Desperate Sunset: Japan's kamikazes against Allied ships, 1944-45

In a last desperate bid to stave off defeat, Japan's High Command launched the terrifying kamikaze attacks.

By the middle of 1944, Imperial Japan's armed forces were in an increasingly desperate situation. Its elite air corps had been wiped out over the Solomons in 1942–43, and its navy was a shadow of the force that had attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941. But the Japanese had one last, desperate, card to play.

The Japanese High Command decided that the way to inflict maximum damage on the supe...