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The Kamikaze's were much more dangerous to crews, particularly exposed crews like lookouts and AAA personnel or crews on unarmored ships like DDs/DEs than the ships, but the Kamikaze's did eat into the available escort vessels off Okinawa. DD/DE losses, not just sunk but ships damaged to the extent that they could not stay on station, were getting severe enough to cause a lot of concern.

That's true. My point is that as a weapon system, kamikazes were reasonably effective at getting hits if they could get through the flak and cap -- which was rare if one considers the numbers of a.c. that made the effort. When they got hits, most of the time they did not do critical damage to the ship, although there were some spectacular exceptions. In particular, also, the idea that a torpedo bomber kamikaze would do similar damage as a successful non-kamikaze torpedo attack is silly, because in most instances if you drop a torpedo against the superstructure or side of a ship, you've dropped a heavy, penetrating, non-exploding missile that gets tossed overboard.

I don't have a problem with late war allied uber cap. Reading the AARs it is clear that kamikazes are less effective than historically. But it is late and inadequate compensation for the exaggerated Japanese power projection capability of 1941-1943, and for exaggerated Japanese production from 1943-1945..

27 sunk.

Class Attacks Hits
CL/CA/BB 48 44%
CV 44 41%
CVE/CVL 37 48%
DD 241 36%
AP/APA/AK/AKA 21 43%
LSM/LST/LSV 49 22%
Small Craft 37 22%

Morse and Kimball, 1951

Harry, can you give a little more info on that table?

What is considered an "attack"? An attack episode (multiple per day)? A days worth of attacks by Kamis? The ship as the object of the attack?

How many planes involved in the attack?

How many planes hit of total? (reflection of accuracy).

Example, against flight-decks, does that 41% mean that 44 flight decks were attakced, and 18 were damaged? Or there were 44 attacks against CVs (so you might have 5 attacks against the same CV (such as Formidable).

You usually produce good documentation, but please to expound a little more on what you've got in that table.

Thanks,
-F-

Bill Gordon, around a decade ago, retallied USN ship losses to Kamikazes and put the tally as follows (which anyone can read by checking Wikipedia entry from Kamikazes):

three escort carriers: USS St. Lo, USS Ommaney Bay, USS Bismark Sea
14 destroyers
3 high-speed transport ships
5 LST
4 LSM
3 LSM(R)
1 auxiliary tanker
3 Canadian Victory ships
3 Liberty ships
2 high-speed minesweepers
1 Auk class minesweeper
1 ocean tug, USS Sonoma
1 submarine chaser
2 PT boats
2 LCS
1 LCI (Large)

These efforts (and damaging another 100 or so ships) cost roughly 4,000 Japanese a.c.

LOL....2 PT boats. KABLAMMO!

The thought does inspire in the mind a vision of, errm, the sudden creation of lots of, umm, toothpicks.

I did a tabulation of an Appendix in Morrison's 14th Volume of his USN History.  It's a list of USN Ships sunk or badly damaged (i.e. out of action for at least 30 days) from Feb 17-30 July 1945 (basically Iwo Jima and Okinawa operations).  I tried to weed out the ships hit only by bombs from a non-kamikaze, but I probably missed a few.
 
BB - 2 Damaged, inc. 1 not fixed until after VJ Day (Maryland)
CV - 5 Damaged, inc. 3 not fixed until after VJ Day (Bunker Hill, Enterprise, Franklin)
CVE - 1 Sunk, 2 Damaged, inc. 1 (Sangammon) that was scrapped/decom before fixing
CA - 1 Damaged (Indianapolis)
CL - 1 Damaged (Birmingham)
DD/DM - 13 Sunk, 47 Damaged, inc. 18 not fixed until after VJ Day and 13 that were scrapped/scuttled/decom before fixing
DE/APD - 1 Sunk, 16 Damaged, inc. 4 not fixed until after VJ Day and 5 that were scrapped/scuttled/decom before fixing
Mine/Patrol - 2 Sunk, 3 Damaged, inc. 1 not fixed until after VJ Day
AP/AK/AV - 3 Sunk, 10 Damaged, inc. 5 not fixed until after VJ Day
LCI/LCT/LSM/LST - 9 Sunk, 15 Damaged, inc. 7 not fixed until after VJ Day and 4 that were scrapped/scuttled/decom before fixing

ORIGINAL: Feinder

27 sunk.

Class Attacks Hits
CL/CA/BB 48 44%
CV 44 41%
CVE/CVL 37 48%
DD 241 36%
AP/APA/AK/AKA 21 43%
LSM/LST/LSV 49 22%
Small Craft 37 22%

Morse and Kimball, 1951

Harry, can you give a little more info on that table?

