Thread 63929482

Did kamikaze attacks have any meaningful impact on WWII? Could they have? Why did no one else in history ever institute this tactic while losing, not even Germany?

They did damage some americans ships and force them to go back for repairs and sink some other ships.
But the most important thing is that they showed japan was ready to sacrifice every man woman and child for the emperor

>>63929482 (OP)
Tactically they were pretty effective. Strategically they weren't because Japan had almost nothing left by the time they started using the tactic. If they were fanatical enough to do it in 1942 it might have made a strategic difference.

>>63929482 (OP)
The failed to adapt their aircraft to keep up with the Americans, and failed to train pilots to replace losses, so turning vulnerable planes into guided bombs did increase hit rates. Along with creating a psychological effect (One which contributed to them getting nuked, but that's another issue.)
If the invasion of Japan actually went off, Kamikazes would have played a big role. Thousands of aircraft, frogmen, boats and subs in hidden positions. Most probably would have been killed before causing damage, but the USN and RN definitely would have taken more casualties. Enough to force an armistice? Highly doubtful.

>>63929574
This.
Too little too late, if they had been making purpose built kamikaze planes from the start they might have been able to attrit the USN enough to take more of SE Asia.
Ultimately I think it would have still ended with the US nuking them but it might have brough them a few years.

>>63929482 (OP)
Attacking US fleet was almost certain death (in 44/45) anyway, and it's easier for suicide craft to do some damage than your classical torpedo/dive bomber. Also it wastes less, less skilled pilots and older planes, compared to seasoned, 3/4 men bomber crew in somewhat advanced aircraft.
So, from pure math standpoint, it was worth. Still, i didn't changed anything

>>63929676
This. Skipping all the moral bullshit, it made perfect sense to use it.

I have been thinking about what would have happened if Japan built Kamikaze V-1s (Fieseler Fi 103R). Could that have changed anything given its high speed and significantly longer range then the autism project that was the MXY-7 Ohka? (Ofc Japan would still loose but what casualties could it have inflicted?)

>>63929768
There were plans for rocket and jet Ohka with longer range, launched from rails on land (IIRC some plans for launching from subs.) Part of the issue with Kamikaze in general were they usually went after the first ship they saw, which was usually the radar picket DD/DE.

The idea of the early, 1942 kamikaze is interesting because realistically speaking it could have resulted in the US flat out not having any carriers in the Pacific pretty early on. Theoretically if you had strike packages of mostly Zeros along with a small number of dedicated kamikaze pilots you could have split training to keep the core pilots good.

>>63929482 (OP)
>not even Germany?
They did to an extent, Sonderkommando Elbe was a dedicated squadron for ramming Allied bombers, but they were hoped to be able to bail out after impact.

>>63929804
That kind of makes sense tho, given that they would most liekly be shot down long before they reached anything important. Better to sink a DD then nothing I guess

>>63929482 (OP)
>how about this tactic that gets pilots killed on purpose, is it any good
Gonna be a no from me dog

>>63929838
>to an extent
no they actually fully did

the leonidas squadron in germany flew suicide missions against bridges across the oder river in april of 1945 that were pretty ineffective and failed to do any sort of major damage except for one incident at Küstrin

>>63929871
In Japan's situation, where they couldn't train new pilots fast enough to keep up with their losses, sending them out before they were ready was a guaranteed suicide mission anyway; their reasoning was that they might as well make it the most effective suicide mission possible.

>>63929482 (OP)
Kamikaze planes are the precursor to anti-ship missiles. They were more effective than attempted bombing or torpedo runs.

>>63929871
The pilots die regardless.

>>63929482 (OP)
Kamikaze planes were not effective. They did some damage to Bunker Hill and a few other ships, but by and large they were awful. The pilots had virtually no training and they were mostly brainwashed kids. If you think about though for the Germans, handing a panzerfaust to a 12 year old and telling them to fight the soviets is not much different.

>>63929482 (OP)
Mitsubishi Zero is such a lovely plane.

>>63932170
T-6/Havard in a bodykit.

