The habits instilled during my training came to my aid. And the one instruction which overrode all others for the fledgling in combat was: “Always stick to the tail of the lead fighter in your V formation.” In a blur of hand movements I tightened the straps on my oxygen mask (with only two hours’ oxygen supply, we used the masks only in combat or during flight above 10,000 feet) and shoved the throttle as far forward as it would go. The engine responded with a roar and the little fighter leaped ahead. All about me fuel cells tumbled wildly through the air as the other Japanese pilots jerked the cockpit toggles. I had completely forgotten to jettison the highly explosive tank below my fuselage and my hand trembled as I reached out to hit the lever. Mine was the last to drop free.
By now I was completely upset. I had done everything in a slipshod fashion, had ignored almost all the basic rules of aerial combat. I failed to see anything going on to the sides or behind me. I couldn’t see a single enemy plane and had not the slightest idea whether or not I was being shot at. All I saw was the tail of my leader’s plane; in desperation I swung after his fighter, my plane looking for all the world as if it were tied to the other.
When finally I had swung into the proper wingman position, behind and to the side of the lead fighter, I regained my senses and no longer fumbled around clumsily in the cockpit. Taking a deep breath, I chanced a quick look to the left. None too soon! Two sleek enemy fighters raced in against my plane. They were Russian-made E-l 6s, with retractable landing gear. Higher powered than our own Claude fighters, the E-16s were also faster and more maneuverable.
Again I faltered—and in that second I was given a new lease on life. My hands hesitated in the air; I actually didn’t know what to do next. Instead of snapping away to the side or clawing for altitude, I simply continued flying as before. By all the rules of air war I should have met my end at that moment. But, unexpectedly, when they had me dead in their sights, the two Russian fighters rolled over and away! For the life of me I could not understand this miraculous turn of fortune.
The solution was simple enough. Anticipating that I might fumble with my-’controls in my first combat—as I did!—the flight leader had assigned one of the veteran pilots to cover my plane from behind. It was his fighter, whipping about in a tight turn and plunging at the enemy planes, which caused them to break off their attack.
And still I was incapable of any original action. I came out of a death trap, flying blindly, not even realizing that the abrupt change of position had placed my fighter 450 yards to the rear of one of the fleeing Russian planes. I simply sat in my cockpit, trying to reason with myself, trying to do something. At last I broke out of my stupor and reached forward.
I had the Russian fighter dead in my sights, and squeezed the gun trigger. Nothing happened. I jerked the trigger, back and forth, cursing the two jammed machine guns until, with acute embarrassment, I noticed that I had failed to complete arming the guns before engaging with the enemy planes.
The petty officer flying the fighter to my left finally gave up in despair when he saw me fumbling in the cockpit and forged ahead, firing at the escaping enemy fighter. The burst didn’t take the E-16, which had steadily been veering to the right, fortunately for me, only 200 yards in front of my own guns. This time I was ready and jammed down on the trigger. The shells arced out but were wasted. I had lost another golden opportunity.
This time, I swore I would shoot down the Russian plane if I had to close in and ram. Under full throttle I narrowed the distance between the two fighters; the enemy pilot rolled, looped, and spiraled in violent maneuvers, successfully evading every burst I fired at him. His sharp turns and attempts to catch me in his own sights were surprisingly poor flying; his own tracers scattered wildly through the air. Actually, the enemy never had a chance. I was unaware of it, but several of the other Claudes circled high over our individual dogfight, prepared at a moment’s notice to plunge down upon the Russian fighter should I be caught in a dangerous situation.
This the enemy knew, and concentrated his attention primarily on escape, rather than on my destruction. It was his undoing. I came out of a tight loop to find the E-16 only 150 yards ahead of me and poured bullets into the fighter’s engine. The next moment oily black smoke gushed from the nose and the plane plunged earthward. Not until the enemy fighter erupted into mushrooming wreckage far below did I realize I had exhausted all my ammunition, something else I had been warned not to do. Every fighter pilot did his utmost to retain some ammunition for his return flight, in the event he was caught by patrolling enemy fighters.
