Lieutenant Masataka Nagaishi, divisional officer of the reconnaissance squadron, entered the ready room and said, “Good morning.” This divisional officer was hard working, and he always woke up with the maintenance crew to monitor flight preparations.
“Good morning. How is the weather?” I asked waking up.
The uneasy reply from Nagaishi was, “The clouds are hanging low, and it’s foggy. It’s not easy today.”
Then Lieutenant Tsujiro Wada entered. He was a skilled pilot, one class senior to me, who flew in pair with Nagaishi. He asked me, “Sub-Lieutenant Fuchida, have you sent somebody to wake up Katsuhata? That guy is late again.”
Lieutenant Kiyoshi Katsuhata was my pair and No. 2 Unit Leader of the reconnaissance squadron. He was in the same class at the Academy as Wada but was two years behind him as an aviation student. More important, his skills were deficient, and his sense as a pilot was far from commendable.
I called the duty sailor. “Go wake up Lieutenant Katsuhata. He’s in his room.”
“Yes Sir, I will go and wake up Lieutenant Katsuhata,” the sailor said as he left.
Then, the squadron leader, Lieutenant Commander Munetaka Sakamaki, entered. “Look, they’ve changed our squadron’s duty this morning. We’ve been ordered to cease drill activity to find a dead body.” He showed us the telegraphic order from the Combined Fleet.
The fact was that, after termination of the exercise the previous night, the Captain of one of the submarines was missing. Lieutenant Commander Yoshiroku Yoshimura had stepped down to his private room for a rest after the drill. He left the operation of the submarine to the officer on deck. It was past 10:00 PM when Yoshimura stepped down. At 3:00 AM the following day, the sailor in charge of delivering telegraphed communications knocked on the Captain’s door, but there was no response. He could not find him on the bridge, deck, or in the restroom, every conceivable place where the Commander might be. After searching all these areas with no results, the sailor reported to the officer on deck on the bridge. “Officer on deck, I can’t find the Captain anywhere.”
The officer shouted, “Don’t be silly!” This was followed by an uproar. Shouts over the loudspeaker called for the Captain again and again, without any response. If he was not found anywhere in the ship, the only possible assumption was that he fell into the water. Along with the other submarines in the group, the missing Captain’s submarine turned back to trace the route it had run from 10:00 PM until 3:00 AM in an attempt to find the missing captain. The order from the Combined Fleet was to cooperate in the search, and that included the Kaga’s reconnaissance squadron.
Finally, Lieutenant Katsuhata appeared. Rubbing his sleepy eyes, he muttered, “Searching for a dead body under such bad weather conditions can result in another dead body.” What he said was an omen of things to come.
Four reconnaissance planes took off from the Kaga at 5:30 that morning. The cloud ceiling was 500 meters with sporadic fog gathering. Visibility was poor. Having reached our searching point in wild-goose formation, the four planes started widening the distance of our search area. We took a course bearing 32 degrees, to fly over the trail of the submarine on our return. The flight altitude was 30 meters, and I was trying with all my effort to spot the dead body from the lower observation window, flat on my belly on the floor of the reconnaissance platform. Typically, one tour is considered completed after 60 nautical miles, and then the plane turns around. We repeated four turns but failed to find the body.
Then, we decided to return according to our flight plan, pointing the compass needle to the Kaga. However, the ship did not come into sight when we reached the estimated time of contact. We searched all around, but we could not find her. The plane we were flying in was a Type-13 carrier torpedo bomber [a biplane officially adopted in 1923], and its cruise duration was three hours. We had already been flying for over two-and-a-half hours. If we failed to find the mother ship within 30 minutes, we would have no other choice but to make a forced landing on the sea. We were in a carrier plane with wheels, so that meant that we would sink instantly. I felt my sight was dimming when I thought that my 27-year life might be coming to an end.
I talked to Katsuhata, who was steering the plane, through the voice pipe: “Sorry Lieutenant. I lost our plane’s position because of a mistake in the navigation method. We will return using radio navigation.”
