We had gone to war with the U.S. in December of the previous year. I’d heard of the attack on Pearl Harbor while part of the Yatabe Air Unit.
The following year, I was sent to Clark Air Base in the Philippines. It had once belonged to the Americans, but the Tainan Air Corps destroyed all of their planes in an air raid two days after the start of the war, and subsequently the Japanese military occupied the base. Apparently the thirty-four Zeros in the Tainan Air Corps knocked out almost all of the Americans’ sixty fighters, while our side suffered just four lost aircraft.
By the time I went to the Philippines, the Americans had been eradicated so we had it pretty easy.
The Tainan Air Corps was filled with some of the bravest and most experienced aircrew, but I was still green. My rank was Flight Seaman 1st Class—basically a plain soldier. The Navy’s ranks included seamen, non-commissioned officers, and officers.
As soon as I arrived at Clark Air Base an NCO said, “Let’s dogfight.” By that he meant a mock air battle. We were to practice going around and coming up close behind the opponent as in a real air battle.
“I haven’t seen combat in a while, so I just want to spar with you,” he said. It was obvious that his ulterior motive was to see if I was any good. The other senior crew were laughing.
“With your permission, sir,” I said humbly, but in fact I was quite confident when it came to mock dogfights. Back at Yatabe I had been at the top of my class or near it. I wanted to impress on my seniors that I was pretty good.
The battle began with me in an advantageous position, as was agreed beforehand. It was like he had given me a leg up. In aerial combat, the aircraft at a higher altitude has an overwhelming advantage.
I dove from that higher altitude. My opponent smoothly turned and broke away, but I still had the advantage. Making good use of my speed I went right after him. He attempted to evade by pulling up into a loop. I followed. But the next instant, I lost sight of him. I’d never experienced anything like that before. My opponent’s plane was nowhere to be seen. Then I looked behind me to find him right on my tail!
He pulled up alongside me, opened his windshield, and indicated another round, just as I’d hoped for.
We began again with me at a higher altitude, but the match ended in the exact same manner. At some point while I was pursuing him, he snuck right up behind me. We went a third round. It ended the same way yet again.
When I got back to the base, the NCO long-timers laughed at me.
“With piss-poor skills like that, you’d never survive even if you had countless lives.”
My opponent, Flight Petty Officer 3rd Class Hayashi, was a year older than I.
“I lose, sir,” I said meekly. “You’re really an excellent pilot, Petty Officer Hayashi.”
“Me? I’m one of the shittier ones in the Tainan Air Corps. I can’t hold a candle to the likes of CPO Miyazaki and PO1 Sakai.”
“Really?”
“The only way is up, as they say,” PO3 Hayashi said, slapping me on the shoulder.
I totally lost my self-confidence.
Piloting an airplane isn’t as simple as driving a car, where turning the steering wheel turns the vehicle. With an airplane, you have to integrate use of the foot bar, too, to bank, and the rudder’s effect is intricately intertwined with the plane’s velocity. This is because aircraft move along a vertical axis as well as horizontally. Up until that point, I had been pretty confident in the cockpit, but the skills of these first-rate pilots far exceeded my expectations.
After that, my superiors drilled me via mock dogfights. They were totally different from the mock fights we did at Yatabe. I realized that actual combat was like these drills. You can bet that I desperately tried out all sorts of maneuvers. It was thanks to the precious training my superiors gave me back then that I was able to somehow survive the war.
While I say “superiors” they were all barely past twenty themselves. Flight Petty Officer 1st Class Saburo Sakai, the oldest NCO there, was only around twenty-five at the time. But to me, they seemed almost middle-aged.
Looking back now, we were all so very young.
Around then, Nagumo Mobile Task Force was taking southern island after island by storm, and the Navy built forward bases on each. To these, aviation units from the interior moved out in quick succession. Soon, the Tainan Air Corps received orders to advance to Rabaul, located on New Britain Island, past the equator, in the northeast part of New Guinea. The island had just recently come under Japan’s control, in February of 1942, and the base was some 6,000 kilometers away from Japan proper. It became our farthest-flung base in the South Pacific.
We traveled to Rabaul in the spring of ’42 on a troop transport ship. On the way, there was intel that a submarine was tailing us, so until we reached Rabaul we felt very helpless. The transport ship was the Komaki-maru. We had only a small submarine chaser as our escort, so if an enemy sub attacked us in earnest, we were as good as dead. The day after the transport ship docked at Rabaul, it was bombed by enemy planes and sank there in the harbor. The ship was later converted into Komaki Pier.
I realized this later, but had the Komaki-maru been sunk at sea, it would have dealt a major blow to the Tainan Air Corps and to the Imperial Navy as a whole. Losing so many highly skilled fighter pilots at once would have been an incalculable setback. At the time, the Combined Fleet had many warships merely idling in the Truk Lagoon, so they could have sent a couple of destroyers to protect us pilots. But perhaps the brass thought of pilots as easily replaceable commodities.
Rabaul was a beautiful place, with limpid blue waters and clear skies, palm trees along the shoreline, and a volcano in the distance. There was an old town near the airfield with houses where Westerners had lived. These houses were European in style, of course, and the look of the town was elegant and refined. But apart from that town, the rest of the island was unspoiled nature. The so-called airfield was actually just a broad field. When we arrived, our planes weren’t there yet. Just a few seaplanes floated in the harbor. Rabaul had a good natural one that later became a berth for warships.
I felt like I had arrived at a paradise on the southern seas. I never dreamed back then that such a place would come to be known as the Airmen’s Graveyard.
Afterwards, the converted aircraft carrier Kasuga-maru brought the Zeros to Rabaul. We boarded the carrier to receive the planes, and it was there that I did my first carrier takeoff. It was far easier than I had anticipated.
“Aircraft carriers don’t seem so hard to deal with,” I said to an NCO once we were back in Rabaul.
“Try saying that after doing a landing,” he reprimanded me. At the time I thought he was just being self-important and patronizing, but later when I became carrier-based, I got an ample taste of just how terrifying the landings are.
Later, we were transferred from Rabaul to Lae further south on New Guinea. It was a forward base built to capture Port Moresby, also on New Guinea. Port Moresby was 400 nautical miles from Rabaul, a tough distance even for the long-range Zero, so another one was built in Lae. Four hundred nautical miles is about 700 kilometers.
Lae was even emptier than Rabaul. Before the war, Australians had settled in a small town there, but after an earlier air raid by our military, most of the town had burned down. There were several charred houses still standing, and we aircrew dragged simple bedding into the houses and slept there.