Zero

by Masatake Okumiya

  The big carrier returned to battle with a vengeance which was stunning. On November 12 her planes alone delivered the final blow to the battleship Hiei, which had been damaged off Guadalcanal, and sent the dreadnaught to the bottom. Two days later the planes caught and merci­lessly bombed the heavy cruiser Kinugasa, which also went down. Also on the fourteenth, and continuing through the following day, the planes from the Enterprise shattered a valuable transport convoy attempting to fight its way to Guadalcanal with supplies and reinforcements for our beleaguered troops. The Enterprise clearly played the dom­inant role in halting decisively our Army’s third all-out offensive of Guadalcanal.

  On the morning of October 27 Kakuda brought the Junyo into fleet formation with the Zuikaku. The all-night repair work of the two carriers gave Kakuda a combined striking force of forty-four fighters, eighteen dive bombers, and twenty-two torpedo planes. The reconnaissance planes which had been launched from the two carriers before dawn failed, however, to discover any enemy ships or planes. The fuel situation had become desperate, with the escorting destroyers ready to fall out of formation. The fleet then received an order from Vice-Admiral Nagumo to assemble and return to base.

  Nagumo had left the scene of action when the Shokaku received crippling damage, and had ordered Kakuda to command the subsequent air battles. Once he discovered, however, that he could not direct the overall operation from the disabled carrier, Nagumo ordered the big ship to return for repairs to Truk; he transferred to a large destroyer which became his flagship for the general opera­tion. Since our reconnaissance planes could not locate the enemy fleet by the morning of the twenty-seventh, Nagumo ordered his scattered vessels to reassemble. Shortly after noon of the same day the warships regrouped their formations and refueled at sea. Nagumo once again transferred his flag, this time to the Zuikaku.

  The carrier’s commander, Captain Tameteru Nomoto, had run his vessel and commanded the air battles for three consecutive days, without sleep, remaining at all times on the bridge of his ship. Nagumo personally offered his thanks to Nomoto for the latter’s superhuman efforts. This was the first time in the Navy that a warship commander personally directed the actions of carrier-based planes without his staff, no small feat in itself.

  Vice-Admiral Nagumo ordered a special conference held aboard the Zuikaku as the ship returned to Truk to discuss in detail the sea and air battle of the twenty-sixth. I attended the conference as the Kakuda Force’s representa­tive. When I boarded the Zuikaku I went directly to pay my respects to Nagumo; he was on the bridge, his face wan and drawn, and in deep thought. It was hard to ascertain the admiral’s thoughts, but obviously he had thrown off the apathetic feeling which had weighed upon him after the Midway defeat.

  Pleased that we had discharged in full Admiral Yamamoto’s trust, Chief of Staff Kusaka warmly praised the accomplishments of the Kakuda Force. Kusaka was in a genial mood and, indeed, the entire staff attending the conference rejoiced in the newly won victory. For me, the price we had paid was bitter; Lieutenant Commanders Seki and Murata, old and good friends, were gone forever.

  Even as the conference compared notes, we did not know accurately the losses our own ships and planes had sustained; some of our men had landed on other carriers, several reconnaissance planes had set down on our Solomons bases, and the crews of a number of planes which had ditched had been picked up by surface vessels. The data submitted to the conference enabled us to arrive at these tentative conclusions:

  Enemy Losses:

  Planes shot down Ships sunk or 80 (55 by our planes)

  seriously damaged 3 aircraft carriers

  1 battleship

  2 cruisers

  1 destroyer

  Ships damaged 3–4 cruisers

  3 destroyers

  Japanese Losses:

  Planes lost

  69 (crashed into enemy or shot down)

  23 (forced landings at sea)

  Ships sunk None

  Ships damaged 2 aircraft carriers (Shokaku and Zuiho)

  1 cruiser (Chikuma)

  We based the estimates for the enemy carrier losses on the confirmation of the Hornet’s sinking and, the following morning, on the fact that our reconnaissance planes could not find any enemy carriers; the planes, however, did sight a large slick in the immediate vicinity where an enemy car­rier had been reported as fiercely burning. We were forced to rely upon such information because we had lost two of our three dive-bomber leaders, all three leaders of the tor­pedo planes, and many other important officers.

