In the Japaneese Empire the pilots were to crash into Enemy Carriers if burning, low on fuel, or just for their country. The pilots had no doubt of kamikazing the enemy carriers if it meant their life. Because deep inside they would be proud of their self. This technique helped the japaneese empire alot. It sunk many carriers and many casualties for the U.S.A navy. But the bad thing is they lost planes by doing this. Here is a site with more information on the Kamikazes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamikaze
Yes a kamikaze usally crash to attack a ship for there country.The japs never surrender they would kill themselves rather then getting captured.
I heard in time of defeat they would gather around each other and one would pull a gernade’s pen and then they would gather together and die togethher.
This is a Kamikaze photo in the Pacific Campaign.
I believe the reason they treated enemy POWs so poorly was because they didn’t believe in surrender. Am I right?
Never thought of it like that. That is an awesome thought.
Thankyou. Do you know if kamakazie pilots were ordered to attack a certain part of the target?
ie: bow, control tower, aircraft, etc.
They would first strike the Commanding Tower first and then they would attack the platform that lifted the planes from under the carrier.
Wolfgang wrote:“I believe the reason they treated enemy POWs so poorly was because they didn’t believe in surrender. Am I right?” German Soldier responded:
The Japanese may have died rather than surrender, which was all right for them, but the Allies believed it was smart to retreat when a battle was obviously lost. They lived to fight another day, and they ultimately won the war. So who do you think had the best strategy? If you haven’t already done so, I suggest you do some research on the Bataan Death March. I know you aren’t much interested in the War in the Pacific, but you might be interested in the Bataan Death March. At least do these men the honor of being as interested in them as you are in the Japanese kamikaze’s, okay?
Start with this link first if you have high speed internet because it is a link to a great video. Let me know what you think. I won’t call it homework because I know how you feel about that 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6A393E3wF-o
http://home.pacbell.net/fbaldie/In_Retrospect.html
“About 1,200 survivors of Bataan are alive today. In perhaps ten years, they will all be gone. Most, if not all, would like to leave behind them the truth that was Bataan. To do less would dishonor those men who died in both events.”
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/macarthur/sfeature/bataan_capture.html
http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/st/~ehimchak/death_march.html
http://www.bataansurvivor.com/content/the_bataan_death_march/1.php
Francesca1973 I really enjoyed your posts. Very funny:). I never knew that. Thanks for the information. I thought it was very interresting. You were right I really enjoyed those sights. Thanks for putting these websites forward.
Your welcome German Soldier. I’m glad you liked the sites. I enjoy your posts, too. Were you able to watch the video tribute to Veterans of WWII on www.youtube.com? I know the music might not be to everyone’s liking, but I thought the message in the song and the video was a very important one. It is a wonderful tribute and Thank You to the Veterans of WWII, as well as to all the men and women of the Greatest Generation. If you go to www.beforeyougo.us it tells the story of how Dr. Sam came to write the song. It is a really great story.
Yeah the song was good and good video. The song really meant alot. Thank you for the song information.
The kamikaze pilots came into being only when Japan was losing the war and its leadership was seeking increasingly desperate ways of defending the home islands from the remorseless advance of the Allies, being for practical purposes the Americans
There are instances which suggest that individual American pilots tried the kamikaze approach earlier in the war when America’s position was more desperate than in 1944 when the Japanese employed it.
The first recorded expression of American kamikaze attitudes is Lt Col Doolittle’s answer to another pilot’s question, before the air raid he took over Japan in April 1942, to the effect that if things came to the worst he’d bail out his crew and then fly his bomber into the best target he could find.
The Kamikaze were volunteers and as Rising Sun says came about near the end of the War as a desperate measure to holt the US march towards victory in the Pacific. There is evidence that a number of pilots were put under pressure to volunteer rather than doing so because they wished to die for their Emperor. Having said that there is no doubt there were a lot of them who were quite happy to give their life up, seeing it as an honour to die for the homeland.
