Download or read book Kamikaze Attacks of World War II written by Robin L. Rielly and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2010 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book details more than 400 kamikaze attacks performed by Japanese aircraft, manned torpedoes, suicide boats and suicide swimmers against U.S. ships during World War II. Part One focuses on the traditions, development and history. Part Two details the kamikaze attacks on ships. Appendices list all of the U.S. ships suffering kamikaze attacks"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book The Kamikazes written by Charles River Charles River Editors and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2014-07-23 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Includes pictures *Includes diary entries and other accounts written by kamikaze pilots *Includes a bibliography for further reading One of the most fascinating aspects of World War II was Japan's use of suicide pilots known around the globe as kamikazes, though the Japanese referred to them as Tokubetsu kogekitai (“Special Attack Units”). Translated as “God Wind,” “Divine Wind” and “God Spirit,” kamikazes would sink 47 Allied vessels and damage over 300 by the end of the war, but the rise in the use of kamikaze attacks was evidence of the loss of Japan's air superiority and its waning industrial might. This method of fighting would become more common by the time Iwo Jima was fought over in early 1945, and it was especially prevalent during the invasion of Okinawa in April 1945. The “privilege” of being selected as a kamikaze pilot played directly into the deep-seated Japanese mindset of “death before defeat.” The pilot training manual assured each kamikaze candidate that when they eliminated all thoughts of life and death, fear of losing the earthly life can be easily overcome. Still, not all cases of those chosen to be kamikazes were equally noble. Recruits were trained with torturous regimens or corporal punishment, and stories of mental impairment caused by drugs or saki abound. Some were described as “tottering” and dazed, being carried to their planes by maintenance officers, and forcibly pushed in if they backed down. Pilots who could not find their targets were told to turn around and spare their own lives for another day, but if a pilot returned nine times, he was to be shot. At the moment of collision, he was instructed to keep his eyes open at all times, and to shout “Hissatsu” (“clear kill”). Altogether, nearly 4,000 kamikaze pilots died in combat between October 1944 and August 1945, and about one in seven managed to hit his target. At their peak, they did far more damage to the American Navy than did conventional air attacks, and they undoubtedly placed a significant new obstacle in the path of the American forces slowly encircling the Japanese home islands. However, the widespread use of kamikaze tactics darkened and hardened attitudes toward Japan within the American military and helped to set the stage for the total war on Japanese civilians that the American military waged in the closing months of the war. The Marine Corps Gazette noted, “The ruthless atrocities by the Japanese throughout the war had already brought on an altered behavior (deemed so by traditional standards) by many Americans resulting in the desecration of Japanese remains, but the Japanese tactic of using the Okinawan people as human shields brought about a new aspect of terror and torment to the psychological capacity of the Americans.” As one sailor aboard the USS Miami recalled about kamikaze attacks at Okinawa, "They came in swarms from all directions. The barrels of our ship's guns got so hot we had to use firehoses to cool them down." The kamikazes were the most effective weapon the Japanese had in terms of sinking ships, but they only appeared in the final year of the war. The fact that Japan's military leadership concluded it was both necessary and justified to establish special units of pilots trained to sacrifice their own lives by crashing their planes into enemy vessels was a mark of their own desperation. In the heat of battle, individual soldiers occasionally risked certain or near-certain death to protect their comrades or advance their mission, but organized unites devoted to suicide tactics were virtually unknown before 1944. They appeared only once the course of the war had turned decidedly against the Japanese. The Kamikazes chronicles the history of Japan's famous suicide pilots and explains when, why, and how Japan resorted to their use near the end of war. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about the kamikazes like never before.
Download or read book Memoirs of a Kamikaze written by Kazuo Odachi and published by Tuttle Publishing. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: **Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY) Winner** An incredible, untold story of survival and acceptance that sheds light on one of the darkest chapters in Japanese history. This book tells the story of Kazuo Odachi who--in 1943, when he was just 16 years-old--joined the Imperial Japanese Navy to become a pilot. A year later, he was unknowingly assigned to the Kamikaze Special Attack Corps--a group of airmen whose mission was to sacrifice their lives by crashing planes into enemy ships. Their callsign was "ten dead, zero alive." By picking up Memoirs of a Kamikaze, readers will experience the hardships of fighter pilot training--dipping and diving and watching as other trainees crash into nearby mountainsides. They'll witness the psychological trauma of coming to terms with death before each mission, and breathe a sigh of relief with Odachi when his last mission is cut short by Japan's eventual surrender. They'll feel the anger at a government and society that swept so much of the sacrifice under the rug in its desperation to rebuild. Odachi's innate "samurai spirit" carried him through childhood, WWII and his eventual life as a kendo instructor, police officer and detective. His attention to detail, unwavering self-discipline and impenetrably strong mind were often the difference between life and death. Odachi, who is now well into his nineties, kept his Kamikaze past a secret for most of his life. Seven decades later, he agreed to sit for nearly seventy hours of interviews with the authors of this book--who know Odachi personally. He felt it was his responsibility to finally reveal the truth about the Kamikaze pilots: that they were unsuspecting teenagers and young men asked to do the bidding of superior officers who were never held to account. This book offers a new perspective on these infamous suicide pilots. It is not a chronicle of war, nor is it a collection of research papers compiled by scholars. It is a transcript of Odachi's words.
