The Conquering Tide (75 page)

Recent encounters with the new-generation American fighters—the Hellcat, the Corsair, and the Lightning—had settled any remaining doubts that the Zero was overmatched and obsolete. Jiro Horikoshi's airplane had been a feat of pioneering ingenuity, and it will always be a milestone in the history of aviation. From the start of its remarkable career, however, the Zero had always embodied a set of design compromises. Horikoshi's team had wrung every last ounce of surplus weight out of the aircraft, and given it a very large wingspan and control surfaces in proportion to its size. These traits gave the Zero long range, a fast climbing speed, and supreme agility, but they also made it sluggish at altitude, slow in a dive, and disastrously vulnerable to enemy fire. Mitsubishi had invested its limited design and development resources into two new interceptors, the J2M
Raiden
and the A7M
Reppu
. Both airplanes offered performance improvements over the Zero, but the early prototypes were plagued with mechanical failures and design flaws. Given enough time and engineering manpower, all of those problems might have been overcome (just as, for example, the assorted defects of the Curtiss SB2C and the B-29 Superfortress were corrected as those machines
entered service). But time was short, and engineering manpower was sorely limited. Only small numbers of the Zero's successors were placed into service, and they were never popular with the airmen or air staff.

Without a viable alternative, the Japanese navy instead committed itself to improving the Zero. Mitsubishi tinkered with successive alterations throughout the war, generally adding horsepower, firepower, and armor plating while reducing wingspan—the Model II, the Model 21, the Model 22, and the Model 52 “Hei,” of which more were built than any other version. Performance improvements were generally too slight to be noticed by the American pilots who engaged the planes. Lieutenant Commander Iyozo Fujita, one of the few veteran Zero pilots who survived the war, found that Model 52 lacked the speed and agility of its predecessors. It was “simply aggravating to fly,” he said. “The aircraft's nose did not rise quickly enough, so it was hard to aim my machine guns well. Because of this, I felt that I lost a lot of opportunities to get hits on enemy aircraft.”
¹¹
The navy also experimented with configuring the Zero as a fighter-bomber, fixing a 550-pound bomb under its fuselage, but an airplane powered by a 1,000-horsepower engine was not well suited to such a role. In all its versions, the Zero was still packaged in the same light airframe, which could not absorb much punishment without blowing apart or bursting into flame. Design alterations consumed an exorbitant amount of the Mitsubishi engineers' time and energy, diverting their attention from the next-generation planes. They also clogged up the company's manufacturing operations. Output at the Nagoya works fell short of the navy's targets every year from 1940 through 1945.

In the 1930s, Japanese firms had imported American and European precision machine tools, needed to polish, grind, and mill high-performance metals. Prewar embargos had cut off those critical imports. By 1942, the plants were equipped with aging equipment that could not be replaced or upgraded. As a nation destitute of natural resources and mining deposits, Japan lacked access to the high-performance lightweight metals found in the 2,000-horsepower engines that powered the big American fighters. The Japanese aviation industry consistently struggled to produce reliable new aircraft engines that achieved high power ratings within desired weight limits. Atsushi Oi, an officer at the Naval Personnel Bureau, pointed to the small scale of Japan's “so-called shadow industries such as the automobile industry which can be easily converted to produce aircraft engines.”
¹²

Critical deficiencies at home were exacerbated by retrograde conditions
in the advanced combat theaters. The Japanese had nothing to rival the civil engineering capability of the U.S. Seabees. Island airstrips were built with light construction equipment and backbreaking manual labor. In the early phase of the war, the Japanese had captured many of the best Allied airfields in the South Pacific and Southeast Asia. As they were wrested back by the enemy, the Japanese were forced to retreat to bases in which ground support facilities were inadequate and living conditions abysmal. Pilots and mechanics were quartered in tents, cooked over open fires, and bathed in fuel drums. Latrines were built over vile open-pit cesspools. Medical facilities were undermanned and undersupplied, and surgery was often performed without anesthesia. There was always a need for replacement airplanes and airmen, but that was only one facet of the logistics problem. Airfields in forward combat areas required a constant resupply of aviation fuel, spare parts, lubricants, ordnance, and ammunition. Fresh ground crews had to be flown in to replace those who succumbed to illness, injury, or death by bombing. Newly trained mechanics were less skilled than the veterans. Japanese air cargo transports were limited in number, and many were lost to operational accidents and enemy attacks. The throttling of Japanese maritime transportation was well underway and growing worse month by month.

