What Was the Life Of a KamiKaze Pilot Like?
World War II was a defining event in world history. An ordeal that started in 1939
and continued on till 1945, making it the longest and deadliest war in the world, involving 30
countries and resulting in the death of more than 75 million people all over the world - World War
II changed political, economic and social courses for countries in nearly every part
of the world - including Japan. During the second World War, Japan made use of their
infamous KamiKaze strategy for the first time to protect themselves from any kind of threat.
Trained to deliberately fly their planes into enemy warships, ending their lives in the process,
in this video we’re taking a look at what the life of a Japanese KamiKaze pilot was really like.
Decades after the war, the KamiKaze pilots of Japan still spark an extremely divided debate.
On one hand, the Japanese KamiKaze are one of the most recognizable icons in the country’s history.
But on the other hand, the whole world is still left wondering why exactly were so many people
ready to voluntarily sign away their lives when they signed up to be KamiKaze pilots?
Most people don’t really know this, but the word KamiKaze literally means ‘divine wind’
and it refers to a strong typhoon that drove away Mongol forces that were on their way to
infiltrate Japan from the West in 1281. This term was then used in 1944 for special soldiers in the
Japanese Army who were specially recruited to carry out suicide missions. The KamiKaze
suicide bomber strategy was a way for Japan to protect themselves from any external threats.
It involved around 3,000 people who signed up to be fighter pilots for the Japanese Army
and took on the task to sink scores of US ships, killing nearly 5,000 American soldiers.
These soldiers were referred to as the ‘KamiKaze’ because for years,
the Japanese people had pinned their good luck and fortune on these winds. And now, they were pinning
their hopes on these brave soldiers who were ready to lay their lives to defeat their enemy.
But the question is, how were these self-sacrificing pilots actually chosen?
What most people don’t know is that by the end of the War, the Japanese Army was desperate to do
anything they could to save themselves from defeat. This was because of an apparent lack
of military equipment and techonlogies and the fact that they just could not keep on
training soldiers to replace the ones that were quickly losing their lives in the war.
So, Japan decided to take the offensive route and used their outdated aircrafts and started
sending out relatively untrained soldiers out to the field to attack.
At the same time, the nationalist idea of ‘death before defeat’ was deeply ingrained within the
minds of Japanese citizens. In fact, when you enter the Japanese military, one of the very first
lessons you’re taught is to quickly end your life in the case that you’re captured by the enemy.
So, the idea of dying for your land and your people wasn’t really anything new at the time.
The KamiKaze forces were led by Admiral Takijiro Onishi who strongly believed that the only way for
Japan to fight back was to use their planes and organize suicide attacks against their enemies.
His idea was that this force would consist of volunteers only. Now, some people definitely
volunteered to be KamiKaze pilots but a lot of them didn’t. The truth is that the pressure
to volunteer was immense. Takijiro made sure that declining an offer to become a KamiKaze
was extremely difficult. Sometimes, you would be asked in a room full of other volunteers,
which was a peer pressuring strategy employed by the troops to get people to say yes. As difficult
as declining was, even if you managed to say no, that really didn’t guarantee anything. A lot of
people actually remember declining the offer, only to find their names on the list anyway.
Most of the time, experienced pilots would be turned down because their skills were needed
for actual combat and training. So, this resulted in most of the KamiKaze soldiers being relatively
inexperienced and young soldiers, barely out of their teens and willing to show the world that
they were ‘real men’. Pilots chosen were usually uneducated men and were the second or third sons
of a family. Once chosen, the Kamikaze pilots were made to accept a 5 point oath. According
to these oaths, a soldier must make loyalty his obligation, they must make propriety their
way of life, they must highly esteem military valor, have a high regard for righteousness,
and lastly, these soldiers must lead simple lives. Before setting out on their mission, KamiKaze
soldiers were made to write a letter to their family that would be sent to them once their death
was confirmed by Japanese military officials. In a lot of these letters, soldiers appeared
to be happy and even proud of the fact that they were given an opportunity to serve their country.
These ‘boy-soldiers’ had to go through an extremely brutal training regime where they
were constantly put through physical and mental torture to prepare them for high
pressure situations and to instill a fighting spirit in them, according to Onishi. If you did
so much as breathe in the wrong direction, you would be punished with extreme beatings and the
rationale behind it all was to build resilience and discipline the soldiers for what lay ahead.
Some KamiKaze soldiers that managed to survive their time in the force report that
their superiors would beat them up to the point where their faces were no longer recognizable
and all of their teeth had fallen out of their mouths. But at the same time,
some KamiKaze pilots were instructed not to sacrifice their lives in certain conditions.
If a pilot’s plane developed some sort of problem or if they weren’t able to locate
the right target, they were supposed to immediately return back because absolutely
none of the soldiers were to sacrifice their lives unless it was for the right purpose. Before being
sent out on their first and final mission, the KamiKaze pilots would be given a ceremonial drink
So, after all of this, how successful was the KamiKaze strategy?
According to the U.S. Nearly three thousand kamikaze attacks took place, managing to damage
368 ships, sinking 34 of them, while killing 4,900 navy soldiers and wounding another 4,800,
but with only about 14% of attacking kamikaze pilots managing to hit a ship.
And if we go by these numbers, the strategy was definitely successful,
especially if you consider that the KamiKaze were up against one of the most technologically
advanced militaries in the world, with their own soldiers being extremely inexperienced.
On July 28, 1945, USS Callaghan was the last U.S. Navy ship to be sunk by a Japanese
Kamikaze attack on a radar picket station approximately 50 miles southwest of Okinawa.a
However, despite the success of the KamiKaze, Japan still lost the war and had to surrender
less than a year later, putting an end to the brutal KamiKaze program for good.
That’s a wrap for What Was the Life Of a KamiKaze Pilot Like. Do you think you have what it takes
to become a KamiKaze? Let us know in the comments below. If you liked this video, make sure to give
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