Sakai Saburo Vs Sugita Sho-ichi

[ThomasP]

Assassination

ie the current colloquial use of the word:

"The willful killing, by a sudden, secret, or planned attack, of a person - especially if prominent or important."

Note that there is no distinction as to whether it happens during peacetime or war-time.

Historically there were sometimes distinctions made between whether the person killed was a military combatant or a civilian, but in the end it all comes down to a specifically planned targeting of a specific individual for political, military, or economic gain (on an international or at least large scale). In civil law, if the person is 'unimportant', and there is not specific conspiracy to kill for political or military reasons, then it is usually treated as the ~equivalent of 1st degree murder.

This is as opposed to the specific targeting of large numbers of individuals for the same or similar purposes - in which case it is often classed as mass murder (when talking about randomly selected civilians), genocide (when talking about a group targeted due to colour or 'race'), persecution plus killing (when targeted due to religious, cultural, sexual orientation, etc), or war (when targeted for any particular raison du jour that encourages/permits mass killing).

 

[GrauGeist]

I understood that Operation Vengeance was more of an ambush, where one force is intercepting another force, with the intention of eliminating a key military figure.

On the otherhand, the death of SS Commander Reinhard Heydrich in Prague by two Czech SOE agents can be considered an assassination.

 

[CHen10]

CHen10 I'm trying to upload the scene here
View: https://imgur.com/a/lPQaTDY

It's just a GIF. Let me know if it doesn't render properly.

T tyrodtom Yes, I see what you mean. So, to clarify, "assassination" is the accepted language used on Wikipedia and by academic sources. Up until Suleimani/Soleimani was assassinated, Yamamoto was the last adversary to have been assassinated in a targeted killing. The term "assassination" has political implications that I am not trying to invoke.

assassination

1. the murder of someone famous or important: 2. the murder of someone famous…

dictionary.cambridge.org

That is the scene I was thinking of. Just to confirm which film is that from?

 

[Thumpalumpacus]

Let's call it '' elimination '' or '' neutralisation''....

Do NOT get me started on euphemisms.

 

[Frog]

Do NOT get me started on euphemisms.

View attachment 803000

The code name used by the French secret services for a clandestine killing is '' Opération Homo ''.

 

[AerialTorpedoDude69]

That is the scene I was thinking of. Just to confirm which film is that from?

That's Zerosen Moyu or "Zero Fighter Burning".

Getting back to Sho-ichi Sugita vs. Saburo Sakai, there have been a lot of attempts to bring aerial victories in line with reality. One scholar put US overclaiming at 3.5 times the actual losses and Japanese claims are even more overinflated, although the Wikipedia article didn't say exactly how much these claims were overinflated. The reality is that in the more desperate the air battles, the losing side typically had fewer resources to dedicate toward verifying claims. The Wikipedia article mentions that the "record" overclaiming from Japan came during an air battle in the Solomons where the IJN pilots overclaimed by more than 10:1. The same is true for most nations. For example, Germany's stringent victory verification system did work, up until 1945 when it ceased to work, because of a lack of resources. So the more desperate the aerial combat, the more inaccurate the victory claims. So Sakai's roughly 26-28 victories are to be treated as being more accurate than Sugita's 70.

Post-war scholarship has tried to "correct" Sugita's claims and one scholar put him at 30 actual aerial victories, although that seems to be actual victories rather than an attempt to standardize claims across nations. The 70-kill claim was created by Ikuhiko Hata. If I remember correctly, Hata stated that his number was an attempt to standardize claims. He mentioned how he synthesized this number in his book on IJN aces although I've lost my copy and cannot reread the methods section.

But regardless of how many victories are ascribed to him, Sugita demonstrated a superior understanding of air combat compared to Sakai. One of the keys to his success as a pilot was in rapidly understanding the fundamentals of air combat in 1943, 1944 and 1945.

Dan King's "The Last Zero Fighter" details some of the lessons Tomokazu Kasai learned from Sugita. There's quite a bit here. Some of the lessons and methods Sugita taught explained why the flier had managed to succeed and why he had conflict with Sakai. The one thing Sugita tried to impart to his students was that they needed to be alert. But as a flight leader, he would also lure American aircraft down to low altitude. Kasai mentioned that after Sugita spotted P-38s, he dove down to 6,000 FT, later explaining to Kasai that the Zero had a climbing and turn advantage at this altitude. In this conflict, Kasai observed Sugita shooting down a P-38 which had overshot and then begun to turn.

