Ikkitosen - One warrior, matching one thousand
43 missions - originally made in 2011, now re-vamped for BAT
I guess you've heard of the Master of the Raiden?
"Ah, that Akamatsu..."
Akamatsu Sadaaki has the most colorful reputation of all the Japanese aces. Not everything you read is true, maybe even the smallest part.
He was an exceptional fighter pilot who served for almost 15 years in the IJN and was was 35 years old and still flying when the war ended.
A lot of his career is badly documented or it's hard to tell facts from fiction in some sources. But I tried to recreate the missions in the spirit.
The late Hentry Sakaida pubished an article shortly before his death, when he had begun to translate the long lost personal memoirs of Akatamtsu. It's hard to believe that only in 2017 such a fisrt-source anaysis was undertaken. Sakaida was only beginning to untangle fact and fiction and bad memory on Akamatsu's behalf, whe he passed in 2018. What a book on the matter would have looked like, we will probably never know. However, Sakaida managed in one article to dismantle a few very persistant legends right away.
“Akamatsu stunned his superior officers by his conduct. Instead of attending pilot briefings and waiting on the flight line like the other men, he had his own warning system hooked up in a brothel! He often came racing to the air base in an old car, driving like a demon with one hand, drinking from a bottle held in the other. The sirens were screaming a warning as he bolted from the car to his fighter plane, already warmed up by the mechanics…” (Samurai! Sakai, Caidin, Saito)
What reads like pulp fiction, sometimes really is....
Martin Caidin, Co-author of the English Samurai! book took enormous liberties with the truth. This is where most of the western Akamatsu stories originate. Sakai, who couldn’t read English, did not know this until long after the book was published in the US in 1957. Akamatsu's memoirs date from 1960 and were only available in Japanese and remain unknown in the west, practically forgotten today.
However, Akamatsu was well known by all Japanese aces, and he defintely was a character.
There was clearly a basis for Akamatsu gaining the colorful reputation he had, all basically from his younger days. Young pilots were always known for their rowdy horseplay, drinking, and getting into trouble, and Akamatsu wasn’t unique. But most certainly he never flew combat while intoxicated.
Akamatsu’s superb dogfighting skills, his enormous victory claims, and his ability to survive when outnumbered, made him famous. “I had confidence that I would never get shot down!” he wrote in his memoirs, and he in fact never was. “This confidence helped me survive. I engaged in severe training for over 10 years. I trained physically and spiritually as a pilot every day. Through my experience, I could freely manipulate my fighter plane just like my hands and feet. This requires a training of ten years.”
Some missions in this campaign are simple training flights and trials. This is what defined his abilities. Enjoy them, while the peace lasts....
Akamatsu wrote: “I am frequently asked how many enemy planes I shot down. I don’t remember exactly, but about 350."
Well, there he is again, that Akamatsu!
His confirmed record stands at 27 to 30 victories, dating from 1938 to 1945. Even without the exaggerated stories, the feat of surviving the service and being exceptional at flying makes this character special enough.
I took my own liberties in the briefings of this campaign but I attempt to recreate a colorful career that spans nearly fifteen years against all odds, so please bear with me.
He was a simple human, nothing supernatural, but sometimes we just love the exaggerated stories and the mysteries. It does not take away from the astonishing life in glory and tragedy. What would flyboy stories be without some yarn?
When I first learned about the expression Ikkitosen - One warrior, matching a thousand - I thought this quite fitting for the legend surrounding Akamatsu.
(partially based on an article by Henry Sakaida, 2017)
****** [historical notes]
generally I have tried to provide briefings in a storytelling tone since for me this feels more "in-game".
- caution, "bad language and adult themes" may appear, parental advisory.
Where documented aerial victories are pictured I have made [historical notes].
All is researched to reasonable proportions. If you know more, please contact me.
I rewrote a lot of the briefings in the light of Sakaida's research compared to the old version and I completely rebuild the missions that now take place on the Kanto map, which wasn't even dreamt about back then.
Due to the nature of Il-2, completely realistic re-enactment is rarely possible. You will most likely reach a different score over the 43 missions. More like Akamatsu's own claims I suppose.
enjoy
D/L
https://www.mediafire.com/file/6d70noxg44ovki9/Ikki-BAT.zip/file
Author
Topic: Ikkitosen - the Sadaaki Akamatsu story, converted to BAT WAW (Read 3077 times)
