9 ms·

Kaiten: Japan’s fully-manned kamikaze torpedos during WWII

86 points by metabagel 4y ago

pcurve 4y ago
"The advantages of human guidance throughout the craft’s trajectory proved to be of little use in practice, with kaitens causing minimal damage to the enemy" I wonder if it could've been more successful with more warhead
- jandrese 4y ago
  I don't think the issue is that they didn't do enough damage on a hit, rather that the mostly missed their targets. WWII torpedoes, even the relatively excellent Japanese versions, didn't have a good hit rate in the war. Steering with a periscope in choppy seas while managing ballast levels and in less than ideal conditions is incredibly difficult. While the crews were trained that training couldn't be too comprehensive as the Japanese training corps were already stretched thin and all training resources spent on these pilots are ultimately lost on their first mission. Even in the article the success they noted was against an anchored ship, something you are much more likely to be able to hit with a conventional unguided torpedo. There is also the environment of the war itself and logistical problems with these devices. The article notes that they can't be carried in a regular torpedo tube, so they had to be attached as a parasite on the top of the sub. But this prevented the sub from doing crash dives, which were vital to staying alive when allied fighters and bombers appeared overhead, which was a constant threat by the time these were available. They were just underdeveloped and then the war was over. Shortly after that people started working out self-guidance systems for torpedoes and the the book was forever closed on these man guided systems.
  - ethanbond 4y ago
    Not to mention the difficulty of gaining expertise in steering the kaiten system!
- giva 4y ago
  Italy had something similar, not designed to kill its own crew however. https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siluro_a_lenta_corsa https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siluro_a_lenta_corsa
  - schoen 4y ago
    The SLC doesn't seem to have its own page in English Wikipedia, but is covered in the article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_torpedo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_torpedo which also includes some other countries' versions (it seems like the Italian SLC might have been the most-used of these).
alexdowad 4y ago
There is a manga series based on the history of the "kaiten", called "Tokkou no Shima" (特攻の島), which is pretty good. It depicts the commander of a kaiten-bearing submarine as lying to his superiors and reporting that each of the kaiten launched from his submarine sunk US ships, when in fact none of them hit their targets. It is implied that reporting anything but success was unacceptable, and the Japanese military leadership expanded this program because of being misled by such false or exaggerated reports.
- darthrupert 4y ago
  It's incredible that some cultures keep falling back to a standard of lying all over the command chain when it should be blindingly obvious to everyone how inefficient it is. If rumors are correct, Russian military is now doing that in Ukraine and a lot of their poor performance derives from it.
gurjeet 4y ago
This website has one of the unique implementations (in a good way) of hijacking the browser's "Back" button. As you scroll, and each story comes into focus, the URL changes to identify that story. This is good if the reader wants to share a story she is currently reading, and needs to copy the URL. But when you press the "Back" button, instead of just changing the URL to that of previous story's, and scroll to the previous story, it takes you through your whole history on the website, all the way back to where you came from; back to HN, in my case. Interesting, to say the least. I'd love for it to _not_ bother cycling/scrolling through previous stories, as it's taking me back to where I came from.
- infogulch 4y ago
  This comes down to the use of pushState vs replaceState, many websites choose the poorly. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17507091/replacestate-vs-pushstate https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17507091/replacestate-vs...
martyvis 4y ago
"The Type 1 suffered from water leaking into the pilot and engine compartment, but due to the nature of the weapon, solving these issues was a low priority." Funny that.
eternalban 4y ago
Japanese Suicide Drone with meat-AI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Yokosuka_Ohka_Model_22.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Yokosuka_Ohka_Model_22.sv... (Looks like something you'd see in Tatooine.)
fsqcds 4y ago
USS Bowfin Submarine Museum in Pearl Harbor has one of these.
douchescript 4y ago
Drafting the Japanese suicide pilots were also a way for the military to clear the ranks of naysayers / peaceniks/ less committed to the cause.
grapescheesee 4y ago
Interesting how I scroll onto this while finishing up Dan Carlin's Hardcore history series about Japan/Pacific WW2 history. Still can't really grasp what life would have truly been like then. The Japanese had an almost unbelievable fire and intensity. http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-62-Supernova-in-the-East-i http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-62-Superno...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
trzy 4y ago
Suicide torpedoes were proposed by the Polish military in 1939 and the program appears to have gotten as far as signing up recruits but to my knowledge none were ever deployed.
- zaphirplane 4y ago
  > signing up recruits I understand there is a serious and dire aspect to this, not specific to the polish. Still recruiting for this is too close to exploiting vulnerable devastated individuals