  Up to the time of this battle, both the Americans and the Japanese had lagged badly in shipboard defenses against aerial attacks; commencing with this conflict, however, antiaircraft defense rapidly improved in quality and quantity. This sudden increase in the defense available to the enemy ships was felt to account for the exorbitant losses sustained by our planes. Because we had lost so many of our experienced men, the conference had no choice but to accept the reports of young officers who were prone to allow the excitement of battle to color their observations. We could not follow any other course but to base our future plans on what these young officers reported to us.

  Much later we discovered that our estimates were far from accurate. The Hornet eventually went to the bottom, sunk by the destroyers Mustin, Anderson, and our four destroyers; the destroyer Porter also was sunk. These two ships, however, were the only vessels which did go down. The second carrier to be attacked (there were only two, not three, carriers) was the Enterprise. Contrary to our pilot reports, the ship did not receive any torpedo hits, and its damage was confined to three direct bomb hits which, for­tunately, inflicted serious damage to the vessel. The reports of the torpedo hits are understandable; superb maneuver­ing by the Enterprise’s captain permitted him to escape our torpedoes which slipped within a hair’s breadth of the ship. Our planes also damaged the battleship South Dakota (which bristled with new defensive armament) and the destroyers Smith and the San Juan. We lost approximately one hundred and forty men in combat, most of them irre­placeable veterans; American personnel losses of air crews amounted to about one hundred men.

  Despite the gross overevaluations, we had inflicted telling blows upon the American warships. The sea battle henceforth was officially titled the Sea Battle in the South Pacific, and Imperial General Headquarters made much of the victory.

  Since the outbreak of the war, the United States had made constant anti-Japanese propaganda radio broadcasts. When I was aboard the Ryujo off the Aleutians I heard William Winter’s broadcast which ridiculed the Nagumo Force as Ahodori, or the foolish bird. Winter crowed long and loud (presumably with justification), since Nagumo’s ships had been overwhelmingly defeated at Midway. This morning, at exactly 6:00 A.M. on October 26, I laughed aloud at Winter’s words when he admitted that never in its history had the American Navy had so little cause to “cele­brate” its Navy Day.

  The battle was over, and, although we had suffered grievously in losing many of our best pilots, the enemy fleet had been soundly trounced. The victory was to be short; this was our only decisive conquest since Midway, and it was to be the last.

  CHAPTER 22

  Our Situation Becomes Critical: Air Battles in the Solomons and Rabaul Areas

  BY MID-1943 WE could no longer ignore the visible deterioration of the Pacific War situation. We still maintained powerful army forces, and our Navy posed a dangerous threat with its surface fleet. Despite this land-sea power, however, enemy attacks rapidly depleted our available planes, and it was obvious to all that without mastery of the air Japan could no longer hope successfully to conclude the war.

  Our loss of air control centered directly about the situa­tion with reference to the Zero fighter. Early in the war and, in fact, until the later stages of the Guadalcanal battle, the Zero clearly demonstrated its superior performance over enemy fighter planes. The Americans, however, bent every effort to augment and replace their inferior fighters with new planes of outstanding performance, and
soon the Zero met increasing numbers of remarkably fast and pow­erful enemy fighters. In the interim we were forced to retain the Zero as our frontline fighter; the Navy did not have a suitable successor to the Zero, nor did the Army have an airplane which could favorably contest the Amer­ican planes.

  As the war continued, the dwindling number of Zeros were forced to fight under the most difficult circumstances against such planes as the Army Air Force’s P-38, which was faster, could outclimb and outdive the Zero, and fea­tured high-altitude performance, all coupled with heavy firepower, self-sealing fuel tanks, and armor plating. Soon there appeared the Navy’s F4U fighter, the first enemy single-engined airplane clearly to outperform the Zero, notably in maximum speed and in diving speed. The sec­ond direct cause of our loss of air control was the numeri­cal superiority of the American fighters in the south Pacific, then the main war theater.

