Quote:
Originally Posted by Red October1984
There's not an option for "Completely Stupid and Out Of Their Minds"
They are wasting a perfectly good fighting man and a perfectly good plane when a bomb or a rocket could be sent in their place.
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By late war a D3A or an early Zero flown by poorly trained pilots were not going to accomplish much but getting torn to pieces anyway. By crashing themselves into the target hit probabilities were substantially incresed, as the aiming problem was somewhat simplified.
While some better planes models were available industrial resources to turn them out in numbers were stretched to the limit. Fuel to operate them or train pilots properly was essentially unavailable.
As for being volounteers, many were. But to make up numbers quite a lot were volounteered too...
Quote:
We were summoned to listen to a special speech from the commanding officer. He explained to us that the army was to set up its own tokkotai, and that it was starting to train pilots for the purpose at Hokota Air Base, on the Pacific coast [of Japan]. Pilots from our base, he said, were being invited to volunteer for the tokko squadrons. Then he went into one of the hangars, and we were called in one by one to see him. He gave us each two pieces of paper, and we were asked to write our name on one of them to indicate our feelings about joining the tokkotai. One piece of paper said 'eager.' The other one said 'very eager.' 'In that case,' I said to the commander, 'I hope that you will not mind if I only write myself down as being "eager."'
Lieutenant Mutsuo Saito
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Note also that while the japanese were big on suicide planes attacks even the germans were sliding in that direction, while the Sonderkommando Elbe was not 100% kamikaze action it was the next best thing.