Fuchida Mitsuo

Mitsuo Fuchida with the rank of frigate captain

Mitsuo Fuchida in preparation for the attack on Pearl Harbor

Fuchida Mitsuo ( Japanese 淵 田 美 津 雄 ; born December 3, 1902 in Katsuragi , Nara Prefecture , Japan ; † May 30, 1976 in Kashiwara , Osaka Prefecture , Japan) held the rank of sea ​​captain in the Japanese Navy Air Forces during World War II . He served as a bomber pilot and has become known that he, the first wave of attack aircraft of the attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 under the commander of the Japanese fleet , Vice Admiral Chūichi Nagumo , commander.

Fuchida also led the air strike on Darwin on February 19, 1942, the first and heaviest air strike in World War II on Australia , and other air strikes in the Indian Ocean .

When the Second World War ended, Fuchida accepted the evangelical faith. He traveled to the USA and Europe, where he reported on his experiences. He had a US green card and, contrary to what some authors claim, he never got naturalized.

Career

Mitsuo Fuchida was admitted to the Imperial Naval Academy ( 海軍 兵 学校 , Kaigun Heigakkō ) in Etajima , Hiroshima Prefecture , in 1921 , where he met his classmate friend Genda Minoru and developed an interest in airplanes. He specialized in bomber planes and acquired skills and knowledge that made him an instructor. In 1929 he was ordered to the aircraft carrier Kaga , where he gained combat experience with the Sasebo Air Group in the late 1930s during air operations in the Second Sino-Japanese War . He became one of the most experienced pilots in Japan. He was promoted to corvette captain and accepted into the Naval College of Japan . In 1939 he was transferred to the carrier Akagi as an air squadron commander . At that time he was the pilot with the most combat experience in Japan, with 3000 hours of flying hours.

Second World War

Preparing for the attack on Pearl Harbor

A Nakajima B5N1 "Kate" torpedo bomber taking off from the aircraft carrier Akagi with a dummy torpedo for training purposes

On Sunday, December 7th, 1941, the attack on the US military base Pearl Harbor on Oahu was carried out by a Japanese force under the command of Admiral Nagumo Chūichi with six aircraft carriers and 423 aircraft.

At 6:00 a.m., the first wave of attacks rose, consisting of 183 Japanese dive bombers , torpedo bombers , horizontal bombers and fighters from the aircraft carriers located 370 km north of the island of Oahu to attack the United States Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor.

At 7:20 a.m., Fuchida, who led the flight group in combat, led the planes along the eastern side of the island, turned them west and led them along the south coast past the city of Honolulu . He assumed they would not be detected by the United States Army radar station on Oahu on this route . However, two US soldiers from the radar station reported to their superior officer that they had seen a large aircraft formation on the screens. However, the officer ignored this message because he assumed that it was a question of radar echoes from a US bomber squadron coming from California .

In the meantime, Fuchida had given the order to Tenkai to take the attack position. At 7:40 a.m. Hawaiian time, he saw that Pearl Harbor was undefended beneath him. He led his B5N (Type 97 Model 3, also known as Kate ), a torpedo bomber, out of range and fired a green flare that signaled the attack.

At 7:49 am, Fuchida gave his radio operator, Petty Officer 1st Class Norinobu Mizuki, the order to send the attack signal To, To, To ( Totsugeskiseyo , German attack! ) Over the radio. Then Fuchida's pilot Lieutenant , Mitsuo Matsuzaki, steered the B5N in a bend around Barber's Point on Oahu.

At 7:53 am, Fuchida Mizuki ordered the Akagi , the flagship of the 1st Air Fleet, the attack signal, the code words “ Torah! Torah! Torah! "( 虎 Torah , German" Tiger ") to send. However, To stands for totsugeki ( 突 撃 ) "attack" and ra for raigeki ( 雷 撃 ) "torpedo attack". The three words mean a completely surprising attack. Because of the excellent atmospheric conditions, the transmission of the code Tora Tora Tora was sent by weak transmitters via ship radio as far as Japan to Admiral Yamamoto and his staff, who were waiting for the attack signal during the night.

Course of the attack on Pearl Harbor

The first Japanese attack began 51 D3A - dive bombers , 40 B5N- torpedo bombers , 50 B5N horizontal bombers and 43 A6M -Jagdflugzeugen.

After the aircraft of the first wave of attack carried out their attack and made their way back to their carriers, Fuchida flew over the target to assess the impact of the destruction and to observe the second wave of attack. After the second wave successfully completed its mission, it returned to its carrier. He proudly announced that the US warships fleet had been destroyed, including the USS Arizona , USS Oklahoma , USS West Virginia , USS California, and USS Nevada , which had sunk. After returning from Pearl Harbor he inspected his Kate and found 21 large bullet holes from the enemy air defense and the main control system was only hanging on a thin wire. The successful attack against the United States made Fuchida a national hero, which earned him an audience with Emperor Hirohito .

Further participation in the war

Air raid on Darwin : explosion cloud from a fuel tank and black smoke from a burning oil tank, in front of which the damaged warship HMAS Deloraine can be seen.

It was "the most dangerous moment" for Churchill when HMS Cornwall was attacked and sunk in the Indian Ocean on April 5, 1942 by Japanese dive bombers.

On February 19, 1942, Fuchida led the first of two attack waves of 188 fighter jets in the devastating air strike on Darwin , Australia. On April 5, he led another series of air strikes in the Indian Ocean on military bases of the Royal Navy in Ceylon , where the headquarters of the British Eastern Fleet was located. Winston Churchill described these attacks as the "most dangerous moment" of World War II.

