The Devil

He was the antithesis of what a fighter pilot should be.  Tall, introverted and sickly, he preferred not the company of his peers, but solitary intellectual pursuits such as reading and martial arts.  He kept no written account of his victories, tactics or techniques.  Very little is written about the man, and even less is understood.  In the air, he was singularly focused, not on the art of flying, but on the art of destroying the enemy. Yet he was unequalled at the controls of an aircraft.  It is said he flew as if he was the aircraft.  His closest friend, famed Japanese fighter ace Saburo Sakai, said of him:

       "Never have I seen a man with a fighter plane do what (he) would do with his Zero.  His aerobatics
       were all at once breathtaking, brilliant, totally unpredictable, impossible, and heart-stirring to witness."

He did not revel in his victories, yet loathed ending an engagement without one.  He was sullen, moody and, at times, full of self doubt.  His vision of his own fiery fate impelled him to request transfer to the divine wind, or kamikaze, of the honored special attack squadrons.  The request was denied, but the fate was granted.  He was the highest ranking ace of Imperial Japan.  His name was Warrant Officer Hiroyoshi Nishizawa, but to the allied pilots of the pacific theater he was known as The Devil of Rabaul, or simply “The Devil”.

His A6M3 Model 22 Zero fighter, tail code UI-105, looked as sinister as his sobriquet.  A Mitsubishi product, its factory applied gray paint was haphazardly over-sprayed and splattered with dark green to meet a 1943 directive that all combat aircraft will have two-tone camouflage .  In doing so, the ground crews of the 251^st Kokutai created a monster of an airplane, so fitting of The Devil. 

He was a feared member of the Clean-Up Trio, a triad of Japanese aces whose collective scoreboard tallied 185 victories.  With fellow members Saburo Sakai and Toshio Ota, Nishizawa once performed  an inconceivable aerial display directly over the allied airfield at Port Moresby; a taunting  “dance of death” consisting of six aerial loops on a dare that he himself perpetuated.   As the air show transpired, the island’s entire population of allied air forces squinted skyward, awed by the spectacle of three enemy pilots performing a ballet of exquisite airmanship.  Then, like ghosts, the three Zeroes slipped away into the pacific sky.  Not a shot was fired by either side during the entire demonstration.

In his short career, Nizhizawa scored an unofficial 87 victories (some figures show as high as 211), fighting his way through the New Guinea, Guadalcanal and Philippines campaigns.   He was Imperial Japan’s leading ace. It is entirely probable that, had he survived, a pilot of Nishizawa’s talent and focus would never have been defeated by an allied pilot in air combat.  The point is moot, however:  On October 26, 1944 he was a passenger on a Japanese transport plane that was summarily shot down and destroyed by U.S. Navy Hellcats.  There were no survivors. Hiroyoshi Nishizawa, The Devil of Rabaul, was 24 years old.     

THE MODEL:  Building scale models is a learning experience, whether you are a novice builder or a master craftsman.  With several years experience under one’s belt and access to proper tools and equipment, the learning curve tends to flatten out a bit. But just when you think you have a handle on things, reality and shortcomings slap you square in the face.  This is one of the reasons building scale models still fascinates me.  There are two truths in model building:  One, there is ALWAYS room for improvement; and two, a build NEVER goes as planned. Such were my follies trying to build and paint Hasegawa’s 1/48 scale A6M3 “Zero Fighter” Type 22 in Hiroyoshi Nishizawa’s sinister looking scheme.

Things started out relatively easily and quickly. Coming out of the cellophane, the sprues and parts were crisp and free of defects.  After soaking the trees in soapy water, I turned my attention to the cockpit.  I quickly threw together a resin office with an add-on Ultracast seat, shot it with a blend of US interior green and white (my Mitsubishi “office” formula), washed and dry-bushed to good effect. 

While I was at it, I decided to paint the wheel wells, which I normally do at this stage. I debated coating the wheel wells with aotake, the clear greenish-blue lacquer that was applied to corrosion-prone interior aluminum surfaces of Japanese aircraft. In fact, at one point I did.  Most current sources state aotake was not used in the landing gear bays or interior doors of Mitsubishi-built A6M aircraft (all A6M3’s were Mitsubishi-built), but only on Nakajima-built variants.  I am under the impression that it was used to some capacity, but a majority of recent historical opinion cannot be ignored.  Not to discount the many expert modelers out there who have chosen otherwise, but I ultimately opted to paint over the aotake with the exterior IJN gray color.  Some facts are lost to history and this seems to be one of them.