“OK,” Katsuhata responded, sounding helpless. I told the radio operator in the back seat to inform the mother ship that we required bearing information. The operator clicked the telegraph key several times, and this was followed by the prolonged sounds of long electric waves. Then, there was a quick reply—”Bearing 47 degrees.” I was relieved. This meant that we still had further to fly before we contacted the mother ship, but we now had a course bearing.
“Lieutenant, the mother ship replied bearing 47 degrees. We will return to the ship taking the course bearing 127 degrees.”
Katsuhata seemed to be relieved. We kept flying with the needle fixed at 127 degrees, but the mother ship still refused to come into sight.
At that time, determining radio-direction was still primitive. If it was a long wave, the bearing line could be determined, but it was hard to tell which direction the radio signal was coming from, and it was up to the chief radio officer’s judgment. That day, since our operational ocean surface was to the north of the mother ship, they advised us that the bearing was 127 degrees. In reality, it was the opposite direction. Because of a navigational error, we lost the plane’s positioning, and we were actually in the direction 127 degrees from the mother ship. Therefore, if we continued to fly in that direction, we would be moving farther away from the mother ship.
“Fuchida, we only have enough fuel for another 10 minutes,” Katsuhata reported with an uneasy voice. I thought it was all over for us. The cloud height was 500 meters, and the plane was flying just below the clouds. As far as we could see, the ocean surface was stormy, and we could see nothing but the white caps of the waves. I was prepared that my final moment had come.
Then, suddenly, I seemed to hear somebody whispering to me, “Increase the altitude, increase the altitude.” But increasing the altitude would do no good. Above 500 meters, there was nothing but endless, thick clouds. However, the whispering,”Increase the altitude,” refused to go away. We had absolutely no other solution, so I decided to follow the voice. “Lieutenant Katsuhata, we will start increasing our altitude.”
Katsuhata was surprised and reluctant to follow. “Increase our altitude?…and thick clouds…” I was not in a position to give him an order as he was senior to me, and he was the commander of the plane. However, as the navigator, I could give him instructions regarding navigational methods. I used every tactic I knew of and finally persuaded him by saying that we had exhausted all other options and that the only possibility of survival was to increase our altitude. Finally, he gave in.
As soon as the plane started to increase its altitude, we entered into the cloud and were flying blind. We could see absolutely nothing. In order to make sure that this dull pilot did not make an error in his steering, I leaned forward from the reconnaissance seat, held his shoulder with both of my hands, watched the meter indicators, and had him increase our altitude slowly. The fuel meter indicated zero, but I thought we could continue to fly for a while. We continued this uneasy flight for close to 20 minutes before we finally moved out of the cloud. The altimeter showed 2,700 meters. Above the cloud, it was very clear and sunny.
Just then, our engine let out a sound like, “broom, broom,” and the propellers stopped. The fuel was completely gone. The plane could no longer fly. Now, we had no other choice but to glide. At that moment, I caught a glimpse of a white spot between the clouds. As I stared at it with the binoculars, I saw that it was a white sailing ship. I estimated the distance to be approximately 10,000 meters ahead of our position.
I shouted through the voice pipe, “Lieutenant Katsuhata, I want you to glide targeting the sailing ship ahea
d. The distance is 10,000 meters. Please glide steadily without reducing our altitude too much.”
In general, a plane may glide four times the distance of its altitude. Since we were now at an altitude of 2,700 meters, we were perfectly set to glide 10,000 meters. I grinned,”How lucky we are!”
In no time, the plane landed on the water just by the sailing ship’s leeward side. At the moment of impact, the legs of our plane were caught by the water, and we flipped upside down. My face hit the windshield of the reconnaissance seat, injuring my right cheek. The scar I have is a permanent reminder of that injury.
The sailing ship hauled in its sails and lowered a rescue boat to save us. It was a trading junk heading for Shanton, loaded with molasses from Kaohsiung. I was eager to know our location and asked the captain, who could not speak Japanese, by writing my question in Chinese characters. We were just halfway between Kaohsiung and Shanton. I checked the location on my air map, but I had absolutely no idea how we ended up in such a remote location.
