Nemo121
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Joined: 2/6/2004
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HansBolter,
Ah, ok. Sorry your use of alternate reality and the manner in which the question of "should they run out" was posed led me up the wrong street. My apologies.
In terms of having the numbers.... Well whenever they were running short the Japanese simply seem to have used peer pressure to get entire waves of IJAAF personnel ( these needn't be pilots but guards, various admin personnel, crews from bombers etc ) to volunteer to transition to kamikaze missions or just general 17 to 20 year olds in the general populace to volunteer.
To give some idea of the number of people who had volunteered for suicide missions:
According to Kamikaze Attacks of WW2 the Japanese themselves listed 1450 suicide motor boats available in Formosa for use against an invasion in July 45 with a total of 4,300 suicide motorboats of all types available as of end of July 1945. In addition they had some minisubs which had torpedoes replaced with contact triggers - thus turning them into suicide/ramming subs.
It should also be noted that while the crew of the suicide motor boats weren't particularly well-trained Kaiten crew were often trainee pilots. So, at this stage of the war not only did Japan have enough pilots for kamikaze missions but they actually were able to send small numbers on to be trained for Kaiten crewing.
In addition they had 1200 fully trained Fukuryu - suicide divers - with another 2800 or so ready to commence training by war's end. Training wouldn't exactly have taken too long but the key point is that that's another 4,000 men who had volunteered for missions which guaranteed their deaths.
All in all between the 5,000 pilots assigned to kamikazes in August 1945 if the HIs ever got invaded, the 4,000 suicide frogmen and the 4,000+ suicide motorboat pilots + the innumerable IJA troops who had contact-triggered AT mines on poles ( another suicide job ) + kaiten pilots + suicide minisub crews I easily count 15,000 men who'd volunteered for kamikaze type missions ( although they weren't all pilots of course ). Bottom line though, I just don't see that a shortage of volunteers was a problem for Japan.
I think they had enough volunteers for any suicide plane/boat/sub/hair-brained scheme they could develop and produce. Certainly everything I've ever read points to the limiting factor in number of kamikaze missions being availability of planes, not pilots. I think the game should represent that by allowing a limitless number of kamikaze pilots albeit that their experience on being recruited sucks.
I'd be happy to hear a counter-argument with quotes from Japanese documents stating they had kami planes but no pilots cause of a lack of volunteers/conscripts but all I've ever seen happen when they had too few volunteers was that they'd "volunteer" an entire unit and pilots who didn't want to be kamikazes could "opt out". Given the way Japanese society worked no-one ever opted out so they technically all volunteered even though, really, this wasn't so. Either way, the High Command got its 30 or 50 pilots and was able to send them out to die like good little drones whenever it wanted.
One thing to bear in mind is that if you DO send out 50 a day every day then pilot low naval skill will plummet and what you do send out will be ineffective. As you say it is much more likely to occur in pulses where little happens for 15 days and then 750 go out in a day. On average though one could easily see 1500 kamis + 1,000 conventional types being used per month for a pilot loss rate of 2,500 per month. At that rate Japan could simply be unable to recruit even a 1 Exp pilot 2 months into 1944. That seems like a seriously broken outcome for me in which the code may be working as designed but the impact on PBEMs may be completely unrealistic.
In reality Japan faced a simple algorithm. It could have more and more pilots per month if it was willing to graduate them with lower and lower experience/skill. Eventually that leads us to a situation where you have an infinite number of trainees but they graduate so quickly that they have negligible skill ( represented by exp 1, skill 1 ).
< Message edited by Nemo121 -- 12/9/2011 2:12:44 AM >
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Well, that's that settled then.
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