I looked frantically about me, searching for the other Mitsubishis, and felt my heart drop when I discovered myself to be entirely alone in the air. I had strayed from the group. My victory was little more than a hollow mockery, for it had been given me on a silver platter by my wingmates, the same men I had lost in pursuing the Russian plane. My humiliation at my own absurd actions virtually choked me and I was close to actually bursting into tears. And that is exactly what I did do when, after looking around again, I saw fourteen Claudes circling slowly in formation, waiting patiently for me to gain my bearings and to join them. I think that for five minutes I must have cried with shame.
At Kiukiang again, I climbed exhausted from my cockpit. My flight commander stormed up to my plane in a rage, his face flushed from his anger. “Sakai! Of all the…he spluttered. “You are a dammed fool, Sakai! It is a miracle you are alive at all! I have never seen such clumsy or ridiculous flying in all my entire life! You...” He couldn’t go on. I stared down at the ground, sorry and penitent, indeed. I hoped, I fairly prayed, he would lose his temper and in his rage kick and beat me. But he was too angry for physical violence.
The captain did the worst thing possible. He turned his back on me and walked away.
CHAPTER 5
To this day we cannot prove the nationality of the enemy fliers who piloted China’s Russian-made fighters. There was good reason to believe that Russian “volunteers” accompanied the Soviet aircraft across the border, but we failed ever to recover from the wreckage of the enemy planes the body of a Russian pilot.
Our Navy had strong evidence that a “Foreign Legion” of pilots manned China’s air force. These men from all nations flew a mixed conglomeration of fighter-plane types, for we met in the air not only Russian planes but those of American, British, German, and other manufacture as well. Sometimes, of course, Chinese nationals were flying these aircraft.
Proof positive that an American pilot was flying an American-built fighter was established when the airplane crashed near Shanghai. Our troops rushed quickly to the site of the wreck and returned with the pilot’s body; his papers identified him conclusively as American.
My own victory over the Soviet fighter soon overcame the dejection caused by my poor combat performance. The day following the flight I lost no time in painting a blue star on the fuselage of the Claude fighter, for a total of six stars on i the airplane. The Japanese pilots, especially enlisted men as myself, did not fly the same plane on each mission. There were not enough fighters to go around, and we took whatever ships were available when it was our time to fly. More than once this arrangement came to the aid of an inexperienced pilot; enemy fliers, upon sighting the dozen or more blue stars on the fuselage, wanted no part of a plane with a double or triple ace at the controls—so they thought!
The conflict in China was an incredible war. Among our forces it was never referred to as a “war,” but rather as the Sino-Japanese Incident. I suppose the same situation existed, when America threw so much military strength into Korea; since the American Congress had not officially declared war, it was a “police action.” Many years prior to this modern struggle, our government felt precisely the same way. We had not actually declared war; therefore, it was an “incident.”
As soon as it was feasible, we instituted a puppet government under Wang Ching-wei, a prominent Chinese who had split openly with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang, or Nationalis
t Party. The most startling aspect of the conflict, however, was the savage internal struggle between Chiang’s forces and those of the Communist Chinese. At every opportunity the latter would strike at Nationalist forces when they were retreating before our own troops.
Opposing the Japanese land and air forces in China were vast enemy armies of millions of men, hopelessly outnumbering our own troops. This disparity in numbers, however, rarely worked to the Chinese advantage, for their troops were poorly trained and ill equipped. Time after time hordes of enemy troops would advance against our well-armed forces, only to be thrown back with shattering losses. Even the flood of Allied assistance to China, in the form of supplies rushed through Burma, Mongolia, and Sinkiang, failed to offset our qualitative superiority. These supplies helped the enemy, of course, especially in permitting Chiang to effect an orderly withdrawal to Chungking, but never allowed him to mount any worthwhile offensive against us. It was strictly a one-sided war until the Japanese surrender to the Allies in August of 1945.
