One Man's Justice by Akira Yoshimura Read Free Book Online

in China were made on Sasebo on the eighth of July; on Nagasaki on the eleventh of August, and on Yawata on the twentieth and twenty-first; on Ohmura on the twenty-fifth of October, the eleventh and twenty-first of November, the nineteenth of December and the sixth of January the following year; but after that the B-29 bases wereswitched to Saipan, and attacks from mainland China stopped.
    During those months, assisted by pinpoint detection of incoming aircraft by electronic detection stations and spotters, the fighters ensured that bombing damage was kept to a minimum, shooting down a total of fifty-one bombers while losing only nine of their own.
    Of the American crew members who baled out of their disabled aircraft, seventeen survived to be taken prisoner. These men were escorted by the kempeitai to defence headquarters in Tokyo.
    Then B-29s operating from bases in Saipan began a concerted bombing campaign on urban targets such as Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya, and in March 1945 they again turned their attention to the Kyushu region. The Nineteenth Air Force Division defence was so effective that the numbers of American airmen parachuting into captivity increased dramatically. Previously such prisoners of war had been escorted to camps in Tokyo by the kempeitai , but in early April the Army Ministry issued a directive to Western Regional Command, delegating authority by stating that the crew members should be ‘handled as you see fit’.
    Six days after that order was received, a kempeitai lorry carrying twenty-four American airmen pulled up at the rear entrance of Western Regional Headquarters. The men were unloaded and shepherded in pairs into cells originally designed to hold local soldiers awaiting court martial.
    That evening, together with a staff officer from the tactical operations centre, Takuya was assigned to guard the prisoners in the cells. The captive crewmen had justbeen given their evening meal trays, so when Takuya entered the holding cell area he saw tall, well-built men, some brown-haired and some blond, sitting in their cells eating rice balls flavoured with barley, or munching slices of pickled radish.
    Takuya stood in the corridor and stared. The prisoners behind the bars were the first American airmen he had ever set eyes upon.
    As the officer in charge of the air defence tactical operations centre, Takuya was among the most knowledgeable of the headquarters staff about the Superfortress bomber. Every time B-29 units intruded into the Kyushu region airspace, his staff painstakingly followed their incoming flight path and then tracked them as they headed off over the sea after completing their missions. Details such as the B-29’s total wingspan of 43 metres, its wing surface area of 161.1 square metres, its fully laden weight of 47,000 kilograms, its top speed and altitude of 590 kilometres per hour at 9500 metres, its maximum range of 8159 kilometres with a 3-ton load of bombs, its ten 12.7-millimetre machine-guns and one 20-millimetre cannon and its maximum bomb load of 8 tons, were etched into Takuya’s mind, and he had become very familiar with the appearance of the Superfortress by examining photographs of the aircraft – both in flight and as wreckage on the ground.
    Hours of meticulous study of the B-29 enabled Takuya to deduce the likely target by determining the speed and course of the incoming bombers, and then, by calculating the intruders’ time spent in Japanese airspace, how muchfuel remained and, from that, the probable course and timing of their escape route.
    To Takuya and his colleagues, who had followed the movements of these aircraft so faithfully since the previous year, the squadron of B-29s were a familiar, almost intimate presence. But now, seeing these American airmen standing and sitting on the other side of the bars, Takuya realised that all along his perception of the enemy had been limited to the aircraft itself, and that somehow he had forgotten there