Samurai!

by Martin Caiden

  The high command credited me with a probable for the day’s action. Two days later a Japanese reconnaissance plane reported that a B-17 had crash landed on a small island between Balikpapan and Surabaya.

  CHAPTER 10

  Several years after the war I read Rear Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison’s heralded historical volumes, the History of United States Naval Operations in World War II. Morison once again shows himself to be an eloquent historian, and in his work has provided voluminous documentation.

  It is regrettable, then, that a specific portion of this war history has little basis in fact. I refer to the campaign which won for us the Dutch East Indies, especially the major bastion of Java. It is the admiral’s own opinion that, where this campaign is concerned, our victories were “of stealth and of strength, rather than skill.” Particular attention is given to the defeat of the Dutch and Allied fleets in February of 1942; here not only Morison but other equally renowned American historians have all neglected to include in their “documented reports” details of the greatest air battle staged in the entire Pacific up to that time.

  As a mere non-commissioned pilot in that fray, my perspective is of course much more confined than that of the writer who encompasses the entire vast war. However, my personal account of part of that February campaign may prove enlightening to the student of the Pacific War.

  The Java campaign was virtually ended on February 26, with the defeat by Japanese warships of the Allied surface forces in the area. A major factor contributing to that defeat was the lack of air cover which the Allied ships required so desperately. But nowhere in the American versions of the war have I read that the Allies’ air units were destroyed on February 19, in a wild air melee over Surabaya when a total of nearly seventy-five fighter planes of both combatants fought their biggest air duel of the war to date. It was this fighter-versus-fighter air victory—and not raids by our bombers against enemy airfields—which denied the Allied warships their air cover, and contributed so completely to their destruction.

  On February 4, 1942, I flew to the Balikpapan airfield with several other Zero pilots. The next day we established new combat patrols in the area. Action was brisk, since enemy air activity was heavy and aggressive. Official Japanese records credit me with a victory on the fifth, when we fought a series of running air battles.

  The next week our reconnaissance planes brought back reports that the enemy had concentrated in the Surabaya area a total of fifty to sixty fighter planes—Curtiss P-36 Mohawks, Curtiss P-40 Tomahawks, and Brewster F2A Buffaloes—which were to resist our invasion of Java.

  Our high command ordered all available land-based fighter planes in the theater to concentrate at newly captured Balikpapan. On the morning of February 19, twenty-three Zero fighters, assembled from the Tainan and Kaohsiung units, took off for Surabaya.

  This was the first occasion on which we knew we would encounter heavy enemy fighter opposition. Before us was a 430-mile flight to the Dutch bastion, where there awaited a numerically superior force. No one expected to breeze through another victory as we had done in the Philippines.

  Every possible precaution was taken to aid our flight. Special ditching islands were assigned all pilots, where naval units awaited those planes which might be forced down. Weather planes preceded our flight to give constant readings, and a fast reconnaissance plane acted as a pathfinder and warning scout for our Zeros.

  We reached Surabaya at 11:30 a.m., flying at 16,000 feet. The enemy force anticipating our arrival was unprecedented. At least fifty Allied fighters, flying at about 10,000 feet, maintained a large, counterclockwise sweep over the city. The enemy planes extended in a long line, composed of three waves of V groups which outnumbered us by more than two to one.

  Upon sighting the enemy fighters, we jettisoned our tanks and climbed for altitude. Sighting our force, the Allied fighters broke off their circular movement and at full speed closed toward us. They were prepared and eager for a fight—unlike the American fighters we had encountered over Clark Field on December 8.

  Less than a minute later the orderly formations disintegrated into a wild, swirling dogfight.

  I watched a P-36 scream toward me, then flicked into a swift left roll, waiting for the enemy’s reaction. Foolishly, he maintained his course. That was all for me, and I snapped around into a sharp right turn, standing the Zero on her wing, and came out directly on the tail of the startled P-36 pilot.

