By the Numbers, and the End: Ugaki’s Last Flight and Ōnishi’s Death

Vice Adm. Ugaki Matome, commander of the Fifth Air Fleet, by a Yokosuka D4Y Suisei at Ōita on the afternoon of 15 August 1945, hours after the Emperor’s surrender broadcast. The photograph was taken at Ōita before take-off (Commons describes it as “off Okinawa”). He flew toward Okinawa with ten other Suiseis and did not return. Photo: Unknown Japanese navy airman, Japanese navy photograph, PD-Japan via Wikimedia Commons.

Kamikaze · Chapter 8 of 9

By the Numbers, and the End

Ten months of special attacks cost the lives of about 3,800 to 4,000 Japanese airmen and thousands more in boats, submarines and other units, sank several dozen Allied ships and killed thousands of Allied sailors. Then, in four days of August 1945, the campaign ended in a last pointless flight and a suicide in Tokyo.

October 1944 – September 1945Sorties · Dead · Ships sunk and damaged · Ketsu-Gō · Ōita · Tokyo Bay~25 min read

Every number in the history of the special attacks comes with a definition attached, and most of the disagreements between sources are disagreements about definitions. Does a count of the dead include only the pilots of aircraft that dived on ships, or also the crews of the bombers that carried Ohka rocket bombs, the men in explosive motorboats and human torpedoes, the airborne commandos landed on Okinawa, the Army fighter pilots who rammed B-29s? Does a count of ships sunk include ships scuttled after being hit, ships so badly damaged they were never repaired, landing craft, merchant ships, a hulk used as a decoy? Does a “sortie” include the escort fighters and the planes that turned back with engine trouble? This chapter sets out the main figures, who gives them and what each counts, and then follows the campaign to its end in August 1945.

The figures come from three kinds of source. Contemporary U.S. Navy analyses, chiefly the CominCh Anti-Suicide Action Summary of 31 August 1945, counted attacks and hits as they were reported (Chapter 7). Postwar official compilations, above all the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey’s Summary Report (Pacific War) of July 1946 and the registers of Japanese memorial associations and museums, counted the dead and the missions. Historians, among them Bill Gordon, Robin Rielly, Steven Zaloga, Kōdachi Naoki and Shawn Woodford, have reworked both. Where they differ, both figures are given.

Counting the Japanese Dead

The most widely cited Japanese figures come from the registers compiled since the war by memorial associations and museums. The Tokkōtai Senbotsusha Irei Kenshōkai, the foundation that commemorates the special attack dead, gives 3,948 men killed in aerial special attacks, 2,531 of them Navy and 1,417 Army, as reported by the journalist Kōdachi Naoki in 2021. The National Air and Space Museum gives 3,913. Bill Gordon’s 2020 thesis, drawing on the association’s 1990 compilation Tokubetsu kōgekitai, gives 3,813 aerial dead (Navy 2,514, Army 1,299). The Navy figure has been stable for decades: 2,519 in Inoguchi Rikihei and Nakajima Tadashi’s insider account of 1951–58, 2,525 at the former Naval Academy museum at Etajima, 2,526 in the Kanoya base museum’s table of the dead by sortie base. The Army figure is less certain, because the Army’s records were partly lost; the Chiran Peace Museum commemorates 1,036 Army airmen who died in the Okinawa campaign, a figure that excludes some 400 who died in the Philippines and elsewhere.

When the other special-attack weapons are added, the totals rise. Gordon’s breakdown reaches 5,843; a figure of 6,418 confirmed dead attributed to the Kenshōkai appears in Japanese reference works; Rielly gives 6,805 for all Japanese suicide attacks. The range chart below shows the major figures. Click a row for what it counts.

