Banzai charge and suicide attack mechanics

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Japanese did crazy banzai charges especially at nights to force americans to meele combat. With current meele mechanic this wont be effective. Devs can add bayonet charge mechanic for japanese faction something like call of duty waw

it seems dumb but actually was very effective. To readress american superior fire power, they forced enemy to close range combat.

Also suicide soldiers which some tnts, anti tanks mines or granades attached to their body. When they die, their bomb/granade release itself immediately after and decimate nearby enemy

i dont think we neeb specific kamikaze unit. We have more than enough kamikazes in current campaigns :smiley:

But some special kamikaze crafts maybe premium

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It was a cultural thing, and it was a tremendous waste of resources almost every time they tried it, the bonsai charge, there are numerous references that Highlight this, it was generally a desperate move born out of frustration and emotional decision making to charge at the enemy instead of staying in their entrenchments.

It can be likened to the Russian human wave of attacks. That also often were a tremendous waste of resources.

Kamikaze attacks with aircraft and other weapons like the torpedoes and the fast attack boats did cause considerable damage during the latter stages of the war but this is a something different entirely from the bonsai charge.

Off Okinawa the Japanese inflicted serious Damage to the US Navy I believe in terms of casualties suffered for a naval engagement It was the highest of the war, one historian noted that all of the primary American naval officers that were present did not live very long after the war, The assertion being that the tremendous stress levels that they were operating under as their ships were hit almost on a daily basis by kamikazes Affected their health to the extent that it shortened their lives

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Needles to say but Japanese army was modernized army with general military theory. Ordinally, they charged when their artillery caused sufficient damage on enemy forces and have support of machine guns and artilleries.
Basically the Banzai Charge was only carried out in an overwhelmingly disadvantageous situation of firepower or a fairly desperate situation that where the withdrawal place is lost and food, weapons and equipment are exhausted.
Similar tactics is also found in other countries. For example, firepower of the Chinese army was significantly inferior to that of the Japanese army, so sometimes they did desperate assaults to Japanese positions with swords.

Surely there are affects of culture/rule that do not allow surrender, but in fact this problem was caused by both failure of strategy and logistics.

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Many of the Chinese units only had swords, so them using them in combat was not unheard of.

It was a cultural thing in the sense that they would willingly sacrifice Themselves for the greater good.

But there were several incidents where the Japanese conducted bonsai charges when it would’ve been much better for them to not have done that if the objective was to prolong the battle and kill more Americans in the doing. Both Okinawa and Iwo Jima have examples of this, and the Japanese command was divided about whether or not to do this during both battles, In both instances they had enough supplies and equipment to last them but they chose to charge the enemy in a very misguided attempt at routing them, this is in part where the cultural element comes in, the Japanese did believe that there warrior spirit would carry the day, perhaps not to a man but generally they believed that there will to fight was greater than that of their enemies, and while it’s certainly pretty easy to argue that the Japanese were the best infantry soldiers in the world, this arrogant viewpoint would actually be there Undoing.

And it wasn’t the imperial Japanese Army that had a monopoly on this the imperial Japanese Navy also at times would exhibit profound arrogance at the command level and get them into trouble.

But as I noted above, the Russians would also conduct human wave attacks, there’s one very disturbing passage in, hot motors cold feet, where German soldiers on the outskirts of Moscow were subjected to a human wave attack containing several hundred Russian soldiers, they almost succeeded in overrunning the German position they were only stopped by the timely arrival of a 7.5 cm infantry gun, when the Germans went to inspect the bodies they were shocked to find that all of them were women… they were soldiers but the Germans were not expecting them to be women and it was apparently quite unsettling for all of them.

But the interesting thing is that you can’t really compare Japan and Russia, the communist system in Russia enabled them to compel their soldiers to fight in ways that the western armies would never be able to nor would they want to, the Japanese on the other hand came from a very different cultural background We’re a like mindedness was something that was normal and a shared since of sacrifice was part of there very being, another words the Japanese didn’t need to be compelled by the state.

Another way to look at this would be to use a contemporary example to help to contextualize it, in Japan for decades now, people have been wearing facemasks to prevent the spread of illness, something that’s lost on most Westerners is the notion that the people who are wearing the masks are the people who think that they may be sick or who are sick, in other words they wear the mask to prevent others from becoming sick, in the United States people wear masks only when compelled to do so and then the thinking is that they’re wearing them to protect themselves not others, The fact that others do benefit from this is a secondary consideration in the west.

Both approaches achieve the same ends but they are motivated by very differing viewpoints.

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I understand it and I agree it. thank you very much.

Some excuses:

Yes, they had only swords so they charged with it. I wanted to say that there’s no difference from that of the Japanese army: they had only rifles with bayonet.

Well, navy is not specialist of ground battles. They often dig a side hole instead of trenches which is not suitable for modern battles.