It is the Jesse Kelly Show. Another hour of The Jesse Kelly Show on a wonderful, fantastic Tuesday. And like we do from time to time, not all the time, not often, we're driving the show off the rails tonight. No more politics, at least for this hour. I'm going to try to get it all done tonight. I don't know how long it will take me, but we are going to do the history of the comic Colze in
World War Two, per your request. It was overwhelming how many people wanted to talk about this and learn about this. So if you missed last night's third hour, that is a good primer to get where we are now.
You don't need it, but it would help. And it's free.
iHeart Spotify iTunes, go download that, listen to it. I'm not going to cover all the background again of the Mongol invasion and the culture and the different things, so tonight we are going to begin essentially where we left off last night. Allow me to recap in about thirty seconds to a minute. Though Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, they are not under the impression, contrary to popular belief, that they were going to knock us out of the war. They knew that we were going to get in the war.
They knew that was going to get us into the war. The intention was to slow us down enough so they could dig in and take all the territory they wanted, Philippines, places like that, and then they would make it too bloody for us to take it back. We would do what countries had really always done, sue for peace. Even if they lose, they win because at the end they have more territory than they originally did. It works out great for them. Now here's what some people may not know.
Most people have heard of the Battle of Midway, But the Japanese were It's hard not to admire this about them. When you look at World War Two. There's all kinds of things to hate about the Japanese and all kinds of things to love and admire. They were majorly aggressive. Pearl Harbor was awful, right, it was terrible. I hate it, you hate it. That's quite an aggressive move. That's a bold move. Load up your fleet, sneak it across the Pacific, which they did. They took off in the fog, sneak
it across the Pacific and attack. So I had mentioned that early in World War Two, it was going poorly for us, really for all the Allies. Nineteen forty one nineteen forty two, these were bad years, and Japan was running into something. They were beating us, or at least getting us to withdraw on many occasions, certainly in naval battles, we would square off with the Japanese navy, you know, our navy squaring off against their navy. We lost a lot of those engagements. We lost a lot of them.
We were losing men. They were really good. Are planes in the sky. Mitsubishi Everyone knows who Mitsubishi is, the car manufacturer of Mitsubishi well as Japanese, and they created a World War two fighter plane for the Japanese known as the Zero. You would known as a zero if you know anything about it. It's a Mitsubishi Zero. It was really good. These guys were good. We were running into good good ships, good navy, good air.
These people are good at what they're doing.
And the Japanese thought, well, I mean, we're winning a lot of these engagements. Why don't we keep going? But here was always the problem lurking underneath the surface for the Japanese. They did not have the industry They did not have the economy that could rebuild the things they would lose. Even good things will get broken in combat. They didn't have the economy they could rebuild it, and
they didn't have the economy that could improve it. When I say improve it, you've heard of a Panzer tank. I'm sure that's a German tank, one of the German tanks that tigers and panzers and all kinds of things. There were several different versions of a panzer. A panzer didn't exist. There was version one, and version two, and version three and version They were always improving it. As combat goes along, your enemy learns what you can do, learns what you can't do, learns your weaknesses, and so
they're improving their counter weapons. So you have to improve your weapons. Japan couldn't do that. Their first punch was brutal, of course brutal. They didn't really have a second one. I say that because Midway Comes. Midway is a tremendous victory for America. We cannot really fully understand what a catastrope loss it was for Japan. You already know the story of Midway. Midway Island. It's an island about midway between Japan and US. It's out in the middle of
the ocean, so it got its name. We had broken their codes. We were reading their transmissions. We found out they were going to attack Midway and they were going to keep going. Remember the Japanese were coming for Hawaii. Did you know that, not just Pearl Harbor, they were coming back to take it. Midway was part of the step to do that. We found out they had this
big fleet coming to Midway. We brought our big fleet out to Midway, and essentially, on a large scale, we ambushed them, and we slapped them around good, and we sunk their carriers, and we took not only their planes out of the sky. This is going to matter for our kamikaze purposes, not just their planes, their pilots. The Japanese had excellent pilots and excellent planes. We had more. Ours were getting better by this point in time, and we won that engagement. Don't get me wrong, we lost
a lot of great men. The Japanese knew what they were doing. But at the end of Midway, yes, we had some damage, plenty of damage. They had plenty of damage. But we are in were America. We'll go back and make more planes.
We have an.
