The Last Zero Fighter

Bookshelves, movies, and History Channel programming are flooded with material about the Second World War. There have been documentaries, fictional accounts, and even a famous musical play by Rodgers and Hammerstein that was based on a book by James Michener.For many of us, our interest has been largely satiated. I'll still watch one of the old classic movies from time to time, just for entertainment, and to enjoy the old movie stars and the ships, planes, cars and jeeps, and hairstyles, but for the most part that has been about it--until now. I recently stumbled upon a new book that I did not really expect to get much out of, but I was pleasantly surprised.Dan King is an American writer who speaks Japanese fluently. He interviewed a number of veteran Japanese Naval aviators, several of them now deceased, for a period of several years, and he has published a book about them.The interviews cover the backgrounds of the men; what it was that interested them in aviation and fueled their ambitions to become naval aviators; how they fulfilled those ambitions; and their military service. These men participated in just about every battle that most Americans know of, and then some. The war in China is covered, and one of the interviewees participated in the sinking of the US gunboat Panay before the US entered the war. Another was on combat air patrol when he saw Doolittle's B-25's bomb Tokyo, but he had been instructed to not interfere with twin engine bombers that were expected to fly over Tokyo Bay that day. The suicide missions are addressed. Two of the men happened to witness the bombing of Nagasaki while enjoying a one-day R&R "vacation" in the mountains. Different and confused reactions to the emperor's unprecedented radio address are spoken of. The arrival of American occupation personnel is mentioned, and the contrast between them and what the Japanese had been led to expect is worth reading about.The interviews cover much more than life in the cockpit and on ship. The hardships endured by these men are well described. The discussion of the awful drinking water on volcanic Iwo Jima contrasts with the story of the abundance of cold milk on a former Chinese island of which I had never heard. The stories of aviators' pet monkeys are amusing and just a bit emotional. One is amused by a story of a rash decision to consume the best sake on hand one night and the next day's announcement that an admiral would be visiting, necessitating a sortie to another island to get some bottles of sake that would meet an admiral's expectations.The book is about a lot more than Zeros, and those who are familiar with other aircraft types will learn something about them. For my part, my long-time interest in aviation history had led me to learn about just about every plane mentioned.Again, I enjoyed this book a lot more than I would have expected from the title.

Dan King has obviously put a lot of time and effort into producing this volume, the premise of which ought to interest anyone interested in the Pacific Theater of World War II. Being able to speak Japanese has also given him an entry into a Japanese cultural environment foreign - in every sense of the word - to American readers. The opportunity to tell a compelling and revealing story of the Japanese airman's side of a conflict just as brutal as its European counterpart might have gone a long way toward filling in some fairly dramatic gaps in the typical American military history buff's knowledge of the Pacific War.Unfortunately, that opportunity has been wasted to a far greater degree than I'd like. I wanted to be able to recommend "The Last Zero Fighter" to friends similarly interested in the story of the United States' involvement in the Pacific Theater, but I can't do so without numerous caveats. While there are complimentary blurbs aplenty on the back cover and on the book's first couple of pages, they, too, should come with multiple caveats. This is a book desperately in need of an editor.While there are a number of compelling photographs included, made more so by the fact that Americans have generally seen almost nothing of the war in the Pacific from the Japanese viewpoint, maps are grouped together with with those photos in no particular scale, and no particular relevance to the chapter in the book where they've been grouped. They'd have been much more effective as visual aids if they'd been given a scale, and much more useful to readers if they'd been spread out in the book so that they provided reference points for the individual story being told. Even the unique and very interesting map of Japanese Naval Air Bases on the home islands - something I'd never seen before in decades of reading about World War II in the Pacific - isn't effectively used. Constant flipping back and forth through the book to refer to the single map detracts from the reading experience.Even more of a negative in terms of the reading experience are the dozens of grammatical and spelling errors, some of them obvious and egregious, that pepper every chapter. "Gunsite" instead of the proper term, "gunsight," is but one of many, many examples. Words are often missing from sentences - not important enough words to completely obscure the meaning of the sentence, but noticeable enough to, once again, detract from the reading experience. "To," "the," "of," and similar terms bring readers up short by their absence.While the individual adventures of the pilots are often compelling, there's no coherent narrative to the book, and the stories are told in isolation - both from each other, and also from the larger arc of the course of the war in the Pacific. For history buffs interested in the technical aspects of aerial warfare, there's very little here. Dogfights are not described in any detail, nor are aircraft, especially Japanese aircraft, in terms of their performance, strengths and weaknesses, as perceived by their pilots.The author's expertise in Japanese is not going to be shared by the vast majority of his audience, yet numerous Japanese phrases and terms appear throughout the book without any special effort being made to connect or relate them to American readers. The phrase briefly explained in Chapter 1 may need to be explained again in Chapter 5 for the benefit of readers not knowledgeable about either the Japanese language or the country's military, but the explanation is given only once.In short, while it's obviously a labor of love for Mr. King, and I'm well aware of the immense amount of work, not to mention travel, that he's put into "The Last Zero Fighter," the end product is not nearly as satisfactory as it ought to be. Before Mr. King produces more books on related topics - as he promises to do in this one - he needs to find, and use, a good editor.

Unlike the air war in Europe, it has been very difficult for Westerners to see 'the other side of the hill' with the stories of Japanese airmen. Here we get to learn what motivated Japanese naval airmen, what they thought of their aircraft and their opponents. It also gives a revealing insight into their view of parachutes. Essentially, you would use your chute over your own territory, but not over your enemies, to be captured was essentially to lose your identity as Japanese, a fate worse than death. Dan King took the trouble to learn Japanese and shows a sensitive and knowledgable appreciation of his subject.

very interesting ww2 from the japanese pilots view

Really good insight into the Japanese side of WW11 especially from the cultural and historical perspective.

For all the ambition that Imperial Japan may have had at the beginning of WW2,their fighting forces were under resourced and ill prepared for serious opposition.This book gives a clear insight to the real meaning of Kamikaze, who were notfundamentalists or suicidal.

Great book about WWII Naval Japanese Pilots side...!