“We’re risking our lives fighting out here. You’d think they’d at least let us eat sweet rice cakes,” PO Higashino joked, and everyone laughed.
That night, there were bean-jam rice cakes lined up on the mess hall tables. The kitchen staff had overheard PO Higashino and had gone all out making rice cakes for us. But PO Higashino, himself, wasn’t there for dinner. No one dared to touch his rice cake.
Eventually such scenes became commonplace.
FPO1 Sakai, who had returned from the first battle at Guadalcanal despite severe injuries, ended up returning to the interior blind in one eye. Only three weeks into the fighting, “The Ace of Rabaul” Lieutenant JG Junichi Sasai, second only to FPO1 Sakai, failed to return to base. In September, we lost FPO1 Toraichi Takatsuka, a veteran pilot, and FPO3 Kazushi Uto, an expert dogfighter despite his youth. In October, FPO1 Toshio Ohta, who had performed the formation loops above Port Moresby with POs Sakai and Nishizawa, didn’t make it back to base.
The situation was unbelievable. Maybe it would have been understandable if they were new recruits who had arrived just the day before, but week after week these expert pilots, the pride of the navy’s aviation corps, were failing to return.
But when you think about it, this was only natural. For days on end we were ordered to make a round trip of over 2,000 kilometers to engage in combat in enemy territory. Once we took off, we were in the cockpit for about seven hours straight, and the whole time death was looking over our shoulders. The fatigue was immense.
We couldn’t let our guards down on the way to Guadalcanal, either. The enemy could attack at any time. And upon reaching hostile airspace, we were confronted by their interceptors. Thanks to their superior radar they were able to detect our attack formations in advance and were always in an advantageous position to ambush us. At the time, we suffered a huge gap in radar detection technology.
Engaging in air battles from a disadvantageous position was no cakewalk even for Zeros. Moreover, the Zeros had the very important job of defending the medium bombers. We were unable to fight freely. Plus, our fuel tanks were filled to the brim for the return trip, weighing us down and ruling out nimble maneuvers.
After our bombers completed their run, we evaded the enemy aircraft in hot pursuit to make the long 1,000-kilometer journey home. Sometimes the enemy would be lurking along our return path, so even then we couldn’t relax for a second. I’d never experienced such intense physical and mental fatigue. And if you got separated from your formation on the way back, you had to calculate your course with map and compass as you flew.
If your aircraft took a hit during combat, even if it didn’t cause you to immediately crash, it often manifested as major damage soon enough. I keep repeating this, but Guadalcanal was 1,000 kilometers away from Rabaul. An airplane is a very delicate piece of machinery. The smallest bit of engine trouble could render it inoperable.
There was also the fuel issue. Like I said, Zeros carried just enough fuel for the round trip to Guadalcanal. If you burned up too much fighting above the island, you didn’t have enough left to get back to base. If the fuel tank was shot and leaking, you weren’t going to make it back. If you made a navigational error and lost track of your position, same thing. The slightest detour could prove fatal.
Pilots like Saburo Sakai who made it back alone and severely wounded were miracles. They were few and far between.
After a mission, your exhaustion didn’t go away after a day or two. Yet before you had the chance to recuperate, you were ordered to sortie again. Three or four times a week wasn’t rare. Many airmen, including myself, were going into battle close to our limits. I’m sure many ended up getting shot down thanks to mistakes brought on by sheer fatigue. When Lieutenant Sasai was shot down, he had sortied every day for the previous five days as formation leader. Had the pilots, including Lt. Sasai, been granted enough time to recover, we surely would have had far fewer casualties.
On the days I was not on a mission, I slept. It was Miyabe-san who taught me to do so.
“Izaki, listen carefully. When you have the time, rest. Eat as much as you can, then sleep. Get the maximum amount of rest like you’re fighting for it.”
I followed Flight Leader Miyabe’s instructions to the letter. Whenever I had some free time, I simply slept. It’s such a strange thing, but getting sleep is a kind of skill. Once you absolutely decide to, you can fall asleep no matter how noisy or bright the room is.
After the war I started a freight company, and I always told my employees until I was blue in the face to get a good night’s sleep and not try to soldier through with willpower, guts, and all that. I’m not sure if that’s the only reason for it, but our drivers have caused almost no major accident.
But some of the pilots badmouthed Flight Leader Miyabe behind his back. This was due to his tactics while on escort duty for the medium bombers.
On those missions, we were ordered to protect the bombers even if it meant giving up our own lives. Protect the bombers loaded with deadly ordnance until they reached the enemy’s airfield, then ensure the success of their bombardment of the target. That was the duty of the escort fighters, and many highly skilled Zero pilots died protecting bombers.
Meanwhile, even though Flight Leader Miyabe fought off hostile aircraft that attacked the bombers, he would never place his plane in the line of fire to shield the bombers nor allow those of us under his command to do so. Some other pilots thought he was “a weasel” for this. As I was often part of his flight, they thought the same of me, too.
What did I think? That’s a tough question to answer.
Zeros had just one seat, while the bombers had seven. If the loss of one life could save seven, then perhaps that’s a sacrifice that should be made, tactically speaking. But if we were to lose a superior pilot like Miyabe-san, wouldn’t we suffer more casualties eventually? Guess that doesn’t really answer your question. And I don’t know what Miyabe-san himself thought.
Well, I bet he probably just didn’t want to die.
Beginning in the latter half of 1942, the Americans’ battle tactics for engaging Zeros totally changed.
They had rarely come after Zeros before then, but from mid-’42 they plainly avoided dogfighting with a Zero. The American fighters stuck to hit-and-runs and two-on-one attacks, and these new tactics bewildered us.
I learned well after the war that the Americans had gotten hold of a relatively intact Zero in July of ’42 and had studied it to come up with anti-Zero tactics.
Apparently, that Zero had crash-landed on Akutan Island during the Aleutian Islands Campaign. The pilot had died on impact, and the fuselage was discovered by a U.S. patrol plane.
Until then, the Zero had been a mystery fighter for the Allies. They’d been doing their utmost to capture a Zero fighter but only obtaining the wreckage of downed planes, so it was a godsend for them to discover a near-perfect one.
The Zero was brought back to the mainland where it was thoroughly researched. It was then that the U.S. was able to peel back the veil of secrecy that had cloaked the mystical fighter.
They say American aviation personnel were shaken by the test results. The “Japs” they’d derided as “yellow monkeys” had created a truly fearsome plane. Astonished, they were forced to acknowledge that at that stage, the U.S. did not have a fighter capable of taking on a Zero on equal terms. That answer appears to have been a scary one for them.
But at the same time, their research granted them insight into the Zero’s vulnerabilities: the total lack of bulletproof armor, limited diving speed, reduced performance at high altitudes, etc. And so the U.S. military worked out battle tactics that mercilessly exploited the Zero’s weaknesses.