Why a U.S. Navy captain ordered a military funeral for a kamikaze pilot during WWII's Battle of Okinawa
CBSN
A Japanese pilot slammed his Zero fighter plane into the USS Missouri and ignited a fireball on April 11, 1945, during the Battle of Okinawa. The suicide attack instantly killed the pilot, but none of the battleship's crew members were badly hurt.
The Missouri's captain ordered a military burial at sea with full honors, marking one of the more unusual and little-known episodes of World War II. The pilot received the same funeral that the ship would have given one of its own sailors.
Eighty years later, the Missouri is a museum moored at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, not far from the submerged hull of the USS Arizona, which sank in the 1941 Japanese bombing that propelled the U.S. into the war. On Friday, three of the captain's grandsons will mark the anniversary of the attack and burial with the mayors of Honolulu and the Japanese city of Minamikyushu, from which many kamikaze pilots set off on their suicide missions.
