One of the biggest problems that the 14th Air Force suffered from was the quality of the aircraft they received. In Tex Hill's memoir he stated that some of his pilots recognized the same aircraft that they flew in training back in the states. While the rest of the USAAF was getting P-51C's and D's they were getting P-51A's and still more P-40's! This stopped when Tex visited the Pentagon and mentioned it to a general there. This was investigated and found to be true. I believe the officer in charge of obtaining replacement aircraft for the 14th had to explain his actions to his superiors with dire consequences to his career.

quote:

Originally posted by ImpStarDuece:

quote:

Originally posted by horseback:
The IJAAF simply was too stubborn to see this in time and had next to nothing to replace it with until the Ki-84 and Ki-100 were developed.

Agree with all your points except the last one. Both the Ki-61 and Ki-44 were there to supplement the Ki-43, if not replace it outright.

The Ki-100 was simply a Ki-61 re-engined with an radial and a turbocharger, granting it better high altitude performance.

Neither was accepted or operated in large numbers in the middle years of the war, partly because the Japanese aviation industry was suffering from material and quality problems, but mostly because the IJAAF brass didn't want those faster but less maneuverable fighters instead of the Oscar.

Nakajima produced the Ki-44 in driblets because its production of Ki-43s and license built Zeros took precedence. There were only about 1,200 of them built, and few were to see overseas service.

Kawasaki produced only 3,000 or so Ki-61-Is, but they were poorly supported overseas and the aircraft was plagued with serviceability problems. It never approached the reliability of the radial engine types, although when it did make contact it did well in the first year of its operation. It was still a year or more behind in terms of development to the American and British types that entered combat at the same time.

The Japanese had a very limited production capacity even before the bombing of the Home Islands; they could have chosen to divert a greater share of that capacity to the Tony and the Tojo, but did not in favor of the slower and lighter designs.

cheers

horseback

quote:

Nakajima produced the Ki-44 in driblets because its production of Ki-43s and license built Zeros took precedence. There were only about 1,200 of them built, and few were to see overseas service.

Not the only reason. An airframe without an engine is not of much use. Production of the Ha.41 engine was stopped in favor of the uprated Ha.109.

Few saw overseas duty?

9th - China
22cd - Japan, China, Philippines, Japan
29th - Formosa, Philippines, Formosa
50th- Burma, Thailand, French Indo-China, Philippines, Formosa
64th - Burma, Thailand
87th - Manchoukuo, Dutch East Indies, Japan
246th - Japan, Philippines, Japan

Some posts make me wonder how WWII got so big at all. The Axis nations just never seemed to have gotten it together
and only fielded problem or outdated equipment. It's a wonder they didn't fight with clubs and spears instead.
No matter what they had, the Allies had on-average much better and many times more of it all.

At least that's how it is after reading posts that lean so hard they could knock an iron lamp post down.

Quote, R_Target: "The "Ichi-Go" offensive is covered with the rest of the CBI in most decent histories of the Pacific War. At any rate, despite the Japanese being able to go where they pleased in eastern China, the offensive had little real value. As Japanese staff officer Shigeru Funaki noted:" Ichigo was a success in a narrow sense, but it did not help our overall strategic position. We still had a million men in China who were denied to the Pacific campaign. Our success in overrunning the B-29 airfields in China simply meant that the Americans moved their bases to the Marianas."


- I fully agree with this assessment, except that two things are probably not so well covered in most histories: First, the scale of these attacks and their successes: This is the first real Japanese use of a true armored division (up to 315 tanks, of which 175 Type 97 mediums), in mass and often with innovative tactics (for the Imperial Army), allowing the defeat, by 120 000 Japanese troops, of American-equipped and trained Chinese troops THREE times their own numbers... (The Chinese had been trained and equipped by the Americans since 1941, and they DID fight much better in 1944-45 than during the 1937-1940 campaign.) These 1944-45 Japanese successes were even compared to "Blitzkrieg" campaigns...

One of the American errors that allowed these Japanese victories was the overemphasis on supplying the 14th Air Force at the expense of the Chinese ground army, convinced as they were that with just air strikes they could stop the Imperial Army.(Also the tacit cease-fire with Mao's communist forces was obviously a great help to the Japanese.)

Still, the damage the 14th Air Force inflicted to the Imperial Army was so great, the Japanese had to mobilize their very last reserves to capture the American airfields. (Japanese Armor, Vol. 5, P.59)

Second, the fact that these Japanese attacks were conducted with far greater professionalism than before, receiving as they did strict, categorical orders forbidding rape, pillage and arson. They were even commanded to extend friendship and mutual respect between the Japanese and their "brothers", "representatives of the great Chinese nation", all this with a pretty phony-sounding slogan of "liberating China from the white-faced opressor"... (Japanese Armor, Vol. 5, p.59)


Quote, Horseback: "as I said earlier, it was simply banditry on a giant scale against a near helpless opponent rather than a legitimate military feat of arms."

Well, let's see a Time Machine run you through that campaign as a Japanese soldier, then we'll talk about it...

Meanwhile, I persist in thinking that the scale of these Japanese Army successes for over a year, all the way up to April 1945, is a bit of a surprise to some around here, as is the notion of several dozens Allied airbases being captured in the Spring of 1945...

I also think it makes a very interesting contrast to what was happening with the Japanese Navy at the very same time...

Even the failed defense of Okinawa, which was in large part an Imperial Army operation, is widely seen now as an AMERICAN failure, because the American losses sustained were so heavy, they dwarfed whatever benefit the Americans could get from the island...

Compare that to Admiral Kurita at Leyte, who turned his ENTIRE Battleship fleet around, in sight of masses of helpless American carriers(!), because a few tiny American destroyers of "Taffy 3" stepped in between, and it really does make a contrast... (This is still seen, I think, as one of the most inexplicable decisions in the entire history of military warfare...) Or these unbelievable "organizing" circles (US radar operators were still shaking their heads at this one 50 years later) of the massive Japanese air strike (at the mid-course portion of the actual attack!)that resulted in the "Great Marianna Turkey Shoot", many miles from their targets...

All this has little to do with how well the Oscar did compared to the A6M Zero, but I wouldn't be surprized if the poor little Oscar wasn't the Zero's retarded cousin in actual kills and accomplishments...

Maybe all these AVG veterans had no cause to get real angry when it was suggested to them that they shot down Oscars, NOT Zeroes!...

Gaston

quote:

Originally posted by Gaston444:
I also think it makes a very interesting contrast to what was happening with the Japanese Navy at the very same time...

