That was enough for the enemy pilot. With three Zeros in front of him, and more coming up behind, he realized the danger of being trapped. The P-39 started looping over from his climb, ready to dive as he came out. But the initiative now was mine. I went down in a turning dive, prepared to catch the Airacobra just as it rolled out and started to race for the earth. The pilot, however, saw me, and jerked over wildly in a left roll, then dove. The towering mountains blocked his path, and even as he started to pull away from my plane he was forced to pull up.
The pilot was good. He whipped down the mountainside, turning and banking sharply as he just missed the crags and slopes, with me on his tail. Every time he turned I cut inside the turn and narrowed the distance between our two planes. And every time the P-39 saw a chance to wing away to the right or left he faced another Zero—my wingmen. Good men! We had the Airacobra boxed; he would have to fight.
And he did. More than once he came around in a wicked turn as he banked to avoid the mountain, firing as he closed in. Every time he did so I turned a little shorter, looped a little closer, and brought the firing range down. I caught him at a distance of 150 yards, firing in short bursts, closing in to less than fifty yards. The P-39 spit black smoke and hurtled into the jungle.
It was a shamefaced Lieutenant Sasai who came up to my plane back at Lae. My mechanics were examining with wide eyes the bullet holes in my wings, when Sasai came up to stammer his thanks.
He looked at the punctured metal, and said no more.
CHAPTER 15
DURING the period from May 1 through the 12, our Lae Wing emerged without a single loss from every clash with the enemy. We had taken good advantage of the enemy pilots’ failures to remain alert when airborne, and excellent tactics on the part of our formations chalked up an imposing string of one-sided victories.
On May 13 the damage suffered by my own fighter grounded me for the day. It gave me the opportunity to catch up on a month’s mail delivered only that morning by submarine. My mother wrote that my brothers were now sharing Japan’s battles. One had volunteered for the Navy Fliers School, but failed to meet their rigid requirements, and had, instead, enlisted at the Sasebo Naval Base. My other brother was drafted into the Army and already was on his way to China. He never came home; he was later transferred to Burma and was there killed in action.
But the most eagerly awaited mail was, of course, from Fujiko. She wrote at length of the great changes which were occurring at home, and surprised me with the news that she was now working in her uncle’s company, which had been converted into a munitions factory.
‘‘Nowadays not one person should stay idle, the Prime Minister has said. He has told the country that even daughters, if they remain home without contributing to the war effort, will be drafted and sent to any munitions plant where their services are needed. So my uncle, in order to keep me with the family, hired me at once to work for him.” I was amazed to realize that Fujiko, the daughter of such an eminent family, had to work in a munitions factory! It was hard to conceive of my mother’s small farm without the help of my two brothers; and she had been forced to labor and found it difficult even when we were home to help.
My cousin Hatsuyo had even more disturbing news. She wrote that her father had been transferred back to Tokyo from Shikoku. Several days after her return to the city, she witnessed the April 18 attack on Tokyo by American B-25 bombers.
“I know that you are in the thick of combat,” she wrote, “and your successes against the enemy are of great comfort to all of us at home. The bombing of Tokyo and several other cities has brought about a tremendous change in the attitude of our people toward the war. Now things are different; the bombs have dropped here on our homes. It does not seem any more that there is such a great difference between the battle-front and the home front. I know that I, as well as the other girls, will work all the harder to do our share at home to support you and the other pilots who are so far away from Japan.”
Hatsuyo was still in school, but her afternoons and part of her evenings were spent with other schoolgirls working in factories, sewing military uniforms. The sudden change in the status at home was bewildering. My brothers in service, Fujiko working in a munitions factory, Hatsuyo in another factory...it was all so strange.
Hatsuyo did not describe the enemy bombing in detail, even though it was the first time that our homeland had been attacked. Of course, we had received the news here at Lae much earlier, the same day, in fact. Officially, the government disclaimed any heavy damage, which seemed reasonable in view of the limited number of attacking planes. But the attack unnerved almost every pilot at Lae. The knowledge that the enemy was strong enough to smash at our homeland» even in what might be a punitive raid, was cause for serious apprehension of future and heavier attacks.