This does not mean, however, that Japan ever conquered— or attempted to conquer—the vast Chinese population, or to occupy its tremendous land area. This would have been absolutely impossible. Instead, our troops occupied key walled towns at strategic areas, cutting enemy communications, and then exacted tolls and taxes from the millions of Chinese peasants within the authority of the occupying Japanese forces.
But outside the protection of these major walled towns violent death awaited all but the most powerful Japanese formations. Chiang’s guerrillas, as well as those of the Chinese Communists, waited in savage ambush where they would do their utmost to annihilate those troops which fell into their hands. It also was obvious to our officers that those Chinese officials within the occupied cities, despite their fawning and seeming cooperation, remained in constant touch with agents of the guerrilla bands roaming the open countryside and the mountains. And, in many instances, to facilitate the problems of occupying enemy cities, such contacts were maintained with the direct acquiescence of the Japanese commanders!
It was, indeed, a strange war.
Many times I flew land-support missions and was astonished at the sights below me. I saw Chinese farmers tilling their farms, paying no attention to pitched hand-to-hand battles or blazing firefights between Chinese and Japanese troops less than a mile away. On several occasions I flew low over the streets of walled towns that were surrounded and under fierce bombardment by our artillery. On those streets rows of stores were operating under “business as usual” conditions, although the blood of the defending Chinese garrison stained the streets red.
For the Japanese air units, however, China duty was by no means hard or unpleasant. It was strictly an air war waged in our favor. Sixteen months after my arrival at Kiukiang, our ground forces stabbed deeply into enemy, territory and secured for us the more elaborate airfield installations at Hankow. The entire unit moved up the line.
By now the newspapers in Japan had reported the details of my first victory over an enemy fighter. A letter arrived from my mother, and the pride in her words was balm, indeed. Of almost equal interest was a letter from Hatsuyo Hirokawa, my uncle’s daughter, now sixteen years old. She wrote: “Recently my father was appointed the postmaster here in Tokushima, Shikoku. I am now studying in the Tokushima Girls’ High School, and you can imagine that it is a big change from Tokyo. Your letter thrilled me. It brought great pleasure to all my classmates. Every day, we pore through the newspapers in search of more news about you. We want to be sure that we do not overlook any news about your air victories in China.
“Incidentally, Saburo, I wish to introduce to you my closest friend here in Tokushima, Mikiko Niori. Mikiko is the most beautiful girl in my class, and she is also the brightest. Her father is a professor in Kobe College. Of all my classmates to whom I showed your letter, she was the most excited, and she has begged me to introduce her to you.”
The letter included a picture of Hatsuyo and Mikiko together, and also a letter from this girl I had never met. She was certainly as pretty as Hatsuyo claimed, and it was interesting to read her charming description of her town, and of her family.
The letters from home were a tremendous boon to my morale, and I went about my work singing. I remember the day with absolute clarity—October 3, 1939. I had just finished reading my mail, and was servicing the machine guns of my fighter plane. Everyone at the field was relaxed; what was there to worry about? We had whipped the Chinese and international pilots in almost every combat.
Abruptly the silence was broken by frenzied shouts from the control tower. In the next instant, without any further warning, the world erupted into a series of shattering roars. The earth heaved and shook, and blast waves smashed at our startled ears. Someone bellowed—unnecessarily—“Air Raid!” and then the sirens shrieked a useless, belated warning.
There was no time to try to run for shelters. The blasting crescendo of exploding bombs was a constant thunder now; smoke rose over the field and I heard the shrill scream bomb fragments cutting through the air. Several other pilots ran frantically with me from the machine shop shelter. I crouched low to escape the whistling pieces of steel, and dove headlong onto the ground between two big water tanks. I was none too soon. A nearby machine-gun storage shed went up in a roaring blast of fire and smoke, and then a stick of bombs walked across the field, hammering at our ears, sending up great spouts of smoke and earth.