>>63932148
Rookies in Kamakaze mode would have been really effective before AA caught up with aircraft attacks. The opposite happened.

>>63929493
>they showed japan was ready to sacrifice every man woman and child for the emperor
People say this but it doesn't make sense. They wouldn't have surrendered at all if that were true.

>>63932193
Officers in the military were certainly ready to; just maybe not the country as a whole.

>>63932246
There are accounts of civilians killing themselves to avoid what the Russians were actually doing to Germans.

>>63932193
They barely managed to, when people found out Japan wanted to surrender, there were literally 2 attempted coups in a 10 day period. This was after both nuke drops obviously

>>63932193
Then America started nuking Japan and people started to think that they wouldn't even get to go out in a honourable last stand, the whole country would just be razed by this powerful new weapon.

>>63929574
>Tactically they were pretty effective. Strategically they weren't because Japan had almost nothing left by the time they started using the tactic
Agreed. On one hand, a plane ramming into your ship is Ruining your day. There'd be burning avgas everywhere while you've got AA crews and their Ammo on the deck.

On the flip side, very few planes died to Kamikaze attacks and the planes and pilots were far more valuable than the damage they were causing.
>If they were fanatical enough to do it in 1942 it might have made a strategic difference.
Disagree. Japan didn't have the population to waste on suicide attacks. Starting in 42 would just mean running out of pilots sooner.

>>63933504
>very few planes died to Kamikaze attacks
Very few SHIPS, FML.

>>63929482 (OP)
>Did kamikaze attacks have any meaningful impact on WWII?
they damaged or sank 200 ships in the war, but only one of which was a large surface combatant
this is, given the size of the US navy, basically a rounding error

their impact was mostly tactical, since a a special attack plane was a one-way journey, they couldnt simply damage the plane and then hope they retreat
this was a much harder task, and until VT fuzes were available, required a huge throw weight to ensure a kill and the US devoted a large amount of resources to creating larger detection networks like the big blue blanket to detect them at a farther distance
in this manner, they could be seen as tactically successful (mostly cost outdated planes but forced the allies to use a lot of high-tech counter-measutes) but strategically irrelevant (very few ships actually disabled despite the large number of them deployed)

>>63932193
>People say this but it doesn't make sense
every single battle the fought until 1945 had double-digit numbers of surrenders out of tens of thousands of defenders
the bayonet charge when the japanese ran out of ammo became a matter of fact starting in guadalcanal, a suicidal charge rather than to surrender
the battle of okinawa was the first, and only, time that the japanese were ever captured in large numbers

and even them the battle of okinawa had the japanese literally trying to jump on tanks with hand grenades to die pointlessly like a warboy instead of surrendering
there was basically no hope of victory at this point and no real point to resistance, they just kept fighting with what seemed like fanatical and suicidal zeal even at the very end

>>63929482 (OP)
They were by far the most effective weapon ever deployed against the USN, and the only thing that ever made things dicey on an operational level after Midway for the Big Blue Blanket. Given the USN got suckerpunched from fucking orbit on Day 1 of War and had inflicted irrecoverable strategic defeats on the IJN less than 7 months later, anything that had a noticeable effect slowing the rate of skullfucking TF77 was handing out like cars at an Oprah show is worth looking into.

>>63932148
>Kamikaze planes were not effective
I mean, thats just not true. They had major operational level effects at Okinawa and Iwo Jima and gave ADM King the leverage to pretty much veto Operation Olympic. He pointed out that as bad as they were in Okinawa it would be way worse in the home islands since the time between detection and impact would be a minute or less, so CAP would be way less effective and the "fuck you have 6,000 pounds of 5" shells every minute" CAs and CLs for air defense wouldn't be able to overwatch the landing and reinforcement points at all.

>>63929599
> (One which contributed to them getting nuked, but that's another issue.)
Honestly that's a pretty good point. The Japanese were percieved by some as death-crazed fanatics that could not be reasoned with, and that was a factor in the decision to drop nukes. How much did Kamikaze help that perception? I dunno, sure hope someone here knows more.