This is particularly interesting to me, because postwar scholarship, as well as simulators, prove that this is a highly effective way for an aircraft like the Zero to combat faster aircraft like the P-38.

 

[CHen10]

That's Zerosen Moyu or "Zero Fighter Burning".

Getting back to Sho-ichi Sugita vs. Saburo Sakai, there have been a lot of attempts to bring aerial victories in line with reality. One scholar put US overclaiming at 3.5 times the actual losses and Japanese claims are even more overinflated, although the Wikipedia article didn't say exactly how much these claims were overinflated. The reality is that in the more desperate the air battles, the losing side typically had fewer resources to dedicate toward verifying claims. The Wikipedia article mentions that the "record" overclaiming from Japan came during an air battle in the Solomons where the IJN pilots overclaimed by more than 10:1. The same is true for most nations. For example, Germany's stringent victory verification system did work, up until 1945 when it ceased to work, because of a lack of resources. So the more desperate the aerial combat, the more inaccurate the victory claims. So Sakai's roughly 26-28 victories are to be treated as being more accurate than Sugita's 70.

Post-war scholarship has tried to "correct" Sugita's claims and one scholar put him at 30 actual aerial victories, although that seems to be actual victories rather than an attempt to standardize claims across nations. The 70-kill claim was created by Ikuhiko Hata. If I remember correctly, Hata stated that his number was an attempt to standardize claims. He mentioned how he synthesized this number in his book on IJN aces although I've lost my copy and cannot reread the methods section.

But regardless of how many victories are ascribed to him, Sugita demonstrated a superior understanding of air combat compared to Sakai. One of the keys to his success as a pilot was in rapidly understanding the fundamentals of air combat in 1943, 1944 and 1945.

Dan King's "The Last Zero Fighter" details some of the lessons Tomokazu Kasai learned from Sugita. There's quite a bit here. Some of the lessons and methods Sugita taught explained why the flier had managed to succeed and why he had conflict with Sakai. The one thing Sugita tried to impart to his students was that they needed to be alert. But as a flight leader, he would also lure American aircraft down to low altitude. Kasai mentioned that after Sugita spotted P-38s, he dove down to 6,000 FT, later explaining to Kasai that the Zero had a climbing and turn advantage at this altitude. In this conflict, Kasai observed Sugita shooting down a P-38 which had overshot and then begun to turn.

This is particularly interesting to me, because postwar scholarship, as well as simulators, prove that this is a highly effective way for an aircraft like the Zero to combat faster aircraft like the P-38.

What I find interesting is that the Japanese Navy would sometimes allocate victories to the entire flight of aircraft rather than give individual victories. A lot of the victories were individually awarded as well of course but the fact that there were so many shared victories means that pilots would probably have official scores with decimals. So it's a bit confusing why the official scores of Japanese pilots never have decimals since they probably should do.

But as things stand Sakai has 28 official victories. Researchers have looked at his overclaiming, and the fact he had shared victories and I've seen their conclusions say Sakai's real score is probably around 10.5-15. So pretty much half of 28.

I haven't researched Sugita's real score that much but from the kills I did analyse he seemed to be fairly accurate. If I had to guess it's definitely over 50% accurate.

 

[GrauGeist]

Saburo's score may have been higher overall had he not encountered that Dauntless, too.

 

[CHen10]

Saburo's score may have been higher overall had he not encountered that Dauntless, too.

Maybe but we'll never know

What we do know is that his score is under 28

 

[GrauGeist]

Maybe but we'll never know

What we do know is that his score is under 28

His "score under 28" was achieved in roughly a year's time.

Imagine his score if he managed to fly as many missions as Nichizawa (who did not survive the war).

 

[AerialTorpedoDude69]

I haven't researched Sugita's real score that much but from the kills I did analyse he seemed to be fairly accurate. If I had to guess it's definitely over 50% accurate.

I think his late-war aerial victories are less accurate because of the durability of the Corsair and Hellcat. Time and time again, a Corsair or Hellcat struck by Sugita's guns would immediately dive toward the Earth, trailing smoke or fire. According to Kasai, Sugita would claim such a stricken aircraft as a victory, but being outnumbered and outgunned, they rarely had time to watch the aircraft crash (this is my own observation, based on Kasai's account of events). Sugita and his wingmen would have to climb to regain energy and then check for aircraft behind and above them.

