One way the Japanese decided to counter the threat was by using pilots known as kamikaze, which means "divine wind," to fly planes directly into ships. In a culture that embraced the idea of ...

A bomb disposal team from the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force later confirmed that the explosion was caused by an American ...

Japan’s war situation from then on only grew worse. By autumn 1943, the idea of a kamikaze squadron had been floated by a small circle in the military, according to a military history ...

Despite numbering just 4000 out of more than 2 million Japanese deaths in World War II, kamikaze pilots hold an outsized place in the public consciousness. Alamy Stock Photo Books and films are ...

No war – won or lost – is ever waged without sacrifice. Those sacrifices can be material in the loss of equipment or infrastructure, monetary in the cost to a nation’s economy of waging a war but ...

There was one certainty about being a kamikaze, he says: “You go, and it’s over.” He survived only because Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender on the radio as he was his way to ...

At age 16, he joined the Imperial Japanese Navy’s preparatory pilot training course and became a special unit member in October 1944. After seeing the first kamikaze unit swing into action off ...

The Japanese word “kamikaze” means “divine wind.”In a military history context, the term was first applied to a force of Mother Nature that saved Japan by destroying Kublai Khan’s would ...

Nine more waves of kamikaze attacks hit the fleet off of Okinawa before the battle came to an end. Almost 2,000 Japanese pilots would willingly lose their lives in these attacks. By late June ...

During the Second World War, the term 'kamikaze' was used for Japanese fighter pilots who were sent on suicide missions. They were expected to crash their warplanes into enemy warships.