What is considered an "attack"? An attack episode (multiple per day)? A days worth of attacks by Kamis? The ship as the object of the attack?

How many planes involved in the attack?

How many planes hit of total? (reflection of accuracy).

Example, against flight-decks, does that 41% mean that 44 flight decks were attakced, and 18 were damaged? Or there were 44 attacks against CVs (so you might have 5 attacks against the same CV (such as Formidable).

You usually produce good documentation, but please to expound a little more on what you've got in that table.

Thanks,
-F-

Individual incidents. Attacks were single kamikazes that reached their terminal dive on identifiable ships. I don't know how many kamikazes took off, but this was the number that actually made through the CAP and long range AA. CVs were attacked 44 times, resulting in 18 hits.

ORIGINAL: Feinder

There's a flaw in your historic account.

There's no flaw in my historical account.  [;)]

Most of  us (myself included) are all very well aware of the fact that that Japan had roughly 7000 planes they were "saving" for Operation Olympic.  I was simply stating that during the course of 1945, there were only 7 - 8 days that Japan launched an "all out" Kamikaze attacks on the US/UK fleets.  There is nothing incorrect or misrepresentative about that statement.

The Historical Picture - Japan chose to save those 7000 planes for Operation Olympic, both sides knew they were looking at November-ish for the assault (the summer/fall being hte typhoon season).  They saved those planes because had they used them in June/July/August, they would NOT have been available in November.  And FYI, despite popular perception, Japanese aviators were generlly -NOT- rushing to bang down the doors of the Kamikaze recruiting office.

The WitP picture - Let's say it's July 1945 in-game, and you have that 7000 plane reserve available to you to sling at the Allied fleets.  You mirror the historical situation.  If you want to sling those 7000 planes at the Allied fleets, go ahead - that's 1500/planes a month = 5 or 6 250+ plane strikes per month.  Difference being, in WitP you can replace many of those planes by November (altho 7000 planes in 4 months is a bit ambitious, I'd say you could replace 5000).

-F-

So what do you mean by "saving" a/c? That seems to suggest they had no choice. It was a strategic decision on their part, despite that it might has been the only practical one left after the Marianas. When you make a strategic decison to either pull back your a/c from other spots, or at least not reinforce them and keep them at home, that is all a matter of saving them. What else could you call it if you disagree with that simple term I used? So you would call it chickening out or something? Please do tell.

As far as your assertion that 7-8 15-+ raids were in the minority, or to be more precise that peeny packets were the majority, we have to come to a matter of definitions. If you meant by that, which would seem really simplistic, that there were more "attacks" that were peeny packets, well that is meaningless, because given we can trust the info you threw in there 10 attacks of on eplane apiece is more attacks than 8 150+ attacks, but of course FAR less kami sorties, which is what I was talking about. Anyway I will assume we're talking sorties instead. Usinig your data again, and understand we are talking Operation Olympic here, not the totality of HI attacks to come.

Do you think that OO was to be almost enitrely a USN attack (IOW little to no RN)? If so, then I will present what is not the totality of the kami attacks agaiinst the USN, but the Okinawa ones anyway, and you will see on that alone, how the penny packet sorties were not the majority. See here:



During just the Okinawa campaign, the Japanese Army and Navy combined lost 1,900 aircraft in suicide attacks, 2,255 in combat operations, 2,655 in operational accidents and more than 1,000 that were destroyed on the ground. In contrast, the USN lost 565 aircraft and the British Pacific Fleet lost 203 - 32 destroyed by Kamikazes, 30 in the accidental hanger fire on Formidable, 33 in combat, 61 (mostly Seafires) in deck-landing accidents and 47 from other causes. As the British Pacific Fleet started out with 218 operational aircraft, these losses put a severe strain on the replenishment system.

