THE KAMIKAZE DISASTER 1945: 355 Japanese Kamikaze Pilots Dead in Hours

Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:03]At 3:00 in the afternoon of April 6th, 1945, the first wave of kamicazi aircraft lifted off from airfields in Kyushu and turned south toward Okinawa. They flew in groups of two and four. Many of them were so inexperienced that they had been given only basic instruction in takeoff and navigation. Because the skills required for combat maneuvering and landing were no longer relevant, they carried letters in their flight suit pockets. Most of the letters said some version of the same thing. Please do not grieve. I am fortunate to die for something. In 5 hours, 355 Japanese pilots flew into the American fleet and died. Six ships sank. Not one American carrier was touched. The Okinawa invasion continued on April 7th. Every pilot who lifted off from Kyushu that afternoon was dead by nightfall. The farewell letters they had written the previous evening went to their families without the men who wrote them. Japan had spent those pilots and received six ships in return, none of them a carrier.

[00:01:08]Over the following weeks, Japan would send 1,460 more kamicazi pilots against the fleet at Okinawa. None of them would sink a carrier either. But the kamicazis had not begun at 3:00 in the afternoon of April 6th. They had begun 5 months earlier in October of 1944 when the first organized special attack core units flew against American ships at Lady Gulf. And the results were documented by Japanese naval planners. A pilot willing to die with his aircraft achieved an accuracy rate that no conventional bombing approach could match. By April of 1945, Japan had converted that observation into a national strategy and built the largest organized suicide operation in the history of armed conflict around it. It was not a kamicazi attack in the sense that previous air attacks had been attacks. The pilots were the weapon.

[00:02:01]Japan was spending trained aviators at approximately one per ship and calculating whether the United States would determine that the cost of continuing to Okinawa and then to Japan itself exceeded the cost of negotiating a settlement that preserved some form of the Japanese state. This was not an irrational calculation. It was wrong.

[00:02:23]But it was not irrational. The specific detail that made Kikusui number one visible was the USS Bush at radar picket station 1. The bush was a Gleeves class destroyer, 2,500 tons, armed with 5-in guns and torpedo tubes and the anti-aircraft batteries that were the primary defense of a destroyer against aircraft attack. She was at the northernmost station, station one, the point in the picket line that was closest to Kyushu and furthest from the carriers and battleships she was protecting.

[00:02:56]At approximately 2:00 in the afternoon on April 6th, groups of aircraft began appearing on her radar from the north.

[00:03:02]She began shooting. She sent the warning. She kept shooting until the kamicazis that had already reached her were no longer something that shooting could address. Okinawa, April 6th, 1500 hours. The first wave of aircraft visible on American radar screens from 40 miles out. The combat air patrol fighters being vetored to intercept. The destroyers at the northern stations tracking the approach on their own radar and calling positions while loading every gun they had. The Okinawa campaign was completed on June 22nd, 1945.

[00:03:37]5,000 American sailors died in the waters around the island over the course of the campaign. Not one American aircraft carrier was sunk by kamicazi attack at Okinawa. The invasion of Japan was still scheduled for November of 1945 when Japan surrendered in August. The ships kept coming. I spent 8 hours writing, editing, and researching this story to verify every number and every decision exactly right. Because Kikusui number one is the largest organized suicide attack in the history of armed conflict. And because the pilots who flew in it deserve to have someone explain precisely what they were trying to accomplish and why they failed and what it cost both sides that they failed. If this story matters to you, subscribe to the channel. Just subscribe. That is all. Thank you.

[00:04:27]Okinawa in the spring of 1945 was the last stepping stone. The island chain that runs southwest from Japan ends at Okinawa before the open ocean that separated it from the Philippines. The American advance across the Pacific, which had moved from island to island since Guadal Canal in 1942, had been building toward Japan proper for 3 years. Ewima, taken in February and March of 1945 at a cost of nearly 7,000 Americans dead, was 2 months behind.