Why do the figures differ? Six reasons recur. The scope differs (aircraft only, or all weapons). Some counts include the crews of multi-seat aircraft, such as the bombers that carried the Ohka and were shot down with it, and some do not. Navy and Army registers were kept separately, and the Army’s were incomplete. Post-surrender flights such as Ugaki’s on 15 August were not official operations and are not always counted. Training deaths are included in some lists. And the registers have grown over time as families and researchers added names. This site’s working summary: about 3,800 to 4,000 airmen died in aerial special attacks, roughly 2,500 Navy and 1,300 to 1,400 Army; counting boats, human torpedoes and other units, about 5,800 to 6,400 men.

Behind the totals are the people described in Chapter 3: mostly young non-commissioned “boy pilots” from the preparatory flight programmes, with a minority of drafted university students who wrote most of the letters that are remembered today.

How Many Flew

The number of sorties is harder to fix than the number of dead, because many aircraft that set out did not attack. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, working from Japanese records after the war, concluded that “the Japanese flew 2,550 Kamikaze missions” between October 1944 and the end of the Okinawa campaign. For Okinawa alone, Steven Zaloga’s table gives 1,465 aircraft committed to the ten Kikusui mass attacks (860 Navy, 605 Army), plus about 250 sorties from Formosa and 185 others, about 1,900 in all; Woodford, for NHHC, also uses 1,900. NHHC’s Okinawa overview speaks of “nearly 1,500 planes” in the ten mass attacks.

Other figures count differently. The Anti-Suicide Action Summary counted about 1,100 aircraft that sortied “with suicidal intent” in February to April 1945, as observed by the U.S. Navy. D. M. Giangreco, writing in Naval History in 1997, noted that of 1,809 sorties logged by the Japanese 3rd, 5th and 10th Air Fleets, 879 kamikazes and escorts returned to base. A Japanese encyclopedia gives about 2,500 special-attack aircraft sortied at Okinawa in April and May, which probably includes escorts. The differences come from what is counted: missions or aircraft; attack planes only or escorts as well; aircraft that returned with engine trouble, bad weather or no target found, which was very common; and Navy against Army reporting.

How Often They Hit

The hit rate is the most often misquoted number in the subject. The USSBS found 475 of its 2,550 missions, 18.6 percent, “effective in securing hits or damaging near misses.” CominCh’s wartime count for February to April 1945 found that about 17 percent of suicide sorties hit ships, and 30 percent of the planes that ships actually engaged. NHHC’s Okinawa overview gives about one in six; its account of Lingayen Gulf in January 1945, roughly one in four. Woodford’s reanalysis gives 9.5 percent of all Okinawa sorties, but 23 percent of the aircraft that actually attacked ships, and 17.7 percent of sorties in the Philippines. The rates differ because the denominators differ: all sorties, including those that turned back or were shot down by fighters far from the fleet, or only the planes that reached the ships. Effectiveness also fell over time, as American defences improved and Japanese pilots grew less experienced. The full set of figures is charted in Chapter 7. A frequently repeated figure of about 14 percent has no traceable source and is not used here.

The comparison that mattered to the Japanese commanders was with conventional attack. CominCh found that 3.6 suicide planes were needed for each ship hit, against 37 conventional ones. That ratio, as much as desperation, explains why the special attacks continued. The USSBS put it plainly: by adopting kamikaze tactics the Japanese “increased their ratio of results achieved to losses.”

Ships Sunk

No figure in the history of the kamikazes varies as much, relative to its size, as the number of ships sunk. Bill Gordon, who has compared the published lists ship by ship, found counts ranging from 34 to 57 for ships sunk by special-attack aircraft. Inoguchi and Nakajima’s list gives 34 (only 32 names, and two of those not sunk by aircraft). The USSBS says “approximately 45 vessels were sunk, the bulk of which were destroyers.” Gordon’s own list of named ships, aircraft attacks only and from 25 October 1944, gives 47, the count that “has the most support” in his judgment. Japanese and American authors have given 40, 49, 55 and 56; Warner and Warner’s The Sacred Warriors (1982) gives 57, from which Gordon removes ten as duplicates, ships scuttled for other reasons or ships sunk by conventional attack. The National Air and Space Museum, counting all special-attack weapons, suggests that “a defensible number is 66 sunk and more than 300 damaged.”

