The Eternal Zero

by Naoki Hyakuta

—

  Rabaul was a beautiful place, with limpid blue waters and clear skies, palm trees along the shoreline, and a volcano in the distance. There was an old town near the airfield with houses where Westerners had lived. These houses were European in style, of course, and the look of the town was elegant and refined. But apart from that town, the rest of the island was unspoiled nature. The so-called airfield was actually just a broad field. When we arrived, our planes weren’t there yet. Just a few seaplanes floated in the harbor. Rabaul had a good natural one that later became a berth for warships.

  I felt like I had arrived at a paradise on the southern seas. I never dreamed back then that such a place would come to be known as the Airmen’s Graveyard.

  Afterwards, the converted aircraft carrier Kasuga-maru brought the Zeros to Rabaul. We boarded the carrier to receive the planes, and it was there that I did my first carrier takeoff. It was far easier than I had anticipated.

  “Aircraft carriers don’t seem so hard to deal with,” I said to an NCO once we were back in Rabaul.

  “Try saying that after doing a landing,” he reprimanded me. At the time I thought he was just being self-important and patronizing, but later when I became carrier-based, I got an ample taste of just how terrifying the landings are.

  * * *

  —

  Later, we were transferred from Rabaul to Lae further south on New Guinea. It was a forward base built to capture Port Moresby, also on New Guinea. Port Moresby was 400 nautical miles from Rabaul, a tough distance even for the long-range Zero, so another one was built in Lae. Four hundred nautical miles is about 700 kilometers.

  Lae was even emptier than Rabaul. Before the war, Australians had settled in a small town there, but after an earlier air raid by our military, most of the town had burned down. There were several charred houses still standing, and we aircrew dragged simple bedding into the houses and slept there.

  Port Moresby was on the same island and due directly south, over the Owen Stanley Range. For days on end, we escorted medium bombers across the neighboring sea to attack Port Moresby. These medium bombers were land-based twin-engine affairs, and the seven-man Mitsubishi G4M was the main type.

  The air corps stationed at Port Moresby were mostly American and British. We battled their fighters nearly every day.

  * * *

  —

  It was there that I experienced my first real dogfight.

  It happened when I participated in an air raid on Port Moresby as Flight Three’s third man. At the time, a flight of fighters consisted of three planes, a leader and two wingmen. Our mission was to establish air supremacy above the enemy’s base.

  Above Port Moresby, the flight leader suddenly entered a steep turn. Plane two followed almost instantly. In a panic, I tried to follow, but they were so fast that we quickly became separated. The entire formation began moving at high speed. I had absolutely no idea why. All I could do was try to catch up with the flight leader. The Zeros were fitted with radios that were totally useless. We relied on reading each other during battles, but that certainly had its limits. If we’d had functioning radios back then, those battles would have been so much easier.

  Anyways, the leader and plane two were flying upwards, downwards. I frantically followed, completely ignorant of where I was going. A few minutes later, the other two entered a level flight path at long last, and I was finally able to catch up.

  It wasn’t until after we had landed at the base that I learned that we had engaged in combat.

  Yes, of course. I was shocked. I hadn’t seen a single enemy aircraft, after all. I asked my flight leader, and he said there’d been about a dozen enemy planes. What’s more, he and plane two had gunned down one of them. They speak of having wool pulled over your eyes, and that’s exactly what it felt like. All told, he said we’d shot down nearly ten enemy planes.

  That made me terribly depressed. How do you take part in a dogfight if you can’t even spot the enemy? But PO3 Hayashi, the pilot of plane two, consoled me, saying, “When I first started out, I never saw any enemy aircraft, either.”

  * * *

  —

  The funny thing is that I saw the enemy very clearly in my second air battle. I must have been nervous during my first. They used to say that if a rookie doesn’t get shot down during his maiden battle, he’s got a good chance of surviving a decent number of sorties. I suppose I know pretty well what they meant by that.

  The second battle took place over Port Moresby as well. We engaged with hostile fighters that ambushed us, and this time I could see the formation of enemy planes. Before setting out, though, Flight Leader Ono had sternly cautioned me not to get separated, so I strove to keep close to him.