  A look behind me showed my own plane clear, and I closed the distance to the enemy fighter. He rolled to the right, but slight control movements kept the Zero glued to his tail. Fifty yards away I opened up with the guns and cannon. Almost immediately the right wing broke off and snapped away in the air stream; then the left wing tore loose. Spinning wildly, the P-36 broke up into wreckage as it plummeted. The pilot failed to get out.

  Swinging into a wide, climbing turn I headed back for the main flight. At least six planes were falling in flames. Fighters swirled crazily about in the air and abruptly the olive drab of a P-36 rolled toward my own fighter. I turned to meet his rush, but in the next moment another Zero whipped upward in a steep climb, caught the P-36 in a long cannon burst, then snapped away as the Dutch plane exploded.

  To my left a P-40 closed in on the tail of a fleeing Zero, and I turned desperately to draw the enemy fighter off. There was no need to do so; the Zero whipped up and around in a tight loop which ended exactly above and behind the P-40. The guns and cannon hammered and the P-40 burst into flames.

  Another P-40 flashed by, trailing a streamer of flame fully three times as long as the fighter. A P-36 flipped crazily through the air, its pilot dead at the controls.

  Below me, our unarmed pathfinder plane flashed by, caught by three Dutch fighters. The Japanese pilot was corkscrewing violently to evade the enemy tracers which flashed all about his plane.

  Again I arrived too late. A Zero plummeted down in a power dive, and his cannon shells exploded the top Dutch fighter’s fuel tanks. Pulling out of the dive, the Zero flashed upward in a steep zoom, catching the second P-36 from beneath. It fell off on one wing even as the third pilot whipped around to meet the Zero. Too late; his cockpit erupted in a shower of glass.

  The other Zero pulled alongside my plane, the pilot waving and grinning broadly, then dropped away as he escorted the reconnaissance plane out of the area.

  A P-36, apparently fleeing the fight, passed over me. I slammed the throttle on overboost and yanked the stick back, looping to come out close to the Dutchman. Still climbing, I opened up with the canon. Too soon the pressure of the turn threw my aim off.

  The cannon gave me away; the P-36 jerked hard over in a left roll and dove vertically for the ground. I cut inside his turn and went into a dive as the Curtiss flashed by less than fifty yards away. My finger snapped down on the button, and the shells exploded in the fuselage. Thick black smoke belched back. I fired two more bursts, then pulled out as a sheet of flame enveloped the Dutch fighter.

  A Zero with two blue stripes across the fuselage passed 200 yards in front of my plane. Without warning the Zero exploded in a vivid blast of fire, killing Lieutenant Masao Asai, our squadron commander. To this day I do not know what caused the explosion.

  Back at 8,000 feet, I noticed about twenty Zero fighters circling in formation. The few surviving Dutch fighters were black specks disappearing in the distance. The battle was over, six minutes after it had started.

  Strangely, with the air cleared of their own planes, the Dutch antiaircraft batteries remained silent as we circled over the city, waiting for any other Zeros that might have left in pursuit of the escaping Dutch fighters.

  While the other fighters circled, I passed over the narrow waterway separating Surabaya from Madura Island...there was a well-camouflaged airstrip there! I descended slowly, marking on my map the location of the airstrip, near Surabuya on the western tip of Madura. We had no reports of the existence of this secret airfield, and the information would be well received by intelligence.


  I began my climb back to rendezvous with the other fighters when a single P-36 passed beneath me, low over the city. It was too good a target to miss. The enemy pilot flew leisurely at cruising speed, unaware of my approach.

  My eagerness lost me a quick victory. Too far away for effective fire, I squeezed the cannon trigger. That was all the warning the Dutchman needed and he nosed down suddenly, fleeing with all his speed. Cursing my own stupidity, I slammed the throttle home and shoved the stick forward to follow the P-36. But I had afforded the enemy pilot a price-less advantage.

  The flight performance of the P-36 was considerably below that of our own fighters; the Zeros were faster, had superior maneuverability, armament, rate of roll and climb. But the Zero was never designed for high-speed dives, and my premature burst enabled the P-36 to extend the distance between our two planes to 200 yards. I could get no closer.

  The enemy pilot could have made good his escape had he begun his dive at a greater height, but the uprushing ground forced him to pull out into level flight. Now I could use the Zero’s superior speed to advantage.

