Kazuo sakamaki biography
- Kazuo Sakamaki (酒巻和男, Sakamaki Kazuo, November 8, 1918 – November 29, 1999) was a Japanese naval officer who became the first Japanese prisoner of war of.
- Kazuo Sakamaki was a Japanese naval officer who became the first prisoner of war of World War II to be captured by U.S. forces.
- Kazuo Sakamaki.
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1st POW
11 pm, December 6, 1941, Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki and Petty Officer Second Class Kiyoshi Inagaki entered their 2-man midget submarine and were released from their mother sub about 10-miles off Pearl Harbor.
They were part of Special Attack Forces, an elite 10-man group of five 2-man midget submarines that would attack Pearl Harbor.
They planned to carry out suicide attacks against the enemy with no expectation of coming back alive: “That the personnel of the midget submarine group was selected with utmost care was obvious.”
“The twenty-four, picked from the entire Japanese navy, had in common: bodily strength and physical energy; determination and fighting spirit; freedom from family care. They were unmarried and from large families.”
“None of us was a volunteer. We had all been ordered to our assignment. That none of us objected goes without saying: we knew that punishment was very severe if we objected; we were supposed to feel highly honored.” (Sakamaki)
His 78.5-foot-long submarine, HA-19, and four other midget subs, each armed with a pair of 1,000-pound torpedoes,
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Kazuo Sakamaki
MILITARY PERSONNEL
1918 - 1999
Kazuo Sakamaki
Kazuo Sakamaki (酒巻和男, Sakamaki Kazuo, November 8, 1918 – November 29, 1999) was a Japanese naval officer who became the first prisoner of war of World War II to be captured by U.S. Read more on Wikipedia
Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of Kazuo Sakamaki has received more than 1,220,467 page views. His biography is available in 15 different languages on Wikipedia. Kazuo Sakamaki is the 1,326th most popular military personnel (down from 846th in 2019), the 887th most popular biography from Japan (down from 594th in 2019) and the 80th most popular Japanese Military Personnel.
Memorability Metrics
1.2M
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59.18
Historical Popularity Index (HPI)
15
Languages Editions (L)
3.87
Effective Languages (L*)
2.24
Coefficient of Variation (CV)
Among MILITARY PERSONNELS
Among military personnels, Kazuo Sakamaki ranks 1,326 out of 2,058. Before him are Günther Pancke, Maximilian Njegovan, Mikhail Kovalyov, Sultan Agung of Mataram, Baba Nobuharu, and Vicente Rojo L
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Kazuo Sakamaki (酒巻和男, Sakamaki Kazuo?, November 8, 1918 – November 29, 1999) was a Japanese naval officer who became the first Japanese prisoner of war of World War II captured by American forces.
Biography[]
Sakamaki was born in what is now part of the city of Awa, Tokushima Prefecture. He was a graduate of the 68th class of the Imperial Japanese Naval Academy in 1940.
Attack on Pearl Harbor[]
Sakamaki was one of ten sailors (five officers and five petty officers) selected to attack Pearl Harbor in two-man Ko-hyoteki classmidget submarines on 7 December 1941. Of the ten, nine were killed (including the other crewman in his submarine, Kiyoshi Inagaki). Sakamaki had set an explosive charge to destroy his disabled submarine, which had been trapped on Waimanalo Beach, Oahu. When the explosives failed to go off, he swam to the bottom of the submarine to investigate the cause of the failure and became unconscious due to a lack of oxygen. The book Attack on Pearl Harbor claims that his sub hit four coral reefs and sank. Sakamaki was found by a Hawaiian soldier,
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