Background on Kamikazes:
During World War II, hundreds of thousands of Japanese pilots made the ultimate sacrifice for Japan by becoming kamikaze pilots. Kamikazes were suicide attacks by Japanese aviators against the allies. These attacks were focused towards taking down naval vessels and only started to happen at the end of the war. Before kamikaze pilots were an official unit, pilots would deliberately crash into their target if their plane had been severely damaged and they knew they had no chance of surviving or didn’t want to risk being captured. Both Allied and Axis pilots would crash into their target of their own volition. However the Axis, specifically the Empire of Japan, were the ones who really started to use this method (1).
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He went to his superiors and asked to make a squad of kamikaze pilots and was granted permission on the condition that he was only allowed to recruit volunteers. So Onishi made announcements and people supposedly started eagerly signing up. They said that there were more people signing up than there were planes, around three pilots per one plane. This information has been questioned by many historians though, especially when first-hand accounts of actual pilots started appearing disputing the fact (2).
Training for kamikazes was very strenuous and brutal. On top of the training, there were daily corporal punishments that were very akin to torture. All of this very quickly lowered morale even though soldiers were told they weren’t allowed to let that happen. They were given a pilot’s manual that told them how they were supposed to think, prepare, and attack as kamikazes. Included in the manual was the fact that a pilot could turn back if they couldn’t locate their target and that they shouldn’t waste their life on nothing. However, it also stated that if a pilot continuously came back to base they would be shot after their ninth return
Japan killed millions in World War II we killed under 100,000 in the dropping of the bombs. “More than 46 million people died in World War II. The Japanese, alone, may have killed 17 million. So why have so many focused so intently on the 80,000 who died at Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945?”(Benson). Atomic bombs destroyed parts of Japan and took out the population of cities; however, the Japanese took the lives of enough people to fill to the population of South Dakota; 17 times.
In August of 1944 the war in Europe was over and the face off between the United States and Japan had finally arrived. The United States had to choose between sending hundreds of thousands of US soldiers, to invade Japan killing and being killed by the hundreds of thousands, OR dropping a newly developed weapon called the atomic bomb on two cities in Japan which would result in tens of thousands of civilian lives with little cost to US servicemen. The only hope of ending the war quickly and honorably was to drop the bombs. Calls for surrender were ignored and the Japanese hierarchy, Okinawa and Iwo Jima had shown clearly what an invasion of Japan would be like. The decision was made, the bombs were dropped, the war was ended and both military and civilian lives were saved by both countries.
In World War II, many new weapons were created to kill more people with more efficiency. The most notable of these was the atomic bomb. As American troops closed in on Japan at the end of the war, they realized that taking the small island nation would be nearly impossible. The Japanese soldiers had shown their willingness to die for their country when kamikaze pilots flew into American ships.... ...
John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated on November 22,1963. Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald.
The Le Paradis Massacre happened on 27 May 1940 when the British troops were attempting to retreat through the Pas-de-Calais region during the Battle of Dunkirk. The Le Paradis massacre was a war crime committed by German troops who were under the command of Hauptsturmführer Fritz Knöchlein. Soldiers of the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Norfolk Regiment had lost contact with their regiment. They then occupied and defended a farmhouse against an attack by German troops in the village of Le Paradis. After they had run out of ammunition, the British soldiers surrendered to the German troops. The British troops were then led across the road to a wall and machine-gunned. Knöchlein at that time had his men armed with bayonets to kill any remaining survivors.
Adolf Hitler was born in Austria-Hungary on April 20, 1889, to mother, Klara Hitler, and father, Alois Hitler; a German by blood.
It’s a beautiful sunny morning, on a tropical island that everyone would love to take a vacation at. It’s approximately 6:00 am, December 7, 1941, when a first group of 181 kamikaze planes attacked; targeting key naval bases stationed at Hawaii; a sustained crippling of U.S. naval forces for about 6 months. The death toll was 2,500. Out of the 9 battleships, 8 were heavily damaged by the assault on Pearl Harbor and out of the 8, three were unrepairable, USS Arizona, USS Oklahoma, and the USS Utah. 160 aircrafts were put out of commission, and nearly 130 were heavily damaged. This was the first incident in which there was an act of war, committed on U.S. soil, outside of the American Revolution and the Civil War. The world was at war, and the U.S. remained neutral until now. Before the attack, the U.S. was in great debate whether to enter the war or to stay out of it. The act of war forced the U.S. into the War and triggered a controversial debate in whether to retaliate against Japan with the use of nuclear arms.
The assassination of president John F. Kennedy was a shock to the entire nation. With him being a very respected president, Kennedy’s assassination surprised many. He showed so much potential for the country and his deaths showed the loss of that potential. It would have been hard to be a young American in those days, and the president you voted for who would change the world dies right in front of your TV. The shock of such of an important figure is what I believed caused many not to accept the fact that he was dead.
The Vietnam War started off just a civil rights battle within the country, but it later intensified to something way bigger. The United States ended up getting involved and it got very serious. The United States did a draft causing many men to go to the war to fight for the Vietnamese people rights. During the time in Vietnam, soldiers had to do many things they didn’t like. An example would be the My Lai massacre. The My Lai massacre was not necessary and it could have been avoided, but since it wasn’t innocent people died and women were raped.
On November 22nd, 1963, the thirty-fifth president, John Fitzgerald “Jack” Kennedy, was assassinated in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, TX. This event would later become one of the most infamous and discussed conspiracies of the century, sparking controversy across the nation. His shooter was an ex-marine, sharp shooter named Lee Harvey Oswald. Over the years, many government officials have pledged that President JFK’s death was a one-man job. However, researchers and theorists suspect that this was not the case due to sketchy coincidences and fragmented information they struggle to piece together. These have lead the public as well as some experts to believe and hypothesize their own conspiracies like the assassination being a more elaborate scheme or inside job.
“As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them”
If the United States had invaded Japanese territory, the number of casualties would soar. Also, the Japanese said that they would fight to their death in this war, also making the United States more nervous. The Japanese thought that suicide or kamikaze was a very honorable deed in the military over surrendering. This was also one of the factors that agitated the United States even more.
One of, if not the most influential part, of allowing the bombs to drop is because of the mentality of the Japanese military and the pull they had in politics. As Maddox stated, “[t]he army, not the Foreign Office controlled the situation” (Maddox, pg. 286). Although Japan had an influential leader in regards to their emperor, the military wanted to and would have engag...
"Was the Atomic Bombing of Japan Justifiable?" The Pacific War 1941-43. Web. 10 June 2010.