A second’s delay in diving for the ground would have meant my end. The nearby series of bomb explosions suddenly ended and I lifted my head to see what had happened. Above the steady crump! of bombs exploding all across the field I heard anguished cries and groans. The men lying all about me had been badly wounded, and I started to crawl toward the nearest pilot when I gasped from a knifelike pain in my thighs and buttocks. I reached down with my hand and felt the blood seeping through my trousers. The pain was bad, but, fortunately, the wounds were not deep.
And then I lost my head. I was on my feet and running again, but this time I ran back toward the airstrip, glancing up at the sky as I moved down the runway. Overhead I saw twelve bombers in formation, very high, wheeling about in a wide turn at a height of at least 20,000 feet. They were Russian SB twin-engined planes, the main bombers of the Chinese Air Force. And there was no denying the incredible effectiveness of their sudden surprise attack. We had been caught totally unprepared. Not a single man had any warning until the bombs were actually released from the Russian planes and shrieking in their descent. What I saw on the airfield itself was a shock.
The majority of the 200 Navy and Army bombers and fighters parked wing to wing on the long runways were burning. Great sheets of flame burst outward from the exploding fuel tanks, sending billowing clouds of smoke into the air. Those planes still safe from the flames were leaking gasoline from shrapnel holes in their fuselages. The flames traveled from one plane to the other, fed upon the dripping gasoline, and, one by one, long rows of bombers and fighters mushroomed into blinding crimson. Bombers were exploding like firecrackers, and the fighters flared like matchboxes.
I ran around the burning planes as if I were crazed, seeking desperately just one undamaged fighter. Miraculously, a few Claudes in a separate group had escaped the carnage, and I clambered into the cockpit of one plane, started the engine, and without waiting for it to warm up gunned the fighter down the runway.
The bombers were gaining height gradually as my faster steadily overtook their formation. I held the throttle against the firewall, coaxing every bit of speed from the protesting Mitsubishi. And, twenty minutes after take-off, I was almost up to the enemy planes, climbing steadily so that I could open fire into the unprotected bellies of the bombers.
I paid little attention to the fact that I was the only fighter plane in the air. It was obvious to me that the lightly armed Claude could not by itself prove a serious threat to the twelve bombers. Below me was the city of Ichang on the Yangtze River, still held by defending Chinese troops. Being sho
t down here, even if I escaped death in a crash, meant certain and horrible death at the hands of Chiang’s men. But there was no delaying the attack. This was why I had been raised in the Samurai tradition, and there was no thought other than to wreak all the damage I could.
I closed in from behind and below the trailing bomber of the formation, not without notice by the enemy, as the flickering guns in the tail proved. The enemy gunner failed to hit the Claude and I pressed as close as possible to the plane, concentrating my fire against the left engine. As I passed by and climbed above the bomber I noticed smoke trailing from the engine I had worked over. The bomber dropped out of formation and began losing altitude as I swung into a diving turn to finish off the cripple. But I never followed the advantage. Even as I pushed the stick forward to go into a shallow dive, I remember that Ichang was at least 150 miles west of Hankow. Any additional flight in pursuing the bomber meant that I would not have enough fuel to return to base and would mean a forced landing in enemy territory.
There is a difference between risking battle against great odds and in throwing away a life and an airplane. To continue the attack would be suicide, and there was no call for drastic action of that sort. I turned for home. Whether or not the Russian bomber reached its own field successfully I do not know, of course, but at the worst it would have crashed among friendly troops.
Back at Hankow, the terrible destruction wrought by only twelve enemy planes was incredible. Almost all of our planes had been destroyed or wrecked. The commander of the base lost his left arm, and several of his lieutenants, as well as pilots and maintenance crews, were killed or maimed.
I had forgotten my own wounds; the heat of the pursuit and my battle excitement had overcome the pain temporarily. I walked a few feet from my airplane and collapsed on the runway.
Samurai! Page 4