[00:04:59]Okinawa was the last stop before the home islands themselves. The Japanese military planners who had been watching the American advance understood its trajectory. The question being asked in Tokyo in the spring of 1945 was not whether the home islands would be attacked, but when and at what cost. The estimates developed by American planners for Operation Downfall, the code name for the invasion of Japan, suggested that the operation would require the equivalent of a dozen Eoimas fought simultaneously and sustained for months.

[00:05:32]The Japanese estimates of what they could do to those forces with the resources still available to them were, if anything, higher. Both sides were looking at casualty projections that made every previous Pacific engagement appear small by comparison.

[00:05:46]The kamicazi strategy had originated at Lady Gulf in October of 1944 when the first organized special attack corps units had flown against American ships in the Philippines. The results were significant.

[00:06:01]In the months between October of 1944 and April of 1945, kamicazi attacks had sunk 22 ships and killed more than 2,000 Americans. The attacks demonstrated something that conventional air attacks had not been able to demonstrate. A pilot who was willing to die with his aircraft could achieve an accuracy rate in a diving strike that no conventional bombing approach could match. The kamicazi was not a desperation measure in the sense that it reflected poor military judgment. It reflected the specific circumstances of a nation with fewer trained pilots than it needed and a coherent theory of how those pilots could be used to maximum effect.

[00:06:44]The pilots who flew in Kikusui number one were not the fanatical automatans that wartime American reporting sometimes described. The records that survived the war, the diaries, the letters, the accounts gathered by historians in subsequent decades revealed something more specific and more complicated. Most of them were university students. After 1943, when the trajectory of the war had become clearer, and the demand for pilots had exceeded the supply produced by the pre-war training pipeline, the Japanese military had expanded its recruitment into university populations.

[00:07:20]Young men who had been studying engineering, literature, history, and philosophy at Japanese universities found themselves in accelerated flight training programs and eventually at bases in Kyushu in the spring of 1945 writing letters home. The letters were not uniform in their tone. Some expressed genuine conviction, the specific ideological commitment that wartime Japanese education had produced in many young men who had grown up with a particular understanding of duty and sacrifice. Others expressed something that reads more like resigned acceptance, a man who understood the situation, who understood what the mission was, and who had made a decision that he would rather acknowledge than flee from. Tai's smaller number contained grief. The grief of someone who understood what was being given up and was not entirely reconciled to giving it up. Flying Petty Officer Firstclass Isa Matsuo wrote to his parents on the night of April 5th, 1945.

[00:08:21]Dear parents, please congratulate me. I have been given a splendid opportunity to die. This was not the letter of a man who was indifferent to death. It was the letter of a man who had decided what he was going to do about it. The 355 pilots who took off on April 6th carried those letters. What they were doing was not separate from who they were. They were university students and fisherman's sons and farmers sons and officers sons who had ended up at the intersection of their country's situation and their own lives. And most of them had found a way to treat that intersection as something other than simply a disaster.

[00:08:59]The American Naval Force off Okinawa on April 6th, 1945, was the largest concentration of naval power ever assembled in the Pacific. Task Force 58, the fast carrier force under Vice Admiral Miter, included four carrier task groups with 17 carriers. The amphibious forces supporting the Okinawa landing included more than 1,400 ships of various types. The total naval personnel in the area numbered in the hundreds of thousands. The organization that fleet used to defend itself against air attack had been refined through 2 years of Pacific carrier combat. The radar systems on the ships could detect incoming aircraft at ranges of 100 m or more. The combat air patrol, the fighters assigned to intercept incoming threats, operated in organized sectors with communication links to the ship's combat information centers, which tracked contacts and vetoed fighters to intercept. The anti-aircraft guns that ringed every ship had been upgraded repeatedly since the war's beginning, and the crews had been trained on the specific patterns that kamicazi attacks followed. The system worked as well as it was going to work. In 5 hours on April 6th, it shot down approximately 400 aircraft, the majority of them before they reached the fleet. What it could not do was shoot down all of them.

