The kamikazes by Hoyt Edwin Palmer

Author:Hoyt, Edwin Palmer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Japan. Kaigun. Kamikaze Tokubetsu Kōgekitai, World War, 1939-1945, World War, 1939-1945, Suicide
ISBN: 0586066837
Publisher: New York : Arbor House
Published: 1983-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

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WHEN the Kamikaze string ran out in the Philippines, the American naval commanders did not know quite what to expect next. There was just enough continued air activity to keep them worried. Admiral Thomas Kinkaid, commander of the U.S. Seventh Fleet, was concerned enough to ask Admiral Nimitz for more destroyers and other fighting ships to provide firepower along the beaches. Admiral Kinkaid need not have worried so.

With the last foray from the Clark Base complex, the army Kamikazes had expended 719 suicide pilots. The navy had sent out 480 Kamikazes and escorts who never returned. So the Japanese had sacrificed 1,198 lives to try to halt the American invasion through suicide attacks, plus the conventional attacks which all agreed were far less effective.

Was it worth it?

For all this, the Japanese navy claimed thirty-seven ships sunk and sixty-eight damaged. The army claimed 116 ships sunk and 191 ships damaged. Obviously there was an enormous amount of overlap in the claims.

The American navy reported that sixteen ships had been sunk and eighty-seven damaged.

Based on the American naval record alone, it is not hard to see why Admirals King, Nimitz and Halsey were more than a little concerned about the Kamikaze threat. More American warships had been sunk and damaged by the Kamikazes in three months of operations in the Philippines than had been sunk and damaged in all the previous naval battles of the Pacific war, including Pearl Harbor. On the record to this date there was nothing trivial about the Kamikazes.

ON January 14 it was possible for the tired sailors in Lingayen Gulf to relax a little. As for the Philippines campaign, the organized threat was over. There was plenty of hard fighting ahead for the army. At Manila and beyond, the Japanese resisted with a ferocity not often seen. They used Kamikaze tactics on the ground. These soldiers knew they had been written off by Imperial General Headquarters. Their one task was to kill as many of the enemy as they could before they died.

The true samurai must live always prepared to die.

That homily was heard day after day. It was a part of the basic training of every soldier and sailor, of every schoolboy in Japan.

What, then, was to come next?

The navy Kamikaze corps under Admiral Onishi began immediately after his arrival in Formosa to reorganize and prepare for action. The army enjoyed no such continuity.

When the Kamikaze string ran out, the Fourth Air Army Commander, General Tominaga, was a sick man. He had been confined to bed with dengue fever for several weeks. He had not wanted to leave Manila for the damp cold of the mountain country, but there

The Kamikazes

was no choice. He was committed to fighting the last fight with General Yamashita. Or so General Yamashita thought.

General Tominaga had other ideas.

After several days of intrigue, Tominaga sent his chief of staff and several other staff officers to Taiwan to seek the cooperation of the Tenth Area Army Commander and the Eighth Air Division commander to get him out of the Philippines before it was too late.

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