  In a flash, we were caught up in a mêlée. Tracer bullets streamed through the air, and a plane fell from the sky. I couldn’t tell which side’s; all I could do was keep close to the flight leader. Tracer bullets burn as they fly, and one out of every four machine-gun rounds is a tracer. They give off a flare that shows the ballistic course so the aircrew can adjust their aims accordingly. The other side also used tracer bullets, and during a dogfight we could see their tracers flying towards us.

  I saw the flight leader and plane two take down an enemy aircraft. The leader shot down yet another. Seeing such an admirable display made the fighting spirit surge within me. I wanna take one out, too, I thought. Perhaps I felt at ease, seeing that our side was winning handily so far.

  I looked around and spotted an enemy aircraft about 1,500 meters below me and to the right. He hadn’t noticed me. In pursuit, I pulled away from the flight leader. The enemy still didn’t see me, and I thought, I can do this…

  My body was rigid from tension and delight. Shortly I made a mistake. I fired before the enemy was in my gunsight. He noticed me immediately and rolled over.

  Seeing that, I fretted. I gave chase, firing with reckless abandon. That made him panic for his part, and he turned, right into my stream of bullets. Machine-gun fire struck his fuselage, and his plane burst into flames and fell away.

  I shivered at my first kill. I confirmed it, the enemy plane going into a tailspin and crashing into the ocean. I shouted in my heart: I did it!

  I frantically looked around at the same time. I couldn’t see a single airplane. I’d forgotten myself in the fight and strayed far from the combat zone. When I banked my plane to look behind me, there were two enemy fighters on my tail. My spine froze.

  Flustered, I tried to flee by going into a dive. But then I noticed that a Zero with rising suns painted on the wings was tight at my side. It was Flight Leader Ono’s. The planes that I thought were hostile were in fact friendlies. PO3 Hayashi was behind us.

  When they had seen me break away to pursue the enemy, they had followed to provide backup. They had watched over me, wanting to let me have my first kill and to be there to help out if things got dicey. They told me as much after we got back to base.

  My first kill became the formation’s laughingstock, what with my letting loose from more than 500 meters away. There’s no way to land a hit at that range. All it accomplished was to alert the enemy to my presence. Fortunately for me, he made a major mistake, too, by trying to turn and face me head-on. Given the difference in altitude, it amounted to suicide. Immediately realizing his mistake, he banked, the worst possible choice, and my machine-gun fire hit home. “Amateurs brawling,” my seniors said, and they also got a laugh out of the fact that I had spent all my ammunition on one plane.

  “If you need to spend all your bullets on one kill, no amount of ammo will ever be enough,” laughed PO1 Ono.

  PO1 Ono and PO3 Hayashi were very kind superiors. They were seasoned pilots who’d fought since the Sino-Japanese War, but later the same year, they both died at Guadalcanal.

  * * *

  —

  It was Lae that tempered me as a pilot. I learned a great many things
that I wasn’t taught in flight school. For a fighter pilot, there’s no better lesson than a dogfight. The difference from flight-school training is that if you don’t learn, you die. At school, if you mess up on your exams, all you do is repeat the grade. Flunking a dogfight equals death.

  That was why we were so driven. In a way, it was only natural that Rabaul produced so many aces. They were sifted through death’s sieve and lived to tell the tale. The famous Saburo Sakai, Hiroyoshi Nishizawa, and Lieutenant Junichi Sasai honed their skills there and went on to become aces.

  Lt. Sasai was a graduate of the Naval Academy. It was very rare for an officer from the academy to become a flying ace. In fact, most aces were self-made types who had worked their way up through the ranks, namely, NCOs from Preparatory Flight Training or the Pilot in Training Program. Officers who’d attended the Naval Academy couldn’t hope to compete with NCOs when it came to piloting and dogfighting techniques. Yet, every unit larger than a flight was placed under the command of an officer, an academy graduate. NCOs had far more experience, better skills, and better judgment than the officers. But in the Imperial Navy, non-commissoned officers simply weren’t to command formations.

