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The duel at Loiwing, April 8-10

continued from part 13

In addition to the usual sources, I was assisted here by an email from Hiroshi Ichimura (Umemoto) about the 64th Senati's April 10 return to Loiwing. He in turn drew upon Hinoki's wartime diary and other Japanese-language sources. -- Dan Ford

April 8: the first round

Shortly after noon April 8, Colonel Kato and seven other pilots of the 64th Sentai took off from Chiang Mai to raid the Allied airfield at Loiwing, which they had reconnoitered the week before. (This was roughly half the group's fighting strength. The other Hayabusas were escorting bombers to Maymyo, in the continuing effort to destroy any possible airfields being used by the Allied squadrons in Burma.) Unusual for the 64th Sentai, three of the pilots in Kato's formation had never before seen combat. They were replacing three experienced pilots who had been called away to provide seasoning to newly formed fighter groups.

As the fighters crossed the China, Kato heard by radio that a JAAF reconnaisance plane had seen 15 "small planes" on the ground at Loiwing. As a result, At 3:15 p.m. Tokyo time, after two hours in the air, the Hayabusas entered the Loiwing airspace at an altitude of 6,000 meters. (Another account says 6,600 meters.) The winds were calm; the sky was clear. The Japanese pilots were on high alert, but sure in their minds that they would meet no opposition.

Kato waggled his wings and led most of the Hayabusas down to strafe the enemy runway, destroying "one large and two small planes" on the ground. [These planes were a British Blenheim bomber and two P-40E Kittyhawks which had stopped at Loiwing en route to China; they'd been left on the ground because they weren't armed for combat.]

Meanwhile, Captain MARUO of the 2nd Squadron was supposed to be flying top cover, but for some reason he also came down to strafe. As a result, the entire group found itself at low altitude, "a very disadvantageous postion."

As it happened, the enemy fighters were circling above the raiders, unseen by them. Kato now zoomed up to higher altitude, took a hit, and began leaking engine oil, so he left the formation and headed home. The remaining pilots found themselves outnumbered by the enemy, which they reported as 20 Tomahawks. "The proficient pilots tried to help green ones and themselves got killed," as one pilot told the story. Lt. TAKAHASI, whose first battle this, was could think of no other expedient but to loop-the-loop, and after 30 repetitions he found that he had somehow left the battle combat; he too headed for home.

Among the seasoned pilots who stayed to fight and who died as a result Captain ANMA, the 3rd Squadron leader, credited with 12 kills in China, Malaya, and the Dutch Indies. Also shot down were Sgt WADA, Lt. KUROKI (who may have been one of the newcomers), and Lt. OKUMURA. That amounted to half the raiding force. One of the returning Hayabusas was riddled with 40 bullet holes, and its pilot may have been wounded. The Japanese pilots apparently made no claims of enemy aircraft shot down in the air.

There was little appetite at dinner that night, as Lieutnant Hinoki would write in his memoir. Another account has pilots complaining: "The fighting leadership is wrong." As for the leader himself, Kato was "holding his right arm and striking himself, crying that Captain Anma in the China War had made a great contribution.... He expressed great sympathy for the fallen pilots.

This prompted Lt. Hinoki to blurt: "There was nothing you could have done."

To which Kato replied: "I'm going back there and attack again. Whatever the hardship, we must not yield. There is always a way!"

[For their part, the AVG pilots claimed 12 Hayabusas shot down. Of the Allied aircraft supposedly destroyed by the Japanese strafing, the actual tally was one Kittyhawk destroyed and another P-40E and the RAF Blenheim lightly damaged.]

April 10: the revenge mission

Determined "to do the revenge" for their drubbing at Loiwing, Colonel Kato spent the next two days studying weather and geography and drawing up a "secret plan" for a return to Loiwing. One difficulty was posed by the fact that the JAAF calculator wasn't able to compute fuel burn beyond 600 kilometers. The one-way trip was a bit more than that, and of course the Hayabusas also had to fight on their internal fuel supply (on the way to the target, they would depend on their drop-tanks). Nevertheless Kato decided to make a return attack, and all his pilots agreed. In the darkness before dawn on April 10, they had an early breakfast and afterward sat very still, with no one speaking. Their ground crews had been working all night to get 12 Hayabusas ready for the flight.

At 0540 Tokyo time (3:40 a.m. local time), the twelve fighters started down the gravel runway at Chiang Mai. The mission began badly: Captain MARUO crashed into a Ki-21 "Sally" heavy bomber at the side of the runway, and his two wingmen also cracked up, evidently because of their leader's accident. Then Lieutenant ENDO returned to the airport when his engine began to run rough. Endo's wingmmen--sergeants YASUDA and YOKOI--tried to pick up the navigation lights of their commander's plane but were misled by stars in the night. When dawn came over the mountains, they realized that they were lost, and so returned to Chiang Mai. That left only six Hayabusas on the mission, led by Colonel KATO.

At 8:05 a.m. Tokyo time, the Hayabusas entered the Loiwing airspace. Kato waggled his wings for the attack, then reached over to shut off his navigation--inadvertently , turning off his main power switch when he did so. He counted 23 Tomahawks on the ground under cover. The Hayabusas dove down to 300 meters altitude and strafed the enemy repeatedly, but the commander's guns of course didn't fire. The pilots saw people on the ground looking up at them: the enemy had been caught flat-footed.

It was "a battle of blood," as the Japanese pilots reported, and they believed that only one or two of the enemy aircraft survived destruction. To their surprise, however, the P-40s didn't explode, presumably because the fuel had been drained from their tanks. Kato waggled wings to return, and after they joined up, he fired a burst from his guns. Afterward, Lt Hinoki asked him why. Kato explained that that his guns had been dead throughout the strafing runs. Forming up, he discovered the error when he went to switch on his lights again; he fired the burst to determine whether he had actually done such a stupid thing.

[There were 13 Tomahawks, 7 P-40E Kittyhawks, and 3 RAF Hurricanes on the field that morning. Half of them were damaged, but most only superficially; only one plane had to be written off. With just one hour's delay, three 1st Squadron pilots took off for the scheduled morning mission.]

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