My pleasure in returning to my uncle’s home in Tokyo on my first holiday leave can well be imagined. No longer was I the frustrated and disobedient teen-ager afraid to face squarely my scholastic and social problems. I was a young man of twenty, fairly bursting with pride, immaculate in new naval flier’s uniform, bedecked with seven shining buttons, and willing—most willing!—to accept happily the congratulations of my uncle’s family. The sight of my cousin Hatsuyo startled me. The young schoolgirl had disappeared, and in her place was an exceptionally attractive high-school student, fifteen years old. Hatsuyo greeted me with more than family warmth.
I had a long discussion with my uncle, who had always displayed such a strong interest in my life, and I was gratified to notice his pleasure at the outcome of my seaman apprenticeship, of studying on my own time, of rising through the ranks. All his pride had returned, no small thing for me after I had failed him so badly in the past. My visit to his home, with the family and Hatsuyo, was one of the most pleasant interludes in many years. After dinner we spent the evening in the sitting room where, after considerable prompting from her family, Hatsuyo honored me with a piano recital.
Hatsuyo was by no means a piano virtuoso, for she had begun her lessons only three years previously. However, I was not a music critic, and her playing seemed beautiful to me. The slow movements of Mozart, my first visit to a home in so many long months, the cordiality of Hatsuyo’s greeting were incredibly pleasant. Here for the first time in a seeming eternity was beauty and affection and comfort in place of the harsh brutality of naval training. The mood was almost overwhelming. The visit, however, was a brief one, and I soon returned to the school.
The Tsuchiura training facilities were located by a large lake, and bordered an airfield with two runways of 3,000 and 2,200 yards. Hundreds of airplanes could be stored at one time within the huge hangars, and there was always the bustle of activity at the base.
Apparently I was never to cease being surprised at what awaited me in each new naval training program. Hardly had I arrived at the new school than I discovered that my prior experiences with naval discipline were minor ones. I was amazed to realize that the disciplinary customs of the Sasebo Naval Base were pleasant interludes in comparison with those of Tsuchiura. Even the Navy Gunners School was hardly more than a kindergarten alongside the Fliers School.
“A fighter pilot must be aggressive and tenacious. Always.” This was our initial greeting from the athletic instructor who called together our first wrestling class. “Here at Tsuchiura we are going to instill those characteristics into you, or else you will never become a Navy pilot.” He lost no time in showing us his ideas of how we were to become indoctrinated with constant aggressiveness! The instructor at random selected two students from the group and ordered them to wrestle. The victor of this clash was then allowed to leave the wrestling mat.
His opponent who had lost the important match had no such luck. He remained on the mat, prepared to take on another pilot trainee. So long as he continued to lose, he remained on that mat, tiring with every bout, slammed about heavily and often sustaining injuries. If necessary, he was forced to wrestle every one of the other sixty-nine students in his class. If, at the end of sixty-nine consecutive wrestling bouts, he was still able to resume standing, he was considered fit—but for only one more day. The following day he again took on the first wrestling opponent and continued until he either emerged a victor or was expelled from the school.
With every pilot trainee determined not to be expelled from the fliers course, the wrestling matches were scenes of fierce competition. Often students were knocked unconscious. This, however, did not excuse them from what was considered an absolute training necessity. They were revived with buckets of water or other means and sent back to the mat.
Following a month’s basic ground training, we began our primary flying lessons. Flight lessons were held in the morning, classroom and other courses in the afternoon. Following dinner, we had two hours in which to study our subjects until the lights were turned out.
As the months wore on, our numbers diminished steadily. The training course demanded perfection from the students, and a trainee could be dismissed for even the slightest infraction of rules. Since the naval pilots were considered the elite of the entire Navy, of all the armed forces, there was no room for error. Before our ten-month course was completed, forty-five out of the original seventy students had been expelled from the school. The instructors did not follow the violent physical-discipline system of my former training installations, but their authority to dismiss from the school any student, for any reason, was feared far more than any mere savage beating.
The rigidity of this weeding-out process was forcibly brought home to us on the very eve of our graduation; on that same day, one of the remaining students was expelled. A shore patrol discovered him entering an off-limits bar in the town of Tsuchiura to celebrate his “graduation.” He was premature in more respects than one. Upon his return to the billet he was ordered to report at once to his faculty board. By way of apology the student knelt on the floor before his officers, but to no avail.
The faculty board found him guilty of two unpardonable sins. The first, every pilot knew. That was that a combat pilot shall never, for any reason, drink alcoholic beverages the evening before he flies. As part of the graduation exercises, we were to pass over the field in formation flight the next day. The second of the two crimes was more commonplace, but equally serious. No member of the Navy was ever to disgrace his service by entering any establishment marked “off limits.”
The physical training courses at Tsuchiura were among the severest in Japan. One of the more unpleasant of the obstacle courses was a high iron pole which we were required to climb. At the top of the pole, we were to suspend ourselves by one hand only. Any cadet who failed to support his weight for less than ten minutes received a swift kick in the rear and was sent scurrying up the pole again. At the end of the course, those students who had avoided expulsion were able to hang by one arm for as long as fifteen to twenty minutes.