>>63933735
Not so much on a psychological level, but like I just said, King basically put his foot down and said Kamikazes made Olympic non-viable. Basically none of the countermeasures they had developed against them would be effective in that scenario with no advanced radar warning, distributed outlying fields, and the inability for cruisers to position themselves between the threat axis and the landing sites. King didn't really give a shit about Nip casualties though, he just vetoed Olympic and said to starve the bastards to death with subs. Truman wanted to end the war quickly though so they got the spicy neutrons instead.

>>63932193
Yes it does retard. No japanese unit ever surrendered before ordered to. Once the emperor said it was over their were multiple coup attempts. Only the Emps prestige ended the war.

>>63933771
Exactly. The only real way to end the war in the Pacific was to somehow make the Japanese Emperor order his military to stop. The nukes convinced the emperor, that was their real military utility.

>>63929482 (OP)
1 plane
1 pilot
1 ship down

>>63933942
There was also that dude the Japs captured and tortured until he told them how nukes worked and that America had a hundred of them. Marcus McDilda apparently.

>>63933942
The nukes were a good face-saving excuse, but if you read the actual timeline from historical documents the news of the Russian invasion of Manchuria (which reached the cabinet between the two nukes) was the tipping point.

>>63929482 (OP)
>thread about kamikaze effectiveness
>nobody has posted the picture
the primary effect of the kamikaze threat was to put the US a decade ahead in naval air defense as every possible solution from 5" VT to 3" autocannons were rushed through development

>>63933983
>McDilda's "testimony" included the following nonsensical description of the A-bomb, which seemed to confuse it with an antimatter weapon:
>As you know, when atoms are split, there are a lot of pluses and minuses released. Well, we've taken these and put them in a huge container and separated them from each other with a lead shield. When the box is dropped out of a plane, we melt the lead shield and the pluses and minuses come together. When that happens, it causes a tremendous bolt of lightning and all the atmosphere over a city is pushed back! Then when the atmosphere rolls back, it brings about a tremendous thunderclap, which knocks down everything beneath it.[2]
Thank you based retard.

>>63934000
this is revisionist cope trying to make the Russians relevant to a front they contributed literally nothing to all war

>>63934032
It's a historical fact. Whining won't make the time-date stamps go away.

The strategic explanation is that Japan was going to use Russia as the neutral guarantor for the treaty after their decisive battle. When Russia officially turned against them it also triggered the end of the last Go North faction's cope and made surrendering to the US preferable to getting occupied by communists.

>>63934052
Literally all of this is Russian cope. The idea of a decisive battle after Japan had been fully blockaded, mined, the Yamato run around in a suicide run and nuclear bombardment had commenced is as delusional as Russian attempts to be relevant in the Asian theatre. The communists could not physically get to Japan because the entire Home Island chain was surrounded by American mines, ships, and torpedo bombers. Manchurian resources were already cut off from Japan by the blockade. And who the fuck is stupid enough to think Russia is a neutral guarantor of anything? Japan fought them less than ten years prior.

>>63934071
>japanese high command was fanatical
no shit?
>Literally all of this is Russian cope
You can look up the timeline and the meeting minutes for yourself in the Japanese national library online. Nagasaki and the Manchurian invasion happened the same day, but the news from Manchuria hit the capital first and was what tipped the arguments.

Read primary sources instead of indulging in this reddit faux-contrarian thought police fantasy slop.

>>63934052
Lmao Ruskies couldn't even ship troops a few hundred miles away, meanwhile the US has amassed an invasion fleet larger than the literal largest amphib of that just happened. But I'm sure some Ruskies that couldn't even paddle to the fight were the problem in Jap eyes. Not the constant US air mail deliveries of fuck you juice

>>63934104
>muh russians
>muh americans
Read the Japanese decision makers' decisions, fool. Stop speculating about post-hoc rationalization and read the fucking ministers own words at the time.

>>63934094
The sum total of Russian contribution to the Pacific Theater was making sure the Red Chinese had enough weapons to backstab the Chinese who actually fought Japan. "The runner for the Manchuria news got there first!!!!!" is an irrelevant historical quirk that had no actual effect on the war, unless you've deluded yourself into thinking Japan could sustain indefinite nuclear bombardment but not the loss of a colony they were already cut off from. The reason you're so fanatically attached to an obviously delusional position is because the entire Russian national psyche requires them to be the heroes of a war they started and enabled.