I was still reading my mail when Warrant Officer Watam Handa approached me to request the loan of my wingman, Honda, for a reconnaissance flight to Port Moresby. W/O Handa was a new arrival at Lae, and a most welcome one. Although he had not yet fought in the Pacific, he was one of Japan’s most famous aces from the China theater, with fifteen enemy planes to his credit. Since his return from the Asiatic mainland he had served as a flight instructor at Tsuchiura. I saw no problem in letting Honda fly with him; certainly he would be with one of our best pilots.
Honda, however, had other ideas about the matter. Veteran ace or not, he growled at my orders. “I’d rather not go, Saburo,” he mumbled. “I have been flying only with you and I don’t want any changes now.”
“Oh, shut up, you fool,” I snapped. “Handa is a better flier than I am, and has been flying a lot longer. You go.”
At noon Honda took off with five other Zeros for a reconnaissance flight over Moresby.
I was disturbed at Honda’s reluctance to fly the mission and sweated out his return. Two hours later five Zeros came in for a landing: Warrant Officer Handa’s lead plane and four others. Honda’s plane was missing!
I ran all the way to the runway and climbed onto the wing of W/O Handa’s Zero even before it stopped rolling. “Where’s Honda?” I shouted, “Where is he? What happened to him?”
Handa looked at me, misery on his face. “Where is he?” I screamed, “What’s happened?”
Handa climbed down from the cockpit. On the ground he took both my hands in his, bowed low, then spoke with an effort. His voice was choked. “I...I am sorry, Saburo,” he stammered. “I am sorry. Honda, he—he is dead. It was my fault.”
I was stupefied! I couldn’t believe it; not Honda! He was the best wingman I’d ever flown with.
W/O Handa turned his face away from me, staring at the ground, and began to trudge to the Command Post. I followed him, unable to speak, as he continued.
“We were over Moresby,” he said in a low tone. “We started to circle at seven thousand feet. The sky seemed clear of enemy planes, and I was searching the field for planes on the ground.
“It was my fault; all my fault,” he murmured. “I didn’t even see the fighters. They were P-39s. I don’t know how many, just a few of them. They came down so fast that we had no warning. We didn’t even know they were on us until we heard them firing. I went over into a roll, as did Endo, my other wingman. When I turned around for a moment I saw Honda’s plane, which had been at the end of my trio, enveloped in flames. He drew the crossfire from the P-39s.”
I stopped and stared at him. Handa walked away. He never seemed to recover from the blow of having lost my wingman. Although he was an ace in China, W/O Handa had apparently lost his sure touch in the air. He had never fought the American fighters, which could outdive our planes by a considerable margin. Whatever had actually happened, Handa took personal blame for the death of my wingman. He was wan and pale for the remainder of his time at Lae. Finally he contracted tuberculosis and was sent home. Many years later I received a letter from his wife. She wrote: “My husband died yesterday from his long illness. I am writing this letter to meet his last request, that I write and apo
logize for him. He never recovered from the loss of your pilot at Lae. The last words he spoke before he died were: ‘I have fought bravely all my life, but I cannot forgive myself for what I did at Lae when I lost Sakai’s man.’”
When he died, Honda was only twenty years old. He was a strong man, in his actions on the ground as well as in the air. He was quick to fight, but was one of the most popular men in the Sasai squadron. I was very proud of him; his wing flying had been superb. I was confident that he was on his way to becoming an ace.
For the rest of the day I wandered around the base in a daze. I paid no attention to the rest of the men in the squadron who pledged revenge for the first pilot lost from our group since April 17. To me, my greatest accomplishment in air battle was the fact that I had never lost a wingman. And now, I had sent out Honda against his own wishes to fly with another man, and he was dead. I could not help thinking that my other wingman, Yonekawa, might well be killed also. For long months Yonekawa had faultlessly covered my fighter in the air; he had done so well by me that he was still without a single victory of his own. Honda had been more aggressive, and had shot down several enemy planes.