I next assembled the fuselage, wings and empennage structures with no problems whatsoever.   The resin cockpit needed a few minor tweaks to get it to snuggle into the fuselage, but that is to be expected.  As I prepped for painting, I had a minor setback: While sanding the top fuselage seam, I inadvertently sanded off a very fine recessed panel line on the starboard spine running directly behind the cockpit to the tail. When I tried to re-scribe the line (admittedly, scribing panel lines is my Achilles heel), I compounded the problem by inadvertently gouging a deep non-conforming line half the length of the fuselage.  My lack of attention and bad scribing technique was turning this “easy” build into a nightmare. 

After a self-imposed time-out and a restored faith in my abilities, I tackled the sanding and re-scribing issues with success, and moved on to painting.  Now, another nightmare awaited me.  And this one was a show-stopper.  Instead of decals, I decided to spray a red undercoat where the hinomarus (“disc of the sun” – the Japanese national insignia) were positioned, and mask over the red paint with discs cut from tape.  I would then paint the entire model with IJN gray and remove the masks to reveal the red insignia. Simple enough…or so I thought.  After painting the red base coat and letting it dry, I cut discs with my Olfa circle cutter out of blue painter’s tape and placed them into position.  I then sprayed the entire model with a special paint mix that approximated IJN gray.  So far so good.  Alas, when all was dry, I removed the tape discs… and pulled off ALL of the underlying red paint!  Panic time.  I was left with a perfectly painted Japanese aircraft, with one major exception: where the red national insignia should have been was nothing but shiny gray styrene plastic.  Bad technique again.  I hadn’t primed or prepped the surface at all!  My wife thought I was suffering from Tourette’s syndrome because of the shrieks and swear words emanating from my work shop.  I took a break, thought about it for a few days, and realized I had a few options, one of which was starting over (which truthfully was never considered).  I ended up re-cleaning, re-sanding and otherwise re-prepping the surface, which I should have done in the first place.  The second attempt went much better and things luckily turned out okay.   

Now it was time to confront the camouflage pattern.  Nishizawa’s chaotic scheme presented problems in representing it accurately.  First of all, the scheme is entirely unique.  Unlike standard schemes, the field-applied camouflage was a one off creation of a hurried ground crewman.  This uniqueness was further exacerbated by chipped and coral-blasted paint along the leading edges and fuselage caused by prop wash.  Due to the significance of the man who flew it and two famous photographs of the actual aircraft in flight, Nishizawa’s A6M3 has become a signature image, an historical trademark so to speak… much like Eddie Van Halen’s famous guitar.  They are both instantly recognizable yet extremely hard to duplicate. 

Specifically, the small camouflage pattern on the port side fuselage (just aft of the engine cowling) was so unique that it remains the primary signature of his aircraft.  After applying the haphazard overcoat of dark green in the field, the ground crewman evidently finished off (or started) his handiwork with a flourish of fluid loops and arches, much like a graffiti artist painting the letter “M” with a spray can or brush.  I consider myself above average with an airbrush, but duplicating this characteristic freehand at 1/48 scale was next to impossible.  I also knew that, if I could somehow pull it off, it would be the defining detail of a spot-on depiction of this aircraft.  Carefully hand painting the pattern was an option, but I quickly dismissed it after much thought and more than a few test failures.  Eventually I came up with a solution that took several days to pull together:  Using photographs of the actual aircraft and professional illustrations as references, I designed the small aft-cowling pattern using Corel’s Photo Paint graphics software.  When I had what I thought was a decent, faux-airbrush facsimile, I sized it, adjusted the RGB formula to match Polly Scale’s IJN Green paint and increased the resolution to photo quality.  After adjusting the gamma and a few test runs on the printer, I printed my computer-generated airbrush pattern on a sheet of Experts Choice clear decal paper made especially for laser printers.   (I also designed the notional starboard pattern, albeit from scratch and with complete artistic license, as no known references exist of the starboard pattern of this aircraft). I gloss coated the areas just aft of the cowling on both sides of the fuselage.  Very carefully (the color coating of laser printed decals is extremely fragile and prone to cracking), I slid both port and starboard decals into place.  They looked authentic, and when carefully blended with paint, my little idea came to life.  I was tickled pink, and for the first time in many weeks, I felt I was going to get the model finished.   

I applied the rest of the paint job by dabbing on IJN green with small flat brush and then blending it in with my Iwata HP-C airbrush, being careful to vary the consistency to achieve the desired look.  Because the green was field-applied to an existing scheme, the upper wing and fuselage hinomarus were not masked and edged with a clean border.  I used a freehand technique to portray this detail, which created an imperfect halo around the insignia. 

