Petty Officer Koga looked desperately for a place to get his zero on the ground, and just a few miles from Dutch Harbor he found the island of Akutan. Ironically his landing on Akutan may have turned Dutch Harbor into a crucial American victory.
Aerial Combat with Japan in 1942 meant fighting Japan’s premier warplane, the Mitsubishi A6M Zero, and among warplanes the Zero had no equal. American pilots who went up against the fabled Zero knew it to be the best warplane in the sky—a huge advantage to the Japanese. The formidable Zero destroyed American planes and ships and killed American pilots and sailors at a frightening rate.
Link to another story “Icy Fog Defended Dutch Harbor”
The Japanese could not under any circumstances allow the Americans any opportunity to study the Zero. Standing orders in the Japanese Navy required pilots still in the air to destroy any Zero that crash landed in enemy territory, regardless of whether its pilot lived or died.
Flying his zero away from Dutch Harbor after the second June attack, Petty Officer Koga, ran into a sudden problem. Ground fire penetrated an oil line in the plane’s engine. His engine on the verge of seizing, he found Akutan and landed. The landing gear sank into the mud and the plane flipped upside down. Petty Officer Koga died instantly.
Two Japanese pilots flew alongside Koga, but, not knowing whether Koga remained alive, his friends ignored the standing order. They couldn’t bring themselves to destroy the plane.
Five weeks later American soldiers found the Zero upside down but virtually intact. And that discovery may have changed the course of the war in the Pacific.
The Army Air Corps transported the Akutan Zero back to the states where they repaired it. Test pilots flew the Zero; figured out its limits and vulnerabilities. And the Americans devised tactics that allowed American pilots to shoot Zeros out of the sky.
At least one Japanese military historian declared that the value of the Akutan Zero to the Americans rivaled the impact of the American victory at Midway.