BIG SCREEN BANZAI!
NEEDED: One each Japanese air armada. MISSION: To bomb, strafe and torpedo the American fleet in the Hawaiian Islands, specifically the Army and Navy installations at Pearl Harbor.
No, this isn't a message from Admiral isoruko Yamamoto aboard his flagship, the aircraft carrier Akagi, riding at anchor on Japan's inland sea in 1939. The above message came from the desk of 20th Century Fox's Elmo Williams, producer of the greatest naval aviation screen epic ever made: TORA! TORA! TORA! Code name for Japan's devastating Pearl Harbor strike.
Elmo Williams has undertaken one of the most formidable tasks in the history of Hollywood film making. The film capital, has always been known for its fantastic jobs of creation and recreation, and most spectaculars hardly cause a shrugged shoulder in this blase film capital, but TORA! TORA! TORA! has the image of Hollywood gaping in disbelief.
The motion picture, now in the making, is the re-creation of that fateful day, 7 December 1941, the events leadng up to it, and a blow by blow description of what happened to our bases and battle fleet in those few disastrous minutes that Sunday morning 28 years ago.
Let's look at the first part of Elmo's directive. NEEDED: A Japanese air armada. A big order indeed.
While there are a scattering of preserved Japanese fighters and assorted combat aircraft in museums throughout the world, only a handful are airworthy and there are no back up spare parts or duplicate airplanes. In order for the picture to have reality in motion, there would have to be plenty of fighters, torpedo bombers and dive bombers launching off carrier decks, forming into attack elements, before re-creating the attack itself. All of this footage would have to be done with airworthy airplanes. When the directors Richard Fleischer and Akira Kurosawa give the orders START ENGINES, they must start, now. There is no time to baby cantankerous old Japanese engines when an air armada is standing by to take to the air and millions of dollars, represented by a completely rebuilt task force is maneuvering at sea . . . that's if you could even find the old Japanese combat birds.
Thus original Japanese types were ruled out. Next idea.
How about building new Japanese aircraft in Japan?
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Left: Fresh from the carrier Akagi, a Va/ and Zefce head for their target, downtown Long Beach. Two of the
over 70 aircraft from the "Fox Air Force" are escorted by an AT-6 from the CAP's 35th Air Rescue Squadron,
flown by CWO Tony Colitti. The Val, a converted BT-13 is flown by civilian test pilot Ray Reynolds and
the "Zefce," a reworfced AT-6 is flown by Captain George Watkins, USN.	(Fox-O'Hara)