[00:10:24]The arithmetic was specific. 355 kamicazis and 344 escort aircraft were enough to saturate a defensive system that could only engage so many contacts simultaneously from so many directions.

[00:10:38]The radar picket destroyers at the northern stations were the part of that system that paid the highest price. The officers and crews of the destroyers at stations 1, 2, and three had known since they took position that their location put them between Kiushu and the fleet.

[00:10:54]They had known this in the abstract since the picket system was established.

[00:10:58]By April 6th, they had also known it in the specific sense that the Okinawa campaign had been going on for 6 days and the pattern of kamicazi approaches had been visible long enough to make the geography of danger concrete. Navigation officer George Finnegan of the USS Cassin Young described the experience of picket station duty later. It was a tremendous psychological experience to be on a radar picket station just to be on it. You were just living from one minute to the next because you knew they were coming in, but you weren't sure when. The Cassin Young was at station three. The bush was at station one. At approximately 1,400, the radar operators aboard the bush began tracking a large formation of aircraft approaching from the north. The formation was consistent with what the warnings issued that morning had described. The bush increased speed, trained her guns, and began transmitting position reports to the fleet behind her. The channel will carry the complete account of what happened to the bush over the following 2 hours, why the destroyer that came to help the bush was also destroyed, and what the 180 kamicazis that penetrated the defensive screen produced across the fleet in the 5 hours that the attack lasted. Subscribe so you don't miss it.

[00:12:15]What made April 6th distinct, even within the extraordinary sequence of Okinawa, was that the Kamicazi assault, was not the only Japanese operation launched that day. On the morning of April 6th, the battleship Yamato, the largest warship ever built, departed from Japan on a mission designated Tango. She carried fuel for a one-way voyage to Okinawa. The plan was for the Yamato to beat herself on Okinawa's shore and use her 18-in guns as shore artillery against the American landing force until she was destroyed. With her sailed the light cruiser Yahagi and eight destroyers, none of them carried sufficient fuel to return. American aircraft found the Yamato on the morning of April 7th and attacked with approximately 380 aircraft over 2 hours.

[00:13:03]She was struck by 10 torpedoes and five bombs. The largest surface warship in history sank, taking approximately 2,790 of her crew with her. The Yahagi sank.

[00:13:15]Four of the eight destroyers sank. Japan lost approximately 3,700 sailors in the Tango operation. On April 6th and 7th of 1945, Japan simultaneously sent its remaining carrier air strength in 355 kamicazis and its last surface fleet asset, the Yamato, toward Okinawa.

[00:13:37]Both were destroyed.

[00:13:39]After April 7th, Japan's Navy as a strategic instrument had effectively ceased to exist. The aircraft that Kikusui number one threw at the American fleet had been given a priority order.

[00:13:51]carriers, then battleships, then other large ships. The kamicazis were supposed to look for carriers and hit them because a carrier was the most valuable target. And because a carrier with its flight deck destroyed would not be launching the fighters that were shooting down kamicazi aircraft. Most of them did not hit carriers. The inexperienced pilots who made up the majority of the force did what inexperienced pilots do under the pressure of their first combat. They attacked what they could see.

[00:14:20]What they could see first were the radar picket destroyers at the northern stations. Station one was the northernmost point. The first American ships visible after crossing the East China Sea from Kyushu. The bush was at station one. The attack on the bush began at approximately 1,400. The first kamicazi hit between the forward stack and the bridge. The bush survived the hit and continued fighting. She sent a distress call. The destroyer Kolhoon operating at station two was ordered to come to station one to assist. The Khune moved north toward the bush while the attack continued. She arrived to find the bush still under assault, still shooting, still floating. The two destroyers fought together for approximately an hour. Then two kamicazis hit the bush simultaneously amid ships. The force of the impacts broke her keel. She began to sink. The Choon continued fighting while the bush went down. Then a kamicazi hit the Khoon. Then another. The Kolhoon's commanding officer, recognizing that the ship could not survive additional hits, transferred to the Cassin Young and ordered the Choon sunk to prevent capture. The Choon was torpedoed by an American vessel. The two destroyers that had been at stations one and two when Kikusui number one began were on the bottom of the East China Sea before the attack ended.

