Yes, but the American and British bomber crews had every *intention *of surviving and making it back to base in one piece.
Did you forget the F-16’s scrambled to take out United 92 on 9/11/01?
When asked “How could an unarmed F-16 take out a Boeing?” the US brass said “We would have asked them to make the ultimate sacrifice”.
Those pilots were scrambled with the expectation that they would have rammed a airliner with a (tiny) fighter.
That was a pure suicide mission.
You don’t hear about them much anymore - it was actually surprising that he put it that bluntly.
It was not supposed to be a suicide mission virtual or otherwise. Torpedo Squadron 8 was wiped out with only George Gay surviving because the plan went to hell. The tactics called for a simultaneous attack on three levels from Fighter 8, Bomber 8 and Torpedo 8. With the rest of the planes on the attack they had a chance. Alone they didn’t. Being separated from the other squadrons sealed their fate.
There was a heavy bombardment. As heavy as they could muster. Terrain and cover meant it wasn’t nearly as effective as Lee hoped.
Of course it didn’t start off being a virtual suicide mission, but when “the plan went to hell” they didn’t recall the torpedo bombers, either.
However, to be fair, at this early stage in the war, the planners didn’t understand how pointless the sacrifice would be.
If that doesn’t qualify as heat-of-battle I’m not sure anything else would either. And there was that slim chance possibly of hitting the silk at impact. To me it just doesn’t fit the stipulations/requirements set out in the OP.
If those F-16 pilots decided to intentionally ram those planes, there’s a very good chance they could eject and survive. Maybe not even as good as 50-50, but not guaranteed suicide either.
Those commercial jets wouldn’t be shooting back and the terrorist pilots wouldn’t know how to take effective evasive maneuvers, and would be likely to lose control if they tried. Just a close fly-by from a fighter jet might convince the hijackers that the primary mission was hopeless and they might as well crash now.
What would be the effect of making a supersonic pass over the airliner at close range?
Related thread over here:
Substantially nothing.
Back to the OP and only the OP.
IMO …
- Rationally you only plan for a suicide mission when you have more people and equipment than munitions and completing your attack now is more valuable than keeping the people and equipment for later use. The kamikaze, and particularly the purpose-trained and purpose-built ones, were desperation moves of a government almost out of munitions and fully out of ideas. But not yet out of people and outclassed equipment now mostly ineffective for its designed role against a better-equipped enemy.
If and when the US finds itself in a similar spot and with a suitably conditioned population it’ll try that tactic. Until then, almost certainly not.
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As discussed by the many folks above. Many hopeless situations have included a “What the hell, we’re all dead anyhow. Might as well take a few extra with us. Charge!!” finale. OTOH very few missions started out planned to end that way. We know of very few examples out of all the times this has happened over our history. Units wiped out to the last man don’t tend to leave notes about their final minutes.
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Legality is interesting. As far as I was/am aware, there is no legal requirement for the service to return you alive. And certainly none to return you undamaged. As I point out in 1) above, your best guarantee as a service member that your HQ won’t kill you is that as Patton may have said “nobody wins a war by dying for their country”. You’re generally more valuable to your HQ alive tomorrow than dead today. In the argot, forces are “spent wisely; not wasted.” With the sober recognition that “spending” means dead bodies and destroyed equipment on your own side.
In peacetime I could certainly imagine some next-of-kin trying to bring a negligent / wrongful death action against DoD. Certainly there have been civil suits about deaths from peacetime mishaps caused by sloppy maintenance or crappy equipment design. Some have even succeeded, but that’s real rare. In an actual war, and especially in one as desperate as I outline in 1) I don’t see that having a snowball’s chance in hell.
I wonder if you could break the windows like that.
One kamikaze mission that an American Sailor might be expected to make is if there is a nuclear reactor that is malfunctioning in a way that will kill everyone on board and the only way to stop it is to enter a radiation area which will surely give a lethal dose. Sort of like Spock did in Star Trek 2.
There’s any number of naval damage control party type activities that get real lethal. First you close the watertight door isolating you inside with the leak or fire but keeping the rest of the ship safe. *Then *you try to fix the leak or fight the fire.
In any multi-crew aircraft the expectation is the commander will try to keep the thing under control until everybody bails out. With the advent of ejection seats, that’s a faster process in a B-52 than it was in a B-17. But AWACS, tankers, & transports still do it the old fashioned way: Geronimohhhh!!!
Ground troops dive on grenades or charge machine gun nests. Or try to pull somebody out of a burning tank before the ammo cooks off.
