Evening star., 1945-06-03
'Kumikuze' and the Navy

In japanese the word "kamikaze'
means divine wind or divine tempest
and the word "baka" means silly or
foolish, but to the American Navy
the two together add up to prob
lem that is scarcely laughing mat
ter "Kamikaze" is the overall term.
When the enemy uses it he is refer
ring to what he calls special attack
tactics" which is another way Of
saying defense by suicide.
AS far as our Navy is concerned
the divine wind was first noted dur
ing the Lingayen Gulf landings in
the Philippines, but it did not begin
to blow in full force until we struck
at Okinawa some 1926 miles south of
Japan proper. Until then the enemy's
suicidal doggedness was most evident
in ground fighting, finding expression
in such wild gestures as screaming
"banzai" attacks and self-immolat-
ing individual acts of no perceptible
military value. Ever since the start
of our operations in the Ryukyus,
however, the scope of "kamikaze"
has been expanded to include special
hara-kiri torpedo boats, the crash
dive plane and the human flying
bomb, the latter being dubbed
"baka" by our own forces, even
though it must seem anything but
silly to the men and ships in its
target area.
AS President Truman has just de-
clared, we at home can hardly i'm
agine the "delirium" of this japanese
defense policy or the heroism of our
forces in coping with it. There is
mad grisliness about it which our
western minds cannot easily COM
prehend. The enemy seals himself
to his weapon. When he takes off in
his crash-dive plane, for instance, he
is locked to the pilot seat and knows
that this is to be his last flight. He
chooses some vessel below him and
dives, and whether he hits the target
or not, he must die, and so he tries
his best to take with him as many
Americans as he can. Similarly, as
he is released from larger plane in
his "baka" rocket bomb, moving at
a speed of more than 400 miles an
hour, he knows that in a matter of
moments he will be blown to bits and
he wants more than anything else to
blow up our men with him and per-
haps sink one of our ships.
Fundamentally, these special at
tack tactic" which Tokyo now de-
clares are to be employed by every
branch of the Japanese Navy as well
as by the air and ground forces-are
quite as futile as they are macabre.
Better than anything else could, they
measure the extent of Japan's mill
tary failure and the depths of its
desperation. Around Okinawa, where
the enemy has already lost more
than 5000 planes, "kamikaZe" has
fallen down completely in the effort
to scatter our naval concentration,
and no major sinking has yet been
credited to it. Yet, even though the
crash-divers and the "baka" bombs
have been shot down in great num-
bers before doing any harm, some of
them have managed to get through,
and every suicide pilot who has thus
succeeded has killed more than a
few Americans along with himself
And naturally ships have been
damaged. Enough of them have been
damaged, in fact, to create a kind of
emergency in the repair yards of
America. Sooner or later, of course,
the divine wind is bound to exhaust
itself, but meanwhile, as we move
closer and closer to the shores of
Japan proper and as long as the
japanese are willing to make a law
ish and hopeless sacrifice of the lives
of their sons, it will probably
blow sufficiently hard to be more
than a minor nuisance. Our Navy,
at any rate, is not disposed to make
light of it.