Rigorous training had continued after his commissioning as a officer three years earlier so that now he and his plane were almost as one. The same was true of his comrades. No one could stand against them. They were modern samurai. They could not be beaten. They would bring honor and glory to Japan and the emperor.
Masao was not afraid to die, although he would not recklessly seek it out. Should it come to him in the course of battle then he would be at peace with his honor. He would have fulfilled his obligations to the code of bushido. Before leaving Japan, he’d left fingernail clippings and a lock of hair with his parents. Should he be killed and his body not returned, they and his little sister could honor him and themselves by enshrining his scant remains at the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. He planned to live a long and prosperous life. However, death in war was a real possibility. He would not, of course, allow himself to be taken prisoner. The shame would be unendurable and his family would disown him. Should that remote possibility arise, he would endeavor to take as many Americans with him as he possibly could.
If the Zero did have a fault, it was a minor one in Ikeda’s opinion. There was no armor. It had been sacrificed for speed and agility. If hit, the plane was prone to burst into flames. Therefore, his fellow pilots all joked, don’t get hit. Avoiding enemy guns was not all that difficult as both the American planes and pilots were slow and awkward.
Nor did the pilots have parachutes. They’d been issued and their commanders had ordered the young Japanese eagles to wear them, but no true warrior would even think of it. If the plane was too badly damaged to make it back to base or be rescued, they would simply seek a target of opportunity and crash into it. Again, skeptics said that was a waste of highly trained pilots, but those who said that didn’t understand the code of bushido.
Ikeda longed for the chance to shoot an American out of the sky. He’d strafed a couple of planes on the ground at Pearl Harbor’s Hickam Field, along with trucks and fleeing personnel, but those did not count as true kills in his mind. His thinking was that he might as well have shot up as many parked cars.
This day he and a dozen others flying from the aircraft carrier Kaga were searching for ships that a scout plane reported had departed Honolulu at night. These were transports and freighters escorted by a cruiser and a pair of destroyers. Killing the three warships was a goal, but attacking the other ships was something that would usually be beneath him. However, he’d been informed that they were full of soldiers trying to flee Hawaii, which made them marginally worthwhile targets. He’d also been given specific orders and, while he could get away with not wearing a parachute, he could not refuse an assignment, however lowly. He and his fellow pilots would sink the lowly transports.
His radio crackled. Directions and orders were given. There were no American planes flying cover for the transports, which further frustrated Ikeda. At least a few Americans had attempted to stop them when they’d attacked Honolulu a couple of weeks earlier, but other Japanese pilots had destroyed them before Ikeda’s chance had come. Back on the Kaga, they’d boasted about how easy it had been, laughing that there weren’t enough Americans to go around, unintentionally humiliating the young ensign.
But now they were over the convoy. The American ships were in no formation to speak of. They were simply running away, now scattering in all directions as they spotted their attackers. Nor did the escorts have much in the way of antiaircraft guns. Only a few streams of tracers searched for them. Ikeda aimed at a transport and dropped his bombs. He cursed when splashes that hit near the ship’s hull told him he’d missed. One bomb might have been close enough to cause internal damage from the pressure of the explosion, but he doubted it. He would have to work on his bombing technique. It wasn’t easy for one moving object to hit another moving object unless they were very close to each other, which he now intended to do.
He swung his nimble plane around and lined up his cannon at a destroyer. He flew lower. He opened fire and walked the 20mm shells up to it and they ripped along the hull. He laughed and returned to attack the transport.
Ikeda exulted. This one is mine. He swung about and launched another deadly attack. The transport began burning and he could see scores of men jumping overboard. It was a sight being repeated throughout the fleeing enemy ships as the Americans were again being slaughtered.
He made another pass and now the American ship was disgorging hundreds of people, some of whom looked like civilians. If they were, so be it. They should not have been traveling with soldiers. Besides, they were Americans and it was the Americans who’d started the war by depriving Japan of her rightful place in the world by trying to contain her with insulting restrictions.
Ikeda decided that his target transport was a burning ruin and sought out another. He fired and heard only a click. He cursed again. He was out of ammunition. The Zero carried only enough 20mm shells for seven seconds’ sustained firing and he had used up too much on the helpless transport. He turned and flew back to the carrier. Next time he would show more patience.
A thought intruded. Why the hell don’t the Americans surrender? They were cowards who did not live by bushido and had surrendered elsewhere, so why not surrender Hawaii? He had another thought and it made him laugh. Perhaps, instead of painting an American warplane insignia on his Zero, he’d have the silhouette of a ship painted instead.
The mighty new battleship Yamato was Admiral Yamamoto’s flagship and she, along with a couple of other older and smaller battleships and three carriers, was anchored in the waters off what had been the American base at Midway Island. The mighty Yamato was a floating citadel, a fortress that could cruise at nearly thirty knots. She was eight hundred feet long and displaced more than seventy thousand tons, which made her twice the size of most navies’ battleships. Anchored alongside her, destroyers and cruisers were absolutely dwarfed. While her top speed was over thirty land miles an hour, she could cruise more than seven thousand miles at a more conservative twenty miles an hour.
Her main weapons were nine massive 18.1-inch cannon and a dozen six-inch guns, and it was thought that she represented a technological leap forward that had not been seen since the British had launched their revolutionary battleship, the Dreadnaught, in 1906. In particular, 18.1-inch guns were thought to be so large as to be impossible to make and fire efficiently. The Yamato, it was hoped, would prove them all wrong. Once again the Americans would pay for underestimating Japanese technological skills.
It was firmly believed that the Yamato and her still-building sister-ship, the Musashi, could simply stand off at a distance and pound every American and British warship to pieces. Just as important, her very name, Yamato, was synonymous with Japan.
At least that had been the theory, but that was then and this was now, and wars, even victorious ones, never go as planned.
Admiral Yamamoto flew his flag in the great ship because it was such a symbol of power and authority, but he now believed that he’d set up his headquarters in a giant dinosaur. The recent carrier battles, fortunately all won by the superb planes and pilots of Japan, had changed the face of warfare and shaken the proponents of traditional big gun battles. American and British battleships had been destroyed by small airplanes, little more than flying gnats, and the great decisive battle Japan wanted to fight and win was unlikely to include the great ships as major players.