In Sakai's timeframe, the IJN were oftentimes shooting down fleeing or turn-fighting Wildcats, Warhawks, I-16s, Aircobras, and more. Most enemy aircraft were slower or roughly equal in speed to the Zero and terrible climbers in comparison. A large number of IJN victories were attributable to the Allied aircraft being unable to follow the Zero in a zoom climb or turning climb. Most would stall while tailing a Zero into a climb, which meant that for a few precious seconds, an Allied aircraft's control surfaces would be unmovable. This allowed Zeros to loop around and strike the aircraft with all four guns blazing. Even the low velocity 20mm Type 99 cannon couldn't miss against a Wildcat stuck in molasses. And with that kind of firepower, kills were virtually guaranteed.

Because Sakai was critically injured prior to the Hellcat's debut, he never developed the appropriate counter tactics. While his "auto" biography states that he engaged Hellcats at Iwo Jima, I suspect that this is more of Caidin's fairytale nonsense and I'm skeptical even the IJN would be flying one-eyed pilots. It was also likely the source of the conflict between Sugita and Sakai because the Hellcat could not be fought in the same way that Sakai engaged Wildcats.

His survival was predicated not just on his toughness and mental fortitude, but on receiving a career-ending injury (if it had been in peacetime, at least) before his comrades were all ground away by attrition in the Solomons and elsewhere in the South Pacific. While Sakai was definitely a great pilot, both technically and tactically, Sugita was the second greatest combat pilot produced by the IJN, the greatest being Tetsuzo Iwamoto. It is difficult to compare the two fliers because they are so different.

By the way, I recently used a transformer-based LLM or "Gen AI" to translate several Japanese Wikipedia pages. I'm attaching the Sakai and Sugita bio pages. Aside from a few last name mistranslations and mild hallucinations, the AI has done a stellar translation job. I have a lot of credits remaining with the service (and there is a free locally installed tool that can do this too) so let me know if there's something you guys want translated into English (from any language).

GrauGeist true. I'd guess somewhere in the 50s. But he likely would not have survived 1943 as almost no one from his unit except Nishizawa did.

 

[CHen10]

While his "auto" biography states that he engaged Hellcats at Iwo Jima, I suspect that this is more of Caidin's fairytale nonsense and I'm skeptical even the IJN would be flying one-eyed pilots.

Sakai did actually engage F6Fs over Iwo Jima. On 24 June 1944 Sakai was credited with two F6Fs and this is stated in Japanese records.

I think his late-war aerial victories are less accurate because of the durability of the Corsair and Hellcat. Time and time again, a Corsair or Hellcat struck by Sugita's guns would immediately dive toward the Earth, trailing smoke or fire. According to Kasai, Sugita would claim such a stricken aircraft as a victory, but being outnumbered and outgunned, they rarely had time to watch the aircraft crash (this is my own observation, based on Kasai's account of events). Sugita and his wingmen would have to climb to regain energy and then check for aircraft behind and above them.

I have looked at some of Sugita's missions where he claimed victories, or was assigned victories with the rest of his group, and even though there are obviously overclaims, a decent number of F4Us, F4Fs, F6Fs did actually get lost. Not the same number he claimed sure, but there are still a fair number of allied losses.

By the way, I recently used a transformer-based LLM or "Gen AI" to translate several Japanese Wikipedia pages. I'm attaching the Sakai and Sugita bio pages. Aside from a few last name mistranslations and mild hallucinations, the AI has done a stellar translation job. I have a lot of credits remaining with the service (and there is a free locally installed tool that can do this too) so let me know if there's something you guys want translated into English (from any language).

Google translate can automatically translate Wikipedia pages too and I'd say it's almost perfect

 

[GrauGeist]

GrauGeist true. I'd guess somewhere in the 50s. But he likely would not have survived 1943 as almost no one from his unit except Nishizawa did.

Actually, two survived the war from the Tainan Air Group, that I recall at the moment:
Shimakawa and Handa.

There may be more, of course, but the two pilots mentioned were some of the group's top scorers at the time.

 

[CHen10]

His "score under 28" was achieved in roughly a year's time.

Imagine his score if he managed to fly as many missions as Nichizawa (who did not survive the war).

Ota Toshio was credited with 34 victories and these took place from April-October 1942. His actual score from what I've researched is about 23-26. Out of the Tainan Kokutai pilots, his rate of success was the highest. I of course haven't researched all 34 victories but from what I've seen, he was about 70-80% accurate which is where I get 23-26 from.

