Takijiro onishi biography of barack obama

DESPERATE JAPANESE MEASURES

In the battles at Okinawa and Iwo Jima, the Japanese fought to the death and used kamikaze attacks. Japanese youths were recruited at age 14 to fight. One Japanese soldiers recalled, "At the time, it was quite natural for us to volunteer for military service, to fight for the Emperor...This system of 'volunteering' was a virtual form of conscription. We were brainwashed into blind belief.”Japanese were taught that dying for their country was a great honor. "Bear in mind that duty is weightier than a mountain, while death is lighter than a feather," read a piece of propaganda attributed to the Japanese Emperor. Japanese soldiers who believed they were going to die washed themselves and splashed on perfume like their samurai ancestors.

In many cases Japanese soldiers preferred dying in hopeless circumstances to surrendering because of the power of shame. The military code issued to soldiers in 1941 forbade retreat or surrender. In 1945, as the United States was preparing to invade Japan, copies of the code were given to civilians. One Japanese scholar told the New York Times, “It had always been a virtue in Japan to sacrifice oneself for someone of higher status, and the government at the time exploited that sentiment.”

The Japanese were determined to die to the last man. At the assault of Tarawa (1943) only eight members of 5000 man Japanese garrison were found alive. There were no search and rescue missions for downed Japanese pilots. As a result hundreds of aviators were lost. The Japanese code of never surrender made them problematic prisoners of war. After captured Japanese soldiers tried to sabotage American submarines, U.S., ships refused to picked them except as for an occasional “intelligence sample.”

During the war, some Japanese have said, generals and admirals believed their own propaganda about Japan being a sacred country that could defeat its foes with spiritual

1 February 1942 is the earliest mention of a Kamikaze attack, but it was more likely an opportunist rather than a planned event. The USS Enterprise was damaged by the crashed plane. Admiral Takijiro Onishi did not create the Special Attacks Groups (Tokubetsu Kogeki Tai) until 19 October 1944, and gave them the title of Kamikaze after the ‘Divine Wind’ that scattered the Mongol invasion of Kublai Khan in 1274 and 1281.

These men volunteered mainly out of a sense of duty, generally university students, in their 20’s, being taught to “transcend life and death… which will enable you to concentrate your attention on eradicating the enemy with unwavering determination…” — an excerpt from the Kamikaze manual kept in their cockpit. Three times as many men volunteered as the number of planes available and experienced pilots were rejected. They would prepare for their fate by writing letters and poems to their loved ones. Each pilot received a “thousand-stitch sash” which was a cloth belt that 1,000 women had sewn one stitch as a symbolic union with the Kamikaze. A ceremony would be held and a last drink to give him a “spiritual lifting” and the toast – “Tennoheika Banzai!” (Long live the Emperor!) before take-off would seal his destiny.

Their initial mission was to attack the Allied shipping around the Philippines. 21 October 1944, the flagship of the Royal Australian Navy, the cruiser HMAS Australia was hit by a Kamikaze carrying a 441 pound bomb – it did not explode – but it killed 30 crew members. Four days later, the ship was hit again and forced to leave for repairs.

During the Battle of Leyte Gulf, antiaircraft fire was unable to stop a bomber from getting in and the 1000 lb. bomb went through the flight deck o

It's the war that few talk about. But now, in an important new book, historian Max Hastings recounts the sheer horror of the battle in the Far East and the Pacific.

In the first part of our serialisation on Saturday, he told of the savagery inflicted on our soldiers by the fanatical Japanese.

Here, he reveals the astonishing campaign of kamikaze attacks carried out by a nation who simply couldn't comprehend the idea of surrender to the steadily advancing Allied forces...

Rear-Admiral Masafumi Arima, commander of Japan's 26th Air Naval Flotilla, removed his badges of rank and clambered into the cockpit of a plane at Clark Field in the Philippines, once an American fiefdom, now under Japanese rule.

But not for long. Out in the Pacific Ocean, one of the greatest military forces the world has ever seen was gathering to recapture the islands.

A slender, soft-spoken warrior, impeccably dignified, Arima came from a family of Confucian scholars and cherished a book on tactics written by his own grandfather, which had become a minor military classic.

He was about to make a personal contribution to the art of war - by crashing his plane into an American aircraft carrier.

As he took off at the head of his fliers, he was untroubled by the apprehension that he might not come back. He intended not to do so. The actions of this gentle man were the blueprint for suicide bombing, which, in another form, is bringing terror to our world more than 60 years later.

And the impulse to die in that self-immolating way was as baffling to Western eyes then as it is now.

Arima's melodramatic gesture ended in bathos. He missed the carrier and plunged into the sea nearby. But four days after his death, Vice-Admiral Takijiro Onishi held a meeting with Captain Renya Inoguchi, senior air staff officer of the 1st Air Fleet.

Like Arima, they were desperate men who realised that new methods were required to offer the Japanese a