Samurai!

by Martin Caiden

  Then she would look around, to be sure no other person was within earshot. “Saburo, tell me,” she implored in a half whisper, “are we really winning? Is everything they tell us true?” Again I could only repeat, we must win. But she was happy. There was no denying that. I knew that she wished there was some way my convalescence period could be made to continue indefinitely.

  Several weeks after I arrived at my sister’s home I had a visitor from Tokyo, a news correspondent sent by the Yomuri Shimbun one of the largest newspapers in Japan. He told me his paper had sent him down from Tokyo to get an exclusive interview with Japan’s leading ace (I wondered how many enemy planes Nishizawa and Ota had shot down by now; I was sure they had surpassed my own victories); the entire country wanted to read my own words on the war.

  I questioned my liberty to talk to this man. Disciplinary action could be swift and harsh if I spoke out of turn. I called the Administration Officer at Sasebo and told him my problem. He was evasive and insisted there were no specific regulations in the matter.

  “I have no authority to discourage you from talking with a reporter,” he concluded. “But I must remind you that your conversation will be entirely at your own discretion, and that you may be held responsible for anything you say. Also, bear in mind that this desk neither approves nor disapproves of any officer giving an interview. Just be careful.”

  That was certainly a negative reply. I returned to my room and told the correspondent that my superiors did not favor the interview he requested. But he would not be shaken so easily.

  “It is not that I meant to bother you,” he pleaded, “but that I have traveled seven hundred miles from Tokyo just to talk to you! Let me ask you only a few questions. Please! Just five minutes will do.”

  Fool that I was, I should have known better. His ability to twist and weave through a conversation was uncanny. His “five minutes” became three days! Every morning he commuted to my home from his hotel and took many notes.

  Never have I encountered such tact! He made me talk almost about everything. His questions kept away from the war, until I discovered that the stories of my personal accounts were of the war. He soon found out that I had lost all optimism, and that our Navy fliers at Rabaul, despite their many successes, were now waging an uphill battle at Guadalcanal, and virtually without any cooperation from the fighters and bombers of the Japanese Army.

  “We need more fighters and more experienced pilots,” I told him in a fit of anger. “Every Zero fighter should be pulled off the line and run through a complete overhaul after one hundred and fifty hours in the air. This has nothing to do with battle damage. Even if the airplane never fires a shot and is never fired at in return, it requires that overhaul. Now, we can’t do that anymore. We consider a Zero in excellent condition if it is only slightly shot up and has a complete overhaul after two hundred hours.

  “Do you know what it means for a pilot to go into combat with an airplane that won’t answer every demand at the controls? Only the best of our fliers can take that kind of a ship into battle and come out alive. If the new pilots we’re sending overseas as replacements don’t measure up to the standards of the men with whom I flew, then heaven help them. The American Navy pilots we encountered over Guadalcanal were the best I have ever fought, and their tactics were superb. And their planes are certain to improve.”

  The reporter was more than satisfied. He could not conceal his elation as he thanked me profusely and bid me goodbye.

  I was to find out later, however, that I had committed a major error even in talking to him at all.

  A week later I returned to the Sasebo Hospital and filed a request for a final medical check-up which would qualify me for reassignment. It was accepted! They assigned me to a cot in the hospital, and told me I would remain for several days until they could complete the examination.

  Early the next morning I was summoned to the Administration Office at Sasebo Headquarters. The roof had caved in; the personnel captain’s face was red from his anger.

  “Warrant Officer Sakai,” he shouted, “you are an idiot! I just received a wire from Navy Military Headquarters in Tokyo, telling me that they have suppressed in its entirety the interview you gave that reporter from the Yomiuri Shimbun. Have you taken leave of your senses, saying the things you did?

  “Now you listen to me, Sakai. Tokyo has reprimanded me sharply for my lack of surveillance over the men under my command. I will not stand for this kind of stupidity! I tell you now that you will release not one single word about your combat duty without first clearing with the Public Information Officer. Do you understand? Any repetition of the nonsense which you just issued will result not only in your court-martial, but mine as well! And no one, no one, you understand, is going to do that to me!”