In Shanton, the captain kindly delivered us to the Japanese Consulate General in the city. The Consul General, Mr. Kumakichi Beppu, gave some reward money to our rescuers and cordially entertained us. A telegraph was sent out immediately, and the destroyer Akikaze, attached to the First Air Squadron, was sent to pick us up. I felt nostalgic as I was once stationed on board the Akizake. We finally got back to our mother ship, Kaga, which was moored in Keelung Harbor.
I had sent a telegraph message to the Kaga before our emergency landing in the Strait of Taiwan: “We are making emergency landing. Running out of fuel. Position of plane is unknown, but there is sailing ship nearby. We expect to be saved by the ship. 0900.”
While the wreckage of our plane was discovered after an all-out search effort by the Combined Fleet, the Kaga did not know anything about our whereabouts for almost a week until they received the telegram from the Consul General in Shanton. Our shipmates were relieved to see us back from the dead, and they burst out with joy and welcomed us when we finally made it back to the ship.
Incidentally, a review of our flight prior to our emergency landing found that, during the third passage of our search mission, I instructed the pilot, Lieutenant Katsuhata, to take a bearing of 32 degrees. Katsuhata fixed the needle to 32 degrees and recited,”Bearing 32 degrees, OK.”
Following his confirmation, I normally should have checked if the needle was actually set at 32 degrees by looking at the compass in the reconnaissance seat, but I was too eager to search for the dead body from the lower window. I was flat on my belly on the floor, and I neglected to stand up and check the compass needle. This was the cause of the error.
As it turns out, Katsuhata, who believed that he set the plane’s bearing at 32 degrees, was actually flying towards 320 degrees. The reason was that the air compass of those days had four needles in the center. The needles were marked 0, 1, 2 and 3, and the anterior edge was scaled from 0 to 90. If you wanted to fly towards 32 degrees, you had to simply adjust the “0” needle to the scale 32 on the anterior edge. For whatever reason, Katsuhata set the “3” needle to the scale 20 on the edge, resulting in a course direction of 320 degrees. I decided our return bearing after the fourth turn without knowing that we had been flying off-course. And because of this directional error, we could never have made it back to the mother ship. Besides, radio-direction error was added, resulting in our emergency landing in an inconceivable location.
There is no question that the pilot was inept for having misread the compass, but my responsibility as the navigator was to check the setting, and my failure to do so cannot be excused. In spite of this, everybody praised my action to increase our altitude when we had only enough fuel to last another 10 minutes.
Above all, when I reported to Admiral Eisuke Yamamoto, Commander of the Combined Fleet, I was praised enormously that my guiding action was the most appropriate under the circumstances. I explained that, at first, I had no conviction about what to do, and I just followed the voice of somebody whispering in my mind.
“Whose voice do you think it was?” the Admiral asked.
I answered, “I really don’t know, but it might have been my deceased mother.”
Yamamoto was silent for a moment, and nodded, “It probably was.”
However, now I have the conviction that it was the voice of Jesus, who ushered me to safety long before I recognized Him.
8
Versatility Theory of Aviation
In 1930, the year I was involved in the emergency landing in the Taiwan Strait, the naval disarmament talks involving the US, UK, Japan, France and Italy were taking place in London.
It had been eight years since the conclusion of the Washington Naval Treaty in 1922. At that time, the three participating nations—the US, UK and Japan—had agreed to the ratio of capital ships of 5-5-3, and now they were going to place limits on auxiliary ships.
The London Naval Treaty was soon ratified. They say five nations were involved, but there was a big gap between the naval power of the two smaller nations, France and Italy, and the three larger nations, the US, UK and Japan. It should not have been a major concern for France and Italy, but the problem for Japan was that the Japanese Navy was constrained again with an inferior ratio of 60% against the US and UK in the force size of auxiliary ships.
The treaty caused a huge uproar inside the Japanese Navy, which had determined that it had no chance of winning a war against its imaginary Enemy Number One, the US Navy in the Western Pacific Ocean, unless the ratio against the US was kept at 70%. A treaty with a 60% ratio was simply out of the question.
