Naval Academy graduates sometimes went directly into flight training, as in the United States—but in Japan, a much larger ratio of airmen were recruited from the ranks of enlisted men and petty officers already serving in the fleet. Commissioned officers were always a privileged minority of the naval air corps, and Etajima graduates an even smaller percentage. Most of the Japanese aces were non-commissioned officers, and as Osamu Tagaya observes, “
It was they who did most of the flying, the fighting, and the dying.” Beginning in the late 1920s, teenaged boys aged fifteen to seventeen were recruited directly into naval flight training out of Japanese schools through a program known as Yokaren. To arouse interest in the program the navy staged school fly-overs. The students (even the youngest) stood at attention in the schoolyard as the planes roared low over the rooftops, dipping their wings in salute. Hideo Sato recalled one such demonstration over his school in the suburbs of Tokyo. The pilots dropped rubber balls attached to small parachutes. He was eight years old.
“I guess they did it to draw us children into the war effort,” Sato said. “Whatever the facts, I only know I was in ecstasy when it was my turn to go up to receive my very own ball.”
The prewar navy was obsessed with building a small, elite corps of flyers, and selection criteria were almost prohibitively exclusive. Less than 1 percent of Yokaren applicants passed the initial written exam, and many of the fortunate few who made that initial cut would then be weeded out during rigorous physical exams. The select few who remained were sent into basic training. Here each day began with reveille at 5 a.m., followed by a forced immersion in cold water. The recruits rushed out to the parade ground, bowed in the direction of the Imperial Palace, recited an oath of loyalty to the emperor, and were led through a punishing calisthenics routine. Everywhere, throughout the day, they were expected to run, not walk. Meals were Spartan, consisting of rice mixed with barley, or miso soup and pickled vegetables, occasionally some fish or meat. Parade ground drills and basic combat training alternated with classroom instruction in math, science, engineering, reading, and writing.
A contemporary photograph depicts pilot-trainees sitting on benches at a long table, listening intently to an instructor. They are dressed in identical crisp white uniforms with oval name tags. Their hair is close-cropped, their faces rapt and hard-set. Each had to maintain a minimum grade average or face expulsion, and class standing was always determined by academic rank. They slept in hammocks slung from the walls of their barracks, like jack-tars on the lower deck of an eighteenth-century man-of-war.
Takeshi Maeda, who would go on to fly a torpedo bomber at the Battle of Midway, went through basic training at Yokosuka Naval Base on Tokyo Bay. Each day he and his fellow recruits spent hours on the bay, rowing an open boat in all kinds of weather.
“Because of the friction between my body and the seat, my pants were covered with blood,” he recalled. “After that your flesh became infected, and it produced yellow pus. . . . I would go to the infirmary, and they treated my wounds by applying ointment and gauze. The following day, when I did cutter boat training, the same thing would happen again, and my old wounds would reopen, which was very painful.”
Recruits were subjected to unremitting brutality by upperclassmen, instructors, and officers. Any infraction, shortfall, wrong answer, or complaint brought
instant retribution, ranging from a casual slap across the cheek to a sudden punch in the face to a savage beating with a baseball bat. A recruit might be forced to stand on his tiptoes for an hour or more, or stand rigidly at attention while a petty officer smashed him repeatedly in the face, or bend over while his tormentor repeatedly belted him on the buttocks with a club. Kicks and blows often persisted after a man had fallen to the ground. No cries or moans of pain were permitted. Often an entire squad was subjected to a brutal beating for one man’s imagined transgressions. If any bones were broken, the injured man was sent off to the hospital; once healed he would be re-inducted with a subsequent class.
Saburo Sakai, who went on to become one of the most celebrated fighter pilots of the Pacific War, was once
dragged out of his hammock in the dead of night and beaten in front of his shocked mates while they rubbed the sleep from their eyes. The petty officer forced Sakai to bend over: “with that he would swing a large stick of wood and with every ounce of strength he possessed would slam it against my upturned bottom. The pain was terrible, the force of the blows unremitting. There was no choice but to grit my teeth and struggle desperately not to cry out. At times I counted up to forty crashing impacts into my buttocks. Often I fainted from the pain. A lapse into unconsciousness constituted no escape however. The petty officer simply hurled a bucket of cold water over my prostrate form and bellowed for me to reposition, whereupon he continued his ‘discipline’ until satisfied I would mend the error of my ways.” After watching one of his fellow recruits subjected to a similar beating, Takeshi Maeda remembers feeling a surge of bitterness:
“How could a human being hit another with a baseball bat?”
