Did Japanese kamikaze aircrafts have any advantages over the use of missiles?

by FHI_iSmile
Bacarruda

Yes, kamikazes did have some advantages over other guided weapons of the era.

Before I get into the differences between the two, I want to make some distinctions.

Guided missiles, like their name suggests, have some kind of guidance system. They fly to the target under their own power, usually a jet engine or a rocket motor. WWII-era guidance systems were pretty crude. The V-1 and V-2 used inertial guidance that was barely good enough to hit cities, but made hitting small targets like ships or bridges a fool's errand. In ideal conditions, V-2's had a 4.5 km CEP (Circular Error Probable, or the radius within which 50% of the impacts would land). That's ... not great.

If you wanted to kill ships, you needed another guidance system. Radar guidance wasn't feasible. Radar sets were too costly, too big, too crude, and too bad at picking out targets from surface clutter to make a self-guided missile feasible (although the U.S. Navy's radar-guided Bat bomb did have some limited wartime success). The same went for infrared technology, which was still in it infancy by 1945. That left command guidance, where a pilot in a chase plane "flew" the missile into the target.

This same guidance method was used for most glide bombs, like Fritz X. Glide bombs, don't have their own propulsion system. Instead, they are carried aloft by a carrier plane, dropped, and glide into the target. Sometimes the pilot watched a flare on the tail bomb to track it. In the case of the U.S. Navy's TDR drone, the pilot used a camera in the bomb's nose to "see" what the bomb saw. Since glide bombs were simpler than missiles, and since they were easier to make (early rocket motors and jet engines were a bitch), most WWII-era guided weapons were glide bombs.

You also have drones, unmanned aircraft that were packed with explosives and guided into the target. Most drones, like the German Mistel, used a command guidance system that flew the bomb into a target.

As you can see, Kamikazes have elements of several guided weapons, albeit with the twist that the guidance system is along for the ride.

Now, Japan didn't have a meaningful guided missile or guided bomb program. Japan badly lagged behind the rest of the developed world in the development of radios, radar, and other electronic warfare equipment. Building and deploying something like Fritz X or Azon wasn't an option for Japan during WWII.

So Japan's choices in late 1944 and early 1945 were: A) Keep using increasingly obsolescent conventional aircraft like the A6M "Zero" and increasingly green pilots in bloody, ineffective attacks on Allied warships. B) Create Tokko (i.e. "Special Attack") units and crash them into Allied warships - a tactic that actually killed fewer pilots for more gain than conventional attacks.

In other words, Kamikazes had one major advantage over radio-guided weapons: Japan could create and use them.

I'll add that there's a reasonable case to be made that the kamikaze aircraft were among the first effective guided missiles. They had a warhead (a bomb fixed inside or underneath the aircraft, or an integrated warhead like the one on rocket-powered Ohka aircraft), propulsion (a piston engine, or in the Ohka's case, a rocket), maneuvering capability (using the airplane's control surfaces), and a guidance system (a human pilot). As you can see in this graphic, the Ohka in particular is very missile-like.

Kamikazes weren't the war's first guided weapons, though. The Kamikazes really came into the fray around October 1944. By that point, the Americans and the Germans had been using (unmanned) guided weapons for some time. Unlike Japan, both nations had made substantial wartime and pre-war investments in radio technology, making their guided weapons program possible. August 1943 made the first successful guided missile attack with the radio-controlled Hs 293 glide bomb. In July 1943, the Germans had become using the radio-controlled Fritx X glide bomb. In September, they had a spectacular success with Fritz X, sinking the battleship Roma. In June-September 1944, the Americans used the radio-controlled VB-1 Azon against targets in Europe, along with some parallel use in the CBI Theater.

There were also various unmanned aircraft used as flying bombs. There was the German Mistel, which perched an Fw 190 on top of a Ju 88 packed with explosives. The combination would take off, then separate to the Focke-Wulfe fighter could guide the bomber to its targets. It was used, with virtually no success, in mid-1944 and early 1945 against targets in Normandy and the Eastern Front.

The Americans had Operation Aphrodite and Operation Anvil, which filled Flying Fortresses and Liberator bombers with explosives and a radio-control unit. The crew would take off, bail out, and the a chase plane would fly the bomber into its target. They were mostly used against V-Weapon sites and U-Boat pens in mid- to late-1944. Infamously, Joe Kennedy Jr. and co-pilot Wilford John Willy were killed when the Liberator blew up prematurely.

