Saburo Sakai climbed away from Iwo Jima on the afternoon of June 24, 1944, with 15 American fighters trying to kill him and the vision in his right eye already gone for good. He had mistaken the formation for friendly aircraft and flown straight into the middle of it before he understood his error. For the next 20 minutes, he stayed alive by timing his turns to the half second, rolling and skidding through one gunnery pass after another. When the clouds closed over him at last, he broke off and went home.
His ground crew checked the Zero and found it without a single bullet hole. He was not yet 30 that afternoon, half blind, and still one of the most dangerous pilots in the Pacific. The fight told him almost nothing he wanted to know. The Hellcat pilots who had chased him were not the opponents he had met two years before over Guadalcanal.
They were better. The aircraft had changed very little in those two years, but the men flying them had changed past recognition. Sakai, who read air combat as well as anyone alive, could not say why. In 1942, the arithmetic had run the other way.
That summer, Sakai flew with the Tainan Air Group out of Lae, a strip of cleared jungle on the north coast of New Guinea. The Tainan was the finest body of fighter pilots Japan had ever gathered into one unit. Most of its men carried 2,000 hours in the air or more. A good number had flown combat over China for years.
Sakai himself had graduated at the top of his flight class and been handed a silver watch by the emperor for it. When these men were told that the American carrier squadrons moving into the Solomons were the best the United States could put in the sky, they believed it. Then they climbed up and shot those squadrons down at a rate that frightened Washington. The pilots who survived encounters with the Tainan came back with the same impression: they had faced not just brave men, but trained ones, flyers in full command of their aircraft.
The average Japanese naval aviator in 1942 had close to 700 hours of flight time before he ever saw a shot fired in anger. His American opponent often had a third of that. The Americans understood the gap better than anyone. All through 1942, the men flying Wildcats off Guadalcanal and the carrier decks were losing to a fighter that could out-turn and out-climb anything in the United States inventory.
The Zero was lighter and quicker, and the man in it had spent years learning to use it. No squadron commander could pour 700 hours of judgment into a 19-year-old who had 300. So the Navy reached for something else. Before the war had even reached the Pacific, Lieutenant Commander John Thach read an intelligence report on the new Japanese fighter and decided not to wait until he met one.
He worked at night, sitting at his kitchen table with a handful of matchsticks, pushing them across the wood hunting for a geometry that would let a slower plane survive a faster one. What he found was a two-plane maneuver of almost stupid simplicity. The fighters flew abreast at a set distance apart, and the instant a Zero fastened onto the tail of one, the pair turned hard into each other, dragging the attacker across the guns of the second plane. At Midway in June 1942, he used it in combat for the first time, outnumbered, and most of his flight came home.
What mattered about the Thach Weave was not its cleverness. It was that an unremarkable pilot could fly it. The maneuver asked for no gift and no genius. It asked for two ordinary men who had been taught the same trick and trusted each other to perform it.
That was the true shape of the American answer, and it ran far past one maneuver. The Navy made its new flyers practice deflection shooting, the hard art of hitting an aircraft that is not pointed straight at the gun, until the skill became routine. It put its tactics on paper, sent them to every squadron, and rewrote them whenever combat reports brought back something new. None of this depended on producing a brilliant individual.
All of it depended on taking what one man had paid in fear and risk to learn and making sure the next man got it for nothing. There was a last piece, the one that did the most work while drawing the least attention. When an American combat pilot came to the end of his tour, the Navy and the Army Air Forces took him out of the fighting and shipped him home, not to rest and not to a desk, but to a training command. The man who had survived a year over the Pacific was turned into an instructor.
A scared young trainee in Florida or Texas in 1943 was being taught by someone who had fought the Zero and walked away from it. The United States had decided to treat the experience of a survivor as a crop, something to be cut and sown again. It could do this because it had the resources to run the largest pilot training enterprise the world had yet seen. The Navy alone would put close to 60,000 flyers through its schools before the fighting stopped.
It was the quietest decision either side made about the air war, and it is hard to name one that counted for more. Sakai himself had been pulled from the front once, and it had taken a bullet to do it. Over Guadalcanal in August 1942, a few months into the campaign, he made a firing pass on what he took for enemy fighters and found instead a formation of American dive bombers whose rear gunners were waiting for him. A round struck him in the head.
It blinded his right eye and deadened the left side of his body. He sat half-conscious in an open cockpit far out over the sea, flew the crippled Zero for close to five hours, nearly 600 miles, back to the base at Rabaul, set it down, and only then let himself collapse. Short of killing him outright, that was close to what it took to pull a flyer of his quality off the line. Japan ran its air war on the reverse of the American idea, and it did so without ever sitting down to choose it.
No machinery existed for pulling a seasoned flyer out of combat and keeping him out. A skilled pilot stayed where the fighting was. He flew and went on flying until he was dead or too badly hurt to fly again. The Tainan Air Group never sent its aces home to stand in front of a blackboard.
It burned through them where they were. When a Japanese veteran went down over the Solomons, every lesson in his head went into the water with the wreck. None of it was saved, and the pipeline turning out the next generation of pilots never saw a particle of it. The numbers followed the split almost month by month.
