However, Lieutenant Sasai was different. He went out of the way to mingle with PO1 Sakai and other NCOs and thought nothing of soliciting advice from his subordinates. PO1 Sakai, too, apparently felt that his friendship with Lt. Sasai transcended rank. Under PO1 Sakai’s tutelage, Lt. Sasai’s skills improved by leaps and bounds.
By the way, the Naval Air Corps’ callousness towards NCOs and seamen was something else. Officers had private quarters and orderlies and were catered to in all sorts of ways, while the rest of us, NCOs on down, slept on the floor in common rooms. Plus, the officers’ quarters were far away, so we rarely interacted. The meals were as different as night and day. Even though we were all part of the same team up in the sky, we lived in totally different environments.
As far as meals went, though, aircrew were lucky. The maintenance and ordnance crews were stuck with even poorer fare. Essentially, the military is a thoroughly stratified world. I would later join the aircrew of a carrier, and it had an elegant officers’ mess called the Gunroom.
This is a vulgar topic, but there were military brothels at Rabaul, and those, too, were segregated for officers and the rest of us. Was the idea that an officer couldn’t possibly be serviced by a lady who’d just seen an NCO or an enlisted man?
It took more than ten years even for the ace Saburo Sakai to be promoted to the rank of ensign. Meanwhile, Naval Academy graduates automatically became ensigns. It’s just like the “career” and “non-career” tracks in today’s ministries and bureaus. What’s more, ensigns who came up through the ranks were referred to as “special duty officers” and considered a step below the ones with degrees from the academy. The Navy was like that.
My final rank was Flight Chief Petty Officer, but only after a postwar promotion. I was a Potsdam CPO.
Let’s get back on subject.
At the outset of the Pacific War, the Zeros’ might was overwhelming. It’s no exaggeration to say that they almost never lost a fight. The enemy pilots were brave, taking the Zeros head-on, but that was akin to suicide. The Zero’s combat capabilities were beyond compare, and an enemy aircraft engaging in a dogfight usually went down by the third loop. In a dogfight, two aircraft twist and turn to get on each other’s tail.
Around that time, we found an astounding directive in the manual of a downed Allied plane. The circumstances where pilots were permitted to abort their mission and retreat were listed as “(1) encountering a thunderstorm, (2) encountering a Zero.”
I met a good number of Allied pilots after the war, among which was Charlie Burns, an Australian pilot who fought at Port Moresby. Charlie was a jovial giant, standing 6’ 3”.
He told me, “The Zero fighters were truly terrifying. They were unbelievably quick, and we could never predict how they would move. They were like will-o’-wisps. We felt inferior every time we engaged with them. Then we got orders telling us to avoid combat with Zeros, period.”
“I’ve heard about that order.”
“We knew that the new Japanese fighters were codenamed Zero,” he continued. “Talk about an uncanny name. ‘Zero’ means ‘nothing there,’ right? Not to mention, the fighters performed magic on us with their unbelievable moves. I couldn’t help but think, ‘So this is the mystery of the Orient.’”
“We were desperate ourselves,” I told him. “We had been training like mad.”
“We thought the pilots of the Zeros weren’t human. We figured they were either devils or fighting machines.”
“I’m quite human,” I assured him. “Now I fight to get food on the table. I run a freight company. I drive a truck instead of a Zero.”
He laughed heartily at that. “These days I ride horses at my ranch.”
Charlie had been the son of an Australian rancher.
Afterwards he and I exchanged letters for a long while, but five years ago his family informed me that he had passed away from illness.
I keep repeating myself, but the Zero was truly invincible. The Allies didn’t have a fighter that could fight on par with a Zero. Even the Spitfire, the pride of the RAF, was no match for the Zero. The renowned aircraft that had defended London from the Luftwaffe’s Messerschmitts during the Battle of Britain dropped like flies before the Zero.
This was partly due to the fact that they had no idea how to engage the Zero. There was no fighter then that could tangle with a Zero and win. Unaware of this, the Allies sent their pilots to take us head-on, and those pilots met tragic ends.
Perhaps they just hadn’t taken Japan seriously enough. An aircraft is the quintessence of a country’s industrial technology. They probably thought that a third-rate country’s yellow monkeys could never produce a superior fighter. To be sure, back then Japan wasn’t even capable of manufacturing decent cars. And yet the third-rate nation created a miracle fighter in the Zero. It was a masterpiece that its young architects had devised through unstinting effort. The enemy came at us totally ignorant of what we had.
But the Zero was not indestructible. If struck by bullets, it burst into flames and got shot out of the sky. The Zero’s shortcoming was a lack of armor. While it may have been unbeatable in a methodical duel, in a brawl it could easily be hit by stray bullets. If it pursued a hostile aircraft too far, it could get nailed by a different enemy.
Surprise attacks were the most terrifying. Snuck up on from a blind spot, even a Zero was helpless. CPO Gitaro Miyazaki, a masterful pilot on par with Saburo Sakai, was killed in such a surprise attack. That day, CPO Miyazaki had sortied in spite of illness, and a moment’s inattention resulted in his plane getting shot down. His death in the line of duty was announced to the entire military, and he received his posthumous promotion by two ranks. That was how esteemed he’d been.
The most dangerous surprise attacks came after supporting an air raid, when we didn’t exercise caution in regrouping for the return trip. The enemy, which had been unilaterally tormented by Zeros in dogfights, realized that they couldn’t defeat us head-on and frequently resorted to surprise attacks and ambushes.
About a month after our initial strike on Port Moresby, the Allies started avoiding us if our numbers were about equal. They engaged if they had twice as many planes, but we were confident of holding our own even outnumbered two to one. During my tour at Lae, I became an adequate pilot. From April to August, Lae-based fighters’ kills reached 300, while we lost a mere twenty aircraft.
As Charlie said, the Allied pilots called us Zero pilots devils—“devils gripping control sticks.” I don’t consider that an exaggeration. Lae’s veteran pilots were truly that good, and Sakai-san and Nishizawa-san seemed like demons even to us.
There’s a funny story about them.
Namely, Petty Officers Sakai, Nishizawa, and Ohta once did a loop in formation over the enemy’s base. PO1 Ohta was PO1 Sakai’s wingman, and as good an ace as the other two. By then, the three of them had probably downed over a hundred enemy planes among them. Sakai-san had planned on doing the loops for some time, and before taking off, he told the other two, “Let’s do it today.”
After the air raid and dogfights, the trio formed up above the enemy’s airfield as though they could communicate. And they wheeled through the air. Three times. Those were marvelous loops. The three fighters moved as one, in perfect order. The rest of us, who hadn’t been forewarned, watched dumbfounded.
They boldly swooped down even closer to the base, then climbed, executing yet another loop that was no less breathtaking. I thought, So you can perform such a beautiful maneuver in formation if all three pilots are masters.