Samurai!

Saburo Sakai, Martin Caidin, Fred Saito

• Editorial: Rare Treasure Editions
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781774643051
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: Military & Maritime History

Samurai! is the personal story of Japan's greatest fighter pilot!

DEDICATION and ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is dedicated to all those fighter pilots with whom I fought, and fought against, who will never come home.

THE AUTHORS wish to express their appreciation to all the persons and institutions without whose assistance this book would not have been possible. Particular thanks are; due to former Naval Aviation Captain Masahisa Saito; to Major General Minoru Genda, JAF; to Colonel Tadashi Nakajima, JAF; to Colonel Masatake Okumiya, G-2,—Japan Joint Chiefs of Staff; to Major Shoji Matsumara, JAF; to all the former pilots and officers of Japan’s wartime naval air arm who contributed details of their air combat service; we wish particularly to thank Otto St. Whitelock, whose editorial assistance has always been invaluable; Sally Botsford, who has worked many long hours in typing the final manuscript; Major William J. McGinty, Captain James Sunderman, and Major Gordon Furbish of the United States Air Force, who have always been most cooperative in providing historical documentation and other assistance.

HIGH FLIGHT

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

Of sun-split clouds—and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there

I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air.

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue

I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace

Where never lark, nor even eagle flew—

And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space

Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

Pilot Officer John G. Magee, Jr., American flier with the Royal Canadian Air Force. Died in aerial combat on December 11, 1941

FOREWORD

Saburo Sakai became a living legend in Japan during World War II. Pilots everywhere spoke in awe of his incredible exploits in the air.

Sakai enjoyed a singular and most cherished reputation among fighter pilots. Of all Japan’s aces, Saburo Sakai is the only pilot who never lost a wingman in combat. This is an astounding performance for a man who engaged in more than two hundred aerial melees, and it explains the fierce competition, sometimes approaching physical violence, among the other pilots who aspired to fly his wing positions.

His maintenance crews held him in adulation. It was considered the highest honor to be a mechanic assigned to Sakai’s Zero fighter. Among the ground complement it is said that during his two hundred combat missions Sakai’s skill was such that he never overshot a landing, never overturned or crash-landed his plane despite heavy damage, personal wounds, and night flying conditions.

Saburo Sakai suffered disastrous wounds and intense agony during air fighting over Guadalcanal in August of 1942. His struggle to return in a crippled fighter plane to Rabaul, with paralyzing wounds in his left leg and left arm, blinded permanently in his right eye and temporarily in his left eye, with jagged pieces of metal in his back and chest, and with the heavy fragments of two 50-caliber machine-gun bullets imbedded in his skull is one of the greatest air epics, a deed which I believe will become legendary among pilots.

These wounds were more than enough to have ended the combat days of any man. Ask any veteran fighter pilot of the appalling difficulties which face a combat flier with only one eye. Especially when he must return to the arena of air battle in a suddenly obsolete Zero fighter against new and superior American Hellcats.

After long months of physical and mental anguish, during which he despaired of ever returning to his first love, the air, Sakai again entered battle. Not only did he again assert his piloting skill, but he downed four more enemy planes, bringing his total score to sixty-four confirmed kills.

The reader will doubtless be surprised to learn that Saburo Sakai never received recognition by his government in the form of medals or decorations. The awarding of medals or other citations was unknown to the Japanese. Recognition was given only posthumously. When the aces of other nations, including our own, were bedecked with rows of colorful medals and ribbons, awarded with great ceremony, Saburo Sakai and his fellow pilots flew repeatedly in combat without ever knowing the satisfaction of such recognition.

The story of Saburo Sakai provides for the first time an intimate look into the “other side.” Here are the emotions of a man, a former enemy, laid open for our world to see. Sakai represents a class of Japanese we in America know little of, and understand even less. These are the celebrated Samurai, the professional warriors who devoted their lives to serving their country. Theirs was a world apart from even their own; people. Now, for the first time, you will be able to listen to the thoughts, share the emotions and feelings of the men who spearheaded Japan in the air.

