Kamikaze

Last night i was channel surfing and chanced upon a documentary on SBS about Kamikaze pilots who survived World War 2.

Towards the end of WWII in 1945, because of the embargoes by the American navy, Japan was running low on resources, including fuel and manufacturing materials.

With the USA insidiously winning the war bloodstained inch by inch, the Japanese military was beginning to feel cornered and desperate.

That was when one of the commanders of the air force came up with the strategy of Kamikaze squadrons, (God Wind) named after the miraculous typhoon which had stopped the Mongolian invasion of Japan centuries ago.

Contrary to popular belief, according to the survivors, no one volunteered for the job and eventually they all got assigned one by one. Although if they wanted out, all they had to do was refuse, but no one did.

One of the flight instructors couldn't let his trainees go on the mission while he stayed back and watched them nosedive in their antiquated and malfunctioning planes to their deaths. He told his wife about it and volunteered for the squadron. His wife wrote a letter saying that if she and their 2 young children were alive before he left, he would be ill at ease. So she carried a child in each arm and threw herself into the river, so that they would be waiting in heaven for him to join them.

4000 Kamikaze pilots lost their lives to bring down a paltry 57 US vessels. All because the higher ups refused to admit that defeat was inevitable and placed too much emphasis on saving their faces. War is all about old men talking and young men dying.

Those few survivors who were interviewed were saved by their malfunctioning planes which crashed landed before they flew anywhere near the US aircraft carriers. The irony.

At that point in the war, it was foreseeable that USA would eventually emerge the victor, all they needed was more time. But prolonging the war meant more casualties, and so they opted to drop the atomic bomb and killed a massive number of civilians instead. I wonder if those pilots flying the B29 that dropped the atomic bomb slept well at night.