..... Nothing happened to the IJN that they hadn't more or less predicted in the original debate about going to war with the US in the first place. Yamamoto knew it was a losing hand and warned the radicals about the likely consequences, but was over-ruled by the radicals and a pliant, ambitious emperor. As for the IJA, perhaps things were going swimmingly in China and Burma, but they too had been ignominiously driven from the Aleutians, the Solomons, New Guinea, destroyed or isolated in situ in a variety of island bastions, and were about to be unceremoniously bundled out of the Philippines.

quote:

Even the failed defense of Okinawa, which was in large part an Imperial Army operation, is widely seen now as an AMERICAN failure, because the American losses sustained were so heavy, they dwarfed whatever benefit the Americans could get from the island...

..... Failure? I'll readily concede it was an expensive purchase in terms of blood, but it was hardly a "failure". The seizure of Okinawa was absolutely necessary to the projected invasion of the Japanese home islands. Without Okinawa, such an operation would have been a logistical impossibility. The fact that Hiroshima and Nagasaki drove Japan to surrender and obviated the invasion plans does not make that logic any less valid.

quote:

Originally posted by Gaston444:
- I fully agree with this assessment, except that two things are probably not so well covered in most histories: First, the scale of these attacks and their successes: This is the first real Japanese use of a true armored division (up to 315 tanks, of which 175 Type 97 mediums), in mass and often with innovative tactics (for the Imperial Army), allowing the defeat, by 120 000 Japanese troops, of American-equipped and trained Chinese troops THREE times their own numbers...

American journalist Theodore White was at Hengyang in June 1944, and describes the state of Chinese troops: "One man in three had a rifle; the rest carried supplies, telephone wire, rice sacks, machine gun parts. Between the unsmiling soldiers plodded blue-gowned peasant coolies who had been impressed for carrier duty. There was not a single motor, not a truck,...not a piece of artillery."

From Major Shigeru Funaki (a tank unit commander for two years in China) again: "As the Chinese had no weapons capable of stopping tanks, they were useful things for us to have.", and "They had no heavy artillery, no armor, and were very poorly organized."

As I already noted, the Chinese troops that were trained and equipped by American forces, away from the influence of Nationalist corruption, fought mostly in Burma.

quote:

One of the American errors that allowed these Japanese victories was the overemphasis on supplying the 14th Air Force at the expense of the Chinese ground army, convinced as they were that with just air strikes they could stop the Imperial Army.(Also the tacit cease-fire with Mao's communist forces was obviously a great help to the Japanese.)

No amount of diverted tonnage over "The Hump" air route would have been sufficient to supply millions of Chinese soldiers, hence the continued emphasis on re-opening the Burma Road. The Nationalists as well as Mao maintained a tacit cease-fire for much of the war, mainly so they could hoard money and supplies intended for their army until the post-war showdown with the communists.

quote:

Second, the fact that these Japanese attacks were conducted with far greater professionalism than before, receiving as they did strict, categorical orders forbidding rape, pillage and arson. They were even commanded to extend friendship and mutual respect between the Japanese and their "brothers", "representatives of the great Chinese nation", all this with a pretty phony-sounding slogan of "liberating China from the white-faced opressor"...

I guess it was a little late for that.

quote:

Meanwhile, I persist in thinking that the scale of these Japanese Army successes for over a year, all the way up to April 1945, is a bit of a surprise to some around here, as is the notion of several dozens Allied airbases being captured in the Spring of 1945...

Maybe somebody is surprised, I don't know. I was unaware that 14AF bases in eastern China numbered in the dozens. Could you name like, say, twelve; and tell which units were stationed there?

quote:

Even the failed defense of Okinawa, which was in large part an Imperial Army operation, is widely seen now as an AMERICAN failure

By whom?

quote:

Compare that to Admiral Kurita at Leyte, who turned his ENTIRE Battleship fleet around, in sight of masses of helpless American carriers(!), because a few tiny American destroyers of "Taffy 3" stepped in between, and it really does make a contrast...

"Masses"= five CVE escort carriers.

Great debate guys, please continue.

Well, getting back to the Ki-43 vs the A6M debate at the tactical level, there is an account by an F4U-1 pilot in late 1943 that a "Zero" rolled so well in a dive at 400 MPH that it forced his early Corsair into aileron overbalance, and he had, as a result, trouble following it around as it switched from one side to the other, always one step ahead of his gunsight piper. "I'd always heard the Zeke's ailerons froze at high speeds, but there was no evidence of this as he switched from side to side, always one step or two ahead of my piper." (I have the US pilot's name and unit somewhere...)

Any evaluation test of even the A6M5 makes it clear no amount of pilot strenght could produce these results...

To me, it seems the only plausible explanation would be that the "Zero" in question was in fact an Oscar.

Even the Ki-84 "Frank" is well-known as having had poor ailerons above 300 MPH, so I wonder if this performance was possible for the Oscar II.

If it was so, it would go a long way towards explaining why the Imperial Army retained it in production for so long (until 1945!), with so many other types available as replacements...

They must have had good experiences with it if they chose to keep such a puny fighter in production for so long...

From the Allied pilot viewpoint, I'm always surprised at how tough an opponent they seemed to think the Ki-43 was: At least tougher than the Ki-61... In one account, eight or twelve P-38s tangled with one Ki-43 Oscar for fifteen minutes, the Ki-43 seemingly loafing around, always breaking into the attacks, and the P-38s all had to abandon after they either ran out of ammo or fuel... Saburo Sakai does mention something similar against Hellcats in an A6M5, but he clearly specified he could only break efficiently to the left side, and any advance anticipation by the Americans of this repeated and predictable move would have spelled instant doom for him... He was abundantly clear on this point...

In detailed late 1944 tests against the P-38J-25, even the weak Ki-43-I seems to keep good handling and roll rates well past 300 MPH IAS: This is a stark contrast to the A6M5 Zero, with its fast deteriorating handling above 230 MPH IAS...

In fact the very fragility of the Ki-43-I seems to indicate good control authority at high speeds, otherwise it would not be so easy to break!

I wonder what else may be out there to indicate why the Imperial Army so consistently preferred the Ki-43 over anything else until very late in the war...

They had plenty of choices, yet that remained their mainstay. Only the Ki-100 seemed to have really eclipsed it in their minds, and they considered the Ki-100 capable of taking on up to three Ki-84s simultaneously in combat tests! The continuing production of the Ki-43 couldn't all have been due to doctrinal dogma...

Gaston

quote:

Originally posted by Gaston444:
I wonder what else may be out there to indicate why the Imperial Army so consistently preferred the Ki-43 over anything else until very late in the war...

