The main feature of the Japanese kamikaze attacks was that there was absolutely no chance of the pilot surviving if the mission went to plan. I can’t think of a single example of this prior to the Japanese war in the Pacific.
Sure, there were missions where the chance of survival was negligible, but the soldiers who went on them all had at least some (forlorn) hope of accomplishing their mission and coming back home afterwards. The Dutch ‘verloren hoop’ (‘lost troop’, the origin of our phrase ‘forlorn hope’) is a prime example: The missions were dangerous but the completion did not require suicide.
And, yes, there were missions that failed, and the soldiers chose to commit suicide rather than come home defeated. This, I understand, was the origin of the kamikaze missions: Stricken Japanese fighters chose to crash their damaged craft into enemy ships. That is, as I mentioned, a failed mission, and not really a suicide mission at all, as the original plan involved the pilot landing at a friendly location.
So, were there any kamikaze-style suicide attacks before the Japanese kamikaze attacks?
Suicide attacks only make sense, strategically, once a lone soldier can take out many in a targeted fashion. With swords and arrows that doesn’t make sense. Canons are projectiles so you can always, theoretically, run away at the last moment.
So that already takes us all the way up to WWI. It’s probably unlikely that a suicide attack would have happened during that war because there were so many closely knit parties duking it out indiscriminately. There wasn’t one guy who would feel bullied and outnumbered.
So that leaves WWII.
Modern wars in impoverished nations, supposedly, has a bit of things like giving kids explosives and making them run into enemy HQ. But with small, cheap drone flyers, I’d say that the age of suicide attacks by a professional army is likely passed and gone.
EDIT: Just noticed this was GQ. Em…I’m unaware of anything previous to WWII, but who knows.
I agree with SageRat. It’s not really possible to do or possible to know before the modern era.
To begin with, how would you define a mission “requiring” suicide? How miniscule do the odds have to be? Afer all there was a slight chance that a kamikaze would survive a mission, and many did. So does that mean that the Kmikaze weren’t suicides? And if we can find another group that has higher rates of survival, does that mean that they were suicides?
If you say that the soldiers themslevs had to expect to die, then you yourself have gven us exmaples of where that happened. I could give you countless others of where assassins and saboteurs carried suicide pills. Do they count as suicides if they expected ot die and had only a tiny chance of survival.
To me the only difference here is cultural. The Japanese held that suicide in battle was worthy and honourable in itself and somehting to be sought after. Other groups with just as little chnace of survival who expected to die held that this was something that was to be avoided unless necessary. It seems to be just a cultural quirk in the way that things are looked at rather than something that can be judged objectively.
I disagree that suicide attacks would not be possible before the modern era.
Take Guido Fawkes… I could imagine him loading up a cart with gunpower barrels and driving it into the courtyard of Westminster Palace. Then lighting a v. short fuse to detonate.
No idea whether there are any examples of this, but I could see how it could work.
There’s also the example of Sampson in the bible… ignoring the “killing 1000 with the jawbone of an ass” bit, the principle of destroying a building’s foundations from below in the knowledge you too will be crushed surely counts as a “suicide attack”?
A cart is slow. If security is so lax that you have enough time to wander in and light a fuse without being seen then you have enough time to light the fuse outside and wander out when it’s in place. Suicide attacks with cars allow you to traverse the space between you and the target ,carrying a large amount of boom, so fast that a fuse won’t always work. But a cart?
Ditto for the foundations. Sappers have been used for millenia to do just that. And they often died when the foundations colapsed on them. But there is no concievable circumstance where there isn’t even a forlorn hope of gettting back out. You need ot tunnel out and you need ot keep that tunnel open ot breathe. Under what possible circumstances could you not try to run back out the tunnel when the foundations start to go?
The OP is based on a false premise : Oka pilots did have a chance to bail out at the last second, and many did. Of course, they also were expected to kill themselves rather than face the disgrace of a capture…
Anyhoo.
The Charge of the Light Brigade comes to mind (as well as many rearguard actions designed to buy the main army some time to retreat - sure, none were designed *to *kill the rearguard, but…)
Also, in any siege assault, the first guys to scale the wall had a very, very low chance to survive once up there (if they even made it to the top), since they’d by definition be surrounded with no way to retreat. Surprisingly, in some cases people argued over who’d get the honor and glory of getting an axe to the face first.
Finally, in the spirit of the Dirty Dozen, penal batallions were tried many times throughout history, and sent to do the worst, most dangerous tasks, but for obvious reasons discipline and results were problematic. It’s very much a Hail Mary pass.
That’s not exactly a Japanese exclusivity - every warrior culture impresses upon its members that death in battle is the worthiest of deaths. I mean, the US does it too, heroic sacrifices, memorials and all that - “don’t try to be a hero and come back home” is a fairly recent doctrine. The only difference is, the Japanese *really *stuck to their guns on that one
The distinction is that the Japanese tradition was that suicide was worthy in and of itself. The rest basically held that death was worthy. Small but important distinction. On the one hand you were a great man for sacrificing yourself while killing the enemy. On the other the sacrifice itself was the ideal. Killing the enemy was a bonus.
The line gets pretty blurry at times but I can’t recall anyone else actualy saying “Come home on your shield if at all possible” rather than “Come home with your shield or on it”.
A quick check on Wiki with an entry of’suicide attack’ also suggests Samson as the first example of someone deliberately suiciding to take down his enemies.
Theres also several historical examples cited, including a suicide attack on a czar using a bomb carried by the person who detonated it.
Gunpowder has been around for a while, while it doesnt seem to have been institutionalised in the way kamikazes were, individual examples seem to exist.
