How effective were Kamikaze attacks during ww2?

What I cant figure out is they went for carriers and other war ships. They may make your life hell, but the troops on the troop ships can take your islands away. Seems they would of been more effective going for the transports. And yes I know the CAP hit them hard. I guess they thought a carrier was a better target then a lowly cargo ship.
docfl
 
That was changed for KETSU-GO: Defense of the Homeland. While there would be some suiciders going after the carriers and fire-support groups, the main targets would be the troopships and larger landing ships like LSTs. But up to and including Okinawa, the main objective was knocking out airpower, and thus carriers were a prime target. The most destructive carrier strike by a Kamikaze was the hit on U.S.S. Bunker Hill (CV-17) on 11 May 45. Heavy blast and fire damage, 344 KIA, and the ship wasn't fully repaired before the end of the war. Like Franklin, she wasn't reactivated for Fleet use postwar, but served as a transport and electronics test bed. She was the last Essex in her wartime configuration, and I don't know if there was an attempt made to preserve her as a war memorial: she was moored at Point Loma, near San Diego for many years, before being scrapped in 1971.
 
If the Japanese do just decide to convert wholesale into suicide attacks, then their carrier forces become essentially one-shot forces. If they throw their entire compliment into a fight, they have to go home and pick up a whole new set of planes, and are hideously vulnerable to attack with no air cover at all.
 
Didn't the basic doctrines of the Japanese work against the Kamikazes? That is they focused on warships when they could have done far more damage concentrating on troop transports and supply ships.
 
Correct. The IJN's focus on neutralizing airpower in both the Philippines and Okinawa meant that the prime Kamikaze targets were meant to be carriers. Though the first mass suicide raid on Okinawa (6 Apr 45) did have a number penetrate to the invasion beaches and slam an LST and two ammo-carrying Victory Ships-both of which blew up after the crews abandoned ship (fortunately for them). Few of the suiciders actually went for things like troopships, supply ships, etc., though one did hit the hospital ship Comfort. She was damaged, but not sunk.
 
I was under the impression they were trying to get pilots to hit transport ships in later attempts, but had problems because the hastily trained pilots would either
A) Get greedy and try to go after the big prestige targets like the carriers
or
B) Freak out or get pressured too much and dive at the first target that was shooting at them (i.e. the escorts)
 
Both, actually, though formally changing primary targets to troopships wasn't until after the Okinawa operation ended and KETSU-GO. But for OLYMPIC, the attack on Kyushu set for 1 Nov 45, the primary targets were the troopships and heavy landing ships like LSTs.
 

elkarlo

Banned
I was under the impression they were trying to get pilots to hit transport ships in later attempts, but had problems because the hastily trained pilots would either
A) Get greedy and try to go after the big prestige targets like the carriers
or
B) Freak out or get pressured too much and dive at the first target that was shooting at them (i.e. the escorts)


Add in that even experienced pilots often made some serious mistakes when identifying ships. A guy will little experience would have far more problems.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
Add in that even experienced pilots often made some serious mistakes when identifying ships. A guy will little experience would have far more problems.

There was one Japanese battleship report sunk on six different occasions and location by various aviators. Most of the time they were actually attacking a cruiser, and and often the missed the cruiser instead of hitting it.
 
When you have pilots with as few as ten flying hours total, much less in type, such mistakes in ship identification were to be expected. And yet, the Japanese told suicide pilots that if they couldn't find a target, to return to base, and await another opportunity. Not all were volunteers, though: by June '45, whole classes of trainee pilots in both the JNAF and JAAF were assigned to suicide duty. Only a few were being assigned to replace losses in fighter or attack units.
 

elkarlo

Banned
There was one Japanese battleship report sunk on six different occasions and location by various aviators. Most of the time they were actually attacking a cruiser, and and often the missed the cruiser instead of hitting it.


Oh yeah. So many false sinking reports, and mis identifications. I think basically by the end of 42, both the American and Japanese fleets had been reported sunk, several times over. Also, a lot of cruisers and Battleships were mistaken as air craft carriers, oddly enough.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
Oh yeah. So many false sinking reports, and mis identifications. I think basically by the end of 42, both the American and Japanese fleets had been reported sunk, several times over. Also, a lot of cruisers and Battleships were mistaken as air craft carriers, oddly enough.

I can see mistaking 8" guns for 15" guns, it is a mater of scale, that is if I release the bomb at 1000 feet but think I released at 1500 feet, the ship would appear to be a bigger class of ships. But how does one mistake a carrier for a BB or CA? One is flat, one has big guns?
 
At Midway, the cruiser Mikuma-damaged in a collision with her sister ship Mogami, was thought to be a "battleship trailing oil." And she got the lion's share of attention on 6 June 42: eight bombs-one of which landed among her torpedo tubes, and the resulting sympathetic detonation wrecked the ship. Read the book Shattered Sword, which tells Midway from mostly the Japanese side, and there's some nasty pics of the ship taken by VS-6 before she sank: the entire ship from the funnel aft is one big floating junk pile, and the forward part of the ship is still on fire. There's even a pic of the actual explosion taken from the backseat of one of the SBDs.
 

elkarlo

Banned
I can see mistaking 8" guns for 15" guns, it is a mater of scale, that is if I release the bomb at 1000 feet but think I released at 1500 feet, the ship would appear to be a bigger class of ships. But how does one mistake a carrier for a BB or CA? One is flat, one has big guns?


Got me. But it did happen fairly often. And this is with highly trained pilots/observers. Becoming a carrier pilot, as you know, is incredibly difficult to become. So, these aren't hucklebuck scouts seeing a few guys and thinking it's a horde. These are pros.
Prolly a lot of factors that we can't even consider. Maybe there were a lot of mirage affects, or the Gs messed up with their vision. Or the brightness of the sun, tired out their eyes. Who knows?
 
Got me. But it did happen fairly often. And this is with highly trained pilots/observers. Becoming a carrier pilot, as you know, is incredibly difficult to become. So, these aren't hucklebuck scouts seeing a few guys and thinking it's a horde. These are pros.
Prolly a lot of factors that we can't even consider. Maybe there were a lot of mirage affects, or the Gs messed up with their vision. Or the brightness of the sun, tired out their eyes. Who knows?

Think of it like this you are diving through high mist, with anti-aircraft fire bursting all around you, your rear gunner yelling that we have a zeke on our tail, sound of machine gun fire outgoing and thump of bullets hitting the wings of your plane, you reach drop altitude, drop your bomb, pull away and see a dark colored explosion behind you. You report it as a hit.

Or...

You are scouting from 15K feet, see several wakes the glare off the water keeps you from seeing exactly what the wakes are but suddenly you are bounced by several fighters. You maneuver hard away trying to avoid the attacks, ducking into the nearby clouds and report "at least one carrier", never noticing that the several fighters were Rufes rather than Zekes and the ships reported as carriers were two light cruisers and several destroyers escorting two tankers.
 
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