After getting out of the plane, Petty Officer Sakai said sharply, “I will go to make my report.”
“You need medical attention first,” Lt. JG Sasai yelled. He and PO Nishizawa held up PO Sakai’s body in their arms. I helped by propping him up from behind. His whole body reeked of blood.
“No, I will report first,” PO Sakai declared. I thought he surely had to be some kind of a demon.
“Pilot senior, you’re not fully aware of the extent of your own injuries,” PO Nishizawa said, but PO Sakai kept on walking towards the command post on his own two feet. The moment he finished his report, he was carried to the infirmary.
Details of PO Sakai’s report quickly spread through the ranks. On the way back after the raid on Guadalcanal, he had mistaken a formation of enemy carrier-based bombers for fighters and attacked them from behind.
He had made a terrible mistake despite being a pilot of his caliber. A fighter is completely defenseless from a rear attack, but bombers have a pair of swivel-mounted machine guns in the back. PO Sakai had charged into a formation of eight carrier-based bombers from the rear. Even though the swivel-mounted guns on bombers had a far lower accuracy compared to fighter planes’ fixed guns, facing eight bombers’ rear gunners was a different matter. A barrage of bullets fired from sixteen machine guns greeted him.
They blew away his canopy, a bullet grazed his skull, and shards of his windshield pierced both of his eyes, effectively blinding him. With his vision clouded over and his left arm paralyzed as a result of the impact to his head, he flew back to Rabaul using just his right hand, blood flowing profusely from his head wound.
“Only Petty Officer Sakai could have made it back under such conditions. He is incredible, just incredible,” Flight Leader Miyabe said. I could only nod silently in agreement. “But the rest of us aren’t up to it. Petty Officers Nishizawa and Sakai are true masters. Not everyone can pull off what they did. This battle is going to be really tough.” The flight leader’s voice had a grim tone as he predicted the hellish fighting to come.
That day, five medium bombers were lost, and there were six unreturned Zeros including those that had crash-landed on Buka Island. Most tragic was the fate of the nine carrier-based bombers that had undertaken a one-way mission. The bombers had received orders to ditch in a designated area of the ocean after attacking, but only four crewmen were rescued by seaplanes. Fourteen expert aircrew lost their lives that day.
The next day at 0800, I set out for Guadalcanal as Miyabe Flight’s second plane. A total of fifteen Zeros—every single one at Rabaul that could be deployed—sortied that day. The formation of medium bombers, all of them armed with torpedoes, numbered twenty-three. Apparently, they had carried bombs the previous day. They’d initially planned to carry out a raid on Port Moresby when new orders to attack the troop transport convoy had suddenly come down, and they hadn’t had time to switch to torpedoes.
We Zeros were escorting the bombers, and while we flew and flew, nothing but clouds and the sea greeted us. I realized in spades just how very far Guadalcanal was from our base.
The medium bombers were slow, and the Zeros had to fly in a zigzag pattern shaving the air to match their speed. As the Zeros had shorter flight ranges and needed to conserve as much fuel as possible, the zigzagging wasn’t exactly enjoyable. As we could be on our own for the return trip, I periodically marked my location during the flight, relying on compass and ruler.
Before departing, Flight Leader Miyabe had insisted, “The battle isn’t just aerial combat with the enemy. It lasts until you return to base.” He’d also told me that more than a few planes lost track of their course over the seas and failed to return. Not making it back to base equaled death.
I glanced at the clock. It was nearly 11:00. We would be close to Guadalcanal at that point. I passed through a cloud and saw the island far in the distance ahead. I looked at Guadalcanal’s waters and gulped. Innumerable warships lay at anchor in the island’s bay.
I was horrified to discover that the Americans sent out so many ships to capture just one little island. How much could we accomplish by taking on such a huge force with just twenty-three medium bombers? I felt gloomy about the prospects but was committed to my mission. I roused my fighting spirit.