Under such conditions, aircraft on the front lines fell into poor repair. Saburo Sakai, the fighter ace, told his superiors that every Zero fighter should receive a complete overhaul after 150 flight hours. In the South Pacific, however, most Zeros in service surpassed 200 hours and began running very rough.
¹³
By 1944, most front-line fighters were shot down before they ever had a chance for a maintenance overhaul.

Writing years after the war, Jiro Horikoshi observed that his country could not draw from the deep wellsprings of engineering and technical expertise that existed in the United States. There was nothing in Japan to compare with America's sprawling complex of universities, research laboratories, design firms, and heavy industries. Japan had a small circle of gifted engineers employed by the navy, the army, and about a dozen industrial firms. Owing to rivalries between the army and the navy and between rival companies and cartels (
zaibatsu
), much of their work was duplicative and wasteful. All too often their talents were squandered on impractical, profligate, stop-and-start projects that never got off the ground (in some cases, literally). They were resourceful and dedicated, but there were not enough of them. Horikoshi and his colleagues drove themselves to the verge of complete
exhaustion and collapse, until the doctors and bosses ordered them to rest. “Such poor management of technical policy created the situation where we had no other choice but to rely on the Zeros from the beginning of the war until its end,” Horikoshi wrote, “and this, in turn accelerated Japan's defeat.”
¹⁴

T
HE NEWEST ADJUNCT TO
O
ZAWA'S FORCE
was the
Taiho
(”Great Phoenix”), a 29,300-ton fleet carrier with an armored flight deck designed to withstand the sort of dive-bombing attack that had destroyed four carriers at the Battle of Midway. This was the first Japanese carrier to have such armor. The heavy steel deck required costly trade-offs, with the result that the ship's two hangars were small in proportion to her great size, and were serviced by just two elevators. She would carry only seventy-five aircraft, twenty fewer than the new American carriers.
Taiho
entered service in March 1944 and sailed that month to Singapore, where Ozawa took her as his flagship.

Two new carrier bombers were gradually replacing their obsolete predecessors. A new torpedo plane, the Nakajima B6N
Tenzan
(“Heavenly Mountain”), was faster and had a longer range than its predecessor, B5N (“Kate”). Its service introduction had been delayed by a balky in-house engine produced by Nakajima, and the navy had eventually insisted on a more reliable Mitsubishi power plant. The
Tenzan
, which the Allies designated the “Jill,” seated a three-man aircrew and could carry a torpedo or a 1,754-pound bomb load for a distance of 2,000 nautical miles. It had gone into production in 1943; by early 1944 Nakajima was turning out about a hundred new planes per month.

The long-serving Aichi D3A dive-bomber (“Val”) was giving way to the Yokosuka D4Y
Suisei
(“Comet”), a fast and maneuverable aircraft derived from a design by the German manufacturer Henkel, and powered by a 1,400-horsepower radial piston engine built by Aichi under license from Daimler-Benz. The Allies named her “Judy.” Like the Jill, the Judy's service introduction had been delayed by various problems with early prototypes, notably a tendency for the wings to flutter while in a dive. The issue was eventually corrected with stronger wing spars and revamped dive brakes. With a maximum speed of 342 nautical miles per hour in level flight, the
Suisei
was the fastest carrier dive-bomber to be placed in general service by any combatant nation during the Second World War. It had been developed
by engineers at the Yokosuka Naval Air Technical Arsenal, an Imperial Navy facility, but most of the units that went into service were built in Nagoya by Aichi. Its chief drawbacks were a lack of armor and self-sealing fuel tanks and its high speed in flight deck takeoffs and recoveries. Like all Japanese carrier planes, it was relatively easy to shoot down. The
Suisei
also lacked folding wings, a feature that had become
de rigueur
in the American carrier planes. Planes with fixed wings required more storage space, reducing the potential size of the air groups, and they required more time to cycle between the hangars and the flight decks. While the
Essex
carriers and their “airedales” had achieved quantum leaps in plane-handling efficiency, Ozawa's crews were hard-pressed even to meet the standards set by Nagumo's
Kido Butai
(carrier striking force) in 1941 and 1942.

