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On 8 August 1942, during the Betty attack off Guadalcanal, many bombers were shot down. You will find in several books that the destroyer USS Bagley approached a floating Betty and saw the crew sitting in the wings. The Japanese airmen fired their pistols on the US sailors and then commited suicide. But in the book "the first team and the guadalcanal campaign", I learned that at the same time, US ships captured 9 survivors of the Japanese bombers.
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See my post #4, above. Only 49 POWs for all of 1942 and the majority of those were sailors from a heavy cruiser that was sunk.
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Tainan Kokutai lost 20 aircraft over New Guinea in 1942 according to one source. I know that at least two pilots were captured, so prisoners are at least 10% of the total losses (not counting pilots that survived being shot down and returned to their unit).
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I thought we were talking about air crew, not just fighter pilots. Furthermore, it is really stretching things to extrapolate across the entire war years from one incident involving 20 aircraft and 2 captured pilots in 1942. The U.S. War Department kept very thorough and accurate figures on how many Japanese air crew were captured and the exact circumstances. If you wish to pursue the subject, you should be able to find some books that give that information. I know, for example, that the ATIS submitted a report at the end of the war on this to the Prisoner of War Board in Washington that gave Japanese POW statistics for the entire Pacific war. Very few Japanese air crew were taken prisoner, and those that were captured were usually too badly wounded or injured to take their own lives.
L.