Kazuo sakamaki biography

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,

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.

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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

Kazuo Sakamaki

Japanese naval officer

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. forces.

Early life and education

Sakamaki was born in what is now part of the city of Awa, Tokushima Prefecture, the second-oldest of eight sons.[1] He was a graduate of the 68th class of the Imperial Japanese Naval Academy in 1940.

Career

Attack on Pearl Harbor

Main article: HA. 19 (Japanese midget submarine)

Ensign Sakamaki was one of ten sailors (five officers and five petty officers) selected to attack Pearl Harbor in five two-man Ko-hyoteki classmidget submarines on 7 December 1941. Of the ten, nine were killed (including the other crewman in submarine HA. 19, CWO Kiyoshi Inagaki.) Sakamaki was chosen for the mission due to his large number of siblings.[2]

Sakamaki's submarine became trapped on a reef off Waimanalo Beach, Oahu, as it attempted to enter Pearl Harbor. The book Attack on Pearl H

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