  I understood perfectly. I was to be gagged, but I could sympathize with my superior’s position. It was all very simple, Sakai, just keep your mouth shut.

  I returned to the hospital, brooding at the tongue-lashing I had just received.

  Someone called my name. An orderly stood stiffly at attention in the doorway, saluting. “What is it?” I snapped.

  “You have a visitor, sir. A tall naval flier is waiting for you in the visitor’s room. I think he said his name is Nishizawa.”

  “What?” I shouted. “Nishizawa! Can it really be he?”

  I forgot everything that had happened and dashed madly from the room, nearly knocking the startled orderly off his feet. I opened the door to the visitor’s room and stared in.

  A tall, lean man paced slowly in the room, a cigarette in his mouth. It was! He hadn’t changed a bit.

  He looked up at me, smiling broadly, and shouted, “Sakai!” I yelled his name. “Nishizawa!” The next second we were pounding each other on the back, happy beyond all words.

  I held my good friend at arm’s length. “Let me look at you!” I cried. “You look wonderful. No wounds?” I asked hastily.

  “None, Saburo,” came the welcome answer. “I left Rabaul in November. Not a scratch on me. It seems that all those bullets just never caught up.”

  I was elated. “Hah! We named you properly, all right,” I said. “Truly you are our own Devil, my friend, to have come through Lae and Rabaul without a mark on you. Nishizawa, it is simply wonderful to see you again.

  “Tell me, how did things go after I left? By now you must be the Navy’s leading pilot. Oh, I can just imagine you over Guadalcanal.”

  He waved his hands in protest. “You make too much of me, Saburo,” he complained. “I am not even sure of the exact figure. Maybe, around fifty or so. But I am still far behind you.” He smiled. “Perhaps you do not realize it, but you are still the best of all our pilots.”

  “Ah, you talk like a fool, old friend,” I said. “I have seen you fly too many times. I am afraid, Nishizawa, that you shall be our leading ace before too long. But, tell me, what are you doing at Sasebo?”

  “They sent me home to the Yokosuka Wing,” he answered, his face turning glum. “An instructor. That’s what they made me, an instructor! Saburo, can you picture me running around in a rickety old biplane, teaching some fool youngster how to bank and turn, and how to keep his pants dry? Me!”

  I laughed. He was right; Nishizawa just wasn’t the instructor type.

  “Well,” he continued, “after a little time at that, I felt disgusted. So I volunteered to go overseas again, just as soon as they would let me. I received my orders this morning; I’m reassigned to the Philippines. That’s why I had to see you today. We take off tomorrow morning.”

  “So soon?”

  “It is the way I wish it to be, Saburo,” he replied. “Flying around Yokosuka is not for me. I want a fighter under my hands again. I simply have to get back into action. Staying home in Japan is killing me.”

  I knew how he felt. Indeed, I knew too well. But...there were other things to discuss, our other friends.

  “I envy you, Nishizawa. But come, tell me about Rabaul, let me hear about every
one else. Where is Lieutenant Sasai now? And Ota, is he with you? What about my wingmen, Yonekawa and Hatori? Tell me all about them!”

  “What?”

  He stared at me, his face blank. Despair crowded his eyes. “So they did not tell you...”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He waved his hand feebly.

  “What is the matter with you, Nishizawa? Weren’t they sent home with you?”

  He turned away, his back to me. His voice choked. “Saburo, they are,…” He put a hand to his forehead. Then he spun around. “Dead.”

  I couldn’t believe it!...It was impossible!

  “What are you saying?” I yelled at him.

  “They are all dead. You and I, Saburo, you and I... we are the only ones still alive!”

  It couldn’t be true! My knees buckled. I leaned against a table, while my mind tried to comprehend this tragedy.

