Comments by "Bruce Tucker" (@brucetucker4847) on "Kamikaze Tactics - Insane or Rational?" video.

@SuperCatacata Combat pilot is a young man's game, especially back then. Pappy Boyington was all of 30 years old when he took over VMF-214 and they thought he was a crazy old man. Young men dying in old men's wars has been lamented since the days of Herodotus at least.
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They may have been rational as a tactical response to the situation, but continuing the war at all after the disaster of the Philippine Sea and the conquest of the Marianas was complete insanity. Japan at that point was like the boxer who can't even throw a punch in response and can barely even hold his hands up but refuses to go down no matter how horrendous a pummeling he's getting from an opponent who's just landing punches at will. Alas, there was no sane manager to throw in the towel and no referee to stop the fight.
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Amusingly, the earliest American attempts to build a self-guided antiship mission involved using a pigeon trained to recognize a ship's silhouette (pigeons are very smart and very easily trained) in the missile's nose to guide it to the target. They never managed to make the concept work before more conventional "smart" weapons were developed. The problem with the Fritz-X, even had the Japanese had them, was that it required the operator to be in a plane flying more or less straight and level within visual range of the target. That would have worked for picket destroyers but for carriers the ability of the operator's plane to survive in airspace so thoroughly dominated by US fighters would have been very doubtful. That's the main reason the weapon had so little impact on the Normandy invasion - Allied air supremacy was much stronger over the Normandy beaches than it had been over Italian beaches in 1943. Allied jamming of the radio control signal was also a serious obstacle.
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