Download or read book Danger s Hour written by Maxwell Taylor Kennedy and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-11-03 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on years of research and firsthand interviews with both American and Japanese survivors, Maxwell Taylor Kennedy draws a gripping portrait of men bravely serving their countries in war and the advent of a terrifying new weapon, suicide bombing, that nearly halted the most powerful nation in the world. In the closing months of World War II, Americans found themselves facing a new weapon: kamikazes--the first men to use airplanes as suicide weapons. By the beginning of 1945, facing imminent invasion, Japan turned to its most idealistic young men and demanded of them the greatest sacrifice. On May 11, 1945, days after Germany's surrender, the USS Bunker Hill--with thousands of crewmen and the most sophisticated naval technology available--was 70 miles off the coast of Okinawa when pilot Kiyoshi Ogawa flew his plane into the ship, killing 393 Americans in the worst suicide attack against America until September 11.--From publisher description.
Download or read book Kamikaze written by Steven J. Zaloga and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2011-09-20 with total page 49 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The destruction of much of the remainder of the Japanese fleet and its air arm in the later half of 1944 left the Japanese Home Islands vulnerable to attack by US naval and air forces. In desperation, the Imperial Japanese Navy proposed using “special attack” formations, or suicide attacks. These initially consisted of crude improvisations of conventional aircraft fitted with high-explosive bombs that could be crashed into US warships. Called “Divine Wind” (Kamikaze), the special attack formations first saw action in 1944, and became the scourge of the US fleet in the battles for Iwo Jima and Okinawa in 1945. In view of the success of these attacks, the Japanese armed forces began to develop an entire range of new special attack weapons. This book will begin by examining the initial kamikaze aircraft attacks, but the focus of the book will be on the dedicated special attack weapons developed in 1944. It also covers specialized suicide attack weapons such as anti-tank lunge mines.
Download or read book Kamikaze Cherry Blossoms and Nationalisms written by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did almost one thousand highly educated "student soldiers" volunteer to serve in Japan's tokkotai (kamikaze) operations near the end of World War II, even though Japan was losing the war? In this fascinating study of the role of symbolism and aesthetics in totalitarian ideology, Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney shows how the state manipulated the time-honored Japanese symbol of the cherry blossom to convince people that it was their honor to "die like beautiful falling cherry petals" for the emperor. Drawing on diaries never before published in English, Ohnuki-Tierney describes these young men's agonies and even defiance against the imperial ideology. Passionately devoted to cosmopolitan intellectual traditions, the pilots saw the cherry blossom not in militaristic terms, but as a symbol of the painful beauty and unresolved ambiguities of their tragically brief lives. Using Japan as an example, the author breaks new ground in the understanding of symbolic communication, nationalism, and totalitarian ideologies and their execution.
Download or read book Kamikaze Diaries written by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2007-03-01 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “We tried to live with 120 percent intensity, rather than waiting for death. We read and read, trying to understand why we had to die in our early twenties. We felt the clock ticking away towards our death, every sound of the clock shortening our lives.” So wrote Irokawa Daikichi, one of the many kamikaze pilots, or tokkotai, who faced almost certain death in the futile military operations conducted by Japan at the end of World War II. This moving history presents diaries and correspondence left by members of the tokkotai and other Japanese student soldiers who perished during the war. Outside of Japan, these kamikaze pilots were considered unbridled fanatics and chauvinists who willingly sacrificed their lives for the emperor. But the writings explored here by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney clearly and eloquently speak otherwise. A significant number of the kamikaze were university students who were drafted and forced to volunteer for this desperate military operation. Such young men were the intellectual elite of modern Japan: steeped in the classics and major works of philosophy, they took Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” as their motto. And in their diaries and correspondence, as Ohnuki-Tierney shows, these student soldiers wrote long and often heartbreaking soliloquies in which they poured out their anguish and fear, expressed profound ambivalence toward the war, and articulated thoughtful opposition to their nation’s imperialism. A salutary correction to the many caricatures of the kamikaze, this poignant work will be essential to anyone interested in the history of Japan and World War II.