- robonerd 4y ago
  The Nazis planned to use similar suicide tactics with a manned version of their V-1 cruise missile. They built and flew prototypes, but Hitler was persuaded to drop the project before it was put to use. Formalized suicide attack programs with purpose-built hardware are chilling to think about, but there is also a broader class of suicide attacks that include impromptu decisions and last resorts which seem easier to understand. On both sides of WW2, there are cases of pilots trying to crash into the enemy after realizing their fate was sealed anyway. This may have happened with an American B-26 at the Battle of Midway, and one of the Japanese pilots who attacked Pearl Harbor apparently announced his intention to do this before the battle (in both cases they missed their target.)
  - trhway 4y ago
    >a broader class of suicide attacks that include impromptu decisions and last resorts which seem easier to understand. In USSR/Russia such attacks by Soviet soldiers (using say your body to close the machine gun embrasure) have been widely celebrated. Where is similar behavior by Ukrainian soldiers against Russian forces in today's war is blamed by Russian propaganda on "Ukrainian nationalists being pumped full of drugs".
  - jillesvangurp 4y ago
    The Russian army also had some chilling tactics. Basically they had more soldiers than guns during the battle of Stalingrad. So they sent them in pairs where one person was supposed to pick up the gun in the (likely) case the other person got shot. To prevent people from refusing orders, they simply shot anyone running the wrong way. Ordering people to march towards (almost) certain death is probably as old as war is. What set the Japanese apart is the fanatical culture that resulted in people volunteering for this. The modern equivalent would be suicide bombers.
nosianu 4y ago
Aside from this article, just continuing to scroll down reveals quite a few interesting headlines. Here's one I found particularly interesting in light of current events and reports of looting: "How German Soldiers Used Lentil Soup as an Effective Defense Mechanism Against the Soviets" https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/lentil.html https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/lentil.html To gain time for a retreat they cooked soup for the attacking underfed Russian soldiers. The ruse was successful. > The Soviets were hot on their heels at first, but once they reached the steaming pots of soup the scent was simply too much to resist. The hungry Soviet troops clambered over each other to grab some of the soup, inadvertently giving the Germans more time.
- cafard 4y ago
  The history of warfare is full of cases in which the side that had just chased away the opponents became disorganized in looting, and then was overrun by a counter-attack.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- robonerd 4y ago
  I never found a source for this, but I once heard that during the Second Punic War the Roman senate stalled Hannibal's army in a similar manner, using prostitutes.
- sandworm101 4y ago
  There would need to be some very specific circumstances for this to work. The general rule of all cooking is that it takes much longer to cook food than to eat it. So spending time cooking soup, rather than fleeing, would be a net loss of time. Whatever time the Russians were delayed eating your soup would be less than the time you were delayed in making it. The only way it would work would be to just put the pot over the fire and run. Without someone watchin it, the window of time between soup getting hot and soup burning/boiling into nothing would be slim. A more likely version might be that starving Russian troops were so hungry that, upon finding ingredients left out, they stopped to make soup themselves.
sbassi 4y ago
Interesting is that some post below this one there is a small book with a washed-up version of Shinto, that is the ideology that lead to this and other war atrocities.
- ThrowawayR2 4y ago
  You perhaps meant to say bushido, the extremist warrior code embraced by Japanese samurai (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushido https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushido), instead of (state) Shinto, the modified religion that encouraged nationalism and emperor worship (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Shinto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Shinto)?
- Hayvok 4y ago
  Simply saying that "Shintoism" led to atrocities is a massive oversimplification of the Japanese during WW2. This topic is so complex and Japanese culture (especially pre-WW2 culture) is so complex that I hesitate even to comment on it. Ever since the war ended scholars have been trying to make sense of the unique cultural stew that led to the atrocities, mass suicides (civilian and military), and organized Japanese units continuing to fight into the 1950s and individuals as late as the '70s. Shintoism, Bushido, Zen Buddhism, the imperial system with a living-deity emperor, and anti-western colonialism (just to name a few) all played into it.
- krapp 4y ago
  The ideology that led to this and other war atrocities was Western imperialism. State Shinto[0] blended the Imperial government's authoritarian doctrine with religion in a similar way that Nazism did with German culture, but was more a matter of propaganda than religion. In particular, emperor worship was an invention of the state and not an aspect of traditional Shinto practice. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Shinto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Shinto
  - bowsamic 4y ago
    Sorry that you're getting downvoted, this is a totally accurate and well informed take

