But what had promised to become a carefully measured testing ground for future air campaigns failed to evolve. The air war over Spain became a scramble, with the diversity in aircraft matched by the moods and the means of the pilots and aircrews. Many men fought with great daring and bravery; others spat upon the aims and goals of the conflict and wasted no time in extricating themselves from difficult or lethal circumstances.
There were no real victors in the skies of Spain. The nations contributing numbers of fighters and bombers did so only to meet their own requirements of combat experience for their aircrews and to have a testing ground for equipment. As quickly as these aims were realized, large aerial forces were swiftly moved out of the fray. Sometimes they were replaced with new units testing experimental aircraft or modified equipment; just as often the needs of the combatants—Loyalists and Nationalists alike—were subordinated to the whims of the nations who employed Spain to suit their many conveniences.
As the Nationalists ground their enemies underfoot, support for the Loyalists in the air trickled away into a morass of ineffectiveness. Resistance on the ground crumbled, and with it went any pretense at an air arm that might decide the course of events far below. The pilots of the Loyalists scrambled for their lives, rushing to safety in any direction where they might escape the harsh hand of Nationalist retribution. In this fashion did the aerial conflict of Spain draw to its conclusion—marked by its inconclusiveness.
The nature of the aerial fighting in Spain was to mislead many Americans. There were few firm lessons to be found in the months of bloody fighting, a condition not surprising when one considers the nature of Spain as a “testing ground” for different nations and air forces. Attacks against enemy bastions and cities produced their grisly effects in terms of tom and bloodied human flesh and appalling casualties, but the military strategist was hard put to interpret meaningful results. Tactics changed as often as the wind. Commanders succeeding their fallen predecessors were wont to change the application of air-power as their moods saw fit. Out of the carnage there came the appalling silence of a nation licking its brutal wounds, and little else to show for the long months of lethal struggle.
What had happened in the air eluded strategists and historians alike. At the same time, there were lessons to be learned from that wild and mad fight. There were technical lessons, first of all: lessons as to the need for more guns for fighters, for better defenses built into bombers, for armor plating, and for coordinated tactics on the part of large fighter formations.
The pilot in Spain could not help but benefit from what took place in the skies over that country.
The aerial war of Spain ended on a note of preparedness for other wars, for which the first skirmishes were already being fought. Only a blind man could fail to see the swelling strength of Japanese airpower in the Far East. Only a blind man and a fool could fail to understand that the major aerial combatants in Spain—the Italians, Germans, and Russians—had satisfied their needs, and were hastily adjusting their own equipment and tactics to conform to what they had gleaned from their Spanish experience.
The United States, unfortunately, had more than its share of fools and blind men. And a disproportionate share of these men occupied the desks at our War Department, which chose, largely, to ignore the lessons carried to them in the experience of Americans who had fought—and successfully—in Spain. One such pilot, for example, was James L. H. Peck, a free-lance aerial soldier of fortune. Jim Peck had become the first American since World War I to shoot down a German plane in aerial combat. He had become an ace in Spanish skies with the destruction before his guns of two German and three Italian warplanes.
Jim Peck came home, his experiences fresh in his mind, and went to the War Department, to speak with officers of the Army Air Corps, to offer his services and the benefit of his experience. But Jim Peck failed in his mission. The War Department cared little for what had happened in Spanish skies, and they cared less for Jim Peck. His status as a seasoned combat flier and an ace mattered little against the fact that he was a Negro.
Official myopia even in the light of facts from Spain was much the same on the other side of the world, where the Japanese were systematically preparing for their major war—against the United States. Before they could be committed to the ultimate struggle, however, the Japanese were in desperate need of experience and time. They needed time in which to build up their military strength, and yet more time in which to test the mettle of their men and the effectiveness of their equipment.
The Japanese engaged in a great aerial conflict that lasted for several years. They fought against the Chinese, and against a mongrel assemblage of airmen and planes brought together by the Chinese in an ill-fated Foreign Legion of the Air. They fought, also, against a powerful Soviet air armada, sent to China specifically to test the cutting edge of Japanese airpower and to verify the needs of Soviet air strength.
