Amphetamines were not the sole domain of madmen holed up in bunkers during World War II. Allied and Axis forces alike knew the benefits of making the drugs available to their fighting men, but none applied the drug’s singular traits to combat so effectively as the Japanese.
The germ of a new and murderously radical idea had been planted long ago. In 1281 C.E. Japan was about to be devoured by the massive Mongol army, led by none other than Kublai Khan. But nature would intervene in a way no one would ever forget. As Japan awaited its destruction an enormous typhoon struck the island nation, wiping out the greater part of the invading force. Japan had been saved. Unable to explain their good fortune, the Japanese called the typhoon the Divine Wind, or Kamikaze.
Seven centuries later, in the autumn of 1944, Japan found itself in similar straits. Instead of the Mongols, this time it was the armed forces of the United States bearing down, and a typhoon would only delay the inevitable. In a desperate attempt to stem the tide of war, the Japanese turned back to history to revive the memory of the Kamikaze.
The historical allusion was a legend wrapped in a euphemism for a suicide mission to be carried out by the country’s most impressionable and compliant, its teenage boys. These young men and their bomb-loaded airplanes would be the world’s first “smart” bombs. The tactic was developed by, among others, Japanese Vice Admiral Takashiro Ohnishi, who noted the destructive power of an airplane crashing into a ship. Packed with a half-ton of explosives, it could cripple an aircraft carrier, strip the deck of aircraft, or send a cruiser into salty oblivion. All that was needed were pilots eager to die for their Emperor.
There would be no shortage. Thousands volunteered, far more than the Japanese military planners had aircraft. The Kamikaze pilot was typically recruited in his late teens and assured that by fulfilling his mission he would save the empire in its darkest hour just as the Divine Wind had seven centuries earlier. Before and after a solemn ceremony with a kind of communion with sake, the pilot was injected with heavy doses of liquid methamphetamine known by the pharmaceutical brand name of Philopon. He then climbed into his bomb-laden plane for launch on his lonely one-way mission. Total commitment on the part of the pilot was the key.
The concept of the suicide mission as part of a broad military strategy horrified the American public. The bewildering nature of the attacks was utterly foreign to Western ideas on how civilized nations conducted themselves, even in the murderous dementia of war. The American G.I. signed up for the dangerous mission, not the suicide mission. Even the Nazis were unwilling to sacrifice their lives so flagrantly for their Führer.
To be sure, the mentality of the Kamikaze pilot had much to do with the process of indoctrination visited upon him at such an impressionable age. But the Japanese leadership clearly knew what they were doing by pumping up young conscripts on methamphetamine so that they arrived in that most singular frame of mind when their target came into view. All the young Kamikaze had to do was, literally, to become one with it.
The suicide mission wasn’t the only application of the drug during the Second World War. This was a war fought by men who were, by necessity, vividly alert. From the beginning it proved to be a new kind of fighting, a war characterized by the mobility of massive forces, fluid fronts, and radical innovations in weaponry. Amphetamines fit into this milieu perfectly, as they facilitated a new sharpness of mind, an alertness not required of troops in The Great War (World War I) who had slogged through a war of attrition. Pale-faced soldiers burrowing into the static mud of Flanders had given way to lightning aerial strikes on European and Asian capitals, and bulging fronts that morphed with the passing of hours.
Through the summer and fall of 1940, England fought alone for its very survival by scrambling squadrons of Spitfire and Hurricane fighters over southern England to meet waves of German bombers lumbering toward Whitehall and Buckingham Palace. But England was at a severe disadvantage, having precious few aircraft and qualified pilots after the long debilitating process of appeasement in the thirties. To make up for the deficit of pilots, squadrons were required to fly two, three, and sometimes four sorties each day. So grueling was the routine that pilots often fell asleep in-flight or immediately after landing. Sleep, as much as skilled pilots, was in short supply.
The head of Fighter Command, Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, understood that sleep and pilots were to some extent interchangeable. That is, more could be gotten out of each pilot if a measure of control over the body clock could be achieved. A central nervous system stimulus, he was advised, could provide that control. Without hesitation, seventy-three million amphetamine tablets, in the form of Benzedrine (“Bennies”) and Benzedrine inhalers were made readily available. When pilots needed to sleep, they may or may not be able to sleep. But when they needed to be not only awake but alert, they would surely be capable of tearing a hole in the sky.
All the while, on the far side of the globe, tremendous stockpiles of Philopon were being built up to bolster the efforts of Kamikaze pilots and Japanese soldiers running wild in the jungles and islands of the Pacific Theatres. But as the Imperial military faltered and the armies retreated to the home islands, two unprecedented explosions brought an unexpectedly abrupt end to the fighting. No one could have predicted the nature of the hell that was about to occur under the soaring mushroom clouds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nor could they have known that the stage was now set for the first amphetamine crisis in the history of the world.