I’m not sure you can compare western soldiers or airman who made a decision to see a mission through to the end regardless of whether this meant death or not with the Kamikaze. The allied men made the decision personally; they were not working under orders and were not part of a deliberate policy based on a historical code of honour. I know actions occurred daily where allied troops were in effect going on suicide missions but it is still a fact that their orders were not to die, but to succeed at all cost.
The Kamikaze had only one purpose, to cause as much death, damage & disruption as they could by sacrificing their lives. Any pilot who returned to base having not found a target was viewed with distrust and sent out ASAP to complete their mission. The name, Kamikaze gives some idea what their role was. Kamikaze means “Devine Wind” and relates historically to a wind that blew a far superior invading army away from Japan’s coast, therefore saving the homeland from expected defeat. This was Japan’s optimistic hope for the wartime Kamikaze pilots.
A funny story about a Kamikaze pilot is the one about the Kamikaze who flew three unsuccessful missions. He set of in his plane three times but always came back. Twice he had engine trouble and once could not find a target. His senior officers were losing patience with him but fortunately the war came to an end and saved his life. I know this is true because I saw him been interviewed after the war. During that interview he was telling the story of another Japanese Kamikaze pilot who was a big hero is Japan. When he died, as a Kamikaze, the whole country mourned their favourite hero with full military honours only for the man who was been interviewed to spot him walking down a street in Tokyo a few years after the war ended. It seemed he had not carried out his mission preferring to land on a US occupied island and hand himself over to the Americans.
Another point is the view that Japanese soldiers did not surrender. This is historically untrue. While Japan’s forces were successful on all fronts they had very little cause to worry about surrendering. Once the Allies began to turn the tide the cases of Japanese soldiers giving themselves up increased. The nearer the allies got to Japan and the more it became obvious Japan would loose the war the larger the number of forces surrendering became.
I’m not for a minute comparing the Japanese forces view on surrendering with that of the allies. They did see it as a dishonour and many thousands did kill themselves in either suicide charges or by dying together in suicide pacts as has been mentioned. They even persuaded their own civilians to kill themselves as the US Forces Island hopped towards the Japanese home islands. What I am saying is the view they never surrendered is based more on a popular miff rather than the truth. Tens of thousands eventually gave up their arms before the end of the conflict and most of these were more than happy to do so.
The Japanese view of surrender may well explain why they treated allied prisoners as they did but this would not explain why they treated Burmese locals they forced to work building railways etc even worse or why they treated so many other civilians so badly.
To say that the Japanese before and during WW2 were a most singular and peculiar people would be an understatement all by itself. The treatment they accorded most captured people, but especially captured soldiers was callous, hard and brutal in ways that both westerners and so-called “liberated” East Asians would never have expected from a western combatant nation.
It strikes me that this was at least in part, and probably wholly, a product of a very insular and isolated society that did not really know what “proper” behavior in the context of a wider world was. The Japanese as a nation was brought up to worship their emperor as a god, and to think of themselves as civilized and the balance of the world as being “in need of Japanese civilizing.” Up until 1945, the Japanese had, for all practical purposes, never lost a war, and, up until Midway, had never come out on the short end of a naval conflict. Thus even towards the end of the war, many, if not most, Japenese could not conceive of the war ending with the occupation by a foreign power.
The Chinese had long known the horrible truth about Japanese behavior, and knew that Japanese bleatings about their Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere was garbage, intended to gull the masses while they simply stole everything of value. Everyone in the Co-Prosperity Sphere was equal, but some (the Japanese) were more equal than others.
The Japanese were equal opportunity brutalizers, towards civilians and soldiers alike, but in general, the civilians fared better, except for the hordes of “comfort women” - mostly Koreans and Chinese - forced to become whores for the Japanese army. The east Asians who were under the illusion that they were being saved from their colonial masters discovered too late that they had simply gained a new colonial master and one that basically had no system of justice in place to deal with them. They came to conquer and to steal, after all, and had no time for such foolishness. Even to this day, the Japanese are almost comically incapable of admitting that they did this, as if those two soft boiled eggs on their collective faces are not enough.