  I can’t even begin to list battles that went awry thanks to poor judgment on the part of unit leaders. If only CPO Gitaro Miyazaki or PO1 Sakai were in charge, I thought again and again.

  Rank is meaningless in the air. It’s a world where only experience and skill matter, experience in particular being the most valuable weapon. The stalwarts of Rabaul gained valuable experience through an abundance of action, literally with their lives on the line. And even though the academy-bred officers lacked experience, they had plenty of pride, which prevented them from trying to learn anything from us seamen and NCOs.

  However, Lieutenant Sasai was different. He went out of the way to mingle with PO1 Sakai and other NCOs and thought nothing of soliciting advice from his subordinates. PO1 Sakai, too, apparently felt that his friendship with Lt. Sasai transcended rank. Under PO1 Sakai’s tutelage, Lt. Sasai’s skills improved by leaps and bounds.

  * * *

  —

  By the way, the Naval Air Corps’ callousness towards NCOs and seamen was something else. Officers had private quarters and orderlies and were catered to in all sorts of ways, while the rest of us, NCOs on down, slept on the floor in common rooms. Plus, the officers’ quarters were far away, so we rarely interacted. The meals were as different as night and day. Even though we were all part of the same team up in the sky, we lived in totally different environments.

  As far as meals went, though, aircrew were lucky. The maintenance and ordnance crews were stuck with even poorer fare. Essentially, the military is a thoroughly stratified world. I would later join the aircrew of a carrier, and it had an elegant officers’ mess called the Gunroom.

  This is a vulgar topic, but there were military brothels at Rabaul, and those, too, were segregated for officers and the rest of us. Was the idea that an officer couldn’t possibly be serviced by a lady who’d just seen an NCO or an enlisted man?

  It took more than ten years even for the ace Saburo Sakai to be promoted to the rank of ensign. Meanwhile, Naval Academy graduates automatically became ensigns. It’s just like the “career” and “non-career” tracks in today’s ministries and bureaus. What’s more, ensigns who came up through the ranks were referred to as “special duty officers” and considered a step below the ones with degrees from the academy. The Navy was like that.

  My final rank was Flight Chief Petty Officer, but only after a postwar promotion. I was a Potsdam CPO.

  Let’s get back on subject.

  * * *

  —

  At the outset of the Pacific War, the Zeros’ might was overwhelming. It’s no exaggeration to say that they almost never lost a fight. The enemy pilots were brave, taking the Zeros head-on, but that was akin to suicide. The Zero’s combat capabilities were beyond compare, and an enemy aircraft engaging in a dogfight usually went down by the third loop. In a dogfight, two aircraft twist and turn to get on each other’s tail.

  Around that time, we found an astounding directive in the manual of a downed Allied plane. The circumstances where pilots were permitted to abort their mission and retreat were listed as “(1) encountering a thunderstorm, (2) encountering a Zero.”

  I met a good number of Allied pilots after the war, among which was Charlie Burns, an Australian pilot who fought at Port Moresby. Charlie was a jovial giant, standing 6’ 3”.

  He told me, “The Zero fighters were truly terrifying. They were unbelievably quick, and we could never predict how they would move. They were like will-o’-wisps. We felt inferior every time we engaged with them. Then we got orders telling us to avoid combat with Zeros, period.”

  “I’ve heard about that order.”

  “We knew that the new Japanese fighters were codenamed Zero,” he continued. “Talk about an uncanny name. ‘Zero’ means ‘nothing there,’ right? Not to mention, the fighters performed magic on us with their unbelievable moves. I couldn’t help but think, ‘So this is the mystery of the Orient.’ ”

  “We were desperate ourselves,” I told him. “We had been training like mad.”

  “We thought the pilots of the Zeros weren’t human. We figured they were either devils or fighting machines.”

  “I’m quite human,” I assured him. “Now I fight to get food on the table. I run a freight company. I drive a truck instead of a Zero.”

