The word kamikaze first described typhoons that scattered Kublai Khan's invasion fleets
Long before 1944, kamikaze, or divine wind, was the name for the storms that wrecked Mongol invasion fleets off Japan in the thirteenth century. Japan's wartime leadership revived it for pilots sent on one-way missions against Allied ships once conventional air power had collapsed, a desperate strategy born of defeat rather than strength.
Kami means god or spirit and kaze means wind. The phrase came from classical poetry and, from August 1281, was applied to the great typhoons that dispersed fleets sent by Kublai Khan in 1274 and 1281. Officially the wartime units were called special attack units, shortened to tokkōtai; the navy's air formations used shinpū, a Chinese-derived reading of the same characters, and the pronunciation kamikaze appeared only informally in the wartime press.
The tactic grew out of collapse. The carrier battles of 1942, above all Midway, gutted Japan's naval air arm, and its slow, selective pilot training was never expanded to replace losses. By the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944, inexperienced crews in outdated planes faced better-trained Americans flying Hellcats and Corsairs, and Japan lost more than 400 carrier aircraft. After Saipan fell in July 1944, bringing the home islands within range of B-29 bombers, officers such as Captain Motoharu Okamura pushed for organised suicide attacks. A military culture that prized death over capture, rooted in samurai ideals of loyalty, made the idea acceptable to commanders.
Isolated deliberate crashes by damaged aircraft had happened earlier on both sides, possibly including one at Pearl Harbor in 1941. Organised attacks began in October 1944 around the Philippines; Rear Admiral Masafumi Arima, killed leading a strike near Leyte Gulf, was posthumously promoted and credited by propaganda with the first. Japan also developed human torpedoes, explosive speedboats and suicide divers.
The human cost ran both ways. Around 3,800 kamikaze pilots died, and their attacks killed over 7,000 Allied naval personnel and sank several dozen warships. Only about 19 percent of attacks succeeded, yet because Allied superiority made ordinary strikes so ineffective, they were more accurate than conventional bombing. The US Navy later described the aircraft as forerunners of the cruise missile.
Source: Kamikaze