  Nishizawa began to talk. “Lieutenant Sasai was the first. We made a sweep to Guadalcanal on August twenty six. It was not as you remember, Saburo. I don’t know how many Wildcats there were, but they seemed to come out of the sun in an endless stream. We never had a chance. Our formation went to pieces. We had to scatter so quickly that no one saw Sasai’s plane go down. We thought that perhaps he had been hurt and had gone ahead of us. But when we returned to Rabaul, he was missing.... He never came back.”

  Nishizawa sighed wearily. “Then it was Ota. Just one week later. Every time we went out, we lost more and more planes. Guadalcanal was completely under the enemy’s control. Ota went the same way as Sasai. No one saw his plane go down. He just didn’t come home.

  “Then, about three or four days after that, Yonekawa and Hatori were shot down. Both of them died the same day.

  “Of all the men who returned with me, only Captain Saito, Commander Nakajima, and less than six of the other pilots who were in our original group of eighty men survived.”

  I was stunned. Nishizawa remained silent, waiting for me to speak again. It seemed so unreal! How could they all be dead?

  Four of my best friends. They were all killed while I lay helplessly in the Yokosuka Hospital. Now I understood why I had failed to learn of their loss before. Nishizawa and Nakajima had made sure that the news did not reach me, not when the operation on my eyes had just been performed.

  Their faces swam before me. I remembered Ota, laughing from his cockpit as we looped over Moresby. Yonekawa and Hatori, who clung grimly to my tail through all the air battles, always alert to protect me, to keep me from being killed. Sasai, he...And now they were...dead. I sobbed aloud, without shame, like a child. I could not stop. My body shook helplessly.

  Nishizawa grasped my hand, begging me to stop. “Saburo, please!” he implored. “Please stop it!” I looked up at him.

  “I am an accursed man!” he choked at me. “I never saw Sasai and Ota going down! I never even knew they had been lost. Our best friends, Saburo, our best friends, and I didn’t do anything to help them! I must be Satan’s bastard,” he raged, “going after other planes while they died around me!”

  He sat down again. “No, no, it is not true. There was nothing I could do. There were just too many enemy planes, just too many,” His voice trailed off.

  We sat silently for a long time, looking at each other.

  What more was there to say?

  CHAPTER 25

  I WAS discharged from Sasebo Hospital during the last week of January, 1943. The long months of medical attention were over. I reported to my original outfit, the Tainan Fighter Wing of the 11th Air Fleet, now stationed at Toyohashi in central Japan.

  I had first joined the wing during its formation in September of 1941 at Tainan on Formosa. Of the 150 pilots who had left Tainan during the great Japanese sweep across the Pacific, less than twenty were now alive. These veterans formed the core of the new wing, the majority of the members of which were green pilots rushed through training schools at Tsuchiura and other air bases.

  Commander Tadashi Nakajima personally greeted me when I arrived at Toyohashi. Neither he nor I ever thought that we would meet here, instead of back at Rabaul. Thank heaven that Nakajima was my superior officer again. He engaged in no nonsense about my not being able to fly, and the very next day I went aloft. Only—in a Flying Fortress! This was the same B-17 which the Army had captured at Bandung, Java, in March of 1942. Every man of my original outfit went up in the great bomber. We got a tremendous kick out of flying the bomber, which impressed us with its excellent controllability and, above all, the precision workmanship of its equipment. No large Japanese airplane I had ever seen was in its class.

  The next day I returned to my first love—the Zero. I can never describe the wonder of the feelings which came back to me as I took the lithe fighter into the air. She handled like a dream. Just a flick of the wrist—she was gone! I went through all sorts of aerobatics, standing the Zero on her tail, diving, sliding off on the wings. I was drunk with the air again.

  As an officer I acquired an entirely new perspective of the war. Enlisted men were denied access to the secret combat reports which the Navy distributed to its officer personnel. Several days after my arrival at Toyohashi, Nakajima wordlessly showed me the report of our withdrawal from Guadalcanal on February 7, 1943, exactly six months after the Americans had landed. The radios blared of strategic withdrawals, of tightening our defense lines, but the secret reports revealed a staggering defeat and appalling losses.

