Nagasaki Pilot Training School Monument
Isahaya City, Nagasaki Prefecture
Starting in 1938, the Ministry of Communications and Transportation established Pilot Training
Schools throughout Japan to serve as training facilities for pilots who would
work in the Ministry primarily to carry mail by plane. During the Pacific War,
which started in December 1941, the Navy and Army utilized these Pilot Training
Schools as sources for trained pilots.
Men who trained at Nagasaki Pilot Training School and who survived
the war formed an association after the war and erected a monument in April 1995
at the former site of the school, where the Isahaya City Softball Field is now located.
The monument face has engraved "Nagasaki Pilot Training School Site" and
shows engraved drawings of ten students facing two instructors. The monument has the following inscription
on its left edge:
This training school opened its national civilian pilot training
facilities in April 1942. Until the end of the war, over 120 instructors
gave rigorous Navy-style training to 441 students in the regular course of
study who entered at 12 or 13 years of age and 162 pilot trainees who
entered at 17 or 18 years of age. These students resided at Isahaya during
their training.
Among those who graduated at 18 or 19 years of age, 102 men devoted
themselves as Navy airmen in World War II, and over 50 died in battle as
members of torpedo squadrons, special attack squadrons [1], and other units.
This monument has been erected for the repose of the souls of those men
who died in battle and as a remembrance to the youths of survivors.
The Navy took over Nagasaki Pilot Training School in March 1944 and
established the Isahaya Air Group. The Isahaya
Naval Air Group Monument, erected in 1973, stands a short ways down the road
from the Nagasaki Pilot Training School Monument.
Note
1. The Japanese word for special attack squadrons
is tokkōtai, which carried out suicide attacks against Allied ships near
the end of WWII. The Japanese Navy's special attack squadrons that carried out
aerial suicide attacks were called Kamikaze (or by the formal name of Shinpu).
Engraved drawings of ten students and two instructors
on face of Nagasaki Pilot Training School Monument
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