On this day in 1944, a Japanese plane deliberately flew into an Australian warship off the Philippines, killing dozens of men including her captain. It was a horrifying glimpse of a terrible new weapon about to be unleashed, the suicide attack. This is the ordeal of HMAS Australia. By October 1944 Japan was losing the war and running out of ships, planes, and trained pilots. As the Americans and their allies closed in on the Philippines in the vast operation that became the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the Japanese grew increasingly desperate. HMAS Australia, a heavy cruiser of the Royal Australian Navy, was there in the thick of it, part of the enormous allied fleet supporting the invasion of Leyte. On the morning of October 21, a Japanese aircraft came at the Australia. Instead of dropping its bomb and flying away, the plane bore in and smashed directly into the cruiser, striking her upper works in a deliberate crash that tore through the ship and sprayed burning fuel and wreckage across her decks. The blow was devastating. Around thirty of her crew were killed or later died of their wounds, among them her commanding officer, Captain Emile Dechaineux, who was mortally hurt. Many more were wounded. The battered Australia had to withdraw from the battle and sail away for lengthy repairs. Historians still argue about exactly how to classify that attack, whether it was truly the first of its kind or an individual pilot's desperate act just days before the practice became official. Because within days, the Japanese would formally unleash the Kamikaze, the Divine Wind, organized units of pilots deliberately crashing bomb laden aircraft into allied ships, trading their lives to inflict damage no ordinary attack could. In the battles around Leyte, the kamikazes began in earnest, and they would torment the allied fleets for the rest of the war, sinking and damaging ship after ship and killing thousands of sailors. What happened to HMAS Australia on this day in 1944 was a grim herald of that nightmare to come, one of the earliest times allied sailors watched an enemy pilot choose to turn his own aircraft into a guided weapon and die to kill them. The Australia survived, was repaired, and incredibly went on to be struck by kamikazes again and again in later battles, becoming one of the most suicide attacked ships of the war, her long agony beginning here, off the Philippines, on this day in 1944.