Winged Samurai Book Review

Winged Samurai: Saburo Sakai and the Zero Fighter Pilots

By Henry Sakaida

Softcover, 159 pages, heavily illustrated

Published by Champlin Fighter Museum, August 1985

Language: English

ISBN-10: 091217305X

ISBN-13: 978-0912173054

Dimensions: 8.2 x 0.5 x 11.0 inches

First-hand accounts of Japanese airmen from the Pacific War are rare in the West; biographies are almost unique. In Winged Samurai author Henry Sakaida presents the results of several interviews with Saburo Sakai, who is recognized as Japan’s fourth-highest scoring ace.

There has been a biography of Sakai’s exploits published in English, Samurai! By Martin Caiden, an adaptation of Sakai’s own Ôzora no samurai (Samurai in the Sky). It appears Caiden took several liberties with the narrative in order to dramatize the account for Western readers. These are not limited to the construction of details and conversations, Sakai himself indicates many incidents related in Caiden’s book never actually happened.

Henry Sakaida corrects Sakai’s…