Just as Americans had fought in Spain, so Americans joined the struggle in the skies of China. The leading proponent of Chinese—and American—airpower in that struggle was no obscure soldier of fortune. Captain Claire Lee Chennault had spent his service life as a pilot in the United States Army. Fiery, abrupt, and often outspoken in his criticism of superiors (a trait that endeared him little to those superiors), he was nonetheless held in great respect for his brilliant flying skill, his tremendous drive and dedication to his service, and his successes as a tactician.
Chennault and a small band of like-minded men were distressingly frustrated in their roles as modem Paul Reveres. They shouted their warnings; they supported their statements with unquestionable proof. They were not only ignored, but they discovered, later, that both their warnings and their proof had been deliberately hidden and even destroyed.
So the great air war of the Asian mainland and the vast reaches of the Pacific ground toward its inevitable outbreak.
It was an air war in which the Japanese were left free to utilize their years of preparedness, in the form of brilliant piloting skill, developed tactics, and superior machinery. It was a strange war, deadly in its immediate results to us. It was a war locked within a twisting fog of havoc and confusion, many times created deliberately so as to disguise the unpleasant truths of that war—in which Americans were slaughtered because of unpreparedness and false beliefs that could not be eliminated prior to the battle.
Pearl Harbor, which received the greatest publicity, was the least of it. Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, was but a natural result of the preceding years, in which Japanese airpower was built to carry out a deliberate mission of conquest.
It was a “crazy kind of a war,” throughout its preparatory stages. American volunteers fought with the Chinese, and were treated to the spectacle of Japanese pilots flying airplanes purchased from the United States, and being used in combat against Chinese and Russian air units. It was a war in which German technicians helped Chinese aircrews to fly German airplanes—against the Japanese—while other German technicians aided their Japanese counterparts in assembling German warplanes in Japan. It was a war in which flamboyant Italian officers roared in sleek limousines through the streets of Chinese cities, flying at odd times against the Japanese, while Italian politicians planned for the political-military alliance of Italy, Germany, and Japan.
It was the war of preparedness waged by the Japanese for their eventual mass strike against American and British military bastions throughout Asia and the Pacific—a strike that tore our defenses to shreds and inflicted staggering casualties among our own forces and those of our Allies.
When that war got under way, we were beaten back along every front on which we fought the Japanese. We found it a bitter pill to swallow. The “it” included almost everything about the Japanese. Their pilots we discovered to be highly disciplined and of great skill at their tasks. Their fighters were the greatest shock of all, because the Zero fighter proved superior to anything We could put up against the enemy. And badly as we were beaten in those first
months of the war in the Pacific and in Asia, our Allies took a worse beating. It was a Japanese show almost all the way.
There still remain, after all these many years, gross misconceptions about that time and the events that occurred then. There is still the feeling that Japan for years hoarded her airplanes until she built up a huge majority of warplanes, and then descended upon us in an overwhelming, locustlike swarm of numerical superiority. The truth is that we outnumbered the Japanese, on December 7, 1941, almost two-to-one in military aircraft on the first day of war. Before that day was over, swift Japanese attacks decimated our forces and drastically changed the .odds. The United States lost two-thirds of all its aircraft in the Pacific theater.
The Japanese onslaught against Pearl Harbor reached its greatest effectiveness in eliminating Hawaii as a source of immediate reinforcement for the Philippines. On those beleaguered islands, Japanese attacks rapidly smashed our remaining air strength until the best we could do, despite great courage on the part of our men, was temporarily to annoy the enemy.