They had plenty of choices, yet that remained their mainstay. Only the Ki-100 seemed to have really eclipsed it in their minds, and they considered the Ki-100 capable of taking on up to three Ki-84s simultaneously in combat tests! The continuing production of the Ki-43 couldn't all have been due to doctrinal dogma...

..... Some possible reasons why the Ki-43 might have been favored/retained for so long:

(a) a proven and more-or-less de-bugged design.

(b) easier to maintain in the field.

(c) operationally more reliable.

(d) existing production line.

(e) easier/cheaper to manufacture.

(f) easier to fly for pilots with limited training.

- - -

Please don't ask me where I located this, because I cannot recall at the moment, but one Ki-43 related article I read regarding its use in New Guinea mentioned a Japanese tactic of flying low through the mountain valleys. This restricted airspace played to the Oscar's great advantage in maneuverability and dramatically limited use of the speed and dive advantages of opposing Allied fighters.

home page -- yarchive
index -- yarchive - military net

AVG posts on tactics -- LOT of material here.
Posts on P-40 also getting into tactics used.

Just more reasons WHY to NOT use kill counts when trying to measure aircraft effectiveness and performance:

quote:

The following is my personal opinion as to the reason why we
as a group were so successful. We had a damn good leader whom we
all loved and admired. He was a good teacher, knew his subject and
how to get it across.
We knew exactly what to expect from the Japanese pilots in
almost every emergency, types of formations, their reaction in
combat situations, what we could do and what to avoid. During our
training at Toungoo Burma, this was drilled into us as a result of
months of tactical lectures by Chennault, .
We also knew the capabilities of every Japanese airplane we
would come up against, their speeds, their weakness, size of
armament, and in regard to bombers, the types of attacks to make,
and to avoid.
An illustration of Americans lacking the above knowledge
Chennault had given us, was when the Lockheed P-38s were first
introduced into the Pacific Theater as late as 1943. Saburo Sakai
says in his book, "The Zeros were having a field day, shooting the
P-38 down in large numbers." The Americans, even though the P-38s
had a speed advantage of almost one hundred mph, were using the
turning combat. This is what happens when an airplane isn't used
properly. Saburo further stated, "When the Americans changed their
tactic, the Zero pilots became fearful of the P-38, because it was
decimating the Zeros."
As early as September 1941 Chennault was teaching the AVG to
hit and run, requiring speed, which was the P-40's forte against
the Japanese. When properly used, the P-40 outclassed the Japanese
Zero. It took the military 2 more years before they stumbling on
the secret of successfully fighting the Japanese in the air. In the
meantime hundreds of American pilots lost their lives. This is a
matter of record.
The so called "Thatch weave," was supposedly used for the
first time in the battle of Midway. According to Commander Thatch,
this was a contributing factor in winning this decisive battle.
This weave was mentioned, and used by the AVG, and part of the
AVG's combat report in the AVG's War Diary for Dec 20, 1941, yet
Daniel Ford called it the "Thatch Weave" and gave him credit for
inventing it, saying it was first used in the Battle of Midway.
Even though Commander Thatch said he had heard this tactic had come
out of China.

quote:

>If the P-40B was so brilliant, how come the Zeros and Oscars shot them
>out of the sky in the Pacific and SE Asia war zones in 1941/2? And why

Pilot quality and Training. The Japanese Pilots had come through the
best flight school for dogfighting combats in the world while the US
pilots in 1940 were in a similar situation to the USAF pilots going into
Vietnam. Basically good pilots trained in formation and basic flying
but with little or no tactical combat doctrine. The Flying Tigers, like
Ed Schilling were drawn from this group of pilots but were trained in a
realistic combat doctrine to get the best out of their aircraft vs the
Japanese (i.e. Dive and Zoom Vertical, high speed tactics vs the Japanese
horizontal turning fight.

quote:

>If the P-40B was so brilliant, how come the Zeros and Oscars shot them
>out of the sky in the Pacific and SE Asia war zones in 1941/2?

Answer:
I will answer this question with an analogy. If I give you a high
powered rifle and tell you it is a club, and you foolishly use it as a
club, and I give another person a 45 cal. pistol, and he knows how to
use it. Who do you think will be the victor.

The same applies to fighters.

If you don't use your equipment properly, you are going to lose the
fight. The Americans unfortunately had been taught the antiquated
dogfighting technic that had been used in WW I, and wasn't successful
against the Zero.

The answer to your question. In the early stages of the war the allied
pilots were not using their equipment correctly. (For your
information, the Allies never built an airplane that could turn inside
the Zero below 200 mph.) So how do you think we eventually outfought
them at every engagement. CHANGE OF TACTICS

In 1943, when the P-38 was first used in the Pacific, the Zero pilots
were shooting them down in large numbers. (See Subro Sakai's book
Zero.)

Isn't this amazing when you consider that the P-38's top speed was 100
mph faster than the Zero, and pilots were still trying to dogfight the
Zero.

Chennault had written a manual on fighter tactics, which discouraged
dogfighting as outdated. The military brass disagreed with Chennault,
and as a result Chennault was given an early retirement from the Army
Air Corps. Unfortunately the American military took Chennault for a
Fool. The same as the court martial board had taken Billy Mitchell as
a fool, when he claimed that bombers could sink any battle ship afloat.
Even though he proved it by sinking a German WW I battleship he was
court martialed.

When you use names and numbers and ignore what happened then it's only useful for revision
since the revisionist substitutes what did happen for his own "must have been" version.

I wish I knew who wrote this 2-part post on the Ki-43.

quote:

The Ki-43 was, in some ways, more dangerous to deal with than the A6M, chiefly
because it had a better rate of roll and was armed with two 12.7mm machineguns.
The P-40 driver with a Zero on his tail could usually break the contact with
an aileron roll. This was much less likely with the Ki-43. The Oscar boy
could plant himself behind the P-40 and stay there no matter what the Curtiss
driver did, all the while hammering .50 cal nails that could do some real
damage.
In contrast, the Zero pilot, even if he couldn't be shaken, was doing most of
his firing with rifle caliber mgs which did less damage (although enough of
them in the right places could do the job). The 20mms generally didn't come
into play unless the Zero was in point blank range. A way to stay out of
point blank range was to execute a series of violent aileron turns; this would
allow the P-40 pilot to gradually pull away from the Zero. Once he had
extended sufficiently, he could go into a fast, shallow climb and leave the
Zero behind.
The best bet for the P-40 driver was to have sufficient altitude to dive away
from either the Oscar or Zero, but that wasn't always the situation.
The Ki-43 had better wing loading and power loading than the Zero, had superior
initial acceleration, a better roll rate and a tighter turning circle. It also
had a substantially better rate of climb. That made it an awesome aerobatic
fighter that you absolutely, positively did not dare engage in a dogfight. It
also meant that if you bounced an Oscar and the pilot spotted you, he was
probably going to escape scott free because, should he choose to turn, he could
roll into a tight turn faster than you could follow, whereas if you bounced a
Zero, should he choose to turn, you could follow him, outrolling him and
staying with him for a considerable portion of his turn, often enough to do him
in. (In practice, Oscar and Zero drivers both generally preferred to snap up
into tight loops when bounced, leaving the P-40 driver the option of blowing on
by and clearing the vicinity or sticking around to get a Nip on his six.)

