At that point, though, the Americans already had complete hegemony in the southeast Pacific. Rabaul was bearing the brunt of America’s counteroffensive. Attacking Australia under such circumstances was a howler.
They called Rabaul the Airmen’s Graveyard, but by the latter half of ’43, the surviving minority were all highly competent and withstood the American counterstrike quite well. After all, earlier they’d had to make the dangerous long-haul runs from Rabaul to Guadalcanal over 1,000 kilometers away, while now they were on the defense, intercepting incoming attacks. They could ambush the enemy on our own turf, so to speak.
Tetsuzo Iwamoto would have been at Rabaul at the time. Iwamoto-san was a flying ace with more kills than any other pilot in either the Japanese or American air forces in the Pacific theater. I believe he had over two hundred kills in the end.
Hiroyoshi Nishizawa was also there. He was temporarily transferred back to the interior, but I believe he returned to Rabaul in ’43. Nishizawa was a master, possibly even better than Iwamoto. The American forces held him in high esteem, and reportedly there’s a photo of him hanging in the halls of the U.S. Department of Defense. Pretty unique he was.
Tsutomu Iwai and Sadamu Komachi must have been at Rabaul, too. Komachi was young, but an expert pilot. In any case, while few in number, the pilots remaining there had virtuoso-like skills in the air. Those were not men who would be easily shot down. And Miyabe was amongst them.
Thanks to the efforts of those pilots, Rabaul held out, but they were far outnumbered. And since we had lost mastery over the seas, it became very difficult to replenish supplies, and eventually Rabaul became useless. As such, the Americans no longer needed to try and capture it. In the end, they succeeded in isolating Rabaul and hopping over to Saipan.
The American forces had lunged into our space swinging.
In early ’44, I was transferred to the Philippines as part of the aircrew on the carrier Zuikaku, which had been deployed since Pearl Harbor. She had sunk the Lexington in the Battle of the Coral Sea and the Hornet in the South Pacific. She was a blessed warship that had never once suffered damage in battle. I felt lucky to be assigned to her. I figured that so long as I was on board that ship, I just might survive again. Military men are more superstitious than you might think.
Crewmembers were scraped together from disparate bases and assigned to aircraft carriers. That was how I had an unexpected reunion with a certain someone—Miyabe.
It was quite a surprise for both of us. Most of those who had survived the Sino-Japanese war had died in the Pacific, so to encounter an old war buddy at that point was truly thrilling.
Miyabe and I were never all that close before, but being reunited with him filled me with the joy of running into an old, dear friend. He seemed to feel the same way.
“So you’re still alive, huh?”
“Glad to see you looking well, Tanigawa-san.”
“Knock off the formal crap, we enlisted the same damn year. You’re gonna make me feel awkward too. No honorifics.”
Miyabe broke into a smile. “All right, Tanigawa.”
After ten years of service, we’d both been promoted to flight chief petty officer of the fleet, which meant in the Imperial Navy nomenclature that we were warrant officers. Neither of us discussed the particulars of where or how we’d fought, but we were both fully aware of how great a feat it was to have survived to that point.
“Looks like it’ll be an all-out battle,” I said.
“It’s gonna get real tough.”
“We might not make it this time.”
Miyabe tightened his lips in reply.
Facing the American Mobile Task Force, which had begun a counteroffensive, was our own Mobile Force of nine aircraft carriers, including the Shokaku and the Zuikaku, which had been deployed since Midway, and the newly built Taiho. Those three were the only “true” aircraft carriers, while the rest, smaller, were often reconstructed merchant ships. The Americans, however, kept pumping out large Essex-class carriers one after another. According to aerial observers’ reports, the Americans had over a dozen carriers. The gap between our respective military might had stretched into a wide chasm. By the way, those Essex-class carriers were ridiculously resilient, and our side never managed to destroy even one of them.
But even when the enemy has the overwhelming advantage, you still have to fight. That’s war.
What was heartening was the fact that the aircraft flown by the First Carrier Division comprised of the Shokaku, Zuikaku, and Taiho were all state-of-the-art. The fighters were cutting-edge Zero Model 52s, the dive bombers were the Suisei D4Y, and the attack bombers were the Tenzan B6N. Since we were at the point where the old Type 99s and Type 97s couldn’t compete, having the latest models of aircraft on board was reassuring. The Suisei bombers were said to be faster than the enemy fighter planes, so we had high hopes that they would lend us much-needed striking power.
Moreover, the Taiho was a large-scale carrier on par with a 40,000-ton battleship, with an armor-plated flight deck able to withstand a dive-bombing with 500-kilo bombs.
“If we’d had the Taiho at Midway, we could’ve won,” I said to Miyabe on the deck of the Zuikaku as I gazed at her in the distance. All four of the carriers we’d lost at Midway had been destroyed by 500-kilo bombs.
He laughed. “Haven’t you got it backwards? If we hadn’t lost at Midway, we’d never have made a powerful carrier like that.”
“Yeah, I suppose.”
“Personally, I’d rather we had planes with better protection.”
I agreed. How many excellent pilots had been killed in action simply because their planes lacked bulletproof armor? I felt it was terribly unfair that a single stray bullet could take your life.
The Grumman F6F Hellcats could take 100 bullets from a 7.7-mm machine gun and still be entirely unfazed. When I was at Kupang Air Base, I once saw the wreckage of a downed Hellcat. I was amazed by how thick the steel plates covering the fuselage were. In particular, the bulletproof armor installed behind the pilot’s seat was so thick that a 7.7 mm bullet could never pierce through.
The Americans really value the lives of their pilots, I thought enviously.
When they conducted air raids on us, they were always accompanied by submarines. It was to rescue any pilots that had to make an emergency landing in the water.
When I discussed this with Miyabe, he said, “If fallen pilots can be returned to the front lines, they can teach others lessons about why they failed.”
“While if we fail just once, we’re dead ducks.”
“There’s that, and they keep building up their collective experience, grooming more and more seasoned pilots.”
“Even as our ranks of veteran pilots grow thin.”
By that point, the skills of the American pilots were far and away superior to what they had been at the start of the war. Plus, the cutting-edge Hellcats and Sikorsky fighters surpassed the Zeros in performance. They flew those excellent aircraft in formation, skillfully coordinated by good radio communication. And to top it off, their sheer numbers overwhelmed us.
On our side, most of our pilots were young, with less than two years’ experience. There was no way to cover up such a decline in skill. This became glaringly obvious when I watched them practice carrier takeoffs and landings off the coast of Tawi-Tawi in the Philippines. One after another, they failed to land on the carrier deck. Some crashed into the ship’s stern, some flipped over on the flight deck, while others failed to rein in their momentum and skidded right off the bow. With every takeoff and landing practice, we lost a considerable number of aircraft and pilots—more than fifty of them all told. Just through landing training, we lost the equivalent of one carrier’s fighting force.