Rabaul Airshow

bigiceman · Oct 3, 2005

There is an interview in the information included in the Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator 2. It is with Saburo Sakai a Japanese ace from WWII. He discribed something that is refered to as the Rabaul Airshow. Here is his description.

Saburo Sakai: During the Japan-China war, I was on a bombing mission when I saw one of our pilots land on the enemy's field burning. He blew up on the field. Later at Rabaul and Lae, we were fighting every day and I knew I wouldn't live long. I wanted to do something before I died, like what that pilot did when he landed on the enemy's base. We couldn't copy that, so we decided to do something as pilots - fly a great, beautiful flight to demonstrate our skills. That was our promise to each other. Nishizawa and Ota - I called them and said, if we have time and the others return to base and we have enough ammo and fuel, we can fly as a team and perform these aerobatics. So when the rest of the flight turned for home, Nishizawa and Ota joined me on my wing as number two and number three. I signaled, "Let's start" and we started. So we did a beautiful loop over the American base, but Nishizawa signaled that our altitude must be much lower! So we lowered our altitude to less than 1,000 meters - 700 or 800 meters. I signaled - three times. So we did a loop three times. I raised my arm in triumph - "ah we did it!" and we flew back. This was a secret between the three of us. Because we knew we could die at any time, we did what we wanted to do. The next day was cloudy day and a P-40 dove from the clouds and dropped a bag with a streamer attached to it.. We opened it and found a note in English. Sasai-san confronted us with note, reading it to us: "Yesterday you performed aerobatics over our base and it was really exciting. We applauded. Next time you come we'll be ready to dogfight - please come wearing a green muffler - we'll be waiting for you, wearing a green muffler as well." Sasai read this to us and yelled, "What is the meaning of this!?" We apologized profusely to him. But I'm sorry I never was able to have that dogfight. After the war, I met some of the U.S. soldiers who were Port Moresby who saw our aerobatics that day - they told me they stopped firing their guns as we did our maneuver, and stopped to applaud us.
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Have any of you heard of this before? How about anything similar?

TA152 · Oct 4, 2005

This was also in the book "Zero" by Masatake Okumiya and Jiro Horikoshi published in 1957.

I don't know about the P-40 pilot wanting to dog fight them. Sounded like a Kamikaze mission to do that in a P-40.

Ali Morshead · Oct 4, 2005

A P-40 from Moresby could make Lae but not Rabaul, It sound a bit like an exaggeration to make the tale more interesting, pity it isnt dated.

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Rabaul Airshow

bigiceman Member

TA152 Ace

Ali Morshead Member

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