On November 21, 1944, kamikaze aircraft continued their assault on the US Seventh Fleet supporting the Leyte campaign in the Philippines, part of a deliberate new tactic Japan had adopted weeks earlier as conventional naval power collapsed. The suicide strikes, born of desperation after catastrophic losses at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October, signaled a grim shift toward attritional terror that would intensify through Okinawa in 1945.
By late November 1944, Japan's Combined Fleet had been shattered at Leyte Gulf, the largest naval battle in history, leaving Tokyo without the ships to contest American command of the sea. Vice Admiral Takijiro Onishi had organized the first organized kamikaze unit, the Shimpu Special Attack Squadron, reasoning that a pilot and a bomb-laden aircraft aimed deliberately at a ship could inflict damage no ordinary bombing run could guarantee against overwhelming American anti-aircraft fire.
Through November, kamikaze strikes hit escort carriers, cruisers, and destroyers screening the Leyte beachhead, killing sailors and forcing the fleet to adopt new defensive formations and combat air patrols. American gunners described the eerie discipline of pilots who held course through flak rather than breaking off, a tactic that unsettled veteran crews more than the physical damage itself.
The human cost on the Japanese side was staggering and calculated: over the following year, more than 3,800 kamikaze pilots, many barely out of flight school, were expended in a strategy that ultimately sank or damaged dozens of Allied ships but could not reverse the war's trajectory. Leyte marked the tactic's grim debut as a sustained campaign rather than an isolated experiment.