Amazing training system. Because of our financial situation in the country, our train you know, finances helped training too. Our pilots would get six hundred hours of training time before they went to combat. By the end of the Japanese involvement in World War Two, their pilots were going out with two hundred hours. All right, we just had better training, We had better more planes, more ships. We quickly replaced everything they couldn't After midway, they have to surrender all
their plans. No more trying to take Hawaii, no more nothing. Now Here is the situation for pan And we look at this understandably as Americans as we begin our long, brave, hard slog across the Pacific Island, hopping on our way to Japan to finally defeat the evil Japanese who sucker punched us. And that is the correct way for an American to look at that. You and me, that's correct. I'm not saying you're wrong or I'm wrong. How I
look at it too. Flip this, because you have to flip this to understand the concept of kamikaze and how it came to be for the Japanese. As we discussed last night. These islands are sacred to them. They're not just land. It's not just an island. The Emperor is sacred. The islands themselves are sacred. And now after Midway, you have this huge American navy that's getting bigger by the day. Remember, by the end of World War Two, America's navy was over built.
We had too many. We just we covered the oceans. You have this.
Huge American Navy with the Marines obviously in the army as well. Think about it like Godzilla, because that's how the Japanese thought about it. That concept came from us slowly swimming across the Pacific, this gigantic monster of destruction swimming its way across the Pacific towards your sacred island and your sacred Emperor, and they're coming to wipe all of you out. They're coming to wipe your existence off the map. You have to understand that's how Japan saw
this before we understand how they conducted themselves. Next, with the next few things that are coming, the next big one. There there are many land backs. I'm skipping over huge parts of this because it's more Comma cause he focused. But the next big one is the Battle of the
Philippine Sea. But before we get to the Battle of the Philippine Sea, since we're talking about suicides and kamakazis and suicide planes and suicide subs and suicide boats and suicide torpedoes and all these other things, we keep countering things with the Japanese during this that we can't wrap our minds around. In fact, there's video of this. You can actually go look it up on YouTube and look. It's ugly and it's dark, but it is safe for kids.
I'm not gonna I'll warn you if something's not safe for kids. There's video in color. You can go look at a Japanese pilot who had been shot down. He's alive, he's intact, he's fine. A US Navy ship pulls up beside him to pull him out of the water. He pulls out a grenade and holds it to himself and blows himself up right beside the ship. It is the Jesse Kelly Show on a Fantastic Tuesday. Remember you can email the show Jesse at Jesse kellyshow dot com. Not
really a political show. Right now, we're talking history. We're talking the history of the Japanese comic coze in World War Two.
And not the least bit sorry about it.
We'll get back to politics maybe next hour, maybe tomorrow, I don't know. All right, So we just had Midway Japanese loss. But it was a more catastrophic loss than we understand. Because if the Japanese send fifty planes after our fifty planes, and let's say each side loses twenty five planes, that sounds even, right. It was an even battle, not even close to an even battle, because we can replace twenty five planes like it was nothing. Jewish producer
Chris looked up the specific number. Here's a number for you. Out of one plant, one American plant, the United States of America could put out twenty to twenty five Hellcats in one day. The Japanese couldn't come close to matching anything like that. If we're losing the same number of things we're winning, they can't replace them. Midway happens, and now the Japanese know the gigantic monster Godzilla. He is crossing the Pacific, he's working his way across the islands,
and he's coming for their homeland. Now along the way, as we're talking about suicide and throwing your life away, for Japan, for the Emperor. Americans encounter a shocking amount of this during their fighting. This is not something the Allies in Europe encountered in mass In any way. Yes, there was lots of bravery over there on both sides and self sacrifice on both sides. This is nothing like they encountered in Europe. This is a This is completely
unique to the Pacific. The Japanese would be wounded or not wounded and pretending to be wounded, and they would just lay there until you would come up to them, and they'd pull a grenade. I watched eb Sledge didn't. Eugene Sledge didn't write about this in his book, which
is Wonderful with the Old Breed, but he didn't. I didn't read it in his book, but I watched an interview with him where he talked about how the Japanese would surrender and they would tuck a grenade with a pin pulled in each armpit, and they would have their hand up, their hands up, but their elbows would still be kind of pressed to their side, and as soon as they got close, woo, pop the elbows out, grenades come down, kill themselves. These the Japanese would strap explosives
to themselves. When they couldn't slow down our tanks and throw themselves onto our tanks, they used to have to go out on what were known by some of the.
