The Matsuyama Wing provided the only spark of hope for the entire day. Nowhere else over Japan could our pilots claim a victory. Indeed, the Hellcats had run wild over all other opposition, and our victories appeared to be the only losses suffered by the Americans. Later we received copies of an American report of the air battle, which registered considerable surprise at the high performance of the Shiden fighter. The American pilots were shocked at the new airplane’s ability to withstand tremendous damage from the heavy machine guns of the Hellcats.
Within a month, however, disaster struck our wing. The greatest pilot still living in Japan, Soichi Sugita, was killed. The Matsuyama Wing had transferred to Kanoya in southern Kyushu to oppose the American planes supporting the invasion of Okinawa. On April 17, without any warning, mass formations of enemy fighter planes screamed down on our field. We had only a glimpse of them at about 12,000 feet as they thundered down. We were caught flat-footed. Apparently the enemy planes, both Corsairs and Hellcats, had flown from aircraft carriers in Okinawa waters. We had no radar at Kanoya, and the fighters were already diving when the alarms clamored.
On the field the battle command flag, “Go Out and Fight,” fluttered in the wind over the Command Post. Several pilots ran for their planes, but Captain Genda shouted to us to get off the field and into the shelters. It was obviously too late to attempt a take-off.
His orders went unheard by Sugita, Shoji Matsumara, and another pilot. All three men had seen the enemy fighters before the alarm sounded, and had run for their own planes. Even as the Corsairs and Hellcats screamed low over the field, Sugita and his wingman, with Matsumara directly behind, were taxiing into take-off position. Two enemy fighters screamed down from the right and to the rear. Sugita’s wingman went first. The Shiden’s wheels were barely off the ground when a Corsair fired a long burst into the fighter. The Shiden reeled wildly under the impact of the bullets of six heavy machine guns, tumbled wing over wing through the air, and struck the ground with a tremendous blast.
Moments later another fighter streaked in. Tracers spit through the air. I stared in horror as the bullets hurled dirt upwards as they moved across the runway and poured into Sugita’s taxiing fighter. Sugita never even had a chance to take evasive action with his plane still on the ground.
In a moment the tracers had found the Shiden’s fuel tanks and the fighter exploded into a roaring ball of fire. Flame and smoke billowed behind the still-moving plane. There was no movement within the cockpit. I could not believe my eyes. The greatest pilot in Japan, an ace more than fourteen times over, was dead before my eyes.
The destruction of Sugita’s plane saved Matsumara’s life. The thick clouds of smoke which trailed the burning fighter enveloped Matsumara’s plane, shielding him from the enemy fighters. (Today Shoji Matsumara is an F-86 Sabre jet fighter pilot in the new Japan Air Force. He finished his war flying with the destruction of six Hellcats and Corsairs during the final days of combat.)
Those were terrible days. The great aces of Japan, their numbers already diminished by American guns, fell one after the other. Two months after Sugita went to his death, Kinsuke Muto, the man who had fought with me at Iwo Jima, was gone. Muto scored at least thirty-five victories in the air; indicative of his superb flying ability and fearless actions in combat were the four B-29s officially credited to him.
Muto had flown brilliantly in the spring of 1945, when he was based at Yokosuka. On February 26 he completed a sensational day in the air by attacking in an obsolete Zero twelve Corsair carrier fighters strafing Tokyo. Muto took off from the fighter base at Atsugi and lost no time in plunging into the enemy formation. The startled pilots scattered before the unexpected attack of a single Zero, and two Corsairs tumbled to earth, wrapped in flames, before the American fliers could turn against Muto’s plane. In a savage, incredible dogfight which ran from Atsugi to over Yokosuka, Muto confounded the enemy pilots with brilliant aerobatics. Despite their frantic efforts, the Corsairs failed to keep Muto in their sights long enough to send the Zero down. By constantly attacking, almost seeming to ram during his wild flying, Muto kept the Corsairs off his own neck while he shot down two more of the enemy. Finally, out of ammunition, he dove away from the fight.