In writing this book, I had the opportunity to speak to many of my friends who flew our fighter planes in the Pacific theater during World War II. Not one among them has ever known the Japanese fighter pilots whom they opposed as more than an unknown entity. They have never been able to think of the Japanese fighter pilot as another human being. He has been remote and alien.

As were our fighter pilots to men like Sakai.

SAMURAI! will do much to bring the Pacific air war into new perspective. The wartime propaganda efforts of our country have distorted the picture of the Japanese pilot into an unrecognizable caricature of a man who stumbles through the air, who has poor eyesight, who remains aloft only by the grace of God.

This attitude was on too many occasions a fatal one. Saburo Sakai was as gifted in the air as the best of pilots from any nation; he ranks among the greatest of all time. Sixty-four planes went down before his guns; the toll, except for his severe wounds, would have been much higher.

The conduct and courage of our men during the trials of World War II require no apologies. We also had our share of the great and the mediocre. However, many of our “documented” victories in the air are conquests on paper only.

A case in point is the celebrated story heroic Captain Colin P. Kelly, Jr. The reader will find not a little interest in Sakai’s version of Kelly’s death, on December 10, 1941, in these pages. The story surrounding his death—that he attacked and sank the battleship Haruna, that he fought his way through hordes of enemy fighters, and that he made a suicide plunge into a Japanese battleship and that he received the Congressional Medal of Honor—is an erroneous one, owing to the inaccuracies of combat observation and the passionate desire of the American people after Pearl Harbor to find a “hero.”

At the time of the reported battle with the Haruna that ship was on the other side of the South China Sea, engaged in support of the Malayan campaign. There were no battleships in the Philippines at the time. The warship Kelly did attack, but did not strike, according to Sakai and the pilots who flew air cover over the vessel, was a light cruiser of the 4,000 ton Nagara class. Kelly’s attack was over and his plane fleeing the area before the enemy even discovered his presence. He did not make a suicide dive, but a bombing run from 22,000 feet and later was shot down—by Saburo Sakai —near Clark Field in the Philippines. Kelly was awarded, not the Congressional Medal of Honor, but the Distinguished Service Cross.

It is ironic, and a disservice to the memory of this fine young officer, that Colin Kelly is not remembered for the actual deed of bravery which is his son’s heritage. Kelly and his co-pilot remained at the controls of their flaming bomber in order that their crew might abandon safely their stricken bomber and live. This was his sacrifice.

To obtain the full record and the story of Saburo Sakai, Fred Saito spent every week end for nearly a year with Sakai, digging into the combat past of Japan’s greatest living ace. As soon after the war as conditions allowed, Sakai prepared voluminous notes on his experiences. These notes, plus the thousands of questions posed by Saito, an experienced and capable Associated Press correspondent, recreated Sakai’s more personal story.

Saito then searched through the thousands of pages of official records of the former Imperial Japanese Navy. He toured the islands of Japan to interview dozens of surviving pilots and officers, to cross-check the accounts given by these men. All ranks have been polled, from enlisted men of the maintenance crews to general officers and admirals, in order to produce this authentic record. Indeed, several of Sakai’s battle accounts have been omitted simply because a search of official Japanese and/or American records failed to produce documentation.

Of especial value was the personal fighting log of former Naval Aviation Captain Masahisa Saito. Captain Saito, who commanded Sakai’s fighter wing at Lae, kept an elaborate log during his combat service in this area. Since it was a personal diary which had not been submitted for Imperial Headquarters, Fred Saito and I consider it the single most valuable document of the Pacific air war.

It is a human failing that military officers at times do not report every difficulty within their front-line command to rear headquarters. This especially was true within the military system of the Japanese Navy. Captain Saito’s personal diary, for example, lists in detail the precise number of Japanese planes which returned or failed to return from their almost daily sorties in the New Guinea theater. The log is at direct odds at times with the overwhelming claims for victory of many of our pilots. Captain Saito survived the war, and the long interviews with him proved invaluable to this book.

Ex-Naval Aviation Commander Tadashi Nakajima, whom you will meet throughout this book, is today a colonel in Japan’s new Air Force. Many hours were spent with Colonel Nakajima, to provide some of the most interesting parts. Also of great assistance has been Major General (formerly Naval Aviation Captain) Minoru Genda, who commanded Sakai’s wing during the latter part of the war. At this writing, Genda is the only Japanese general officer who is rated jet fighter pilot, and who has logged many hours in types as the F-86.