And that links to this page of discussion.

Again, I don't know who wrote this:

quote:

Very true. But through 1942 the AAF boys were always outnumbered and the
Ki-43s would swarm over them like piranhas. The bite of a single one might not
be fatal, but a school of them in a feeding frenzy could bring down the biggest
prey. The P-40s would come home riddled with bullet holes, belly in on the
runway to be dragged off and rebuilt. The P-39s wouldn't come home.

>However as they demonstrated against the Zero, this [superior maneuverability]

means little in combat.

In New Guinea through 1942 and well into 1943, the chief U.S. opponent of the
Ki-43 was the P-39, and the Ki-43 generally made short work of any P-39 it
encountered (since all the P-39's plumbing was in the rear, and poorly
protected, only a few well-placed rounds would finish it off). The boys in the
8 and 35 FGs had a very tough time of it, and soon gave the Bell fighter the
nickname "Fearless Fos****." They didn't think much of the P-39's fighting
qualities at all. Yet against another opponent on another front, the P-39
proved itself formidable--the Soviets apparently thought very highly of the
P-39 and many of their aces flew it. One key to why they thought so highly of
it might be discovered in the flight tests the RAF carried out with a P-39C
against an Me 109E at Duxford in mid-1941. The Bell demonstrated clear
superiority to the 109 in all but one category up to 15,000 ft.--the lower the
altitude the greater the superiority. (The exception was rate of climb, the
advantage of the Bell held only briefly). It was noted that when the 109 was
planted on the tail of the P-39, the Bell was able to out-turn it to such an
extent that it would be on the 109's tail in less than two 360s and there was
nothing the 109 driver could do to shake it--he couldn't outrun it, outdive it
or outturn it.
So if the Russians in their P-39s were getting in low-level dogfights with
109s, the superior maneuverability might have been very important--it might
have been what kept them from getting those few deadly rounds in the cooling
system that would put the Bell down.
It's a reminder not to dismiss the Ki-43 c.1942 as a completely inferior
fighter since it could best a fighter that could best the vaunted 109. But by
the latter half of 1943 in Guinea, the Oscar was increasingly encountering the
P-38 and P-47, airplanes whose pilots did not dogfight but floated high in the
sky like hawks looking for pigeons, swooped, struck and rose to the heights
again. Against these opponents, the best the Ki-43 could do was dodge. But if
the Lockheed or Republic pilot ever abandoned those tactics, the Oscar would
fix its teeth in him like an enraged terrier. It was always a bad idea to be
low on altitude, airspeed and ideas when in the presence of a Ki-43.

>I thought all of the 44's were kept at home.

The 87th Fighter Regiment, equipped with Ki-44s defended the oil fields of the
DEI. The 49FG (P-38s) had some terrific fights with Tojos over Balikpapen in
the fall of 1944. Ops Exec Gerry Johnson got into a desperate one-on-one with
a Tojo over Manggar airfield in Oct., the fight dropping from 24,000 ft down to
the deck and back up to 19,000 ft before he was able to nail the Ki-44. Both
planes could dive AND climb like sonsuvbitches so the dogfight wasn't the usual
nose-below-the-horizon spiral.

> Was the 44 superior to the 61?

Put my money on the Ki-44.

And something on the training some USAAF pilots got prior to combat:

quote:

I also wonder about pilot skill. The Soviets must have had a leavening of
Spanish Civil War veterans in their air units, while the AAF kids coming up
against veterans of the war in China and the Soviet border incident, were
pretty green.
The P-39 pilots who went to Guadalcanal were pure green peas. Their group, the
58th, had only been formed at the beginning of 1941. It didn't get any pilots
until that fall, kids fresh out of flying school. It had no veteran officers.
It was shipped overseas way understrength in Feb, 1942, to Australia, then sent
to New Caledonia. It's 40 pilots had 45 P-400s delivered to them, all neatly
packed in crates, but with no manuals or assembly equipment, and no ground
crews. The kids spend the next weeks unloading the planes, dragging them to
the airstrip, figuring out how to assemble them and doing that. Only then
could they, for the very first time, fly a P-39. About the time they had got
the planes put together, learned how to navigate the pattern with them and
land, they were sent to Guadalcanal, where the Japanese Navy's Zeros ate them
alive. Big surprise.

I think the old USAAF "superior training" blanket statement has at least one hole in it.

quote:

Originally posted by Blutarski2004:

quote:

Originally posted by Gaston444:
I wonder what else may be out there to indicate why the Imperial Army so consistently preferred the Ki-43 over anything else until very late in the war...
[...]

..... Some possible reasons why the Ki-43 might have been favored/retained for so long:
[...]

Don't forget the "Bombed Into Oblivion" factor. I'm trying to remember what this was, but there was an interesting late war Japanese design (I don't even remember if it was an engine or a plane) that got stopped when a stray 1,000lbs bomb hit the building it was being developed in and wiped out the design team.

You can imagine what it would have been like is a stay German 500kg had knocked down the North American building during the height of the NA-73X project. Would we have even known what had been lost?

I definitely agree with M_Gunz here.

In my opinion

1. the pilot (training, experience, tactics)
2. the tactical situation (fuel, supply, numbers)
3. the plane itself

You can generally say that 1941-42 both IJN and IJA were doing "ok" in all of those.

BUT, I think you can't compare the plane itself in a situation at which the two other factors aren't really comparable.

Example: One can say "the Brewster Buffalo was the worst fighter of WW2 because USN and other allies were losing with it against Zeros and Nates/Oscars." Sure, atleast A6M and Ki-43 were really superior to it. But why on earth did the Finns so well with it? Because
a) they had better tactics than Soviet pilots
b) they were numerically sup... no, they were not.
c) the plane was superior... well, yes compared to I-153 or I-16, but Yak's, La's... no.

And if you still made stupid conclusions, and just compared the planes, you got

A6M/Oscar > Buffalo > La-5

which doesn't sound quite right to me.

