That’s true but isn’t the modern interpretation of a “suicide attack” one that involves a single player on one side being able to inflict heavy damage on the other side with some form of explosive (planes into ships, bombs, IED’s, etc)?
I can’t think of a historical equivalent whereby there was absolutely ZERO doubt that the carrier of the suicide mission had ZERO chance of surviving…and invloved such one-sided damage.
I’ll second that. The Okha was a suicide weapon, pure and simple. It was a terminally guided rocket bomb with a human providing the guidance all the way to impact. It would make no sense for the pilot to bail out as it would remove the guidance. It would also make no sense as the pilot wouldn’t survive anyway as he would now be in the water right next to the ship he flew a bomb into.
In any event, the OP isn’t based on a false premise; kamikaze missions were suicide missions. “Special Attack,” the euphemism for suicide units wasn’t limited to kamikazes and Okhas either, there was the kaiten suicide torpedo, the Shinyo suicide motor boat, suicide diver squads, suicide human anti-tank squads, you name it. There’s a good listing here. When the battleship Yamato was sent to attack Okinawa, it was designated as being a special attack mission. I’d be very wary of trusting anime as being at all historically reliable; I loved Starblazers but it didn’t exactly provide an accurate history of the end of the Yamato in the first episode
I recall reading that the ancient Celts (?) painted themselves blue, stripped naked, and would deliberately impale themselves on the lance of a Roman soldier, pushing as far up as they could to be able to kill the Roman. However, I have no cite, only a vague memory of reading this.
No, not tortured usually. Unless somebody had a serious grudge, that wasn’t in the cards. And common warriors, or just Samurai without a lot of cash, or mercenaries, were routinely sighned up to the victor’s forces after a battle. However, nobles and such were very likely to be killed anyway, so a suicidal death in battle was arguably a more heroic option.
This actually does differentiate things from European warfare, where defeated foes were usually ransomed. Treatment of common soldiers differed a lot over time, although mass executions were usually reserved for when the soldiers were treated as hostages.
So this thislink mentions two early cases. There is a reference to a sucide attack by the Knights Templar during the crusades (that I cannot find a reliable cite for) and by this incident in the Beligan War of Independence…