Naoki Hyakuta - The Eternal Zero

No matter how good a pilot is in a mock dogfight, it isn’t the same as a real dogfight. There’s a tremendous gap between those who’ve engaged in mortal combat day in and out and those who haven’t. It’s the difference between kendo fencing in a dojo training hall and dueling on a battlefield. Even if you’re strong in a match with bamboo swords, that doesn’t mean you can win with a naked blade. Someone who has repeatedly cut down people would be the stronger fighter. I was certain, and proud, that my skills were superior to those of the carrier pilots.

I was transferred to Rabaul in the fall of 1942. With the start of the Guadalcanal Campaign that began that summer, part of the 3rd Air Corps advanced on Rabaul under the command of the Tainan Air Wing.

Guadalcanal proved to be a harsh battleground. It was a long flight, a thousand kilometers from Rabaul, and we’d never launched such a long-range attack. Just to get there took three hours. And the enemy’s aircraft were much tougher than the stuff at Port Darwin. On the first mission, two veteran pilots from the 3rd Air Corps who had been transferred to Rabaul along with me failed to make it back.

This is one helluva place, I thought.

We had combat sorties nearly every day, and lost many planes each time, a rare occurrence in Kupang. The Rabaul guys, though, didn’t blink an eye. It was expected there. Most of the planes that did make it back were riddled with bullet holes. Rare was the aircraft that came back unscathed.

Yet Miyabe always came back from such an intense battlefield unscratched. He came back looking as if nothing had happened even from tough battles where nearly half of our guys had bit it, his airplane as clean as when he’d departed. Most of the planes in flights under his command came back unharmed, too.

You might want to say that he was very skilled. But that’s not it.

I asked a veteran pilot stationed at Rabaul how Miyabe always came back unscratched. Was he really that good?

He laughed bitterly and said, “Yeah, at running away.”

You must understand this: aerial combat is totally different from fighting on land. Once planes from both sides get jumbled together in a mêlée, you lose sight of who’s friend or foe. In a way it’s much more terrifying than ground combat. There are no trenches in the air. Everything is laid bare. Not only is the enemy on all sides, they’re above and below as well. An enemy plane flies away, you give chase, and immediately another enemy fighter is on your tail. And behind him, there’s one of our guys in pursuit. It is fundamentally different from a land battle where you are on one side and the enemy is on the other.

Then I saw it.

It was sometime in mid-September. We got into a mêlée with Allied fighters that had lain in wait for us in the skies above Guadalcanal. They were flying Grumman F4Fs—short, stout, sturdy planes. They weren’t as nimble as Zeros but they could take quite a beating.

I was separated from my flight, and two F4Fs hounded me. They were very skilled. If I tailed one, the other one got right on my tail. If I shook it off and got behind it, the first one fell back on my tail. In formation air combat, it’s standard to cover each other’s blind spots, but we were never as thorough as these guys were. The big difference was probably due to the quality of their wireless communications. Our radios were very lame at the time, static making it nearly impossible to understand what anyone said. It was so bad that I had ripped out mine from the cockpit and sawn off the antenna. Getting rid of the useless thing reduced my flying weight, and I was glad to shed even the antenna’s marginal air resistance.

But the performance of the Zero was such that it wasn’t handicapped in a two-to-one fight. When one of the F4Fs tailed me again, I pretended to panic and flee, cutting right in front of the other F4F I’d been targeting. For a moment, I had two F4Fs pursuing me. I’d been waiting for that moment.

I pulled sharply on the control stick and went into a loop. Both F4Fs followed my lead and looped as well, which was their fatal mistake. No fighter could best the Zero when it came to looping as it had an extraordinarily short turning radius. They should have been well aware of that but must have forgotten, thrilled at the chance to get me. After completing one loop I was snuggled right behind one of the F4Fs. One volley from my cannon and it burst into flames. The other one fled away in a full-speed dive. Because of the loop I had just done, my plane had lost speed and I had to give up pursuing him.

It was then that I realized I was far from the site of the battle. When aircraft repeatedly bank, they lose a great deal of altitude. And during the fight with the two F4Fs, I had descended about 2,000 meters. There were still many planes engaged in combat in the skies above. I pulled up the nose of the plane, aiming to get back in the action. I glanced skyward and saw three Zeros leisurely flying along some distance from the battle. It was Miyabe’s flight.

He apparently couldn’t leave the battlefield soon enough, bringing the two other Zeros with him to stand idly by. Of course, I have no proof. Maybe he had temporarily moved away from the action as I had. But I doubt it. Call it a conviction on my part.

Why, you ask me? Because he was a big coward.

He was paranoid when it came to keeping watch during flights. Of course, there’s nothing more important to a pilot than being vigilant. The best ones were all eagle-eyed, always keeping watch and spotting the enemy first. But he went completely overboard. Not a moment went by where he wasn’t looking around restlessly. Everyone was appalled by this. There were many who said he was just a scared SOB. It was surprising to find such a pilot among the renowned Rabaul Air Corps.

Rabaul was called the Airmen’s Graveyard. Yet he continued to survive there. Of course he survived. Do nothing but run away from the fight and you’ll be spared.

His “precious life” antics made him the laughingstock of the squadron. Everyone was aware of his infamous declaration: “I want to get back home alive.” I have no idea when and where he let the thought slip out, but given that it was the subject of so much talk, I assume he’d said it many times.

No member of the Imperial Navy ever said such things. Aviators, in particular, would sooner die than utter the words. We were not drafted into the military. We enlisted and then volunteered to become pilots of our own accord. And yet such a man had said, “I want to get back home alive”? If he had uttered the words in my presence, I’d have slugged him then and there. At the time he was a Flight Petty Officer 1st Class whereas I was just an FPO 3rd Class. I would face imprisonment for striking a superior officer, but even so.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—we were pilots. There is nothing a pilot is more intimate with than death. “Death” was always right by our side, ever since pilot training. Several of my classmates had bought the farm while practicing spins or nose-dive training. I’ve also heard that many test pilots got killed during the development of the Zero.

But in spite of that, and out on the front lines, he dared to say “I want to get back home alive”?

Your comrades are failing to return to base nearly every day. When you’re all fighting nonetheless with everything you’ve got, one guy wants to save his own skin? The nerve!

Ah, but there’s more. I’ve got another story concerning what a coward Miyabe was. It’s about parachutes.

He never failed to carefully inspect his parachute. One day I sarcastically asked him, “Flight Petty Officer Miyabe, just where do you expect to land with a parachute?”