Hiroyoshi Nishizawa was the deadliest fighter pilot Japan ever produced, credited with around 87 aerial victories, and much of his killing was done in the skies over the very island we talked about today, Guadalcanal. They called him the Devil.
Nishizawa was a thin, sickly-looking, moody young man on the ground, quiet and withdrawn, prone to illness. In the air he transformed into something otherworldly. His control of his Zero fighter was so brilliant, his aerobatics so unpredictable and precise, that his own comrades were awed by him, and they gave him the nickname the Devil for the way he seemed to defy the limits of the aircraft. He flew with the famous Tainan air group, part of a trio of aces alongside Saburo Sakai, and he ran up an enormous score in the brutal air battles over New Guinea and the Solomons, including the long, grinding fight for the air over Guadalcanal in 1942, where Japanese and American pilots died by the hundreds.
His end was strangely quiet for such a warrior. In 1944, during the fighting in the Philippines, Nishizawa was not shot down in a dogfight. He was killed while riding as a passenger in a transport aircraft, which was caught and shot down by American fighters. Japan's greatest ace died unarmed, in the back of another man's plane.
Here is the honest part about his recognition, and it says something about how Japan differed from the other combatants in these stories. The Japanese military almost never decorated its living pilots. There were no medals pinned on aces for their victories the way the Germans handed out Knight's Crosses or the Allies their stars and crosses. Saburo Sakai, who flew beside Nishizawa, noted with some bitterness that he received no decorations at all during the entire war. Recognition in the Japanese system came overwhelmingly in death, through posthumous promotion in rank and, for the war dead, the Order of the Golden Kite, the empire's decoration for valor in battle, along with enshrinement and honor as a fallen hero. So Nishizawa, like so many of Japan's fighting men, was honored not in life for what he did, but after he was gone, promoted in rank posthumously and mourned as one of the great aces of the war. The Devil, who ruled the sky over Guadalcanal and died in the passenger seat.