Such beatings were a fact of military life in Japan. Indeed, they were generally much worse in the army. Unabashed sadism had a lot to do with it, no doubt; but there was also a school of thought, prevalent in the army and to a slightly lesser degree in the navy, that the beatings did the men good, served to harden and toughen them, groomed them for combat. Military men were convinced, said Katsumi Watanabe, who was beaten savagely as an army draftee, that
“beatings were a form of education”—indeed, the beatings were often called “lessons.” The cumulative violence, wrote Sakai, transformed the recruits into
“human cattle” who “never dared to question orders, to doubt authority, to do anything but immediately carry out all the commands of our superiors. We were automatons who obeyed without thinking.” Naval policy seemed not just to tolerate but to encourage such brutality; Takeshi Maeda observed that
the most violent instructors were rewarded with promotions.
Recruits could not fight back, nor file formal complaints; they could not quit, and they dared not risk being discharged. To be drummed out of the service would bring shame on their families—and not the kind of shame we talk about in the West. A failed recruit’s entire family might suffer social ostracism and even persecution. It was a staggering burden, and no surprise that many young men resolved the dilemma by taking their own lives.
Those who survived basic training were assigned to flight training at Kasumigaura. The base had two long runways, 3,000 and 2,200 yards long, and a huge complex of hangars housing hundreds of aircraft. The road to the main gate was lined with a magnificent stand of mature cherry trees, with views of Lake Kasumigaura beyond the airfield. The daily routines of a first-year flight student remained exactingly regimented, and he would continue to suffer the occasional slap or fist punch—but here at least he was permitted (at prescribed times) to smoke, to drink, even to spend a Saturday afternoon in Tsuchiura. The specter of dismissal at any time for any reason hovered over his head. The initial weeks of the program involved a full day of classroom instruction, with a greater emphasis on such practical skills as over-water navigation, engine maintenance, and radio communications. Students pressed their noses into the books for two hours each night before lights-out; many slipped surreptitiously from their cots in the small hours to study by flashlight. The program was designed to function as a ruthless screen for weaker performers. Even those trainees who demonstrated good aptitude in both the classroom and the cockpit were often expelled for trivial offenses. Of Sakai’s entering class of seventy students, forty-five were gone before the end of the initial ten-month course, and he noted that expulsion “
was feared far more than any mere savage beating.”
Kasumigaura aimed to create a cadre of super-athletes, men endowed with superior physical traits honed in a punishing training regimen. The students trained in gymnastics and acrobatics to improve strength, balance, coordination, and physical reaction time. They walked on their hands and balanced on their heads for five minutes; they ran for miles in full gabardine flight suits in the sweltering heat of high summer; they leapt from a tower, somersaulted in the air, and landed on their feet.
They were required to hang by one arm from an iron pole for ten minutes. Those who could not swim had a rope tied around their waists and were thrown into the lake; if they sank, they were finally hauled to the surface. Every man was eventually required to swim 50 meters in less than thirty seconds, to swim underwater for a distance of at least 50 meters, and to remain underwater for at least ninety seconds.
Men were pitted against one another in vicious wrestling matches. After each round, the victor was permitted to walk away, while the exhausted loser was required to remain on the mat to take on the next man. A weak or undersized trainee, losing three or four consecutive contests, might be drained of all his remaining strength; nonetheless, he was obligated to continue until he had pinned a man to the mat, or had been pinned in turn by every man in the class. If the unlucky perpetual loser could not get back on his feet, he was dismissed from the program. “
With every pilot-trainee determined not to be expelled from the flyer’s course, the wrestling matches were scenes of fierce competition,” recalled Sakai. “Often students were knocked unconscious. . . . They were revived with buckets of water or other means and sent back to the mat.”
They trained to improve their eyesight. They were required to identify objects and symbols that were flashed before their eyes for a fraction of a second. They learned to recognize and describe objects in the outermost corners of their peripheral vision. Sakai writes that he and his fellow students were taught to find and identify stars in broad daylight. “
Gradually, and with much more practice, we became quite adept at our star-hunting. Then we went further. When we had sighted and fixed the position of a particular star we jerked our eyes away ninety degrees, and snapped back again to see if we could locate the star immediately. Of such things are fighter pilots made.” Reaction times were shortened by such exercises as sitting still while a fly was buzzing in a room; the student was expected to reach out and seize it in his fist. At first, Sakai recalled, few could do it, “but after several months a fly which flew before our faces was almost certain to end up in our hands.”
Instructors used
the ancient principles of kendo, or Japanese swordsmanship, to teach the trainees how to attack and defeat an opponent. The aviators sat through long and mostly silent sessions with Zen priests, in which they were instructed to set their attention in the lower abdomen, to evacuate the mind, to experience combat as a series of effortless acts, in which the hands and feet on the cockpit controls moved without the intrusion of conscious thought.