Four months later he was dead. He transferred to Okinawa in June, still flying the old Zero fighter. He was last seen attacking a Liberator bomber near Yaku Shima. As our other pilots reported the battle, Muto closed in to point-blank range, pouring a stream of fire into the four-engined bomber. He never saw the Mustang which dove with tremendous speed against him, firing a long burst which tore the right wing off his plane.
We had hardly recovered from the shock of Muto’s loss when the death of another of our greatest aces stunned all pilots. Lieutenant S/G Naoshi Kanno, of the Kanoya Wing, met his end near Yaku Shima in a fighter wrapped from nose to tail in flames. Kanno was famous for his unprecedented successes against the B-17s in the South Pacific, and had no less than a dozen Fortresses among his fifty-two confirmed air victories. He was the first pilot to perfect the rolling and diving head-on attack against the Fortresses, the same firing pass later discovered by the Luftwaffe to be the most effective against the powerful B-17.
So now, to the list of Sasai, Ota, Nishizawa, and others were added more of our greatest—Kanno, Muto, and Sugita.
Now, I, who had been denied permission to fly combat missions while at Matsuyama, was the surviving ace who led all other pilots. My demands for permission to fly the Shidens in combat were denied repeatedly by Captain Genda, who finally ordered me and Hatsuyo back to Yokosuka. In April, chafing at my orders to stay out of the air, I returned to my former base.
Our return to Yokosuka involved a wearying, sleepless journey of forty hours by train. We stopped perhaps two dozen times to stand on the tracks outside different cities which even at that moment were receiving terrible punishment by enemy fighters and bombers. The strain of the uncomfortable ride was telling on Hatsuyo, who was visibly fatigued from the halting progress of the train. She never complained, but always smiled at my worried glances, and assured me in a tired whisper that she would be all right.
We were appalled at the ruins and charred wreckage which met our eyes as we passed through the different cities along the route. Vast areas stretched away from each station, blackened and seared by the terrible fire bombs sown by the B-29s. Each of these cities was a wasteland of ash. The wind picked up fine soot and dust and filled the air with its choking substance. Every time we left a city we breathed a sigh of relief, only to encounter almost exactly the same garish scene before our eyes at the next station. Our country was being pounded into wreckage and it was obvious to me as a pilot that we could do little to prevent the appalling destruction from increasing.
To our surprise, the big naval city of Yokosuka was intact. Strangely, the Americans spared it, while the B-29s burned and leveled more than 140 other provincial cities, many of far less strategic value than this naval bastion. Perhaps the fact that Yokosuka harbored none of the huge battleships or aircraft carriers contributed to its immunity from the enemy’s bombs. I saw only small motorboats churning across the big port, maneuvering wildly, undergoing special training. The crews were preparing themselves for the final day when our soil would be invaded. These were the counterparts of the Kamikaze planes. Each speedboat was crammed full with high explosives, and its crew would race in against enemy transports to destroy themselves with the enemy. Again, there was a price to be paid. But how many men on an American transport or warship could be killed by two or three Japanese smashing their boat against the sides of an enemy vessel?
The Navy provided us with a small three-room dependent house near the Oppama Airfield, in northern Yokosuka. Our life was far from easy, and Hatsuyo did her best to transform our meager supplies of food into something resembling meals.
The huge storage warehouses at Yokosuka were virtually empty, stripped of all their goods by the military. The meals served to officers and enlisted men were no longe
r different; they were equally poor and ill tasting. We lived at the barest level of subsistence. All Post Exchange and Dependent Purchase centers had long ago been boarded up for lack of supplies.
Most of the stores in the city proper had been closed for months. Even though it had escaped the bombing which had smashed other cities, Yokosuka was dreary and almost lifeless. The few people who trudged the streets were hungry and destitute.
And still the B-29s came in ever greater numbers, and carrying more and more bombs. The raids we had thought to be the ultimate in destruction were eclipsed less than twenty-four hours later in assaults which beggar description. Literally millions of fire bombs cascaded down from the skies, causing conflagrations the like of which the earth had never seen before.
