I’ll add to this point about the difficulty of recruitment. My uncle was a Zero pilot during the war. I regret being too young to really ask about it before he passed away, but I do recall a bit about what he told Dad and I on our last visit to Japan.
I got the impression that he was a fairly typical fighter pilot in that they were eager to fly and fight; not die in a questionable blaze of glory. He did say specifically that from what he saw, the only “eager” Kamikaze pilots were young, inexperienced rookies who were inundated with propaganda and filled with stories of duty and glorious deaths. The older vets thought it was a load of BS.
He was asked to volunteer for Kamikaze duty and he said that his first thought was, “Are you crazy?? Why would I want to kill myself?” He then suggested to his commanding officer that he could better serve Japan by training all these new pilots instead. He was granted the transfer and served the rest of the war as an instructor in relative safety and survived to tell of it.
He was quite a character really. Absolutely convinced he was invincible and drove his car like it was a fighter plane. Scariest car rides I ever had :eek:
What he meant were capital ships of the line, the kind whose survival could easily decide the outcome of a battle. Escort carriers are secondary ships.
If you kamikaze a modern battleship, you’ll probably kill a lot of sailors and officers and eventually neutralize its AA batteries. Then comes the ‘easy’ part: sink it with torpedoes. The Yamato and Musashi required at least 10 torpedoes each to bring them down, and only after dive bombers knocked their AA guns out.
If you try to hit a fleet carrier, you’ll be up against its air cover (and those pilots are the best in the navy.) Its escorting ships will throw up a wall of flak against you. Fleet carriers are so well-protected you need at least to be at par in carrier power to touch them.
Exactly; not a single fleet carrier, light carrier, battleship, heavy or light cruiser that was hit by kamikaze attack was sunk. At a cost of 4,000 aircraft and pilots kamikazes only sank 47 ships, a large part of them vessels as small as PT-boats, ocean tugs, submarine chasers, Landing Craft Support (Large) and Landing Ship Medium. The loss of three escort carriers was certainly painful, but the significance should be weighted against the fact that the USN commissioned 122 escort carriers during the war.
It’s not really a fair comparison, as no battleships or fleet carriers were sunk by land based planes that late in the war. If you were going to use the tokkoutai effectively, it would be to take out the smaller ships.
The light carrier Princeton was sunk by a bomb dropped by a D4Y Judy divebomber on October 24, 1944 the day before the escort carrier St. Lo became the first escort carrier to fall victim to a kamikaze attack.
That’s what makes it so self-defeating: small, unprotected, lightly armed ships can be attacked by light bombers without fighter escort. Why sacrifice the plane and pilot?
Initially, kamikaze attacks were more effective than other attackers, and required a change in AA tactics.
It’s been conclusively shown here that the answer to the OP is that the Japanese* would have done considerably worse to start off with only suicide planes, but this does not mean that there would never be any case where it wasn’t. It may be possible that a cheaper plane could be flown with a less experienced pilot (however, I don’t know if that was ever carefully studied by the Japanese).
The problem is also that they were running out of material and trained pilots. It was an act of desperation.
I live in the UK and Jap isn’t considered offensive here, although American influence may be changing that. But when all is said and done it’s simply an abbreviation, in my opinion the offense would only lie in how it is used.