Battle of the Philippine Sea
This is an excerpt from a script for a film about four World War II battles. The challenge was to capture each battle in about eight minutes, saying something about the airplanes and people involved. This segment had the additional task of wrapping up the war in the Pacific. It combines my narration with found quotes. For the Flying Heritage Collection museum. Produced by Weatherhead Experience Design Group.
Title Sequence
Narrator: In 1939, for the second time in twenty-five years, the world descended into armed conflict.
The global struggle of World War Two encompassed five theaters of war.
The Pacific Theater covered vast stretches of ocean.
While Japanese and Allied soldiers struggled bitterly for obscure Pacific islands, naval fleets attacked one another across hundreds of miles of open water in great aircraft-carrier battles.
The largest of these carrier battles came in June 1944: The Battle of the Philippine Sea.
End Title Sequence
Narrator: Japan entered the war dramatically on December 7, 1941, when they struck British and American colonies in the Pacific.
Their most audacious—and fateful—target was the United States Pacific Fleet stationed at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.
Quote: Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.
—President Franklin D. Roosevelt
Quote: The situation being such as it is, our Empire for its existence and self-defense has no other recourse but to appeal to arms and to crush every obstacle in its path.
—Japanese Imperial Declaration of War, December 7, 1941
Narrator: The attack was a calculated gamble. Japan lacked the resources for a long, drawn-out war. They needed to win quickly and decisively.
Japanese forces quickly took much of resource-rich Southeast Asia, as well as many Pacific islands from which to defend the area.
This startling wave of victories created a legend around the Mitsubishi A6M Reisen, a fighter aircraft better known as the Zero.
Quote: The Zero was so light and maneuverable, and climbed so high and fast that to remain engaged with it for any time at all meant that it was soon around on your tail and shooting at you.
—James B. Morehead, American P-40 pilot
Narrator: The Zero was a weapon of attack, not of defense. Anything deemed unnecessary by Japan’s military leaders was eliminated.
Quote: None of our Zeros carried pilot armor, nor did they have self-sealing tanks, as did the American planes. A burst of .50 caliber bullets into the fuel tanks of a Zero caused it to explode violently into flames.
—Saburo Sakai, Zero pilot
Narrator: Pilots were encouraged to see themselves as heirs to the samurai tradition. In the beginning, at least, Japan’s highly trained pilots fit the role well.
Quote: We had little use for our parachutes, for the only purpose they served was to hamstring our cockpit movements in battle. It was out of the question to bail out over enemy-held territory, for no fighter pilot of any courage would ever permit himself to be captured by the enemy.
—Saburo Sakai, Zero pilot
Narrator: But the Japanese advantage in the Pacific could not last. The attack on Pearl Harbor had provoked the United States, a country rich in invention and resources.
Within six months of the attack, the Imperial Japanese Navy, which had never lost a battle in its seventy-two-year history, was surprised and defeated by the United States at the Battle of Midway.
Throughout the remainder of the war, Japan found itself struggling to keep up while America churned out ships, airplanes, and trained pilots.
The Grumman F6F Hellcat appeared on American naval carriers in 1943.
It was more than a match for the Zero.
Quote: We had more range, more speed, more power... more everything.
—George Orner, Hellcat pilot
Quote: Indeed, when we did meet the enemy planes, they were full of confidence. Up until then they had been very afraid of us, but now they became full of fight.
—Komachi Sadamu, Zero pilot
Narrator: The increasingly powerful American forces began island-hopping across the Pacific. Japan realized that the only way to stop them was to destroy the American carrier fleet.
They got their chance in June 1944 when the U.S. fleet sailed into the Marianas Islands to support the invasion of Saipan.
The Japanese planned a two-fisted attack: First, land-based bombers from Saipan, Guam, and other nearby islands would batter the U.S. fleet. Then, from outside the range of American planes, Japanese carriers would launch a massive attack to finish them off.
Quote: The fate of the Empire rests on this one battle. Every man is expected to do his utmost.
—Vice Adm. Jisaburo Ozawa
Narrator: Unfortunately, by 1944 the elite pilots who had built the Zero’s reputation were long gone. Their replacements were undertrained and unprepared.
American air strikes in preparation for the amphibious assault on Saipan all but wiped out any island-based air forces in the vicinity.
Four hundred miles away, Japanese naval commanders never learned of this debacle, and on June 19 they launched a series of air strikes on what they assumed would be a crippled American fleet.
For many of the Japanese pilots, this would be their first combat experience.
And their last.
American pilots in Hellcats shot Zeros out of the sky. Pilots were scoring four, five, and six kills in a single day—a day that quickly became known on American carriers as the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.
Quote: Our pilots and planes were so superior to those of Japan that only a handful of enemy planes reached our ships, and these were promptly shot down by anti-aircraft fire. It was the greatest aerial victory in the Pacific war.
—Admiral J. J. Clark
Narrator: Late in the afternoon on the following day, June 20, it was the American forces’ turn to attack the Japanese fleet. Submarines had already sunk two Japanese carriers; American bombers hit several others.
For American fliers, the return to their ships was the deadliest part of the two-day battle. They reached the fleet in darkness, low on fuel after 700 miles of flying.
Quote: There were planes landing all over the place. It didn’t matter what carrier they were from. The minute anybody flashed ready deck, somebody landed on it. Almost every landing was some kind of deck crash—they were running on fumes. There were planes going in the water everywhere.
—Cecil S. King, Jr., Chief Warrant Officer, USS Hornet
Narrator: But American forces had delivered a staggering blow to the Japanese fleet: three carriers sunk, others damaged beyond repair. Thousands of sailors had died—and of the 460 planes brought to the Philippine Sea, only 35 were left.
Quote: The long and difficult air war, so much to our advantage in the early days, degenerated into a vicious nightmare in which we struggled hopelessly against a rising enemy tide impossible to overcome.
Of my twenty-five-man class, eventually I was the only man left alive.
—Saburo Sakai, Zero pilot
Narrator: Desperate, the Japanese formed Special Attack Units, also known as Kamikazes.
Quote: We had few planes and no fuel to train pilots, so we had no other choice.
—Iyozoh Fujita, Zero pilot
Narrator: The sacrifice was futile. After taking the Marianas Islands, the United States set up airbases and began bombing Japan.
Fire-bombing raids devastated Tokyo and other major cities. Then, in August 1945, atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, effectively ending World War Two.
Quote: The enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.
—Japanese Emperor Hirohito, address to nation
Image: F6F Hellcat fighters aboard the carrier Saratoga, off Gilbert Islands, early 1943. From United States Navy National Museum of Naval Aviation. Found at https://ww2db.com/image.php?image_id=17289