  The rapid diminution of our air strength is evident in a running summary of the Pacific War in the year following Admiral Yamamoto’s death, when Admiral Mineichi Koga became Commander in Chief of the Combined Fleet. Koga’s first planned large operation was stopped in its tracks. In May of 1943 an American force invaded Attu Island in the Aleutians Chain; if successful, the invasion would cut the defense chain we had established across the Pacific. Koga planned a massive aerial counterattack to drive the enemy back to the mid-Aleutians, and for this campaign concen­trated the major strength of the fleet in Tokyo Bay. The enemy’s rapid moves, however, caught Admiral Koga off balance and, before he could make his bid for the counterattack, the Americans controlled Attu.

  One month later the Americans began a powerful assault against Rabaul, rolling northward through the Solomon Islands from Guadalcanal. By November the enemy secured his forces on the southern half of Bougainville Island, threatening our positions in the entire area. Another massive enemy thrust crushed our defenses in the Gilbert Islands, and this, too, became an American bastion. Seemingly in coordination with this move, the American and Australian forces in the New Guinea area intensified their air, ground, and sea attacks. The furious tempo of air and ground fighting visibly reduced our available fighting forces and weapons. By late 1943 the enemy assaulted our positions on the Merkus Peninsula in the western end of New Britain, the very island on which lay our Rabaul airfield.

  We could now appreciate at first hand the incredible power of the American military machine, for despite furi­ous and courageous defensive fighting and counterattacks the enemy ground his way northward. By the close of 1943 we were in a precarious position. Our Zeros no longer showed themselves over enemy territory, for every venture against enemy positions met awaiting swarms of high-per­formance American fighters. Indeed, our pilots were hard pressed even to maintain air control directly over Rabaul. Both quantity and quality played a direct part in this con­stant reduction in our air strength, for the American Navy now threw into combat its deadly Grumman F6F Hellcat fighter plane. Appearing for the first time in November of 1943, the Hellcats increased rapidly in number. Not only were they superior to the Zero, but out pilots faced literally hordes of the new enemy planes.

  In late January of 1944 the enemy took the Marshall Islands and, several weeks later, stormed ashore on the Green Islands, some one hundred and thirty nautical miles east-southeast of Rabaul. Even as the troops hurled our own forces back into the jungles and mountains of these islands, the American engineers performed miracles of airbase construction and again established new fields from which to increase air attacks. The Americans demonstrated their mushrooming power on February 17 with an irre­sistible carrier raid against Truk Island, our Navy’s largest and most powerful naval base in the inner southern Pacific. Disdainful of even the fierce opposition they confronted, the carrier planes wreaked chaos throughout our installa­tions. Six days later, flushed with victory, a carrier task force hurled hundreds of planes against our Mariana Island air bases and again sowed a path of terrible destructions.

  By this time we tottered on the brink of total defeat in the southern Pacific. Enemy Army Air Force planes slashed by day and night at our installations, and unbelievably powerful carrier task forces roamed the Pacific, striking where and when they desired. By February 20 our position at Rabaul was no longer tenable, and our naval air force units abandoned the island. This evacuation drew down the curtain on two years of the greatest air battles of the Pacific War, which began with our occupation of Rabaul in January of 1942.

  The remainder of this section describes in detail how many of the air battles were fought in the Solomons and Rabaul theater, for the most part taken from my (Oku­miya’s) personal experiences in the area. These episodes reveal the transition of power from the Zero fighter to the enemy, representing, as it were, the yielding of strength on our part to the enemy across the entire Pacific.

  Simultaneously with the American invasion of Attu Island, in May of 1943, enemy counterattacks and island invasions in the Solomons increased steadily in tempo. On June 30 a vast assembly of ships poured men and supplies ashore on Rendova Island. This latest invasion directly per­iled Rabaul, and Admiral Koga ordered all the air groups of the 2nd Carrier Division, then at Truk, immediately to transfer south to our base at Rabaul, and to Buin in southern Bougainville. Rear Admiral Munetaka Sakamaki assumed command of the assembled air groups; at the time I was the air staff officer to Admiral Sakamaki.