The 300 Spartans at Thermopylae. Before deciding to march there in the first place, King Leonidas consulted the oracle, and was told that for Sparta to survive, a king (Sparta had two kings) must die. Leonidas picked men who had already had children (and thus their lineage wouldn’t be wiped out by their deaths) to accompany him. They knew it was a no-return mission before they left.
You could also consider the Zealots who were active in the first century AD. The Zealots at Masada held out for years in what they surely knew was a hopeless defense and ultimately killed themselves before the Romans could finish the job. Other Zealots were said to be willing to assassinate Roman leaders even in circumstances where their capture and death were virtually guaranteed.
As far as kamikazes go, I think it’s more a coincidence of technologies and less a comment on Japanese culture. At that point, they had enough technology to arm a flying craft with massive bombs, but not enough technology to make an automated guidance system. (The fact that the Nazis figured the guided missile part out shows just how small of a window in technology we’re talking about). The Japanese also experimented with man-guided torpedoes. I suspect that Americans might have done the same thing if the tables were turned and we were facing a likely invasion of California. The fact that it was dressed up in Japanese culture and superstition just tells us they were Japanese - Americans could have used a different script for the same purpose.
I believe suicide was often required of the original Assassins, they would actual choose where an assassination would take place to minimize the chance of the assassin surviving (e.g. when the target was at Friday prayers surrounded by a mob of worshipers).
Of course the thing that distinguishes Kamikazis and modern suicide attacks, is the attack itself ensures the deaths of the person carrying it out. For that you really need explosives. I’m sure there must be examples of that pre-WW2, but can’t think of any. I believe primitive hand-laid explosive charges were use in sieges in the the English Civil War, that all but ensure the death of the person laying them (can’t find a cite, or the term that was used to describe them). However IMO that is no different to plenty of other heroic war-time exploits, going back to antiquity, that had little chance of survival (as far as I’m aware they did TRY to get away after lighting the fuse, it was just generally not possible, particularly with the defenders doing their best to make sure you don’t get out alive).
I guess I don’t see the distinction. The idea behind the Oka wasn’t to kill the pilot or commit honorable suicide - they could have fallen on their swords on the landing strip if that were the case, helped by their friends. The general idea was “you’ll most likely die - but thanks to your death, Japan will survive. It’s the only chance we have left”. In other words, same thing as any military sacrifice ever - no matter how mad, stupid or useless it seems, the soldier’s death was meant to achieve a greater purpose (and impress in the enemy’s mind the notion that “We Do Not Fuck Around” and “We will not surrender, you’ll have to kill every last one of us”).
If you’re into anime, the Japanese short The Cockpit goes into great details about it, with the kamikaze pilot willing to do his duty and refusing to back down despite being young and having a girlfriend back home, while the crew of the carrier plane pity him or try their best to dissuade him. The escort pilots understand what he feels and vow to help him die “right”, in a last act of defiance, even if it costs them *their *lives. It’s a great exploration of the interractions of fatalistic, samurai-like duty, will to live and happiness, versus the hoplessness and futility of it all. Kamikaze pilots weren’t mindless fanatics. I think.
Or at least, no more mindless of fanatics than the Texans who defended the Alamo, the Legionnaires who held Camerone etc…
It’s also worth noting that the Kamikaze were arguably a degenerate, obsessive form of Samurai honor.
Samurai, even in Samurai epics, were not known for going on suicide missions, although they cultivated a distinctly apathetic attitude towards death. They tended to do this in order to acheive victory, however. They normally kileld themselves only to avoid the shame of defeat. While stories of doomed Samurai charging a huge number of opponents, they also emphasized that such actions were the way to win glory and often the onl;y way to survive (as many other stories attest, small groups with great courage often won over larger, but less dedicated, fighters).
Another group of suicide-squads, similar to the Hashashim, were early Chinese killers. Never a unified group, they nonetheless killed many important figures, and death was pretty well expected - many killed themselves quite efficiently or even brutally (and always publicly) in order to repay debts or gain vengeance. The point was to instill fear as well as slay rivals, and the originators of the plots were usually powerful figures who aided honorable men with few opportunities. If the stories are further right, they may also have focused on middle-aged men as assassins.
Indeed. Bushido (the samurai ethic) waxed and waned for centuries but in many ways probably wasn’t all that different from chivalry. During the mass move towards nationalism and militarism, the book Hagakure became widespread as the book of Bushido, but really it was a more extreme version of bushido which had probably never actually been followed. A lot of modern ideas on bushido are tainted by the historical proximity of Hagakure’s influence. Japanese warriors weren’t really guys straight out of James Clavell’s Shogun, probably things were a bit more muted and fuzzy about the edges when it came to official rules.
Not to say that honor wasn’t a big deal nor that people didn’t fight duels or commit suicide, but it’s probably pretty likely that if it weren’t for Christianity’s rule against suicide that European chivalry would have been largely indistinguishable. It certainly doesn’t make much sense that by someone pointing out you did something dishonorable that you correct it by killing him and everyone goes “Oh alright then.”
Really? Cite? Everything I have read or seen on the Okha, including the replica at Wright Pat. mentions that the cockpit was bolted shut from the outside. They were purposely designed to be a one way trip not matter what.
In Norse folklore, there was the concept of “fey”.
Not the noun, meaning “fairy”, but the adjective, meaning “knowing that one is going to die soon, and feeling OK about it”.
A warrior who had been chosen by a valkyrie knew that he was destined for Valhalla, and he would charge headlong into battle, trying to go out in the biggest possible blaze of glory.
Or so the poets claimed.
I don’t know how widespread it was in the real world, but the culture did preach that death in battle was preferable to dying in bed, and it made them very aggressive on the battlefield.