To simulate the faded and blasted appearance of the leading edges and areas of the upper wings that fell within the propeller arc, I used both the point of a toothpick and an old airbrush needle dipped in the IJN gray to create the miniscule paint chipping and sand blast effect so common of land-based fighters operating from coral islands.  It makes a nice visual transition from green to gray in this highly weathered area of the aircraft.

A note about my interpretation of the dorsal paint scheme: Careful study of the famous in-formation photo of his aircraft reveals that Nishizawa’s UI-105 had a broken scheme of green and gray running the length of the dorsal spine of the aircraft, from the aft canopy to the vertical stabilizer.  I interpreted this as the ground crew’s hasty application of green paint to areas on the aircraft which could be easily reached from the ground, i.e., fuselage sides, vertical surfaces and tops of wings.  Just an educated guess, but it looks extremely cool.

 For the tail code decals, I chose to depict the “105” sans the “UI”.  This is another contestable area of research.  In his book Imperial Japanese Aces, 1937-45, Henry Saikada points out that “the tail code of this fighter was originally UI-105, but at various times the prefix “UI” was painted out with the hastily applied green daubed over the remainder of the aircraft’s previously gray fuselage.”  Others have suggested that the ‘UI” was photographically removed in the two existing photos of UI-105 by Japanese intelligence in an effort to thwart tracing Nishizawa (Japan’s top ace) to a specific unit.  Either explanation could be correct; ultimately I decided to go with the sans “UI” scheme.

I then turned my attention to the spinner and propeller assembly.  It is apparent in photos that Nishizawa’s spinner was painted up to a point just forward of the prop blades.  What color this was is also contestable.  Several professional illustrators show it as green, while others portray it as brown.  Japanese aircraft historian Jim Lansdale has noted that the rear prop blades of A6M3-22’s were painted dark brown and the Mitsubishi factory was beginning to produce all-brown propellers during the IJN color scheme transition of mid-1943.  In the end, I chose to go with brown, for no other reason than it seems logical that the spinner carried the same color scheme as the aft prop blades and, graphically, the contrast looked better.  Regardless of what color the actual spinner was, it was severely weathered from both the salted airstream and harsh ground effects of the coral islands in which Nishizawa operated this aircraft from. After painting the prop and spinner with Alclad II aluminum, I carefully masked off the spinner with a strip of Parafilm M, a paraffin-based medical film that adheres to compound curves better than anything on the market.  After masking, I lightly faded in the brown with my airbrush; heavier at the demarcation line and thinner towards the tip of the spinner.  I finished things up by painting the aft-facing prop blades dark brown and finally joining the propeller and spinner assembly.

The canopy, as always, was a challenge.  Working with clear plastic is tough enough, but the bird-cage structure of the A6M canopy frame makes it a tougher…and you only get one shot at it.  After a dipping in Future, I carefully masked the canopy and windscreen, shot an initial coat of blue-black (to simulate interior framing) and followed up with a couple of light coats of IJN gray.  Decent results were attained. 

After that, the engine was built, and I sprayed the cowling blue-black.  Most A6M3 cowlings were glossy, but quickly faded in the relentless sun of the south pacific.  Photographs show Nishizawa’s cowling to be slightly glossy, so to portray this, I buffed the flat paint to a semi-gloss with a patch of cotton t-shirt.  I then used a sharpened graphite pencil to simulate chipping around the cowling latches and vents.  The engine was completed and, with the cowling, was slipped into place and now I had an airplane.  I finished things up by spraying the gear struts with Krylon gloss black and Alclad II chrome silver.  After careful weathering and dulling things down a bit, I mounted the gear at a two degree toe-in and attached the doors and other various hardware items.  The pitot tube and exhaust stacks were then glued into place.  After a few touch ups and a bit of weathering with a rubbed-out coat of raw umber oil wash, I flat coated the model with Polly Scale clear flat.  I attached the prop and spinner and Hiroyoshi Nishizawa’s A6M3 Zero was finally complete.

This simple build ended up being extremely hard to pull together, especially with conflicting research and a paint scheme that was tremendously difficult to portray.  True to the rule of thumb mentioned at the beginning of this post, nothing went as planned and I learned much from my efforts.  A special thanks to the Mr. Wayne Little at WW2 Aircraft.net and the research of Mr. Jim Lansdale and others on J-aircraft.com.  Their expert opinions and research significantly helped in the accuracy of this model. As always, thanks for visiting.  Enjoy the pics and stay tuned for upcoming builds. Cheers!