Doesn’t much matter what your role is, there’s plenty of opportunity for nigh-suicidal heroism in the heat of the moment. IMO that’s not the point of the OP.
Wouldn’t it be better to evacuate the reactor half of the submarine and put all the crew forward of the diesel tank. Surface the sub and get most of the crew off. Call for help. If radiation readings are too high near the sub, get away from it.
For K-19, they sacrificed those sailors to save Russia’s pride. There were western ships in the area willing to rescue the crew, and they should have abandoned the submarine once they figured out the reactor was not salvageable.
Depending on how bad the melt down was, the best thing might have been to tow the submarine to a part of the ocean where the water depth is high and the ocean currents are slight, and just scuttle it. Use a cannon or with workers who approach the bow, away from the reactors, and put demolition charges to open a hole.
Or tow the submarine back to port and use cable saws operated from a distance to separate the portion containing the reactor from the rest. Essentially just replace that section.
I recall reading of the captain of a small American ship (destroyer?) deliberately steering his ship directly into the path of a torpedo that would otherwise have hit a much more important capital ship (aircraft carrier?).
Assuming that actually happened and wasn’t fictional, couldn’t that be considered a kamikaze move?
To save Russian secrets, not Russian pride. I cannot imagine any nation, NATO or Russian/Soviet letting the enemy get its hands on a fully functional (if slightly glow in the dark) Boomer.
This is one case where it certainly would be “with your shield, or on it”. But, regardless, shield gets back.
Guys…we put those bombs and missiles on your airplane so you don’t have to fly it into the target yourself.
Airplanes and their pilots are expensive. That’s why the military generally likes them to be reusable.
I think the closing thing we had to “kamikaze” missions were the U2 flights over the Soviet Union. The pilots were expected to self-destruct the airplane and kill themselves if they were shot down and in danger of capture (IIRC Gary Powers got a lot of shit for not doing this). But the U2 was also expected to be able to fly above Soviet air defenses.
I’m not a pilot, but I feel like it would be relatively easy for a small, nimble fighter to close on a larger, slower, less maneuverable bomber or passenger airplane and bump into the tail or other control surface at a closing speed slow enough to not cause the smaller aircraft to disintegrate into a ball of fire. Probably easier than a mid-air refueling, since those planes are that close and trying NOT to hit each other.
Not the US military, but the first firemen who went into Chernobyl did so knowing that they were going to die from radiation. But they went in anyway.
The Japanese kamikazes were not entirely motivated by military considerations. “Kamikaze” means “divine wind” - it is a reference to a famous typhoon that prevented the Chinese from invading Japan several centuries earlier. The WWII kamikazes were sort of hoping for a miracle - that their budo spirit and self-sacrifice were going to conquer the Allies in the teeth of all evidence to the contrary, just like the typhoon did for the Chinese. And the notion that the highest ideal for a warrior was to die nobly for the Emperor.
The Japanese didn’t waste good planes on kamikazes - they didn’t have any to spare. The Baku bombers they used were mostly wood. It was just a glider with a bomb in it, and the pilots were carried into action on a real plane and then were released and expected to crash into enemy shipping and sacrifice themselves. In general it’s not good military tactics, but what the hell - they were going to lose anyway, and you might as well go out in a blaze of glory.
Regards,
Shodan
See this post in a current thread for more on this point. There’s a few other relevant posts by others as well. http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=20077703
They used a mixture of obsolete, obsolescent and modern a/c. And even the arguably obsolescent ones, like Zeroes by then, were still also in widespread use in front line fighter units.
An extensive listing of special attack missions by unit/a/c type in Japanese Army and Navy respectively used to fully appear online. I notice now they’re semi-dead, hard to see the print now, oh well.
http://ww41.tiki.ne.jp/~yt737/army.htm
http://ww41.tiki.ne.jp/~yt737/navy.htm
Anyway I counted up and of 1101 Army sorties 153 were by the latest ‘Frank’ (Type 4) fighters, another 345 by ‘Oscar’ and ‘Tony’ less up to date but still also used by front line fighter units. On the Navy side 662 of 1394 listed sorties were by Zeroes and 112 by the recently introduced ‘Francis’ (Ginga) twin engine bomber, though none were by the latest Navy fighters (‘Jack’ and ‘George’). A countervailing consideration to avoiding waste of still relatively modern a/c was that they were harder to intercept than trainers, obsolete float planes etc though those were also used. 55 listed sorties were by Ohka built for purpose suicide rocket planes.