Iichi Marumo started competing in his late 80s, after a life spent farming, publishing poetry and volunteering to fly in a ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

For this purpose, Japan had reserved about 5,000 conventional aircraft and a variety of suicide vehicles, including about 5,500 kamikaze planes, 1,300 suicide submarines, and several hundred ...

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 ...

He recalled a close call with a Japanese kamikaze plane, which struck a nearby vessel, the USS Zeilin, during a convoy in the Leyte Gulf on Jan. 13, 1945, according to an email sent Sunday by his ...