We are also deeply indebted to Colonel Masatake Okumiya, who is today Chief of Intelligence, Japan Joint Chiefs of Staff. Colonel (formerly Commander) Okumiya, one of my co-authors on ZERO! and THE ZERO FIGHTER, was in more air-sea battles than any other Japanese officer, and for the last year of the war commanded the homeland air defense of Japan. Through his efforts we were able to secure the necessary records from the archives of the defunct Imperial Navy Ministry.

I believe it is important here to tell of Sakai’s attitude toward his present position as Japan’s greatest living ace. Sakai feels he was fortunate to survive the losing war, the devastating air battles fought from 1943 on. There were many other great Japanese aces—Nishizawa, Ota, Takatsuka, Sugita, and more—who fought until the long odds of incessant air battles caught up with them.

This is Sakai’s own statement of the post-war period:

“In the Imperial Japanese Navy I learned only one trade— how to man a fighter plane and how to kill enemies of my country. This I did for nearly five years, in China and across the Pacific. I knew no other life; I was a warrior of the air.

“With the surrender, I was thrown out of the Navy. Despite my wounds and my long service, there was no possibility of a pension. We were the losers, and pensions or disability payments are received only by the veterans of the victor nation.

“Occupation rules forbade me even to sit at the controls of an airplane, no matter what its type. For seven long years of the Allied occupation of 1945 to 1952, I was banned from obtaining any public position. It was all quite simple; I had been a flier in combat. Period.

“The end of the Pacific War only opened a new, prolonged, and bitter struggle for me, struggle far worse than any I had ever known in combat. There were new and deadlier enemies—poverty, hunger, sickness, and all manner of frustration! There was the ever-present barrier raised by the occupation authorities which prevented my gaining any public post. There was only one opportunity, and I snatched at it eagerly. Two years of the hardest manual labor, with primitive living quarters, with rags for clothes, and barely enough food.

“The ultimate crushing blow was the death of my dearest wife from illness. Hatsuyo had survived the bombs and all the danger of war; she could not, however, escape this new enemy.

“Finally, after the years of self-imposed privation, I scraped together enough money to open a small printing shop. By working day and night it was possible to make ends meet, and even to get a little ahead.

“Soon I succeeded in reaching the widow of Vice-Admiral Takijiro Onishi, a person I had sought out for many months. Admiral Onishi committed harakiri immediately after the surrender in 1945. He chose death in this fashion rather than remaining alive, when so many of his men—men he had ordered out to die—were never to return. For it was none other than Onishi who had instituted the devastating Kamikaze attacks.

“Mrs. Onishi was even more to me than the admiral’s widow; she is the aunt of Lieutenant Sasai, the best friend I ever had. Sasai flew to his death in combat over New Guinea while I was in a hospital in Japan.

“Mrs. Onishi had for several years scratched out the barest subsistence by peddling on the street. I was enraged at the sight of her shuffling along in her tattered rags, but there was no way to help.

“Now, with a small printing shop, I persuaded her to accept a position as manager. Soon our business was expanding; I searched diligently and brought into the business several other widows and brothers of my close friends who flew with me during the war and who met their death.

“Fortunately, things have changed. It is now more than a decade since the war’s end. Our business has continued to expand, and the people who work together in my shop are again well on their economic feet.

“The later years have been strange, indeed. I have been invited as a guest of honor aboard several American carriers and other warships, and the incredible changes in present-day jet fighters from the old Zeros and Hellcats is astounding. I have met men against whom I fought in the air, sat and talked with these men, and found friendship. This to me is truly the most impressive fact of all; these same people who, for all I know, came under my guns so long ago, sincerely offered friendship.

“On several occasions I have been approached with offers to accept a commission with the new Japan Air Force. These offers I have declined. I do not wish to return to the military, to relive all which has passed.

“But to fly is just like swimming. You do not forget easily.

I have been on the ground for more than ten years. If I close my eyes, however, I ...

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