>>63934110
Look at a fucking map retard. Japan had already lost the war when Manchuria was invaded. "B-b-b-but muh runner" kill yourself dumb nigger.

>>63934110
I don't need to. The Jap high command clearly and deliberately acquiesced following the nukes. They dropped all negotiations the minute they were hit the second time. The Russians mean nothing, the nukes toppled the military leadership and forced the Emperor's hand. This has been documented as nauseam. But according to you, this one note of meeting minutes completely negats all logic, high command testimonies and the actual factual fact that they surrendered and attempted no resistance post due to the simple fact we dropped the world's newest and most powerful weapon on them, twice

>>63934136
It's a motte and bailey argument - the motte is "the news of the Manchuria invasion arrived first", the bailey is the indefensible counterfactual that Japan wouldn't have surrendered if the Soviets didn't invade Manchuria. Notice how anon hasn't attempted to defend that position at all, despite it being central to his claim that the invasion mattered more than the total blockade and atomic bombardment.

>>63934136
>I don't need to look at primary sources because I feel I'm right based on other things

And there it is. I'd feel sorry for you if this was an innate mental handicap but it looks like willfully blind irrationality.

>>63934168
see
>>63934155
you have latched on to a single line in a single source to justify a much larger view of the war utterly unsupported by any source

>>63933771
>No japanese unit ever surrendered before ordered to.
Complete lies. Millions surrendered in Manchuria.

>>63933942
The Emperor? The guy who stated he wanted to surrender in June? The war cabinet and military refused to go ahead with it. Then the nukes dropped. They then couped him. Even then they refused to honor what the emperor wanted until the the coup failed.
all this to say "They were willing to sacrifice everyone!" and "They were all robots who did precisely what the emperor said!" are just bullshit arguments by people who repeat what they learned from the History Channel.
It was a military fascist regime but even such regimes have breaking points. They're irrational, but less ideological than you claim them to be.

>>63933316
That's the point. They obviously were not willing to sacrifice everyone or they would have sacrificed everyone. The "sacrifice everyone" faction got their shit promptly pushed in by the majority.

>>63929482 (OP)
>A lot of Westerners looked at the kamikaze strategy with complete shock, the idea of putting a kid in a plane and telling him to kill himself by crashing into the enemy. But even if you don't tell him to crash into something, putting a kid with only about 20 hours flight time into a plane and telling him to take on U.S. pilots in Hellcats and Corsairs is just as much a suicidal tactic as being a kamikaze. We figured that if they're going to die anyway, the kamikaze attack will probably cause more damage to the enemy for the same price in lives.
Kamikaze attacks created the backbone of everything we know about how to defend a carrier, it often goes understated how difficult naval aviation is to effectively pull off and how much experience matters and no other navy on earth has more experience than the Burgermutts do at fending off what are effectively missile strikes

>>63933761
There's some pre- post War brickmanship too. America saw the rise of Russia in Eastern Europe and wanted to prevent Russia from expanding in the Pacific. The nukes were used to make Russia pause a bit.

>>63929872
Suicide attacks are not part of Germanic warrior tradition

>>63934024
Only like 15% of them even hit the target, so while that nip is burning in hell, at least he hit his target

>>63934024
Going in low is the better option
>When I coached those kids [kamikaze pilots], I'd tell them, "If you've gotta die, you at least want to hit your target, right? If so, then go in low, skimming the water. Don't dive on your target. You lose control in a dive. You risk getting picked off by a fighter, but you've got better chance of hitting your target."

>>63934250
>the Russian cocksucker shut up after this post
typical lmao

>>63936141
Pionier Klinke says otherwise.

>>63929482 (OP)
>not even Germany?
By the late war Germany was looking to put the Fi 103R into service, a manned variant of the V-1. Now the pilot was supposed to bail out at the last moment, but between "the last moment" and the really cramped cockpit being right in front of the engine the survival rate was expected to be less than 1%, ie it was just a not so honest Kamikaze plane.