Download or read book Days of Steel Rain written by Brent E. Jones and published by Hachette Books. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This intimate true account of Americans at war follows theepic drama of an unlikely group of men forced to work together in the face of an increasingly desperate enemy during the final year of World War II. Sprawling across the Pacific, this untold story follows the crew of the newly-built "vengeance ship" USS Astoria, named for her sunken predecessor lost earlier in the war. At its center lies U.S. Navy Captain George Dyer, who vowed to return to action after suffering a horrific wound. He accepted the ship's command in 1944, knowing it would be his last chance to avenge his injuries and salvage his career. Yet with the nation's resources and personnel stretched thin by the war, he found that just getting the ship into action would prove to be a battle. Tensions among the crew flared from the start. Astoria's sailors and Marines were a collection of replacements, retreads, and older men. Some were broken by previous traumatic combat, most had no desire to be in the war, yet all found themselves fighting an enemy more afraid of surrender than death. The reluctant ship was called to respond to challenges that its men never could have anticipated. From a typhoon where the ocean was enemy to daring rescue missions, a gallant turn at Iwo Jima, and the ultimate crucible against the Kamikaze at Okinawa, they endured the worst of the final year of the war at sea. Days of Steel Rain brings to life more than a decade of research and firsthand interviews, depicting with unprecedented insight the singular drama of a captain grappling with an untested crew and men who had endured enough amidst some of the most brutal fighting of World War II. Throughout, Brent Jones fills the narrative with secret diaries, memoirs, letters, interpersonal conflicts, and the innermost thoughts of the Astoria men—and more than 80 photographs that have never before been published. Days of Steel Rain weaves an intimate, unforgettable portrait of leadership, heroism, endurance, and redemption.
Download or read book Hell from the Heavens written by John Wukovits and published by Da Capo Press, Incorporated. This book was released on 2015-04-07 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From acclaimed historian John Wukovits, the untold story of the USS Laffey and her crew, who heroically withstood twenty-two kamikaze attacks at Okinawa which the US Navy describes Òas one of the great sea epics of the warÓ
Download or read book Crucible of Hell written by Saul David and published by Hachette Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the award-winning historian, Saul David, the riveting narrative of the heroic US troops, bonded by the brotherhood and sacrifice of war, who overcame enormous casualties to pull off the toughest invasion of WWII's Pacific Theater -- and the Japanese forces who fought with tragic desperation to stop them. With Allied forces sweeping across Europe and into Germany in the spring of 1945, one enormous challenge threatened to derail America's audacious drive to win the world back from the Nazis: Japan, the empire that had extended its reach southward across the Pacific and was renowned for the fanaticism and brutality of its fighters, who refused to surrender, even when faced with insurmountable odds. Taking down Japan would require an unrelenting attack to break its national spirit, and launching such an attack on the island empire meant building an operations base just off its shores on the island of Okinawa. The amphibious operation to capture Okinawa was the largest of the Pacific War and the greatest air-land-sea battle in history, mobilizing 183,000 troops from Seattle, Leyte in the Philippines, and ports around the world. The campaign lasted for 83 blood-soaked days, as the fighting plumbed depths of savagery. One veteran, struggling to make sense of what he had witnessed, referred to the fighting as the "crucible of Hell." Okinawan civilians died in the tens of thousands: some were mistaken for soldiers by American troops; but as the US Marines spearheading the invasion drove further onto the island and Japanese defeat seemed inevitable, many more civilians took their own lives, some even murdering their own families. In just under three months, the world had changed irrevocably: President Franklin D. Roosevelt died; the war in Europe ended; America's appetite for an invasion of Japan had waned, spurring President Truman to use other means -- ultimately atomic bombs -- to end the war; and more than 250,000 servicemen and civilians on or near the island of Okinawa had lost their lives. Drawing on archival research in the US, Japan, and the UK, and the original accounts of those who survived, Crucible of Hell tells the vivid, heart-rending story of the battle that changed not just the course of WWII, but the course of war, forever.
Download or read book The Kamikaze Hunters written by Will Iredale and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-06-07 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In May 1945, with victory in Europe established, the war was all but over. But on the other side of the world, the Allies were still engaged in a bitter struggle to control the Pacific. And it was then that the Japanese unleashed a terrible new form of warfare: the suicide pilots, or Kamikaze.Drawing on meticulous research and unique personal access to the remaining survivors, Will Iredale follows a group of young men from the moment they signed up through their initial training to the terrifying reality of fighting against pilots who, in the cruel last summer of the war, chose death rather than risk their country's dishonorable defeat—and deliberately flew their planes into Allied aircraft carriers.
Download or read book Kamikaze written by Yasuo Kuwahara and published by American Legacy Media. This book was released on 2007 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic World War II autobiography describes the horrors of war and the author's brutal training and experiences as a kamikaze pilot.
