Samurai!

by Martin Caiden

  Twenty non-commissioned officers and three enlisted fliers were packed into a single shack. This so-called building was six by ten yards. In its center there rested a large table, which we used alternately for eating, for writing, and for reading. On both sides of the room cots were jammed together. A handful of candles provided our only light. The billet was a typical tropical hut with a floor raised five feet off the damp ground. A rickety staircase at its front provided entry to our “home.” A big water tank lay behind the billet. The men cut an empty fuel drum open and shaped it into an impromptu bathtub. It was an unwritten law that every other night each man would bathe. Other fuel drums were cut open and bent into different shapes for use as cooking facilities and washbasins.

  One orderly attended the kitchen. He was a harried man, for the task of providing sixty-nine meals a day alone kept him busy. But, despite the intense combat of later weeks, every man took special pains to wash out all his underclothes in the basins every day. We might be living in a pesthole, but no man wished his own body to become filthy.

  Near the row of drums the men had dug a crude dugout for an air-raid shelter. When the enemy bombers came, flying swiftly and low over the trees in surprise attacks, the dugouts were filled in amazingly short time by men leaping from the billets, bath, or latrine.

  We were quartered some 500 yards east of the airstrip and walked or ran to the runway to reach our planes. The luxury of motorized transportation appeared only when we had orders to scramble. Then the Ford snorted its way down to pick us up.

  Five hundred yards northeast of the strip lay the officers’ quarters. Their billet was exactly the same as ours. Their only advantage was that ten officers comprised their total strength; they had the same facilities for half the number of men. The base commander, his deputy, and an assistant crowded into a smaller shack adjoining the officers’ billet.

  Our daily schedule for the four months following our arrival settled into an almost unvarying routine. At 2:30 A.M. the maintenance crews were aroused from their sleep to prepare our fighters. One hour later the orderlies woke all the pilots.

  Breakfast was taken either at the billet or, occasionally, around the Command Post. Our menu was monotonous and unvarying. A dish of rice, soybean-paste soup with dried vegetables, and pickles comprised breakfast. For the first month the rice was mixed with an unsavory barley to stretch out our supplies. After four weeks of steady combat, however, the barley was stopped. At its best, our chow at Lae was pitifully inadequate.

  Following breakfast six pilots waited by their planes, their fighters warmed up and ready for take-off. These were to be scrambled for interception, and they stood at the end of the runway, poised for immediate flight. We never flew scout missions at Lae, and radar was something unknown. But the six fighters could be moving in seconds.

  Those pilots not scheduled for the scramble flight waited around the CP for orders. With little to discuss except aerial tactics, we resorted to chess and checkers to pass the time.

  At eight in the morning a formation of Zeros went aloft tor patrol. On a fighter sortie, they took the shortest route for the enemy area, down Moresby Alley. If the mission was bomber escort, we flew southeastward along the Papuan coastline and joined the bombers over the usual rendezvous of Buna.

  Usually we were back at Lae by noon for lunch. It was hardly anything to come home for. The meals were unchanging and exactly the same fare we would have for supper. Lunch consisted of bowls of steaming rice and canned fish or meat. The officers were only slightly better off; their rations were the same, but the five orderlies assigned to them took special pains to disguise the food as “different” dishes.

  Between the regular three meals, all pilots were fed fruit juice and various types of candy to compensate for the deficiency of vitamins and calories in our regular meals.

  About five o’clock each evening, all the pilots assembled for daily gymnastics—a required athletic course designed to keep our bodies agile and our reflexes sharp. After the group training, all men off emergency stand-by returned to their billets for supper and bathing, and spent two or three hours reading or writing letters home. By eight or nine we were in bed.

  Our recreation was all improvised. The pilots often took out their guitars, ukuleles, accordions, or harmonicas, and joined together to play our national songs.

  While the Rabaul base hired many natives to work as coolies our own force at Lae had no natives to do our work. The nearest village was two miles away, and no coaxing or coercion could force the inhabitants to expose themselves to the attacks which came almost daily. They were terrified by the roaring planes, the machine guns, and the shattering thunder of bombs.

