Amazingly, warrior Saburo Sakai survived the war!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabur%C5%8D_Sakai
Saburō Sakai was born on August 25, 1916, in Saga, Japan, into a family of samurai ancestry whose ancestors had taken part in the Japanese invasions of Korea but who were forced to make a living as farmers following haihan-chiken in 1871.
Early in 1942, Sakai was transferred to Tarakan Island in Borneo and fought in the Dutch East Indies. The Japanese high command had instructed fighter patrols to down all enemy aircraft encountered, whether they were armed or not. On a patrol with his Zero over Java, just after shooting down an enemy aircraft, Sakai encountered a civilian Dutch Douglas DC-3 flying at low altitude over dense jungle. Sakai initially assumed it was transporting important people and signaled to its pilot to follow him; the pilot did not obey. Sakai came down and got much closer to the DC-3. He spotted a blonde woman and a young child through the window, along with other passengers. The woman reminded him of Mrs. Martin, an American who had occasionally taught him as a child in middle school and had been good to him. He decided to ignore his orders and flew ahead of the pilot, signaling him to go ahead. The pilot and passengers saluted.
His squadron included fellow aces Hiroyoshi Nishizawa and Toshio Ōta. On the night of May 16, Sakai, Nishizawa and Ota were listening to a broadcast of an Australian radio program, when Nishizawa recognized the eerie "Danse Macabre" of Camille Saint-Saëns. Inspired by this, Nishizawa came up with the idea of doing demonstration loops over the enemy airfield. The next day, at the end of an attack on Port Moresby that involved 18 Zeros,[4] the trio performed three tight loops in close formation over the allied air base. Nishizawa indicated he wanted to repeat the performance. Diving to 6,000 ft (1,800 m), the three Zeros did three more loops, without receiving any AA fire from the ground. The following day, a lone allied bomber came roaring over the Lae airfield and dropped a note attached to a long ribbon of cloth. The soldiers picked up the note and delivered to the squadron commander. It read "Thank you for the wonderful display of aerobatics by three of your pilots. Please pass on our regards and inform them, that we will have a warm reception ready for them, next time they fly over our airfield". The squadron commander was furious and reprimanded the three pilots for their stupidity, but the Tainan Kokutai's three leading aces felt Nishizawa's aerial choreography of the "Danse Macabre" had been worth it.
If you have never read Sakai’s biography “Samurai!”, do so. He wrote it with Martin Caidin and Fred Saito and it is a very good read. Amazingly, Sakai not only survived the war, he scored a couple more air-to-air kills while flying with only one good eye and fought off around fifteen Hellcats in his lone Zero to land safely when stationed on Iwo Jima in 1944.
Sakai, interestingly, was not shot up over Guadalcanal by a fighter. He attempted a bounce of what he thought were Wildcats but turned out to be Dauntless dive-bombers (Sakai identified them as Avengers in “Samurai!”). He got two, but their rear gunners shot through his unarmored canopy and grievously wounded him.
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