  In the central Solomons and east New Guinea our forces waged furious battles, retreating steadily before the aggressive enemy attacks. The jungle ground became red with blood of our troops who, despite every effort, could not stem the relentless enemy drives. The Navy Air Force centered at the Buin air base made every effort to destroy the enemy air units then based at Guadalcanal, and to provide air cover for our land forces and surface vessels in the area. To maintain an air blanket over our forces was in itself a major undertaking, for American planes in round-the-clock attacks hammered at troops and ships.

  Consequently, the air battles centered about our Buin air base developed into violent day and night raids by both forces. The campaign was deadly, for the stakes included the entire southern Pacific and perhaps the war’s outcome. Both the United States and Japan concentrated their main air strength in the theater.

  Buin, a wretched air base, was not comparable in airfield facilities to the enemy’s magnificent engineering achievements. Our pilots had only one runway, 4,000 feet long and 800 feet in width, running at a right angle to the coast. Extending from each side of the airstrip were numer­ous small roads leading into the jungle, where we con­cealed the majority of our planes from aerial observation. Each night we moved every plane from the field into the jungle revetments and, during the day, did the same except for those ships which were on call. This dispersion kept our losses from enemy bombing and strafing to a minimum.

  Our airforce headquarters and sleeping quarters were located on the beach, approximately a mile and a half west of the field. Our “quarters” were simply barracks or, more accurately, tents scattered haphazardly over the ground. We raised the floors about six feet above the soil for pro­tection against the severe heat and moisture.

  I remained at Buin approximately three months, from July 2 to September 28, 1943. During this time I kept detailed notes of our harassed life at this jungle air outpost:

  “The daily activity at the air base begins at least three hours before sunrise. In the steaming humidity, surrounded by insects, the mess crews begin the task of preparing meals for the day. Most of the maintenance crews also arise at this time to prepare the planes for the day’s missions. The work of our mechanics is most strenuous, for they must bring all the aircraft which are to fly that day from their jungle revetments onto the field. One by one the planes move from the jungle cover, a band of men tugging and pushing the heavy aircraft over the soft ground. Everything must be done by hand; there is not a single tractor on the field! Two hours later, with sixty minutes yet to go before the sun shows over the horizon, the entire field awakens, and all
men take their posts. The pilots and the air-crew members carry their flying gear to the assembly point, which is the flight personnel pool near the runway. Here they eat their breakfast while they await their orders of the day.

  “Even as the pilots receive their briefings, reconnais­sance planes bound for routine search missions in the Guadalcanal area thunder along the runway and disappear into the brightening sky. By now every Zero fighter in fly­ing condition is ready for an immediate takeoff, to defend the base against attacking enemy planes. The Zeros are fueled and armed, placed along the runway so that the pilots have only to fly straight ahead to take off. The ‘standby’ fighter pilots wait near the personnel shack, lis­tening to the radio reports from our reconnaissance planes and from the distant ground-watching stations on the islands close to the enemy’s airfields.

  “Now the loudspeaker blares its warning. The outermost watching stations have sighted enemy planes wheeling into formation over their bases and heading for our area. The fighter commander checks the reports of each station, estimating the enemy planes’ time of arrival. He waits until the last possible moment before ordering the Zeros into the air. The fighters rock and bounce slightly as they roll along the runway; then faster, the motors thundering, dust streaming behind the planes. Then they are in the air, dwindling to small black specks, and finally disappearing as they claw for altitude. They will wait high above the field, so that they can dive out of the sun against the enemy formations. Superior altitude in launching an attack can decide the outcome of the air battle.

  “The base is quiet now. The only sounds are the metal­lic crackle of the loudspeaker, the hammering of mechan­ics, and the voices of men. Suddenly the lookout on our tower stiffens behind his binoculars; his voice carries to the ground. We see him pointing to the south. Yes . . . there they are! Enemy planes, fast approaching the air base. The siren screams its warning and the men on the field dash for cover, never too soon, as the enemy bombers close on the field with great speed.