Mitsuo Fuchida

Japan state institutions 1902–1976 ○ Natural causes

Naval aviator who led the first wave at Pearl Harbor and wrote the disputed "five minutes" account of Midway

Born in Nara Prefecture, he was a naval aviator who led the first wave of the attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. At Midway, recovering from an appendectomy, he was on Akagi's bridge, and when the ship burned he broke both ankles escaping down a rope. After the war he became a Christian convert and evangelist in the United States and Europe, and in 1951 he and a colleague published an account of Midway from the Japanese side. His "five minutes" story of decks crowded with armed counterstrike aircraft long passed as fact, but Parshall and Tully and other historians have refuted it, and other claims of his have been criticised as self-serving.