Any of the above doesn't propably help this thread to come to any kind of conclusion or even compromise though...

But really... 50% of ALL Japanese fighter kills? 18500 vs 6500, while 18500 is not including any Ki-27s, Ki-100s, J2Ms, Ki-45s, J1N1s, A5Ms...

quote:

Originally posted by HarryVoyager:
You can imagine what it would have been like is a stay German 500kg had knocked down the North American building during the height of the NA-73X project. Would we have even known what had been lost?

nope

quote:

Originally posted by Daiichidoku:

quote:

Originally posted by HarryVoyager:
You can imagine what it would have been like is a stay German 500kg had knocked down the North American building during the height of the NA-73X project. Would we have even known what had been lost?

nope

quote:

In 23 June 1940, a special long range Fw 200C-13/U2/U7/R6 departed Berlin-Gatow airfield heading to Tokyo, Japan. It had a fuel load of 15400 kg, most of it in specially modified wings and extra bomb bay tanks. After refuelling in Japan, Major Conrad Hollenbach, the plane's captain, ordered the plane to be loaded with a Japanese 500 kg bomb. The mission was obviously top secret, as the planned target was no less than the North American Aviation plant at Inglewood, California.

The mission was a success, as the route went across the northern Pacific Ocean, far from all US fighter bases and well outside of any patrol aircraft's ranges. Only when approaching the continental USA there was any danger of failure. It's been suggested that the aircraft's modifications also included radar-jamming and even some stealth techonology, which may have helped it not only attack unnoticed but also escape to safety. The bomb was a direct hit, using a proper fuze it penetrated the roof of the factory's main hall, exploding in the middle of it. Destruction was massive, about half a dozen mock-ups and prototype planes completely destroyed. Also the archive room and all the plans inside, located directly below the hall was totally lost.

It's been rumoured that among the burned documents were plans for a new kind of fighter, NA-73X, meant to be built against a British order. But, due to the loss of the plans and the prototype and the promise of Lockheed's P-38 and Republic's P-47, all work on the project was abandoned. Like the Bf 109, Spitfire, and Fw 190, it's considered one of the most famous WWII aircraft, even when it never actually flew. Only few earlier drawings of this very advanced plane survive, and most historians and expert today agree, that if it had become available, it's unprecedented features, including superb range and all-around performance, it would almost certainly have been the war-winning weapon the Allied were in dire need of.

quote:

Originally posted by M_Gunz:

"The so called "Thatch weave," was supposedly used for the
first time in the battle of Midway. According to Commander Thatch,
this was a contributing factor in winning this decisive battle.
This weave was mentioned, and used by the AVG, and part of the
AVG's combat report in the AVG's War Diary for Dec 20, 1941, yet
Daniel Ford called it the "Thatch Weave" and gave him credit for
inventing it, saying it was first used in the Battle of Midway.
Even though Commander Thatch said he had heard this tactic had come
out of China."

According to Thach's biography, the "Thach Weave" was developed in the summer and fall of '41, obviously a little too early to have come from the AVG. Ford is correct on this one.

True that Eric Schilling isn't 100% correct about everything has been pointed out here before.
He obviously didn't know or didn't believe that Thach had been working on the tactic prior to
the attack on Pearl Harbor.

I think of it as a sort of linear Lufbery Circle!

Fascinating story.

quote:

Working at night with matchsticks on the table, he eventually came up with what he called "Beam Defense Position", but what soon became known as the "Thach Weave". It was executed either by two fighter aircraft side-by-side or (as illustrated) by two pairs of fighters flying together. When an enemy aircraft chose one fighter as his target (the "bait" fighter; his wingman being the "hook"), the two wingmen turned in towards each other. After crossing paths, and once their separation was great enough, they would then repeat the exercise, again turning in towards each other, bringing the enemy plane into the hook's sights. A correctly-executed Thach Weave (assuming the bait was taken and followed) left little chance of escape to even the most maneuverable opponent.
The basic Thach Weave, executed by two wingmen.

Thach called on Ensign Edward "Butch" O'Hare, who led the second section in Thach's division, to test the idea. Thach took off with three other F4F Wildcats in the role of defenders, Butch O'Hare meanwhile led four F4Fs in the role of attackers. Trying a series of simulated attacks, Butch found that in every instance Thach's fighters had either ruined his attack or actually maneuvered into position to shoot back. After landing, Butch excitedly congratulated Thach: "Skipper, it really worked. I couldn't make any attack without seeing the nose of one of your airplanes pointed at me."

quote:

quote:

Originally posted by M_Gunz:
home page -- yarchive
index -- yarchive - military net

AVG posts on tactics -- LOT of material here.
Posts on P-40 also getting into tactics used.

Just more reasons WHY to NOT use kill counts when trying to measure aircraft effectiveness and performance:

[QUOTE] The following is my personal opinion as to the reason why we
as a group were so successful. We had a damn good leader whom we
all loved and admired. He was a good teacher, knew his subject and
how to get it across.
We knew exactly what to expect from the Japanese pilots in
almost every emergency, types of formations, their reaction in
combat situations, what we could do and what to avoid. During our
training at Toungoo Burma, this was drilled into us as a result of
months of tactical lectures by Chennault, .
We also knew the capabilities of every Japanese airplane we
would come up against, their speeds, their weakness, size of
armament, and in regard to bombers, the types of attacks to make,
and to avoid.
An illustration of Americans lacking the above knowledge
Chennault had given us, was when the Lockheed P-38s were first
introduced into the Pacific Theater as late as 1943. Saburo Sakai
says in his book, "The Zeros were having a field day, shooting the
P-38 down in large numbers." The Americans, even though the P-38s
had a speed advantage of almost one hundred mph, were using the
turning combat. This is what happens when an airplane isn't used
properly. Saburo further stated, "When the Americans changed their
tactic, the Zero pilots became fearful of the P-38, because it was
decimating the Zeros."
As early as September 1941 Chennault was teaching the AVG to
hit and run, requiring speed, which was the P-40's forte against
the Japanese. When properly used, the P-40 outclassed the Japanese
Zero. It took the military 2 more years before they stumbling on
the secret of successfully fighting the Japanese in the air. In the
meantime hundreds of American pilots lost their lives. This is a
matter of record.
The so called "Thatch weave," was supposedly used for the
first time in the battle of Midway. According to Commander Thatch,
this was a contributing factor in winning this decisive battle.
This weave was mentioned, and used by the AVG, and part of the
AVG's combat report in the AVG's War Diary for Dec 20, 1941, yet
Daniel Ford called it the "Thatch Weave" and gave him credit for
inventing it, saying it was first used in the Battle of Midway.
Even though Commander Thatch said he had heard this tactic had come
out of China.