In June Fuchida was wounded in the Battle of Midway on the Akagi . At the time, he was unable to board a plane because he was not operational a few days after an emergency appendix operation. He was on the ship's bridge during the morning attack. After the hits by US bombers, a chain reaction started on the Akagi with burning fuel and exploding bombs. When the Akagi began to self-destruct, the exit of the bridge was blocked and the officers descended. Fuchida was caught in an explosion while abseiling and thrown onto the deck, where he broke both ankles.

After his recovery, he spent the remainder of the World War as a staff officer. He was promoted to sea captain and was the staff officer of the Japanese Air Force in the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944, when the military force of the Japanese aircraft carriers was finally crushed.

On the day the atomic bomb exploded in Hiroshima , a seven-day military conference of the Imperial Japanese Army was held in Hiroshima , in which he attended. That day he received a telecommunications call asking him to go to the Navy headquarters in Tokyo and so he was not there when the atomic bomb exploded. He returned the day after the atomic bomb exploded with an investigation expedition that had been commissioned to investigate the effects and destruction of the atomic bomb. Later, all the other members of the investigative commission died as a result of radioactive contamination ; Fuchida suffered no consequential damage.

Life after the war

After the World War, Fuchida was called to court to testify about the war crimes committed by the Japanese military. This angered him because he believed that this was more of a justice of the victor . Convinced that the Americans had treated the captured Japanese in the same way, he intended to bring this up at the next court hearing. That is why he met in the spring of 1947 in the port of Uraga near Yokosuka with returning Japanese prisoners of war. He was surprised to meet former flight engineer Kazuo Kanegasaki, who was believed to have died in the Battle of Midway. When he questioned Kanegasaki, the latter reported - much to Fuchida's disappointment - that he had not been tortured or ill-treated. These and other experiences changed Fuchida's point of view. In September 1949 he entered the Evangelical Church.

Own publications

In 1951 Fuchida published a report on the Battle of Midway from a Japanese perspective. In February 1954, Reader's Digest published Fuchida 's experiences during the attack on Pearl Harbor. Fuchida wrote and co-wrote the books From Pearl Harbor to Golgotha (also known as From Pearl Harbor to Calvary ) and in 1955 the expanded version of his book Midway, written in 1951 (also called Midway: The Battle that Doomed Japan, the Japanese Navy's Story known). Fuchida's experiences are also reflected in God's Samurai: Lead Pilot at Pearl Harbor (The Warriors) by Donald Goldstein, Katherine V. Dillon and Gordon W. Prange.

criticism

Fuchida was a significant figure in the early days of the Pacific War and his written accounts, translated into English and published in the United States, were influential. After other Japanese sources had been translated into English, Fuchida's statement that he had called for a third wave of attacks on Pearl Harbor's fuel tanks was refuted and his version of the American counterattack at the Battle of Midway contradicted by Parshall and Tully.

Motion picture

In the 1970 film Torah! Torah! Torah! Fuchida was portrayed by the Japanese actor Takahiro Tamura .

literature

• Hiroyuki Agawa: The Reluctant Admiral: Yamamoto and the Imperial Navy. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2000. ISBN 4-7700-2539-4 .
• Donald Goldstein, Katherine V. Dillon, Gordon W. Prange: God's Samurai: Lead Pilot at Pearl Harbor (The Warriors). Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2003. ISBN 1-57488-695-9 .
• Jonathan Parshall, Anthony Tully: Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway. Dulles, Virginia: Potomac Books, 2005. ISBN 978-1574889246 .
• Mark R. Peattie: Sunburst: The Rise of Japanese Naval Air Power 1909-1941. Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 2001, ISBN 1-55750-432-6 .
• Gordon W. Prange: At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor. New York: Penguin Books, 1982. ISBN 978-0140157345 .
• Mike Wright: What They Didn't Teach You About World War II. New York: Presidio Press, 1998. ISBN 0-89141-649-8 .

Web links

• militaryhistoryonline.com : Pearl Harbor.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} nationalgeographic.com ( Memento of the original from October 13, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. : Capt. Mitsuo Fuchida (1902-1976). Retrieved July 16, 2011.  
2. ^ Fuchida, Mitsuo: For That One Day: The Memoirs of Mitsuo Fuchida, Commander of the Attack on Pearl Harbor (ebook). Translated by Douglas T. Shinsato and Tadanori Urabe. Waimea, Hawaii: eXperience, inc., 2011, ISBN 0-9846745-0-0 . P. 11
3. ↑ Goldstein et al. (1990): What They Didn't Teach You About World War II. P. 5. (see literature).
4. ^ Agawa (2000): The Reluctant Admiral: Yamamoto and the Imperial Navy. P. 267. (See literature.)
5. ^ Prange (1982): At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor. P. 515. (See literature.)
6. ↑ ww2db.com : Mitsuo Fuchida. Retrieved December 27, 2011
7. ↑ christianity.com : Mitsuo Fuchida: The Enemy Whose Attack Provoked America. Retrieved December 27, 2011
8. ↑ Goldstein et al. (1990): God's Samurai: Lead Pilot at Pearl Harbor (The Warriors). Pp. 178-179. (See literature.)
9. ↑ biblebelievers.com : From Pearl Harbor to Calvary by Mitsuo Fuchida. Retrieved December 27, 2011
10. ↑ Fuchida, Capt. Mitsuo: I Led the Attack on Pearl Harbo. Reader's Digest , Vol. 64, No. 382, February 1954.
11. ↑ Fuchida, Mitsuo and Masatake Okumiya: Midway: The Battle That Doomed Japan, the Japanese Navy's Story. United States Naval Institute, Annapolis Maryland, 1955, Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 55-9027.
12. ^ Parshall and Tully 2005: Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway. Pp. 437-442. (See literature.)

Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . Thus Fuchida is the family name, Mitsuo the first name.