Troops as.
Possum patrols. You know what a possum patrol is. You know what playing possum means. Playing possu means you pretend to be dead. The American troops, especially when unsupervised, they were so tired of Japanese soldiers coming back to life and killing themselves to kill an American. They would go out after a battle when they had a moment when you saw a Japanese soldier quote dead, you shot him in the head. You didn't walk up, You didn't try
to render aid, you didn't none of those things. You learned very early on that guy can kill you and will kill you. He'll kill himself to kill you. So they's just stopped even trying. Boom you put one in his head right away. Japanese troops, in every form, killing themselves to kill you was part of their culture. It was ingrained in their military culture. The Kamikazi. As we work our way towards them, it's treated as some radical new concept. They came up with and you may consider
it radical. I may consider it radical. It was radical. It is not a huge departure from how the Japanese fought that war the entire time. And keep this in mind. They just lost midway. Godzilla is swimming towards the islands, and they are getting more and more desperate the closer Godzilla gets there, as you would be as well, desperate, desperate in.
A way you can't imagine.
And then comes the Battle of the Philippines Sea.
It all adds up.
Don't get me wrong. All this stuff adds up. But if I had to point to one battle, one significant thing that led directly to the creation of the Kama Kaze, the special attack units, we'll get to that, but the Kama Kaze, it would be the Battle of the Philippine Sea. I won't break down all the details. Will do that another time. We've talked about it kind of before. But our Navy, our forces are marching across the Pacific, sailing across the Pacific. Obviously they're not Jesus, They're not walking
on water, sorry, Chris. They're marching across the Pacific, and the Japanese by now, as we discussed, they can't really replace their ships. They can't replace their good pilots. They don't have the money, the resources for a good pilot training program, and so they're really down to kind of the last of their good planes. And they've lost already most of their good pilots, but not all of their good pilots.
And they look at.
This fleet and they decide, we have to throw all of our ships, all of our planes at the American Now we have to fight the Battle of the Philippines Sea as if it is everything. And so they loaded up everything they had and they sent it at the Americans.
Will continue in a moment.
It is the Jesse Kelly Show on a wonderful, wonderful Tuesday. Remember you can email us Jesse at Jesse kellyshow dot com. Back to our story about the Kamakazie Godzilla is getting closer to the islands of Japan soon, the Japanese decide they need to throw everything at us in the Philippine Sea. Now, the Philippines we will get to in a few minutes, because that's really where this whole thing kind of kicks off, the kamakazi stuff kicks off. But the Philippines are now
and were then a wild, wild place. I heard or read a stat on the Philippines that they have something like seven thousand islands. Isn't Isn't that completely bonkers? You don't think about the Philippines in that way whatever you know about at least I did, And obviously I knew it's an island chain thousands. That seems crazy. But not only was it crazy, it's crazy rich in resources. The Philippines they have all the resources Japan wanted. And it's
not an accident. You know, the Baton Death March, that was the Philippines. Okay, that was the Philippines. Why would the Japanese pounce on us in the Philippines right after Pearl Harbor? Why were they so hot to take this place? It was maybe the place they prized the most as far as resources go. They wanted to take it, They wanted to hold it, and frankly, as the war fought on,
they had to hold it. Besides the Japanese home islands themselves, they valued the Philippines probably more than anything else because they had to have those rears horses. They had to have them, which brings us to the Philippine Sea. They drag up whatever navy they have left, they drag up the planes they have left, they drag up the pilots they have left, and they throw them at us in
the Battle of the Philippine Sea. The Battle of the Philippine Sea, maybe you haven't heard of before, because you know what the Americans called it, the Great Marianna's Turkey Shoot. That's what they called it. Why would they call it that? We just completely annihilated them the Japan of early nineteen forty two. They could take out our ships. They're pilots who could take out our pilots. That Japan was gone. The ships were rotted, the shoot, the gasoline was bad,
the pilots were bad. The planes. Remember that great Mitsubishi zero, which was great in the beginning, Well they still had some Mitsubishi zeros. But you know what I mean, Erica was doing with all of its money, with all of its resources, advancing getting better planes.
Better.