American flight time climbed across the war. By 1944, a fresh Navy pilot reached his squadron with more than 500 hours logged. Japanese flight time fell the other way and fell fast. The 700 hours of 1942 sank below 300, and then, as aviation fuel turned scarce and submarines strangled the tankers that carried it, lower than that.
The exact numbers shift from source to source, and Japan’s wartime schools kept their records in poor order once the system began to come apart, but every account traces the same plunge. Sakai watched it from inside the schoolhouse himself. “We were told to rush men through,” he said of those months, to forget the fine points. By the last stretch of the war, cadets were reaching combat units with a few dozen hours in the air, some of them having first learned to stay aloft in gliders to save gasoline.
Fire engines and ambulances stood ready beside the training runways for the takeoffs and landings that went wrong. They had steady work. There was a grim logic to where this ended. A training system exists to produce a flyer who can fight, come home, and fight again.
Once Japan’s schools could no longer manage even the first of those tasks, a boy and an airplane still had one use left in them. In the autumn of 1944, off the Philippines, the Imperial Navy began sending up young men with too little instruction to do much beyond takeoff and hold a heading, and ordering them to fly their aircraft into American warships. Most of the men who flew those missions had spent only weeks of their lives in the air. The flaw had been present from the first day, buried under the opening run of victories.
Japan’s prewar program produced magnificent aviators and produced too few of them. It was built for quality on the belief that quality would settle the matter fast. The 29 naval flyers Japan lost at Pearl Harbor, in what was by every other measure a clean success, came to more than a quarter of everything the schools turned out in a year. Japan saw the danger, but it could not move fast enough to escape it because the long course that made a combat aviator out of a civilian could not be shortened by order alone without the men reaching their squadrons worse than before.
It would be a mistake to read any of this as foolishness. The Japanese system had been built with care for a war that did not turn out to be the war Japan fought. Had the Pacific conflict been short and sharp, the quick decision that nearly every Japanese plan assumed, then keeping the best pilots at the front and spending them hard would have been the sound choice. Pulling a country’s most experienced men away from the fighting to teach beginners pays for itself only when the war lasts long enough for those beginners to reach the front and matter.
Japan did use instructors. Sakai gave most of 1943 to that very work after the wounds he took over Guadalcanal cost him the sight in his eye. But the men sent to the schools were sent there for the most part because they were too broken to fight, and the moment Sakai could talk his way back into a fighter, he did. The teaching post was a consolation prize, not a plan.
By the middle of 1944, the two pipelines had been running in opposite directions for two solid years, and that June, the totals collided in open sky over the Mariana Islands. Across two days, Japanese carrier aircraft went out after the American fleet, and something close to 600 of them never returned. The crews watching it happen named it the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot because the attacking formations were torn apart almost without an answering blow. Three Japanese carriers went down as well, two of them to American submarines, and close to 3,000 of their sailors and air crew were lost.
The fighters doing the tearing were not flying far better machines than the Zeros climbing to meet them. They were flown by men who carried, at second hand, three years of recycled and reissued experience, and they were shooting at aviators who in many cases had reached their squadrons with something near 40 hours of flight time. The other side of that ledger holds a detail of its own. The United States lost well over 100 aircraft across the battle, and most of them were not shot down by anyone.
They were lost in the dark, ditching into the sea or breaking up on the decks as worn-out pilots tried to land on their carriers at night far from home after a strike flown at the very edge of their fuel. The most dangerous thing the flyers faced that day was the trip back. This was the war Sakai walked into when he argued his way to the front and reached Iwo Jima. The afternoon the 15 Hellcats nearly killed him, his fighter was one of more than 50 Zeros sent up to meet three squadrons of carrier aircraft, and he could see well enough what was wrong with his own side.
His wingmen were children. They could keep a plane in the air, more or less, and could do little beyond that. He lost two of them over Iwo Jima, and Sakai had spent an entire career proud that he had never lost a wingman. Between that week and the first days of July, the fighter strength based on the island was all but wiped out, and he was among the handful who kept surviving.
He could see, too, that the Americans had stopped making the errors of beginners. The Hellcat pilots kept their formations tight, covered one another, and fired from angles a novice never thinks to try. What Sakai could not see, sealed inside his cockpit, was the apparatus that produced all of it. A fighter pilot meets other fighter pilots.
He does not meet a rotation policy, and he does not meet an instructor in Texas who had lived through the Solomons and was now teaching the boy who would one day fly onto Sakai’s tail. He saw only the man in the opposing aircraft, and the man in the opposing aircraft kept getting better. That was the thing the Japanese veterans could not explain, and there was nothing unreasonable about their failure to explain it. They searched where a fighter pilot is trained to search, in flying skill and in the worth of the enemy’s machine and nerve.
The cause lay in none of those places. It lay in an administrative decision taken far from any airfield about what a man was for once he had become good at his job. Sakai outlived almost everyone who might have grasped the problem beside him. Most of the Tainan aces he had flown with in 1942 were dead before the surrender, and the knowledge they had bought so dearly had gone down with them just as the system had all but promised it would.
Sakai himself lived until the year 2000. In his last decades, he talked to schoolchildren and businessmen, sat for interviews, and said he prayed for the souls of the enemy airmen he had killed. He had survived the very thing that killed off the men who could have taught a new generation how the Americans had done it.
By the time anyone came to ask him, there was no new generation left to teach, and there had not been one for a very long time.
