materials or time can be saved by developing planes not intended to last for more than one flight. You could even make fun size versions and get those useless children* to pilot them. Then essentially put a warhead on the plane and make it as close to a missile, in effect, as possible.
*I do not advocated, nor have I ever advocated, the use of children on suicide missions in times of war or peace. I just think it would be practical.
It would have been a terrible idea. Kamikazes were used out of desperation; while they were more effective than conventional attacks at the end of the war when they were used they were not more effective than conventional attacks at the beginning of the war. Before the war Japanese pilots, particularly carrier pilots, underwent hundreds of hours of flight time training before being assigned to units. While this produced very skilled pilots, it couldn’t produce them fast enough to meet the need for pilots in wartime. As the war progressed the amount of training Japanese pilots received became progressively less and less. Due to the huge material advantage the US enjoyed the amount of training American pilots received increased as the war went on. This resulted in a self feeding downward spiral for Japan; less skilled pilots didn’t last as long and needed to be replaced even faster resulting in less training for new pilots and the average skill level dropped further. Compounding this was the lack of available fuel to train new pilots with and the above mentioned lack of rotation of skilled pilots back home to train the next generation of pilots.
By the time Kamikazes were turned to new pilots were only receiving the most rudimentary flight training before being sent into the meat grinder. The ultimate result was actions like the Battle of the Philippine Sea, from wiki, note particuarly the last paragraph:
Just speculating here, but I suspect that kamikaze pilots would also have been more difficult to recruit earlier in the war. Even considering Japanese cultural attitudes towards death, honor, etc., I would think that early in the war it would have been a lot more difficult to convince young men that it was necessary for them to take on suicide missions.
^
Brave and stupid. Against the Nimitz I would during a war but against a building with 6,000 civilians?
But swerving to the topic, Japanese naval aviation lost its most precious assets after Guadalcanal: it’s peacetime select-trained pilots. After that, the entire Pacific basically became a turkey shoot for the American pilots. So kamikazes in 1941 would have hastened that defeat. How many new pilots can the US crank out in a month? My guess is 100. The Japanese? Saburo Sakai knew of only two pilots trained after 1942 who really shined.
The only question here is how many Japanese planes and pilots were lost during the war, categorized by losses from successful kamikaze attacks, unsuccessful kamikaze attacks, and successful conventional attacks, unsuccessful conventional attacks, and losses unrelated to attacks on ground or sea targets (basically accidents and dogfights). You can pretty well determine from that how many land and sea targets they could have destroyed if they only used their airforce as we know it for kamikaze attacks. We can also assume they would have been more successful had they concentrated on doing that by producing more less expensive disposable planes, and training more one mission pilots, except that would probably be balanced by our own concentration on defending against those attacks.
It has been my understanding for some time that kamikazes were only effect for a time, until the allies adapted. One major flaw of kamikazi attacks (and other strategies that leave no survivors on your side) is that with no one coming back you have little or no information on enemy tactics. Once the enemy come up with a good strategy against your kamikazis it’ll work again and again because no one is coming back to tell you what they are doing.
You just send out an observer plane to find out what happened. They’ll also be making planes more suited to the mission. I imagine they’d develop torpedo planes designed to run on the water and complete the hits even if disabled. These things would be flying bombs, and if we didn’t catch them well in advance of the attack they score a steady percentage of strikes. So it’s just a question of what that percentage is and how many planes they could produce.
I really want to stress the recruitment problem. A friend of mine once talked to a former kamikaze pilot-in-training, and his true reason for joining had very little to do with honour. He knew he was going to fight, and the way the war was going, he knew he was going to die. Kamikaze pilots were comparatively pampered and he only wanted a bit of comfort before he died. I think his story was typical.
The father of one of my old girlfriends was a Zero pilot in that battle. He survived the war, obviously. He didn’t talk much about it, so I don’t know how many US planes he shot down.
Anyway, back to the topic on hand. The problem is that Japan didn’t really plan on going to war with the States. The IJA generals in China who were driving policy pushing the country further and further closer to war with the States and no one was making any national policies to prepare Japan for total war. I think most people fail to understand the differences between Germany’s and Japan’s approaches to the lead up to the war.
There are zillions of things which Japan could have done from back in the 30s had they started with a plan on going to war with the States. Study submarine warfare, both offense and defensive. Rethink the capture and hold islands strategy and how to fight more effectively. Dust off those old maps and abacuses and calculate supply lines. Get the IJA and IJN to talk to each other, or better yet, work together. Plan on how to defend the homeland.
Out of all of this, it’s possible that having a few more Tokkoutai earlier on could have helped, but it would have been suicide (no pun intended) to have the majority of their pilots only trained to guide themselves into ships.
They looked at what the Tokkoutai pilots wrote in their journals before their final flights, and it was mostly about their families and fellow fighters. The tradition of suicide missions wasn’t invented by the Japanese and it didn’t end with them. However, there has to be some great motivation in order to get people to train to die. In the 9/11 attack, it’s thought that not even all of the hijackers were aware they were going to be sacrificed. I doubt the could have had thousands trained in the early part of the war.
It’s possible that after the Japanese troops had taken particular islands, that they could have trained some of the soldiers from those islands to be Tokkoutai and taken out more US troop transport ships. If the Japanese were well dug in, then it would have hurt the US more to take out the transports rather than the warships.
It’s also possible that they could have had a few trained for fights against other carriers. However, in either case, once they started using that tactic, the US would have found some way of combating it.