I assume that this is one of the Eric Schilling quotes, and if so, this proves what I said in my earlier post about veteran pilots still not knowing what they didn't know back then, when they were young men, and 90% of the information they got was third hand information from other young men.

Point One: Sakai had been badly wounded & left the Solomons over three months before the combat debut of the P-38 in the Southwest Pacific. Where he heard the Lightnings were shot down in ..."large numbers," I don't know but the loss figures from those early units that first fielded the Lightning don't support his contention. Any unit entering combat for the first time takes higher losses at first, but the 35th FG were former P-39 pilots who had already seen combat, and they knew exactly what the Lightning could give them, and they actually had more trouble with maintaining the Lightning than they had with fighting the Zeros and the first few Oscars over New Guinea in the last month of 1942.

Point Two: the Thach Weave issue has been addressed.

quote:

>If the P-40B was so brilliant, how come the Zeros and Oscars shot them
>out of the sky in the Pacific and SE Asia war zones in 1941/2? And why

Pilot quality and Training. The Japanese Pilots had come through the
best flight school for dogfighting combats in the world while the US
pilots in 1940 were in a similar situation to the USAF pilots going into
Vietnam. Basically good pilots trained in formation and basic flying
but with little or no tactical combat doctrine. The Flying Tigers, like
Ed Schilling were drawn from this group of pilots but were trained in a
realistic combat doctrine to get the best out of their aircraft vs the
Japanese (i.e. Dive and Zoom Vertical, high speed tactics vs the Japanese
horizontal turning fight.

In the USAAC, fighter doctrine and tactics were taught at the Group/Squadron level before the war. Gabreski's autobiography makes this clear, and his CO even had the ability to conduct dogfighting against dissimilar aircraft, with the P-36s his unit still operated competing with the newer P-40s they were still in the process of converting to.

One of Gabreski's fellow young pilots at Hickam, a fellow named George Welch, scored 4 kills in two sorties during the Pearl Harbor attack. Apparently, it wasn't all luck, because Welch scored a triple flying a P-39 and went on to finish his next combat tour in P-38s with a total of 17 kills, scoring in multiples on several more occasions.

The pilots in the Philippines were also pretty seriously drilled as much as the fuel supply and weather permitted; Buzz Wagner, the first USAAC ace of the war, was known for his enthusiasm for dogfighting and getting into rat races with his fellow pilots, and he was hardly alone in this.

The problem was that the Japanese entered the war with a well planned campaign for the first several months of the war and had a very clear idea of the capabilities of Allied aircraft whereas the Allied pilots didn't have a current set of aircraft silhouettes of Japanese aircraft, much less a clue about what they could do. When you add in the huge good luck they had catching the Philippines' air forces on the ground the morning of Dec 8th 1941 (MacArthur's air commanders had their planes up at first light that morning awaiting the expected first Japanese raid after news of Pearl Harbor; what they didn't know was that the Japanese were grounded by heavy fog in Formosa that morning, and were delayed by about three hours. They arrived over the US bases just as the American commanders decided that they weren't coming, and had ordered their planes down to refuel...)

Since most prewar planners had expected that the Japanese would not start the war until spring of 1942, the Japanese achieved strategic surprise; Allied resources were not yet in place, the troops were not prepared, and when the US Army Air Corps in the Far East was decimated in the Philippines in the early days of the war, the dominos just started falling. Everything was run on a shoestring, and the line that was expected to hold for six months or more until the superior manpower and production of the US could be applied didn't hold for even 6 months.

That wasn't a matter of training, that was a matter of planning, and the fact that Germany was given a higher priority.

quote:

I wish I knew who wrote this 2-part post on the Ki-43.

The Ki-43 was, in some ways, more dangerous to deal with than the A6M, chiefly
because it had a better rate of roll and was armed with two 12.7mm machineguns.
The P-40 driver with a Zero on his tail could usually break the contact with
an aileron roll. This was much less likely with the Ki-43. The Oscar boy
could plant himself behind the P-40 and stay there no matter what the Curtiss
driver did, all the while hammering .50 cal nails that could do some real
damage.
In contrast, the Zero pilot, even if he couldn't be shaken, was doing most of
his firing with rifle caliber mgs which did less damage (although enough of
them in the right places could do the job). The 20mms generally didn't come
into play unless the Zero was in point blank range. A way to stay out of
point blank range was to execute a series of violent aileron turns; this would
allow the P-40 pilot to gradually pull away from the Zero. Once he had
extended sufficiently, he could go into a fast, shallow climb and leave the
Zero behind.
The best bet for the P-40 driver was to have sufficient altitude to dive away
from either the Oscar or Zero, but that wasn't always the situation.
The Ki-43 had better wing loading and power loading than the Zero, had superior
initial acceleration, a better roll rate and a tighter turning circle. It also
had a substantially better rate of climb. That made it an awesome aerobatic
fighter that you absolutely, positively did not dare engage in a dogfight. It
also meant that if you bounced an Oscar and the pilot spotted you, he was
probably going to escape scott free because, should he choose to turn, he could
roll into a tight turn faster than you could follow, whereas if you bounced a
Zero, should he choose to turn, you could follow him, outrolling him and
staying with him for a considerable portion of his turn, often enough to do him
in. (In practice, Oscar and Zero drivers both generally preferred to snap up
into tight loops when bounced, leaving the P-40 driver the option of blowing on
by and clearing the vicinity or sticking around to get a Nip on his six.)

Probably true; however the first Ki-43 units in New Guinea did not arrive until December of 1942, by which time US and ANZAC forces had a pretty good idea of how to deal with Japanese air combat philosophy; most of them were not rookies any more, and their higher commands had begun a pretty comprehensive program of making sure that experienced pilots were made available to new units to help 'break them in'.

quote:

And that links to this page of discussion.

Again, I don't know who wrote this:

quote:

Very true. But through 1942 the AAF boys were always outnumbered and the
Ki-43s would swarm over them like piranhas. The bite of a single one might not
be fatal, but a school of them in a feeding frenzy could bring down the biggest
prey. The P-40s would come home riddled with bullet holes, belly in on the
runway to be dragged off and rebuilt. The P-39s wouldn't come home.

Whoops! Where did all these Oscars come from in 1942? As I just stated, the first Oscar Sentai in New Guinea was the 11th, arriving at Rabaul on Dec 18th, 1942, so they must have been in China or Burma, right?

Except that most of the IJAAF was still flying Ki-27 Nates for the first half of 1942, and there were no P-39s in the Philippines, Java, Burma or China that I am aware of...