[00:15:44]129 men from the two ships died. 53 were wounded. The first aircraft struck her at approximately 1545.

[00:15:52]It hit the after fire room and caused a fire. The Nukem's crew fought the fire while continuing to engage incoming aircraft with every gun that could still be brought to bear. The second aircraft struck her before the first fire was out. The third followed by the fourth impact. The Nukem was making no way. Her engineering plant destroyed her decks a sequence of fires that her crew was fighting at multiple points simultaneously. The destroyer Loitzer came alongside to assist and was struck by the fifth kamicazi which skipped off the Newm's deck and hit the loiter. Both ships were severely damaged. Neither sank. Lieutenant Leyon Grabowski, the Loitzer's acting commanding officer, received the Navy Cross for directing damage control efforts on his own vessel while providing assistance to the Nukem.

[00:16:43]The Nukem's survival after five impacts that would have been sufficient to sink a destroyer several times over was the result of specific actions by her crew at each stage of the assault. They did not stop fighting when the first aircraft hit. They did not stop when the second hit. They continued to function as a military unit under conditions that were by any assessment terminal for the ship and the ship was not terminal. The same pattern appeared across the fleet that afternoon. Some ships were hit and sank. Some were hit and survived. The difference when investigators examined it afterward was not primarily the severity of the damage. It was the speed and effectiveness of the damage control response. The destroyers that lost their engineering plants immediately were the ones that could no longer maneuver, could no longer generate power for the pumps that controlled flooding, could no longer maintain the organized response that damage control required. The ones that kept power kept fighting fires and kept floating. The 5 hours of Kikusui number one produced a specific and documented pattern across the fleet that would be studied and addressed before the subsequent Kikusui attacks. The kamicazis that penetrated the combat air patrol and the anti-aircraft fire were coming from multiple directions at altitudes that ranged from wavetop level to 15,000 ft. The defensive systems of any individual ship were designed to handle threats from a limited number of vectors simultaneously. When the attacks came from five directions at once, the gunners were choosing which targets to engage and which to leave to another gun mount. and the targets that were left to another gunmount sometimes arrived before that gun mount could engage them.

[00:18:26]Subscribe to this channel right now because what the rest of this story covers, including precisely why 180 of 355 kamicazis penetrated the most sophisticated naval air defense system ever assembled. The specific question about the kamicazi campaign that the atomic bomb answered before it could be tested any other way. And what happened to the men who served on the radar picket destroyers through 10 mass attacks and eventually survived to tell about it is the part that closes the account of what Japan was attempting to accomplish on April 6th, 1945 and why it failed. Do not miss it. April 1st, 1945, American forces land on Okinawa.

[00:19:11]Japanese ground forces do not defend the beaches. Defensive lines prepared in land. April 5th, Kamicazi pilots at Kyushu bases write farewell letters.

[00:19:22]Yamato and escort depart Japan on Tango mission. April 6th, 1400. USS Bush at radar picket station 1 begins tracking approaching aircraft. April 6th, 1500.

[00:19:35]Kikusui number one launches.

