soc.history.war.world-war-ii

On Wed, 20 Feb 2008 00:47:12 -0500, Alan Meyer
wrote:

>Although the answers already given pretty much explain it all,
>you might find Saburo Sakai's autobiography _Samurai_ to
>be a fascinating first-person account of the air war from the
>point of view of the leading Japanese ace to survive. He had
>62 victories, many against good American pilots flying better
>airplanes.

"Samurai!" is pretty much a fiction concoted by the American aviation
writer Martin Caidin, using a rough translation of some of Sakai's
writers by Fred Saito. There never was a Japanese version of the book,
and Sakai never got a dollar in royalties from it.

As for his 62 victories, that is probably a fiction also. In my
research into Japanese army combats in Southeast Asia, I reckoned that
their fighter pilots overclaimed by five to one. John Lundstrom, in
similarly testing Japanese navy fighter claims, reckoned that the
overclaiming was more like ten to one. Sakai's actual victories are
probably more like 10 or 15--still impressive, to be sure.


Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Claire Chennault and His American Volunteers, 1941-1942
new from HarperCollins www.FlyingTigersBook.com