''Samurai!'' is a 1957 autobiographical book by Saburo Sakai co-written with Fred Saito and Martin Caidin. It describes the life and career of

Saburō Sakai was a Japanese naval aviator and flying ace (''"Gekitsui-O"'', ) of the Imperial Japanese Navy during World War II. Sakai had 28–64 aerial victories, including shared ones, according to official Japanese records, but his autobiography, ''Samura ...

, the Japanese combat aviator who fought against American fighter pilots in the

Pacific Theater The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean (or, depending on definition, to Antarctica) in the south, and is bounded by the continen ...

of World War II, surviving the war with 64 kills as one of

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

's leading flying aces. Caidin wrote the prose of the book, basing its contents on journalist Fred Saito's extensive interviews with Sakai as well as on Sakai's own memoirs. According to an analysis of official Japanese records, Sakai had 28 aerial victories, which includes shared victories. The same source claims that Martin Caidin intentionally inflated those numbers to generate publicity for that book. It also attests that many of the stories written in his books are fiction and that the claims made in ''Samurai!'' are very different from the content of Japanese works on his life.''Zero Fighters of Our Grandfathers'' . Kodansha. . pp. 315–325.

References

1957 non-fiction books Aviation books {{mil-bio-book-stub

See also

References