He had found himself in a classic cartwheel attack with each Hellcat in turn making its run on him. Each time he pushed the limits of his Zero just enough to avoid destruction. He later said that all they would have had to do was station one fighter in a counter weave of the cartwheel to nail him. But they didn't. He remarked about how it was a good example of American pilots being much more able than the average Japanese fighter pilot by this time, but also all the American veterans who could even come close to his level of expertise and experience had long since been rotated home to serve as trainers.
Finally he got close enough to the alto cumulus cloud to risk entering, and apparently he wasn't followed. By the time that he could emerge from the cloud and recover from all the wind sheer his aircraft had been subjected to, he found he was less than ten feet over the Pacific!
And when he got back to Iwo Jima? The troops on the ground had gotten a good look at his struggle in the air, and his ground crew told him to their rank astonishment that his Zero didn't have a single hole in it!
In his lifetime of combat, Sakai reported that he never faced an enemy of equal ability who had a plane equal to his Zero (in his opinion). Only three pilots did he ever acknowledge as having
possibly matched his own skills, but they were all in weaker planes, and he bested them all.
The first, an Australian P-39 which he drove into a New Guinea mountain.
The second, an Australian
Hudson (also over New Guinea) which he overmatched with 6 other Zeroes. But the Australian pilot of that Hudson flew so aggressively that he almost shot down some of Sakai's wingmen! The Hudson model he faced had tremendous forward firepower. But once they finally took out the mid-section gunner the Hudson was doomed.
The last was a US Navy F4F pilot (at Guadacanal) who was so good that in Sakai's opinion it was more a matter of him being the younger pilot that he simply wore down an obviously much older pilot, until he crippled the F4F. He was so impressed by the Wildcat pilot's performance that he drew up alongside the American, waved his wings, and pointed him towards the Guadacanal shore. Once there, he indicated by hand signals to the American to invert his crippled fighter (the pilot appeared to be wounded as well) to parachute out over the beaches controlled by the US 1st Marine Division.
Almost immediately after this event, Sakai launched an attack on a group of F4Fs, coming up behind and below them, to gain a tactical advantage, even leaving his two wingmen behind him. The F4Fs closed formation, meaning they hadn't seen him. As he closed to within a hundred yards, he saw that he was not attacking Grumman Wildcats, but rather attacking Grumman Avenger torpedo planes, an aircraft he had never seen before, but at a distance and from behind looked similar to Wildcats. In fact, the Avenger crews HAD seen him, and closed up for defense. Now he had sixteen 50 caliber machine guns all pointed at his one little unarmored plane. He had no choice but to charge right in. If he dived they would have blasted him and his cockpit to pieces, if he turned they would have ripped his plane to shreds.
It was then that he lost his eye.
How he managed to fly the hundreds of miles back to his base with one eye gone and the other oozing blood, we can never know... But it undoubtably saved his life. Not just then, but in keeping him out of combat until the closing months of the war.
Courtesy of "Samurai!", the memoirs of Saburo Sakai
