Even if a chute was worn, the sword would not be fastened and he would need both hands to get out as quickly as possible. īefore now, I had wondered similarly how an aviator might carry a sword in his cockpit, maybe a prized ancestral blade, and yet be able to bail out. No fighter pilot of any courage would ever permit himself to be captured by the enemy. A man who did not return from combat was dead.
JAPANESE FIGHTER PILOT CODE
It was out of the question to bail out over enemy territory, for such a move meant a willingness to be captured, and nowhere in the Japanese military code or in the traditional Bushido (Samurai code) could one find the distasteful words “Prisoner of War.” There were no prisoners. The majority of our battles were fought with enemy fighters over their own fields. There was another, and equally compelling, reason for not carrying the chutes into combat. It was difficult to move our arms and legs when encumbered by chute straps. We had little use for these parachutes, for the only purpose they served for us was to hamstring our cockpit movements in a battle. Often, however, they never fastened the straps, and used the chutes only as seat cushions.
At some fields the base commander insisted that chutes be worn, and those men had no choice but to place the bulky packs in their planes. Actually, we were urged, although not ordered, to wear the parachutes in combat. Every man was assigned a parachute the decision to fly without them was our own and not the result of orders from higher headquarters. This has been misinterpreted in the West as proof that our leaders were disdainful of our lives, that all Japanese pilots were expendable and regarded as pawns rather than human beings. Despite this, in those days not one of our pilots flew with parachutes. As the enemy pilots soon discovered, a burst of their 50-caliber bullets into the fuel tanks of a Zero caused it to explode violently in flames. In 1942, none of our fighter planes carried pilot armor, nor did the Zeros have self-sealing fuel tanks, as did the American planes.
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