  The Dutchman hedgehopped and zigzagged frantically. Every time he turned I cut inside his turn, narrowing the distance between our two planes. He flew lower and lower in a desperate attempt to escape, barely clearing trees and houses, hoping to elude me until a shortage of fuel would cause me to break off the attack.

  And I was close to that mark. In a final bid for speed I pushed the engine on overboost even as the Malang-Air Base came into sight. Fifty yards away I concentrated on the P-36 cockpit and squeezed the trigger. The cannon were empty, but two streams of machine-gun bullets tore the pilot apart. The fighter crashed into a rice paddy and flipped over on its back.

  I was the last pilot to rejoin the other fighters, circling at 13,000 feet twenty miles north of Madura.

  We had lost Lieutenant Asai and two other pilots. Back at Balikpapan the pilots claimed a total of forty enemy fighters shot down and probably destroyed. I have always been inclined to discount by 20 or 30 per cent the claims of any group of pilots after a wild battle such as we had fought over Surabaya; in the confusion of a dogfight, two or three pilots shoot at the same enemy plane, and each will claim that fighter for his own. This time, however, it appeared that there was little exaggeration in our claims, for from that day on we met practically no opposition from Dutch fighters.

  There was more good fortune. Intelligence officers sent out a bombing group to attack the secret air base at Djombang, and the unexpected bombing destroyed most of the remaining enemy planes—P-40s, Buffaloes, and British Hurricanes—on the ground.

  We returned the next day to Java to attack any fighters encountered in the air and to strafe available targets on the ground. The enemy antiaircraft which had remained silent the day before now opened up with a vengeance, and we lost three of our eighteen Zeros.

  Each night we heard Allied claims of five to six Zero fighters shot down in battle by the enemy during the day. It was remarkable, considering that our group flew the only Zeros in the area, and that our greatest casualties occurred on February 19 and 20, with six planes and pilots lost.

  On the twenty-fifth eighteen Zeros left Balikpapan with orders to mop up the Malang Air Base, where intelligence believed the enemy was servicing several Allied bombers staging a last-ditch defense of the islands. En route to Malang we encountered a Dutch floatplane, and I broke formation long enough to send him crashing into the ocean.

  If the Dutch had any fighters left at Malang, they refused to do battle. After circling the field for six minutes, our flight leader led us down to strafe three B-17s on the field. Antiaircraft fire was intense, but we saw all three bombers exploding in flame. The Dutch ground gunners holed several fighters, but failed to bring down any Zeros.

  My next kill—officially my thirteenth—came on the last day of February. I flew as part of the escort of twelve fighters shepherding twelve Betty bombers from Makassar to attack the Allied forced evacuation of Tjilatjap. The enemy ships had cleared the harbor before our arrival, and the fighters cruised slowly while the bombers dumped their missiles into the port installations. The attack was uneventful for us and, after escorting the bombers back to the Java Sea, we turned toward Malang in search of enemy planes.

  Luck was with us today. Four fighters, of a type we had not yet encountered, circled in the air near a tremendous cumulonimbus cloud which towered to 25,000 feet. As we approached, we identified the enemy planes as Dutch Buffaloes. I have never understood the lack of caution on the part of these Dutch pilots; even before they knew we were in the vicinity, we closed in and one Zero set a Buffalo blazing with a long burst. I rushed the second fighter, which whipped around in a tight turn; he was willing enough to fight! I cut easily inside the Buffalo’s turn, heeling over in a vertical bank and coming out of the turn 200 yards from the enemy plane, I rarely fired when still in a turn, but this time I jabbed impatiently on the button. Several bullets hit the Buffalo’s engine and smoke burst back from the plane. It seemed as if the pilot had also been hit, for the Brewster went into a series of repeated slow rolls until it disappeared into the cloud. It appeared impossible for the crippled fighter to survive the violent thermal inside the cloud, but, as I did not actually see the plane crash, I was credited only with a probable.