Bacarruda

Adding onto my other post, there were some other advantages that kamikaze aircraft did have over early glide bombs like the Fritz X.

Before we begin, check out this graphic on kamikaze attacks to see some of the different tactics used by kamikaze pilots.

  1. Low-light attacks: Glide bombs had to be visually-tracked so the operator could make course corrections. This limited their use to clear days. Kamikaze weren't quite as limited. In theory, this was an advantage that existed in theory, but was never fully-exploited in practice. Prior to WWII, the Imperial Japanese Navy's elite pilots had made dawn and dusk attacks a specialty. However, mastering these attacks took a great deal of practice. By late 1943, most of these skilled pilots were dead, and the few survivors were too precious to waste flying suicide missions. The Japanese knew the rookie pilots tasked with flying kamikaze attacks could barely fly in the day, much the less at night. They'd attempt dawn attacks on a few occasions, but generally stopped attempting suicide attacks before dusk.
  2. Harder to detect: Glide bombs like Fritz X had to be dropped from around 10-20,000 feet. That meant the carried aircraft flew high enough to be spotted on radar. Ships could take evasive action, deploy countermeasures, vector in CAP aircraft, or turn on their jammers. By contrast, kamikaze could come in right on the deck, which made them much harder to spot on radar or with the Mark I Eyeball. Some planes flew as low as 10 feet! Even when kamikaze were spotted, it took time for the American task force to react. In the Philippines in 1944-1945, the average "open fire" range for U.S. Navy ships under attack was just 5,700 yards. One postwar analysis noted that sometimes "ships were ... taken so completely by surprise [by kamikazes] that they did not even have a chance to open fire." Granted, such low-level hits weren't always as effective as a diving attack from 20,000 feet, another kamikaze tactic.
  3. Subterfuge: One favorite technique of kamikaze pilots was to shadow American carrier planes returning to their carriers from a strike. This helped the Japanese fighters find the American carriers. It also allowed them to create confusion at the critical moment of the attack. With American and Japanese aircraft mixing together, it was harder for American pilots and gunners to sort out friend from foe. This tactics became so prevalent that carrier fighters had to greet returning American aircraft to "delouse" them of any kamikaze that might be trailing them!
  4. No reliance on other aircraft: Glide bombs and drones usually had to be carried and/or guided by another aircraft If this other aircraft was shot down or driven off, the weapon was wasted. These carrier aircraft were usually big, vulnerable aircraft that were easy to detect. They required large crews and burned a lot of precious fuel. With the exception of the Ohka rocket aircraft (which was dropped from a G4M "Betty" bomber), kamikaze aircraft had more independence since they didn't need a mothership.
  5. Resistant to electronic countermeasures: Glide bombs had to be radio-controlled. Those radio signals could be jammed, making the bomb a useless hunk of dumb metal. As soon as Fritz X and the Hs 239 arrived on the scene in 1943, Allied boffins started working on countermeasures using captured weapons. By mid-1944, Allied jamming had effectively neutered the German glide bombs. Kamikaze pilots were impervious to such electronic skullduggery.
  6. Cheaper: A glide bomb required a carrier plane, specialized control equipment, delicate radio units, lots of operator training, and pricey R&D. All a kamikaze needed was an out-of-date plane, a bomb, enough aviation fuel for a one-way trip, and a pilot barely qualified enough to reach his target.
  7. Use existing aircraft: Glide bombs had to be build. Mothership aircraft had to be modified. Meanwhile, any aircraft could be a kamikaze. Some 4,300 trainer aircraft were earmarked for kamikaze missions in the event of an Allied invasion of the Home Islands. Obsolescent fighters like the A6M "Zero" or the K-43 "Oscar" were often used for kamikaze missions, since were obsolete for air fighting, but still able to carry a decent warload at high speeds on their final missions.
  8. Untrained manpower: Using a glide bomb was a very tricky skill that took time, training, and effort to master. Meanwhile, the average kamikaze pilot had less than 100 hours of training. Some had as little as 40 hours of flight time due to serious shortages of training aircraft, instructors, and fuel).