By February Sakai had claimed 13 Allied planes. During the spring he pushed his score. By July 22, he had reached 47 victories and on that day he claimed two more. He was flying over the beach at Buna, guarding the men landing there, when a pile of bombs exploded in the men and equipment. He soon saw a Lockheed Hudson coming through the clouds. As he attacked, the pilot of the Hudson used his bomber/transport as a fighter, chasing the Zeros. The tail gunner fired until he was killed by a lucky burst and the Hudson’s doom was sealed. Sakai jumped behind it and flamed the left engine. The Hudson crashed into the jungle, a burning
mess.
In the horizon, he saw a tiny speck, and so they raced after this tiny speck and as he neared, he identified it as a Lockheed Hudson, a twin-engine bomber.
He thought it was going to be a very easy kill, so he manoeuvred in to shoot it down, and just as he got to the firing distance, he opened up with his guns, hoping to make the enemy bomber turn, and he got the surprise of his life, because the Hudson, just very rapidly, a very sharp U-turn and just came straight at him with all guns blazing.
"Every forward firing gun in the Hudson opened up in a withering barrage."
HENRY SAKAIDA: And then he just manoeuvred the Zero right out of the way to escape the line of fire. And after that, all hell broke loose. It was every man for himself.
SAKAI: We were being attacked. I felt, gosh, this is going to be some fight.
HENRY SAKAIDA: Sakai had trained his pilots to be very disciplined fighter pilots, but everything that he had taught his subordinates just went out the window. Just totally went out the window. There was mass confusion in the dogfight and there was several times when they almost collided.
Our Zeros scattered widely, rolling or diving in the different directions. Nothing like this had ever happened before.
BOB PIPER: As pilots, we don't know today how Warren managed to spin a Hudson on its wingtip like that. We can only surmise that perhaps he practised the technique earlier of pulling the power off on one engine, applying full power on the other, and pivoting it like a pirouette to turn it as sharply and as steeply as he could on the wingtip.
SAKAI: I caught a glimpse of Lieutenant Sasi. His jaw hung open in astonishment at the audacity of the enemy pilot.
BOB PIPER: All the time he had to keep that aircraft twisting, turning, climbing, descending, and indeed, Sakai, in his book, describes that he was doing just that and creating as much confusion against the enemy fighters as he possibly could.
SAKAI: All of us failed to score a single hit. The bomber rolled and soared up and down in violent manoeuvres, with top gunner firing steadily at our planes.
HENRY SAKAIDA: The dogfight lasted over 10 minutes, which, in fighter pilots' terms, it's like eternity. 10 minutes of just full-bore dog fighting. They could never keep their gun sights on the bomber long enough to hit it.
BOB PIPER: You've also got to remember that these sort of manoeuvres are very, very tiring on a pilot and require a lot of concentration, and that 10 minutes that Warren fought would have seemed like 10 hours to him. As he turned the controls and pushed the rudders I imagine that he was absolutely exhausted and that his strength was running out even though he had a co-pilot with him.
Jim Cowan
JIM COWAN, Warren's brother: He would have said, "To hell with you. I'm going to really get stuck in here." He'd stick his nose into any sort of a fight, not for the love of the fight, so much, as how dare you do this to me?
DAVID VINCENT, aviation historian: I really get this vision of Warren Cowan and his whole crew being galvanised to try and save their lives. But with a twin-engine bomber, it has some limitations as to what you can do with it. In the account by Sakai he did remarkable things with aeroplanes that just can't be... can't be really imagined how that could have happened, but he did it somehow.
HENRY SAKAIDA: Their Zeros would have been like these real high-performance sports cars, you know, and the Hudson would have been something like a large truck. The sports car could just turn rings around the truck. Well, the Zeros could turn rings around the Hudson. And the Zero had about 80 miles per hour more speed than the Hudson, so there's no way that Cowan could have outrun the Japanese. So he decided to just stand and fight and he did a miraculous job.
BETTY SHILLABEER: I thought, why did he have to turn back and chase them? But then he would have been taken anyway. They were after them, so... I don't think they ever would have got out of it.
SAKAI: I saw the gunner throw his hands up and collapse. Without the interfering stream of bullets from the turret, I closed in to 20 yards and held the gun trigger down, aiming for the right wing. Seconds later, flames streamed out and spread to the left wing.
HENRY SAKAIDA, Sakai's biographer: I asked Mr Sakai, well, what was your feeling at that time when this was happening? And he said, well, at that moment, when the airplane caught on fire, and it was going down, then that's when he knew, okay, they didn't have a chance. The combat was over, they were going to die.
So he was watching them intensely and was muttering under his breath. He was saying, "Come on, come on, come on." And I asked him, Well, what did you mean by that? And he said, well, it's like he was hoping that they didn't have to die, that they were such heroes that it was just sad to see them die like that. But then at the same time he knew they were the enemy and so... he felt sympathy for them. You know, they had put up a good fight, now they were going to die, and there was nothing he could do, there was nothing THEY could do.
JIM COWAN: I didn't know that Warren had been shot down that day. In fact, it was quite some time before any of us knew, because he was posted missing, believed killed, but he was never confirmed until the end of the war when they found his plane.
HENRY SAKAIDA: After the Cowan combat, the Zeros landed back at base and it caused quite a consternation. The Zero pilots failed in their mission and Sakai told me that a bulletin was issued to other air groups in the area stating that, you can't take these Aussies very lightly. Their fighter pilots are great, but watch out for the Hudson pilots because even when outnumbered, vastly outnumbered, they'll turn against you and they will fight you. And so after that the Zero pilots were very, very careful when they came upon Hudsons, you know.
You know, Sakai, when I talked to him about the enemy Hudson pilot's flying abilities, he said, "That guy was a master! I mean, he just took his bomber and he flew it like a fighter!" And he'd never seen that done. He said the guy was a tremendous pilot, a tremendous pilot, he knew exactly what he was doing, and if I were to tell Mr Sakai today that the guy was a novice pilot, he would probably shake his head in wonder. That's amazing.
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Originally Posted by csadn
Yep a couple of Hudsons would fit real well for early Pacific & New Guinea missions.
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