That day, I was guarding the medium bombers. Escorting consisted of two tasks: tactical air control and guarding the bombers. TAC was about establishing supremacy in hostile airspace, while the guard contingent stayed close to the bombers to protect them from enemy fighters.
I caught sight of hostiles ahead. The TAC which had sortied first was already engaged in combat with enemy interceptors. The TAC fought hard, trying to keep them away from the bombers, but slipping through, the enemy approached.
These fighters were Grumman Wildcats, and it was my first encounter with them. I would learn after the war that the U.S. fighters there belonged to the aircraft carriers Saratoga, Enterprise, and Hornet. The U.S. Navy had deployed every carrier it had on hand to take Guadalcanal.
The hostile fighters took advantage of their higher altitude and swooped down. Their tactic was the simple hit and run. They would plunge down, fire a volley of bullets, and then continue downward to escape.
Their fighters did not engage the Zeros. They dove in and focused their attacks solely on the bombers. Since our primary mission was to guard the bombers, we devoted ourselves to driving away the enemy rather than dogfighting. The guard contingent could not stray from the medium bombers. That would be playing right into the enemy’s hands. The fighter guard’s mission was to protect the bombers even if it meant giving up our lives.
The TAC team, too, had to conserve enough fuel for the return trip, so they could not chase the enemy very far. After diving down to flee, the Grummans pulled up into a climb to repeat the same style of attack. Once they were high in the air, the TAC team tried to close in on them, but the Grummans shied away and instead went after the medium bombers again. That day, we suffered a number of these recurring strikes.
The fighter guard strove desperately to protect the bombers, but in the face of such persistent interception, they began spewing flames and dropping one after another. It was humiliating.
Although the land-based Type 1 attack plane was the Imperial Navy’s standard-bearing bomber craft, it had exceedingly poor defenses. The Americans gave it the unenviable nickname of “one-shot lighter” since it could catch fire from just one shot. Despite the fact that it was a slow-moving bomber, its fuel tanks were unprotected and there was practically no armor for the cockpit, which meant it was easily taken out by fighters. In fact, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Commander-in-Chief of the Combined Fleet, was killed in 1943 when a Type 1 that had been transporting him got shot down.
Even so, the bomber formation managed to draw close to the troop transports. Just when we thought the enemy fighters had scattered, we faced a storm of anti-aircraft fire. The fighters soared to escape the onslaught, but the bombers had to continue their descent headlong into the barrage in order to launch their torpedoes. The tempest of AA fire from the enemy fleet made columns of water spout up around the bombers as they entered level flight. One plane after another caught fire and crashed into the waves, but the other brave crews pressed on through the blaze of gunfire. It was a bloodcurdling sight.
I watched as a torpedo delivered a death blow to the hull of a transport.
As the surviving bombers attempted to flee after the torpedo attack, enemy fighters pounced on them, and Zeros set upon them once more in turn. The enemy was tenacious, and our escorting fighters had a hard time of it.
The fruits of that day’s battle according to our reports: two warships and nine transports sunk. A splendid achievement—only, the American tally made available after the war lists the loss of just one destroyer and one transport.
I departed at 0800 and finally returned at 1500, having spent seven hours in the cockpit. My first sortie to
Guadalcanal had been unbelievably exhausting, and for a moment I felt faint when I landed at Rabaul. I’d never experienced such severe fatigue. I barely managed to crawl out of the aircraft, feeling like every bone in my body was about to rattle right out of my skin. I remember walking back to the barracks feeling like the ground was slowly rolling and pitching beneath my feet. I wanted to just collapse if I could.
That day, we lost eighteen medium bombers and two Zeros. Twenty-three bombers had taken off and only five had returned. In just two days, we had lost nine Type 99 bombers, twenty-three Type 1 bombers, and eight Zeros, which were almost all the attack planes and nearly half the Zeros at Rabaul. We had lost the lives of some 150 aviators. Since the medium bombers had a crew of seven each, the loss of one plane took the lives of seven men at once. Pilots, bombardiers, mechanics, radio operators—all of them first-rate in their fields, valuable aircrew who had spent years to get there. And we had lost 150 of them in just two days.