My mind was made up: Yonekawa must get his own victim. On the following day, May 14, I received NAP 3/C Hatori as Honda’s replacement. Before we took off in a flight of seven fighters for Moresby, I told Yonekawa that, if we met enemy fighters, he would fly my position and I would cover him. Yonekawa’s face lit up with excitement. If I had known what was in store for us that day, I would not have arranged things differently.
The Allied pilots, it appeared, had given serious study to the unexcelled maneuverability we enjoyed with the Zero fighter. Today marked their first attempt at new tactics. We saw the enemy planes over Moresby but, unlike their previous maneuvers, they failed to form into a single large formation. Instead, the enemy planes formed in pairs and trios, and were all over the sky as we approached. Their movements were baffling. If we turned to the left, we’d be hit from above and the right. And so on. If they were trying to confuse us they were achieving their purpose.
There was only one thing to do: meet them on their own terms. I pulled up to Sasai’s plane and signaled him that I would take the nearest pair of enemy fighters. He nodded and as I pulled away I saw him signaling the other four Zeros into two pairs. We split into three separate groups and turned to meet the enemy. We rushed at the two P-39s I had selected and I fired a burst at 100 yards. The first Airacobra evaded my shells and winged over into a screaming dive. I had no chance even to get near him for another burst.
The second plane was already rolling over for a dive when I rolled hard over to the left, turned, and came out on his tail. For a moment I saw the pilot’s startled face as he saw me coming in. The P-39 skidded along on its back, then whipped over again to the left in an attempt to dive. He looked good for Yonekawa, who was glued to my tail. I waved my hand in the cockpit and rolled to the right, leaving the P-39 for my wing-man.
Yonekawa went at the Airacobra like a madman, and I clung to his tail at a distance of 200 yards. The P-39 jerked wildly in a left roll to evade Yonekawa’s fire, and Yonekawa took advantage of the bank and turn to narrow the distance between the two planes to about fifty yards. For the next few minutes the two fighters tangled like wildcats, rolling, spiraling, looping, always losing altitude, with Yonekawa clinging grimly to the tail of the enemy plane and almost leaping out of the way whenever the P-39 turned on his Zero.
It was a mistake on the part of the enemy pilot to break his dive in the first place. He had every chance of getting away, but now with Yonekawa so close to him, the dive would mean an open and clear shot for the Zero. From 13,000 feet the two planes—with me right behind them—dropped to only 3,000 feet. The enemy pilot, however, knew what he was doing. Unable to shake the Zero after him, he led the fight back to the Moresby air base and thus within range of the antiaircraft guns.
It was by no means a one-sided battle, for the P-39 pilot maneuvered brilliantly with an airplane which was outperformed by his pursuer. The Airacobra and Zero looked like whirling dervishes, both firing in short bursts, and neither pilot scoring any major hits. Soon it became obvious that Yonekawa was slowly gaining the upper hand. On every turn he hung a second or two longer to the tail of the P-39, steadily gaining the advantage. The two planes passed over Moresby and continued their running battle over the thick jungle growth.
Hatori pulled alongside my own fighter and we gained altitude, circling slowly over the two battling planes. Now they were down to treetop level, where Yonekawa could use the Zero to its best advantage. The Airacobra no longer had air space in which to roll or spiral, and could only break away in horizontal flight. As he swung out of a turn Yonekawa was on him in a flash. There was no question of his accuracy this time. The P-39 dropped into the jungle and disappeared.
Yonekawa had drawn his first blood.
CHAPTER 16
A torrential downpour on May 15 meant a day of rest for all pilots. But the respite was short, for before daybreak on the sixteenth several B-25s swarmed over the field at treetop level, digging craters in the runway and shooting up maintenance facilities.
For the second day in a row we remained on the ground— it would take the entire day merely to fill in the holes and patch up the field. We sat around in the billets, several pilots catching up on sleep, while the rest of us discussed the rising tempo of the enemy attacks.
A bomber pilot joined our group (he had landed at Lae for refueling, and was grounded after the attack) and listened with interest to our descriptions of attacking the enemy bombers. After a while he looked wistfully at the Zero fighters parked off the runway.