  For the next several months we moved from one air base to another. We returned to the Philippines and flew support missions for the Army as they wore Corregidor’s defenses to the breaking point. Then our unit transferred south to Bali Island in Indonesia, to prepare for the next major operation to the south.

  I have never understood the American versions of the aerial combats of those days. Especially astonishing was a report by a Lieutenant Colonel Jack D. Dale, who claimed that his P-40 squadron shot down seventy-one Japanese aircraft with a loss of only nine F-40 pilots in forty-five days of fighting in Java. This is an incredible figure, as our actual losses were less than ten Zeros in combat during this period According to Dale, his P-40 pilots used a split-S maneuver, descending 6,000 to 8,000 feet when encountering Zeros, and then returning to fighting position. He claimed that in this fashion he could make his sixteen fighters appear as forty-eight. In all my combat with American P-40 fighters, I never once encountered this maneuver as described by Colonel Dale. Especially against the P-40, a fighter plane markedly inferior in performance to the Zero, my own group invariably terminated combat in a heavy victory for our own pilots.

  Also confusing is Dale’s report that “one night we heard Radio Tokyo say: ‘Hundreds of P-40s were attacking out of nowhere. They are a new type of Curtiss, armed with six cannon.’” Katsutaro Kamiya, who at the time was in charge of Radio Tokyo’s shortwave English broadcasts, told me that there was never any such broadcast as quoted by the American colonel. There was little need for such statements, Kamiya added, for then we had nothing to report but victories.

  Colonel Dale’s reports of air victories held as little truth as did the “sinking” of the Haruna by Captain Kelly.

  CHAPTER 11

  IN EARLY March of 1942 the 150 pilots of the Tainan Fighter Wing, who had been scattered over a wide area of the Philip-Dines and Indonesia, reassembled in Bali Island in the East Indies. The complete occupation of Indonesia itself appeared imminent. One company of Japanese army troops constituted the entire military occupation force of the island. Occupation is a misleading term, for our forces found the Bah natives friendly to the Japanese.

  Bali seemed like a paradise. The weather was perfect, and the local scenery the most colorful and beautiful I have ever seen anywhere in the Pacific. Lush vegetation grew around our airfield, and we delighted in the hot springs which bubbled from the rocks. Since we were grounded for a while, we turned, at least for the moment, to more personal pleasures.

  One afternoon we were lounging inside our “club” when we were startled by the sound of a heavy bomber approaching the field. One pilot ran to the window, then jerked his head back, his eyes wide
. “Hey! B-17! And it’s coming down!”

  We ran to the window, crowding for a look. There it was, the impossible! A giant Flying Fortress, its landing gear and flaps extended, engines throttled back, easing out of its approach path for a landing. I rubbed my eyes; this just couldn’t be true. Where could the plane have come from?

  But...there it was, bouncing slightly as the wheels hit the earth. The squeal of brakes came to our ears. In a moment we were rushing through the door, excited with the prospect of being able to study in detail the defenses of the powerful American bomber. That ship out there could only be a plane we had captured!

  The roar of machine guns brought us up short. Someone pointed—the Army troops! The B-17 wasn’t captured! Its pilot had landed in error at our field, and some idiotic soldier was firing at him even before the plane stopped rolling!

  Hardly had the machine gun spit out a dozen rounds when the bursting roar of four engines suddenly rammed to full power thundered over the field. The B-17 raced down the runway, streaming dust behind as its pilot fought the plane into the air. And then it was gone.

  We were stunned. A B-17, intact, right in our hands, and the priceless opportunity had been thrown away by some trigger-happy baboon of a machine gunner! In a group we ran to the Army revetments. Several of the pilots could barely restrain themselves. One non-commissioned officer lost his temper. “What damned stupid fool son-of-a-bitch fired that gun?” he roared.

  An indignant sergeant stood up. “Why?” he asked. “That was an enemy plane. Our orders are to shoot at enemy planes, not to make them welcome!”

  We had to restrain the pilot; white with anger, he might have tried to kill the sergeant. The Army unit’s lieutenant heard the shouting and came running up. When the full story unfolded, he bowed deeply and could only state, “I do not know how to apologize for my men’s stupidity.”