While the Kamikaze was a brutal and morally abhorrent tactic, if you were to look at it from the viewpoint of the imperial high command, it was far from “pointless”-as the article indicates, it was an accurate and surprisingly effective method of attacking and disabling U.S. aircraft carriers, carried out because the high command refused to accept that the tactic could, at best delay the coming defeat, not prevent it. It was stupid, but it was grounded in a form of twisted logic and a mindset in which acceptance of defeat was not possible.

IN that sense, the Kamikaze tactic was little different from the insistence on the part of the high command of BOTH sides in the Great War (the one Americans insist on calling “World War I”, as though everybody knew there was going to be another war after it while it was still being fought and that every life lost was lost simply as a prequel to the war that actually mattered) that their troops keep killing each other until the moment the Armistice went into force at 11am on November 11, 1918"the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month”- even though everyone in the high commands knew that nothing that happened in the last 24 hours of that spectacularly pointless conflict was going to make any real difference in how events in the postwar world played out. In both cases, the choice was to send young men to their deaths in the name of an useless, arrogant concept known as “honor”.