On the pretext that it constituted an intervention in the supreme command’s jurisdiction, Admiral Kanji Kato, Secretary General of the Naval Military Command Department, resigned in protest against Prime Minister Osachi Hamaguchi’s government. The uproar went to a further extreme when Lieutenant Commander Eiji Kusakari of the Military Command Department waited at the station for the arrival of the Naval Minister, Takeshi Takarabe, a member of the conference mission, to hand him a dagger. He meant to tell the Minister that he should commit hara-kiri.
I was watching the uproar from the aircraft carrier Kaga. Frankly what I did not quite understand was why they were fussing about the force size, whether it was 70% or 60%. The center of the commotion was that the request for a ratio of 70% was rejected. This covered the 10,000-ton cruisers, which mounted 8-inch guns and were considered to be the main element of the auxiliary force. Under the terms of the treaty, aircraft carriers were still included in the auxiliary force. Therefore, I personally thought that, as a compromise, it was a good idea to halt all construction of the worthless 10,000-ton cruisers and, instead, deploy all our resources to the building of aircraft carriers. However, from my position as a mere Sub-Lieutenant, I could not stick my nose into such a subject.
Against this background, the Washington Naval Treaty was set to expire in 1936. If any of the participating nations gave two years’ prior notice, the treaty could be abolished at the end of 1936. In this context, Japan proposed abolishment in 1934, on the pretext that the nation could no longer endure the unfair treaty.
On the other hand, the London Naval Treaty had a term of five years with an expiration date set in 1935. However, it was agreed to hold another conference the year before expiration so that the participating nations could discuss post-London Naval Treaty disarmament issues. Under the circumstances, in 1934, the UK proposed to open preliminary disarmament talks in London. And representatives from five nations—the US, UK, Japan, France and Italy—met again to discuss disarmament issues. The chief representative for the Japanese was Rear Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.
In these preliminary talks, the Japanese Navy proposed a new treaty based on the principle of gross tonnage. Japan’s objective was to abolish the Washington Treaty and London Treaty because of their unfairness, so they agreed with the disarmament itself.
And in this proposal, the Japanese Navy insisted on the total elimination of aircraft c
arriers. On this matter, I was frightened to death. I thought it was sheer madness. What this implied was that armament is not for invasion of other nations but only for protection of one’s own country. We were proposing to abolish all weapons of offense, limiting us to only defensive weapons based on the principle of no-threat/no-invasion. And, according to this premise, we were proposing to abolish all aircraft carriers and even battleships if necessary.
I thought what a foolish Navy to make such a naive statement. This was nothing but a defensive-weapons-only security theory—a childish trick. It is an ironclad rule, articulated by Sun Tzu, the Chinese strategist genius, that the most important objective of any military power is not to fight. On the other hand, it is also an ironclad rule that, unless a military power is good enough to fight and win, that military power is incapable of accomplishing the first objective of military power, which is to avoid fighting.
There can be no difference between offensive and defensive. Offense and defense are two sides of the same coin. This has been an unchangeable rule for thousands of years. Since ancient times, there has been no victory won exclusively by defense. I did not care if they abolished battleships, which had become antiquated, but the idea of abolishing aircraft carriers was sheer madness. At that time, I already had a strong premonition that the main force of the Navy would move to aircraft carriers—in view of the trend of rapid progress in aviation power across the globe. In those days, however, it seemed that there was no one among the top leaders of the Japanese Navy who understood that aircraft carriers would be the main force behind maintaining our premier position as a sea power.
Meanwhile, preliminary talks in London ended up in failure, and the main conference in London the following year also broke down. Thus, the world entered a no-treaty era once again, 13 years after the disarmament conference in Washington. This plunged the developed world into a ship-building competition. Ostentatiously, the US announced a huge ship-building plan. Since it was impossible for Japan to compete in terms of volume, after a great deal of deliberation, the Navy decided to focus on quality.
For That One Day: The Memoirs of Mitsuo Fuchida, Commander of the Attack on Pearl Harbor Page 4