Pearl Harbor Squadron Renamed for Japanese Fighter Ace
By Tom Highway
“We’ve done nothing but honor the so-called ‘winners’ and ‘good guys’ since that war ended,” says Maj Hugh Wilson, making air quotes with his hands. “I don’t understand why we can’t honor anyone who fought bravely and well in that war, even if they did fight for the ‘wrong’ side.”
Wilson refers to renaming the former Pearl Harbor Composite Squadron to the Saburō Sakai Memorial Composite Squadron. Sakai was a famed aviator in the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) Air Service from 1933 to 1945. His life and time in the IJN was documented in the biography ‘Samurai!’, co-authored by Martin Caidin and Fred Saito. The authors credit Sakai with 64 aerial victories, mostly over American flyers.
Wilson is working hard to justify renaming the squadron, because he’s under pressure from local civic groups to rename the unit again.
“They want me to change the name to something acceptable like ‘Hickam’ or ‘Lt. George S. Welch’. But that’s just the powers-that-be being politically correct,” Wilson says dismissively. “I’m a quarter Japanese-American on my mother’s side. A lot of Hawaiians are. This is part of our heritage. What they’re trying to do is erase our history.”
“Sakai was a top-notch aviator, he deserves the recognition,” continues Wilson. “But apparently just because your government started a couple wars, raped and pillaged its way across the Pacific rim, enslaved and murdered people, committed genocide, impressed women into sex slavery, and barbarically violated the Geneva Conventions, its proud and loyal military members can’t be honored.”
Harold Jaywick, representing one of the groups asking Wilson to rename the squadron, points out that Imperial Japan was not just a war enemy. “It was a horrific regime that committed appalling human rights violations as official policy,” he says. “There’s no way to ignore that.”
Wilson disagrees with this view.
“It’s not right to make value judgments on the behavior of people who lived before we were born,” Wilson says. “It was a different world then, and all that raping, and murdering, and bayoneting POWs was just how things were done.”