The reasons for the spread are again mostly definitional: aircraft only or all special weapons; whether ships scuttled after a hit, ships declared “beyond repair” (such as the destroyers Newcomb, Leutze and Morris after 6 April 1945) or a damaged hulk being used as a decoy (Barry, 21 June) are counted as sunk; whether small craft (LCS, LSM, PT boats, a submarine chaser) and merchant ships (the Liberty ships John Burke and Lewis L. Dyche, the Victory ships off Okinawa) are included; whether a near miss counts (William D. Porter, 10 June 1945, sunk by a kamikaze that exploded beneath her); and duplicates. Other special weapons added a handful: the Kaiten human torpedoes sank the oiler Mississinewa at Ulithi on 20 November 1944, the infantry landing craft LCI-600 in January 1945 and the destroyer escort Underhill on 24 July 1945; the only ship sunk by an Ohka was the destroyer Mannert L. Abele on 12 April 1945 (Chapter 4).

What all the counts agree on is more important than where they differ. No fleet carrier, battleship or cruiser was sunk by a kamikaze. The largest ships lost were three escort carriers: St. Lo off Samar on 25 October 1944, Ommaney Bay in the Sulu Sea on 4 January 1945 and Bismarck Sea off Iwo Jima on 21 February 1945. The USSBS put it in one sentence: “However, no ship larger than an escort carrier was sunk.” Gordon’s list also shows when the sinkings happened: 1 in October 1944, 2 in November, 14 in December (most of them in the Ormoc and Mindoro convoys), 3 in January, 1 in February, 12 in April, 9 in May, 4 in June and 1 in July.

Ships Damaged

Damaged ships are counted less carefully than sunk ones, but they carried most of the casualties. The USSBS recorded that “warships of all types were damaged, including 12 aircraft carriers, 15 battleships, and 16 light and escort carriers,” besides cruisers, destroyers and many smaller vessels. NASM gives “more than 300” damaged in all; Kōdachi, counting only what he could match in U.S. records, gives 198, of which 23 were scrapped. Off Okinawa alone, Woodford counts 225 U.S. and Allied ships damaged by kamikazes, including eight fleet and light carriers, four escort carriers, ten battleships, five cruisers and 63 destroyers. The figures often quoted for the whole Okinawa campaign (36 ships sunk and 368 damaged, in the U.S. Navy’s 80th-anniversary message of 2025) include ships lost to all causes, not only kamikazes.

On the Okinawa picket line, Rielly counts 15 ships sunk and 45 damaged, with 1,348 men killed and 1,586 wounded. In CominCh’s count for February to May 1945, destroyers received 38 percent of all suicide attacks: 193 attacks, 67 hits, 7 sunk. The pattern is clear in every source. The special attacks were aimed at carriers and battleships, but the ships that took the worst of them were the destroyers and small ships on the outer edge of the fleet.

The Allied Dead

No official total of Allied deaths caused by special attacks exists, because the U.S. Navy recorded casualties by ship and by action, not by weapon. The best estimates are built up from ship-by-ship figures. Woodford gives at least 1,400 sailors killed in the Philippines campaign and at least 3,389 Americans killed by kamikazes at Okinawa. Kōdachi, compiling from U.S. records, gives 8,064 killed and 10,708 wounded for the whole campaign. Round figures of about 7,000 naval dead are often repeated but cannot be traced to a single source.

At Okinawa the Navy’s losses from all causes, overwhelmingly from the air attacks, exceeded those of either ground service: “more than 4,900” sailors killed and over 4,800 wounded, against 4,675 Army and 2,938 Marine dead ashore (NHHC). Nearly one in seven of all U.S. Navy deaths in the Second World War occurred off Okinawa. The chart shows the deadliest single kamikaze attacks on individual ships.

