“That’s right.”
“I don’t know how much the old man remembers, but I hope he can tell you some good stories.”
“Thank you.”
Former Chief Petty Officer Kiyotaka Nagai, Aviation Maintenance, lived in a farmhouse. It was old but fairly large, with a sizable garden out front sporting well-tended trees and shrubs.
Nagai was leaning on a cane, waiting for us.
“You all right, Dad?”
“Why do you ask?” the old man laughed.
“I’ve gotta do something at the agricultural co-op, so I’m heading out,” his son said, then turned to us. “When you’re ready to leave, call me on my cell and I’ll drive you back to the station.”
He drove away, and my sister and I were shown to a large Japanese-style room that faced out south.
“I remember Miyabe-san very well,” Nagai said. “We met at Rabaul. I worked on the Zero engines, as part of the ground crew.”
* * *
—
Aircraft aren’t like cars, where you can just turn a key in the ignition and start moving right away. Planes need constant maintenance. After a fixed number of flight hours, the plane’s engine needs to be taken apart and given a full check and tune-up. With the Zeros, we gave their engines a major overhaul after 100 flight hours, I believe.
Rabaul was on a volcanic island, with Mount Hanabuki as we called it fuming all the time. The runway was always covered in ash. When aircraft took off, their wheels kicked up clouds of dust so thick you couldn’t open your eyes.
First thing every morning, I used a palm branch to clear off the ash piled on the aircraft’s wings. As you can guess, the fine particles also got into the engines, so the tune-ups were a real hassle. If the engines weren’t properly maintained, the planes could stall out mid-flight and kill the pilots, so we spared no effort.
There was a leading seaman called Heisuke Kimura who’d enlisted the same year as me. One day, a Zero that he’d serviced ran into engine trouble, had to turn back, and ended up crashing into the ocean, killing the pilot. Kimura committed suicide by disemboweling himself. To be honest, I wouldn’t have gone that far myself, but regarding engine maintenance I was the embodiment of seriousness. Even so, occasionally a plane that I was responsible for had to return right after takeoff because of engine problems. That always made me feel like a chump.
I was a mere mechanic, but I felt like I was participating in the battles fought by those Zeros. It pained me whenever one of my planes failed to return from a mission. It felt like I’d lost a child. Of course, it meant a pilot had died, too, so my sorrow was two-fold. I’d worry whether he’d lost a dogfight because the plane wasn’t properly maintained or if he’d crashed into the sea on his way back because of engine failure. It’d make my chest ache like I was having a heart attack.
Rare was the day when all the pilots who sortied made it back to base. It was common for pilots who had laughed happily in the morning to have departed this world by nightfall. At first it came as such a shock that my dinner would stick in my throat. But after a while, I got used to it. Casualties were commonplace at Rabaul. Still, when a land-based bomber went down, it took the lives of seven men with it, so that was always sad. The bomber crews always flew as a team and liked to dub themselves the This-or-That Family. They all got along great with each other. And when they died, they went together, as a family. At Rabaul, we lost over a thousand bomber crewmen.
Looking back now, I feel sorry for the airmen. They were ordered to sortie almost every day to do battle at faraway Guadalcanal. The higher-ups were basically saying, “Go die.”
They say the General Staff used to joke that airmen were “expendable goods,” but I don’t think they were kidding. Apparently, they called us maintenance crews “accessory equipment.”
* * *
—
But the truth is that I wanted to be an aviator.
They were gallant and carefree and really cut a dashing figure. I would think, “Now that’s what a man should be.” At the time I was twenty by the old reckoning, only eighteen or nineteen by today’s way of counting. I didn’t fear death at all. What a brat, huh? Sure, I was afraid of air raids and dying, say, of illness. But getting killed in the skies fighting like a man was, you know, exactly what I wanted. Now I can look back and see how badly mistaken I was, but that’s how I felt then. If only I was in the interior, I could be taking the pilot-in-training test, I lamented.
But if I had become an airman, I don’t think I’d be alive today. So maybe it was for the best that I never got to be one.
This sounds petty, but the airmen got the good food. Compared to the meals we mechanics were served—well, theirs were delicious and nutritious beyond comparison. That made us all very jealous because we ground crew ate really poorly at Rabaul.
One thing the mechanics always looked forward to was hearing the reports of the aircrew returning from missions. I just loved hearing pilots say things like, “Today I shot down an x number of planes.” I would always pester them to tell me about what had happened. Some pilots loved to talk, and they’d describe the air battles in great detail, gesturing with their hands for effect. As I listened, my heart would be aflutter with excitement. Listening to their stories made me feel like I was right there in the midst of battle.
* * *
—
Among the aviators there, Miyabe-san was something of an oddball.
How? I don’t quite know how to put it, but he didn’t seem to have a shred of that old bravado. He spoke politely and had the air of a well-bred salaryman in today’s terms. He didn’t seem anything like a fighter pilot. No matter how much I pestered him for battle stories, he never told me any.