>>63936383
Seems like terrible advice frankly. Going in low (and slow by implication) would give you an almost guaranteed chance to get picked off by fighters bouncing you from high, not to mention presenting a very easy target for AA of all ranges if no fighters were present. Well, I guess since they were using second-tier planes, they might not be able to handle a dive.

>>63929482 (OP)
>first guided missiles

Had they doctrinally committed to it from the outset, then they get big returns. Same as the hybrid sub coastal arson and Panama Canal raids Yamamoto wanted out of the gates— sound but delivered om too late. Probably ought've baited their Decisive Battle set piece by taking and holding both Midway and the Aleutians en mass (sending a group south in the former to hedge bets was counter to their strategic and operational ethos and only tempted fate, as the historical outcome(s) bore out)

>>63932193
Because at the time the Japanese thought this attitude would lead to the US giving them more favourable surrender terms due to victory being costly and time consuming due to their steadfastness. Once they realize the US is just going to kill them to the last man using increasingly more advanced weapons and the Russians would be joining in (and don't care about how costly victory would be) they realized there was nothing they could do anymore.

>>63929482 (OP)
>Why did no one else in history ever institute this tactic while losing, not even Germany?
The allies only used VT fuses at sea because they didn't want any shells to be captured and reverse engineered, and since Germany was mostly fighting over land that meant that their pilots weren't faced with certain death like the Japanese pilots were. At least for most of the war, there was a month or two when they did use VT fuses over Germany but by then they didn't have enough planes to do it anyway.

>>63929482 (OP)
Jap pilot losses were already bad without kamakaze. It didn't make much difference at all.

>>63929599
Could they even have adapted, outside some fantasy land where they suddenly reveal jet planes equiped with anti ship missiles?
Their navy was decimated and they where fighting at a numerical disadvantage against carrier groups armed to the teeth with shiny new radar controlled AA guns in addition to better and more numerous planes.

>>63941388
Some things were just impossible due to resources, even if they had been able to keep Americans away from convoys and overseas refiniries for longer.

Training pilots on ground and with 200hp paper plane only gets them so far. They need brand new plane types to train into, fuel for at least few dozen hours, spare parts and maintenance crews. No amount of theory could save them.

Industrial capacity, quality alloys and amount of qualified engineers were also limits they couldn't have overcome.

>>63934028
To be fair, only a hand of people in the World knew how nuclear weapons could work and the Manhattan project was still a Military Secret. NOBODY told Marcus McDilda Jack Shit about nuclear weapons Specifically so he couldn't reveal them.

McDilda told that to the Japanese officers that captured him and they tortured him anyway. The next day the Japs threated to kill him so Marcus made something up. Don't do torture, kids. You end up not believing the truth when you're told it.

>>63929482 (OP)
>Did kamikaze attacks have any meaningful impact on WWII?
forcing the development of motion sensitive munition fuses
which made kamikazes almost irrelevant

>>63929574
>>63929609
you would just be sending more potential aeronautic talent into the meatgrinder faster before the marianas turkey shoot even happened

>>63943076
>motion sensitive munition fuses
Don't you mean proximity sensitive fuses?

>>63929482 (OP)
Maybe psychological warfare making you think every enemy is a nutbag who will destroy themselves just to take you out

>>63943088
sure whatever

>>63943090
Too bad they underestimated the American tendency to shoot anything that's vaguely threatening.

What makes me condemn it as fully retarded is the fact that they sent some of their best surviving pilots on suicide missions. If you're going to do this it should be junior pilots with the fastest viable training period flying in the most outdated, cheap to produce planes in vast numbers, with the best pilots training them and flying their best fighters as escorts.
And the planes were the only really effective suicide weapon they had, they should've compared the effectiveness of kamikaze pilots with the human torpedoes that didn't work half the time, the ohka and the ludicrous frogmen living in underwater bunkers with mines on sticks and gone all in on aircraft. Another advantage of the plane attacks compared to other kamikaze weapons is that the pilot can go home and try again if they didn't hit a target, all the other weapns were certain death if they missed or there was a malfunction. Japan didn't have a population advantage but a lot of the time they seemed intent on selling their lives as cheaply as possible.

