RCU Forums - View Single Post - Knowledge Quiz for Warbird wiz
View Single Post
Old 08-30-2018, 10:13 AM
  #16237  
Hydro Junkie
 
Hydro Junkie's Avatar
 
Join Date: Nov 2004
Location: Marysville, WA
Posts: 10,524
Received 130 Likes on 123 Posts
Default

Actually, four of six Wildcats that tried to land on Ford Island were shot down and the pilot's killed long after the attack was over. There were two more Enterprise plane shot at, during the attack. A pair of Dauntless dive bombers had flown ahead with orders to land at Pearl Harbor. They arrived during the attack with one plane landing on Ford Island with holes in it's wings. The second was shot down by a combination of Japanese fighters and friendly FLAK. I know the pilot was able to bail out before the plane crashed, don't know about the gunner.
One other bit of not well known trivia is that one of the Japanese fighter pilots intentionally crashed his plane at, IIRC, Bellows Field. The Japanese pilots were all told to do everything they could to return to the ships but, in the case of this pilot, flying an A6M-2, he told others in his squadron that if his plane was damaged, he would dive into any target he saw rather than try to nurse the plane back to the ship. As luck would have it, his plane was hit and, after signaling to another pilot what he was going to do, he rolled the plane onto it's back and dived into a building, destroying it between the ensuing explosion and avgas fire. I believe he was the first pilot to make what would later be referred to as a Kamikaze strike