There were some bad rumors whispered about him, too. Oh, what were they? Actually, I really don’t remember it all too well…
No need to hold back? Well, okay, I think I remember hearing words like “coward” being used to describe him.
It’s a fact that a number of airmen spoke of him in such a way. To be perfectly honest, I suspected that the rumors probably weren’t far off the mark.
By that, I mean he rarely came back from a mission with bullet holes in his aircraft. No matter how skilled the pilot, his ride didn’t come back unscathed all of the time. Especially on missions where you were escorting medium bombers, you tended to get hit. If you were guarding bombers, you were ordered to be their shield, literally if need be, so it was very difficult to come back without a single scratch. I think we lost many an excellent pilot thanks to that policy.
Yet Miyabe-san almost always came back with his aircraft totally clean, so at the very least he wasn’t catching any bullets for the bombers. Which made me think the rumors might be true.
There was another thing that made me wonder if he was a coward. He never came back out of ammo. It meant he wasn’t engaging in air combat all that much.
Of course, not every aviator in the Imperial Navy was a model warrior. There were some that just weren’t up to snuff. For example, a pilot might brag on and on that he scored a kill that day, but afterwards, while tuning up his aircraft, I’d discover that his magazines were all full. Wow, you downed an enemy plane without firing a single shot? Was this like judo master Mifune’s “air throw”?
It was pretty common for new pilots to come back with full magazines. In other words, they hadn’t engaged. Newcomers were terribly nervous, so they couldn’t even see the enemy on their first sortie, and participating in air battles simply meant darting around running away. Even so, first-timers were pretty lucky to come back at all. I say that like I was there, but this is all second-hand stuff I got from veteran pilots.
The fighters flown by the officers often came back with full magazines, too. This was because Naval Air Corps formation leaders had able NCO wingmen as bodyguards and often stayed at high altitudes, where they avoided combat and instead �
�directed” it. Back then, our aircraft radios were practically useless, so frankly, directing combat from on high was a bad joke.
In any case, in working on Miyabe-san’s aircraft I came to the conclusion that he didn’t do much fighting, that maybe what people said was true and he was extremely good at running away from fights.
And another thing. Well, this was just my personal feeling, but I found him irritating.
That’s because he was very meddlesome when it came to airplane maintenance. “It doesn’t feel right,” he was always telling us ground crew, and what he really meant was, “Redo it.” He was particularly sensitive about the engine. No, not just the engine—if he sensed anything was slightly off with the ailerons or some other part, he came to us. I thought maybe that side of him, too, was responsible for him being called a coward.
I mentioned before that standard operating procedure for Zero maintenance was to disassemble and tune their engines after 100 flight hours. But Miyabe-san would often ask for a full overhaul before it had reached 100 hours. He was so sensitive that he picked up on the tiniest change in the sound of his engine. If he detected even the slightest hint that something was off, he’d come right over to the mechanics’ area, so there were many among the ground crew who openly despised him.
You know, it might seem like I’m contradicting myself, but Miyabe-san wasn’t merely being oversensitive. A fairly high percentage of the times he came to us suggesting something was wrong with his engine, there would, in fact, be something faulty. Of course, this just made the mechanics resent him even more.
Yet he never forgot to express his appreciation to the ground crew. He would always say, “It’s thanks to your diligent work that I’ll be able to fight to my fullest.”
Some badmouthed mechanics liked to mutter behind his back, “What ‘to my fullest’ when he won’t fight at all?”
For some reason, Miyabe-san seemed to favor me. “When you work on my aircraft, I feel at ease, Nagai,” he’d say.
Coming from him, it somehow made me very happy. I guess that’s what people are like, huh?
To be honest, I was very confident in my skills as a mechanic, and it made me glad to have someone recognize them. In the Imperial Navy, it was very rare for an NCO to praise the work of the rank-and-file. So while I disliked Miyabe-san’s cowardice, I liked him as a person.
Working on his plane was actually a breeze. That’s because he never pushed it to its limits.
Airplanes are finely crafted machines, so we mechanics can tell right away if one has been handled harshly. For example, if a plane is taken into an excessive dive, the metal of the wings shows wrinkles or thin cracks. Or if the machine guns were continuously fired, they would overheat, resulting in malfunction. In some such cases, bullets from the plane’s own guns had struck the propellers. The weapons were designed to fire through the gaps in the propellers, but if the barrels overheated, bullets could fire without being triggered and sometimes hit the propeller.
Miyabe-san’s plane, however, always returned in great condition. It was pleasing to a mechanic to see an aircraft handled with such good care. The saying “Fine is the steed that survives intact” aptly described Miyabe-san for better or for worse.
* * *
—
Zeros were good planes, but starting in 1943, their quality began to deteriorate. While the changes were minor, their construction was shoddier than before. But it was something that we noticed because we were mechanics.
Surprisingly, Miyabe-san picked up on it, too.
“Doesn’t the new Zeros’ quality seem different?” he asked me one day while I was working on an engine.
Privately, I was astonished by his perceptiveness, but I couldn’t find it in me to just tell him yes.
