Kamikazes: Suicide Patriots

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combat, not on one-way missions to certain death. Lieutenant-Commander Goro Nonaka was openly critical of the rocket bomb project from the very beginning. He commanded the Betty bombers which were to act as mother ships for the Thunder God's Ohka rocket planes, and he anticipated many of the same problems predicted by Tadanao Miki at the research lab: Namely the short range of the rocket plane and slow speed of the mother ship. These two factors required Nonaka's Betty bombers to slowly approach to within visual range of an alert American Carrier task force in order to release the Ohka rocket planes fastened to their fuselages. He saw no way for his bombers to achieve such missions, and became convinced that the bomber crews were as doomed as the Ohka pilots.
The death of Emperor Taisho may be the point when Japan had started to become the fascist state that it was during the Pacific War. Although the military had been active ever since the Jiji period (1867-1912) in wars such as the Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895), and the Russo-Japanese War (...