Passing the buck of responsibility to the officer in charge

FRENZIED brainwashed loyalists ready to die for their Emperor, they were manic in their patriotic determination to destroy American shipping.

Their faces fixed in vicious resolution as they speeded downward from the sky, knowing they would die on impact, they were nonetheless madly secure in their conviction that they personified the best of the Samurai and Bushido ethic. Highly skilled suicides in the flower of their youth.

That tends to be the image of Japan’s Kamikaze pilots in the second world war. Just under 2,000 of them dive-bombed US aircraft carriers in the Pacific in the dying days of the conflict.