Sasai Jun-ichi was credited with 27 victories from February-August 1942. His actual score is about 18 since from what I've seen he was about 70% accurate.

These percentages aren't completely accurate since I haven't researched all their victories, the percentage is just based on the victories I have looked at, and so 23-26 and 18 actual scores aren't definite and just estimates from what I've seen.

There are also a few other Tainan Kokutai pilots where the actual scores seem to be higher or the same as Sakai's.

I do plan to analyse the true scores of the top IJN aces by analysing all their victories, but that hasn't happened yet (I'm doing another aviation project currently) and so the numbers above are just estimates based on my research so far and so they could be wrong. My point here is that Sakai doesn't seem to 'stand out' when it comes to other pilots from the Tainan Kokutai. I am also confident that if Ota had survived the war and continued fighting throughout he would probably be the 2nd or 3rd highest IJN ace.

 

[special ed]

Just a brief diversion, in the "Dogfights" video series, an F6F pilot tells of his encounter with an experienced Japanese pilot. The Japanese pilot began his zoom climb followed by the Grumman pilot in his newly delivered F6F. As they climbed vertically, the U.S. pilot says, "Poor boy, you think I'm in a Wildcat." The Japanese plane stalled first.
How many experienced Japanese pilots were downed before the F6F capability became known to the IJN ?

 

[AerialTorpedoDude69]

Sakai did actually engage F6Fs over Iwo Jima. On 24 June 1944 Sakai was credited with two F6Fs and this is stated in Japanese records.

That's what the Gen AI-translated PDF I uploaded also said. And it seems likely given how desperate the war was. Putting my skepticism aside, it's mentioned that Sakai's commanders thought it would be a morale boost to have a war hero flying alongside the other pilots. IIRC, he took part in three air battles before they put him back on training duties. US fliers later said of Sakai's flying skills during this battle that he was phenomenal. Maybe I should shelf my skepticism entirely.

The Gen AI-translated PDF is substantially better than Bing or Google Translate (it's also computationally far more energy intensive) in translating nuance and euphemisms. Bing or Google Translate will render such expressions as gibberish at best and mistranslate it in a way that it deranges the meaning of the text. Although these are obvious mistakes. Gen AI is likely to distort the text in a way that makes sense and escapes scrutiny.

But that said, generative AI translation is better than many human translators because it is fully conversant in both colloquial expressions and in academic language. The AI I used (probably this model) is also poor quality compared to Chat GPT or the even more superior Claude AI. I believe that translation-trained and fine-tuned AIs like Aya will soon be able to translate huge chunks of Japanese aviation documents into English very rapidly.

Regarding the accuracy of Sugita's claims, there are several air battles where Sugita's claims usually equalled or exceeded all actual losses from the USN (IIRC, see "Shiden-Kai vs Hellcat" by Tony Holmes for details. But the matter is complex because of Sugita's superlative combat acumen and veracity. He seemed to have an extraordinary understanding of his surroundings. This characteristic was reflected during debriefings following air battles. He would frequently chop down Kasai's victory claims as he would always ask "did you follow the plane down and witness the crash?" (the answer is "no" because neither pilot was following the aircraft down). However, Sugita would still claim Hellcats as victories because they "caught fire" or "blew up in midair". The reality is that Hellcats which caught on fire would oftentimes self-extinguish the flames because their fuel tanks had excellent self-sealing properties. So a smoking or flaming Hellcat plunging down as a defensive tactic wouldn't always burn out and crash.

The reality is that they were unable to verify claims because they were outnumbered and surrounded. Dan King's "The Last Zero Fighter" interviewed Kasai, Sugita's wingman in 1944 and 1945, as to why. In clear terms, Kasai said that it was impossible to verify claims because that would get you "flamed".

There may be more, of course, but the two pilots mentioned were some of the group's top scorers at the time.

IIRC, Hata's book covered Tainan Kokutai in more detail than any other English-language source; the book mentioned the insane amount of attrition as did Sakai's book. But I did not know that two of the top pilots survived. I'm sure others did, too as you say.

Just a brief diversion, in the "Dogfights" video series, an F6F pilot tells of his encounter with an experienced Japanese pilot. The Japanese pilot began his zoom climb followed by the Grumman pilot in his newly delivered F6F. As they climbed vertically, the U.S. pilot says, "Poor boy, you think I'm in a Wildcat." The Japanese plane stalled first.
How many experienced Japanese pilots were downed before the F6F capability became known to the IJN ?

