[CJDave]

/wwwthreads_images/icons/crazy.gif I noticed that TeanRush has been seeking the answer to a difficult question, and since I have been the beneficiary of a slew of good ignition upgrade advice, I thought it only right to reciprocate and answer his question based on what I know of WWII history and the complex Japanese mind./wwwthreads_images/icons/wink.gif
Basically, it's a self esteem issue. Now you know that the job the guy is doing has few, if ANY, long term benefits, once the bomb goes off, so the self-satisfaction must be ongoing....instantaneous you might say. If, for example the guy wore a ten-gallon Stetson, the sailors aboard our Navy ships would have pointed and said: "Look, a cowboy!: Nobody would have swung the AA batteries around, and nobody would fire thousands of rounds of AA fire. Likewise, if the guy wore a baseball cap, sure as heck, some sailor aboard ship would spot it and say: "Look, it's the third-base coach for the Yankees!" Again, no guns would swing into action, and no withering curtain of AA fire would rise to meet the plane. By wearing the leather pilot's helmet, however, the guy in the plane actually gets to THINK he is a pilot after having only six hours of training; which helps his attitude immeasurably; and add to that the thrill of being immediately identified as a genuine Kamikaze pilot, and having the ship's entire AA defense cut loose on him. Without that, the deed would surely be diminished and it would beat up on the pilot's self esteem during those final seconds as the ship grows ever larger in the windscreen of his diving plane./wwwthreads_images/icons/crazy.gif

CJDave
I never believe any statistics unless my moonguys /wwwthreads_images/icons/crazy.gif/wwwthreads_images/icons/wink.gif made 'em up themselves.

 

[13337]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you just said that helmets were cheaper than training pilots?
OR
Our guys wouldn't know who to shoot at if they wore baseball caps?

NOW I'M REALLY CONFUSED!!
I'll bet CJ Dave can confound the best of them!

I'm desperately trying to figure out why kamikaze pilots wore helmets...

 

[Guest]

How about this one: Our little small town here used to have a number of One-Way streets. But, they had stop signs at each intersection for all directions. Meaning 1/2 of the signs could only be read if you were already going the wrong way/wwwthreads_images/icons/crazy.gif.

TEX

/wwwthreads_images/icons/wink.gif Got Mud?
G.U.M.B.O. Mud Racing

 

[CJDave]

/wwwthreads_images/icons/crazy.gif Aaron, you know how it works. You can pay someone less money if you make him "Assistant Mgr." It works the same with Kamikaze pilots....yesterday I couldn't spell pilot, today I go out and dive on a carrier?/wwwthreads_images/icons/crazy.gif I can hear it now on the #4 AA mount: "Hey....that's a COWBOY in that plane!" You never know. Maybe they thought that nut from Texas in Squadron Eight had captured a Japanese plane for a souvenir?/wwwthreads_images/icons/crazy.gif

CJDave
I never believe any statistics unless my moonguys /wwwthreads_images/icons/crazy.gif/wwwthreads_images/icons/wink.gif made 'em up themselves.

 

[Guest]

Lets just sum it all up by saying that its what their goverment said was the right thing to do, and the right thing to spend money on. Besides, if they didn't complete their mission (and get blown to smitherenes), they wanted the pilots to be able to be rescued and brought back to the mainland for a public execution as punishment for not being sucessfull... BUT : How did they expect to rescue them if they were handcuffed to the plane? /wwwthreads_images/icons/crazy.gif Tis true too...

Florida Mud CJ-5
'77 RB304, t-150 D20 4" 35" swampers

 

[109]

They wore helmuts to protect their heads from being shot off so they could be able to guide the plane all the way in to the target. The reasoning was a head wound would cause a loss of consciousness and the plane would spin harmlessly off course. Essentially, a kamikaze was a guided missile with a living computer guidance system aboard. As for understanding why use trained pilots in this way; I cannot figure that one out.

 

[13337]

It worked then, just like it works now....
Then, they crashed perfectly good airplanes into the ocean hoping to hit a boat....
When they had huge metal shortages in Japan...

Now they sell Lexis to us...
A $45,000 toyota with leather seats....

Who is stupid now....

I'm desperately trying to figure out why kamikaze pilots wore helmets...

 

[109]

TeamRush, you are right./wwwthreads_images/icons/smile.gif American auto makers love those high priced Japanese cars. Why? So they can keep their prices, and thus profits, higher than they should really be and still be competitive with the Japanese cars.

So much for "protective" tarriffs /wwwthreads_images/icons/tongue.gif

PS Are there any all American auto makers left????/wwwthreads_images/icons/crazy.gif

 

[109]

Aaron, forgot to mention Mitsubushi.... the makers of the A6M fighter plane, known famously as the "ZERO"

 

[Guest]

Of course there are american auto makers, we are them... I'm american, and i'm building my jeep /wwwthreads_images/icons/cool.gif.
Still dont know about the helmets though.... Hmmmm.....
BJ

to hell with it, lets go wheelin'

 

[251]

Here is one for ya

why do they call it a butterfly, shouldnt it be called a flutterby?

I razz everybody Ive ever known with a Mitsubishi, I tell them a good patriot would beat them for such a ride..

OzarkJeep
NW Arkansas, need a CJ rear seat

 

[dorfs]

So why do they sterilize the needel before a leathal injection?