Some day soon, one hopes, Japanese might even admit that they started the whole mess in China and East Asia, but admission of such a titanic blunder and mistake might be more than the Homeland can bear to accept. To this very day, Japanese history books fudge, obfuscate and outright lie to their readers about their actions during WW2.
The comfort women issue is not quite as crystal clear as it’s been presented in recent publicity and US Congressional hearings.
The common notion that the IJA roamed occupied areas seizing women for brothels is not correct. Apart from raping in the field and exploiting captured service personnel and civilians, they left it mostly to private enterprise.
Here’s a UN Human Rights Commission assessment.
B. Recruitment
23. The most problematic aspect of attempting to write an account of the recruitment of military sexual slaves during the period leading up to the Second World War and during the war itself is the lack of remaining or disclosed official documentation concerning the actual recruitment process. Nearly all evidence concerning the recruitment of “comfort women” comes from the oral testimony of the victims themselves. This has made it easy for many to reject the testimonies of the victims as anecdotal or even created to implicate the Government in a matter which was essentially a private and, therefore, a privately run, system of prostitution. Yet the consistency of the accounts of women from quite different parts of South-East Asia of the manner in which they were recruited and the clear involvement of the military and Government at different levels is indisputable. It is wholly implausible that so many women could have created such similar stories about the extent of official involvement solely for their own purposes.
The first comfort stations under direct Japanese control were those in Shanghai in 1932, and there is first-hand evidence of official involvement in their establishment. One of the commanders of the Shanghai campaign, Lieutenant—General Okamura Yasuji, confessed in his memoirs to have been the original proponent of comfort stations for the military. 5/ There had been a very high incidence of rape by Japanese troops and, in response, a number of Korean women from a Korean community in Japan were sent to the province by the Governor of Nagasaki Prefecture. The fact that they were sent from Japan implicates not only the military but also the Home Ministry, which controlled the governors and the police who were later to play a significant role in collaborating with the army in forcibly recruiting women.
Following the rape of Nanking in 1937, it became apparent to the Japanese that discipline had to be improved and the “comfort women establishment” was revived. Agents were sent to the same area in North Kyushu, and when there was inadequate response from volunteers from brothels they resorted to deceiving local girls with offers of well-paid jobs, ostensibly as cooks and laundresses for the army. Instead, they worked as military sexual slaves in a comfort station situated between Shanghai and Nanking, a centre which became the prototype for future stations. 6/
Later in the war, the military relinquished, for the most part, its involvement in the running and operation of comfort stations to private operators who were either approached by army agents or who applied for permits on their own initiative. It was considered inappropriate for the army to be running prostitution services and the facilities of the private operators were considered to be more “suitable” for the troops. The recruitment process, however, increasingly became the responsibility of officials, although the extent to which private individuals were involved and who exactly was responsible for initiating the establishment of comfort stations varied from area to area. However, since the Japanese authorities were until recently unwilling to recognize their role in forced recruitment and duplicity, or indeed their responsibility in the recruitment process at all, information about the process of acquisition of women to serve as military sexual slaves comes largely from the accounts of the victims themselves.
