``Banzai!'' or ``Long Live the Emperor'', was their battle cry. Or so popular mythology has it.

But the way the pilots who survived the war tell it, their prime motivation was simply desperation to protect the people they loved from coming to harm in a war that was rapidly - and very clearly - deteriorating into defeat. If they could keep the Allies from their shores and loved ones, they would have achieved their purpose.

In interviews conducted in Japan, some of the would-be kamikazes expressed relief, sadness even today that their comrades had died, and even some survivor guilt.

A handful of veteran Japanese pilots and their families gathered in Mabalacat in the Philippines last month to pay tribute to that sentiment at the spot where the first kamikaze mission took off exactly 60 years ago from a nondescript airfield about 80 kilometres north of Manila.

Local historian and artist Daniel Dizon witnessed the departure of the original kamikaze pilots on their missions when he was a boy of 14. He said most of the pilots ``acted like they were going on a picnic''. Dizon has been instrumental in creating kamikaze memorials in the area, and last month he helped to unveil a statue of a kamikaze pilot, a memorial largely funded by Filipino admirers of what they consider the pilots' extraordinary courage.

``How can you forget something like that? They were brave - it's difficult to describe,'' Dizon said.

One of the pilots at the memorial, Tsukasa Abe, now 77, said: ``I am extremely grateful that the local people have erected this statue for us. I am grateful that relations haven't been ruined despite what the Japanese did [in the Philippines]''.

After successive defeats across the Pacific, Japanese commanders recognised by October 1944 that it was only a matter of time before the United States would invade the main islands of Japan. As the number of operational aircraft diminished and the Allies increasingly focused on the Pacific theatre, senior Japanese navy air commanders decided there was no alternative but to create a special-forces unit to crash-dive planes, armed with 250-kilogram bombs, into the flight decks of enemy carriers.

These aircraft and the men who flew them came to be known as the kamikaze, named after a divine wind that saved Japan from a Mongol invasion in 1274. This legendary wind, probably a typhoon, destroyed Kublai Khan's fleet as it lay at anchor off the southern Japanese island of Kyushu.

The kamikaze name was apparently given to the first group asked to volunteer in the Philippines by senior commanders who ordered the tactic. The moniker was supposed to be something of an honorific for the original unit only, but quickly it came to be applied to other units using the same suicide tactic.

The kamikaze were widely known as ``special-forces'' - the pilots did not call themselves kamikaze - but the word became popularised and has stuck in the Western imagination. It has come to mean anyone who acts recklessly or suicidally.

That was far from the case with the pilots, interviews with a number of them in Japan showed. They survived because their missions were aborted, they couldn't find a suitable target, they were shot down and forced to ditch into the water, or they had to turn back because of bad weather or mechanical failure.

``Not one person went because they thought they wanted to die,'' Toyotaro Nakajima, a former special-forces pilot, said.

He later ended up living and working in the US for many years. ``It was an order - help your country, your country being the family you loved, your brothers and sisters, friends, your home town - to protect these things from the enemy,'' he said.

After the kamikaze sinking of the aircraft carrier Saint Lo in Leyte Gulf off the coast of the Philippines in October 1944 proved the tactic could inflict severe damage, the Japanese navy expanded the special-forces during the Battle of Okinawa. According to the US Strategic Bombing Report on the Pacific War, the Japanese flew 2,550 kamikaze missions from October 1944 to the end of the Okinawa campaign in June 1945.

That represented the vast majority of all kamikaze missions, although final and definitive figures were not collected by the US after the Okinawa campaign.

The kamikaze managed a hit rate of about one in five planes; sinking some enemy ships, damaging others.

Others had mechanical problems or were repelled en route or by their target ships.

Other former kamikaze pilots agreed that most special-forces pilots were thinking primarily about their families when they left on their one-way missions.

Shigemitsu Saito, now 78, was a fighter pilot in campaigns including those in New Guinea and Guadalcanal. He said the schoolboy comic-book image of the Emperor-worshipping kamikaze pilot bears little relation to reality.

``The Emperor never really came into it - that's just something the newspapers made up. I doubt anyone actually went to his death shouting `Banzai!'' he said.

Although the initial units were directly asked to volunteer for such missions by their superiors, later pilots were asked to fill in a form and state whether they would be willing to go on such missions. Most pilots said they would.

Those who had expressed willingness later received a ``special-forces order'' from central command and there was no turning back. These orders were often posted on noticeboards at air bases for all to see.

Because pilots knew their chances of surviving the war were slim to begin with, the prevailing sentiment at the time was that they should seize any chance that their deaths would not be wasted - by keeping the enemy away from Japanese shores.

Hiromi Kawasaki, now 77, was a navy pilot trainee when he saw a recruitment poster for a top-secret project pinned to the noticeboard at his base. The stand-out attraction for the 18-year-old was that volunteers would have the chance to go to the front after only two or three months of training.