  So this was Lae. The chow was poor, the daily schedule harsh and unchanging. We had no post exchange, or any other recreation facilities. Women? At Lae, everyone asked, “What are those?”

  Yet, our morale was high. Certainly, we lacked the physical comforts—and even some of the so-called necessities—of everyday life, but this was little cause for complaint. We were, here not to have our personal requirements met but to fight. We wanted to fight; what were we fighter pilots for, except to engage enemy planes in combat? At Bali, with a paradise at our disposal, the men bitched unceasingly. At Bali we had been grounded, and clipping the wings of our group was the worst possible punishment.

  It must be remember that the pilots’ garrison at Lae was unlike those of other air bases. Every one of us was hand-picked from our Air Force. At Lae our officers had collected the men whose only desire was to be squeezing the gun trigger in a Zero while riding an enemy fighter’s tail.

  On April 11 I was back in combat. It was a most auspicious return, for on that day I scored my first “double play.” The prospect of returning to combat after nearly two months of enforced idleness excited me. The day before, April 10, I was not scheduled to fly, and had to remain on the ground while the other pilots enjoyed a field day. Six of our fighters escorted seven bombers to Moresby, shot down two enemy bombers caught trying to flee the enemy field, and probably shot down a third. Later the same day three stand-by Zeros scrambled from the Lae runway to make a timely interception of several enemy bombers over Salamaua; of the latter, one was shot down and the others damaged.

  Our flight on the eleventh was more of a familiarization mission. With eight other new arrivals to Lae we took off and formed into three V’s, flying toward Moresby. During the run along the coastline we pulled steadily for altitude. The weather was perfect, and the white sandy beach looked like a mass of bleached bones ground up and scattered along the edge of the island. Then the Owen Stanley Range towered in front of us, jutting 15,000 feet above the ocean. Despite their extreme height, not snow-capped their peaks, and the slopes resembled vast wall of fearsome jungle.

  At 16,500 feet we crossed the mountain ridgeline. And, abruptly, we were in a new world: the enemy’s. I failed to sight even a single ship on the vast, deep blue surface of the Coral Sea. The water was an incredible indigo-marble sheet, stretching as far as the eye could see. The mountains before us sloped down to the southern coast in a decline more gradual than their drop to our airstrip. Otherwise it was all the same.

  Forty-five minutes after the take-off, the Moresby base slipped beneath my wings. I could see a large number of planes of different types on the ground. Many were being rushed from their exposed positions on the field to jungle revetments hidden from the air by the thick foliage surrounding the enemy strip. The antiaircraft guns remained silent—perhaps we were above their effective range. It seemed to be a perfect setup for a strafing attack—we could hit the planes on the ground long before they could be in their revetments and safe from our guns. But the orders were for a familiarization flight—air combat only, and no strafing.

  We passed Moresby, and turned out to the Coral Sea.

  After a while we retraced our former course, again passing over the enemy base. We were amazed that the enemy gunners and pilots seemed to ignore our presence and offered no r
esistance.

  We passed over the airfield, this time with the sun directly behind us, cruising slowly when we finally sighted the enemy’s planes, four P-39s, the first Airacobras I had ever seen. They were flying almost directly at us, some three miles off and to our left. It was impossible to tell yet whether or not we had been sighted. I jettisoned my fuel tank and poured power to the engine, my two wingmen right with me. I pulled alongside our lead fighter, and signaled my discovery to Lieutenant Sasai, requesting cover for our attack. He waved his hand forward. “Go ahead. We’ll cover you.”

  Not a move from the four Airacobras yet. We were in luck. With the blinding sun directly before them, the American pilots failed to pick out our approaching fighters. The P-39s flew in two pairs, the first two planes preceding the others by about 300 yards.