Actually the tactical description is fairly accurate; as a 49th FG ace was quoted as saying "The Oscar was probably the slowest Japanese fighter in the theater and had very light armament, but it was a performing fool. An experienced pilot in an Oscar was not that much of a threat to an experienced P-40 pilot, because of the Oscar's lack of guns and the P-40's ability to take it, but he could send you home talking to yourself."

quote:

>However as they demonstrated against the Zero, this [superior maneuverability]

means little in combat.

In New Guinea through 1942 and well into 1943, the chief U.S. opponent of the
Ki-43 was the P-39, and the Ki-43 generally made short work of any P-39 it
encountered (since all the P-39's plumbing was in the rear, and poorly
protected, only a few well-placed rounds would finish it off). The boys in the
8 and 35 FGs had a very tough time of it, and soon gave the Bell fighter the
nickname "Fearless Fos****." They didn't think much of the P-39's fighting
qualities at all. Yet against another opponent on another front, the P-39
proved itself formidable--the Soviets apparently thought very highly of the
P-39 and many of their aces flew it. One key to why they thought so highly of
it might be discovered in the flight tests the RAF carried out with a P-39C
against an Me 109E at Duxford in mid-1941. The Bell demonstrated clear
superiority to the 109 in all but one category up to 15,000 ft.--the lower the
altitude the greater the superiority. (The exception was rate of climb, the
advantage of the Bell held only briefly). It was noted that when the 109 was
planted on the tail of the P-39, the Bell was able to out-turn it to such an
extent that it would be on the 109's tail in less than two 360s and there was
nothing the 109 driver could do to shake it--he couldn't outrun it, outdive it
or outturn it.
So if the Russians in their P-39s were getting in low-level dogfights with
109s, the superior maneuverability might have been very important--it might
have been what kept them from getting those few deadly rounds in the cooling
system that would put the Bell down.
It's a reminder not to dismiss the Ki-43 c.1942 as a completely inferior
fighter since it could best a fighter that could best the vaunted 109. But by
the latter half of 1943 in Guinea, the Oscar was increasingly encountering the
P-38 and P-47, airplanes whose pilots did not dogfight but floated high in the
sky like hawks looking for pigeons, swooped, struck and rose to the heights
again. Against these opponents, the best the Ki-43 could do was dodge. But if
the Lockheed or Republic pilot ever abandoned those tactics, the Oscar would
fix its teeth in him like an enraged terrier. It was always a bad idea to be
low on altitude, airspeed and ideas when in the presence of a Ki-43.

See above. There was only one Sentai equipped with the Oscar at the outbreak of the war, and they were in Burma. Most of the IJAAF's early fighting was done by Ki-27 Nates, and these were slowly replaced by Oscars as the first production models of the Ki-43-I came out of the factory. By the end of 1942, about 10 Sentais were fully converted to the Hayabusa.

No P-39s had to worry about the Oscar until the P-39 was largely relegated to ground attack; air combat was supposed to be done by P-38s and P-40s, and this was generally the case by mid 1943.

quote:

>I thought all of the 44's were kept at home.

The 87th Fighter Regiment, equipped with Ki-44s defended the oil fields of the
DEI. The 49FG (P-38s) had some terrific fights with Tojos over Balikpapen in
the fall of 1944. Ops Exec Gerry Johnson got into a desperate one-on-one with
a Tojo over Manggar airfield in Oct., the fight dropping from 24,000 ft down to
the deck and back up to 19,000 ft before he was able to nail the Ki-44. Both
planes could dive AND climb like sonsuvbitches so the dogfight wasn't the usual
nose-below-the-horizon spiral.

What I said was most Ki-44s were kept at home; the Doolittle Raid spooked the brass hats in Tokyo pretty badly not least because the B-25s outran both Ki 27s and Ki-43s attempting to intercept them. The Shoki's higher speed and heavier armament made it a better choice in Japanese eyes for Home Defense and for defense of the Balikpapan oil facilities from Allied heavy bombers.

Most units that used the Ki-44 in China or Burma did so in mixed units in conjunction with Ki-43s; however, there were only 1200 built, and most of them that saw combat use did so over the Home Islands. It wasn't a popular mount because of its relatively high landing & stalling speeds.

quote:

> Was the 44 superior to the 61?

Put my money on the Ki-44.

So would I, but for different reasons: the Ki-61 was plagued with maintneance problems, and there were very few qualified technicians who could maintain it. Most of them died in New Guinea instead of being sent back to Japan where their skills could be put to use.

quote:

And something on the training some USAAF pilots got prior to combat:

[QUOTE]
I also wonder about pilot skill. The Soviets must have had a leavening of
Spanish Civil War veterans in their air units, while the AAF kids coming up
against veterans of the war in China and the Soviet border incident, were
pretty green.
The P-39 pilots who went to Guadalcanal were pure green peas. Their group, the
58th, had only been formed at the beginning of 1941. It didn't get any pilots
until that fall, kids fresh out of flying school. It had no veteran officers.
It was shipped overseas way understrength in Feb, 1942, to Australia, then sent
to New Caledonia. It's 40 pilots had 45 P-400s delivered to them, all neatly
packed in crates, but with no manuals or assembly equipment, and no ground
crews. The kids spend the next weeks unloading the planes, dragging them to
the airstrip, figuring out how to assemble them and doing that. Only then
could they, for the very first time, fly a P-39. About the time they had got
the planes put together, learned how to navigate the pattern with them and
land, they were sent to Guadalcanal, where the Japanese Navy's Zeros ate them
alive. Big surprise.

I think the old USAAF "superior training" blanket statement has at least one hole in it

I covered this earlier, but let's reiterate that The Allies were not ready for war with Japan, that the casualties in the Philippines and Java left the Army Air Force scraping the bottom of the barrel, and that those kids paid for it.

Guadalcanal was a Navy/Marines show at first, but the Army still had more resources and had to contribute something (that being the politically astute thing to do, and never let it be said that the Army is not politically astute...). That something was the first P-39 outfit that they found at loose ends--and they quickly determined that the P-39, without sufficient time to get to altitude, was not going to be an effective air to air weapon.

But they did become quite adept at shooting up the barges the Japanese used to transport troops and supplies down the Slot to Guadelcanal (I read the memoirs of a 'Cobra pilot who was with that outfit Way Back When...)

