Remembrance "I Was Far from Confident"

By ZENJI ABE

A bomber pilot based on the flagship Akagi during the Pearl Harbor attack, he is now a 75-year-old businessman.

At Pearl Harbor we achieved more than expected. Two days later, the naval air force sank the British battleships Prince of Wales and Repulse off Malaysia. They were said to be unsinkable, so the central command of the navy began to be overconfident. I was far from confident.

In May 1942 I was assigned to the aircraft carrier Junyo to train 18 bomber pilots. My mission was to attack Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands at the same time as the attack on Midway. The commander didn't know anything about planes. Since he remembered the dive bombers' pinpoint strikes in the Indian Ocean, he wanted to use them. But it was not the kind of battle for dive bombers to fight. I lost four of my men. When we returned to Japan, I heard that the carriers Akagi, Soryu and Hiryu had been sunk by careless mistakes at Midway. Then I realized the war was over.