USN Ships Sunk and Damaged by Kamikazes3
Sunk Damaged
Ship Type Qty Ship Type Qty
CVE 3 CV 16
DD 13 CVL 3
DE 1 CVE 17
DMS 2 BB 15
SC 1 CA 5
AM 1 CL 10
APD 3 DD 87
LST 5 DE 24
ATO 1 SS 1
Auxiliary 1 DM 13
PC/PT 3 DMS 15
Total 34 AGP/AGS 3
AH 1
AK/AKA/AKN 6
AM 10
AO 2
APA/APD/APH 30
ARL 2
ATF 1
AV/AVP 4
CM 1
LST 11
PC/PT 3
YDG/YMS 7
Total 288


Find it here: http://www.navweaps.com/index_tech/tech-042.htm


Now, taking your 8 150+ sortie strikes you get ballpark 1200 kami's. Notice the kami sorties listed here, 1900 (which would leave 700 for penny packets). Especially since the kamis enjoyed so many hits, I see no reason why they wouldn't at least achieve a good number of larger raids during OO, because I think you infer to penny packet is tantamount to failure, and usually to amass a good number of planes like that is to use them at least in the ratiio you had displayed against the USN, but, again, it anybody's guess. Maybe IJ considered their kami attacks as failures at Okinawa (I've no idea) and so they abandon the kamis before OO, but why would you have them ready for that role otherwise?

I also don't agree when you infer that the 3500 planes would not had been used for kamis, because people weren't allegedly beating down doors to fly that way. Study just the Okinawa raids and see a different picture. If you can manage 1900 in such a short period of time, and arguably OO could had been shorter, what makes you think they can't fill another 3500 which might had even been filled during Okinawa? True, there were more Okinawa standard sorties used than kamis (standard procedure to escort them), but I don't see that as being enough to assume that defense of the very HI's themselves wouldn't had seen the same ratio. But, think what you want to think, that's fine. We all enjoy our speculations.

One thing to note about the Kikusui raids (large scale kamikaze attacks during the Okinawa campaign) is that they weren't typically a single strike of 150+ kamikazes.  Those sorties happened over the course of the day (sometimes multiple days).  They were usually staging from multiple airfields spread across the region from the HI, Formosa, other islands in the Ryukus, etc.  Those raids hit the invasion fleet as individual strikes.
 
The most successful Kamikaze attacks were the ones that snuck in undetected until the last minute, since it was very difficult to overwhelm the US/RN CAP and AAA with one big raid by this time.  Many of the attacks happened around dawn or dusk when visual spotting was difficult and before the CAP (particularly USAAF CAP) was up and in place.

The most successful Kamikaze attacks were the ones that snuck in undetected until the last minute, since it was very difficult to overwhelm the US/RN CAP and AAA with one big raid by this time.

The most successful kamikaze strikes were the ones that were nowhere near task groups that operated CAP. Had it come to an actual invasion of Japan, the US would likely have employed J. Thach's (yeah, *that* Thach), "Big Blue Blanket" strategy which was, for want of a better term, "Uber CAP."

PBEM stock game experience

July 1944, I launched four Kamikaze attacks till date...hit percentage is some 15 %  of launched aircrafts (firts strike got more then 30% hit rate, last one against British carriers was slaughtered  by CAP and only three hits to armored CVs ... )

units experience 40-55
Oscars and Betty planes

For what it's worth, I'd say a contributing factor to "uber CAP" in WitP is the (over) effectiveness of Radar.  Radar was but part of the equation.  Radar could say where the strike was coming in from, the CAP directors would sned the planes on a guestimated intercept vector, and then the flight leaders would have to find the enemy.
 
There were many instances when an incoming flight was detected on radar, but not intercepted by CAP (either because of poor vectors by CAP controller or the fact that once CAP got there, they had a box of about 2 x 2 x 2 miles to search for enemy (which is actually a considerable amount of airspace).
 
That being said, the effectiveness of strikes/patrols finding an enemy fleet is also seems to be greatly over-stated.  THere were many occasions when the Japanese strikes/patrols were unable to locate TF-38, and you're talking well over 200 ships about 100 miles off the coast.  But there were many times when a ships radar operator watched an inbound patrol/strike wander around looking for the fleet, CAP was sent off to intercept, and strike never found TF-38 and CAP never found the strike.

ORIGINAL: Panther Bait

One thing to note about the Kikusui raids (large scale kamikaze attacks during the Okinawa campaign) is that they weren't typically a single strike of 150+ kamikazes.  Those sorties happened over the course of the day (sometimes multiple days).  They were usually staging from multiple airfields spread across the region from the HI, Formosa, other islands in the Ryukus, etc.  Those raids hit the invasion fleet as individual strikes.

The most successful Kamikaze attacks were the ones that snuck in undetected until the last minute, since it was very difficult to overwhelm the US/RN CAP and AAA with one big raid by this time.  Many of the attacks happened around dawn or dusk when visual spotting was difficult and before the CAP (particularly USAAF CAP) was up and in place.

If 150+ planes don't form up together, or at least don't strike within mere minutes of each other, regardless of where they came from, I for one wouldn't call that a group that large, but a series of packets, be they the penny variety or not.