  I moved Honda behind and above me, and signaled the less experienced Yonekawa to follow directly behind my fighter. Then we were only 500 yards from the enemy planes, heeling over to the left. In a few seconds we would be ready to strike. If only they continued to be blinded by the sun, we could hit them before they even knew we were in the air.

  Even as I was ready to roll over for the attack, I changed my approach. If I pulled up to come in from a dive, I would lose the advantage of having the sun behind me. Instead, I shoved the stick forward and dove, Honda and Yonekawa sticking to me like glue. We went down and then came around in a sharp, fast turn, in perfect position.

  The last two fighters were now above and ahead of me, unaware of our approach. They were still blinded, and I closed the distance steadily, waiting until it would be impossible to miss the target. The two P-39s were almost wing to wing, and at fifty yards they were clear in my range finder. Now! I jammed down on the cannon button, and in a second the first, Airacobra was done for. The shells converged in the center of the fuselage; pieces of metal broke off and flipped away. A fountain of smoke and flame belched outward.

  I skidded and brought the guns to bear on the second P-39. Again the shells went directly home, exploding inside and tearing the fighter into bits. Both Airacobras plummeted out of control.

  I brought the Zero out of its skid and swung up in a tight turn, prepared to come out directly behind the two lead fighters. The battle was already over! Both P-39s were plunging crazily toward the earth, trailing bright flames and thick smoke. They had been shot down as quickly as the two I had caught so unawares. I recognized one of the Zeros still pulling out from its diving pass, Hiroyoshi Nishizawa, a rookie pilot at the controls. The second Zero, which had made a kill with a single firing pass, piloted by Toshio Ota, hauled around in a steep pull-out to rejoin the formation.

  It was incredible that in less than five seconds the fight was over, and four enemy fighters were smashing on the surface far below. It was remarkable that two of the kills were registered by Nishizawa, twenty-three years old, and Ota, only twenty-two.

  A word of explanation is proper here. As stated before, all the pilots at Lae were hand-picked. Foremost among the reasons for their selection was their flying aptitude; both these two young pilots stood out, even among the men with whom we flew. Many of us were combat veterans, and the newcomers were especially quick to learn. Nishizawa and Ota proved to be brilliant at the controls. They went on to become, with myself, the leading aces of the Lae Wing. Often we flew together, and were known to the other pilots as the “clean-up trio.”

  I can think of Nishizawa and Ota only as pilots of genius. They did not fly their airplanes, they became a part of the Zero, welded into the fibre of the fighter, an automaton which functioned, it seemed, as a machine capable of intelligent thought. They were among the greatest of all Japanese fliers.

  Both men were devoted solely to their roles as fighter pilots. Everything was subordinated to their fighting function. Their skill made them particularly dangerous opponents. Even against a fighter airplane of superior performance—such as we were to encounter later in the war—their prowess enabled them individually to invite attack by several enemy planes and still emerge victorious.

  Hiroyoshi Nishizawa became Japan’s greatest fighter ace. He did not look the part, indeed, one had only to look at Nishizawa to feel sorry for him; one felt the man should be in a hospital bed. He was tall and lanky for a Japanese, nearly five feet eight inches in height. He had a gaunt look about him; he weighed only 140 pounds, and his ribs protruded sharply through his skin. Nishizawa suffered almost constantly from malaria and tropical skin diseases. He was pale most of the time.

  Despite the worshipful attitude of his pilots, Nishizawa rarely returned the offers of intimate friendship. He cloaked himself in a cold, unfriendly reserve almost impossible to penetrate. Often he spent an entire day without speaking a word; he would not even respond to the overtures of his closest friends, the men with whom he flew and fought. We became accustomed to seeing him strolling alone, disdaining friend-ship, silent, almost like a pensive outcast instead of a man who was in reality the object of veneration. If there is such an expression, Nishizawa was “all pilot.” He lived and breathed only to fly, and he flew for two things; the joy which comes with the ownership of that strange and wonderful world in the sky, and to fight.