This better that we're churning out course airs now in hellcats. Don't worry about specifically what those are. Just know they're better, bigger, stronger, faster. The Mitsubishi Zero as the same as it ever was. They couldn't improve it didn't have the materials, didn't have the money, didn't have anything. They rolled out all their best stuff that they had in the Philippine Sea and got completely wiped out, swept off the ocean, in the air, in the sea. Now, that is not a huge battle
for US historically. I mean, people know about it, who know about World War Two. But I'm going to describe that battle. This is the best way I'll describe that battle. I want you to picture this as an American. You an American. Let's say we have in our military is much bigger than this. Let's say we have five hundred thousand troops, Army, Marines, all those things. Five hundred thousand troops.
Let's say the Chinese they land a couple million troops on the shore of California and they start making their way towards Washington, d C. To wipe out our government and take over our country. We take all five hundred thousand troops and we send them out to California. We're gonna stop the Chinese here. In fact, this is all we have. We have to stop the Chinese here. If they take out all these troops, what stands between them in Washington, D C. We have to stop them here,
and then you wake up tomorrow morning. You roll over, wipe the sleep out of your eyes. You pick up your phone and the headline, the first headline you read is all five hundred thousand troops lost in California. That's what the Battle of the Philippine was for Japan. You just threw all you had left at us and we wiped it out without even losing that much. That was the last of your traditional I want to stress this,
that was the last of your traditional forces. Our destroyers taking on your destroyers, our fighters taking on your fighters are subs versus. You tried one last big traditional battle and you didn't even scratch us. You got crushed and now you have nothing left. What are you thinking now in Japan. Well, here's the thing about warfare, and it is one thing I definitely have learned in all my time reading about history and watching history, geeking out on
it the same way you geek out on it. You know who wants to fight traditionally and insists on fighting traditionally the more powerful country every single time.
You know who.
Resorts to tactics that are thought of as dirty gorilla, not fair, the weaker power. Everybody wants to fight. Traditionally, I don't want to become a gorilla fighter. You don't want to become a gorilla fighter. I want to raise my army and raise my ships, and raise my air force, and I want them to be more powerful than yours and wipe you off to sea, and wipe you off
the land, and wipe you out of the air. But if those options become no longer available to me, then I either lay down my arms and quit, or I throw out tradition and I have to go with other means. So Japan had a choice to make. Now what are those other means? Well, as we discussed last night, you would kind of need the third hour of last night show, or at least no what I'm talking about to really fully understand this. What is the thing that Japan still has. They may not have the.
Ships, they may not have the fuel, they may not have.
All the fight and all the modern fighter planes and the bombs and everything else. But what do they still have. They still have an entire country of people who have been nurtured and trained, you'd call it indoctrinated, probably in a willingness to die for the emperor, in a willingness to die for the country. And that may not be as valuable as an American aircraft carrier, It may not be as valuable as fifty hellcats with well trained pilots. But it's all you've got. If it's all you've got,
then you better lead with that. You better use it because it's all you've got. When I was in sales and selling RBS, I didn't know anything about our vs, no that nothing. I had never sold r v's before.
I knew nothing. You know what I could do. I could make you laugh.
I could make you relax, make you laugh and talk. Guess what I didn't want to do. I didn't Well, the wall is actually three quarters of.
An m stick. Nope, I can't do it.
I don't have that option available to me. I'll tell you a stupid joke. I'll make you laugh. You lead with whatever you've got. After the Battle of the Philippine Sea, they had to lead with their people, but they also didn't have the pilots left. As we talked about America, really, I mean, we really did it so smart. Our pilots are experienced pilots.
You know.
We'd have these pilots and they'd go, they'd fight, they'd get these kills and fight and get kills, and fight and get kills, and then we would rotate them out. We didn't want them staying in combat till they died. We'd rotate them back to America. And so these super experienced pilots were training the next generation of pilots, getting the ultimate education. Japan didn't and Japan couldn't. They didn't have the numbers. Their experienced pilots are gone. What do
you do? What do you do as Godzilla swims towards the Philippines which you need? You create a special attack force. Next it is the Jesse Kelly Show on a Wonderful Tuesday, talk in the history of Japanese kamic cozies. If you miss any part of the show last night and at the beginning of it, well it was a third hour of last night.
Any part of the.
Show ever, iHeart Spotify iTunes. Japanese lose the Battle of the Philippines Sea. They can't fight traditionally anymore, and so they come up with a plan. They decide to use what they have, and what they have is a country full of people who will will die for it, will die for the Emperor, including young pilots and they even start scarfing up people who had previously been exempted from military service. And this is something that happens in every
country when it starts to lose a war. And whenever a country does this, when we read about it or talk about it, we always kind of look down on them. Oh, look at that they're conscripting teenagers. Look at that they're conscripting older people.