I thought back on Miyabe-san’s warning that this battle was going to be incredibly tough.
And our losses that day would be hardly exceptional.
Chapter 5
Guadalcanal
“May I rest for a moment?” Izaki asked, reclining on his bed. His daughter Suzuko pressed the call button for the nurse.
“Are you all right, sir?” I asked.
Izaki, still lying down, raised his right hand in reply.
After a moment, a nurse entered the room. “I’m in a bit of pain,” Izaki told her. She gave him an injection. He closed his eyes and turned onto his side.
“We probably should be going,” my sister said to Suzuko Emura.
As soon as he heard her, Izaki practically shouted, “Wait a minute. I still have many things I need to tell you.”
“Are you sure, Father?” Suzuko asked worriedly.
“I’m fine. The pain is already gone.” Izaki sat up, but his face belied him.
“We’ll come back again in a few days.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Izaki said. “After living for eighty years, it’s a given that one’s body starts to fall apart.”
The nurse sat down in a chair and told us that she could stay a bit since her shift was over.
“With a nurse on hand, we’re all set,” Izaki joked, but his smile looked forced, and his daughter looked at him anxiously. “I had such confidence in my physical strength when I was young. When I was at Rabaul, I was the same age as Seiichi is now.”
Seiichi’s expression stiffened momentarily.
“Izaki-san, it sounds like you had strong ties with our grandfather,” Keiko said.
“As I mentioned before, it’s entirely thanks to the fact that I was Flight Leader Miyabe’s wingman that I survived. And precisely for that reason, I came to fear death. I only say this now, but when I first arrived at Rabaul I was totally unafraid of death. A kid of nineteen can’t possibly understand how sacred life really is. This is a slightly odd analogy, but it’s like someone with only a little money going out gambling and, assuming he’ll lose anyway, happily betting everything he has. But then somehow he keeps on winning, and as the jackpot grows he becomes fearful and starts to not want to lose.”
“I think I understand, sir.”
“Beginning in the fall of 1942, veteran aircrew who’d survived Midway were transferred from the interior to Rabaul. But even for those seasoned aviators, Rabaul was a harsh place.”
“It was the Airmen’s Graveyard, right?” Keiko asked.
Izaki nodded. “But even so, Saeki-san, we were among the fortunate. The ones who really went through hell were…” Izaki paused and sighed quietly, “the Imperial Army soldiers who fought at Guadalcanal.”
* * *
—
Do you know about the battle fought by the Imperial Army soldiers at Guadalcanal?
No? Ah, I see. Well, I guess young people these days wouldn’t know anything about it.
This is getting off the topic of Flight Leader Miyabe, but I want you to hear about those soldiers that fought at Guadalcanal. In fact, I don’t want any Japanese to forget about that tragedy. I definitely want Seiichi, here, to know about it, too.
And unless you know about the Army’s battle at Guadalcanal, you won’t be able to comprehend why the Rabaul Air Corps, to which Flight Leader Miyabe and I belonged, fought so hard grinding down our very lives.
It wasn’t until after the war, though, that I became fully informed as to what had happened on the island. And when I finally learned the full story, I realized that Guadalcanal was a microcosm of the Pacific War. The foolishness of Imperial General Headquarters and the Japanese military came into full play in the battle for that island. No, it was Japan, as a country, that laid bare its worst weaknesses on that battleground.
That’s exactly why I want all Japanese people to know about Guadalcanal!
This battle that spanned six months was the very turning point of the Pacific War.
* * *
—
When the U.S. forces attacked Guadalcanal on August 7th, the Imperial General HQ apparently assumed the conflict would be local. They seemed to have concluded that the U.S. merely wanted to score an easy hit on a weakly defended island. This, too, I only learned after the war was over.