What the Special Attacks Achieved

The postwar American assessment was blunt in both directions. The USSBS acknowledged that the special attacks were the most effective air weapon Japan had in 1945 and explained why it had been adopted: “The one and only asset which they still possessed was the willingness of their pilots to meet certain death.” It also judged that the Japanese had misjudged what they were doing. They “were misled by their own inflated claims of heavy ships sunk,” and they “ignored the advice of their technicians that a heavier explosive head was required to sink large ships.” A Zero with a 250-kg bomb could wreck a carrier’s flight deck and kill hundreds of men, but it rarely reached the magazines or the waterline of a large armoured ship.

Three further reasons emerge from the action reports. First, many pilots aimed at the most visible part of a ship, the flight deck or the island, rather than at the waterline. Second, American damage control, practised since 1942 and refined after every hit, saved ships that by earlier standards would have been lost: Bunker Hill, Franklin, Laffey and Aaron Ward among them (Chapter 6). Third, the American defences described in Chapter 7 destroyed most attackers before they could choose their target, and the picket destroyers, by drawing attacks on themselves, protected the transports and carriers behind them.

The special attacks did achieve something real. They slowed operations at Leyte and Lingayen, tied the fast carriers for weeks to waters within reach of the Kyushu airfields, diverted B-29s from the cities to the airfields, and killed more U.S. sailors in three months off Okinawa than the Navy had lost in any campaign before. They did not change the outcome of any battle, and they could not, as Ōnishi had hoped in October 1944, stop the American fleet. Whether that was ever a realistic purpose, or whether the attacks were by 1945 chiefly a way of exacting a price for defeat, is a question Japanese historians and the veterans themselves have argued over since (Chapter 1; Chapter 9).

Ketsu-Gō: The Battle That Was Not Fought

Even as the Okinawa campaign went on, the Japanese Army and Navy were holding back aircraft for the decisive battle in the home islands, the plan called Ketsu-Gō (決号, “Operation Decisive”). Its first test was expected to come in southern Kyushu, where the Americans planned to land on 1 November 1945 in Operation Olympic, followed by Operation Coronet on the Kantō Plain near Tokyo in 1946.

The scale of what was waiting became clear only after the surrender. The USSBS found that “at the time of surrender, the Japanese had more than 9,000 planes in the home islands available for Kamikaze attack,” and “more than 5,000 had already been specially fitted for suicide attack to resist our planned invasion.” Giangreco, using Japanese planning documents, describes plans to expend about 5,000 aircraft against Olympic and 5,500 against Coronet within the first ten days of each landing, dispersed on more than 125 airfields and strips. American intelligence had estimated Japanese aircraft at about 6,700, later 7,200; after the surrender more than 12,700 were found. Woodford gives more than 10,000 aircraft for homeland defence. Many were trainers and obsolete types, and fuel and trained pilots were short; but the lesson of Okinawa was that even poor aircraft flown by poorly trained men could hit ships if enough of them came.

The air attacks were to be joined at sea by the special-attack boats and submarines described in Chapter 4: Shin’yō and Army explosive motorboats hidden in caves along the Kyushu and Shikoku coasts, Kaiten human torpedoes at shore bases, Kōryū and Kairyū midget submarines, Ohka rocket bombs adapted for launching from coastal catapults, and Fukuryū divers trained to attack landing craft from the sea bed with mines on poles. The CominCh Anti-Suicide Action Summary, dated 31 August 1945, was written to prepare the fleet for that battle.

The Special Attacks and the Decision to Use the Bomb

The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August and Nagasaki on 9 August 1945 belong to another part of this site (the 509th Composite Group and the decision; the Manhattan Project collection). The connection with the special attacks is real but should be stated with care.