All Japan was shocked by a raid on Tokyo which came on the night of March 10. More than nineteen square miles of the city lay gutted the morning after, a fantastic, rotting wasteland. There were reports that as many as 130,000 people had died during the flaming night.
Originally, the Army had been charged with the responsibility of intercepting the great bombers. They never achieved even a fleeting moment of success in this task. After a series of costly and futile attempts to stem the tide of Superfortresses, the Army licked its wounds and abandoned all attempts at interception. They left the sky to the B-29s, and all Army planes were withdrawn from active service. Mechanics swarmed over the fighters and bombers, working to bring them into the best possible condition, preparing them for the day of reckoning when the Americans would invade.
Now the responsibility for defending the homeland lay entirely in the hands of the Navy. Every day our fighters went up to slash at the B-29S, and every day we achieved spectacularly little success. Our men were doing their best, but it was not enough against the Superfortress. From Atsugi, near Yokosuka, Raiden fighters took off on interception flights against the B-29s that resulted in daily wild scrambles. For a short period of time the fighters broke the B-29’s myth of invincibility, and the Raiden’s four cannon and flashing speed raised our hopes by blowing several B-29s from the sky.
The enemy’s answer was to send swarms of Mustangs over Japan during the daylight raids. The swift enemy fighters tore savagely at our planes and slaughtered them. Where the Raiden shone against the B-29, it was helpless before the swifter, more maneuverable Mustang. Almost every day our new fighters plunged burning from the sky, their wings tom off, their pilots dead.
Out of this terrible massacre there emerged but one shining pilot, a man of superb flying ability. Lieutenant J/G Teimei Akamatsu, who was as different from other pilots as night from day. He was the only Japanese naval pilot I ever knew who had successfully defied almost every regulation in the books. He was the typical swashbuckling hero of fiction, powerfully built, noisy, and always happy. Akamatsu had joined the Navy nearly ten years before my own enlistment, but he failed to achieve the rapid promotions which his fellow pilots coveted. Indeed, he was even broken in rank on several occasions, and threatened with dishonorable discharge. He was incorrigible, but he was a genius in the air, and the Navy was loath to lose a man of his spectacular ability.
Akamatsu stunned his superior officers by his conduct. Instead of attending pilot briefings and waiting on the flight line like the other men, he had his own warning system hooked up in a brothel! He often came racing to the air base in an old car, driving like a demon with one hand, drinking from a bottle held in the other. The sirens were screaming a warning as he bolted from the car to his fighter plane, already warmed up by the mechanics. He took off the moment the cockpit canopy was closed. He was equally as wild in the air as he was on the ground, and was the only pilot who ever successfully engaged both Mustangs and Hellcats in dogfights and emerged the victor. Akamatsu shot down no less than ten of these excellent enemy planes while flying the Raiden, a feat most other pilots considered to be impossible. Akamatsu was fortunate in that at least eight of these kills were verified by other fliers.
To this day no man knows how many enemy planes Akamatsu shot down in combat. He fought continuously for more than six years, cutting his teeth in China, where he bagged several enemy fighters. Then he went on to fight in almost every area of the Pacific, often returning with his plane shot to ribbons, grinning and shouting loudly.
Akamatsu himself does not know his total number of victories. When drunk, he would pound his fist on the table and bellow that he had blown at least 350 Allied planes out of the air. He never boasted when he was sober. Other pilots who had fought with him and managed to survive through the war corrected this figure down to about fifty air kills.
I often saw Akamatsu landing at Oppama when he failed to reach Atsugi because of fuel shortages caused by the wild air melees. It was heartening to everyone on the field to see him climbing out of his fighter, thumbing his nose at the bullet holes, always grinning. He would shout to me and hold up his hand with several fingers upraised, denoting the number of planes he had shot down that day.
More than once Akamatsu took off in a flight of five to eight fighters, and was the only man in the group to survive the battles. Mustangs were his favorite prey, and he had a healthy respect for the American fighter. He cursed the officers who sent up green pilots in the Raiden—they could barely fly the airplane, let alone fight with it.