  He laughed heartily at that. “These days I ride horses at my ranch.”

  Charlie had been the son of an Australian rancher.

  Afterwards he and I exchanged letters for a long while, but five years ago his family informed me that he had passed away from illness.

  * * *

  —

  I keep repeating myself, but the Zero was truly invincible. The Allies didn’t have a fighter that could fight on par with a Zero. Even the Spitfire, the pride of the RAF, was no match for the Zero. The renowned aircraft that had defended London from the Luftwaffe’s Messerschmitts during the Battle of Britain dropped like flies before the Zero.

  This was partly due to the fact that they had no idea how to engage the Zero. There was no fighter then that could tangle with a Zero and win. Unaware of this, the Allies sent their pilots to take us head-on, and those pilots met tragic ends.

  Perhaps they just hadn’t taken Japan seriously enough. An aircraft is the quintessence of a country’s industrial technology. They probably thought that a third-rate country’s yellow monkeys could never produce a superior fighter. To be sure, back then Japan wasn’t even capable of manufacturing decent cars. And yet the third-rate nation created a miracle fighter in the Zero. It was a masterpiece that its young architects had devised through unstinting effort. The enemy came at us totally ignorant of what we had.

  But the Zero was not indestructible. If struck by bullets, it burst into flames and got shot out of the sky. The Zero’s shortcoming was a lack of armor. While it may have been unbeatable in a methodical duel, in a brawl it could easily be hit by stray bullets. If it pursued a hostile aircraft too far, it could get nailed by a different enemy.

  Surprise attacks were the most terrifying. Snuck up on from a blind spot, even a Zero was helpless. CPO Gitaro Miyazaki, a masterful pilot on par with Saburo Sakai, was killed in such a surprise attack. That day, CPO Miyazaki had sortied in spite of illness, and a moment’s inattention resulted in his plane getting shot down. His death in the line of duty was announced to the entire military, and he received his posthumous promotion by two ranks. That was how esteemed he’d been.

  The most dangerous surprise attacks came after supporting an air raid, when we didn’t exercise caution in regrouping for the return trip. The enemy, which had been unilaterally tormented by Zeros in dogfights, realized that they couldn’t defeat us head-on and frequently resorted to surprise attacks and ambushes.
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br />   About a month after our initial strike on Port Moresby, the Allies started avoiding us if our numbers were about equal. They engaged if they had twice as many planes, but we were confident of holding our own even outnumbered two to one. During my tour at Lae, I became an adequate pilot. From April to August, Lae-based fighters’ kills reached 300, while we lost a mere twenty aircraft.

  As Charlie said, the Allied pilots called us Zero pilots devils—“devils gripping control sticks.” I don’t consider that an exaggeration. Lae’s veteran pilots were truly that good, and Sakai-san and Nishizawa-san seemed like demons even to us.

  There’s a funny story about them.

  Namely, Petty Officers Sakai, Nishizawa, and Ohta once did a loop in formation over the enemy’s base. PO1 Ohta was PO1 Sakai’s wingman, and as good an ace as the other two. By then, the three of them had probably downed over a hundred enemy planes among them. Sakai-san had planned on doing the loops for some time, and before taking off, he told the other two, “Let’s do it today.”

  After the air raid and dogfights, the trio formed up above the enemy’s airfield as though they could communicate. And they wheeled through the air. Three times. Those were marvelous loops. The three fighters moved as one, in perfect order. The rest of us, who hadn’t been forewarned, watched dumbfounded.

  They boldly swooped down even closer to the base, then climbed, executing yet another loop that was no less breathtaking. I thought, So you can perform such a beautiful maneuver in formation if all three pilots are masters.

  Surprisingly, not a single anti-aircraft shell was fired by the enemy’s airfield as the trio did this. They dropped quite low for the second round, and an anti-aircraft gun had a pretty decent chance of scoring a kill. I think it was out of chivalry and a sense of humor that the enemy didn’t fire. Had it been us, an academy-trained officer would have turned red in the face and screamed, “Fire, fire! Shoot them down!”