What can be documented is this. American planners in the summer of 1945 had just watched Okinawa cost more than 12,500 Americans killed or missing on land and at sea (NHHC), with the Navy’s share driven by the kamikazes, and they expected the defence of Kyushu to be harder. The special attacks were the most visible evidence that Japanese forces would fight on regardless of losses, and the Navy was planning for them in detail. Richard B. Frank and other historians have shown how intelligence in July and August 1945 revealed Japanese forces on Kyushu, in the air and on the ground, growing far beyond earlier estimates. After the war, defenders of the decision, beginning with Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson in 1947, pointed to the scale of the resistance expected in an invasion.

What cannot be documented is that the kamikazes “caused” the decision, or that any specific casualty projection derived from them decided it. The decision was made by a small number of men for several reasons, including the wish to end the war quickly, the cost already paid, the diplomatic situation with the Soviet Union and the momentum of a weapon that had been built to be used. The USSBS itself concluded in 1946 that Japan would have surrendered “certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945,” even without the atomic bombs, the Soviet entry into the war or an invasion. That opinion has been used ever since by critics of the decision, and challenged by historians who argue that it was not supported by the Survey’s own interrogations of Japanese leaders. The special-attack record does not settle the argument. It explains why so many Americans in 1945 believed that the alternative to ending the war quickly would be a battle off Kyushu far worse than Okinawa.

The Last Attacks, July – August 1945

After the end of the Okinawa campaign the special attacks did not stop, but they became smaller and more scattered, and the Japanese increasingly conserved aircraft for Ketsu-Gō. On the night of 28–29 July the destroyer Callaghan (DD-792), on the picket line off Okinawa, was hit by a Willow, an obsolete biplane trainer, and sank with 47 dead and 73 wounded; DANFS dates the sinking to 02:35 on 28 July, NHHC’s H-Gram 051 to 29 July, probably a matter of time zones. She was the last U.S. destroyer sunk in the war and, in Gordon’s list, the last ship sunk by a kamikaze. The next night a Willow struck Cassin Young, killing 22 and wounding 42, among them her commanding officer. On 9 August, the day of the Nagasaki bomb, five B7A Grace torpedo bombers attacked four picket destroyers off Honshu, and one crashed into Borie (DD-704): 48 dead, 66 wounded.

The last U.S. ship hit by a kamikaze was the attack transport LaGrange (APA-124), at anchor off Okinawa on the evening of 13 August 1945. Two aircraft got through and struck her; 21 men were killed and 89 wounded (NHHC H-Gram 051). Two days later, on the afternoon of 15 August, after the Emperor’s broadcast, a Judy dive-bomber attacked four picket destroyers off Honshu and was shot down by Heermann with help from Black and Bullard, the last U.S. anti-aircraft action of the war.

Ugaki’s Last Flight, 15 August

Vice Adm. Ugaki Matome had commanded the Fifth Air Fleet at Kanoya since February 1945 and directed the Navy’s part in the Kikusui attacks on Okinawa (Chapter 5). He had been Yamamoto Isoroku’s chief of staff and had survived when the second bomber of Yamamoto’s flight was shot down in April 1943. He kept a diary throughout the war, published in Japan as Sensōroku and in English as Fading Victory (1991), one of the most important contemporary Japanese sources for the special attacks. On 11 March 1945, the day of the long-range raid on Ulithi, he wrote: “I also am determined to follow at some time after the young men in the Special Attack Corps.”

At noon on 15 August the Emperor’s broadcast announced that Japan accepted the Allied terms. That afternoon Ugaki, then at Ōita, ordered a special attack by the 701st Air Group’s Suisei (Judy) dive-bombers and announced that he would lead it himself. According to the account compiled by Bill Gordon, he addressed 22 men of the squadron and asked whether they would go with him, telling them that he was determined not to return alive. At about 17:00, some four hours after the broadcast, eleven aircraft took off. Ugaki rode in the lead plane, flown by Lt. Nakatsuru Tatsuo, the squadron leader. Three aircraft crash-landed in Kagoshima Prefecture with engine trouble; five men survived, and one of their crew, Flight Petty Officer 1st Class Hidaka Tamotsu, died after the landing. U.S. records, as cited by Gordon, recorded two aircraft crashing on Iheya-jima, an island north of Okinawa; the fate of the others is unknown. No American ship was hit. NHHC’s H-Gram 051 says that 19 Japanese lost their lives and that Ugaki’s plane probably dived into a sandbar in the darkness.