As I just said, those of us in the Rabaul Air Corps immediately attacked their troop transports when the island first fell. But the following month, the Imperial General Headquarters sent Army soldiers to recapture the airfield on Guadalcanal. That was the beginning of the tragedy.
After sizing up the U.S. forces to number about two thousand without properly reconnoitering them, IGHQ sent an attack wave of just over 900 troops. It’s a mystery as to where they got “2,000,” but what’s shocking is that they thought a force less than half as strong could recapture the island and airfield. Maybe they believed the Imperial Army was simply that powerful. However, it turned out that there were 13,000 U.S. Marines on the island.
After the war, I read in a book that the night before the assault, the Army’s landing forces were in celebratory spirits as if they had already won the battle. The commander, Colonel Ichiki, was a cocksure man himself. Apparently, when he received his orders he asked his superior, “Can we attack Tulagi to the north of Guadalcanal as well?”
That battle was the first showdown between the Imperial Army and the U.S. Marines. It seemed that our soldiers went into battle thinking they would kill every last one of those spineless Yanks. Back then, it had been drilled into our heads that Americans were total cowards and sissies. That they put their families first and had cushy lives waiting for them back home. That they all hated war and valued their own lives above all else. They’d all surrender without hesitation if the fighting got too fierce. They lacked the fearless resolve of Imperial troops who would opt for a hero’s death over the lot of a captive. So defeat wasn’t possible. It was thanks to such a bias that they figured a force half the expected strength of the enemy would be perfectly sufficient. So I can’t really blame the troops in Ichiki Expeditionary Force for laughing and thinking that an easy victory awaited them the next day.
But the results—it pains me even to say this, but Ichiki Expeditionary Force was totally annihilated when they mounted their first night raid. The Japanese military’s assault charge was utterly ineffective in the face of the U.S.’s overwhelming firepower.
Back then, the Imperial Army’s basic tactic was the bayonet charge. Troops threw caution to the wind, rushed the enemy’s position, and stabbed the enemy with their bayonets to kill them. Meanwhile, the Americans used heavy artillery, as well as heavy and light machine guns. The U.S. forces rained shells on and inundated with machine-gun fire the charging Japanese troops.
There was no way our side could win. The Japanese ground forces at Guadalcanal were like the Takeda Cavalry challenging Nobunaga Oda’s musket lines during the Battle of Nagashino c
enturies ago. Why on earth had our side chosen to carry out such a stupid operation? What was the IGHQ staff thinking? On what grounds did they conclude that such medieval battle tactics could defeat the Americans? I just can’t fathom the idiocy of it all.
After the war, I saw a photograph taken in the immediate aftermath of that battle. It showed countless Japanese soldiers strewn along the sandy shore the morning after. The bodies had no blood on them; perhaps the waves had washed them clean. The photo clearly depicted their expressions. They’d all had fathers and mothers back in their hometowns, even wives and children waiting back home. I could barely see it after a while because my eyes welled with tears.
Of the approximately 800 troops who participated in the charge, it’s said that 777 died, on that one night. Colonel Ichiki burned the battle flag and committed suicide. It is said that casualties on the American side could be counted on one hand.
Upon receiving news of Ichiki Expeditionary Force’s fate, IGHQ said, “Well, in that case,” and decided to send in a much larger attack force, of 5,000. That would surely do?
But the Americans outdid us. They’d repelled the Japanese forces, but predicting that we’d strike again with more troops, they increased their garrison to 18,000 troops.
The General Staff’s plans were entirely haphazard. At first, they didn’t bother finding out the size of the enemy’s forces, made assumptions that worked in their favor, and thought they could win back the island with an expeditionary force of less than a thousand. When that failed, they simply concluded that five thousand should do the job. Sending in troops as they come instead of amassing them is a tactic that should be avoided at all costs, but the elite staff at IGHQ didn’t even know the ABCs. Sun Tzu’s Art of War famously states: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” They were fighting without knowing the enemy, which was out of the question. Pity the soldiers who were used like pawns in such a haphazard operation.
The Eternal Zero Page 13