What of the famed Flying Tigers—the American Volunteer Group? These men, who fought so hard and against overwhelming odds, appear to be forgotten in our review of the long period of Japanese preparations for her war against the United States. But this is not the case. The great majority of Americans who believe that the FlyingTigers fought a lonely war against the enemy, long before America as a nation was committed to the battle, are in error. For the truth is that the Flying Tigers never entered combat against the Japanese until December 20, 1941—13 days after the attack against Pearl Harbor and the Philippines. Strange as it may seem, they were actually latecomers to the opening phases of the war.
In swift order Japan toppled her enemies and swept over the opposition that was so often bravely, but pitifully, presented against her military strength. As the war against the United States and her Allies burst across the Pacific, Japan controlled as much of the vast China mainland as she desired. The French had capitulated without a shot. Japanese forces took Guam and Wake. We were dispossessed in the Netherlands East Indies. Singapore tumbled with humiliating defeat into the Japanese net, and brilliantly executed Japanese tactics almost entirely eliminated the British as combatants. Within a few months anxiety and outright fear gripped much of Australia; some of its northern cities were brought under air attack and many of them abandoned. Japanese planes swarmed almost uncontested against northern New Guinea, New Ireland, the Admiralties, New Britain, and the Solomons. The occupation by the Japanese of Kavieng, Rabaul, and Bougainville threatened greater disasters; not only did these takeovers threaten the precarious supply lines from the United States, but they were being expanded into potential springboards for the invasion of Australia itself.
The long and dreary months after Pearl Harbor were a combination of disaster, humility, and astonishment. We were astonished—and too often with fatal results—at the unexpected quality of Japanese equipment. We had committed not one but countless errors, and the worst of these was in underestimating the enemy. We had believed our own press releases, and our antiquated planes fell like flies before the agile and swift Zero fighters of the Japanese Navy.
We must pause for a moment for a further word about this astonishing airplane. Astonishing, because we refused to believe that the Japanese could ever build such a machine in the first place. And just as astonishing because the Zero effectively swept aside all opposition. In this fighter aircraft the Japanese made the most of both qualitative and quantitative superiority. They used the former swiftly to achieve the latter.
The Japanese fighter was faster than any opposing plane. It outmaneuvered anything the Allies had in the air. It outclimbed and could fight at greater heights than any plane in all Asia and the Pacific. It had more than twice the standard combat range of our standard fighter, the P-40, and it featured the heavy punch of cannon. Zero pilots had cut their combat teeth in China and pushed to the utmost this clear advantage over our own men. Many of the Allied pilots who contested in their own inferior planes this hallmark of Japanese airpower literally flew suicide missions.
During these early and dark months the black night of defeat was sometimes lighted with bright sparks of heroism—and momentary success—on the part of the defenders. It was enough, at times, temporarily to check the sweeping advance of the enemy. But only temporarily.
We were fighting a dirty, crude, overwhelming, stinking war in the air. The conditions were primitive and rugged beyond belief. Men lived like animals, but fought—and died—like men. The picture of the American airman, as most people back home thought of him, was a grim joke. Our men lived in tents, and just as often slept on the open ground, scraping together food and personal belongings for day-to-day living. They flew combat mission after - mission, until some of them fell asleep in their airplanes the moment their machines rolled to a stop—too weary to climb out of their seats. Their eyes were gaunt and their tempers frayed, and defeat did nothing to bolster their morale. But still they fought, striking those sparks of heroism and brief victory in the black night. They were, in every sense of the word, the ragged warriors of our nation.
Our story is of that opening period of the war in the Pacific and in Asia. It is the story of men who had no choice but to enter battle in machines that, back in the United States, would immediately have been condemned as unfit for a brief flight around an airport. Yet it was with this decrepit, weary, and outmoded equipment, patched together by unsung mechanics for whom the world became a blur of maintenance around the clock, that they fought America’s war, a war for time.
