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To: agere_contra

I have read that the Japanese were astonished when several of the pilots of crashing planes deliberately crashed into carriers. Way before they thought of the kamikaze strategy.


11 posted on 06/06/2012 10:02:55 AM PDT by DManA
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To: DManA

It certainly wasn’t unknown among the Japanese...but it just as certainly wasn’t regarded as strategy in 1942.

Under Bushido, a warrior was to go into battle prepared for death should it come...if you were crippled, or you had no chance of returning to your base, then it made sense to use yourself (or your plane, in this instance) as a final weapon when you were going to die anyway. To go into battle *intending* to die, on the other hand, was viewed as madness.

The twisting of Bushido into the purposeful death of the Kamikazes had more to do with cynical exploitation of the strong Japanese cultural sense of obligation to one’s “betters”, and the desperate sense among the Japanese that civilization itself (their version of it anyway) was at stake.


13 posted on 06/06/2012 10:27:35 AM PDT by M1903A1 ("We shed all that is good and virtuous for that which is shoddy and sleazy... and call it progress")
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