Someone tell me that war is worth any of this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQWv9KpDWEg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJ7N9E58dWo&NR=1
Hello Rising Sun*.
I don’t want to judge, neither i mean to say any opinion - i just say, that this material is very ‘impressive’.
I would like to add this footage:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=WdHezBN5mBE&NR=1
Greetings.
Looks like you read my mind while I was posting the same video elsewhere. http://www.ww2incolor.com/forum/showthread.php?p=126606#post126606
Pretty disgraceful…
Takes the glory out of the war 
_
Good morning.
Yes i noticed that impact also - i first thought it was from the survive waistcoat, but it looked too strange [and the film had sound].
I think a naval soldier aimed at the pilot [so he doesn’t try any fools when they rescue him] in the water and when the grenade exploded, he reacted by instinct.
Worth a notice, but not worth calling the soldier who shot a war criminal, in my opinion dear Rising Sun*.
There was no chance, that the pilot would have survived that explosion, and perhaps the soldiers bullets ended the pain which was probably coming after the shock.
Laters.
That was also my conclusion. The slight delay allows for the reaction time of someone already aiming at the pilot.
I agree as far as whoever fired the shot is concerned, although as water is incompressible the impact of the explosion would have been worse than an air burst so the pilot would have been doubly damaged by a fragmentation grenade held against his body.
I’m more interested in the cause of the alleged grenade explosion.
Some considerations are:
Were kamikaze pilots issued with hand grenades? (If so, it suggests a certain lack of confidence in the quality of their training, which perhaps isn’t surprising because they came into existence partly because towards the end of the war Japan couldn’t train enough pilots sufficiently well to be effective combat pilots, while flying into big ships ain’t that hard for a pilot of even very modest competence.) Even if it wasn’t standard issue, that doesn’t mean this bloke didn’t take one.
Given that the common Type 91, 97 and 99 Japanese hand grenades all required percussion (hitting the fuse on a hard object) to initiate ignition, the bloke in the water doesn’t have one of those grenades.
The Type 23 Japanese grenade was initiated by friction by pulling a cord after removing the cap, which could be consistent with the pilot pulling it with his teeth as far as we can see in the film. The problem is that the Type 23 had a five and half second delay and, according to the counter on the film clip, the explosion occurs less than two seconds after apparent ignition. Either a shorter delay grenade was issued or the film was cut or something else caused the explosion.
The scene showing the supposed explosion doesn’t quite agree with the narration.
I’d like to know what happened in the period where the film seems to have been cut between the pilot apparently pulling the cord on a grenade with his teeth and the explosion, because apart from the grenade delay time problem it doesn’t seem to be continuous film from the changed angles between those two events.