Akamatsu survived the war. Today he runs a small restaurant in Kochi, his home town in Shikoku Island.
The Oppama air base was mainly a testing field where pilots ran new fighters through their flight checks. I was not given the opportunity to fight for a long time, since the base commander felt that my long experience would be invaluable in testing our new planes. I realized that more combat, however, was only a matter of time. Every man who could fly, every plane which could stagger into the air, would be thrown against the invading fleet.
In June I was ordered to report to Nagoya to test a new fighter plane, the Reppu. There had been rumors about the new aircraft which indicated that the Reppu was the greatest plane which had ever flown. I was anxious to get my hands on the ship to see if the rumors had some substance. Such a fighter would be a blessing to us.
All the rumors were true. The Reppu was a sensational airplane, the fastest I had ever flown. It took my breath away with its tremendous speed, and its rate of climb was astounding. With a powerful engine, a four-bladed propeller, and new superchargers, the Reppu ran away from everything in the air, Japanese or American. It could fly circles in a climb around either the Hellcat or the Mustang, and the engineers told me it would fight at better than 40,000 feet.
Unhappily, for us, the Mitsubishi factories which were to produce the Reppu were blasted into wreckage before production could get under way. Only seven planes were produced; the one existing model, flown by the enemy after the war, astounded the American pilots with its flashing performance. Before I left for Nagoya, Hatsuyo had made me promise to purchase for her a small dagger. The city was famous for its outstanding swords and daggers, and my wife insisted upon a blade from the craftsmen of that city. Upon my return Hatsuyo silently inspected the gleaming length of steel, cautiously touching the blade. “Saburo, it is not sharp enough.” She looked at me. “Tomorrow, at Oppama, will you hone the steel to a fine edge?”
Her serious expression startled me. “What on earth did you want a dagger for, anyway?” I asked.
She took my hands in hers and looked directly into my eyes. “You are my life, Saburo,” she said quietly. “All that matters in this world is you. There is only one thing for me to do if you are killed.”
She said no more, and I pressed the matter no further. The next day I sharpened the blade on an oilstone until the edge was razor sharp. That night Hatsuyo tested the steel by slicing effortlessly through soft tissue paper. “It is good now,” she commented, then slipped the dagger beneath her kimono sash. We never discussed the subject again.
After our departure from Matsuyama, Hatsuyo never touched a piano. I knew that she wanted to play again; she had a wonderful f
eeling for music and could have passed the hours much more easily with a piano to occupy her during the long days. She declined my offer to borrow the instrument we had at the officers’ mess. So long as we were all fighting so hard, she said, it was not right for her to enjoy the pleasure of music by herself. I could appreciate her attitude. All Japan suffered bitterness which rose even above the pain and horror of the bombings. The nation was being torn asunder, our cities lay prostrate and flaming as if trampled by a gigantic foot. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that the end was near, that soon the fighting would be transferred to our soil. There was no possibility of surrender. We would fight to the last man.
On August 6 the reports of a vast and terrible explosion in Hiroshima, later confirmed as an atomic bomb, stunned the pilots at Oppama. The idea that a single plane could inflict so much damage was staggering and too great to absorb all at once.
Then came the hammer blow of the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, which followed almost immediately. This was more personal and more real and far more devastating in its implications.
The second atomic bomb on Nagasaki followed. My mind was hazy from the unbelievable devastation being wrought by the Americans. All of this exceeded the limits of credibility. It couldn’t be true, and yet it was.
At three in the afternoon on August 13, all officers at the Oppama base were hurriedly summoned to a secret meeting in the commandant’s office. Our commanding officer was pale and visibly shaken. He could hardly stand and supported his weight against his desk. He spoke weakly, in a faltering voice.
“What I am about to tell you is of the utmost importance,” he began, “and must be regarded as absolutely top secret. I rely upon your integrity as officers of the Imperial Navy to keep this information strictly to yourselves.
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