Every enlisted man in the Imperial Navy was required to be able to swim. There were a good number of students who came from the mountain regions and had never done any swimming at all. The training solution was simple. The cadets were trussed up with rope around their waists and tossed into the ocean, where they swam—or sank. Today, thirty-nine years old and with pieces of shrapnel still in my body. I can swim fifty meters (162 feet) in thirty four seconds. At Fliers School, swimming that distance in less than thirty seconds was commonplace.
Every student was required to swim underwater for at least fifty meters, and to remain below the surface for at least ninety seconds. The average man can, with effort, hold his breath for forty or fifty seconds, but this is considered inadequate for a Japanese pilot. My own record is two minutes and thirty seconds below the surface.
We went through hundreds of diving lessons to improve our sense of balance, and to aid us later when we would be putting fighter planes through all sorts of aerobatic gyrations. There was special reason to pay strict attention to the diving lessons, for once the instructors felt we had received enough assistance from the boards, we were ordered to dive from a high tower to the hard ground! During the drop we somersaulted two or three times in the air, and landed on our feet. Naturally, there were errors—with disastrous results.
Acrobatics formed an important part of our athletic instruction, and every requirement laid down by the instructors was fulfilled—or the student was expelled. Walking on our hands was considered merely a primer. We also had to balance ourselves on our heads, at first for five minutes, then ten, until finally many of the students could maintain position for fifteen minutes or more. Eventually I was able to balance on my head for more than twenty minutes, during which time my fellow trainees would light cigarettes for me and place them between my lips.
Naturally, such circus antics were not the only physical requirements of our training, But they
did permit us to develop an amazing sense of balance and muscular coordination, traits which were to have lifesaving value in later years.
Every student at Tsuchiura was gifted with extraordinary eyesight; this was, of course, a minimum entry requirement. Every passing moment we spent in developing our peripheral vision, in learning how to recognize distant objects with snap glances—in short, in developing the techniques which would give us advantages over opposing fighter pilots.
One of our favorite tricks was to try to discover the brighter stars during daylight hours. This is no mean feat, and without above-average eyes it is virtually impossible to accomplish. However, our instructors constantly impressed us with the fact that a fighter plane seen from a distance of several thousand yards often is no easier to identify than a star in daylight. And the pilot who first discovers his enemy and maneuvers into the most advantageous attack position can gain an invincible superiority. Gradually, and with much more practice, we became quite adept at our star-hunting. Then we went further. When we had sighted and fixed the position of a particular star, we jerked our eyes away ninety degrees, and snapped back again to see if we could locate the star immediately. Of such things are fighter pilots made.
I personally cannot too highly commend this particular activity, inane as it may seem to those unfamiliar with the split-second, life-or-death movements of aerial warfare. I know that during my 200 air engagements with enemy planes, except for two minor errors I was never caught in a surprise attack by enemy fighters, nor did I ever lose any of my wingmen to hostile pilots.
In all our spare moments during our training at Tsuchiura we sought constantly to find methods by which we could shorten our reaction time and improve our certainty of movement. A favorite trick of ours was to snatch a fly on the wing within our fists. We must have looked silly, pawing at the air with our hands, but after several months a fly which flew before our faces was almost certain to end up in our hands. The ability to make sudden and exact movements is indispensable within the cramped confines of a fighter-plane cockpit.
These improvements in reaction time came to our aid in a totally unexpected way. Four of us were racing in a car at sixty miles an hour along a narrow road when the driver lost control of the car and hurtled over the edge of an embankment. The four of us, to a man, snapped open the car doors and literally flew from the vehicle. There were some scrapes and bruises, but not a single major injury among us, although the car was thoroughly demolished.
CHAPTER 4
The twenty-five students of the Thirty-eighth Non-commissioned Officers Class, including myself, graduated near the end of 1937, I was selected as the outstanding student pilot of the year, to receive as an award the Emperor’s silver watch.
Our group of twenty-five men was all which remained of seventy students, hand-picked out of 1,500 applicants. We had undergone intensive and often grueling training. However, before we were to be committed to action in China, where the war was launched in July of 1937, we were to receive additional in-service training.
Despite our excellent and arduous instruction, several men from my group were later killed by enemy pilots before gaining even a single victory. Even I, with unusual flying aptitude, would have met death during my first air combat if my opponent had been even slightly more aggressive in his maneuvers. There can be no doubt that I faltered clumsily through my first dogfight, and nothing less than the support of my fellow pilots and a lack of skill on the part of my enemy saved my life.