The flight was not an authorized operation. The surrender had been announced; no order from Tokyo called for further attacks; and Ugaki decided not only on his own death but, as his critics in Japan have said ever since, on the participation of the young men who flew with him. The brother of one of the airmen, interviewed decades later, put the other side of the story: “Even if my older brother had known that the war had ended, he probably would have made a sortie.” Both judgments are part of the record. What is not in doubt is that the last special attack of the war killed eighteen or nineteen Japanese airmen, including the admiral who led it, after the war was over.

Ōnishi’s Death, 16 August

Vice Adm. Ōnishi Takijirō, who had formed the first Special Attack Corps at Mabalacat in October 1944 (Chapter 1), had been vice chief of the Naval General Staff since May 1945. In the last days before the surrender he argued against accepting the Allied terms and for continuing the war. In the early hours of 16 August, at his official residence in Tokyo, he took his own life by seppuku; the time is given as about 02:30 on the memorial plaque erected at Bamban in the Philippines. Standard accounts say he refused help to end his life quickly and died some hours later.

He left a note. In the English translation published by Inoguchi and Nakajima in 1958, it was addressed first to the souls of the special attack dead, thanking them for what they had done and saying that he sought by his death to make amends to them and to their bereaved families. It then turned to the young people of Japan, urging them to work for the country’s welfare and for peace with the same devotion the special attackers had shown, and telling them: “You are the treasure of the nation.” The note is the closest thing to a verdict on the special attacks that their founder left. It does not say they were wrong. It accepts responsibility for the deaths, and it asks the living not to follow the dead.

Final note · Tokyo, 16 August 1945

“You are the treasure of the nation.”

— Vice Adm. Ōnishi Takijirō, to the young people of Japan; English translation in Inoguchi and Nakajima, The Divine Wind (1958), as quoted by kamikazeimages.net

Ōnishi was never tried; he died before the occupation began. Neither the Tokyo tribunal nor any other court was asked to judge the special attacks as such, which were attacks on warships by members of the armed forces. The moral judgment has been left to historians, to the veterans and to the families, and it is the subject of Chapter 9.

The Surrender

In the days after 15 August the Japanese armed forces stood down, not without friction: some officers at air bases tried to keep fighting, and there were isolated incidents, but the imperial order held. Under the occupation the aircraft held for Ketsu-Gō were disarmed and destroyed, and the boat depots and Kaiten bases dismantled. On 2 September 1945 the instrument of surrender was signed aboard the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay. Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz signed for the United States aboard a ship that a kamikaze had struck off Okinawa on 11 April; the dent it left in her rail can still be seen at Pearl Harbor (Chapter 9).

The Balance

Measured coldly, the special attacks were the most cost-effective weapon Japan had in the last year of the war, and they did more damage to the U.S. Navy than any other Japanese effort after 1942: several dozen ships sunk, hundreds damaged, several thousand men killed. Measured against the purpose for which Ōnishi created them, to stop the American fleet, they failed completely; no major warship was sunk, and the invasion of Okinawa went ahead on schedule. Measured in human terms, they cost the lives of some 4,000 Japanese airmen, most of them under twenty-five, and some 2,000 more in boats, submarines and other units, along with the thousands of Allied sailors they killed.

The last of them flew after the war had ended, behind an admiral who had decided to die; the man who had begun them killed himself the next night. Within three weeks the war was formally over. How Japan, the United States and the families on both sides have remembered the special attacks since is the subject of Chapter 9.