Most of Tainan Kokutai had been KIA by August of 1943, when the Hellcat entered combat. So in many ways the Hellcats were just intensifying the IJN's losses of green pilots.

The event that you're speaking of, though, didn't result in the Zero stalling. A zero wasn't fast enough to escape the Hellcat in a zoom climb.

The A6M series had terrible energy retention so in a long climb, a Hellcat would get within gun range rapidly. A Zero's stall characteristics were the best out of all fighters during the war, except maybe the Ki-43. It had a much lower stall speed than the Hellcat's.


View: https://youtu.be/COC1CZlXWCc?t=779

 

[ThomasP]

FWIW

My understanding is that the Japanese used a method of claiming victories that was very similar to what the British used in WWI. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find the details of that system. Might be worth looking into when attempting to sort out what might justifiably be said to have been false or over claiming vs what was not.

 

[AerialTorpedoDude69]

FWIW

My understanding is that the Japanese used a method of claiming victories that was very similar to what the British used in WWI. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find the details of that system. Might be worth looking into when attempting to sort out what might justifiably be said to have been false or over claiming vs what was not.

As far as I'm aware, that's true. But I've seen sources which claim the Japanese modeled their air forces after the French and Italians of the First World War. Which means that the official records only assign victories to units and not to individuals. However, individual pilots still painted unofficial victory markings on their aircraft. Yet, even this information seems faulty because Japanese pilots still did debriefings where they were asked to verify claims and high scoring individual pilots were sometimes awarded medals for merit. The overall picture is piecemeal and confusing.

Although in the literature, we know that the Imperial Japanese modeled their Navy on the Royal Navy and their army on the Prussian army. The IJN apparently had a different victory assignment system than the IJA, which explains why the victory totals are completely different between the two, with the Army having superior aircraft and outcomes, yet lower victory totals compared to the IJN. I've read several Western sources which explain the exact system of scoring the IJN used but I've never seen anything on the IJA's scoring system and assumedly, they must have borrowed something from the Navy or from the Prussians around WW1.

 

[BobB]

I'll have to agree on flight instructors, I had several different flight instructors during my WOC flight training .
They were all fresh from Vietnam, maybe some suffering from PTSD also, and some insisted that teaching new helicopter pilots was more hazardous than flying in combat.
Myself I reacted better to the calm approach. I did have one instructor yell " you trying to kill me Hodges?" Like he didn't seem to remember I was in it with him.

"You're going to kill us!" and a lot of shouting was pretty common with old school instructors. My mother quit flying after marrying my father who was an instructor. She said "I didn't have to take that from him!" Twenty some years after his time instructing in T-6's, my father met someone who had trained at the base where he instructed. They had a personality conflict with their first instructor, Bill S., and asked for a change of instructors. Walking out for their last flight with Bill S., they found him leaning on the stabilizer and he handed them a slip for a failed lesson, no need to fly that day. By contrast, their flight commander, whom I met after he moved near us in his retirement, was a calm, soft spoken man who said that when he gave wash-out rides, he often was able to spend a little time working on the student's problem and getting him to pass. That wasn't required but that was the type of guy he was.

 

[tyrodtom]

"You're going to kill us!" and a lot of shouting was pretty common with old school instructors. My mother quit flying after marrying my father who was an instructor. She said "I didn't have to take that from him!" Twenty some years after his time instructing in T-6's, my father met someone who had trained at the base where he instructed. They had a personality conflict with their first instructor, Bill S., and asked for a change of instructors. Walking out for their last flight with Bill S., they found him leaning on the stabilizer and he handed them a slip for a failed lesson, no need to fly that day. By contrast, their flight commander, whom I met after he moved near us in his retirement, was a calm, soft spoken man who said that when he gave wash-out rides, he often was able to spend a little time working on the student's problem and getting him to pass. That wasn't required but that was the type of guy he was.

When I was in training in 1970, if you had 3 failed days in a row, they first changed your instructor, if you didn't improve with the new instructor, you got a check ride from another senior instructor. If you failed that too, you were out.

But flight training was risky, just in my WOC company of about 150 students we lost 3 students and 1 instructor. At Ft. Wolters there were, on average, about 1 fatal accident every other week.
The first accident was a instructor and student right around the time everyone was soloing.
The TH-55 was found inverted, there was no mayday call, and no one witnessed the crash, so they never knew for sure what happened.
Their guess was the student kicked the wrong pedal on a simulated engine out. That could invert a TH-55.