To me a dogfight has always been a difficult, grueling task, with almost unbearable tension. Even after my first combats were behind me and I had several enemy planes to my credit, I never emerged from the wild aerial melees without being soaked in perspiration. There was always the chance of committing that one slight error which meant flaming death. Through all the aerial maneuvers, the vertical turns, stalling turns, spins, half rolls, rolls, slow rolls, spirals, loops, Immelmanns, dives, zooms, falling leafs—through all these and more, one slight error could bring extinction. Of my twenty-five-man class, eventually I was the only man left alive. The long and difficult air war, so much to our advantage in the early days, degenerated into a vicious nightmare in which we struggled hopelessly against a rising enemy tide impossible to overcome.
During the 1930’s, the Japanese Navy trained approximately 100 fliers every year. The rigid screening and expulsion practices reduced the many hundreds of qualified students to the ridiculously low total of 100 or fewer graduated pilots. Had the Navy received additional funds for its training program and had it eased its intolerant attitude toward selecting pilot trainees, I believe our path during World War II would have been eased considerably. Doubtless the outcome would have been unaltered, but the brutal beating suffered by our air units during the last two years of war might have been somewhat alleviated. Only after the war began in the Pacific, and the attrition of experienced pilots emphasized the alarming need for an increased flow of replacements, did the Navy abandon its unreasonable training policies. By then it was too late. The caliber of the pilots produced during the wartime years was at best questionable. I know that the forty-five pilots expelled from my own student class at Tsuchiura were superior to those men who completed wartime training.
Our graduation was followed with assignment to various air squadrons for service training. My orders sent me to Oita and Omura Naval Air Bases in Northern Kyushu. Both installations stressed flying from land fields as well as from aircraft carriers. My introduction to the skill of the carrier pilots left me fairly quaking. Their aerobatics were astonishing, and were carried out with the most consummate skill. I doubted my own ability, even after years of training, to duplicate their superb airmanship.
Carrier landings proved particularly difficult for me to master. A month’s hard grind of approaches and touchdowns, approaches and touchdowns, over and over again, dispelled my troubles. Strangely enough, after this training I never took off or landed on a carrier in combat. All my combat flying was done from land installations.
Following three months of intensive carrier and land training, I received orders to transfer to the Kaohsiung Air Base on Formosa Island, then Japanese territory. The tempo of naval life had changed. The China War was already raging over sprawling battlefronts, and there was a sudden urgent need for more fighter pilots, even green pilots such as myself.
From Formosa I moved up to Kiukiang in Southeastern China, and in May of 1938 I tasted my first combat...with hardly an auspicious start. The Kiukiang Wing commander disdained the use of green pilots in regular air sorties, feeling that their inexperience would mark them clearly to the veteran pilots flying for the Chinese. So for several days I flew low-level missions in support of Army operations. The sorties were anything but dangerous; the Japanese Army was smashing aside all enemy opposition on the ground, and there was little opposition in the air. As the weeks passed I chafed at my restriction to support flights only. I was zealous and ambitious, proud of my rank as a Naval Aviation Pilot, Second Class, and determined to storm into enemy aircraft with great valor. On May 21 I was overjoyed to find my name among the fifteen fighter pilots selected to fly over Hankow on a regular patrol the, following day. Hankow promised action, since it was the main air base of Nationalist China at the time.
In 1938 the Zero fighter plane, which I later came to know so well, was not yet available for combat use. We flew the Mitsubishi Type 96 fighter plane, later given the Allied codename identification of Claude. These were slow and restricted in range. The landing gear was fixed, and we flew with open cockpits.
Our fifteen fighters left Kiukiang early on the morning of the twenty-second, adopting a formation of five V’s as we climbed. Visibility was excellent. The ninety-minute flight from our air base northwest to Hankow was like a leisurely training cruise. No interceptors arose to attack our formation, and not a single antiaircraft gun disputed the air with us. It seemed incredible that a war raged below.
From 10,000 feet the Hankow airfield was rem
arkably deceptive. Bright green grass stood out clearly under the morning sun, and the enemy’s major air base in the area looked for all the world like a sprawling, well-tended golf course. But fighter planes do not use such sporting facilities, and those three dots I saw racing over the ground, rising toward our own planes, were enemy fighters.
Then suddenly they were at our altitude, big, black, and powerful. Without warning—to my astonished mind, at least —one of the enemy planes whipped out of his formation and bored in with alarming speed at my own fighter. Abruptly all my careful plans of what I would do in my first combat evaporated. I felt my overtaut muscles twitch nervously and, although it is unpleasant to relate this now, I am certain I trembled with excitement and the shock of the other plane using me for his target!
I have often believed that I acted stupidly during those crucial moments, and the reader may well share this opinion. I must emphasize, however, that our mental reactions at 10,000 feet, after some ninety minutes at this height without oxygen, were hardly as reliable as when we were on the ground. The air is thin, with correspondingly less oxygen reaching the brain. The engine noise in the open cockpit is deafening, as is the streaming cold wind racing past the glass windshield. And there is no such thing as relaxing at the controls; I was turning my head, trying frantically to look in all directions to avoid being caught unawares, working the control stick, the rudder pedals, the throttle, and other controls and instruments. In short, I was completely confused!
Samurai! Page 3