If well-handled, the
Tenzan
and
Suisei
offered considerably better performance than their predecessor airplanes. They flew faster, higher, longer, and farther. Their introduction into the fleet had been rocky, but the same was true of carrier planes produced by other nations. If wartime Japan had possessed the resources to build a new fleet of larger and more sophisticated aircraft carriers to compare with the
Essex
class, and had simultaneously trained a new generation of pilots with the skill to measure up to 1942's “first team,” the
Tenzan
and
Suisei
might have posed a deadly threat to the American fleet. But most of Ozawa's aging Third Fleet carriers (the
Taiho
excepted) were too small to comfortably handle the hot new machines. The heavy sisters
Hiyo
and
Junyo
, whose top speed was about 24 knots, could not launch or recover them at all unless the wind was blowing hard. Because it needed a full deck run to achieve its takeoff speed, the
Suisei
had to be spotted well aft. That limited the number of bombers that could be launched in a single cycle. Air staffs experimented with new catapults and even fuselage-mounted rockets to get the new dive-bombers safely aloft.

Carrier recoveries were always a white-knuckle performance. The
Suisei
approached fast and low, often failing to snag the arresting cables. When the new dive-bombers entered the landing circle, recalled an air officer on the
Zuikaku
, “there was always great tension on the bridge. We had special respect for the crews of these planes.”
¹⁵

The Japanese navy had been slow to acknowledge that its flight-training pipeline was inadequate. Most of the replacement aircrews who went aboard Ozawa's carriers that spring of 1944 had spent fewer than 150 hours in the cockpit and had acquired only rudimentary flying skills. Virtually
none had practiced gunnery or qualified for carrier landings. The projected flight-training shortfall had been anticipated and discussed among Japanese aviators prior to the war, but no concerted effort to expand the pool of qualified flyers had come until 1941, when it was too late. Ruinous air losses in the Rabaul campaign had left the Japanese with no choice but to rush their cadet pilots through truncated programs and send them out to the fleet. Ozawa now faced the daunting task of preparing those undertrained young men to fight the decisive naval battle that loomed in the immediate future.

The elite Japanese naval air corps that launched the Pacific War had been trained in a small, super-exclusive program at the Kasumigaura Naval Air Training Center, the “Japanese Pensacola,” near the city of Tsuchiura, about fifty miles north of Tokyo. The trainees had received two years of classroom instruction, flight training, and gunnery training, followed by an additional year of training in a forward operational unit. Recruits were selected from among recent graduates of Etajima (the naval academy), noncommissioned officers in the fleet, and civilian students between the ages of sixteen and nineteen. Screening criteria were extremely and even excessively rigorous. Even so, fewer than half those accepted survived to the end of the training program. When naval warrant officer Saburo Sakai applied for flight training in 1937, he was one of seventy chosen from a pool of 1,500 applicants. In primary flight training, each instructor was responsible for just three students. Lesser performers were pared from the program at every stage. Of the seventy men in Sakai's class, forty-five washed out before receiving their wings.
¹⁶
Most cadet pilots accumulated more than 500 cockpit hours before they were permitted to attempt a carrier landing.

The small and selective program produced some of the best aviators in the world, but it did not generate enough of them. In the mid-1930s, the Imperial Navy was producing only about a hundred new pilots per year. That figure grew after the China Incident (1937), but not rapidly enough to fulfill the navy's internal goals. Even in the early stages of the Pacific War, when the Japanese naval air squadrons ruled the skies throughout the theater, senior aviation officers were concerned about the supply of replacement aircrews. The navy had about 3,500 trained pilots in front-line service at the start of the Pacific War. Reserves were thin, and attrition would immediately begin to strain the system. Three months before Pearl Harbor, the Imperial Navy optimistically adopted a plan to train 15,000 new pilots. Masatake Okumiya, serving as an air staff officer at Kasumigaura, pointed
out that the navy did not have enough combat airplanes to continue training pilots like they did in peacetime—that is, by sending the Kasumigaura graduates to advanced units to perform an additional year of “on-the-job” training. Moreover, even if the funnel was opened to a much larger training pipeline, “We would not feel the effect of the mass-training program for at least another two to four years.”
¹⁷