“You know,” he said suddenly, “I think my greatest ambition has been to fly a fighter, not these trucks we go around in. It’s funny,” he mused, ‘‘we’ve been taking more and more punishment on our raids. Most of the men feel they’ll never live to go home. I feel the same way.
“Yet,” he turned to look at us, “I would be satisfied if there was one thing I could do,”
We waited for him to continue. “I’d like to loop that truck I fly,” he added. He grinned. “Can you picture that thing going around in a loop?”
One of the Zero pilots spoke up. “If I were you, I wouldn’t try it,” he said softly. “You’d never come out of a loop in one piece, even if you could get up and around into one.”
“I suppose so,” he replied. We watched him walk across the field and climb into the cockpit of a fighter, where he sat and studied the controls. At the time we didn’t know that all of us would remember this pilot for the rest of our lives.
The day passed slowly and that night Nishizawa, Ota, and I went to the radio room to listen to the music hour which came over nightly on the Australian radio.
Nishizawa suddenly spoke up. “That music—listen. Isn’t that the Dame Macabre, the dance of death?”
We nodded. Nishizawa was excited. “That gives me an idea. You know the mission tomorrow, strafing at Moresby? Why don’t we throw in a little dance of death of our own?”
“What the devil are you talking about?” Ota snapped. “You sound like you’ve gone crazy.”
“No, I mean it!” Nishizawa protested. “After we start home, let’s slip back to Moresby, the three of us, and do a few demonstration loops right over the field. It should drive them crazy on the ground!”
“It might be fun,” Ota said cautiously, “but what about the commander? He’d never let us go through with it.”
“So?” was the retort. “Who says he must know about it?” Nishizawa grinned broadly.
We went off to the billet, and the three of us talked in whispers of our plans for the morrow. We had no fear about appearing over Moresby with only three fighters—among the three of us, we’d shot down a total of sixty-five enemy planes. My tally was twenty-seven, Nishizawa had twenty, and Ota had accounted for eighteen.
We hit Moresby the next day with a maximum fighter sweep of eighteen Zeros, with Lieu
tenant Commander Tadashi Nakajima personally heading the formation. Nishizawa and I flew as his wingmen on the mission.
The strafing was a failure. Every bomber on the field was hidden from our view. The story in the air was different. Three enemy fighter formations came at us over the field. We turned into the first group and took them in a head-on attack. In the swirling air battle, six P-39s—two of them mine-fell in flames. Several Zeros broke from the battle to shoot up the field, which proved later to be their undoing. Two fighters, badly shot up, crashed on the Owen Stanley slopes during the return trip.
After the dogfight we reformed. As soon as we were in formation I signaled to Commander Nakajima that I was going down in pursuit of an enemy plane; he waved his hand and I dropped down in a long turning dive.
I was back at Moresby in a few minutes, circling above the field at 12,000 feet. The antiaircraft remained quiet, and no enemy fighters appeared. Then two Zeros came in at my height, and we fell into formation. Nishizawa and Ota grinned at me and I waved back in greeting.
We gathered in a formation with only a few scant feet between our wing tips. I slid my canopy back, described a ring over my head with my finger, then showed them three fingers. Both pilots raised their hands in acknowledgment. We were to fly three loops, all tied together.
One last look for enemy fighters, and I nosed down to gain speed, Nishizawa and Ota hugging my own plane. I pulled back on the stick, and the Zero responded beautifully in a high arcing climb, rolling over on her back. The other two fighters were right with me, all the way up and around in a perfect inside loop.
Twice more we went up and around, dove, and went back into the loop. Not a single gun fired from the ground, and the air remained clear of any enemy planes.
When I came out of the third loop Nishizawa pulled up to my plane, grinning happily, and signaled that he wanted to do it again. I turned to my left; there was Ota, laughing, nodding his head in agreement. I couldn’t resist the temptation. We dove to only 6,000 feet above the enemy field and repeated the three loops, swinging around in perfect formation. And still not a gun fired at us! We might have been over our own field for all the excitement we seemed to create. But I thought of all the men on the ground watching us and I laughed loudly.
Samurai! Page 13