  Two full divisions of Army troops were gone, annihilated by the savagely fighting enemy. The Navy had lost the equivalent of an entire peacetime fleet. Rusting in the mud off Guadalcanal were the blasted hulks of no less than two battleships, one aircraft carrier, five cruisers, twelve destroyers, eight submarines, hundreds upon hundreds of fighters and bombers, not to mention the crack fighter pilots and all the bomber crews.

  What had happened to us? We had stormed through the Pacific with impunity. Time and again we had whipped the enemy fighter planes. But the secret reports from the front told of new enemy fighters far superior to the P-39s and P-40s.

  And for the first time I learned what really had happened at Midway last June. Four carriers! And nearly 300 airplanes, with most of their pilots, lost! It was unbelievable.

  My heart sank when I saw the new pilot arrivals assigned to the Tainan Wing, They were eager and serious young men, unquestionably brave. But determination and courage were no substitute for pilot skill, and these men lacked the fine temper which they would need against the Americans who stormed the Pacific in every increasing numbers. These recruits with their shining faces—were they to fill the yawning gulf left by such men as Sasai and Ota? How? How in the name of heaven could they be expected to do that?

  Their training at Toyohashi was severe. From sunup to sundown the instructors ran them through their paces. Classroom studies, and more and more flying. Teach them to hold their formations. That’s a control stick you’re holding there, not a broom handle! Don’t just fly your airplane, become a part of it! This is how you save fuel...squeeze your trigger for short bursts, don’t burn out your guns. All the lessons of the past battles relived again, trying to implant the invaluable lessons, the little tricks, the advantages in these new men.

  But we didn’t have enough time. We couldn’t watch for individual errors and take the long hours necessary to weed the faults out of a trainee. Hardly a day passed when fire engines and ambulances did not race down the runways, sirens shrieking, to dig one or more pilots out of the plane they had wrecked on a clumsy take-off or landing.

  Not all the new pilots were so ill equipped to master the training planes and fighters. Many appeared as gifted in the air as the great aces in 1939 and 1940 had been. But their numbers were distressingly few, and there would be no painless interval for them to gain many hours in the air or any combat experience before they were thrown against the Americans.

  Less than a month after Guadalcanal fell, we were called in for a special officers conference, to hear news of a
further disaster. The report remained classified throughout the rest of the war and was never revealed to the Japanese public. Behind locked doors, I read that a Japanese convoy of more than twenty ships—twelve transports, eight destroyers, and several smaller auxiliaries—had attempted to land Army troops at Lae, my old fighter air base. At least 100 enemy fighters and bombers attacked the convoy on the open seas with determined runs, sinking all the transports and at least five of the destroyers. The news carried implications of a disaster greater than Guadalcanal, for it meant that the enemy now dominated the skies as far north as Lae, and that we were helpless to stop his incredibly effective attacks against our shipping.

  Several days later the Tainan Air Wing was ordered to transfer without delay to Rabaul. Commander Nakajima asked me if I would accompany him back to the southwest Pacific. How could he believe I wished to do otherwise? Nakajima told me that, despite the loss of my right eye, he was convinced I was better than the new pilots. That night Headquarters posted a list of the men who were transferring to Rabaul. My name was included.

  But we failed to reckon with the Chief Surgeon at Toyohashi. He was outraged when he read my name on the list. He stormed into Nakajima’s office and vented his wrath on the unhappy commander. “You are out of your mind!” he bellowed. “Do you want to kill this man? What is wrong with you, even to consider allowing a one-eyed pilot to go into combat? He wouldn’t stand a chance! The whole thing is preposterous! I will not allow Sakai to transfer to Rabaul!” We could hear them shouting at the other side of the field.

  Nakajima protested that I was better than most of the new fliers, that, two eyes or one, nothing could replace my skill behind the controls of a Zero nor, for that matter, my long combat experience. The surgeon refused to budge an inch. Now Nakajima became angry. They argued back and forth for several hours, but in the end it was the surgeon who emerged triumphant. He persuaded Nakajima to change his mind.