Download or read book Bloody Okinawa written by Joseph Wheelan and published by Hachette Books. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stirring narrative of World War II's final major battle—the Pacific war's largest, bloodiest, most savagely fought campaign—the last of its kind. On Easter Sunday, April 1, 1945, more than 184,000 US troops began landing on the only Japanese home soil invaded during the Pacific war. Just 350 miles from mainland Japan, Okinawa was to serve as a forward base for Japan's invasion in the fall of 1945. Nearly 140,000 Japanese and auxiliary soldiers fought with suicidal tenacity from hollowed-out, fortified hills and ridges. Under constant fire and in the rain and mud, the Americans battered the defenders with artillery, aerial bombing, naval gunfire, and every infantry tool. Waves of Japanese kamikaze and conventional warplanes sank 36 warships, damaged 368 others, and killed nearly 5,000 US seamen. When the slugfest ended after 82 days, more than 125,000 enemy soldiers lay dead—along with 7,500 US ground troops. Tragically, more than 100,000 Okinawa civilians perished while trapped between the armies. The brutal campaign persuaded US leaders to drop the atomic bomb instead of invading Japan. Utilizing accounts by US combatants and Japanese sources, author Joseph Wheelan endows this riveting story of the war's last great battle with a compelling human dimension.
Download or read book Divine Wind written by Rikihei Inoguchi and published by Naval Institute Press. This book was released on 2013-11-12 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A classic and poignant treatment of Japan's struggle between recognition of the kamikaze's futility and the country's pride in having made the attempt to stem the tide of the American advance in 1944-1945, this account, given by two former Kamikaze pilots, testifies to Japanese perspective of the last days of World War II. This book stands out among English-language translations of Japanese accounts of the Pacific war, and was translated by a former American officer who fought against the Japanese in the Pacific.
Download or read book American Aces against the Kamikaze written by Edward M. Young and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2013-09-20 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This illustrated history describes the clashes between the US against the hastily created Kamikaze units of the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy Air Forces, some of the last large scale aerial engagements of the Pacific War. The Japanese High Command realised that the loss of Okinawa would give the Americans a base for the invasion of Japan. Its desperate response was to unleash the full force of the Special Attack Units, known in the west as the Kamikaze ('Divine Wind'). In a series of mass attacks in between April and June 1945, more than 900 Kamikaze aeroplanes were shot down. Conventional fighters and bombers accompanied the Special Attack Units as escorts, and to add their own weight to the attacks on the US fleet. In the air battles leading up to the invasion of Okinawa, as well as those that raged over the island in the three months that followed, the Japanese lost more than 7,000 aircraft both in the air and on the ground. In the course of the fighting, 67 Navy, 21 Marine, and three USAAF pilots became aces. As Edward M Young shows, in many ways it was an uneven combat and on numerous occasions following these uneven contests, American fighter pilots would return from combat having shot down up to six Japanese aeroplanes during a single mission.
Download or read book Thunder Gods written by Hatsuho Naitō and published by Kodansha. This book was released on 1989 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thunder Gods is the compelling first-hand account of the pilots who pledged themselves to die for their emperor in the closing days of the Pacific War. Known to the world as kamikaze-divine wind-their suicide attacks on American naval forces caused panic and disruption, but they were bourn out of the desperation of the Imperial Command, determined to avoid the shame of surrender at any cost. Using as a rationale the loudly proclaimed belief that suicide attacks by Japanese pilots attested to the spiritural righteousness of Japan's struggle, the Command's exhortations convinced legions of young men of the virtue of bombs were contructed whose only guiding mechanism was their human cargo. The pilots are the thunder gods of the title, and this is the first time they have told their own story.
Download or read book At War With The Wind written by David Sears and published by Citadel Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last days of World War II, a new and baffling weapon terrorized the United States Navy in the Pacific. To the sailors who learned to fear them, the body-crashing warriors of Japan were known as "suiciders"; among the Japanese, they were named for a divine wind that once saved the home islands from invasion: kamikaze. Told from the perspective of the men who endured this horrifying tactic, At War with the Wind is the first book to recount in nail-biting detail what it was like to experience an attack by Japanese kamikazes. David Sears, acclaimed author of The Last Epic Naval Battle, draws on personal interviews and unprecedented research to create a narrative of war that is stunning in its vivid re-creations. Born of desperation in the face of overwhelming material superiority, suicide attacks-by aircraft, submarines, small boats, and even manned rocket-boosted gliders-were capable of inflicting catastrophic damage, testing the resolve of officers and sailors as never before. Sears's gripping account focuses on the vessels whose crews experienced the full range of the kamikaze nightmare. From carrier USS St. Lo, the first U.S. Navy vessel sunk by an orchestrated kamikaze attack, to USS Henrico, a transport ship that survived the landings at Normandy only to be sent to the Pacific and struck by suicide planes off Okinawa, and USS Mannert L. Abele, the only vessel sunk by a rocket-boosted piloted glider during the war, these unforgettable stories reveal, as never before, one of the most horrifying and misunderstood chapters of World War II.