[00:19:38]355 kamicazis airborne. April 6th 15 to 2000. 5 hours of attacks. 200 shot down by combat air patrol. 200 by anti-aircraft fire. 180 penetrate. Bush sunk. Kolhoon sunk. Emmens sunk. 367 Americans killed. April 7th, American aircraft attack Yamato. 10 torpedo hits, five bomb hits. Yamato sinks with 2,790 of her crew. April through June. Kikusui attacks 2 through 10. 1,465 additional kamicazis, 4,633 additional American sailors killed. June 22nd, Okinawa declared secure. Japanese ground commander General Ushiima dies by ritual suicide. August 6th, atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

[00:20:33]August 9th, atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki. August 15th, Japan announces surrender. The technical explanation for why approximately 180 of 355 kamicazis penetrated the American defensive system on April 6th requires examining four factors that the system could address only partially. The combat air patrol that task force 58 maintained around the fleet was organized to handle incoming threats by sector and altitude. Fighters were assigned to specific patrol areas and vetoed by combat information centers to intercept contacts before they reached the fleet. On April 6th, the volume of contacts overwhelmed the vectoring capacity. When 355 aircraft were approaching from multiple directions at altitudes ranging from wave level to 15,000 ft simultaneously, the combat information centers were triaging which threats to vector fighters to ward and which to leave to the ship's anti-aircraft guns. The fighters shot down approximately 200 of the incoming aircraft. The ones they did not reach were the ones that had approached at altitudes or from directions that the patrol could not cover simultaneously. The anti-aircraft fire from the ships covered the gaps that the combat air patrol could not fill. The guns of a destroyer at general quarters could maintain accurate fire on targets approaching from a limited number of directions simultaneously when five aircraft were approaching from five different angles at the same moment. The gun crews were choosing which targets to track and which to leave. The ones they left were arriving from the angles the guns could not cover while tracking the targets they had already committed to.

[00:22:17]The ship shot down approximately 200 more of the incoming aircraft. The ones that penetrated were the ones that arrived in the specific windows of time and angle that no gun mount was pointed at when they arrived. The inexperience of the pilots who flew Kikusui number one compounded both problems in a specific way. Pilots who had been given priority instructions to attack carriers instead attacked radar picket destroyers because the destroyers were the first ships they saw. This produced an outcome that the defensive planners had not fully anticipated. The most concentrated damage fell on the picket destroyers rather than on the carriers those destroyers were screening. The net result was that Japan's heaviest attacks hit the ships that were least valuable to the fleet strategic function while leaving the ships that were most valuable relatively intact. The carriers that the kamicazis were supposed to sink were further back and the inexperienced pilots either did not reach them or could not navigate to them under combat conditions. The American naval command analyzed these patterns between the Kikui attacks and made specific adjustments. The combat air patrol over the picket stations was reinforced.

[00:23:29]Additional light gunboats were assigned to the picket positions to provide anti-aircraft support. The coordination between the fleet radar systems and the fighters was improved to allow more efficient vectoring at higher volumes of contacts. The subsequent Kikosui attacks met incrementally improved defenses.

[00:23:48]They continued to cause losses. They never caused the concentrated losses on major ships that the original strategy required. The paradox of the kamicazi campaign at Okinawa is the question of whether it was ever close to succeeding.

[00:24:02]The case that it was having an effect begins with the American casualty figures. The 5,000 American sailors who died in the waters around Okinawa represented the highest naval death toll of any campaign in the Pacific War. The Navy was losing destroyers at a rate that was creating logistical strain in the picket system. The joint chiefs of staff had received assessments indicating that if the kamicazi attacks continued at the Okinawa rate during the invasion of Japan itself, the naval losses would be severe enough to affect the operational planning.

[00:24:36]Admiral King, the chief of naval operations, had explicitly stated that the kamicazi threat was among the most serious problems facing the Navy. These were not the responses of a force that was finding the kamicazi campaign irrelevant. The case that it was failing begins with what the kamicazis did not achieve. Not one American aircraft carrier was sunk at Okinawa. Not one battleship was sunk. The ships that provided the strategic backbone of the fleet's capability, the ships whose loss would have forced the kind of operational rethinking that might have altered the invasion timeline remained operational throughout the campaign.