As already mentioned, this information is, however, abundant in the stories of former “comfort women” and presents a reasonably clear picture. Three types of recruitment are identified: the recruitment of willing women and girl. who were already prostitutes; the luring of women with the offer of well-paid work in restaurants or as cooks or cleaners for the army; and, finally, large-scale coercion and violent abduction of women in what amounts to slave raids in countries under Japanese control. 7/
In the quest for more women, private operators working for the military, as well as members of the Korean police force who worked in collaboration with the Japanese, would come to the villages and deceive girls with the promise of well-paid work. Alternatively, in the years preceding 1942, Korean police would arrive in a village recruiting for the “Women’s Voluntary Service Corps”. This made the process official, sanctioned by the Japanese authorities, and it also implied a certain level of compulsion. If the girls recommended as “volunteers” failed to turn up, the kempeitai or military police would investigate their reasons for doing so. In fact, the “Women’s Voluntary Service Corps” gave the Japanese military the opportunity to make use of local Korean operators and police to put pressure on local girls to “join the war effort” under false pretexts, as described above. 8/
In cases where even more women were needed, the Japanese military resorted to violence, undisguised force and raids which involved the slaughter of family members who tried to prevent the abduction of their daughters. These methods were facilitated by the strengthening of the National General Mobilization Law, which had been passed in 1938 but was only used for the forcible recruitment of Koreans from 1942 onwards. 9/ The testimonies of many former military sexual slaves bear witness to the widespread use of violence and coercion in the recruitment process. Moreover, the wartime experiences of one raider, Yoshida Seiji, are recorded in his book, in which he confesses to having been part of slave raids in which, among other Koreans, as many as 1,000 women were obtained for “comfort women” duties under the National Labour Service Association as part of the National General Mobilization Law. 10/
Written sources also state that the daughters of officials and the landlord population were spared from recruitment, as their families were useful in keeping general control over the local people. The girls seized from village. appear to have been very young, the majority between the ages of 14 and 18, and the school system was exploited for the acquisition of girls. Professor Yun Chung Ok, who is now working to raise awareness on the issue of military sexual slavery, was lucky enough to have escaped recruitment from her school through the forethought of her parents. She, however, bears witness to the fact that such a method was used to recruit school-age virgin girls without sexually transmitted diseases. 11/
As a result of their young age and innocence, many girls did not even question the good employment opportunities offered to them, they were unable to resist forcible removal and, in most cases, were complete strangers to any understanding of prostitution or the sexual act. Their vulnerability and powerlessness was aggravated by the fact that their schoolteachers, local police and village authorities, whom they trusted, were often involved in the recruitment process. Moreover, the stigma attached to prostitution inhibited women returning from such service before the end of the war from speaking of their experiences and thereby warning other girls of the danger; most of the women victim. were concerned principally with hiding their horrendous experiences and reintegrating into society.
http://www.comfort-women.org/coomaras.htm
Yuki Tanaka’s book Japan’s Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution During World War II and the US Occupation is also a good treatment of this isse, and also the widely overlooked but equally important failure of the Allies to deal with this issue as a war crime. http://wwwsshe.murdoch.edu.au/intersections/issue9/morris_review.html
It’s hard to know whether Japan or Holland ought to be more ashamed of their contemptuous valuation of the suffering of Dutch / NEI rape victims.
In 1998, as a result of Jos Hagers’ December 9, 1992 newspaper article on the wartime forced prostitution of Dutch women in captivity, the Japanese government and private groups offered approximately 3500 guilders, or about $1500, to each of the 100 surviving Dutch women, but many rejected the payment because it was not accompanied by sufficient words of apology. In 2001, the Dutch government itself made a token ex-gratia payment of 3000 guilders, or just over $1200, to each survivor of Japanese internment, in recognition that the victims were not likely to collect anything from the Japanese government during their lifetimes.
http://www.jpri.org/publications/workingpapers/wp84.html
The Japanese were equal opportunity employers. Here are claims by a male victim (whose self-evidently embellished claims might well be true, but which claims should not be accepted as they have been in various circles as evidence of a string of Japanese homosexual brothels throughout Asia) which became a film
http://wwwsshe.murdoch.edu.au/intersections/issue13/klein_interview.html
http://www.frameline.org/festival/26th/programs/markova_comfort_gay.html
Other info http://www1.jca.apc.org/vaww-net-japan/english/womenstribunal2000/histsig.pdf
http://academic.udayton.edu/race/05intersection/Gender/gender02.htm
Well to say they didn’t know how to treat prisoners isn’t that correct, since during the Russo-Sino war and WW1 they had taken prisoners and treated them very well. It was post WW1 that the nationalists started to take power and somehow…the proper treatment of prisoners just got thrown out the window
Hmm, no so sure Boff, they executed several prisoners in 1905.
Interesting discussion. I keep learning new things, which is the point.