![]() ![]() When Koga took off for Dutch Harbor that June morning, he probably expected to complete his mission and return to base as usual. But then, what Japanese pilot wouldn’t swagger with the indomitable Zero at his command? In an undated service photo, he looks directly into the camera, almost smiling, his left hand tucked into the pocket of his uniform. On June 4, with orders to bomb the Allied base Dutch Harbor on Unalaska Island, young pilot Tadayoshi Koga, thought to have been 19 years old, strapped himself into his plane and prepared to carry out the mission of the Imperial Army. Whatever the rationale, sending Zeroes to the Aleutians would prove to be a critical intelligence error for Japan. Others think Japanese troops planned to island-hop through the Aleutians to Alaska Territory, and then invade the mainland United States through Canada. Some historians believe the Aleutian attack was an attempt by Japan to lure American naval power away from Midway Island, which would make an Imperial victory there easier. Uniformly barren and rocky, the islands offer no support for human settlement. The inhospitable chain of 120 small islands sweeps westward some 1,000 miles from mainland Alaska into the Pacific Ocean. In fact, no one knows exactly why Japan invaded the Aleutians. It’s curious, then, that Japan allocated any of its mighty fighter planes to an attack on the Aleutian Islands in June 1942 instead of saving them all for the massive campaign it was poised to mount at Midway Island. So formidable was the Zero that the official American strategy for pilots attacked by the Japanese fighter boiled down to this: run away. In that sortie, 36 Zeroes took on 60 British aircraft-and shot down 27 of them, with the loss of just a single Zero. The Zero cemented its reputation in an April 1942 battle with well-trained English pilots over Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Fast and powerful, it was known as a nearly invincible fighter plane with a 12:1 kill ratio in dogfights with the Chinese as early as 1940. ![]() Those servicemen had heard of the Zero’s reputation, though. Until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, most American servicemen had never seen a plane like the “Zero,” so named not because of the prominent Rising Sun emblem painted on the side but for the manufacturer’s type designation: Mitsubishi 6M2 Type 0 Model 21. ![]()
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