[00:25:13]Okinawa was declared secure on June 22nd despite the 10 Kikusui attacks and the continuous smaller kamicazi operations that supplemented them. The Pacific War ended before the invasion could be tested against the defenses Japan was preparing. The paradox resists resolution because the atomic bomb answered the question before the other answer could be found. If Japan had not surrendered in August of 1945, the invasion of Kyushu would have begun in November and the kamicazi forces that were being assembled for that operation, estimated at several thousand aircraft, would have been used against the invasion fleet. Whether that would have produced the results that the Okinawa campaign had failed to produce is unknowable. The historians who have examined the question most carefully have not reached a consensus. The advocates of the kamicazi strategy argue that the Okinawa results proved the concept was working and would have worked at scale. The critics argue that the Okinawa results prove that even massive kamicazi attacks could not prevent a determined American force from completing its operational objectives.

[00:26:23]Both positions have evidence and neither can be definitively tested because the bomb ended the question in August.

[00:26:29]George Finnegan served aboard the USS Cassin Young through the Okinawa campaign. The Cassin Young survived the campaign. She was hit once during Kikosui number one and returned to action. She was hit again on July 29th, 1945 in the last weeks of the war and again survived. She made it to the war's end. The Cassin Young was decommissioned after the war and eventually transferred to the National Park Service. She is currently preserved as a museum ship at the Charlestown Navyyard in Boston, Massachusetts, morowed in the same harbor where she was commissioned in 1943.

[00:27:06]She is the only World War II destroyer preserved afloat in the United States.

[00:27:10]Visitors who boarded her at Charles Town can see the same weather decks that her crew stood on while calling out contacts in the East China Sea in April of 1945.

[00:27:20]The radar picket station she occupied is not visible from her deck. It is 5,000 mi away at the bottom of the ocean north of Okinawa. The letters that the Kikusui pilots wrote were collected by the Japanese military before the missions departed and were preserved after the war in archives that historians and journalists have had varying access to over the decades. Some have been translated and published. They cover a range of emotional registers that the wartime American narrative did not always represent. not only acceptance and conviction but grief, humor, ambivalence and the specific kind of melancholy that belongs to a young person who has understood that he is not going to be old. Fisel Matsuo's letter, dear parents, please congratulate me. I have been given a splendid opportunity to die. Is the one most often quoted because it is the most direct expression of the specific emotional transformation that the kamicazi program required of its pilots. the reframing of death not as the end of life but as the culmination of it. The other letters include fathers asking their wives to raise their children well, men apologizing to their parents for dying before them, men noting the irony of the weather or the food on their last morning, men who wrote that they were not afraid, and men who wrote nothing about their fear, but whose handwriting tells a different story to anyone who reads it carefully. The 10 Kikusui attacks launched between April 6th and June 22nd of 1945 deployed 1,815 kamicazis in total. 4,97 American sailors died at Okinawa. The Japanese ground force of approximately 110,000 soldiers was effectively destroyed. 83,000 Japanese soldiers and Okinawan conscripts died in the ground battle. Between 60 and 90,000 Okinawan civilians died. Casualties of both the Japanese and American military operations conducted on their island.

[00:29:23]The ships that the kamicazis were trying to stop were still afloat on June 22nd when the island was declared secure.

[00:29:31]They kept coming. Subscribe to this channel right now and turn on notifications because every week we bring you the stories that the histories reduced to a number of kamicazis and a number of ships sunk without telling you that most of the pilots were university students who had been in training for months rather than years and who wrote letters that did not all sound like the ones that made the newspapers. that the destroyer hit by five kamicazis did not sink because her crew did not stop fighting the fires after the fifth one.

[00:30:02]That the same day as the largest kamicazi attack in history, the largest warship ever built left Japan on a one-way mission and was sunk before it reached the island it was sent to defend. Or that the question the kamicazi campaign was trying to answer, whether America would stop coming if the cost was high enough, was answered not by the campaign, but by two bombs dropped in August. Hit subscribe now.

[00:30:24]Then like so this reaches more people who should understand that the ships kept coming because the calculation Japan was making turned out to be wrong about what it would take to make them stop. Drop a comment below telling us where you are watching from. We will see you in the next one.