How could they do that?
But the truth is every country does it when that country gets desperate enough. When the situation gets desperate enough, countries will do it. Countries will well, they'll grab what they have. They started grabbing young Japanese men, some of whom were completely exempted from this, some of whom were already in pilot school. And they handed them a sheet of paper. And on this sheet of paper it had
three choices on it. It's kind of hilarious, but the three choices were I will enthusiastically they're asking them, if you'll be a kamakzi pathot, I will enthusiastically die for the emperor, I will die for the emperor, or I refuse to die for the emperor. Two of the three were I'll die for the emperor and I do not want to sit here and act as if they were all forced or coerced.
Many were all.
We have to really figure out what's inside of their minds. Are the letters they wrote back home. The stories will differ depending on which book you're reading, or which documentary you're watching or podcast you're listening to. But the number I kept hearing fairly consistently was about two thirds of the Kamakzies were volunteers, willing, completely willing. As it went on, the volunteer became less and less and they had to kind of force more people, but they did find a
willing population. Now pause on everything, and let's describe the few different kinds of kamakazis, because we're only really going to focus on the one really main one, the one most successful one.
There were.
Kama Kazi boats. These are tiny little boats. They're not very big. Japan was so hurting for parts at this time that they were putting car engines in these little boats. You know, you don't have to sink any money into the material of the boat. You just have to get it to where it's going, and you have to load enough explosives into it. It was paper mache. I mean it was lightwood with a car engine and a bunch of explosives in it.
And the idea was.
You zoom this boat up to a big American ship and simply crash it into the side of it. It had a few whose sticking out the end and when the fuse hit, boom. The reason you haven't heard that much about these is, I'm sure it happened. I could not find a documented recording of a kill of one of these things. It may have happened. Don't get me wrong. You could welcome to email me and correct me. I'm not saying it didn't happen. If it happened, it was rare.
The reason we know so much about these boats is after we ended up spoiler Alert, winning the war and taking over Japan, we discovered legions of these boats all over Japan. They were preparing, They were preparing for Godzilla to be ray outside of the island. Also another form submarines. Now people confuse these two. The Japanese had Kamikazi submarines and Kamakazi torpedoes. Believe it or not, those are two different things. The submarines, again, I'm sure there were hits.
I'm sure they were kills. It was never done that successfully. Remember, submarine technology in World War Two on every side was nothing close to what it is today. You need to set aside your modern thinking of it. When a submarine went underwater back then, because of the technology they had, it was one easily visible to a plane flying overhead. You're gonna look down and see that's a submarine. It's very obvious. Have you ever seen a helicopter flying over
a beach today looking at sharks? How obvious are the sharks? You look down, you see them. That's how obvious a submarine would have been. It's not only obvious that it's there. They're super slow, majorly slow, way slower than any ship. If you were a submarine and you got seen, you were in deep trouble. So they didn't get a huge amount of success either. But also another thing we discovered when we took over at the end of the war, they were building legions of these boats submarines to take
out Godzilla. There was also a Japanese torpedo. Really freaking cool, by the way, a Japanese torpedo that is exactly what it sounds like. They would put some poor sap. They created essentially a cockpit in a torpedo, and the Japanese, Yeah, Chris was amazing, and the Japanese had amazing torpedoes. They were called long lance long lance torpedoes, which I know
is a cool name, long lance torpedoes. They found a way to put a pilot in one so he could I mean, torpedo is much faster than a submarine, so they could launch him from something at an American ship and he could guide it into the side of the American ship. The reason I'm mentioning all these things in passing is not because they're not cool. They're all kind of cool in a way. It's wild to think of the different ways they were planning on using their people
who were willing to die. But I just kind of passed over most of these because they just were never employed in any significant way and they never did any amount of significant damage. I am not, of course, dismissing any loss of life that did come from these things, or American sailors marines who were killed by these things. I just can't find much of a record of it. And I looked, I looked at if there was a
significant loss. I've never read about it ever. Maybe been a little ship here hurt or a little ship there hurt. They just didn't do very much damage. What did do unbelievable amounts of damage more than you know about are the planes as we sailed towards the Philippines, the kamikaze were deployed. Will hopefully finish up our talk next. Maybe not, but we'll try.