![]() ![]() Its ideological underpinnings were gyukosai and Bushido. Peleliu was about to fall, and the Philippines would be next.Ī negotiated peace being Japan’s best hope, Japanese military leaders embraced attritional warfare as a means of forcing the Allies to drop their demand for unconditional surrender. American submarines were shutting down the oil and rubber pipeline from Southeast Asia. B-29s now menaced mainland Japan’s major cities and ports from new Mariana bases. One was the mass kamikaze attack.The loss of Saipan, Tinian, and Guam in the Mariana Islands and the better part of Japan’s air force during the summer of 1944 forced many senior officials to realize that the war was lost. ![]() Fifth Fleet. The attacks did not alter the course of the Pacific war, but the death toll of more than 4,900 Navy crewmen increased the misgivings of some members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff about invading Japan.Īs American forces edged closer to mainland Japan in 19, Japanese leaders adopted desperate measures to thwart the looming disaster. ![]() “It was an awful, bloody mess as they chopped him up and pulled him under.”įor three months in 1945, this was an all-too-common occurrence in the seas off Okinawa, where 10 mass kamikaze attacks, each with hundreds of suicide planes, struck the U.S. Luce went down five minutes later with 149 men lost. In the water, sharks hit men “left and right, just tearing them up,” said radioman Tom Matisak, who saw them rip into the ship’s barber. A minute later, a kamikaze fighter slammed into Luce’s 5-inch stern port guns, and their magazine erupted in a fireball. On May 6, 1945, a twin-engine kamikaze plane’s bomb exploded beside the destroyer Luce, part of the radar picket ship screen surrounding Okinawa, and ripped her starboard side “like a sardine can.” Flames shot 200 feet high. ![]()
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