86 points by metabagel 4y ago

"The advantages of human guidance throughout the craft’s trajectory proved to be of little use in practice, with kaitens causing minimal damage to the enemy" I wonder if it could've been more successful with more warhead

jandrese 4y ago
I don't think the issue is that they didn't do enough damage on a hit, rather that the mostly missed their targets. WWII torpedoes, even the relatively excellent Japanese versions, didn't have a good hit rate in the war. Steering with a periscope in choppy seas while managing ballast levels and in less than ideal conditions is incredibly difficult. While the crews were trained that training couldn't be too comprehensive as the Japanese training corps were already stretched thin and all training resources spent on these pilots are ultimately lost on their first mission. Even in the article the success they noted was against an anchored ship, something you are much more likely to be able to hit with a conventional unguided torpedo. There is also the environment of the war itself and logistical problems with these devices. The article notes that they can't be carried in a regular torpedo tube, so they had to be attached as a parasite on the top of the sub. But this prevented the sub from doing crash dives, which were vital to staying alive when allied fighters and bombers appeared overhead, which was a constant threat by the time these were available. They were just underdeveloped and then the war was over. Shortly after that people started working out self-guidance systems for torpedoes and the the book was forever closed on these man guided systems.
- ethanbond 4y ago
  Not to mention the difficulty of gaining expertise in steering the kaiten system!
giva 4y ago
Italy had something similar, not designed to kill its own crew however. https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siluro_a_lenta_corsa https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siluro_a_lenta_corsa
- schoen 4y ago
  The SLC doesn't seem to have its own page in English Wikipedia, but is covered in the article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_torpedo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_torpedo which also includes some other countries' versions (it seems like the Italian SLC might have been the most-used of these).

alexdowad 4y ago

There is a manga series based on the history of the "kaiten", called "Tokkou no Shima" (特攻の島), which is pretty good. It depicts the commander of a kaiten-bearing submarine as lying to his superiors and reporting that each of the kaiten launched from his submarine sunk US ships, when in fact none of them hit their targets. It is implied that reporting anything but success was unacceptable, and the Japanese military leadership expanded this program because of being misled by such false or exaggerated reports.

darthrupert 4y ago
It's incredible that some cultures keep falling back to a standard of lying all over the command chain when it should be blindingly obvious to everyone how inefficient it is. If rumors are correct, Russian military is now doing that in Ukraine and a lot of their poor performance derives from it.

gurjeet 4y ago

This website has one of the unique implementations (in a good way) of hijacking the browser's "Back" button. As you scroll, and each story comes into focus, the URL changes to identify that story. This is good if the reader wants to share a story she is currently reading, and needs to copy the URL. But when you press the "Back" button, instead of just changing the URL to that of previous story's, and scroll to the previous story, it takes you through your whole history on the website, all the way back to where you came from; back to HN, in my case. Interesting, to say the least. I'd love for it to _not_ bother cycling/scrolling through previous stories, as it's taking me back to where I came from.

infogulch 4y ago
This comes down to the use of pushState vs replaceState, many websites choose the poorly. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17507091/replacestate-vs-pushstate https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17507091/replacestate-vs...

martyvis 4y ago

"The Type 1 suffered from water leaking into the pilot and engine compartment, but due to the nature of the weapon, solving these issues was a low priority." Funny that.

eternalban 4y ago

Japanese Suicide Drone with meat-AI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Yokosuka_Ohka_Model_22.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Yokosuka_Ohka_Model_22.sv... (Looks like something you'd see in Tatooine.)

fsqcds 4y ago

USS Bowfin Submarine Museum in Pearl Harbor has one of these.

douchescript 4y ago

Drafting the Japanese suicide pilots were also a way for the military to clear the ranks of naysayers / peaceniks/ less committed to the cause.

grapescheesee 4y ago

Interesting how I scroll onto this while finishing up Dan Carlin's Hardcore history series about Japan/Pacific WW2 history. Still can't really grasp what life would have truly been like then. The Japanese had an almost unbelievable fire and intensity. http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-62-Supernova-in-the-East-i http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-62-Superno...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

trzy 4y ago

Suicide torpedoes were proposed by the Polish military in 1939 and the program appears to have gotten as far as signing up recruits but to my knowledge none were ever deployed.