 

[Guest]

Cuz if the guy has some weird resistance to the injection, its an act of god and the guy is let go with no charges following. If he then gets and infection and dies, the state is guilty of murder... I swear its true.

Florida Mud CJ-5
'77 RB304, t-150 D20 4" 35" swampers

 

[Guest]

OzarkJeep butterflys actually used to be called flutterbys. I don't know why, but they were. There are alot of interesting things that you might not have known such as 315 words where mispelled in the 1996 Webster's dictionary or a rat can last longer than a camel without water or if you place a tiny amount of liquor on a scorpion it will instantly go mad and sting itself to death.

Tim Springer
1980 CJ7
WALSTIB/wwwthreads_images/icons/wink.gif

 

[13337]

I JUST GOTTA TRY THAT SCORPION THING! We have little scorpions all over down in the Keys!
This is gonna be fun!

I'm desperately trying to figure out why kamikaze pilots wore helmets...

 

[Guest]

I gotta try that scorpion thing the next time I get to the SOUTH. I hated those damn things; not as much as I hated spiders though. Damn spiders give me the creeps. Has anyone ever seen an Amazon Bird spider. Saw one face to face in the Smithsonian, over a foot in diameter, nast damn things. Anyway, I will have to try that scorpion thing this spring break.


Lee R. Byrd

 

[Guest]

We got a lot of scorpions here in the desert SW. Instead of firewater, just tap it on it's back with a stick. After a while, it will try to kill the stick and impale itself - makes a poping sound when it commits suicide.
BTW. I was backing my cj into the garage last summer and backed over a 6"er. I don't go into the garage now without shoes on! My wife, however, has developed a habit of collecting tarantulas that we find around the neighborhood. Keeps them in a terrarium (spell?) and lets them go after a few weeks.

 

[JEEPN]

Got this from Cecil Adam's home page, the home of the Straight Dope, my favorite reading.

In reply to:

Dear Cecil:

I have a question. When a prisoner is put to death by lethal injection, does he or she still get their arm cleaned with an alcohol swab? --Mark Alonso, 101st Airborne Division

Dear Mark:

Does make you wonder. Here they are, about to snuff the guy, and they're worried he might get infected with germs?

But according to a spokesman for the Texas Department of Corrections, which has carried out many executions by lethal injection, the technician (it's never a doctor) is in fact supposed to swab the prisoner's arm first. One presumes other states employing this method do likewise.

There are several reasons for this. Apart from its usefulness as an antiseptic, alcohol causes blood vessels to rise to the surface, making it easier to insert the needle.

More important, there's a chance the prisoner's sentence might be delayed or commuted at the last minute.

It's happened before. In October, 1983 condemned murderer James Autry was strapped to a gurney for an hour in a Texas prison with saline solution dripping into his arm. (He was awake the whole time, incidentally.)

At about the time he was scheduled to die he was told he had received a stay of execution. He was returned to his cell and not executed until the following March. Whatever you think of the death penalty, you wouldn't want the guy to die of sheer carelessness.

Which brings us to what I think is the real reason for swabbing the arm--it allows the executioners to think of themselves as professionals doing a job rather than killers.

Interviews with members of execution teams reveal that they place great stock in following proper procedures. We may be certain that if the prisoner were to choke on a chicken bone during his last meal, the authorities would spare no effort to save his life an hour prior to ending it. Indeed, if you can believe Chuck Shepherd's News of the Weird column, that's already happened. "In Texas convicted murderer David Lee Herman slashed his throat on April 1 [1997], a day before his execution, but was patched up and given his lethal injection one day late," Shepherd writes.

Nazi death camp guards observed no such niceties. Thus do we persuade ourselves that we are better than they.

--CECIL ADAMS

JEEPN
'81 CJ-8 Scrambled!
GM151/SM465/NP205/7" Lift/33" Swampers/D44's F&R 4.10's & Lockrights

 

[JEEPN]

More from the Straight Dope archives!

In reply to:

Dear Cecil:

I read this as a tagline on the Internet, but it's still a good question: why did kamikaze pilots wear helmets? --Matt McCullar, Arlington, Texas

Dear Matt:

To keep their ears warm, goofball. As anyone acquainted with aviation or basic physics knows, the pilot's helmet has never been intended to provide protection against a crash. If the plane encounters the landscape too abruptly you're sausage no matter what you're wearing. The leather or cloth head covering worn by WW2 aviators was a holdover from open cockpit days, when you needed protection against the wind and rain.

Closed cockpits had come into general use by WW2, but in the early years at least it was customary to take off and land with the canopy open, apparently (Cecil hears differing stories on this point) in the ill-founded hope that you'd be able to get clear of the plane if it nosed in while you were near the ground. Pilots also wore helmets because they held your radio earphones, but most of all, military bureaucracy being what it was, because regulations required it. When jets came in most air forces switched to the hardened "brain bucket" in use today, but the purpose of this was merely to protect a fighter pilot's head from being bashed against the canopy during high speed maneuvering, not to save him in the event of a crash. Similarly, the kamikaze pilot's helmet merely helped him complete the trip, not survive it.

--CECIL ADAMS

JEEPN
'81 CJ-8 Scrambled!
GM151/SM465/NP205/7" Lift/33" Swampers/D44's F&R 4.10's & Lockrights

 

[Guest]

Yep, like JEEPER said, it was to hold their radio earplugs in.

Cutch 88YJ