To summarize, Ki-43s were a lot like horse flies in that they could buzz around your head and sting a little, but most of the time they wouldn't kill you, regardless of what they told the folks back at their home base. Their pilots were lucky in their choice of early opponents, and once the IJAAF began operations in New Guinea, it was a case of too little, too late. Meanwhile, back in China and Burma, most of what they did in the air or on the ground meant very little in the strategic sense.

cheers

horseback

I think, if the Oscar really scored more kills than the Zero (which given the 11-to-1 kill ratio of the F4U, and the 19-to-1 kill ratio of the F6F, seems very possible to me), then we could try to add up the reasons why the Oscar proved to be a noticeably better and more useable fighter than the A6M.

Note the number of air-to-air kills for the US Army fighter with the most kills in the Pacific Theater, which probably is among the top two, if not the top, of the most common adversaries for the Oscar; the P-38: 1600.

Note the number of air-to-air kills for what is unquestionably the Zero's most common opponent, the F6F: 5400+...

Now look at damage absorption ability: Ki-43: Rubber lining protection for the tanks from the get-go, much improved on the Ki-43-II. From the II models made in mid-1943, in service in the distant 64th Sentai on 19 july 1943, 8 mm head armour and not insubstantial 13mm armour for the pilot's back, this from the factory...

The Zero? Basically nada on both counts, except for fire extinguishers and bullet-proof windscreen on the later A6M5b, and a bullet-proof rear glass on a few end-of-the-line models in 1945... No comparison here, although some of the very end of the A6M production might have also got rubber lining: Not many.

High speed handling? 230 MPH A6M5 vs 300-350 MPH+ Ki-43-I-II for a severely slowed response, the edge unquestionably goes to the Oscar... With an additional Zero handicap of a lack of symmetry at high speeds, Saburo Sakai vividly describing a significantly slower roll to right above 250 MPH, a disadvantage noted in tactical evaluations by the Allies: "Dive and roll to right to escape". This made Sakai's escapes maneuvers so predictable it could easily have cost him his life, probably more than once...

Speed: a 30 km/h edge to the Zero: surprising considering the A6M5's heavier armament and the identical engines on both... But still insufficient, and acceleration is sometimes quoted on the Oscar's side.

Climb rate: Generally slightly better on the Ki-43, especially at lower altitudes.

Armament: The early Oscars-I were limited by unreliable 12.7mm guns to two 7.7mm guns, or one 12.7 and one 7.7, resulting in a reputation of VERY weak armament, yet later twin 12.7mm guns of the KI-43-II were reliable and seemed able to punch above their weight of fire, with explosive shells that were apparently considered almost as effective as some 20mm rounds... The real problem was the slow rate of fire of the Browning system when synchronized: 400 rpm vs 700-800 unsynchrosized...

This did not prevent the Oscar from shooting down many P-39s, P-40s and P-38s. Even the P-47 would regularly meet its end with this armament... But against bombers this armament was simply close to useless.

The Zero had slow-firing (350-400 rpm) but fairly high velocity wing 20 mms from the A6M5 model onward (same velocity as MG-151 but much heavier shells), but this could not match the trajectory of its cowl 7.7mm armament, so it was not as practical to hit fighters with them as it should have been, and most of the work ended up being done with the weak cowl guns...

Though this apparently superior armament does in theory allow taking on the vital task of bomber interception, the fragility of the Zero's structure made it in fact unsuitable for this task. One account has two B-24s, completely alone and beyond any help, flying at wave top in the middle of the sea, taking on 5 Zero A6M5s that happened to cross their path...

One Zero plowed into the sea when he tried to fly under the bombers, and two of the others were shot down by defensive fire... Neither of the bombers suffered more than minor damage...

Going strictly against fighters, the Ki-43-II's armament may actually have had a slight edge...

Given all of the above, it seems to me the Ki-43's greater wartime fame within Japan, and its continuing production into 1945 was not entirely unrelated to how it did in battle... Given the Ki-84's and Ki-61's severe reliability woes (All the Kai-Tei(d) Ki-61s, half the 2400 made, were 600lbs heavier than earlier models, and were thus massively used as Kamikaze, or to provide spare parts to keep the earlier short-nose Ki-61s flying...), only the Ki-44 seems to have been a much better Army fighter, with an impressive actual WEP speed of 650 km/h in one Japanese document.

Why the Ki-44 was not more massively produced is a bit of a mystery to me, but they had those two side-by-side at the same time, and went for more of the Ki-43-II... They did listen to their pilots, so it could not have been a top-down doctrine alone that kept the Ki-43-II going.

It does seem a bit inexplicable... Perhaps the Ki-44 had many maneuvers that were unsafe and forbidden, and it also had a much shorter range. Maybe it also had higher losses?

I would be curious to know how severe were its problems, or if it was just that in mock dogfights with the Ki-43-II it always lost...

Gaston

i have rarely seen anyone be able to draw so many conclusions out of anecdotes, which don't even mention the subject.
the most noteworthy so far was

quote:

Originally posted by Gaston444:
there is an account by an F4U-1 pilot in late 1943 that a "Zero" [...]
To me, it seems the only plausible explanation would be that the "Zero" in question was in fact an Oscar.

where, debating the advantages of Ki-43 vs A6M, and to support the case in favour of the Oscar, a pilot's account of his engagement with a Zero is quoted, but which is considered an Oscar by the poster, because it

quote:

Originally posted by Gaston444:
[...] rolled so well in a dive at 400 MPH that it forced his early Corsair into aileron overbalance, and he had, as a result, trouble following it around [...]

which would mean, that the 'Oscar' is a plane, that - near at it's never-exceed-speed (and i am not the tech-master, but the planes i know have their max roll-rate quite below their max level-speed) - out-rolls the Corsair, which is not the worst roller in the game.

later the armament is discussed, concluding that the

quote:

Originally posted by Gaston444:
twin 12.7mm guns of the KI-43-II [...] were apparently considered almost as effective as some 20mm rounds

which i would like to know, who 'considered' that - and who tested it.
anyways, the twins were apparently so effective, that

quote:

Originally posted by Gaston444:
Even the P-47 would regularly meet its end with this armament...

the Zero is then described having

quote:

Originally posted by Gaston444:
fairly high velocity wing 20 mms from the A6M5 model onward [...] but this could not match the trajectory of its cowl 7.7mm armament, so it was not as practical to hit fighters with them

where i might ask, why the trajectory of 750m/s (Type 99) won't meet the trajectory of Type 97 (720m/s). so i don't know, why the Type 99 Mk.II would be less capable to engage fighters than the fancy P-47-killertwins on the late Oscar, or the worse MG-FF? not to speak of the fairly higher amount of ammunition in any Zero...

with all respect, but besides the 'considered', 'seemed', unsourced 'accounts' and the indirect conclusions, what might perhaps have been the reason... is there anything else which leads to the so much wrong (or not) reported kill-rate of the Oscar?