The Last Zero Fighter: Firsthand Accounts from WWII Japanese Naval Pilots - Paperback

by Dan King (Author)

Firsthand accounts from interviews conducted in Japan with five WWII Japanese Naval aviators. All are veterans of the pivotal battles of the Pacific War including; USS Panay, Nanking, Pearl Harbor, Wake Island, Rabaul, Port Darwin, Indian Ocean Raid, Ceylon, Midway, Guadalcanal, Marshall Islands, Tarawa, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, the Kamikaze in the Philippines, the home defense and the dropping of the atomic bomb. The book is 348 pages includes 78 photos (many from the veterans' own albums), 9 original maps and illustrations. Includes an introduction to the Japanese pilot training system for both officers and enlisted men. Each pilot is followed from the time he joined the navy until war's end. They explain in their own words; why they joined the navy, what they thought about the war, about the aircraft they flew, how they felt about their friends and their former adversaries. The interviews were conducted firsthand in their own language by KING who is a linguist and Pacific War historian who spent 10 years living in Japan. King has interviewed 97 Japanese WWII veterans and this is the first in a series of books on their experiences.

Author Biography

Dan King earned his bachelors' degree in Japanese in 1986 before moving to Japan for 10 years. He was later awarded the Japanese Ministry of Education's top level of language certification for non-native speakers. He has worked as a tech/language adviser on several movies and dozens of documentaries about the Pacific War. As of September 2014, King has interviewed 100 WWII Japanese Army and Navy veterans, and met well over 250 of them in the past 30 years. He worked as a historical / technical / language / researcher adviser on several movies and documentaries: Windtalkers, Last Samurai, Flags of Our Fathers, Only the Brave, HBO's The Pacific, Wake Island Alamo of the Pacific, and others. He traveled to many of the WWII battle sites in search of firsthand knowledge of what the veterans experienced at: Iwo Jima, Chichi Jima, Saipan, Guam, Rabaul, Singapore, Tinian, Peleliu, Midway, Wake Island, Peleliu, Ponape, Yap, Guadalcanal, Rabaul, Truk Lagoon, Okinawa, Nanking China, and many others.