Given that it could have taken up to a year to see combat if he had stayed in the regular forces, Kawasaki took little heed of the warning on the poster that the mission had ``no guarantee of survival''.

He was assigned to the manned torpedo unit, a variation on the original crash-dive aerial tactic. Kawasaki was trained to pilot a single-man torpedo with a 1.55-tonne explosive warhead into enemy ships, using little more than a stopwatch and a periscope for navigation.

He said he had few qualms about volunteering as the probability of death for an ordinary Japanese navy pilot was already extremely high - Japanese soldiers used to joke that joining the military not only got you a discount on your movie tickets but also on your lifespan, he laughed.

``From the outset, I never really expected to return from the front,'' he said.

But since Kawasaki was posted to coastal Shikoku in southern Japan to await the US invasion that never came, he lived to tell the tale.

Kawasaki said that during the war, the manned torpedo pilots all wanted to take part in an attack and eagerly waited their turn on the attack roster. Missions were assigned according to the order in which pilots had graduated from training, with the first graduates assigned to the first missions. And so if someone botched his mission and had to be reassigned to the next attack, it was always very disappointing for the younger pilots waiting further down the line, he recalled.

``We thought we didn't need money, or fame, or our lives - that was the mindset,'' Kawasaki said.

But once the war ended, he realised he would have to find a way to live. Eventually, he ended up working in a flour mill and getting married.

``I've been able to lead an interesting life,'' he said, adding that if he had the chance to go back in time, he probably wouldn't place himself in harm's way so enthusiastically.

``It seems strange that I was a soldier at 18 and now I'm almost 80.''

Some of the survivors escaped death when the war ended before the day of their scheduled sortie. Former special-forces pilot Tsukasa Abe, interviewed in the Philippines, dodged what would have been his fate by just a few hours - his scheduled mission was for the afternoon of August 15, 1945, but at noon the Emperor of Japan broadcast to the nation that Japan must ``endure the unendurable'' and accept defeat.

Of those pilots who remain, almost all watched close friends fly off to sacrifice their lives in kamikaze attacks.

``It was very painful to see them off,'' recalled one special-forces pilot. ``They were going first and you were staying behind, so you felt indebted in a way.''

And yet despite seeing his friends perish in this manner, this pilot, who declined to give his name, was remarkably candid about how it felt to realise that it would not be his fate to die in battle.

``It would be a lie to say I didn't have at least some feeling that I was glad I wasn't chosen,'' he said.

Although the use of the kamikaze tactic didn't change the final outcome of the war, there is some evidence that those pilots who flew to their deaths hundreds of kilometres away were indirectly able to protect their families from harm. Because of the threat posed by the kamikaze attacks to Allied forces, more than 2,000 B-29 sorties that were to have attacked civilian and industrial targets in mainland Japanese cities ended up being diverted to striking kamikaze airfields in Kyushu.

Reliable estimates indicate that between 34 and 45 ships were sunk by kamikaze attacks and hundreds more were damaged. Kamikaze pilots were also known to ram enemy planes in midair. In addition, many sailors who witnessed kamikaze attacks suffered psychological trauma due to the shocking nature of the suicide tactic.

Bill Obitz, standing just a short distance from where a kamikaze plane hit the USS Missouri on April 11, 1945, said sailors were scared of kamikaze because ``you knew when they came in that that you were either going to shoot them down or they were going to dive into the ship.''

While the bomb failed to explode in the attack he witnessed that day, Obitz said the dedication evident as the pilot lined up his single-man plane on the final run towards 45,000 tonnes of battleship firepower was fearsome. It was awe-inspiring that ``you knew that he wouldn't turn back'', Obitz said.

Some have suggested that the Japanese kamikaze were an inspiration for the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, but the surviving pilots unanimously disavowed any comparison to modern terrorists.

The intention of the kamikaze in World War II, they said was only to hit military targets. Whether the September 11 terrorists ever thought about the kamikaze will never be known.

``It's a major mistake to say that the September 11 attacks were kamikaze attacks - the special-forces were only ever used in a theatre of war,'' said Kawasaki. ``We never carried out any attacks [against civilians] like the ones on September 11.''

The former pilots also said it was a soldier's duty to obey orders and their underlying motivation was different from that of today's suicide bombers. The kamikaze tactic was a defence to keep the Allies at bay more than an attack.

``Nobody was chasing after death or trying to commit suicide - we did it because we had a duty to protect our country. To me, there's a major difference,'' said former kamikaze pilot Nakajima.

Bennett Richardson is a Tokyo-based freelance journalist with a special interest in Japanese defence policy, politics and modern history. Fumiko Hattori is an independent researcher and translator specialising in the World War II Pacific theatre

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