“Not particularly, sir,” I said, standing at attention.
“Oh. Guess it was just my imagination,” he conceded, bowing his head slightly.
I felt bad about my misleading reply. “Well, sir, now that you mention it, they seem to have been a little lenient during the manufacturing process compared to before, but it should in no way impact their flight performance.”
“That’s reassuring to hear.”
“How did you notice, sir?”
Miyabe-san made a dubious face. “I can tell when I fly it.”
I was impressed. “This is only a rumor, sir,” I said, lowering my voice, “but I hear that we’re running low on skilled factory hands. The Army is sending out more and more draft notices, and they’re drafting even our best factory workers to become foot soldiers.”
“Is that so.”
“And the Zeros, as you know, are aircraft designed with an unusually high amount of aerodynamic lines. Not just on the outside, but the interior is made up of many intricate curves. Only the most skilled workers are able to cut such delicate curves with a lathe. Losing such workers must cause operations at the factories to suffer.”
“I had no idea the Zeros were being crafted by such experts. Come to think of it, the Zero is indeed a beautiful plane.” Miyabe-san touched the wing of the Zero. He whispered, “In war, the battle surely begins in the factories.”
“Yes, sir. Getting just one aircraft in the air requires the efforts of many people,” I said, deliberately referring to the maintenance crew personnel.
“I agree. The factory workers and the maintenance crew are extremely important.”
I felt slightly abashed. “Not that it’s my place to say, sir, but I think it’s no easy task to replace such highly skilled craftsmen. Back in the interior, they’re recruiting middle schoolers and ladies old and young to work in the factories instead. They’re just not capable of doing the same work as top-notch factory hands.”
“Which means that the manufacturing’s only going to get worse from here on out?”
“It’s possible, sir. But what scares me more is—” I broke off, instantly regretting what I had started to say.
“Tell me, Nagai.”
“The engines, sir,” I confessed.
“The engines also require skilled craftsmen, yes?”
“That’s true, but I’m concerned about the attrition of the machine tools used to make the engines.”
“The machine tools?”
“An engine is precision machinery, so you need machine tools that can accurately cut metal to a hundredth of a millimeter. Without them you can’t make a good engine. If the tools wear out, our quality level will undoubtedly decline.”
“The equipment isn’t made in Japan, I take it.”
I nodded in silence. This was something I had learned from an instructor while I was with a maintenance training unit. The instructor had previously worked in a factory that made aircraft engines, and he had high praise for the American-made equipment used there. He would often say, “Japan just doesn’t have machine tools quite that good.”
Miyabe-san sighed deeply in response. “So we’re up against such a country in this war.”
“The Sakae engines that power the Zeros are made in Japan, though. We use American equipment, but the people who created the outstanding engine are Japanese. And the Zero that carries the Sakae engine was also built by Japanese hands.”
“But I’m sure the Americans will create an even better fighter eventually. If we want to make fighters that can stand up to them, we’ll need engines even finer than the Sakaes, won’t we?”
“Perhaps, sir. But I don’t think even the Americans can readily make such an excellent fighter.”
“I hope you’re right, Nagai,” Miyabe-san said uneasily.
Unfortunately, his fears came true. The Grumman F6F, a fighter that surpassed the Zero, first appeared in the skies over Rabaul in late ’43. Oh, you want to hear about Miyabe-san apart from the fighting? Hmm, well, there wasn’t really much at Rabaul aside from the war.
Ah, I know. I just remembered somethin
g. He loved to play go. How did I ever forget?
We mechanics used to occupy ourselves during down time by playing hanafuda cards, shoji chess, and go. The ground crew’s work was busiest immediately before and after sorties. Aside from then, however, we had a fair amount of free time. After lunch, during the afternoon nap time, troops from various crews who fancied shogi and go would come to play in the shade cast by the eaves of the mechanics’ barracks. By ’43, though, we would no longer have the time to spare for games.
But this was in the fall of ’42. As usual, a number of mechanics were hanging out in front of the barracks playing park go when Lieutenant Commander Tsukino of Fleet HQ dropped by. In addition to the aviation units, Rabaul had a naval port that was home to many warships. There was also an Army garrison, so there were quite a lot of infantrymen around.
To us rank-and-file servicemen, a Fleet HQ lieutenant commander was like a deity, so his sudden presence made everyone freeze stiff with tension. But Lt. Cdr. Tsukino ordered us to be at ease, plopped down on a bit of grass, and began to watch the go players. After a few rounds, he picked out Chief Petty Officer Hashida, the strongest player amongst the maintenance crew, and asked him, “Mind if I challenge you to a round?”
Hashida was floored. The rest of us were stunned, too. Lower-ranking troops usually didn’t even dare to speak to a lieutenant commander. Playing a game of go with one was unheard of. I remember Hashida looking around at the rest of us, his face ready to burst into tears.
We all found ourselves holding our breath. We couldn’t joke around like we normally did, what with the lieutenant commander right there. We stood at attention even as we watched the games of go. Once more he told us to stand at ease.
The Eternal Zero Page 18
