For American sailors who served in the Pacific theater during the final two years of World War II, nothing was more terrifying than a kamikaze attack. Grainy black-and-white footage of Japanese fighter aircraft plunging into the decks of aircraft carriers, shown repeatedly on television, also formed the most enduring images of the war for several postwar generations of Americans.
Such fanatical resistance on the part of kamikaze pilots convinced many Americans in the military at the time, and many American civilians afterward, that an invasion of Japan would lead to equally fanatical suicide attacks by ordinary Japanese, resulting in millions of casualties on both sides. That conviction would be used to justify the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a way to end the war quickly.
But who were the kamikaze pilots? What motivated them, and what were they thinking and doing in their final hours before they took off in their bomb-laden planes? What did their families, friends and those in the local villages near the kamikaze bases think?