@Slamet: The 20mm gun was smaller and lighter than the Bofors. You could put a lot of them in places where a 40mm won´t fit. And if director controlled they were even more accurate. Furthermore you don´t need to destroy the kamikaze ouright, a small change in the flightpath might result in a near miss or glancing blow.
Hmm, that and the fact they weren't electronically controlled. Makes sense if all the ships electricity goes phut.
burmafrd said:The Japanese had plans to disperse the Kamikaze's around roads and open fields and anywhere they could take off from (since landing was not a problem). The CAP and anti air operations would have slaughtered them, but when you are talking 500 planes per attack and they expected to use them all in the first 3-4 days after the invasion, if only 10% got to their targets that is 50 planes per assault. And there would have been 8-10 assaults. It would have been very bloody to say the least. Anyone trying to claim that thousands on our side and 10's of thousands on their side would have died are fools. Frankly I would think around 100,000 casualties on our side and around 1 million on theirs.
If Chilperic puts in the fact that the US does fighter sweeps before the invasion, this could be a factor why those sweeps caused so little attrition to their air forces. Add the above factor and the factor that most Japanese had also built dummy bases aircraft, dummy airfields. AFAIK the US knew of only 125 airfields and airstrips - the occupational forces revealed that the Japanese actually had 325 (95 concealed, add 76 dummy airstrips) as of July 13th 1945.
And also, the Japanese air doctrine for the Ketsu-go (Decisive Operation) called the Japanese to fight as close to the mainland as possible. They could anticipate the feints - at least AFAIK.