A year after having entered basic training, the trainees reached a milestone that none would ever forget. They left the earth for the first time in a Type-3 Primary Trainer—a two-seat, dual-control, open-cockpit biplane, powered by a 130-horsepower, five-cylinder engine. An instructor sat in the forward cockpit, the trainee behind. A voice tube ran from the forward seat back to the trainee’s flight helmet, allowing for one-way communication. Once the aircraft was aloft, the trainee was tested for basic flight aptitude. How was his hand-eye coordination? How confidently did he take the controls? Could he maintain straight and level flight? The most natural flyers were permitted to handle the aircraft in takeoffs and landings, and a select few were even permitted to solo for the first time. Based on those first assessments, the class was subdivided and the future course of each man’s aviation career was decided. Some would become pilots, some aircrew; some would be sent into land-based aircraft, others into floatplanes.
Having mastered the rudiments, the trainees were introduced to a more powerful intermediate trainer known as the Type 93 biplane, or Akatombo, the “red dragonfly.” The Akatombo was powered by a 300-horsepower, nine-cylinder radial engine. Here
the trainee sat in the front cockpit, providing an unobstructed view forward but also allowing the instructor to clout him on the back of the head. (Takeshi Maeda recalled that his instructor often shouted through the voice tube,
“You’re so stupid!” and walloped him with a wooden stick. To protect his skull, Maeda wrapped a towel under the lining of his leather flight helmet. Realizing he was being cheated, the instructor waited until the plane had landed, ordered Maeda to stand at attention with head uncovered, and meted out the accumulated backlog of punishments.) In the Akatombo, the student mastered basic flight aerobatics: rolls, spins, loops, stalls. He took his first long overland solo flight, cruising in his open cockpit at an altitude of 15,000 feet or higher: he often found his way home using Mount Fuji’s majestic cone as his point of orientation. He would be introduced to the art of formation flying in a three-plane shutai, then in a nine-plane chutai. He learned to fly using his instruments alone, in a cockpit covered by a canvas hood.
At the end of this intermediate training period, the trainee was subjected to a grueling battery of tests. If he passed, he was awarded his coveted “wings,” an insignia patch sewn on the left sleeve: a pair of wings superimposed on an anchor under a cherry blossom. Although his training was far from complete, he could now call himself a naval aviator.
Five or six months of “extended education” followed in operational aircraft, usually obsolete models that had been taken out of front-line service. (Mercifully, men with aviator’s wings rarely suffered beatings. Not so mercifully, the newly minted flyers were entitled to beat others junior to themselves, and often did.) The men were divided into carrier and twin-engine land-based programs, and the carrier men were further subdivided into fighter, dive-bomber, and torpedo bomber units. Now their training would emphasize gunnery, bombing, dogfighting, formation flying, and over-water navigation. Fighter pilots practiced firing at drogues towed behind another plane, with results captured by a gun camera. Bombers attacked targets on the ground, with the results measured and scored vigilantly. Pilots destined for carrier squadrons progressed from practice landings on short segments of a runway, to low-speed, low-altitude approaches over an aircraft carrier, to “touch and go” landings (touch the deck and take off without cutting the engine). Finally, they were cleared to lower their tailhooks and put their birds down on a carrier flight deck for the first time.
Having logged an average of about 500 flight hours, they were assigned to a front-line unit, either an air base or an aircraft carrier. Non-commissioned officers and enlisted airmen were promoted to the rank of airman first class; officers were promoted to lieutenant. Here they completed the last phase of their training side by side with veteran aviators. Training schedules were intense. The new flyboys flew constantly: morning, afternoon, sometimes at night.
A popular song celebrated the navy’s intense pace of training in the years leading up to the war with Britain and the United States. Weekends were a thing of the past, went the refrain; now the days of the week were “Monday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Friday.”
“You can’t go home again,” wrote Thomas Wolfe, and he might as well have been writing about the newly minted Imperial Japanese Navy aviator, resplendently clad in blue and brass, returning home to visit his family. Of course his parents and siblings were overjoyed to see him, and he them. He had done them a great honor, lifting the status of his entire clan in the eyes of neighbors, colleagues, and friends. He was bigger, stronger, tougher, older, wiser. But his homecoming was inevitably poignant, and more than a little strange. He might have dreamed of home every night he was away, clasping it in his imagination as a sanctuary from the brutality of his tormentors and the unremitting toil of his training. Once there, however, he was inevitably taken aback by the comfort, the ease, the disorder, the aimlessness. The reality of home had steadily diverged from the image he had carried in his mind. It contrasted too sharply with the harsh, purposeful life to which he had grown accustomed. He loved his family as much as he ever had, and they loved him as much as they ever had, but he was aghast at how much space had grown between them. They could never fully understand what he had done and endured, or what he had become. That was a secret known only to his classmates, his fellow survivors, who had shared in the long crucible of his training—the fatigue, the humiliations, the beatings, the deprivations, the chronic dread of expulsion, the ecstasy of flight, and the inconceivable joy he had felt upon receiving those blessed wings. He might never admit it, but his fellow airmen were closer to him now than his own kin. He belonged with them. He could not go home again because now the navy was his home.