We are aware, of course, that theirs was, in the end, a struggle of unquestioned success. Despite their smashing military triumphs, within one year of the opening strike of the war the Japanese had had the offensive in the Pacific wrested from their hands. The overwhelming numerical superiority which they had gained—largely through destruction of our forces with relative impunity—had become a cherished dream of the past. By the spring of 1943 the American steamroller had clearly shifted the balance of strength. The Japanese were undeniably powerful, unquestionably capable of fierce and dangerous action. But just as undeniable was the fact of new American strength. We enjoyed not only a huge increase in the number of weapons, but astounding advances in the quality of those weapons.
That was enough to put the Japanese on the defensive —and the handwriting of death and defeat on the wall.
But it all had to be bought—bought with time, sacrifice, and a savage war conducted largely in the air.
The Americans—along with the British, Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, Dutch, Filipino, and other combatants of the air war—learned something about that aerial conflict that the Chinese had known for a long time. The unwritten rules of war in the air, handed down from World War I, sustained to some degree in Spain and in shadow form over the early battlegrounds of Europe and Africa, didn’t apply in the conflict with the Japanese.
Earlier in these pages I wrote: ‘"Tradition and rules of conduct in the air varied with circumstances. Much depended upon the nature of the conflict. Customs observed in one part of the world were unknown in other parts.”
We learned—to our dismay and outrage—that the Japanese pilot, almost to a man, considered the unwritten laws of chivalry of aerial war in European skies as indescribably stupid.
The entire concept of Japanese aerial operations was built around a single word: Attack. This was their code, their operational concept, the reality of their conduct in the air. Defensive air operations were not in their plans. They flew not as fanatics, but with a fanatical code of battle. Attack.
They were grimly unrelenting in this attitude. Fighter airplanes were offensive weapons. They could only be used as such. The purpose of an offensive weapon was to kill the enemy, to render him incapable of fighting any longer.
The man who bailed out of an enemy fighter was fair game for Japanese guns. It was not a matter of being cruel, of gunning down a helpless victim. That such sentim
ents are to us so real as to constitute a way of life should not blind us to the Japanese way of thinking— that the man in a parachute can live to fight again, and should be destroyed while the opportunity is at hand. It could not matter less if that man were still in his airplane, or floating to safety in a parachute, or even if he were adrift on the ocean surface in a life raft. Kill the enemy—that was the only way to fight for Japan.
By the spring of 1942 this was a well-established fact of life with American and Allied airmen. If a Japanese pilot caught a man drifting earthward beneath his silken canopy, the odds were that the pilot would attack—using his guns or his propeller to kill the American pilot and, all else failing, trying to make a high-speed pass directly over the parachute so that the wind would collapse the canopy.
Not all Japanese pilots pursued this “death to the enemy under all conditions” philosophy; no more so than all American and Allied pilots followed the covenant of not shooting a man helpless in his parachute or gunning him to death while he drifted in a life raft or a boat.
The hard pursuit of the Allied airman, no matter what his circumstance, brought into existence bizarre and often ridiculous beliefs about Japanese pilots. Quick to believe anything that might downgrade the Japanese as a civilized man, we spread the story that the Japanese cared little for their pilots’ lives, that the pilots were forbidden to wear parachutes, and other such arrant nonsense.
Saburo Sakai, Japan’s greatest ace (64 confirmed kills) to survive the war, sets the record straight:
“In 1942 none of our fighter planes carried pilot armor, nor did the Zeros have self-sealing tanks, as did the American planes. As the enemy pilots soon discovered, a burst of their 50-caliber bullets into the fuel tanks of a Zero caused it to explode violently in flames. Despite this, in those days not one of our pilots flew with parachutes. This has been misinterpreted in the West as proof that our leaders were disdainful of our lives, that all Japanese pilots were expendable and regarded as pawns instead of human beings. This was far from the truth. Every man was assigned a parachute; the decision to fly without them was our own and not the result of any orders from higher headquarters. Actually, we were urged, although not ordered, to wear the parachutes in combat. At some fields the base commander insisted that chutes be wom, and those men had no choice but to place the bulky seat packs in their planes. Often, however, they never fastened the straps, and used the chutes only as seat cushions.
The Ragged, Rugged Warriors Page 2