Port Moresby was on the same island and due directly south, over the Owen Stanley Range. For days on end, we escorted medium bombers across the neighboring sea to attack Port Moresby. These medium bombers were land-based twin-engine affairs, and the seven-man Mitsubishi G4M was the main type.
The air corps stationed at Port Moresby were mostly American and British. We battled their fighters nearly every day.
It was there that I experienced my first real dogfight.
It happened when I participated in an air raid on Port Moresby as Flight Three’s third man. At the time, a flight of fighters consisted of three planes, a leader and two wingmen. Our mission was to establish air supremacy above the enemy’s base.
Above Port Moresby, the flight leader suddenly entered a steep turn. Plane two followed almost instantly. In a panic, I tried to follow, but they were so fast that we quickly became separated. The entire formation began moving at high speed. I had absolutely no idea why. All I could do was try to catch up with the flight leader. The Zeros were fitted with radios that were totally useless. We relied on reading each other during battles, but that certainly had its limits. If we’d had functioning radios back then, those battles would have been so much easier.
Anyways, the leader and plane two were flying upwards, downwards. I frantically followed, completely ignorant of where I was going. A few minutes later, the other two entered a level flight path at long last, and I was finally able to catch up.
It wasn’t until after we had landed at the base that I learned that we had engaged in combat.
Yes, of course. I was shocked. I hadn’t seen a single enemy aircraft, after all. I asked my flight leader, and he said there’d been about a dozen enemy planes. What’s more, he and plane two had gunned down one of them. They speak of having wool pulled over your eyes, and that’s exactly what it felt like. All told, he said we’d shot down nearly ten enemy planes.
That made me terribly depressed. How do you take part in a dogfight if you can’t even spot the enemy? But PO3 Hayashi, the pilot of plane two, consoled me, saying, “When I first started out, I never saw any enemy aircraft, either.”
The funny thing is that I saw the enemy very clearly in my second air battle. I must have been nervous during my first. They used to say that if a rookie doesn’t get shot down during his maiden battle, he’s got a good chance of surviving a decent number of sorties. I suppose I know pretty well what they meant by that.
The second battle took place over Port Moresby as well. We engaged with hostile fighters that ambushed us, and this time I could see the formation of enemy planes. Before setting out, though, Flight Leader Ono had sternly cautioned me not to get separated, so I strove to keep close to him.
In a flash, we were caught up in a mêlée. Tracer bullets streamed through the air, and a plane fell from the sky. I couldn’t tell which side’s; all I could do was keep close to the flight leader. Tracer bullets burn as they fly, and one out of every four machine-gun rounds is a tracer. They give off a flare that shows the ballistic course so the aircrew can adjust their aims accordingly. The other side also used tracer bullets, and during a dogfight we could see their tracers flying towards us.
I saw the flight leader and plane two take down an enemy aircraft. The leader shot down yet another. Seeing such an admirable display made the fighting spirit surge within me. I wanna take one out, too, I thought. Perhaps I felt at ease, seeing that our side was winning handily so far.
I looked around and spotted an enemy aircraft about 1,500 meters below me and to the right. He hadn’t noticed me. In pursuit, I pulled away from the flight leader. The enemy still didn’t see me, and I thought, I can do this…
My body was rigid from tension and delight. Shortly I made a mistake. I fired before the enemy was in my gunsight. He noticed me immediately and rolled over.
Seeing that, I fretted. I gave chase, firing with reckless abandon. That made him panic for his part, and he turned, right into my stream of bullets. Machine-gun fire struck his fuselage, and his plane burst into flames and fell away.
I shivered at my first kill. I confirmed it, the enemy plane going into a tailspin and crashing into the ocean. I shouted in my heart: I did it!
I frantically looked around at the same time. I couldn’t see a single airplane. I’d forgotten myself in the fight and strayed far from the combat zone. When I banked my plane to look behind me, there were two enemy fighters on my tail. My spine froze.
Flustered, I tried to flee by going into a dive. But then I noticed that a Zero with rising suns painted on the wings was tight at my side. It was Flight Leader Ono’s. The planes that I thought were hostile were in fact friendlies. PO3 Hayashi was behind us.
When they had seen me break away to pursue the enemy, they had followed to provide backup. They had watched over me, wanting to let me have my first kill and to be there to help out if things got dicey. They told me as much after we got back to base.
My first kill became the formation’s laughingstock, what with my letting loose from more than 500 meters away. There’s no way to land a hit at that range. All it accomplished was to alert the enemy to my presence. Fortunately for me, he made a major mistake, too, by trying to turn and face me head-on. Given the difference in altitude, it amounted to suicide. Immediately realizing his mistake, he banked, the worst possible choice, and my machine-gun fire hit home. “Amateurs brawling,” my seniors said, and they also got a laugh out of the fact that I had spent all my ammunition on one plane.
“If you need to spend all your bullets on one kill, no amount of ammo will ever be enough,” laughed PO1 Ono.
PO1 Ono and PO3 Hayashi were very kind superiors. They were seasoned pilots who’d fought since the Sino-Japanese War, but later the same year, they both died at Guadalcanal.
It was Lae that tempered me as a pilot. I learned a great many things that I wasn’t taught in flight school. For a fighter pilot, there’s no better lesson than a dogfight. The difference from flight-school training is that if you don’t learn, you die. At school, if you mess up on your exams, all you do is repeat the grade. Flunking a dogfight equals death.
That was why we were so driven. In a way, it was only natural that Rabaul produced so many aces. They were sifted through death’s sieve and lived to tell the tale. The famous Saburo Sakai, Hiroyoshi Nishizawa, and Lieutenant Junichi Sasai honed their skills there and went on to become aces.
Lt. Sasai was a graduate of the Naval Academy. It was very rare for an officer from the academy to become a flying ace. In fact, most aces were self-made types who had worked their way up through the ranks, namely, NCOs from Preparatory Flight Training or the Pilot in Training Program. Officers who’d attended the Naval Academy couldn’t hope to compete with NCOs when it came to piloting and dogfighting techniques. Yet, every unit larger than a flight was placed under the command of an officer, an academy graduate. NCOs had far more experience, better skills, and better judgment than the officers. But in the Imperial Navy, non-commissoned officers simply weren’t to command formations.
I can’t even begin to list battles that went awry thanks to poor judgment on the part of unit leaders. If only CPO Gitaro Miyazaki or PO1 Sakai were in charge, I thought again and again.
Rank is meaningless in the air. It’s a world where only experience and skill matter, experience in particular being the most valuable weapon. The stalwarts of Rabaul gained valuable experience through an abundance of action, literally with their lives on the line. And even though the academy-bred officers lacked experience, they had plenty of pride, which prevented them from trying to learn anything from us seamen and NCOs.