Saburo Sakai

Air Classics, Dec 2000

Saburo Sakai, Japan's top-scoring living World War Two ace with 64 victories over Allied aircraft, died on 22 September in Tokyo after suffering a heart attack while dining with American military officers at the Atsugi US Navy base in Japan. He was 84.

Weary of the Japanese citizenry's blaming the war solely on its military, former Imperial Japanese Navy Aviation Pilot 1 st Class Sakai spoke strongly last August at a Tokyo news conference on the eve of the anniversary of Japan's 15 August 1945 complete surrender: "We were ordered to go die for victory..who gave the orders for that stupid war? The closer you get to the emperor, the fuzzier everything gets."

Japan, he felt, had for decades whitewashed the war-related decisions made by Emperor Hirohito and the politicians who were surrounding him. "We were following his orders," Sakai said in a 1995 interview. "After the war, the emperor should have quit, shaved his head and retired to a temple to take responsibility."

Sakai, who sent a daughter to college in Texas to "learn about democracy," made more than two dozen trips to the US over the years, meeting many of the pilots he formerly tried to kill. He made similar

trips to Australia, where a captured Zero (reputed to have once been flown by Sakai) is on display in the National War Memorial in Canberra.

Unlike American aces, Sakai had no medals or trophies, except a small one he won against US pilots in a 1971 golf tournament at the American Fighter Aces Association reunion in San Diego.

Most touching of Sakai's peaceful encounters with Americans perhaps was his meeting in San Gabriel during 1983 with the US Navy gunner who had nearly killed him over Guadalcanal. Sakai chatted through an interpreter with Harold L. Jones, then owner of a bed and breakfast in Unionville, Nevada. Sakai rated the visit one of the great events of his life.

"His cockpit exploded in orange flames, and his head went back against the headrest," Jones told reporters at the meeting. "I thought he was gone." But Sakai's Zero plummeted 7000 feet, apparently extinguishing the flames in the dive. Struggling for consciousness, he used his silk aviator's scarf - a piece of which he later gave to Jones - to wipe blood from his good eye and, with his left arm useless, flew the plane 560 nautical miles back to his base on New Guinea.

The legendary survival flight is memorialized in a painting in Sakai's hometown of Kyushu showing his bullet-riddled Zero carrying him away from Guadalcanal - upside down. Never mustered out of the Imperial Navy despite the loss of his eye, Sakai taught combat pilots unti he was ordered back into combat over Iwo Jima near the end of the war. He was wounded four times and was one of only three survivors of the 150 pilots in his prewar outfit.

A gifted pilot, but never a strong student, Sakai learned to fly at the Navy Fliers School in Tsuchiura, one of 70 men selected from 1500 applicants. He first went into combat over southeastern China in 1938. Sakai kept meticulous notes in his combat years and later turned them into ten books, including Samurai of the Sky, which was made into a 1976 Japanese movie.

Within those notes, eventually confirmed by American records and pilots, was Sakai's near-miss that could have altered history. On 9 June 1942, he shot at a USAAF bomber named the Heckling Hare over his New Guinea base. He crippled the B-26 Marauder's right engine, but was unable to down the plane because it dove into a cloud.

Aboard on a fact-finding mission for President Franklin D. Roosevelt was a Texas congressman, Lyndon B. Johnson. In 1964, when Johnson was president, Sakai said he had only fulfilled a routine duty by firing on the aircraft and that he considered Johnson, "a real patriot deserving the highest esteem."