>>63944058
Nips were mellodramatic fags
there were kamikaze attacks before it even became doctrine
there was a reported kamikaze in pearl harbor
most Jap pilots would rather 9/11 themselves into the nearest ship instead of trying to ditch their kate or Zero near an island and hide out until the navy found them like everyone who was stuck having to fly F4 wildcats did

>>63944198
If I'm remembering correctly there was at least one spontaneous American kamikaze too.

>>63944243
unless youre talking actual nose dive into a target
air ramming isnt "kamikaze"

>>63943103
>make motion sensitive fuse
>it explodes in the barrel
mfw

>>63944270
I have no source but if I'm remembering correctly he was going down anyway and he simply aimed himself at a Japanese ship.

>>63935996
That's an after-the-fact thing. The US wasn't even really *thinking* about dealing with the USSR all that much at the time, as evidenced by '45-'48 when Stalin was allowed to do almost anything he liked before the Truman Administration finally woke up and realized that they had a problem on their hands.

To the US, nukes were just really big bombs that allowed a single bomber to do what had taken several hundred with HE and incendiaries at Dresden, Tokyo, and Yokohama. The scary nuke thing didn't really take shape until after the Bombs were dropped (and especially after Stalin got them).

>>63944330
There was a crippled bomber at Midway that appeared to try to ram a carrier on its way down, but missed.

>>63929482 (OP)
not clicking thread to read it

germans made the tactic while ramming american/british bombers with their planes

then the japs copied it and made it famous for hitting ships with the tactic

>>63944353
Yeah, B-26 "Devil's Playmate", I think that's what I'm remembering.

>>63944198
>most Jap pilots would rather 9/11 themselves into the nearest ship instead of trying to ditch their kate or Zero near an island and hide out until the navy found them like everyone who was stuck having to fly F4 wildcats did
there was a guy who kept getting sent out and coming back because there wasn't a target and after the third or fourth time they just shot him

>>63944295
the fuse doesnt ignite in proximity of being inside the gun either

>>63944379
>after the third or fourth time they just shot him
Imperial Nips confirmed Jew tier death cult

>>63945066
There was a genuine problem getting people to actually carry out the strikes, there was a large faction of people in charge that knew they had lost the war at that point and didn’t want kids to kill themselves over nothing, easiest solution is to just shoot anyone that has all their pilots have engine or navigation problems 40 times in a row, make an example out of some of the pilots themselves for good measure, they had actually been pretty lenient up to a point because good pilots are valuable but push eventually comes to shove, some of the old guard literally begged to be a kamikaze pilot but were told they’d be escorts or instructors instead

>>63929482 (OP)
Something like 50 ships hit in the Okinawa campaign alone, yeah they definitely had a big impact since they were sinking and damaging enemy ships with extremely expendable aircrews who received the bare minimum flight training.

>>63945100
Ugaki actually conducted a kamikaze attack after the surrender, if you want to call it that. He couldn't fly so he went in a two seater with a pilot, but the copilot wanted to go to so he sat in Ugaki's lap. No record of an attack around then and they were never seen again

>check out some of the most famous special attack unit pilots on japanese wikipedia
>their biographies are 80% about their romances and read like light novels

>>63945182
I mean between limited training and not exactly being able to write after a successful mission its not exactly surprising

>>63945253
sure but you'd expect a short article in that case rather than a long article describing every date he went on

>>63945055
They actually had a pretty clever solution to that. Essentially, every RPF fuse was armed by an Inertial fuse. A glass vial full of electrolytes had to be shattered and the round had to be spinning but not accelerating in order to complete the battery that powered the RPF fuse.

But seriously, Motion Sensitive Fuse? The shell is zooming along at 2600 FPS. Do you need to detect that?

>>63943084
You don't need highly skilled pilots for kamikaze missions, they only need to be able to take off, climb, maintain level flight and not overspeed in a dive.
You only need one pilot in a group that can navigate, everyone else can just follow him.