  Once he had taken wing, this strange and phlegmatic man underwent a startling transformation. His reserve, his silence, his spurning of his associates vanished almost as quickly as the darkness vanishes before dawn. To all who flew with him he became the “Devil.” He was unpredictable in the air, a genius, a poet who seemed to make his fighter respond obediently to his gentle, sure touch at the controls. Never have I seen a man with a fighter plane do what Nishizawa would do with his Zero. His aerobatics were all at once breath-taking, brilliant, totally unpredictable, impossible, and heart-stirring to witness. He was a bird, yet he could fly in such a way as no bird could imitate.

  Even his eyesight was unusual. Where we could see only sky, Nishizawa, with almost supernatural vision, could catch the specks of enemy planes still invisible to us. Never in his long and brilliant career as a warrior of the skies was this man caught unaware by the enemy. He fulfilled truly his title of Devil—only he was a devil of the blue and the clouds, a man so gifted as to make us all, even myself, envious of his genius in the air.

  Toshio Ota was exactly the opposite. A brilliant youngster, Ota was amiable and friendly, willing to join in the fun and festivities of the group, quick to laugh at our jokes, instantly at the side of a fellow pilot in need of help, either in the air or on the ground. He was taller and heavier than I was and, like Nishizawa, was inexperienced in combat on his arrival at Lae. Despite his amiability and stark contrast to Nishizawa, his talent at his controls was quickly recognized and Ota flew always as cover wingman for the squadron commander’s own fighter.

  Ota was not the conventional hero type. He was too quick to grin and laugh, too quick to be friendly. The aura of hero worship could not be attached to this smiling young man, who appeared more at home, I am sure, in a nightclub than in the forsaken loneliness of Lae. Yet this intimacy with his friends in no way detracted from the great respect which his flying skill inspired; even the rough-and-ready men like Honda held him in high regard, although Honda, as well as Yonekawa, feared and shunned the Devil.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE ALLIES poured an unceasing flow of men and matériel into their bastion at Port Moresby, and our high command called on us for more and heavier strikes against the growing complex of airstrips, ground installations, and harbor facilities. On April 17 I flew my first escort mission to the enemy area. Thirteen Zero fighters, instead of the usual six or seven, covered the bombers; our reconnaissance reports indicated a strong Allied fighter build-up and we anticipated stronger opposition than in the past.

  I was worried about my pilots. NAP 1/C Yoshio Miyazaki looked almost emaciated after a long bout with diarrhea, and I did not think him fit for duty. Despite my protestations, Miyazaki refused to stay grounded.

  I was worried lest his feverish feeling affect his ability to hol
d the weave pattern when we flew escort, but as we neared Moresby my apprehension vanished. Miyazaki navigated perfectly with my group of six fighters, which flew top cover for the bombers and the seven other fighters.

  With the bombers at 16,000 feet and my own group 1,500 feet higher, we crossed the Owen Stanley Range. Moresby slid into view. The seven Zeros closest to the bombers suddenly broke their projecting weave and wheeled around in a tight climbing turn, still bunched together. P-40s, dropping from higher altitude to hit the bombers, had been seen too soon, and the wedge of climbing Zeros split their ranks, spilling the fighters away from the lumbering heavyweights,

  The seven fighters returned to their original position. Angry blossoms of flame and black smoke burst into being below the bombers; the flak was some 1,500 feet low. However, the bursts were a roaring sign of danger. Immediately we broke formation and rolled frantically to escape. Barely in time; a second flak barrage exploded thunderously above us, but not close enough to damage our planes.

  Even as we rolled back into formation, the bombers and their fighter escorts were clawing in a maximum-power climb. We knew the third flak barrage would have caught the bombers dead center if they had maintained their original course. And there it was, exactly where the bombers would have been, the violent, cracking sounds of the antiaircraft shells materializing out of nowhere. For some unknown reason the Americans refused to alter the change-of-range settings for their antiaircraft shells. They followed a pattern we could anticipate almost exactly. So precise was their battery range-setting formula, and so unchanging its use, that evading the American flak at high altitude was almost no problem.