zaphirplane 4y ago
> signing up recruits I understand there is a serious and dire aspect to this, not specific to the polish. Still recruiting for this is too close to exploiting vulnerable devastated individuals
robonerd 4y ago
The Nazis planned to use similar suicide tactics with a manned version of their V-1 cruise missile. They built and flew prototypes, but Hitler was persuaded to drop the project before it was put to use. Formalized suicide attack programs with purpose-built hardware are chilling to think about, but there is also a broader class of suicide attacks that include impromptu decisions and last resorts which seem easier to understand. On both sides of WW2, there are cases of pilots trying to crash into the enemy after realizing their fate was sealed anyway. This may have happened with an American B-26 at the Battle of Midway, and one of the Japanese pilots who attacked Pearl Harbor apparently announced his intention to do this before the battle (in both cases they missed their target.)
- trhway 4y ago
  >a broader class of suicide attacks that include impromptu decisions and last resorts which seem easier to understand. In USSR/Russia such attacks by Soviet soldiers (using say your body to close the machine gun embrasure) have been widely celebrated. Where is similar behavior by Ukrainian soldiers against Russian forces in today's war is blamed by Russian propaganda on "Ukrainian nationalists being pumped full of drugs".
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  The Russian army also had some chilling tactics. Basically they had more soldiers than guns during the battle of Stalingrad. So they sent them in pairs where one person was supposed to pick up the gun in the (likely) case the other person got shot. To prevent people from refusing orders, they simply shot anyone running the wrong way. Ordering people to march towards (almost) certain death is probably as old as war is. What set the Japanese apart is the fanatical culture that resulted in people volunteering for this. The modern equivalent would be suicide bombers.

nosianu 4y ago

Aside from this article, just continuing to scroll down reveals quite a few interesting headlines. Here's one I found particularly interesting in light of current events and reports of looting: "How German Soldiers Used Lentil Soup as an Effective Defense Mechanism Against the Soviets" https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/lentil.html https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/lentil.html To gain time for a retreat they cooked soup for the attacking underfed Russian soldiers. The ruse was successful. > The Soviets were hot on their heels at first, but once they reached the steaming pots of soup the scent was simply too much to resist. The hungry Soviet troops clambered over each other to grab some of the soup, inadvertently giving the Germans more time.

cafard 4y ago
The history of warfare is full of cases in which the side that had just chased away the opponents became disorganized in looting, and then was overrun by a counter-attack.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
robonerd 4y ago
I never found a source for this, but I once heard that during the Second Punic War the Roman senate stalled Hannibal's army in a similar manner, using prostitutes.
sandworm101 4y ago
There would need to be some very specific circumstances for this to work. The general rule of all cooking is that it takes much longer to cook food than to eat it. So spending time cooking soup, rather than fleeing, would be a net loss of time. Whatever time the Russians were delayed eating your soup would be less than the time you were delayed in making it. The only way it would work would be to just put the pot over the fire and run. Without someone watchin it, the window of time between soup getting hot and soup burning/boiling into nothing would be slim. A more likely version might be that starving Russian troops were so hungry that, upon finding ingredients left out, they stopped to make soup themselves.

sbassi 4y ago

Interesting is that some post below this one there is a small book with a washed-up version of Shinto, that is the ideology that lead to this and other war atrocities.

ThrowawayR2 4y ago
You perhaps meant to say bushido, the extremist warrior code embraced by Japanese samurai (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushido https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushido), instead of (state) Shinto, the modified religion that encouraged nationalism and emperor worship (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Shinto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Shinto)?
Hayvok 4y ago
Simply saying that "Shintoism" led to atrocities is a massive oversimplification of the Japanese during WW2. This topic is so complex and Japanese culture (especially pre-WW2 culture) is so complex that I hesitate even to comment on it. Ever since the war ended scholars have been trying to make sense of the unique cultural stew that led to the atrocities, mass suicides (civilian and military), and organized Japanese units continuing to fight into the 1950s and individuals as late as the '70s. Shintoism, Bushido, Zen Buddhism, the imperial system with a living-deity emperor, and anti-western colonialism (just to name a few) all played into it.
krapp 4y ago
The ideology that led to this and other war atrocities was Western imperialism. State Shinto[0] blended the Imperial government's authoritarian doctrine with religion in a similar way that Nazism did with German culture, but was more a matter of propaganda than religion. In particular, emperor worship was an invention of the state and not an aspect of traditional Shinto practice. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Shinto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Shinto
- bowsamic 4y ago
  Sorry that you're getting downvoted, this is a totally accurate and well informed take